New Humanist Articles and Posts

Book review: The Revolutionists

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 05:00:00 GMT

The Revolutionists: The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s (Penguin) by Jason Burke

As the subtitle of this book acknowledges, hijacking has a metaphorical resonance as well as a literal meaning. Both describe the garnering of widespread attention by the determined actions of small and reckless groups or individuals. The key characters in this rollicking narrative number barely a few dozen, but they transfixed hundreds of millions throughout the 1970s.

“The Revolutionists” is a clever title, correctly implying a difference between Burke’s protagonists and actual revolutionaries – who, while no less zealous, are also organised and methodical, which is why they sometimes win. Revolutionists, by contrast, are essentially grandstanders and cosplayers, vastly more interested in means than ends. A revolutionary may see the application of violence as a regrettable necessity. A revolutionist is more someone who quite fancies striking poses in a beret and Raybans, and blowing things up, and seeks an excuse.

If one personality exemplifies the revolutionist, it is Andreas Baader: a twenty-something drifter who dominated West Germany’s Red Army Faction to the extent that it became interchangeably known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, after Baader and fellow militant Ulrike Meinhof. Burke describes Baader as “spoilt, arrogant and lazy”, and notes that he was “uninterested in politics and unmoved by progressive causes”. Baader was, however, extremely keen on fast cars, women, drink, drugs and the adoration of credulous supplicants. He went to extraordinary lengths to maintain supplies of them.

Baader and his comrades allied themselves early on to the budding militancy attached to Palestine, making their first visits in 1970 to the training camps in Jordan being operated by Fatah, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. The pages recalling the first trip undertaken by the Red Army Faction to Jordan are rich black comedy. “The following weeks could not be described as an unqualified success,” understates Burke. The Germans whined about the accommodation and the food, wasted precious ammunition acting the cowboy on the firing ranges, and annoyed their hosts with their general performative bohemianism. Nor were they the only vexatious guests (“A group of British International Socialists smuggled alcohol into one camp, got drunk, held an impromptu sing-song, and then got into a fight with a group of British Maoists.”)

Burke is the Guardian’s international security correspondent and the author of several excellent books covering al-Qaeda, Islamic State and other manifestations of a more recent fanaticism. The Revolutionists serves as something of a prequel to his previous works, suggesting a legacy even more baneful than the casualties of the bombings, hijackings and kidnappings wrought by its subjects: that the self-indulgence, self-regard and eventual self-destruction of this broadly secular pro-Palestinian tendency helped bring forth the theocratic nihilists of later decades.

The Revolutionists is a brilliantly told story with many dimensions – Burke also furnishes the wider geostrategic contexts to the follies of the players, even if many of them were ignorant of, or indifferent to these diplomatic shadow plays. It is mostly, however, a story – it might be hoped a cautionary fable – of failure. Things ended badly and/or early for most of the individual “revolutionists” – though some are still with us, including Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, the prolific Venezuelan terrorist better remembered as Carlos the Jackal, now serving forever in a French prison.

And while the revolutionists may have got their pictures in the papers, and though they spawned a minor industry of literature, cinema, music and sundry popular culture, it is difficult to make any case that they, or their approximate contemporaries, much advanced any of the actual causes for which they claimed to have taken up arms. The Red Army Faction and similar groups in Italy, Japan and elsewhere fell some way short of dismantling capitalism, while Palestine, for all the picturesque mayhem wrought on its behalf, is arguably further than ever from being a functional sovereign state. The revolutionists did nothing good, and nothing good came of what they did.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

A new kind of fingerprint

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 05:00:00 GMT

The names of bacteria rolled off my colleague’s tongue like chocolate bar brands. “There’s all kinds of streptococcus, lactobacillus, E. coli of course, and that’s just the bacteria. You can find out the viruses, too. We’re talking mycoviruses, enteroviruses, astroviruses – oh, and the sample is always contaminated with human DNA.”

I thought for a minute. “So, I could be identified from a sample of my shit?”

“Not could – you already can be! You could call it ... a data dump.” He chuckled.

I was talking with David, my office neighbour at the University of Oxford, about all the new information on humans and bugs that can be learned using cutting-edge methods in pathogen genomics. By examining the genetic material of microorganisms that cause disease, microbiologists can now see how your infection is related to someone else’s, or whether what you have is treatable or not. For example, by studying the DNA of the norovirus you’re carrying, in combination with other kinds of data, they might be able to tell what you have eaten, who you have been in contact with and if you passed the infection on.

It’s an up-and-coming area, already starting to overtake old methods of disease surveillance and diagnosis, which relied on assessing the symptoms of a patient, or sending off a sample of bacteria to be grown in a lab. Some of these new methods can also enable clinicians to look at a range of microorganisms at once, giving them a more complete and detailed set of data.

Your specific set of bacteria and viruses can be as identifying as your fingerprint – not only that, but they can associate you with other people’s disease fingerprints. The information can go on to inform your clinical care, and also public health responses like contacting people you might have infected, or designing vaccines. It’s fast. It’s reliable. It’s powerful.

But as well as helping prevent disease, this data can be used for other means – to establish where a person has been, who they have met and even the nature of the interaction between these people. It can be passed on to health insurance companies, criminal courts or to justify targeted public health measures such as quarantining “disease-spreading” groups.

As a bioethicist, I spend my days learning about ever-accelerating scientific advances like these. It’s my job to help make sure that new technologies are properly regulated and ethically used. So, I listened to David and then did my own research. Some questions immediately came up. “Where are you getting the genome fragments from?” (Surprisingly often, the answer is “shit”.) “And that information only gets shared with the individual and their doctor, right?” (Surprisingly often, the answer is “no”.)

I discovered that, while it has already had a significant positive impact – like helping us control Covid-19 outbreaks and improving care for people living with HIV/AIDS – pathogen genomics data is also being used in harmful ways.

So, should we simply stop? It’s not that easy. We need to be asking a different question: how do we prevent disease while simultaneously protecting people from privacy violations, unfair discrimination, and other moral wrongs?

Fighting disease outbreaks

My interest in pathogen genomics began during the Covid-19 pandemic, when I came across newspaper reports on apartment blocks full of “superspreaders”. These stories troubled me. The newspapers referenced wastewater testing, which used pathogen genomics to see if Covid-19 and other microbes were in building sewerage. These tests gave public health authorities reliable strain data, so they could take strong, fast action. But they also exposed these people, through their data, to public shame. And the apartments’ occupants didn’t consent to their waste, and therefore their DNA, being tested.

This kind of data collection might be justified on the grounds that no one person in any given apartment block is likely to be identifiable. But what if all the occupants are shunned, or their movements restricted? In Melbourne, Australia, nine social housing apartment blocks experienced extended quarantine during the pandemic, as a collective, as a result of pathogen genomic testing. And who is this most likely to happen to? Probably those living in the most overcrowded, unsanitary conditions where disease transmission is the hardest to control.

We saw too many cases of racism and group discrimination during the Covid-19 pandemic. For example, South Asian people were discriminated against during a wave of the disease originally called the “Indian” strain, because it was first detected in India. The World Health Organisation (WHO) and others then shifted from naming strains by country towards letter names (the “Indian” strain became “Delta”; the South African” strain was “Beta”.) But the problem itself points to risks in associating disease with particular communities, or groups of people. The availability of more – and more detailed – data on disease could lead to more speculation and ostracisation of groups that may already be underprivileged and marginalised.

At the same time, there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic about pathogen genomics, now and in the future. More detailed data on disease is already helping with diagnostics and public health action, while the development of better vaccines against the next pandemic could save countless lives. In the UK in 2022, for example, a salmonella outbreak was curbed by tracing it back to specific contaminated chocolate products and issuing recall notices.

Playing out in real-time

Many of the harms and benefits will not affect us, but future generations. If you’re a parent, you might already be thinking about what this means for your children. It could help keep them healthy, but they also could face Big Brother-style surveillance, where the state has genetic data on people – block by block, city by city – collected in hospital rooms, in wastewater, in prisons, care homes and detention centres. If that powerful data is used for people’s benefit, that’s great. But what if it’s used against them? This depends on whether proper guidance and regulations are put in place.

We are already seeing this tension play out. For a start, tissue or fluid samples are often taken from hospital patients, to confirm their diagnoses or see which drug they should take. But, if they have a notifiable disease, doctors are required to report it to public health authorities – even without the patient’s consent – in order to track disease spread. If the patient’s sample was added alongside other data like their testing location, date or demographic data, the person may then be re-identifiable as a link in a disease transmission chain. The same thing can happen in disease chains in care homes or prisons.

This might not be a problem, if the data was only used for disease prevention. But it can be used for other means, including in criminal courts. In Australia, a 47-year-old man was accused in 2008 of intentionally infecting two people with HIV between 2001-2003. Pathogen genomics wasn’t powerful enough to provide conclusive evidence in the original legal case, but it was later used in a study with more powerful methods to confirm that the defendant had infected the first two people, lining up with the legal decision, which resulted in the man being charged with grievous bodily harm.

On the one hand, I am horrified that someone who knew he had HIV for years would intentionally expose his sexual partners to the disease. On the other, this man went to a clinic to receive a diagnosis, and his sample was used not just to protect his health, but to investigate a crime. And what about other court cases, in other jurisdictions? What about the deterrent effect? In countries where homosexuality is criminalised, men who have sex with men are already fearful of seeking healthcare and testing for HIV. Lower levels of testing can mean higher transmission rates and more deaths.

