New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 10, 2026 Biological Systems, Health and Healing Adrian Woolfson is the co-founder, president, and CEO of Genyro, a synthetic genome design and construction company based in San Diego, CA. He is the author of Life Without Genes, and An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics. Additionally, he has authored over 160 scientific papers, book chapters, reviews, and patents. His newest book is On the Future of Species: Authoring Life by Means of Artificial Intelligence. Adrian explores the emerging field of synthetic biology, including the design and creation of entirely new life forms using artificial intelligence. He explains how genomes function as both instruction manuals and component libraries, and how decoding their “grammar” could allow humanity to engineer organisms for medicine, sustainability, and beyond. Woolfson also addresses profound ethical questions, ecological risks, and the long-term future of life as a programmable medium. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:20 Synthetic life creation 00:12:40 Genome grammar regulation 00:19:00 AI timelines ethics 00:25:20 Ecology risks firewalls 00:31:40 Governance human editing 00:38:00 Philosophy human nature 00:44:20 Biological possibility mapping 00:50:40 Genome building technology 00:54:50 Conclusion New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on Thursday, April 23, 2026)

The Prosperos Community Update for May

May 10, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

The Supreme Court Ends Multiracial Democracy as We Know It

May 10, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

As Tennessee eliminated its only majority-Black district, Ari Berman and Tennessee state Rep. Justin J. Pearson explain how SCOTUS enabled the right’s “power grab.”

The Intercept Briefing

May 8, 2026 (TheIntercept.com)

Photo: Asha Ransby-Sporn

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act, triggering a new wave of redistricting fights in the midst of midterm primary elections. Last week, the court struck down a Louisiana congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The decision requires there to be evidence of intentional racism to prove that a map is discriminatory, making it nearly impossible to successfully challenge racial gerrymandering.

Following the 6-3 decision along partisan lines, Louisiana suspended its already active congressional primary, throwing out cast ballots. Alabama’s Republican governor took steps to gerrymander her state’s maps ahead of November elections. Tennessee GOP leaders also convened a special session to eliminate the last remaining Democratic stronghold in the state, home to Memphis, a majority-Black city and district; the new map would split Memphis into three districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. On Thursday, Tennessee Gov. Lee signed a bill that repealed a state law prohibiting mid-decade redistricting, and the new map was passed by Tennessee Republicans.

The primary goal state Rep. Justin J. Pearson tells The Intercept Briefing “is to dilute Black political voting power and representation, and it’s starting at the U.S. congressional level.” The Democratic Tennessee state representative for Memphis is running for U.S. Congress in the district at the heart of the state’s re-districting fight. “When you look across the South, the truth is about at least a dozen seats are likely to be taken in this very racist redistricting era that we are in, but it won’t stop there,” Pearson says. “We have over 200 legislative seats in the House and the Senate that are also likely to be eliminated through racist redistricting that is happening.”

Voting rights journalist and author Ari Berman says SCOTUS’s latest blow to voters’ rights is a “power grab.”

This week on the podcast, Berman and Pearson speak to host Jessica Washington about how the latest Supreme Court decision bolsters President Donald Trump and Republicans’ aims to take control of voting in the country.

“This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act,” says Berman. “You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. … This is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

Berman says that this ruling could bring us back to the “dark days” before the Voting Rights Act made the United States a “multiracial democracy.” Now you look at what’s going to happen in these places, in places like Tennessee, in places like Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi. If they eliminate all of their Black members of Congress, that’s going to make politics a white-only game. If politics is a white-only game, that’s going to mean that white supremacy in some form or another is going to be the dominant politics in those states. It’s already the dominant politics in lots of these states, but it’s going to become much more explicit in terms of how it’s expressed.”

Pearson says that the Supreme Court’s assertion that these protections are no longer necessary is a lie. “The hatred that hung us on lynching trees did not disappear. It dissipated into institutions of power, into state houses, into governor’s mansions, into the U.S. Senate, into the U.S. House, into the presidency of the United States,” says Pearson. “Everybody has to do more than they are currently doing in this moment in time in order for us to preserve this modicum of a democratic constitutional republic. … Because what is likely to happen is the most significant purging of Black political power and elected Black leaders since the end of Reconstruction.”

