Lately (for the past decade or so), everything feels like a lot, and the internet has become a place for shadowy actors to capitalise on our collective anxiety. So, to remind us that the internet doesn’t have to be a bot-driven, brain-damaging surveillance hellscape, here are some calming websites that offer a brief moment of respite and a chance to procrastinate without doom scrolling. Enjoy!

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1. This is Sand

https://thisissand.com/

Let the sand flow and create weird little landscapes

Here’s one of mine:

2. Draw a Fish

https://drawafish.com/

Just do it. Trust me. Draw a fish.

3. Do Nothing for Two Minutes

https://donothingfor2minutes.org/

Don't move your mouse or press any keys. Just breathe and watch the waves.

4. Type a tone dot com

https://typatone.com/

Each letter you type corresponds to a musical note. Compose weird little tunes with words

5. Make Everything OK

https://make-everything-ok.com/

Press the button. Make everything OK.

6. Calming Manatee

https://calmingmanatee.xyz/

Surrender to the wisdom of the calming manatee.

7. Pixel Thoughts

https://www.pixelthoughts.co/

Type a worry and watch it disappear into the starry abyss.

8. Iceberger

https://joshdata.me/iceberger.html

Draw an iceberg and see how it will float.

9. Pointer Pointer

https://pointerpointer.com/

The pointer becomes the pointee!!!

10. Hacker Typer

https://hackertyper.com/

Pretend you're a hacker just for lolz.

I promise this hasn’t become a self-help newsletter and I’ll resume normal operations (posting writing, sometimes, if I feel like it) soon.

I hope you have a calm end to your week.

Emily

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P.S. I wrote a biography of Henri Bergson which the NYT called “lively and deft” and John Banville called “The most intellectually stimulating book I read this year” (in 2024). Get your copy here!

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About a year ago, I saw an 82-year-old Paul McCartney play a sold-out arena in Paris. When he sang “Michelle”, I cried more than seemed reasonable. I later explained to my French partner that, for a British person, seeing Paul McCartney is like a Catholic seeing the Pope. It stirs something primordial in you.

Some of the best moments of my life have happened at concerts. One time, I took advantage of a pause between songs to shout “That was SO FUCKING GOOD” to Thom Yorke, and he replied, completely unmoved, “I’m glad you liked it.” Another time, at a festival in London, I watched Karen O swallow her microphone, shove it down her leggings as a mock erection and smash it on the ground before hurling it into the crowd. My partner caught it and handed it to me. I will forever be chasing those highs.

Live music is, by far, one of the best things we’ve accomplished as a species. Not to be dramatic, but the closest I’ve ever come to understanding the meaning of life was when I was squashed between a barrier and hundreds of sweaty humans while Amy Taylor screamed in my face.

Maybe it’s because those are the moments when I truly experience that “living in the present” thing people are always going on about. Maybe it’s because music is actual magic. All I know is that I always need to have a couple of concerts in the diary (next year I’m going to see Geese and Lily Allen!) or else I really start to feel the weight of everything ugly in the world.

This year was unfortunately a good one for ugly things, but it was also a great one concert-wise. So I’ve decided it’s listicle time, baby!

Here are, in no meaningful order, my five favourite concerts of 2025.

A quick note before we begin: Writing takes time, and your support makes it possible. I write about philosophy, music and anything else that catches my interest. Some posts, like this one, will remain free while others will be for paid subscribers only. Anyone who supports my writing by subscribing before Christmas will get 15% off their first year!

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And now, on to the thing!

Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso – Le Bataclan – Paris

Like many of their European fans, I first discovered Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso when NPR released their Tiny Desk Concert just over a year ago. If you haven’t seen it yet, you should watch it immediately. I’m serious. Stop reading and watch it now. In fact, nine out of ten doctors agree that injecting Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso’s Tiny Desk Concert directly into your veins will increase your life expectancy and improve your general well-being.

The duo, who are childhood friends from Buenos Aires, are well on their way to international stardom. They are already huge in Latin America, and their Tiny Desk performance has put them on many more radars including Kendrick Lamar’s, who chose them to open for a handful of his “Grand National Tour” dates.