We need to ask the broader questions. Do people living with HIV have a right for their data to be used only to promote their own health? Many of my colleagues would object to this: it’s the job of clinicians and healthcare systems not only to protect their own patients’ health, but to protect public health more broadly.

The real risk of discrimination

Pathogen genomics follows an already established trend by not requiring individual consent for public health (and even, occasionally, forensic) uses of clinical data. But that has to be balanced against the risk of the data being misused, for example to discriminate or prosecute on the basis of sexual orientation or behaviour.

The stigma of disease can take many forms. Those living in poorer conditions, with inadequate housing or lack of sanitation, are more prone to disease and its spread. Migrant communities may be more vulnerable, particularly those living in refugee camps. In 2015, the BBC reported on chaos on the Greek islands as overcrowded camps left children at risk of disease spread, abuse and heatstroke. In 2020, 140 ill refugee children were moved from the Lesbos refugee camp, with Médecins Sans Frontières accusing the Greek government of “deliberately depriving” the children of adequate medical care. A few months later, refugees and asylum seekers were being blamed by Greek politicians and the media for Covid-19 spreading to the general population. These populations already face systemic discrimination. Then they’re labelled as disease carriers, too.

In the future, our healthcare will look very different. Clinicians will increasingly be supported by AI and care will be highly personalised. So will future ethical issues. Our decision to give away our own data may feel like a personal choice, but it could have significant effects on other people. (How many of your relatives have sent away their DNA for ancestry testing without considering how this might impact you?) Still, if you live in a democracy, then misuse of health data only happens elsewhere, right?

Wrong. Democracies in the western world are gathering and using pathogen genomics data, and there are legitimate concerns that well-intentioned public health authorities might be required to share that data with other agencies – for example, for immigration and customs enforcement, or even to inform political campaigns. There are many incentives for governments to use this data, including the desire to be technologically competitive with other countries and the economic savings to be made by predicting costly events such as potential epidemics.

Biopower

In bioethics, we call this form of state control “biopower”. In the future, it may not matter whether people are willing to disclose information about their interactions, behaviours, locations or health status. The authorities could find out about them regardless. The pathogen genomics data, certainly, is already there: in the water, on the bus handles, in the air of hospitals.

This may seem rather futuristic, but it’s important to look where the slippery slope may lead, and how we can put up barriers along the way to guard against moral failure.

But we also need to consider the significant positive outcomes, in diseases prevented and lives saved. These positives are also likely to increase. So do they outweigh the risks?

Let’s return to Australia’s use of this cutting-edge science. It’s true that people’s waste was tested without their consent during the pandemic, resulting in quarantine for some. But public health action based on pathogen genomics information was estimated to have saved almost 1,000 lives, by alerting policymakers early to a second wave of Covid-19. It was used to develop an award-winning wastewater testing initiative, which functioned as an early-warning system.

Also, because the state could better target lockdowns to areas where Covid-19 was circulating more, restrictions were eased earlier in areas where they weren’t needed. On the one hand, targeting lockdowns impinges on some people’s right to freedom of movement and association. On the other hand, it protected rights relating to health and to freedom of movement and association for others.

The same goes for other forms of moral harm. The asylum seekers who arrive at our shores are often not given access to basic healthcare, and pathogen genomics may only exacerbate injustice for them. But what about other groups who, though marginalised, might benefit from the use of this data? In the US, pathogen genomics data on hepatitis viruses has shown up clusters and chains of people who have infected each other – often through injecting drugs and sharing needles. This cluster data has been used to target populations in need of needle exchange programmes and other support.

Preparing for the future

The final piece of the puzzle is to re-examine future uses of pathogen genomics. The WHO is calling for a global network for pathogen genomic surveillance to be established. This network will better inform our response to two major threats: another pandemic, and the rise of antibiotic resistance.

We have seen how the field could help in the next pandemic. It could also help to combat superbugs that emerge in people, animals and the environment and cause deaths from drug-resistant diseases. Pathogen genomics can tell us about what genes a pathogen has that might make it able to flush out certain kinds of drugs. With this knowledge, we can opt for different drugs that can properly treat the disease, and stop the pathogen from surviving and passing its resistance genes down the line.

On balance, it seems that these efforts, and positive results, could outweigh potential future harmful uses of pathogen genomics data.
I knocked on David’s door.

“And? What’s the bioethicist’s conclusion?” David wasn’t exactly holding his breath; he was confident in the moral merit of his research.

“I think it’s really important work. There are so many ways the data can protect our future health. But it can also harm us – it’s chaos out there, and there aren’t enough rules to prevent misuse. We need to do better. Will you help me?”

This is where bioethicists like me need to work with both scientists and members of the public. Firstly, we need to establish how much people care about the different harms and benefits. What is most important to people, and why? Once we’ve answered these questions and followed them up with ethically informed regulation, we can put this exciting new subfield of genomics to good use.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Breaking free from faith

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

At 21, Joy Brooks had spent her whole life as a member of an evangelical charismatic church in Leicester. Her husband and three children were part of the community, too, and she worked for the Church as an events producer. But she was struggling to cope with her job, and was burning out. Her husband suggested stepping away from the community for a bit. At first, she was uncertain. “I was thinking, ‘I’m going to destroy my kids’ lives if I pull them out [of Church],’” she tells me. But his concern for her mental health gave her pause. “I now know he was thinking, ‘We’re never going back’. He opened the door enough for me to leave.”

Brooks now describes herself as agnostic, “with an allergy to certainty in religion”, while her husband believes “there probably is ‘something’, but he wouldn’t claim to know much more than that”. Having seen other marriages end after one party left the Church, she feels lucky that they moved together. But it still came at a personal cost. “About 90 per cent of our closest friendships ended,” she says. “The relational loss was the thing that hit first, before the loss of beliefs. At first I was too scared to let my beliefs unravel because I couldn’t face losing anything else.”

Twelve years on, Brooks has a Master’s in counselling and provides therapy for people questioning their faith. She’s also a host of Nomad, a podcast for Christians who are questioning their faith, and works part-time as an NHS counsellor. As a private therapist, she specialises in working with clients who are “deconstructing” their beliefs. This is a relatively new term used to describe the process whereby people untangle their own ideas from those imparted by their faith, examining where these might overlap, and where they don’t.

The term originated in the US, where it was originally connected with the “exvangelical” movement and used to describe people leaving conservative evangelical Christianity, often taking on more liberal positions but not necessarily leaving the faith altogether. That same year, non-denominational pastor and author Brian Zahnd defined “deconstruction” as “believers in the process of paring away the extraneous elements of culture, myth and toxic dogma from their faith”. In 2019, a piece published by Premier Christianity defined it as “what happens when a person asks questions that lead to the careful dismantling of their previous beliefs”.

This process can also be helpful for people leaving their faith, or breaking their connections with institutional religion. The proportion of Americans identifying as religiously unaffiliated – that is, atheist, agnostic or simply “nothing in particular” – has been growing for many years, although the latest stats suggest this trend may be levelling off. In the US, therapists offer “deconstruction” as a practice, and the term is starting to be used by some therapists in the UK, too, to describe the work of helping their patients navigate profound changes in their belief structure.

When Brooks became a therapist, she decided to specialise in deconstruction. For many clients, “the process is ongoing, maybe for decades or a lifetime,” she says. “But it’s not necessarily all really painful and difficult – there’s a lot of growth and stimulating exploration too.”

'Post-cult counselling'

Therapy to support people leaving religion is nothing new, and there are many kinds of therapy designed to support survivors of religious trauma, or to guide patients through the challenges of leaving a religious community.

The psychotherapist Gillie Jenkinson has developed a new methodology aimed at people who are leaving, or who have left high-control religious groups. She was part of such a group herself, which she describes as “a Bible-based cult”. After leaving, she gained a Master’s in Gestalt psychotherapy and in 2023 published the book Walking Free, which outlines her “post-cult counselling” methodology. She also offers therapy sessions online and trains UK and international therapists in how to use her process.

Jenkinson says her work helps people to understand the dynamics of the group they have left. “This is the process of how they developed a cultic or what I call an ‘introjected pseudo-identity’,” she explains. “You need to change to become a [cult] member ... If you’re born into the group, then you’re ‘introjecting’ constantly.” She describes this pseudo-identity as being like a “foreign” part that belongs to the group, “sitting over” the authentic identity. “For me it took me over. I fully changed when I was in the group.” The untangling process is painstaking. “As one of my therapists said, it’s like sifting sugar and salt.”

The idea of “deconstruction” helps to describe this process, which is not as simple as a total rejection. Some people choose to walk away from their religious group, but find themselves missing the positive aspects of being part of the faith or community. Abi Millar was brought up in an evangelical church in the north east of England but left at the age of 17, after several years of questioning. Later in life, she found that she missed aspects of her former faith, and began to look into secular forms of spirituality, which she writes about in The Spirituality Gap, published in 2025. Through psychedelics, somatic practices, meditation, nature and music, Millar has been able to discover new sources of profound meaning and deeper forms of connection with others and the world.

Millar tells me she didn’t have any therapy while leaving the faith. “I’m sure a therapist could have helped me, but it would have to have been someone specifically trained in these issues,” she says. “Back in the noughties (pre-Zoom) that would have been highly location-dependent and there wasn’t anything local to me.” Instead, she turned to informal support through online forums and books. “I fully believed myself to be ‘bad’, which I now understand is typical for people ‘leaving the fold’,” Millar tells me. “This was the water I swam in, and I didn’t recognise it for what it was: a cognitive distortion. Similarly, I didn’t frame my feeling of unsafety as a problem with me, so much as a problem inherent to the godless universe. It wasn’t till much later that I really grappled with it.”

