Merchants House, 5-7 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RQ Telephone 020 3117 0630 Email editor@newhumanist.org.uk Website www.newhumanist.org.uk Editorial Editor Daniel Trilling Assistant Editor Samira Shackle Commissioning Editor Laurie Taylor Associate Editor Sally Feldman Contributing Editors Alice Bell, Kenan Malik, Suzanne Moore, Nina Power, Alom Shaha Critics Fatema Ahmed, Mark Fisher, Jonathan Rée, Fiona Sampson Art Direction Emily Foster Copy Editing Dan Hancox Proofreader Yo Zushi subscriptions New Humanist Subscriptions, Merchants House, 5-7 Southwark Street, London SE1 1RQ Email subs@newhumanist.org.uk Telephone 020 3117 0630 Advertising editor@newhumanist.org.uk Distribution Comag Specialist, 01895 433 753 Published by

The Rationalist Association Registered charity No 1096577, a company limited by guarantee No 4118489 The Rationalist Association is a charity promoting rational inquiry and debate based on evidence rather than belief. President Laurie Taylor Trustees Clive Coen (Chair), Sally Feldman, Ian Glendinning, Conrad Lichtenstein, John Metcalf, David Pollock, Stephen Sedley, Jonathan Stopes-Roe, Tess Woodcraft CEO Jose Gonsalves Honorary associates David Aaronovitch, Peter Atkins, Lord Birt, Colin Blakemore, Alan Brownjohn, Colin Campbell, Philip Campbell, Noam Chomsky, Helena Cronin, Richard Dawkins, Sanal Edamaruku, Ekow Eshun, A C Grayling, Trevor Griffiths, Tony Harrison, Simon Heffer, Ted Honderich, Robin Ince, Linton Kwesi Johnson, Richard Leakey, Stewart Lee, Haydn Mason, Jonathan Meades, Jonathan Miller, Edwin Mullins, Alice Onwordi, John Postgate, Philip Pullman, Amartya Sen, Simon Singh, Marcus du Sautoy, Ralph Steadman, D J Stewart, Ian Stewart, Hazhir Teimourian, Claire Tomalin, David Tribe, Baroness Turner of Camden, Arnold Wesker, Francis Wheen, Elizabeth Wilson, Richard Wiseman, Lewis Wolpert

New Humanist | Summer 2016

Editor’s Note

Reading between the lines

If you look to the left-hand side of this page, you will see that the charitable aim of the Rationalist Association, our publisher, is to promote “rational inquiry and debate based on evidence rather than belief ”. Occasionally, we receive letters from readers asking why we see the inclusion of poetry in the magazine as part of this remit. One subscriber went so far as to say that the poems would “irritate and bewilder” him to the extent that he was unwilling to read the rest of the magazine.

On the one hand, this seems an odd reaction: the poems take up very little space; and since we run fewer adverts than many other magazines, one can hardly complain that they are squeezing other content out altogether. On the other, it’s understandable: poems are slippery, beguiling things. In fact, one might say, they are supposed to irritate and bewilder us. Among other things, they remind us that language – the primary tool we have at our disposal to describe and analyse the world around us – is never entirely precise and can often produce unintended, not wholly rational responses in the minds of readers and listeners.

Yet poetry – which, as Fiona Sampson reminds us in her essay on page 42, is “embroiled in the understanding and celebration of ambiguity” – can allow us to reflect on the way we think. We look for patterns but sometimes, like the patterns of rhyming couplets, they might simply be arbitrary. We look for certainty but, despite the exhortations of assorted fundamentalists, sometimes it’s best to admit what we don’t know. “We must proceed gradually,” Sampson writes, “by way of doubts, uncertainties, metaphors, hints and ambiguity”.

I E R OX

Meanwhile, we are delighted to announce two new recent appointments to the board of the Rationalist Association. Conrad Lichtenstein, who joined in spring 2016, is chief scientific officer of the biotech start-up Nemesis Bioscience, which addresses the problem of bacterial resistance to antibiotics. He holds a PhD in molecular biology from the University of Cambridge and was appointed professor of molecular biology at Queen Mary, University of London. Ian Glendinning, who joined late last year, is an engineer who specialises in information management and systems. He blogs on epistemology and other related topics at www.psybertron.org. l Daniel Trilling LUC

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