“The litmus test for America’s progress is not Massachusetts, New York, and California,” says Pearson. “The litmus test for America’s progress is what happens in the South, where 50 percent of Black African American descendants of enslaved people live.”

For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to the Intercept Briefing. I’m Jessica Washington, politics reporter at The Intercept.

Maia Hibbett: And I’m Maia Hibbett, managing editor of The Intercept.

JW: Midterms are heating up this week, and Maia, on top of being my editor, you also manage our election coverage. So what’s sticking out with you this week?

MH: This was a really weird week because we’re coming off some primaries where the most-watched races in the country were actually a set of state Senate races in Indiana. And that’s weird because most people don’t even know who their state senator is. It’s very rare to be focused on state legislative elections as the top race.

But this one was seen as a huge test for Trump because essentially he was on this revenge path where a handful of Indiana state senators, Republicans, part of his party, had defied the president when he wanted them to redistrict the state. So he said, I’m gonna primary you, and I’m gonna kick you out of office for not doing what I wanted.

In all but one or maybe two of those cases, the people that Trump backed — so the challengers taking out the incumbents — won. So it looks like, if that was a test of Trump’s power in his base, at least in Indiana, at least there, it looks pretty good for him on that front.

JW: Trump has really set off this redistricting war that’s happening across the country. There was this idea that Donald Trump was going to be weakened by the war in Iran, by the economy. The fact that we’re also seeing redistricting, which generally makes people really angry, also doesn’t seem to be weakening Trump, that sets the stage for something really interesting in the midterms.

MH: It’s a really interesting question because I think it gets at the constant tension in politics between the politician’s identity and the issues.

So on the issues, the conventional wisdom right now is that Trump and the Republicans look really weak going into the midterms, right? People don’t love it when you’re running on lowering the cost of living and not starting new wars — and then you start a new war and spike the cost of living.

But it is still, in my view, a cult of personality around Trump in the Republican Party, and it seems like he still holds a ton of sway over what the Republican base thinks. That’s really interesting if we think ahead, not just to the midterms, but to 2028, which unfortunately we’re already thinking about because even if Democrats have a stronger footing perhaps on a lot of these popular issues right now, they don’t have that figurehead.

JW: Republicans have been unleashed by the Supreme Court ruling striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district. The ruling also required there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a congressional map is discriminatory.

Obviously, we know that there’s going to be many new redistricting efforts as a result of this ruling, and we’re going to get into the ruling itself a little later in the episode. But Maia, where are we seeing pushes from Republicans to reshape the map?

MH: Right now, this is according to The AP, as of Thursday, there are four states that are still in flux. Louisiana, as you mentioned; there’s also Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee.

This is such an interesting issue because gerrymandering to help your party get seats or keep seats is frankly anti-democratic in the simplest, most literal possible sense of the word. You’re taking some of the power of choice away from the people. But it also puts politicians in a really weird bind because if one party’s doing it, how is the other party supposed to not?

JW: Yeah, as you point out, there’s been a lot of news on that front. On Wednesday, Republicans in Tennessee unveiled a new congressional map that would split Memphis into three distinct districts and further split Nashville and the surrounding counties into five districts. The new Memphis district would span nearly 300 miles. On Thursday, the Tennessee House passed this new map.

Then there’s Virginia. The FBI raided the office of Virginia Senate President Pro Tempore Louise Lucas on Wednesday. She’s one of the leaders in the Democratic-led redistricting fight there, and she’s been a real target of Trump and Republicans’ ire.

On the podcast today, we break down the latest Supreme Court decision with voting rights journalist Ari Berman and Justin J. Pearson. He’s a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis. He is also running for Congress in the district at the heart of these redistricting fights. Pearson lays out Republican strategy to eliminate the last remaining Democratic district and gut Black voting power in the South.

But first, we’re going to start with Ari. He’s going to give us more of a bird’s-eye view of what this decision actually means for voters and democracy as we head into an election.