Beliefs that linger

There are other ways to support the process of deconstruction, aside from therapy. Humanists UK, the charity that publishes this magazine, runs a programme called Faith to Faithless, which provides support and advice to those who have left or are leaving high-control religious groups, with support delivered by volunteers – some of whom have lived experience. The number of people using the programme’s peer support service jumped from 71 in 2023 to 260 in 2025. In February 2024, they launched a helpline, which has already responded to over 900 people.

One of the helpline volunteers, Iacopo, 39 – who did not wish to give his last name – grew up as a Jehovah’s Witness. He left in 2007. More than a decade later, during the first Covid-19 lockdown, he noticed that something did not feel right for him. At the time he was working for a corporation and says it began to feel controlling in a similar way to how the Jehovah’s Witness community had felt. “It was really very recently when I started deconstructing properly,” he says. “I started to notice that there were things about the way that I was behaving and the issues that I was facing that felt like patterns repeating.” He also found it difficult to shake the influence of particular ideas. He said that the impact of teachings about demons and possession lasted a particularly long time for him.

For the past couple of years Iacopo has worked with a therapist who follows Jenkinson’s “Walking Free” modality. He says specialist therapy was essential for him: “I went for somebody who would immediately get exactly what I’m talking about. That way, I can cut to the chase.”

While therapists with lived experience face particular challenges, they are also able to bring to bear unique insight and understanding. Aisha Khan is a therapist who draws on her own experience of leaving the Islamic faith. Growing up in the UK, she struggled to disclose to her family that she was not a Muslim. When she finally did, a friend – another ex-Muslim – suggested to her: “‘There aren’t many therapists who know what our struggles are. That’s something you should look into doing.’ I didn’t follow up at the time, because I wasn’t in a great place with that stuff myself,” she says. “But years later, I thought, ‘This is something I could support other people with’.”

Why specialists are needed

Khan is now an accredited therapist practising in Yorkshire. As she grew her specialism, she noticed two challenges that non-specialist therapists might face when working with people who are questioning or leaving their religion. The first is a failure to explore beliefs with clients. “People can present in session as religious, for example, wearing religious garments,” she says. “I’ve definitely been guilty in the past [of assuming they believed in that faith]. That’s one thing that I wish had been taught to me when I was in training. We don’t actually know a person’s religious beliefs if they don’t mention it.”

The second is assuming that faith is a “protective factor”, a term used in mental healthcare to describe something that helps someone cope, such as relationships, pets or a creative practice. But faith isn’t always “protective” and a lack of understanding increases the risks to clients, Khan says. For example, those struggling with their faith might be encouraged by their therapist to speak to people within their community, which can actually make things worse.

She experienced this herself after seeking counselling when she was grappling with how to tell her family. “There was a lot of having to explain why, for both the cultural and religious stuff,” she says. “One big area is that not all counsellors or therapists fully understand some of the risks that can be associated with leaving high-control religion. I felt like I had to fill in the gaps of why it wasn’t as simple as walking away, or sharing everything openly.” In new clients, Khan notices a lot of self-blame and perfectionism. “I often hear about guilt and shame, and that goes across all of the religions,” she says. “A lot of the time, people will be hiding parts of themselves from their loved ones.”

After a while, clients might begin to express a newfound vulnerability. “There may well be more existential themes coming up,” Brooks says. “People might say, ‘When I was anxious before, I used to be able to pray,’ or ‘I felt like God cared about me or would help me, and now I don’t know what to do’ – things around what helps a person feel safe in the world.” Khan says she also has clients with “sticky” beliefs. “Some people who’ve actually denounced faith completely and declared they aren’t religious anymore, still have this fear of hell,” she says. This is something she struggles with herself. “In my head I don’t think hell exists, but actually there’s a part of me that feels terrified that I’m going to burn in eternal torment. I can feel it in my body. That’s not an easy thing to tell someone.”

But while having personal experience of leaving a faith helps in many ways, it can also be a hindrance. Brooks says her greatest professional challenge is not to project her own experience onto her clients. Both personal therapy and professional supervision help reduce the risk of this. She’s been left with a lot of anger about the harm and injustice caused, but she sees her work on the Nomad podcast as a form of activism that fulfils her.

True freedom of belief

The wider provision of therapy aimed at supporting apostates, as well as other forms of advice and support, are also part of a broader cause to provide true freedom of religion or belief in the UK, which includes protecting the right of people to leave a faith. Religious affiliation in the UK is declining. Those saying they had “no religion” rose by 12 percentage points at the last census in 2021 and while this is largely due to religion “ageing out” (younger generations being less religious than older ones), a proportion of this shift will also be down to people changing their beliefs.

In 2023, the Bloom review into freedom of religion or belief recommended that the UK government fund services like Faith to Faithless as part of a wider package of reforms to protect those leaving faith groups, and those at risk of religious harm. The government hasn’t yet taken up the recommendation.

Whether people are receiving therapy or other forms of support, deconstruction is going to be a long and complex process. Millar says it took many years before she could untangle her old faith from her current desire to live a spiritual life. Today, she sees her departure from the Church as more of an arrival. “Over time, losing your religion may start to feel less like a loss,” she says, “and more like an opportunity to rebuild yourself from the ground up.”

In future, the idea of “deconstruction” may gain more recognition amongst mental health providers, particularly in countries where religion is in decline. And specialised therapists like Jenkinson, Brooks and Khan will be ahead of the curve.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

You think you know me?

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Olga Koch is a Russian-British comedian. Her award-winning debut show “Fight” told the wild story of how her father briefly served as deputy prime minister of Russia in the 1990s, under President Boris Yeltsin, but later fled the country. She has appeared on television shows including “Mock The Week”, “QI” and “Live at the Apollo” and is working on a PhD in human-computer interaction.

Your new one-woman comedy show “Fat Tom Cruise” is touring in Britain and Australia. It’s described as “immersive” and “genre-defying”. What does that mean?

I want to keep it as vague as I can to preserve the element of surprise. It’s a history lesson, it’s a gossip session and it’s a horror story. I’m really honing my storytelling abilities but also using a tremendous amount of tech in a way that I never have before.

There’s quite a bit of time travel. We’re going from the 70s all the way to the present day and the jumps occur constantly, so it’s a matter of creating a visual language for the audience to understand what timeline we’re in without constantly having to remind them. It’s like watching movies that do a really good job of signposting where you are at the very beginning and then later on you don’t have to be reminded what year it is. So, how do you achieve that on stage with one person who’s wearing the same outfit throughout? It’s a really interesting challenge.

Your first show explained how your dad came to play a key role in Russia’s privatisation efforts in the 1990s. Having moved to the UK when you were 14, is there anything you think the west gets wrong about Russia?

I’m very careful about not co-opting the experience of living in Russia or being Russian today because I truly don’t know what it’s like. Me and my fiancé went to Paris last weekend, and we went to Napoleon’s tomb. On the tomb is every battle he won, and one of them is Moscow. I have never in my life been so angry, because I was like “He didn’t win Moscow, we gave him Moscow! That was a strategic military decision to leave Moscow, light it on fire and then let him have it.” My fiancé was like “I’ve never seen you this angry, and I’ve never heard you refer to Russia as ‘we’ before”. I think it’s because I have as much claim on the Napoleonic wars as any Russian living today, whereas I don’t feel comfortable saying “we” when it comes to Russia now.

That being said, in some aspects the Russia that I lived in and remember was significantly more progressive than people give it credit for. I have a joke that Russia was one of the first countries to grant women the right to vote – in a single-party state. But my grandmothers were engineers and the idea that I would study computer science [Koch has a degree in the subject from New York University] was not as crazy in Russia as it felt in the US at the time I was studying. Obviously, Russia, especially in the last 10 to 15 years, has become more traditional and religious than before, but in the country that I was raised in, some things were more progressive than people realise.

In “Fight”, you mention an interesting anecdote about visiting the “Museum of Democracy” – officially the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Center – in Yekaterinburg and seeing that your father had been written out of history. What did you take from that moment?

It was a matter of growing up. The thing that really struck me is how well produced the museum is. It’s a really high-budget operation. They have a recreation of the president’s study there, you walk in and they play Yeltsin’s resignation speech, and it feels very emotionally powerful. And then you leave and realise you’ve just been successfully manipulated into feeling all these things in a sort of Disney-level production.

I was in my early 20s at the time and it generally made me more cynical when it comes to museums and countries writing their own histories as a whole. You know how the domino falls for everyone at some point? That was my sort of red pill Matrix moment – although not in the context of how “red pill” is used today, of course!

In your previous show, “Olga Koch Comes From Money”, you explored what it means to come from privilege. What made you write about that?

I think socio-economically we have reached a boiling point where it’s something that we can no longer ignore. It’s something that needs to be discussed, and it felt very cruel and unfair that the only people who are forced to have that conversation are people who come from working-class backgrounds. As a person who comes from tremendous privilege, the silence of that became deafening.

But also, after 10 years of doing stand-up, I felt – maybe wrongfully so or rightfully so – that I finally had the writing and performance ability to tackle a subject like that. It was one of the most agonising processes because I wanted to do it in an aggressively objective way, but there was a constant understanding of my own inability and failure to do so, because I’m so entrenched in it. There’s a silly gag in the show, “There’s only so much self-awareness and perspective I can have. It’s like taking a selfie – my hand can only extend so far before I have to hand my camera to my butler.”

