New Humanist

New Humanist is a quarterly publication released by the Rationalist Association in the UK. It explores topics related to culture, news, philosophy, and science, all viewed through a skeptical lens. This magazine has a rich history, having been in circulation for 125 years, originally launched as Watts's Literary Guide by C. A. Watts in November 1885.

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Book review: A Nose and Three Eyes

2 days ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Lucy Popescu

A Nose and Three Eyes (Hoopoe Books) by Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, translated by Jonathan Smolin Egyptian author Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, who died in 1990, is one of the 20th century’s most prolific and popular writers of Arabic fiction. Born in Cairo in 1919, a contemporary of Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, Abdel Kouddous also enjoyed a long career in journalism. He was editor at the daily paper Al-Akhbar and editor-in-chief of the political weekly magazine Rose El-Youssef.
The greatest astronomy PhD ever written

1 week ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Marcus Chown

Everyone knows that Isaac Newton discovered the law of gravity, and that Charles Darwin discovered evolution by natural selection. But how many people know that Cecilia Payne discovered what makes up the Universe? This year marks a century since Payne, an English woman at Harvard university, submitted the most important astrophysics PhD of the 20th century.
Monkeying around

1 week ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Martin Cohen

If you’re the proud owner of a dog or cat, you might get the distinct impression that your pet has a sense of humour. They don’t literally tell jokes, of course, but many species of animal seem to excel at other behaviours we might qualify as humorous: appearing to tease or mock their targets, or make them the subject of practical jokes.
Relics of a revolution

3 weeks ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Samira Ahmed

I am in a Paris museum looking at thick bronze plates full of crushed parchment. The bronze is an engraved “Declaration Of The Rights of Man And Of The Citizen” from 1789 and the paper, a copy of the 1791 new French constitution.
How to topple a tyrant

1 month ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Andrew Mueller

How Tyrants Fall: And How Nations Survive (John Murray) by Marcel Dirsus As late as November 1989, Nicolae Ceausescu probably thought things were motoring along pretty nicely. He was 71 years old, and had been the uncontested overlord of Romania since 1967. The 14th Congress of the Romanian Communist Party had just awarded him another five-year term. Construction of his ghastly 3,000-room palace in the heart of Bucharest was proceeding.
What’s the point of politics?

1 month ago | newhumanist.org.uk | James Ball

Britain’s Labour Party, finally back in power after 14 years of opposition, are now having to navigate their many internal divisions. Over the last decade, the issue of welfare has proven particularly fraught. Founded as the party of workers, Labour went on to create much of the modern welfare state. Given this history, the choice to support a more generous provision of benefits might seem uncontroversial. In practice, it has proven anything but.
In remembrance of Caspar Melville

1 month ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Laurie Taylor

Now that I am in my late eighties, I have sadly become used to losing good friends of a similar age. But the news of the death of Caspar Melville tragically fails to fit that pattern. For Caspar died a few weeks ago at the tender age of 58, after spending a total of twenty-two months lying in hospital and nursing home beds following a serious cycling accident.
Argentina’s gamble

1 month ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Sam Meadows

The defining image of Javier Milei’s rapid rise to power in Argentina was his favourite campaign stunt: waving a chainsaw above his head and promising to crush the political elite. The garden tool served as a symbol of his libertarian, small-state ideology. The state is not the solution, he told delegates of the World Economic Forum; it is the problem. When Milei took office in December 2023, Argentina was in the grips of a deep economic crisis, with monthly inflation at 25 per cent.
Ammonia was detected on an 'exoplanet'. Here's why it matters

1 month ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Briley Lewis

Ammonia (NH3) is a common chemical here on Earth. It’s in fertiliser, refrigerator coolant and even some biological waste – if you’ve ever cleaned a fish tank, you’re surely familiar with the molecule’s scent. It’s also common beyond our planet, as its component elements of nitrogen and hydrogen are both readily produced in stars. Astronomers first spotted ammonia floating in the spaces between stars around 1970.
In a word: Coup

2 months ago | newhumanist.org.uk | Michael Rosen

Coup, 19th century: a sudden decisive exercise of force in politics and especially the violent overthrow of an existing government There are times when people feel that their native tongue lacks a word, so they grab it from another language. One such is “coup”, which is a shortening of “coup d’état”: word for word, a “blow of state”. Most of us know that it’s French because we pronounce it as “coo”, and as we might expect from French words, it has Latin origins: colpus, meaning a blow or hit.