MH: Cool. I’m excited to hear that conversation.

JW: Ari, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.

Ari Berman: Hey, Jessica. Great to see you. Thank you.

JW: Glad to have you on. I want to get into the news of last week. As you’re well aware of, last week, the Supreme Court dealt another blow to the Voting Rights Act, striking down Louisiana’s congressional map with a second majority-Black district, and requiring there to be evidence of intentional racial discrimination to prove that a map is discriminatory.

Ari, you wrote that the Louisiana v. Callais decision “narrows Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act to the point of irrelevance, making it nearly impossible to prove that a gerrymandered map violates the right of voters of color.”

What did you mean by that, and what does this decision mean for voters?

AB: What I meant by that is that the last remaining weapon of the Voting Rights Act is essentially gone. The Supreme Court has already narrowed other parts of the Voting Rights Act, or struck them down altogether, so that the law has lost almost all of its teeth. And now they took away the last part of it, which was the protections against racial gerrymandering — the ability of voters of color to elect candidates of choice.

Basically what they said is, those districts in which voters of color can elect their preferred candidates are unconstitutional. At least, that’s what they ruled in Louisiana. The expectation is that’s what they’ll rule in other places as well.

My big fear with this ruling is that it’s going to lead to a major rollback in representation for candidates of color. It could lead to the largest drop in Black representation since the end of Reconstruction. You could have a situation throughout the South — where the largest percentage of Black Americans live — there could ultimately be no Black representatives. That would take us back to the Jim Crow era, in terms of how representation looks in America.

“You could have a situation throughout the South — where the largest percentage of Black Americans live — there could ultimately be no Black representatives.”

JW: You’re laying out a really scary scenario where we no longer have any of the protections that the Voting Rights Act — that was obviously so hard-won and fought for — those protections are now mostly gone. I guess my question is, for voters as they’re thinking about primaries, November, what does that mean for them?

AB: Voters are going to have less choices. It’s going to mean that red states, in the South in particular, are going to maximize Republican representation. The way they’re going to do that is by eliminating Black representation, because in the South, voting is very racially polarized. By and large, white people vote for Republicans, and Black people vote for Democrats. That was one of the really insidious things that the Supreme Court said in their opinion in Callais was basically that, if Black people support Democrats and Republicans are just targeting Democrats, then it doesn’t matter that Black voters are disenfranchised.

17 States Have Now Tried to Pass Bills That Strip Powers From Reform-Minded Prosecutors

But the fact is that even if race and party are intertwined, this is ultimately about race. This is ultimately about white legislators in all of these states — because all of these Southern states have white-majority legislatures and governors — eliminating Black districts. That means that in a place like Mississippi, for example, that’s 40 percent Black, you could have no Black representatives. In states like Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, states with large Black populations, there could be no Black representatives, and that means those communities are going to be underrepresented.

“This is ultimately about white legislators … eliminating Black districts.”

A lot of these communities are already underrepresented in Congress, and a lot of these communities are already among the poorest, most impoverished areas with the greatest need for representation, and now they’re going to have the least amount of representation. It’s really going to skew representation all across America.

JW: You just brought up Louisiana. And in this episode, we also are going to speak to Justin J. Pearson, a Democratic Tennessee state representative for District 86 in Memphis, about how after the Supreme Court ruling last week, Sen. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee, called for eliminating the one remaining Democratic-held House seat, which is home to Memphis, a majority-Black city.

What’s your reaction to that redistricting effort?

AB: It just reminds me of what happened when Reconstruction ended in the South. That you had a situation where there were Black members of Congress from the South elected during Reconstruction after the passage of the 15th Amendment. And then you had violence, you had fraud, and then you had, ultimately, changing of the laws: things like literacy tests and poll taxes and gerrymandered districts and all-white primaries.

Suddenly, there were no more Black representatives, and that situation lasted for nearly 100 years in the South. When I see states rushing to immediately get rid of majority-minority districts, immediately get rid of districts in which there are Black majorities after this ruling, I think of what happened at the end of Reconstruction.