You have experience of how different countries and cultures view money, and in the show you talked about the various moral mythologies around it.

Yes, so in Russia, money is luck, in America, money is hard work – with the caveat that people can work hard doing bad things – and then in the UK, money is something you get from your dad. Every country or culture thinks that theirs is the objective and correct attitude, when in reality there is no such thing.

The other big theme in your comedy is tech, and you’re doing a PhD now in human-computer interaction. What does that mean?

Oh boy, if I knew. It started in the 80s but now that computers are everywhere, everything is human-computer interaction. You unlock a door and it’s a computer now, because we don’t use keys anymore. You use a microwave and that’s human-computer interaction because it has a microchip in it. So it used to be how you interacted with a computer at work and what the interface would look like, and now it’s literally everything because we’re putting microchips everywhere.

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is putting a microchip in something that doesn’t need it. A door doesn’t need it, a scale doesn’t need it – there’s even electronic toothpaste dispensers. You can’t squeeze out your own toothpaste? Come on, buddy. The amount of tech waste we are creating with all these micro things, it makes me so angry.

What’s the focus of your PhD?

Parasocial relationships [one-sided relationships that people develop with someone they don’t know, such as a celebrity or social media influencer]. I used to think that parasocial relationships were an anomaly or almost pathological. But then when I met people who have all these intense parasocial relationships – for example, people who have one-sided conversations with celebrities constantly on social media – I realised it was the most normal thing in the world. If you are exposed to personal information about a person, which we are every day on Instagram stories, it is totally normal for your brain to short circuit and think you know this person. I got interested in it because I started experiencing it myself in some small way. People have seen the inside of my house, people have seen me without make-up, in settings that 30 years ago only a close friend or family member would have seen me in. Of course your brain thinks you know me.

It’s a weird phenomenon, but is it a problem?

The problem isn’t people developing any of those feelings or attachments; the problem is the technology that is actively encouraging it in order to increase screen time and addictiveness. People experiencing the effects of the technology aren’t to blame, it’s the architects of the technology. I don’t know if they know the true repercussions [of what they’re doing].

After your PhD, I hear you have plans to go into tech communications?

That’s always been the dream. I think that comedy is the best way to learn things. As children and young adults, we’re okay being patronised when it comes to learning things, but the older we get, the more sensitive we get to feeling like somebody’s patronising us or teaching us something. Comedy is a great way to sneakily teach people.

I read this paper that I keep coming back to. It said that people who watch satirical news shows are actually as, if not more, informed than people who watch the news. But satirical news shows do something that the regular news doesn’t do, which is give context. If John Oliver or Jon Stewart explain something happening in Congress, on The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight, they’re never just giving you that piece of news in isolation. They’ll go through the rigmarole of explaining “This is how the Congress works”. But because they’re doing it in a comedy setting, you don’t realise you’re being taught. I mean, Horrible Histories – what’s that? If you’re laughing, you don’t realise that you’re learning.

“Fat Tom Cruise” is touring until 4 December.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

We're hiring a freelance marketing designer

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 16:00:35 GMT

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We're keen to hear from people who can bring some flair to traditional advertisements (both print and digital), inserts, banners and social media cards.

These will mostly be promoting our subscription packages, building on existing images such as magazine covers.

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Please apply as soon as possible or by 26th March at the latest.

We're hiring! Apply to be our Art Director

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:08:28 GMT

Job title: Art Director, New Humanist

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We're looking for an Art Director for the beautiful print edition of our magazine. The role involves creativity and a keen eye for magazine design, a good understanding of story presentation, knowledge of legal issues surrounding the use of images in an editorial context, and experience of collaborating with editors in a magazine or journalism environment.

The role will kick off with a partial redesign project, which is expected to take 4-6 days of design work. This will involve creating new InDesign templates and producing designs for new article formats, with lots of opportunity for creative input.

After this, you'll work five days per quarter (3 remote, 2 in the office) on each edition of the magazine, on an ongoing basis. The Art Director takes the lead on layout design, picture research and image permissions, commissioning the cover illustration, managing image library accounts and overseeing the picture budget. There is also a small amount of work each quarter creating social media and other digital assets.

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To apply, please send your CV and portfolio to editor@newhumanist.org.uk, with the subject line Art Director. Applications must be received by midnight on 30th March 2026.

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Book review: Frontline Poets

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:47:35 GMT

Frontline Poets (River Books) by Joe Freeman and Aung Naing Soe

Talk of male anatomy was the last thing I expected as I walked into a book launch at Bangkok’s foreign correspondents’ club. Yet there it was, beaming across the projector screen: a poem about a political penis tattoo. “On my manhood rests a tattooed / portrait of Mr. President / My beloved found that out after / we wed / She was utterly gutted / Inconsolable.”

This is the most reserved translation of a terse, subversive piece written by Maung Saungkha, a poet in Myanmar. When he posted his work to Facebook in October 2015, he “dropped the poetic equivalent of a bombshell,” according to a new book by journalists Joe Freeman and Aung Naing Soe – a bombshell that led to six months behind bars for online defamation of the president. It was while covering this bizarre court case that Freeman and Aung Naing Soe first met Maung Saungkha. A decade on, he is one of five poets they have profiled in a deeply moving, often humorous book that repeatedly defies expectations.

While it includes several works translated from Burmese to English for the first time, this is not a poetry anthology. Rather, it is a history of Myanmar told through the lives of poets who have not only chronicled but actively participated in decades of political upheaval, resistance and conflict since the end of colonial rule. Yet its main goal is not to explain Myanmar’s many deep divisions, or why the 2021 military coup and subsequent civil war unfolded. Instead, at its core, the book is an exploration of why poetry is still such a powerful force in Myanmar, where the literary form continues to be a vehicle for resistance and identity. Writers evade military censorship with obscure metaphors, short works become rebel anthems, and poignant poems allow people to reflect on all that they have lost.

“I abandoned everything after I had abandoned everything” is one especially gut-wrenching line, in a long, tumbling poem by Yoe Aunt Min that depicts the mind of a rebel fighter. After the coup in February 2021 and the junta’s violent crackdown on peaceful protesters, Yoe Aunt Min followed Maung Saungkha into war. Maung Saungkha had become the leader of an armed opposition group called the Bamar People’s Liberation Army, and Yoe Aunt Min was one of his first recruits. Their journey from poets and activists to armed fighters living in the jungle hits on another theme in the book. Yoe Aunt Min’s vivid, meandering poem points at this shift in her own life, before concluding: “What kind of wisdom is necessary for those who hold / lethal weapons? / I don’t know how to solve this. / Please answer.”

The book asks what it means to be a frontline poet – whether that frontline is Maung Saungkha and Yoe Aunt Min’s battlefield, the street protests that cost another poet, K Za Win, his life, or the displacement camps where two others, Lynn Khar and A Mon, fled to safety. Yet despite the palpable sense of loss, the narrative balances heartbreak and horror with humour, humanity and – much like the penis poem – the unexpected.

The book evokes a vivid picture of life in Myanmar, and of the poets who remain determined to better their country against extraordinary odds.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Red lipstick resistance

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Darya Afanasyeva remembers sitting at a sewing machine, in the factory of a penal colony in south-eastern Belarus. In front of her was a round cushion, which she had studded with three pins: two white and one red. The three dots of colour were tiny, but looking at them filled her with joy. “To me, it was a form of inner protest,” she says.

During the summer of 2020, Belarus was flooded with red-and-white flags, symbolising people’s opposition to President Alexander Lukashenko. Hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors took to the streets following a disputed election that brought the authoritarian strongman and close ally of Russia’s President Putin to office for the sixth time, making him the longest serving leader in Europe. Afanasyeva was jailed for two years for taking part.

Today, she lives in exile, and wants to tell her story, and the story of the many women imprisoned in Belarus for resisting the regime. Hundreds of dissidents were jailed after the mass protests – including politicians, journalists, activists and students. And while US-led negotiations secured the release of more than 100 political prisoners in December, people continue to be arrested for as little as liking social media posts critical of the president or supporting the opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya. Of these, many are sent to penal colonies – a legacy of the Soviet-era gulags. But despite the government’s attempts to crush their spirits, the women who have emerged from these colonies tell stories of defiance and solidarity.

Afanasyeva told me about her life in the Gomel colony, one of two that hold women prisoners. She said they were put to work doing strenuous manual labour and only allowed to take a short shower once a week. One of the guards “enjoyed punishing” them by not even permitting this chance to clean themselves. “She was a young woman, about 25 years old,” Afanasyeva said. “I wanted to say to her, ‘Damn it, imagine doing this yourself: spend the whole day working at the sewing factory; then lift heavy sacks filled with metal off a truck; then sweep the [colony] streets; and then finally go to the cafeteria, where your clothes will soak up the smells – knowing you can’t change them. And after all that, you can’t take a shower!’”

But Afanasyeva also told me how she and other women were determined to resist, and to support each other wherever they could. They came up with handy inventions – for example, they would cut up a plastic bottle and use the bottom section to wash their body parts, one by one.

The women campaigning for president

Along with many of her fellow political prisoners, Afanasyeva wants Belarus to be rid of Lukashenko, so that the country can move on. He is the country’s first and only president, having held the office since 1994, following independence from the Soviet Union. In the 2020 election, he claimed to have secured over 80 per cent of the vote, but a lack of scrutiny, with no observers present, led to widespread allegations of vote-rigging.