I saw them play their first ever concert in Paris last October, and I predict that when they come back, they will play in a much larger venue than the Bataclan.

Parisian concert-goers aren’t the most expressive. They tend to act blasé, as if they’re too cool to show any appreciation or enjoyment. Initially, I was worried that the crowd wouldn’t be willing to reciprocate the duo’s energy. But I hadn’t anticipated that a good half of the audience would be made up of Paris’ Latino expats, which meant that the atmosphere was appropriately effusive.

Had I not attended Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour this summer, I would say that Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso are the most charismatic performers I have ever seen. They are best experienced live, as no studio recording or streaming service can capture how dazzling they are in person. Like Beyoncé, they exude raw diva confidence, impeccable breath control, and boundless energy.

I was able to dance my way through the chaos to the front, where I experienced the awesomeness of their immaculate setlist up close. It combined Tiny Desk classics with deeper bass-heavy cuts, laser vortexes and outfit changes (well, outfit depletion).

Being in my mid-thirties, I briefly worried that my dodgy meniscus might not be able to withstand the relentless pace of the set. However, I’m still young at heart, and I have two menisci, but only one life, so I ignored it.

It was one of those gigs where I arrived feeling tired and weighed down by the worries of the week and left feeling energised, lighter and stronger. I can’t wait to see them again.

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Yeah Yeah Yeahs – O2 Apollo – Manchester

I’ve been a Yeah Yeah Yeahs fan since I was fifteen. I took one look at Karen O’s bowl cut on the cover of NME and immediately spent all my pocket money on Show Your Bones, their beautiful second album.

Back in the mid-00s, they were at the forefront of the New York indie boom, alongside people like The Strokes and LCD Soundsystem. But the Yeah Yeah Yeahs stood out thanks to the raucous glamour of their lead singer Karen O, who has the ability to float effortlessly between electric rawness, chaotic joy, and devastating softness. Last spring, at the Manchester O2 Apollo, the latter two took centre stage.

The trio were celebrating their 25th anniversary with the “Hidden in Pieces Tour,” a series of intimate gigs in gorgeous venues, showcasing acoustic and string arrangements of some of their deeper cuts. Uncharacteristically for the band, this was a seated affair.

I went alone because I wanted to treat myself to the “VIP package” (which included fourth-row seats, a lanyard, and a signed poster), and I assumed none my friends would be interested in paying extra for such privileges. I highly recommend going to concerts alone. For me, it means I can focus on the performance without constantly scanning for my companion’s reaction.

I had already seen the Yeah Yeah Yeahs three times, most recently a few summers ago when my heroic partner caught Karen O’s microphone mid-flight. On that occasion Ms O was in full dragon mode, screeching, writhing, spitting, and throwing heavy objects into the crowd. But in Manchester, she was way more introspective and vulnerable.

She appeared on stage like a biblically accurate punk angel, and sang some of the band’s most beautiful songs directly to me. I spent the entire concert smiling and weeping back at her. I suppose we’re only ever as strong as our teenage taste in music.

There was no microphone hurling this time, though she did slo-mo stab herself in the heart with one at the end of Maps, as shown here:

Karen O, you will always be famous, and you will always be my favourite.

Beyoncé – Tottenham Hotspur Stadium– London

I often think about how it was in my living room that my friend Jade first heard Beyoncé’s Renaissance. It immediately secured a spot in her favourite albums of all time and I feel a warm sense of pride at having been there to witness the moment her brain chemistry was forever altered by “Alien Superstar.”

Renaissance also instantly became one of my favourite records ever. It sits firmly in my top three alongside Radiohead’s In Rainbows. Depending on my mood, the third spot rotates between Fever to Tell by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Bowie’s Hunky Dory and Revolver by The Beatles. I know that’s not much of a “top three,” and admittedly, it has nothing to do with Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour, but this is my listicle and if I want to include lists that lie about how many things they list within the official list, that’s My Prerogative (which is in my top ten Britney songs).