So it’s a very dark chapter in our history. It’s one that we would like to think we’ve moved past. In his opinion in Callais, Justice [Samuel] Alito talked about all the progress that America has made on race, but he completely ignored the dark parts of American history that could return when laws like the Voting Rights Act no longer exist or are functionally irrelevant.

JW: Do you take the court at face value when they argue that racism, racial gerrymandering, these are issues of our past? Should this be understood as more of a conservative power grab, or are these genuinely held opinions that the court is expressing?

AB: It’s impossible for me to get inside Alito’s head and know that, but I think it’s a power grab, ultimately.

The fact that they not only dismantled the Voting Rights Act but did so leaving Southern states time to actually redistrict for 2026 makes me believe that this is ultimately about a power grab. Because at the very least, they could have waited until June when it was too late for most of these Southern states to be able to redistrict.

Instead, they did it with just enough time for Southern states to redraw their maps. The Supreme Court has said over and over, you shouldn’t change voting laws too close to an election. And now they’ve basically allowed all of these Southern states to change their voting laws in the middle of an election — in some cases, canceling elections to put in place new maps.

This is extremely political to me. It’s extremely partisan. This decision just underscores how partisan, how political, how authoritarian the Roberts court has become.

“The Supreme Court has said over and over, you shouldn’t change voting laws too close to an election. And now they’ve basically allowed [it].”

JW: In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan touches on just how big of a decision this actually is, and how the court is trying to hide the extent to which this is going to change what voting looks like in this country.

So I’m going to just read a small piece of her dissent: “Under the Court’s new view of Section 2, a State can, without legal consequence, systematically dilute minority citizens’ voting power. Of course, the majority does not announce today’s holding that way. Its opinion is understated, even antiseptic.”

What do you make of what Kagan wrote there? Is this a fair reading of the decision?

AB: Yes, because Alito basically made it sound like he was just updating the VRA, it was just these technical changes, and what Kagan said was, this was a demolition of the law. And it wasn’t the first demolition of the law; it was part of a pattern. This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act.

In 2013, they ruled that states with a long history of discrimination no longer need to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That was the first blow against the Voting Rights Act.

In 2021, they ruled that it was going to be much harder for voters of color to challenge discriminatory voting laws. That was a second major blow against the Voting Rights Act.

“This is now the third major decision by the Roberts court gutting the Voting Rights Act.”

Now they have essentially overturned majority-minority districts, which is a third major blow of the Voting Rights Act.

You can’t understand this latest attack on the Voting Rights Act unless you understand the attacks that came before it, and how this is part of a pattern. A pattern that the Court wants to dismiss, but a pattern that is now impossible to ignore.

JW: To your point, the echoes of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County v. Holder decision are clearly felt throughout both the dissent and the opinion. For those who don’t know, the Shelby County v. Holder decision effectively struck down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which required certain states and localities to seek preclearance before changing their voting laws. Can you set the stage a little bit more for us about what happened in Shelby County v. Holder, and how we’re still feeling that to this day?

AB: Shelby County v. Holder eliminated the most important part of the Voting Rights Act, because the requirement that states with a history of discrimination, largely but not exclusively in the South, had to approve their voting changes with the federal government. That stopped attacks on voting before they even occurred.

It was like stopping a crime before it had been committed. It was such a powerful tool the federal government had to block voting discrimination. It meant that when all of these Southern states had to do new redistricting plans, they had to be approved with the federal government. Now they no longer have to be approved with the federal government, but they can openly discriminate in terms of these maps.

What was clear at the time was that the Shelby County decision was going to open the door to new attacks on the Voting Rights Act, and the court denied this at the time. Chief Justice John Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion in that case, said this attack on Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act will not affect Section 2, the other part of the Voting Rights Act.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened in 2021, and again in 2026. They attacked the other remaining part of the Voting Rights Act, which makes me believe that they’re not out to get one part of the Voting Rights Act or another part of the Voting Rights Act. They’re out to get the Voting Rights Act altogether, and this is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

The Voting Rights Act is the most important law of the civil rights movement, of the civil rights era, and that’s why this has been the top target of the right for so many years.