Opposition candidate Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya claimed that she had actually won the election. Tsikhanouskaya had launched a presidential campaign alongside two other women – Maria Kolesnikova and Veronika Tsepkalo – after their husbands and partners were imprisoned or exiled due to their own intention to run. In a country where politics has tended to be male-dominated, thousands of women came out onto the streets, calling for change and opposing the authoritarian and patriarchal culture.

When the crackdown began, Tsikhanouskaya and Tsepkalo fled the country. Kolesnikova was jailed – and only released as part of the December 2025 deal, after more than five years in prison – while Tsikhanouskaya was sentenced to 15 years in prison in absentia. Many other women who participated in the protests and women’s marches are also now in exile. Even after the December release, 175 female political prisoners remain in jail, according to the Belarus Women’s Foundation.

Journalist Ksenia Lutskina was released in 2024, after more than three and a half years of imprisonment on charges of “destabilisation of the political, social, economic and informational situation” in Belarus. When I talked to her, she also recalled how united political detainees were. “We lived as a community. The conditions were very hard, but solidarity made up for that,” she said. “If food was sent to one of us [by family and friends], we shared it. And when a new political prisoner was brought in, we knew what we needed to do, right away: give her clothes, hygiene items and food; make her tea or coffee; and if she smokes, give her cigarettes.”

Acts of solidarity

Viktoria Zhukouskaya – a Belarusian researcher with a PhD in management and sociology, who lives in exile – has interviewed many former political prisoners. She confirms the stories of solidarity. Several women have told Zhukouskaya that prison authorities would throw homeless people into the cell with them, “using the bodies of other women” to increase their discomfort. They would have to endure “the smell, the lice, and so on, in a cell designated for four people – but where eight to 12 were held.” But the political prisoners said they rejected this tactic of division. From the moment a homeless woman entered their prison cell, they would start cleaning her up: “One of them took off her clothes, another washed her, while a third extracted the lice.”

However, there was a price to pay for these acts of solidarity. In the penal colonies, they could be harshly punished.

“The [prison] system is aimed at dividing people, and not only political prisoners,” said Alana Gebremariam, who spent two years behind bars for student activism. Sharing anything – even toilet paper – could lead to punishment, such as being held in an isolation cell with no access to letters from the outside world. “You’re kept in this small, damp, dark cell, where all you can do is keep walking around to avoid freezing [to death] if it’s winter and there is no heating,” said Gebremariam.

The women were also subjected to high levels of surveillance. Gebremariam told me that, in the Gomel penal colony, authorities set up a “network of informers” among inmates. As a result, she said, people were “very suspicious of one another” and “scared of telling each other things”. Afanasyeva added that political prisoners were under particularly high levels of scrutiny, and were more likely to be labelled as “maliciously breaking the rules” – an official term that could often lead to punishment. They were made to wear yellow tags on their uniforms, which set them apart from non-political prisoners, who had white tags. Afanasyeva was once denied a visit from a loved one because she had shared “a small piece of ice cream” with another inmate.

Yet these women still found ways to connect with each other. After work at the factory, many formed “interest clubs”, Afanasyeva said. “We would tell [other women inmates] about modern art, or about our hobbies, such as hiking in the mountains, and so on. As for me, I spoke about feminism and femicides.” For example, she explained to other prisoners what domestic violence is – and that being beaten by one’s husband or partner “is not the norm”. Some of the women had been jailed for murdering their husbands or partners, she pointed out, when many of them were acting in self-defence.

'Defiance drove the authorities mad'

Gebremariam added that political prisoners tend to have a higher level of formal education and can pass on their knowledge and skills. She said that they were able to help other inmates understand the political and social situation in Belarus, as well as supporting them practically with actions such as appealing their convictions. She said it was important to educate these women about the outside world. They might have spent 10 to 20 years behind bars. For some, “the last thing they saw was a push-button phone,” so they needed to catch up with developments in Belarus and internationally, including being told about the 2020 protests and the women’s marches.

Gebremariam said you could always spot a fellow political prisoner, because they refused to be victims. “They were recognisable by their smile, their straight posture and their appearance, including hair and makeup; and by the way they carried themselves as they walked through the [colony] streets, with their heads up high,” she said. Zhukouskaya, the researcher, noted the importance of maintaining this attitude. “In a situation of absolute control, domination and violence, where people are reduced to the status of animals, the very fact of preserving one’s dignity is an act of resistance,” she said.

Red lipstick became a symbol for supporters of Maria Kolesnikova, mimicking the opposition figure’s signature style. “This [kind of defiance] drove the authorities mad, because they wanted to see prisoners broken and humiliated. Instead, they saw beautiful women in front of them,” said Zhukouskaya. The prisoners were later forbidden from wearing red lipstick.

The political prisoners would also try to lift the morale of their fellow inmates by organising their morning routine with an emphasis on helping each other out – such as making coffee for everyone instead of just themselves – and finding opportunities for creativity and generosity. “We drew together, we made things with our hands; we gave gifts to each other for birthdays, and New Year’s Eve,” Gebremariam said. They hand-made gifts from materials that were permitted, such as paper for origami. “We gave one of the girls a heart made from old red fabric, which we filled with feathers from a pillow.”

Secret acts of protest

There was also something else that prison guards couldn’t prevent women from sharing with one another: laughter. Ksenia Lutskina recalled how they would find humour even in the barbaric prison conditions. One of the cells was comically small – maybe nine square metres for the beds, toilet and the table where they sat to eat their food. “And so, we used to joke that while sitting on the toilet, we could put our feet on the table!”

Gebremariam told me that some of the guards couldn’t help but feel moved by the dignity and integrity of the political prisoners. She remembers one who worked in the detention centre where they were sent before trial. He was “a very simple man, who spent 15 years working in the [prison] system”. At first, he looked at political prisoners “suspiciously”, she recalls, but “little by little”, he became “intrigued” by them. “He would come near our cell and ask us what we were doing and how we were feeling.”

During their trial in court, she and other defendants had to stand next to a wall with their hands tied behind their backs “for an hour and a half, or two hours”. But the guard must have decided that this was not right, because he let them have breaks – taking them to the restroom or to have a smoke.

“When the trial was over, he said he was very tired of working in the system,” Gebremariam said. “He said its cruelty and absence of humanity was killing him, and that he wanted to live a simple life and didn’t care what became of him – whether he worked as a taxi driver, or went back home to help his father in the countryside.” I asked her what became of the man. “As far as I know, he did quit.”

But that was more of an exception, rather than the rule, she emphasised. Some guards, on the contrary, “wanted to hurt people, mentally and physically, in very perverse and sadistic ways”. Afanasyeva agreed – many of them were “overly proactive” in punishing prisoners. That’s why she often chose secret, small acts of protest, like studding the sewing cushion with red and white pins. Of the guards she said, “there is no sense in trying to prove something to them.”

The female-led government-in-exile

But with fellow prisoners it was different. She told me about making bouquets of three autumn leaves, to resemble the red-and-white opposition flag. Another form of hidden protest was doing work poorly at the sewing factory, which for her wasn’t hard to achieve. “It happened naturally because I’m not very skilled at sewing!” she laughed.

She was skilled at decorating, though. She told me how, in the colony, they only had black clothes, but they were permitted to mark these items with their names, in bleach, so that they wouldn’t get stolen. Along with some other political detainees, Afanasyeva added glittery paint to the bleach and marked one of her T-shirts with a “GRL PWR” inscription. She hid the T-shirt under other clothes, but secretly wearing it made her feel powerful.

As we talked, she lifted up the black T-shirt and showed me the words “GRL PWR” written on the back. She was able to smuggle it out of the penal colony. Now it reminds her of the years spent in imprisonment, but also of the bonds she formed with the other women, some of whom she still sees now that they’ve been released. “Many of them have become my close friends,” she tells me. “Going to the cinema, sharing a pizza, or even having a chat with someone who has been through a similar experience is easier. That’s why we stick together.”

Today, Lukashenko has regained total political control of Belarus, having dismantled the opposition and clamped down on civil society. And although he has released dozens of political prisoners under US pressure, many women dissidents remain in captivity. Inside Belarus, no one talks in public about the political prisoners. But their cause is considered a top priority by Belarusian civil society, which continues to organise abroad.

The 2020 protests showed what civil society might be able to acheive, as well as women’s ability to take the lead. Within hours of her release in December, Maria Kolesnikova was filmed wearing her signature red lipstick and calling for the release of those who remain in prison. Tsikhanouskaya has formed a government-in-exile, which is preparing democratic reforms that, according to Zhukouskaya, will be implemented as soon as “a window of opportunity” opens for political changes.

When that happens, she hopes that civil society in Belarus will come together to build a new future. Perhaps it will be led by women – once they return from exile and are released from jail. Lukashenko has put much effort into cracking down on them. But listening to the women I spoke to gave me the feeling that the state hasn’t yet managed to crush this source of resilience and opposition.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.

Six voices on how to fight propaganda

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 16:58:41 GMT

With the great powers facing off and a global authoritarian slide, we are entering a new era of brazen propaganda.

Dissidents already living under totalitarian regimes are reaching out to those who feel their democracy is under threat. We hear from six of these champions of free thought on how to fight back and protect the truth.