Anyway, I digress. Renaissance opened Beyoncé’s current project, a three-act affair that explores, celebrates and expands upon the Black roots of music genres that have long been co-opted and dominated by white performers. With Act I, Beyoncé paid homage to the Black and queer pioneers of club culture, inviting a world fresh out of lockdown to come together and dance again.

When I attended the Renaissance World Tour in 2023, I left the stadium confidently declaring she could never top the scale, the precision, the joy, the release of it all. But then, this summer, I went to one of the London dates of the Cowboy Carter Tour (see, we’re back on track), and I had to admit that, in a sense, I had been wrong.

Cowboy Carter, the album, is Act II. It is a personal and historical reckoning with country music, a genre which has long had a problem with its Black roots in general and with Beyoncé in particular. It is arguably the most ambitious work in Beyoncé’s already extremely ambitious repertoire, and it doesn’t hold back. The main message is clear: as a Black Houston native with “folks down in Galveston, rooted in Louisiana,” country music is Beyoncé’s birthright. The album itself demonstrates this, expertly exploring the history, present and future of the genre, while dismantling the very notion of genre. It won Album of the Year at the last Grammys, and rightly so.

The album has its brighter moments, but, overall it is much more sombre than Renaissance. I wondered how that would translate to a stadium concert. But if there’s one thing we know about Beyoncé, it’s that she is going to put on a *show* no matter what.

Aside from an insane vocal rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner”, the album’s political messaging was mainly conveyed through visuals on the jumbo stadium screens (you can read an analysis of them by Jose Richard Aviles here).

On stage it was all about THE SHOW. Beyoncé flew around the stadium in a car! She set fire to a piano with a fake cigarette! A literal robot served her a glass of her own brand of whiskey! She flew around again, this time on a horseshoe! She sang an operatic aria while her dress lit up with thousands of LED lights. She also sang while twirling around on a mechanical bull. And she did all of this while delivering some of the best vocals of her three-decade career, clearly having the time of her life.

There is no question in my mind that Beyoncé Giselle Knowles Carter is our greatest living entertainer, and possibly the greatest to ever do it. I feel lucky to be alive to witness her perform.

If, as rumour has it, Act III really is a rock album, I don’t think we’re ready.

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Water from Your Eyes – La Boule Noire – Paris

Last night, I saw the brilliant Brooklyn-based band . All the music nerds have been talking about their excellent new album “It’s a Beautiful Place” and the buzz is well deserved.

Lead singer recently told The Guardian: “When I sat down to write the lyrics, it just so happened that we both were thinking about cosmic existentialism.” In the same interview, the other half of the duo, multi-instrumentalist Nate Amos added: “My working mindset for this album was ‘your favourite indie rock album is not as cool as any dinosaur.’”

This sums up the experience of seeing the band live pretty well: otherworldly, philosophical, and as sleek as Jeff Goldblum in Jurassic Park.

I have been listening to their banger, “Playing Classics”, on repeat for months now, and, as is usually the case when you get to experience your current musical obsession live, it felt extremely rewarding to bop around to it with a few hundred (annoyingly subdued) Parisians.

One day, I’ll learn about musical time signatures and figure out what sorcery was taking place between Amos’ guitar riffs and the band’s rhythm section. With my limited technical music vocabulary, all I can say is that it ruled.

Brown’s part-robotic, part-dreamy delivery of the occasionally metaphysical and frequently oblique lyrics heightened the whole experience and I left feeling like I’d communed with some really friendly aliens.

Stop Making Sense – Cinéma L’Epée de Bois – Paris

OK, this one wasn’t technically a gig.

Stop Making Sense is widely regarded as one of the greatest concert films ever made. Directed by Jonathan Demme, it was filmed over the course of four Talking Heads concerts in Los Angeles in 1983.

A few months ago, I came across a clip from the film on YouTube which made me realise how annoyed I was that I hadn’t gone to see it at the cinema when A24 restored and re-released it a couple of years ago. Then I remembered that I live in Paris, a city with dozens of independent cinemas, and that surely one of them must be showing this music film classic. My hunch was correct: it was showing at the adorable Epée de Bois cinema, located on Rue Mouffetard, and I booked my tickets weeks in advance, as though I were going to an actual concert.