“They’re out to get the Voting Rights Act altogether, and this is part of a larger conservative counterrevolution against the civil rights movement of the 1960s.”

JW: As you point out, it’s been a while since this decision. We’ve had over a decade in between. Do we have any sense that the Supreme Court has been looking at the track record of what happened, the aftermath of them undermining Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act?

Do we have any sense in any of their opinions or writings that they’ve noticed what’s happened, the kind of carnage that they’ve unleashed on the country in this decade-plus since?

AB: No, the Supreme Court completely got all the facts about the aftermath of the gutting of the Voting Rights Act wrong.

Justice Alito said the Black and white turnout gap is narrowing. Well, the elections that it narrowed were 2008 and 2012 when Barack Obama was on the ballot. If you look at what happened after that, in the wake of Shelby County, the Black and white turnout gap has widened. So Justice Alito was just completely wrong in terms of the statistics that he talked about in terms of Black/white turnout, in terms of racial polarization in voting.

The Untold Link Between Justice Alito and Trump’s Election-Denying Efforts

The only time that the court has reversed itself was two years ago in Alabama, when they upheld a second majority-Black district in Alabama. That makes the Louisiana ruling even more confounding because the Louisiana case followed from the Alabama case in 2023. It was only because of the Alabama decision, which was authored by John Roberts and joined by Justice Kavanaugh, that Louisiana created a second majority-Black district.

“Alito’s dissent in the Alabama case in 2023 became the majority opinion in the Louisiana case in 2026.”

So some of the justices clearly had buyer’s remorse from that decision. Basically, what happened was Alito’s dissent in the Alabama case in 2023 became the majority opinion in the Louisiana case in 2026.

At some point, someone’s going to write a backstory of how that occurred, but it’s clear that the small victories from voting rights that emanated from the Roberts court have been the exception, rather than the rule. And the rule more often than not has been a steady stream of weakening things like the Voting Rights Act, and more broadly attacking voting rights.

JW: I would definitely read a book on that backstory. I want to ask a little bit more about the history of the Voting Rights Act, because I think to understand what’s happened in the decade-plus since Shelby and what’s likely to happen now, we have to understand how we even got the Voting Rights Act in the first place.

Continue reading →

Dostoyevsky on becoming something

May 10, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Portrait by Vasily Perov, c. 1872

“I could not become anything; neither good nor bad; neither a scoundrel nor an honest man; neither a hero nor an insect. And now I am eking out my days in my corner, taunting myself with the bitter and entirely useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot seriously become anything, that only a fool can become something.“

~ Dostoyevsky

Russian novelist (October 30, 1821 – February 9, 1881), short story writer, essayist and journalist. He is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in both Russian and world literature, and many of his works are considered highly influential masterpieces. Wikipedia

Seven of the Greatest Farts in Western Literature

May 10, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Elizabeth Zaleski Finds Famous Moments of Flatulence in Classic and Contemporary Works

Elizabeth Zaleski May 4, 2026 (LitHub.com)

I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I spent the bulk of my twenties in various English programs writing papers with titles like “Metonymy and Violent Signifiers in Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend” and “The Floating Phallus and the Signification of Gender in Wuthering Heights.” As you may have guessed, these papers bear more than a whiff of theoretical garbage. And while I don’t regret having studied literature for many years, I do regret the focus of those years.

Instead of reading for language I could plug into Lacanian psychoanalysis, I should have been noticing, for instance, how many plots in the history of the novel center around the fallout from an unplanned pregnancy (a lot of them). Or, on the other hand, how many scenes in the canon depict farting (not a lot of them). To rectify this oversight, a few years ago, my friend Cassey Lottman and I created the Great Farts of Literature database, an ongoing project dedicated to cataloging the best butt bombs in print and from which this list is adapted. I’m pleased to present here seven of the greatest farts in Western literature, all of which reek in exactly the right way.