Russia’s last dissidents

By Andrei Kolesnikov

Journalist, author and analyst. The following is an extract from The Closing of the Russian Mind (Polity)

I am one of the so called “remaining” – those who, continuing to fulfil their research and journalistic duties, risk staying in Russia, analysing what is happening to our country from the belly of the beast. There are few of us, but we do not feel isolated. We have spontaneously formed “clubs” where we discuss matters at private apartments or in cafés. One of the regular toasts at our table is: “May we all survive this.”

The sociologist Yuri Levada spent many years developing the concept of the “Soviet man”, the archetypical personality type shaped by the Soviet system. Adaptability is the main characteristic. Levada called this type of behaviour a “game”.

Consider, for example, the “work” game. In the Soviet version, it was described by a successful joke of those years, “We pretend to work, you pretend to pay.” Another is the game of “consent”: imitation of submission to the state and support for its actions in exchange for a quiet private existence.

When external circumstances in Russia once again became authoritarian and then hybrid totalitarian, both the former “Soviet man” and the new “Putin’s man” turned to all their adaptive capabilities to survive. Their reverse transformation into “normal” people – i.e. non-authoritarian personalities – is possible under very simple conditions: the authorities must change, the external conditions of existence must be altered, and propaganda slogans and ideological postulates must be modified. Then, quite unexpectedly – just as happened with “Soviet man” at the turn of the 1990s – the “neo-totalitarian man” will begin to evolve rapidly toward normalisation.

For this transition to occur and hold, institutions matter. During the transition period from the Stalinist state to a more or less normal, nearly democratic system, they did not have time to form. The post-Soviet person has become a consumer in the capitalist sense, but has not become a citizen who is a supporter of human rights, humanistic values and the rotation of power as something extremely important for everyday life. Without democracy there can be no modernisation, especially in an ideologised empire with messianic hallucinations.

Once, when my friends – all people with “dissenting” thoughts – and I made our regular toast, “May we all survive this,” one of the circle, in his 70s, who was born under Stalin, remarked gloomily: “No one has ever managed to do so.” He was referring to the endless return of Russian history to its despotic beginnings – several times in the course of his lifetime. My own mother was the daughter of an “enemy of the people”, and it’s a good thing she didn’t live to see me declared a “foreign agent”. Such are the Russian cycles from which one yearns to escape.

I am 60 years old. People of my age and circle are often asked why we are so attached to the 1990s, a time of transition from socialism to capitalism. For us, it was a time of hope and freedom. The freedom that the great Andrei Sakharov spoke of in his 1968 work, Thoughts on Progress, Peaceful Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom: “ ... intellectual freedom is essential to human society – freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues, can be transformed into bloody dictatorship. Freedom of thought is the only guarantee of the feasibility of a scientific democratic approach to politics, economy and culture.”

You might say that all this is too simple and naïve. Perhaps, but it is precisely the absence of such a vision of the world that leads to the emergence of Putins, dictatorships and wars. In my opinion, nothing better than this triple freedom has been invented in my 60 years on Earth. I would not want my sons and daughter, who have become the children of a “foreign agent”, to be the parents of the next “enemy” of the next Russian dictator. Me, my family and my country, which should not be equated with Putin’s regime, need the kind of freedom of which Sakharov dreamed.

Drowning in climate lies

By Adam Barnett

News reporter, DeSmog

“Climate change – it’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.” That was Donald Trump, speaking to the United Nations in September. The US president went on to denounce what he called the “green energy scam” and praised “clean, beautiful coal”. Just months earlier, wildfires had devastated California. Trump and his allies around the world want people to believe this is normal. But everyone who can read knows that climate change is a clear and present danger.

Scientists say that 2025 was one of the three hottest years on record. The World Weather Attribution service identified 157 extreme weather events last year as “severe”, in that they killed at least 100 people, affected half an area’s population or led to a state of emergency being declared. Of these, it said the year’s deadly heatwaves were made 10 times more likely than a decade ago by climate change.

Meanwhile, oil and gas companies (which donated $25.8 million to Trump’s re-election campaign) have taken Trump’s return to power as a sign that they can stop pretending to curb their emissions. Companies like BP have scrapped their 2030 targets for switching from oil and gas to renewable energy production.

All this has encouraged climate deniers in Europe. In December 2024, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage spoke at the launch of the European branch of the Heartland Institute, a US think-tank that boasts of “supporting scepticism about man-made climate change” and has received funding from ExxonMobil. Spooked by Reform’s polling, Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party has declared net zero “impossible” and pledged to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act.

Meanwhile, green policies at the European Union level have been opposed by far-right parties across the continent, with similar arguments from Conservative Pierre Poilievre in Canada. In Europe and North America, the Venn diagram of far-right parties and climate deniers is a circle. And these nationalists are increasingly working together across borders.

Despite this, and despite the COP30 summit in Brazil in November failing to even mention fossil fuels in its final statement, some long-time climate-watchers remain optimistic. Former US vice president Al Gore and environmentalist Bill McKibben have recently pointed to the extraordinary growth of renewable energy (92 per cent of new electricity generation in 2024) as a trend that right-wing demagogues can’t stop.

The biggest challenge is to generate political will for effective climate action. Advocacy has had some recent wins. Guardian climate journalist Nina Lakhani noted that the first ever “just transition mechanism”, agreed at COP30 for an energy transition that respects human rights, was the result of “years of civil society organising” including large protests at the climate summit itself. She also highlighted plans by Colombia, the Netherlands and 22 other states to work on moving away from fossil fuels outside the sluggish COP process.

In another promising development, the International Court of Justice ruled in July that states have a legal duty to tackle climate change – the result of a case brought by law students in the Pacific Islands, which are on the frontline of rising sea levels. That ruling could now be used to oppose new fossil fuel projects. In recent years, France has passed a law against corporate greenwashing, while the Hague has banned fossil fuel advertising outright. The idea is to treat “Big Carbon” the same as tobacco companies.

As for the climate denial flooding our screens, the EU and the UK’s respective Digital Services Acts require tech companies to moderate the deluge on their platforms. At COP30, more than 20 countries signed a “Declaration on Information Integrity on Climate Change”, calling on governments, the private sector and civil society to tackle climate denial and support accurate information.

But these efforts are under growing attack from the political right, as if “freedom of speech” includes the freedom of corporations (and their proxies) to lie about their planet-warming emissions. The rise of nationalist politics threatens to drown out climate as a priority, and to use “cost of living” worries to dismiss green policies as a left-wing “elitist” luxury.

The challenge is to build a democratic politics that connects the struggle against predatory corporations and authoritarian demagogues with the need for climate action – and, crucially, gives people something to vote for, instead of simply against. “Clean power, people power” would be a good slogan.

We must hold the line against hate

By Zoe Gardner

Immigration policy campaigner

Anti-immigration propaganda saturates the UK. Well-funded far-right social media accounts proliferate, pumping misinformation onto our screens, often straight from the US where anti-migrant messages brought Trump to power. The mainstream media has joined in with obsessive coverage, framing immigration as a problem to be eradicated, rather than a human reality to be managed.

As Reform UK top the polls, Labour moves right and Tommy Robinson leads huge nationalist marches, it is easy to despair. But that is exactly what the people funding the far-right hope for: that decent people will stay quiet and let them pass.

While immigration is a huge issue of concern, we should remember the public remains relatively level-headed about the subject. There is significant opposition to small boats, but quite strong support for most other kinds of immigration, from carers to builders to students, and even for protecting refugees.

What is criminal is that so few voices speak for this silenced majority. Changing that starts with a more confident, proactive approach – less responding to negative framing and more telling the story of the alternative.

There are three lessons we can take into 2026:

Focus on who suffers from anti-migrant politics, and who gains

The government is making it harder for immigrants to get settled, permanent status. Care workers, for example, who came on the promise that after five years they could settle, must now wait a further 15. But when workers have temporary status, they are at risk of exploitation, as they rely on their employer for their right to remain in their home. This move creates a more exploitable second class of worker, which in turn impacts wages and conditions for all.

It is businesses seeking to underpay workers who benefit from them being more insecure, and loan sharks who celebrate more migrants being trapped in cycles of debt to pay visa renewal fees for longer. Meanwhile, private security firms and corporate landlords rake in lucrative government contracts to provide an ever-escalating but never effective pantomime of enforcement at the border and in asylum seeker accommodation.

On the other side, fewer workers means costs pushed up in hospitality, care and farming, resulting in higher prices for everyone. All the while, much lower immigration means a smaller economy with less money for public services and more tax rises.

Talk about real solutions

In the face of chaos, it’s tempting to say “but we must do SOMETHING” as if the only option were more restrictions on rights and movement. In fact, we have plenty of highly evidenced alternative approaches available to us. From the striking example of how a safe route for Ukrainians saved lives and bypassed smugglers, to the evidence that more stable, settled status correlates to higher salaries, or economic modelling that shows investment in integration and giving asylum seekers the right to work produces better outcomes and saves money for the state.

It is striking how utterly the anti-migrant politics of deterrence, pursued over years, has failed on its own terms. Yet we still accept a conversation where “more of the same, just a bit harder this time” is the answer. We must articulate how to run an immigration system to the benefit of the country, because we know how to do that. We don’t have to choose between the chaotic status quo and even more hostility.

Find our courage

For too long, progressive voices have been cowardly. Propaganda has convinced many that it is “out of touch” to support immigrants. Since the Brexit vote took much of the commentariat by surprise, they are desperate to prove they “get it” by giving up ground to an increasingly belligerent and extreme anti-migrant right. We find ourselves now facing potentially the most serious far-right threat in our history, dominated by figures like Farage, and even Robinson, who are miles away from representing the majority of ordinary Brits.