The film opens with 31-year-old David Byrne, simultaneously the most beautiful and weirdest man you will ever see, stepping onto a completely bare stage and performing an unhinged but perfect solo rendition of “Psycho Killer.” With each subsequent song, new bandmates and equipment appear, or are wheeled onstage until finally, the whole band (plus a handful of incredible extra percussionists, keyboardists and background singers) fills the space.

What follows is unadulterated musical bliss. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen David Byrne, waltzing with a lamp during “This Must be the Place.” The concert features some of Byrne’s best dance moves and most impressive cardio. It also debuted his iconic “big suit”

And it’s not just Byrne. This film is about a group of beautiful, highly talented individuals, who come together to create a moment of sublime, chaotic harmony.

A friend of mine told me that when he saw the film in Leeds, the audience were moved out of their seats by the music, and by the end everyone was dancing beneath the projection of Byrne’s massive head. My viewing wasn’t as vibrant. Once again, this was a Parisian audience. But even though this was ostensibly a cinema-going experience, not a concert, the film still delivered the same soul-cleansing effect as any good live show

I think that’s what live music is all about: that gorgeous synergy between musicians and audience, meeting in a moment made unique by its ephemerality; it’s about the sweat, the joy, the release, the beautiful, messy, shared humanity of it all.

Let me know what great concerts you’ve seen this year, and I hope 2026 brings many more xx

Emily

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Author’s note: This piece was greenlit and then later dropped by a British newspaper, so I’ve decided to publish it here instead. Trans-exclusionary and “gender critical” takes are extremely prevalent in the British media. I therefore wrote with the assumption that many readers might not realise that such views are seen as fringe and extreme by the vast majority of feminists outside the UK (and by many within the UK too). My aim was to show readers who may not have spent much time thinking about trans rights, just how far outside the mainstream of feminism the “gender critical” feminist movement really is. Those already well-versed in these questions will probably find my arguments quite basic, and yet, sadly, this stuff still needs to be said.

In the hours and days following the assassination of American right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, MAGA commentators hastened to point the finger at left-leaning organisations in general, and trans people in particular. The shooter was not transgender, but the mere suggestion he might be was enough for prominent Trumpian figures like Laura Loomer or Elon Musk to declare the trans community “a national security threat,” or a “terrorist cell.”

This marked the escalation of a rhetoric that far-right movements worldwide have increasingly been placing at the centre of their messaging over the past decade or so, portraying trans people (and the LGBTQ+ community as a whole) as a danger to women, children, and the traditional family unit.

In the UK, the political divide over trans rights is not as clear-cut. While Reform and many conservative groups have, like their American counterparts, opposed what they call the “transgender ideology,” it is under a Labour government that the trans community now faces potential new restrictions. What surprises many left-leaning and liberal observers outside Britain is that much of the pushback against trans rights over here comes from feminists who do not, at least on the face of it, align themselves with Farage, Trump, or Orbán, yet have become prominent voices in trans-exclusionary politics.

These feminists, often called “gender-critical” or “radical feminists,” believe that biological sex is an unchangeable reality that should guide laws and policies, rather than what they see as the more nebulous and subjective idea of gender identity. Their views clash with much of the feminist philosophy and movements of the past several decades. Of course, feminism has never been a monolith, but many feminist scholars and activists, both in the UK and elsewhere, have found that gender-critical perspectives both misunderstand and misrepresent what gender studies and medical research actually say about these issues.

One of the main points of contention is that gender-critical views boil womanhood down to anatomy, chromosomes, or the capacity to bear children. The question “What is a woman?” has become a kind of gotcha, used by both right-wing grifters and gender-critical feminists, to expose what they see as contradictions in gender theory. Anyone who challenges the supposedly common-sense sex-based definition (“a woman is an adult human female”) is accused of relying on subjective and flimsy “feelings” about gender as a social construct.

In reality, a great number of scientists reject the idea that anti-gender claims are grounded in science or common sense. In 2018, for example, thousands of them, including over 700 biologists, more than 100 geneticists, and nine Nobel Prize-winners, signed a letter condemning the Trump administration’s plan to legally define gender based on genitalia at birth. The scientists denounced this proposal as “fundamentally inconsistent not only with science, but also with ethical practices, human rights, and basic dignity.”