1. Nicholas’s canonical ass cannon in the Canterbury Tales
In “The Miller’s Tale,” Nicholas is carrying on an affair with Alisoun, whom Absalom also desires. Alisoun has previously tricked Absalom into kissing her butt by sticking it out the window just as Absalom leaned in, intent on kissing her other cheek. Absalom returns for more, but also with a plan for revenge. This time, Nicholas puts his tush out the window: “This Nicholas just then let fly a fart / As loud as it had been a thunder-clap, / And well-nigh blinded Absalom, poor chap.” Squinting through the flatulent fog, Absalom manages to return fire, planting a red-hot iron on Nicholas’s bum. Chaucer, who wrote in Middle English, was famously raunchy, and this fart has been rumbling since the fourteenth century. One thing is for sure: a blinding fart to the face never gets old.

2. The demon’s toot in Dante’s Inferno
In canto 21, in some literal circle of hell or other, the poet sees a troop of demons sticking their tongues out as a signal to their head honcho. Showing us why he is boss, the chief demon “wheel[s] about” and makes “a trumpet of his rump.” Of course, Dante wrote in Italian, and the translation I’m quoting is by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. I commend Longfellow for his choice of “rump” and “trumpet” for cul and trombetta, as the word “rump” is playfully doubled in the word “trumpet.” Other options the poet doubtless weighed—such as “butt horn,” “ass cornet,” and “bum bugle”—still strike one as infelicitous, though “booty kazoo” has a nice ring to it.

3. The manticore’s elliptical fart in The Satanic Verses
In Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, certain humans find themselves transforming into monstrous forms. One, who is becoming a manticore, is discomposed to find that as he leaves his old body behind, his behind is chugging along like a steam engine: “Every night I feel a different piece of me beginning to change. I’ve started, for example, to break wind continually…I beg your pardon.” Ever the gentlemanticore, this character avoids the word “fart”—opting for the euphemistic image of “breaking wind”—and begs pardon for his flatulence. We have very few details about the scent or strength of this fart, as the passing of gas is a source of ongoing mild embarrassment to this character. In fact, the fart is not narrated at all but presented in an ellipsis. Rushdie does not linger, unlike most farts.

4. The pilot’s silent but actually deadly farts in Hatchet
Gary Paulsen doesn’t mess around and plunges us face-first into both a cloud of ominous fart fumes and a plane crash in the opening scene of Hatchet. Brian is flying to meet his father for the summer, and he politely attempts to ignore the increasingly potent stink emanating from the pilot, “Jim or Jake or something[,] who had turned out to be an all right guy… Except for the smell.” The scene goes on like this for a while, Brian documenting the building “body gas”—“More smell now. Bad”—and then hoping that the pilot is just having stomach troubles. The pilot continues to disintegrate until his eyes roll back in his head, spittle leaks from his mouth, and finally, one presumes, he soils himself: “The smell became worse, filled the cockpit, and all of it so fast.” Brian now realizes that the pilot’s loss of sphincter control portends not a momentary breakdown of bodily integrity but death.

5. Agatha’s room-clearing rip in The School for Good and Evil
In chapter 3 of Soman Chainani’s The School for Good and Evil, Agatha, who feels she is always in the wrong place, finds herself the center of unwanted attention and in desperate need of a “diversion.” Thinking quickly, and digesting incompletely, Agatha does “the first thing” she can think of and “deliver[s] a swift, loud fart”: “An effective diversion creates both chaos and panic. Agatha delivered on both counts. Vile fumes ripped through the tight corridor as squealing girls stampeded for cover and fairies swooned at first smell, leaving her a clear path to the door.” The School for Good and Evil is a YA fantasy novel, but as Chainani’s Agatha reminds us, even in the realm of magic, few forces can match the power a well-timed fart.

6. Sancho’s “little sound” in Don Quixote
Don Quixote by Miguel Cervantes is one of my favorite books, and Sancho’s fart is the first that made me think, “This is a literary achievement.” Sancho and Don Quixote are on one of their ludicrous adventures, and Sancho, whether from “something laxative he had eaten at supper, or…merely a necessity of nature…fe[els] the will and desire to do that which no one else could do for him.” In other words, Sancho needs to relieve himself, but he’s too afraid to leave Don Quixote’s side because of the frightful sounds they have been moving toward. Sancho unlooses his breeches, and the rest is literary history:

Having done this…he encountered another difficulty: how was he to vent himself without making some noise or sound? Gritting his teeth and huddling his shoulders, he held his breath as best he could; but despite all these precautions, the poor fellow ended by emitting a little sound quite different from the one that had filled him with such fear.