We ordinary people who reject a hyper-nationalist future for Britain, like that which has overtaken the US, need to find our courage. There can be no wishing this issue away. The right has successfully made the debate about immigration, and now we have got to win it.

Protecting science is a matter of life or death

By Michael E. Mann and Peter Hotez

Scientists and authors of Science Under Siege (Scribe), from which the following is an extract

As the great Mahatma Gandhi reportedly counselled, let us be the change we wish to see in the world. This also applies to us scientists. We can mount legal challenges to the promotion of lies and conspiracies. We can organise and pressure academic and scientific institutions to take a more proactive stance against anti-scientific disinformation, and to provide support and defence for scientists subject to concerted right-wing attacks.

If we don’t, these institutions will assuredly cave in to the bad-faith demands of polemicists, propagandists and pressure groups. Look no further than Stanford’s pitiful capitulation to right-wing critics in dissolving their Internet Observatory for the study of disinformation because it came under attack by disinformation promoters like the Putin-loving Ohio congressman Jim Jordan.

We’ve seen some progress over the past decade. Back in 2012, Andrew Weaver, a leading climate scientist from the University of Victoria in British Columbia ran for office. He was elected as the first Green Party member of British Columbia’s legislative assembly in 2013 and went on to become the leader of the Green Party of British Columbia in 2015. He used this platform to push for clean energy and oppose the expansion of liquefied natural gas. Climate policy scholar Claudia Sheinbaum took it to a new level in June 2024, running for and becoming president of Mexico. It remains to be seen just what she will do with this platform.

Of course, you hardly need to be an expert to play an important role. All of us can work towards increased support for science education and objective and comprehensive science standards in schools. Any lasting solution to the anti-science crisis will require limiting the ability of vested interests and plutocrats to seize control of our media environment, increasing support for public media, enforcing basic rules of journalistic integrity and getting special-interest money out of our politics. That relies on each of us taking action.

It often comes down to voting, and not just at the presidential level, but at the state and local levels. Even the 2024 US election, which handed full power of our federal government to a Republican Party opposed to science-based policies, offered at least one silver lining. Climate initiatives did well across the country. Voters in Washington rejected a ballot measure that attempted to repeal the state’s cap-and-trade system for emissions reductions, while voters in California and Hawaii overwhelmingly passed measures to invest in climate resilience. We must – as youth climate activists have done – speak truth to power and put pressure on our elected representatives to work toward global climate agreements that truly meet the moment.

We face an anti-science threat of epic proportions, a battle for the Earth itself. In The Two Towers – the second book in the Lord of the Rings trilogy – the two hobbits Merry and Pippin face a similarly daunting task. They find themselves among Treebeard and his army of tree-like beings known as Ents, as they mobilise against Saruman, who is destroying the forests for his military operation (yes, Lord of the Rings is replete with environmental themes). The diminutive Pippin questions the purpose of such a small creature as he in this great war. He says to Merry that at least “we’ve got the Shire” and that “maybe we should go home”. Merry admonishes Pippin, explaining that the war will spread, “and all that was once green and good in this world will be gone”. He chillingly warns, “There won’t be a Shire, Pippin.”

It might be tempting to see the battle against anti-science as too removed from your everyday life. But if humanity fails to combat the great global crises we face today, there won’t be an Earth – at least not one that we’d recognise. We will lose the welcoming planetary home we know today, with its rich forests and oceans and ecosystems teeming with diverse, interconnected life forms. That’s stark. But the choice is ours. The obstacles are not physical or technological. They are political.

Today, harm is being done by the spread of despair and defeatism, some of it weaponised by bad actors like Russia to create division and disengagement. We are, in fact, far from defeat. The United States remains close, according to some estimates, to being on track to meet its commitment to cutting carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2030 and reaching zero by 2050, despite the opposition by Trump, the Republicans, and polluters and petrostates.

A path to limiting warming below 1.5°C still exists, though it is becoming increasingly narrow. Yes, we may miss the 1.5°C target. But keeping warming below 2°C would still avoid much harm and suffering. It’s never too late to make a difference.

Orwell in China

By Yang Lian

Poet and dissident. The following is translated by Duncan Hewitt

With the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing in 1989, history began to run in the opposite direction. Just as exiles from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were returning home, our own time of exile began. Not long ago, the nightmare was reincarnated, as the war criminal Putin strode smugly across the red carpets of China, the US and India. To my eyes, it was as though each of his footprints was steeped in the blood and flesh of those crushed by the tank tracks on Tiananmen Square.

“The Great Leap Forward”, the Chinese political slogan of the 1950s, could be changed to “the Great Leap Backward” to perfectly describe the post-Cold War world. Today, the spiritual crisis of humanity is far graver than during the Cold War. Globalisation and the illusion of “the end of history” have concealed a frightening reality: autocratic totalitarianism and western big capital have been quietly converging. Big capitalists are scrambling to throw themselves into the arms of the Communist Party of China, enjoying the cheap labour made possible by autocratic repression and obtaining huge profits that are unimaginable under the rule of law, while the CCP has strengthened its power by hijacking western capital, technology and knowledge.

The “theory of evolution” has thus become a joke: getting rich means abandoning your moral principles. Since there is no idealistic vision, all that remains is to grab what you can, in line with immediate interests. Selfishness, cynicism and “profit first” have combined to paint an ugly portrait of the world.

My poem “1989” ends with the line, “This is no doubt a perfectly ordinary year”. This implies a self-questioning. If Tiananmen shocked us as though it were the first time we had ever heard of a massacre, then where were our memories of the countless dead in the Cultural Revolution? If they had simply been forgotten, then who can guarantee that the tears we shed after Tiananmen Square were not just washing away our memory in preparation for the next shock? Today, we stare open-mouthed in astonishment as the nations of Big Brother – including Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Trump’s US and Khamenei’s Iran – openly form agreements, and democratic systems degenerate into games of majorities.

In China, lies and suppression are the two magic weapons of the CCP’s rule. While state propaganda blames the west for blocking China’s access to YouTube, Google, X (formerly Twitter) and Facebook, Chinese people are locked in a high firewall by their own government, hopelessly becoming either prisoners or their own guards in the world’s largest prison.

In 2018, I spent more than 10 months translating George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm. Soon after, news came from Beijing: Orwell was officially banned in mainland China. My translations could only be published in Taiwan in the end. 1984 reveals the true face of totalitarianism, which the Big Brothers of today seek to conceal. In 1984’s final, most terrifying sentence, we learn of the protagonist Winston Smith: “He loved Big Brother”. In 2026, it is we who love Big Brother. Today’s world goes beyond Orwell’s darkest imaginings. Once Xi Jinping rebuilds a comprehensive autocracy, and lies and violence become pervasive, Mao Zedong’s system of surveillance will pale in comparison.

This brings us back to the essence of resistance. It should not only be directed towards an external power, but even more towards our own spiritual decay, because it is precisely the surrender of each individual that creates opportunities for totalitarian control. Today, a rebel must be an “active other, who takes the energy of self-questioning – I question therefore I am – and consciously resists self-inertia, regardless of what immediate benefits this attitude might bring them.

Where do we go from here? Firstly, there is no heaven, but we must resist every hell; and secondly, we must understand that we are starting from the impossible. Orwell’s works can still guide us. They shatter the utopian illusion, and at the same time affirm human dignity and the essence of civilisation.

This article is from New Humanist's Spring 2026 issue. Subscribe now.

Call of the wild

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 06:00:00 GMT

Humans began bending wild things to their will at least 15,000 years ago (some evidence suggests these processes probably started earlier). Domestication was a turning point in human evolution. Starting with wolves, we exerted further pressure on animal and plant species honed by millions of years of natural selection – exaggerating desirable qualities and reducing undesirable ones on a much shorter timescale.

Dangerous predators became hunting partners and loyal friends. Flinty seeds and hard fruits were fattened in the forges of our appetites. And our lives became progressively easier as a result. The ability to harness evolution and turn it to our own ends was a major facilitator of civilisation and ultimately our colonisation of most of the planet.

But the organisms we now consider to be domestic were never truly our creations. We have certainly modified them beyond recognition in some cases. The obese pug waddling down the sidewalk bears little resemblance to its wolf ancestors. The plump kernels of a corn cob are nothing like the stingy, hard little knobs produced by its parent plant, teosinte. Given the chance, though, many of these organisms are more than happy to rewild themselves. They are not the static, placid entities we think they are. The genes of domesticated organisms remain compatible with those of their wild progenitors. The DNA in everything from a head of lettuce to a greyhound is primed to escape its human confines.

This rewilding process might seem benign – a return for these species to their older state, before humans started meddling. But the practical effects are more complex. When these domesticated genes make a break for it, they can have serious effects on wild populations, sometimes threatening their survival. These challenges call into question our ideas around what is “natural”, along with our assumptions about change and modification.

Interbreeding on the rise

Domestication was a messy process from the start. Ever since humans began to breed crops and domesticate wild animals, there has been some element of interchange with their ancestor species. After all, some of our domestic species were accidental in the first place, or at least partially; wolves in search of easy scraps were drawn into human encampments; wild cats attracted to rodents feeding on grain became prized as pest-killers. As they slowly integrated into human life, these early domesticates invariably returned to the wild or bred with newly acclimated wild specimens. Early dogs almost certainly bred with human-curious wolves, and freshly minted lapcats snuck off behind the grain silos for sneaky trysts with dirty-hot wild toms.