Unlike anti-gender feminism, many feminist movements have long tried to move beyond definitions that reduce women to their biological attributes. Feminist philosopher and central figure in gender studies since the 1990s Judith Butler recently summarised this point in their book, Who’s Afraid of Gender: “feminism has always insisted that what a woman is is an open-ended question, a premise that has allowed women to pursue possibilities that were traditionally denied to their sex.” Or, as feminist philosopher Carol Hay put it in a 2019 New York Times column: “Any attempt to catalog the commonalities among women… has the inescapable result that there is some correct way to be a woman”. The scary question then becomes: who gets to decide what that is?

Thinkers who take gender seriously do not treat it as a vague feeling that anyone can adopt on a whim, nor do they deny the realities of biology. At the same time, they recognise that what it means to be a woman is shaped not only by biology but also by norms, expectations, and interactions, all of which vary across history and culture and fall under the umbrella of gender.

Much of the feminist literature since the early 1990s recognises that conversations about sexism and misogyny cannot be separated from the ways racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism interact. This is what civil rights advocate and feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw meant when she introduced the concept of intersectionality in 1989 (though the idea had existed long before then) as “A prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”

Anti-gender feminism, however, by insisting that all women fit under the same immutable, sex-based definition of womanhood, seems to have missed the memo. It leaves no room for the notion that different forms of misogyny can be experienced by different women, including trans women. As writer argued in her 2021 book The Transgender Issue: An Argument for Justice: “The concept of women as an undifferentiated global female sex class, more or less exploited in the same way for the same reasons, can only work by downplaying or minimizing any internal distinctions or hierarchies or exploitation within that class. Yet black and indigenous (or otherwise anti-colonial) feminisms render such a specious consensus on universal ‘female experience’ largely untenable”.

While anti-gender feminism is a relatively fringe movement in the grand scheme of global feminism, its real-world impact is huge. British anti-gender feminists recently celebrated what they considered a great victory. In April, the UK Supreme Court ruled that the term “woman” in the Equality Act refers to a person’s biological sex at birth and not gender identity. This means that the definition of “woman” should not include trans women. The ruling has been invoked to restrict the spaces trans people can access meaning that trans women would be barred from women’s single-sex spaces, and trans men from those designated for men. There are many reasons to be deeply sceptical that this would constitute a victory for anyone.

Research has consistently shown no link between trans inclusive policies and a decline in safety in toilets or changing rooms. This decision will not make women safer, but it will undoubtedly endanger trans and non-binary people, who already face higher rates of harassment and violence, as well as anyone who doesn’t conform to narrow expectations of how men or women should look.

Even if we were to set aside its alarming real-world implications for trans and non-binary people (and to be clear, we shouldn’t), very little practical thought has gone into this ban. Are business owners expected to demand that people carry their birth certificates to prove they’re using the “right” toilet? Should people’s genitals be inspected before they can use a public loo? And who gets to decide if a woman looks womanly enough?

Supporters of the ban have vaguely gestured toward creating “third spaces” for trans people, without acknowledging that this would exclude them from the countless places that lack such facilities and would force them to out themselves every time they use a public toilet, exposing them to greater harassment. The logical outcome of such measures is the removal of trans people from public life.

It’s easy to forget that the constant public debate over trans people’s right to exist is a relatively recent phenomenon. In the UK alone, media coverage has exploded, from a few dozen articles a year in the early 2010s to more than 7,500 in 2022, with the majority of them negative and presenting trans people as a threat. This upsurge in sensationalist and exclusionary language in the past decade or so should give us pause. Who does this serve?

When this wave of hostility began gaining real momentum in 2017, journalist and activist noted that the representation of trans people as dangerous was “chillingly familiar,” reminiscent of the moral panic surrounding gay and bisexual men and women in a not-so-distant past: “The tropes are the same. Back then, gay people were sexual predators; a “gay lobby” was brainwashing children; being gay was a mental illness, or just a phase; and gay rights was political correctness gone mad.”

