New Humanist spring 2023 cover

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Better, faster, stronger

The fountain of youth

Peter Ward on the longevity fanatics experimenting with gene therapy. Is there any value to this unregulated research?

In 2015, at the age of 44, Parrish flew to Bogotá, Columbia, to receive dozens of experimental gene therapy injections, with the goal of turning back her biological clock. By that time, she had founded her own company, BioViva. For her first public appearance as CEO, she had chosen to address the immortalist group People Unlimited, where she told a receptive crowd that she wanted to cure ageing, and do it fast enough that they could all benefit.

What dreams may come

In our obsession with getting more sleep, we are overlooking the strange mysteries of night terrors and other parasomnias, writes Diletta De Cristofaro

Vernon’s reflections on Dracula, the protagonist of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, note that he causes paralysis, somnambulism and night terrors in his victims. He was not just a vampire, she concludes, but “every parasomnia combined in the figure of a folkloric monster”.

The temple of the body

Weightlifters were once seen as freaks – but now the fitness industry has taken over the world. Peter Salmon asks, how did we get here?

In Christianity we are born with sin and spend our lives trying to repay that debt. In capitalism we must keep earning to stop our financial debt growing. This moral imperative is analogous with the prevalent framing of fitness today as an endless and unresolvable quest: one can always be fitter, and not pursuing this goal is a failing to oneself and to society.

Q&A: Anna Lembke

The program director of the Stanford Addiction Medicine Fellowship talks to J.P. O'Malley about how to create a healthy pleasure-pain balance.

What I have seen over two decades of clinical work is parents who have assiduously insulated their children not just from painful experiences, but really any kind of challenging experiences. This means that children haven’t had the opportunity to build up the mental strength they need to live in the real world.

The spring 2023 issue of New Humanist is on sale now! Subscribe here for as little as £10 a year.

Also in this issue:

Indian widows are standing up for their rights

  • Sanket Jain meets the women fighting back against India’s regressive widowhood traditions

  • Jen Stout reports from Ukraine, where she joins the search for a missing writer taken by Russian forces.

  • Sometimes voters get it wrong. Eliane Glaser asks why we find this so hard to admit.

  • Euan Lawson makes the case for drug consumption rooms, to tackle the UK's scandalously high rates of drug-related death.

  • Samira Ahmed dives into the new trend for witch-lit. Is it all hocus-pocus?

  • It's 70 years since two men declared they had cracked DNA. Mark Lorch pays tribute to the female scientists whose contributions were overlooked.

  • Marie Le Conte plays the surprise hit Hades. Why are gamers addicted to dying, again and again?

  • Bob Dylan has no intention of ageing gracefully, as Yo Zushi discovers from the singer's latest work.

  • J.R. Patterson on the philosophy of travel and what we can learn today from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  • PLUS: Columns from Michael Rosen and Laurie Taylor, book reviews, poems, cryptic crossword and Chris Maslanka's quiz

New Humanist is published four times a year by the Rationalist Association, a 136-year-old charity promoting reason and free enquiry. We're a quarterly magazine of culture, ideas, science and philosophy. To make a deeper commitment to our work, why not become a member of the Rationalist Association?