It was a similar story with plant life: crops selected for greater production (wheat and barley were two of the first) were often in proximity to their wild relatives and exchanged genes. This entry of one genetically defined population into another is called “introgression”.

However, as human civilisation has expanded, opportunities for this kind of interbreeding have increased exponentially. Large areas of the Earth are now covered by crops and livestock. Pollen is carried by wind or by insects and other creatures outside of the cultivation area, to fertilise any compatible wild plants. Of the world’s 13 most important food crops, 12 are known to hybridise with related species in the wild. Domestic animals often range freely or escape captivity entirely.

The effects of rewilding may be subtle, such as changes in size or colour or reproduction time. Or they may be massive, in some cases resulting in what is called “genetic swamping” – fundamentally altering the wild population and eliminating the genetic diversity that allows the species to adapt to changing conditions. This process is exacerbated by the fact that species are often bred by humans to be stronger and more resilient than their wild counterparts. But these advantages are general, whereas wild species may have adapted to thrive in particular environmental conditions.

Domestication can also go wrong. It can lead to the accumulation of hidden alternative forms of genes that result in problems such as greater disease susceptibility, which then enter wild populations too. In some cases, introgression can result in failed breeding events (incomplete fertilisation or the production of sterile hybrids). Think of the horse breeding with the donkey and producing the sterile mule.

Hybrid swarms of rice

It’s clear that domestic introgression affects a wide range of plants and animals. But research on the subject is patchy. In some cases, we simply do not yet know what the effects will be. “This is a somewhat avant-garde aspect of linking ecology and genetics,” says Joshua Daskin, chief scientist of biodiversity data organisation NatureServe. “There are not enough ecologists and geneticists, and there’s not enough funding to understand the depth of this threat.”

Most current research concerns the problem of hybrid plants that return to “invade” farmers’ fields, in the form of aggressive weeds. These wild-domestic hybrids can be stronger and more pesticide-resistant and can also evade detection due to their resemblance to the crop. Some of the world’s worst weeds are the result of domestic genes entering wild populations. For example, Johnson grass is a major pest of corn, soybeans and domesticated sorghum, after becoming more vigorous and resistant to herbicides as a result of breeding with its domestic relative. These supercharged weeds also produce larger, more viable seed crops. Genes originally sculpted to serve the needs of farmers have turned against them.

Another remarkable example is that of Asian wild rice. The entire global population now appears to consist of a hybrid swarm derived from domestic rice genes that made their way into the wild through wind and insect pollination. Unfortunately, domestic genes may have conferred some disadvantageous qualities, like reduced seed shattering. This is helpful for a crop meant to be consumed by humans, but wild seeds shatter as a means of resistance to insect damage.

We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of introgression may be. The picture is not clear cut, and while it should be monitored, we should also remember this process has been going on for millennia. For example, nearly all populations of wild rice have some level of domestic ancestry, to such an extent that tracing the exact origins of rice has thus far proven impossible. So clearly these mutations have not been fatal.

What we don't know

Genetic rewilding in animals is even less well studied, with perhaps the exception of salmon. Though the domestication of species such as Atlantic salmon only began in the 1970s, alteration to their basic physiology and habits has been rapid. As with most domestic species, farmed salmon appear less attentive to predator risk, and mature at an accelerated rate. Large salmon farming operations in the Americas, Europe and other regions have led to the escape of farmed varieties from ocean pens into the wild. Their precocious maturity appears to coincide with changes in their migration patterns. Domestic salmon return to the sea at younger ages and may also return to freshwater to breed at later dates.

When salmon escapees breed with local populations, these traits become more common and alter the long-established life histories of the species. This can pose a larger ecological problem, as salmon runs are major events, upon which entire species and ecosystems are dependent (think of grizzly and black bears who rely on salmon to fatten up before their winter hibernation). Even minor alterations may result in significant consequences.

When domesticated animals re-enter the wild, it’s usually because they have escaped captivity. But in some cases, domesticated animals are freed by animal rights activists. In the last few decades, well-intended releases of domestic American mink – bred for their fur, which is highly prized for coats and other clothing – have had damaging effects on native populations of both wild American and European mink. A 2009 Canadian study found that 64 per cent of mink in Southern Ontario were either released mink or hybrids between domestic and wild mink. Because domestic mink have been selected for both exotic colouration and more moderate temperament, survival instincts may be reduced, as well as general fitness and disease resistance. If they breed with wild mink, those vulnerabilities may be passed to their offspring.

In cases where American mink have escaped in Europe, their mating with European mink has resulted in reproductive failures. While American mink are stable within their native range, European mink are critically endangered.

A 2022 study on cross-breeding in New York City also raised concern. Researchers discovered a population of coyotes in Queens that had significant levels of dog DNA – and looked more like dogs too. The researchers also detected genetic elements associated with the domesticated dog trait of hypersociality, leading to concern that they might be less avoidant of humans than pure wild coyotes. Daskin says there is evidence of more of these hybrids across the eastern US. “There’s not a lot of work yet on what that functionally means for their ability to live as wild coyotes,” he says.

This was not an anomalous event – dogs, coyotes and wolves form a genetic complex that has been subject to intensely controversial research. There is debate, for example, as to whether the black coat colour observed in some wolf populations is the result of breeding with dogs or is an ancestral genetic variation. This coat colour may be a beneficial adaptation for wolves in northern, forested environments, but also appears in other populations where it might not be effective camouflage.

One wide-ranging study from 2020 found that Eurasian wolves had nearly 3 per cent dog ancestry, whereas free-ranging dogs in the same region showed evidence of less than 1 per cent wolf ancestry. While the wolves appeared to gain little benefit from having bred with dogs, the dogs seemed to have inherited wolf genes encoding greater caution and self-sufficiency.

The case of the rare Scottish wildcat

The problem becomes more existential when the threat of extinction rears its head. Should we care if the genes of one species are altered by those of another, to the extent that the original is wiped off the map? Mike Daniels is an ecologist with the Centre for Mountain Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands. He says that this dilemma tends to lead on to more questions. “You have a natural process: how do species form, and what is a species? Then you’ve got the even bigger question: is man part of nature?”

This might seem like abstract reflection, but the problem is brought into stark relief when domestic species swamp wild species. This is more likely to occur when wild populations are scant and free-ranging domestic populations are high. Such has been the case with the rare Scottish wildcat, a subpopulation of the European wildcat, now restricted to the Scottish Highlands, and thought to have been isolated from other European wildcats in Great Britain for some 9,000 years. Except now, all wild specimens are believed to carry domestic cat DNA. They are thus functionally extinct in the wild.

The Scottish wildcat is not totally extinct, however, as we humans intervened. From the mid-1950s, captive populations were established in zoos, thus protecting them from domestic cats, whose populations were spreading across the country. Modern conservationists then set up breeding programmes, pairing the purest specimens. In recent years, efforts have been made to release them back into nature, in the hope they would re-establish a true wild population. In 2023, 19 of the offspring of these wildcats were released in Cairngorms National Park in northeastern Scotland. Another nine were released the following year, which also saw the birth of the first wild litter. Further kittens were produced in 2025.

But these “pure” wildcats are constantly under threat. Daniels uses the analogy of water in a bathtub to explain. “You’ve got this bathtub full of cats,” he says. “You’ve got a cold tap and a hot tap and a [drain hole]. The hot tap is pure wild cats. The cold tap is domestic cats coming in. And then the [drain hole] is cats getting killed illegally. You put a plug [in the hole] – stop cats being killed – and you want to turn the tap off from the domestic cats.” The latter apparently has not yet happened. “They found a litter of kittens that suggests that the population they’ve reintroduced have started to introgress with domestic cats, so they’re kind of back to square one,” he says.

Abstract ideas of "purity"

Should it matter whether “pure” Scottish wildcats exist or not? These attempts at reverse engineering raise questions that have bedevilled conservation movements for generations. Are these efforts truly in the interests of a larger ecosystem? Or are they simply aesthetic or sentimental, based on a romantic notion of the superiority of the original species?

The act of reintroducing an endangered or functionally extinct species to its native environment appeals to basic human ideas around freedom and natural goodness. But does it matter if that animal can trace 5 per cent or 10 per cent or 50 per cent of its ancestry to another animal that has been touched by humanity? Outside of the scientific community, most people wouldn’t know, or care too much about that. “Normally you’re releasing Californian condors, or you’re releasing wolves. You’re not releasing something that’s a particular genetic ‘thing’,” Daniels says. The case of the Scottish wildcats is, for now, an unusual exception.

But as introgression progresses, we may want to pay more attention to genetics – and not just due to abstract ideas around “purity”. If a salmon migrates at a different time or is less resistant to predators or disease due to genes inherited from domestic escapees, that is clearly detrimental. If a crop plant is responsible for the emergence of a damaging weed because it has passed its superpowers on to wild plants, there are clear economic concerns. While the effects of interbreeding between dogs, wolves and coyotes may be less concerning, it’s still crucial that we bear witness to yet another effect of our activities on wild things.

There is a need for more research on the introgression of domestic organisms into the wild. For now, work in this area remains halting and inconsistent. Further investigation will in most cases be propelled by dramatic instances that are discovered well after they have caused damage. Occasional anomalous events will inevitably be discovered – a shockingly patterned wild animal or unusual flower betraying the adventurous sexual habits of its parents. But most of the pairings will remain beautifully obscure, taking place at the permeable boundary between wildness and domesticity, and reminding us that the line between is largely an illusion.

This article is from our Spring 2026 edition. Subscribe now.