The vilification of trans people, framed as a danger from which cis women must be protected, serves the far right’s agenda. In the United States, trans people are scapegoated for a range of societal problems from gun violence (based on made up figures), to the recent government shutdown. This also extends to anyone who fails to fit within traditional definitions of femaleness and maleness. See for example J. D. Vance’s remarks about “childless cat ladies”, or MAGA podcasters’ discourse on “beta males” referring to men who do not embody a toxic form of masculine dominance.

In the UK too, so-called “debates” about trans rights (that seldom centre the experiences of trans people) serve as a convenient distraction. While trans people are vilified and othered, questions of rising inequality and injustice under a historically unpopular Labour government remain unaddressed.

While some British feminists have proclaimed Trump a “feminist icon” (yes, really) for his anti-trans policies, I would hope that the vast majority of feminists, “gender critical” or not, would not see themselves as ideologically aligned with a man who bragged about “grabbing women by the pussy” and praised the US Supreme Court for overturning abortion rights. Yet when feminism retreats into exclusionary logics, it cuts itself from the alliances that have historically kept it alive, and people like Trump are counting on that.

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Since March, I’ve been writing a regular philosophy column for The New World (formerly The New European). It’s a fun prompt: I put a philosophical spin on any subject that catches my interest, from the TV show Severance (if you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading this and go watch), to the weirdness of package holidays.

When I started sharing my columns online, I noticed that some internet men were having big feelings about them. How dare I write about serious philosophical topics in bite-sized, mostly light-hearted, articles aimed at a non-specialist audience?

When my column on the decline of the French philosopher-celebrity was published, I was told in no uncertain terms that my 1000-word piece had failed to provide a satisfactory literature review. Later, when I wrote about the philosophy of taste and smell, noting that these are subjects that have historically been neglected by philosophers, a handful of specialists who do write on them took great offense. One commented: “Been caring about [it] with many, many others for over a decade. Sigh” evidently without noticing that I had cited examples of recent research in the very article they dismissed.

Even when I was still in academia, I never understood the disdain some scholars harboured toward the so-called “popularisation” of ideas. I am not inclined to criticise the use of academic jargon – language that some may find obscure and that populists often seize upon to discredit scholarship. Conceptual rigour has obvious utility. But I also believe that rigorous research remains rigorous no matter how it is presented, and that there is real value in more engaging presentations of difficult concepts.

Surely the wider dissemination of specialist ideas is, dare I say it, a good thing? But maybe this radical idea is a tad too revolutionary for the men of the internet.

Some exciting news:

On October 5th I will be speaking about my biography of Henri Bergson, Herald of a Restless World, at Ilkley Literature Festival. There are still a few tickets left here.

Herald of a Restless World, is now available in paperback! Check it out!

John Banville called it “The most intellectually stimulating book I read this year.”

The LA Review of Books recently called it “the best introduction I know of to Bergson’s life and thought... It is also the most delightful book I’ve read about him, written with clarity, joy, humor, and narrative drive.”

Get Herald of a Restless World

Dear friends,

Something pretty cool happened last week! The New York Times published a positive review of my biography of Henri Bergson, Herald of a Restless World (you can read the review here)!

Get a copy of Herald of a Restless World

The author, Anthony Gottlieb, enjoyed my writing, describing the book as a “lively and deft biography”, despite clearly having very little time for Bergson as a thinker, as shown in the final sentence of the review:

“Herring presents the waning of Bergsonmania as if it were largely a matter of shifting philosophical fashion. Perhaps it’s also true that Bergson’s ideas were not substantial enough to endure.”

While it is truly delightful to be positively reviewed in such a huge outlet, I couldn’t help but feel *ever so slightly* dispirited to read an all too familiar assessment of Bergson as an interesting historical figure who is ultimately utterly dismissible as a thinker.

Such a take is not uncommon in the analytic/anglophone world, partly because it was popularised by a hero of analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell. In a scathing article published in the Monist in 1912, later reproduced in his History of Western Philosophy, Russell painted Bergson as scientifically illiterate and accused him of promoting an “anti-intellectual philosophy” that led to the absurd view that “incapacity for mathematics is therefore a sign of grace.”