“What noise was that, Sancho?” said Don Quixote.

“I do not know, sir,” he replied. “It must be something new; for adventures and misadventures never come singly.”

7. Nanapush’s Malodorous Miracle in Louise Erdrich’s The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
In addition to being, generally speaking, one of the greatest novelists of our time, Louise Erdrich is, more specifically, the reigning queen of the literary fart. In one exquisitely rendered and uproarious scene, Nanapush, whose wife Margaret has been undercooking his beans as punishment for his having failed to catch a moose, experiences a night to end all nights:

That night was phenomenal. Margaret was sure that the cans of grease rattled on the windowsill, and she saw a glowing stench rise around her husband but chose to plug her ears with wax and turn to the wall, poking an airhole for herself in the mud between the logs, and so she fell asleep not knowing that the symphony of sounds that disarranged papers and blew out the door by morning were her husband’s last utterances.

Yes, he was dead.

But wait, there’s more. Later, when everyone is gathered for the funeral, the mourners are witness to what can only be described as the sulphureous sublime. I leave you to discover the miracle that awaits, but suffice it to say that Nanapush has one left in the chamber, and it is fit to wake the dead.

I hope you have enjoyed reading about some of the greatest farts in Western literature. I’m sure I’ve forgotten a few of the gems I overlooked in the past, but the project of sniffing out the best literary farts is ongoing. If you know of a great fart that should be added to our website, please pull my finger to get in touch!

Elizabeth Zaleski

Elizabeth Zaleski is the author of The Trouble with Loving Poets and Other Essays on Failure. She farted four times while writing this article.

The Relevance of Mother’s Day | Marianne Williamson

May 10, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Marianne Williamson May 10, 2026 Williamson reflects on the history of the original Mother’s Day Proclamation, signed in 1870. Subscribe to Marianne’s Substack: MarianneWilliamson.Substack.com

John thinks Jesus is divine and so are his followers

May 9, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

C. J. Cornthwaite May 8, 2026 Footnote Famous – Interviews with the world’s best Bible scholars What does the Gospel of John actually claim about Jesus — and about everyone else? In this conversation, I sit down with Dr. Hugo Mendez (UNC Chapel Hill) to talk about his new book The Gospel of John: A New History (Oxford University Press), and the result is one of the most genuinely surprising readings of John I’ve encountered. Most readers know John as the gospel that “makes Jesus divine.” That’s half the story. The other half — the one Mendez argues we’ve been missing for centuries — is that John’s Jesus extends that same divinity to his followers. The logos becomes flesh, yes. But the logos also draws human beings into oneness with God, gives them the glory he had with the Father, and even tells them in John 10, “you are gods.” We get into:

Why John is almost certainly the work of a single author (and where chapter 21 gives itself away as a later addition)
How John knew and creatively reworked Mark, Matthew, and Luke — the Lazarus story is a wild example
John’s Philonic logos theology and why it isn’t yet 4th-century Trinitarian thought
The deification of believers — what scholars have missed about John 10 and John 17
Mendez’s argument that humans in John may also be angelified (John 1:51 and the angels ascending and descending on the Son of Man)
Why Mendez calls John the first apocryphal gospel — and how it pioneered the eyewitness-claim playbook later used by Thomas, Mary, and the Protevangelium of James
The Beloved Disciple as a literary device, not John son of Zebedee
How the Johannine epistles and even Revelation may belong to a wider tradition of works imitating the Gospel of John

The Gospel of John: A New History

Hugo Méndez

The biblical Gospel of John casts itself as a memoir of “the disciple whom Jesus loved”–a mysterious figure who allegedly watched Jesus die on the cross and stepped into his empty tomb. But in this groundbreaking study, Hugo Méndez argues that the text is something else a falsely authored gospel that inspired a rich tradition of disguised writing.