These claims are demonstrably false. Bergson was very gifted in mathematics '(see chapter 2 of my book in which I explain that, at the age of 17, Bergson casually solved a problem which polymath Blaise Pascal had left unanswered since the 17th century). In preparation for each of his books, Bergson extensively studied the empirical sciences of his time from experimental psychology, to neurophysiology, to evolutionary biology and physics. In other words, contrary to what Russell suggested, just because Bergson found limitations in the methods of science did not mean that his own understanding of these methods was limited.

Furthermore, it is simply wrong to qualify Bergson’s philosophy as anti-intellectual or anti-science. Bergson viewed science and metaphysics as two different but complementary forms of knowledge, each limited in their own way. According to him, the perspective on reality offered by science would always be relative to its sometimes rigid symbols. For instance, the concepts of biology are often unable to account for the apparently incompatible features of living beings. In the introduction of Creative Evolution, Bergson wrote:

None of the categories of our thought (unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intelligent finality, etc.) can be unequivocally applied to the things of life— who can say where individuality begins or ends, whether the living being is one or many, or whether the cells come together to form an organism or the organism divides up into cells? It is in vain that we force the living being into one or another of our frameworks. All of the frameworks crack. They are too narrow and, above all too rigid for what we would like to fit into them.

Biologists cannot do away with these symbols and concepts, nor should they. How else would they make quantitative predictions, or make sense of the overwhelming diversity of life, than by classifying, measuring, and conceptualising? But Bergson believed that philosophy, understood as complementing science rather than subjugated to it, might come to the aid of science by making it aware of its own limitations and unconscious metaphysics. He believed that progress in our understanding of reality would only come by putting “more science into metaphysics, and more metaphysics into science.”

These ideas resonated with Bergson’s contemporaries over a hundred years ago, and they still find an echo today. Quantification is seeping into the most intimate realms of our psyches via algorithms that purport to anticipate our desires in a consumerist, capitalist society. Some engineers believe that they are able to replicate human consciousness through machines, while critics point out that current so-called artificial intelligence programs simply rehash pre-existing materials without ever displaying the creativity and freedom inherent in the human experience.

In his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson wrote about the need to inject more spirit— meaning more humanity— into our technology, which is progressing too fast for our ethics to keep up. He also wrote about our need to find ways to open societies that close up on themselves and retreat into increasing authoritarianism and xenophobia.

I would argue that Bergson’s ideas have not only endured, but that they are currently undergoing a revival and I hope that readers of Herald of a Restless World will feel, as I do, that Bergson still has a lot to say to the present moment.

You can order the book here

Here are some of the nice things people have said about Herald of a Restless World:

• “The most intellectually stimulating book I read this year” John Banville, New Statesman’s Best Books of 2024

• A “lively and deft biography of Bergson” The New York Times.

  The editors of the New York Times also put my book on a list of “7 New Books We Recommend This Week” which included the first tome of Cher’s memoirs!!!

• "Herring weaves together biographical detail with lucid accounts of [Bergson's] basic ideas. She has produced a much-needed reintroduction of Bergson to English-language readers." The Wall Street Journal

• Written in graceful prose and drawing a clear analogy with contemporary techno-optimism and its discontents, this captivates.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

• "A solidly researched and earnestly accessible portrait of a creative, free-thinking intellect." Kirkus Reviews

Thank you so much for reading! I hope you have a creative end of week.

Emily

I am delighted to announce that my first book, Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, is now available everywhere you get your books!!! Below I share some thoughts about why I hope my book will inspire a Bergson revival!

You can order the book here!

It is hard to imagine nowadays that Henri Bergson was once one of the most famous intellectual figures in the world, discussed in philosophical, literary, religious, political and scientific communities. His lectures at the Collège de France in the early 20th century were so crowded that people often had to resort to climbing up the side of the building of the prestigious Parisian institution, and a conference he gave, in French, at Columbia University in 1913 caused the first ever traffic jam on Broadway. Around this time, the philosopher’s influence was so great that the New York Times labelled him “the most dangerous man in the world.”