The author of John believed that Jesus was a divine being who came to earth to transform humans into divine beings. To encourage others to embrace this startling vision, that author composed a gospel filled with invented materials—one in which Jesus communicates the author’s views through cryptic words and symbolic gestures left for readers to decipher. Finally, to make this revisionary portrait of Jesus plausible, the author concealed his identity, attributing his Gospel to an invented, shadowy disciple of Jesus gifted with supernatural insight and able to retrieve lost memories of Jesus’s life. In these respects, the Gospel of John is similar to the so-called apocryphal gospels produced in the second century, including the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Judas.

The invention of this eyewitness was not a self-contained event, however. It was the genesis of a new and vibrant literary tradition. As the enigmatic disciple of the Gospel was folded into the same collective memory as Peter and Paul, he became a viable mask for other authors. In time, many such writers—among them, the authors of 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Revelation, the Apocryphon of John, and the Epistula Apostolorum—coopted this figure, repurposing him for new agendas and weaving countless afterlives for him. The Gospel of A New History traces this arc, showing how a single act of disguised authorship ignited new literary trajectories and dramatically shaped twenty centuries of Christian culture.

(Goodreads.com)

An Open-Ended Conversation with Paul H. Smith

May 9, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 9, 2026 Paul H. Smith, PhD, has served twice as president of the International Remote Viewing Association an organization of which he is a founder. A former Army intelligence officer, he served for seven years as part of the military’s top-secret remote viewing program. He is author of Reading the Enemy’s Mind and The Essential Guide to Remote Viewing. He currently serves as president and chief trainer for Remote Viewing Instructional Services. His website is https://rviewer.com/ This wide-ranging conversation, recorded in 2020, begins with an evaluation of the prospects for those considering professional careers in the field of remote viewing. The discussion moves toward a consideration of UAPs. Paul explains that he is most excited by the possibility that the empirical findings of remote viewing will contribute to our understanding of consciousness. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded November 25, 2020)

Communicating with Your Future Self with Lori Williams

May 9, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 7, 2026 Lori Williams is author of Monitoring: A Guide for Remote Viewing and Professional Intuitive Teams and also Boundless: Your How-To Guide To Practical Remote Viewing. She is founder and president of Intuitive Specialists. She is very active as a trainer of remote viewers. Lori explains how individuals can communicate with their future selves by deliberately creating time loops using techniques from associative remote viewing. She outlines practical methods involving body-based signals, structured feedback, and short training cycles to enhance intuitive decision-making. Williams also discusses the importance of practice, emotional neutrality, and consistent feedback in developing reliable access to future-derived insight. 00:00:00 Introduction 00:06:36 Foundations of body signals 00:13:12 Creating time loops 00:19:48 Feedback and learning 00:26:24 Practical decision making 00:33:00 Associative remote viewing 00:39:36 Group experiments and results 00:46:12 Emotional factors and safety 00:52:48 Limits and philosophical context 00:59:24 Conclusion For the special discount to Lori’s courses, use the code: NewThinking30 New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on Friday April 17, 2026)

Shamanic Physics, Part II, with Fred Alan Wolf

May 9, 2026 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 8, 2026 This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded circa 1990. It will remain public for only one week. Fred Alan Wolf is a physicist and author of Space-Time and Beyond, Taking the Quantum Leap, The Body Quantum, Star Wave, Parallel Universes, and The Eagle’s Quest. He describes his interactions with shamans among the North American Sioux Indians and in the jungles of Peru and in England. Shamans see the world as made up of vibrations, using resonance between individuals to effect healings. He confesses that he observed many things among the shamans that were unexplainable to him in terms of modern physics, noting that the shamans he worked with were loving healers who touched him in a deep and nurturing manner. Now you can watch all of the programs from the original Thinking Allowed Video Collection, hosted by Jeffrey Mishlove. Subscribe to the new Streaming Channel (https://thinkingallowed.vhx.tv/) and watch more than 350 programs now, with more, previously unreleased titles added weekly. Free month of the classic Thinking Allowed streaming channel for New Thinking Allowed subscribers only. Use code THINKFREELY.

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