And yet, despite this intense period of fame, Bergson is perhaps today best known, in the English-speaking world at least, for his brief appearance in a Monty Python sketch. A cheesy game show host (John Cleese) asks an old lady contestant (Terry Jones) a ludicrously challenging question about the history of philosophy. Against all odds, the woman answers correctly (“Is it Henri Bergson?”), before delivering the punch line: “That was lucky! I never even heard of him!” In 1970, the Pythons could safely assume that Bergson’s name would come across as particularly obscure to an anglophone audience, and this is still true today.

But Bergson is more than just the punchline of a joke about obscure thinkers of the past. His life story reads like a Hollywood script in which a greedy producer has tried to cram in too many celebrity cameos. When Bergson was married in 1891, Marcel Proust was his best man. In 1917, the French government sent him on a secret mission to convince US president Woodrow Wilson to enter the war. In the early 1920s, he was involved in a very public debate with Albert Einstein on the nature of time.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Bergson as a historical curiosity. In the early 20th century his philosophy of durée inspired a generation of readers to embrace their own freedom and creativity. At the time, artists, intellectuals, and even scientists were voicing increasingly loud concerns about what they viewed as the excesses of technology and science. They saw the mechanisation of human life as ridding the world of wonder, beauty, and mystery. Many of Bergson’s followers, who felt as though all sense of purpose and moral bearings was being lost, found in his philosophy a much-needed antidote to the disenchantment of the world.

As I researched the life and times of Henri Bergson, I was surprised to find just how much the concerns of his contemporaries echo many of our current anxieties. Quantification is seeping into the most intimate realms of our psyches via algorithms that purport to anticipate our desires in a consumerist, capitalist society. Some engineers believe that they are able to replicate human consciousness through machines, while critics point out that current so-called artificial intelligence programs simply rehash pre-existing materials without ever displaying the creativity and freedom inherent in the human experience.

In his final book, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, Bergson wrote about the need to inject more spirit— meaning more humanity— into our technology, which is progressing too fast for our ethics to keep up. He also wrote about our need to find ways to open up societies that close up on themselves and retreat into increasing authoritarianism and xenophobia.

I hope readers of Herald of a Restless World will feel, as I do, that Bergson still has a lot to say to the present moment.

You can order the book here

There have already been two very nice reviews of Herald of a Restless World: Kirkus Reviews call the book “A solidly researched and earnestly accessible portrait of a creative, free-thinking intellect” and Publishers Weekly describe it as a “scintillating debut […] [w]ritten in graceful prose and drawing a clear analogy with contemporary techno-optimism and its discontents, this captivates.”

Here are more nice things people have said about the book:

Thank you friends for all your support, I leave you with one of my favourite quotes about Bergson from George Tyrrell in 1908: “[Bergson] frankly admits that we must stand on our heads, and seize that brief moment of unstable equilibrium to snatch a hasty glance at things as they really are. We must use our minds in a wholly unaccustomed way, and recognise that its customary use is fatal to speculative truth just in the measure that it is adapted to practical ends. In short, we have to approach philosophy with a new mind and a new method.”

Creatively yours,

Emily

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Nine months before Pierre Curie died, his head crushed under the wheel of a carriage, and two years after he and his wife Marie were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their research on radiation, the physicist took part in a bizarre experiment.

Curie sat at a table with other scientists and scholars in a small, dimly lit room in the centre of Paris. His left hand was wrapped firmly around the right hand of a middle- aged woman sitting next to him, while her right foot rested upon his left shoe. The woman was Eusapia Palladino, a world-famous medium born in the mountains of Abruzzi, at the top of the heel of Italy’s boot. In her everyday life, she did not bother to adopt the air of grandiosity of some of her spiritualist peers. But in her element, in the right conditions, she transformed into an impressive and intimidating presence.

That day, her round eyes widened with such intensity that a shiver of anticipation rippled through the room. Because she wore all black, her body blended in with the dark velvet curtain behind her, and her worn, pale face appeared to hover, disembodied, above the table. The flickering of a gas lamp intermittently highlighted a single striking streak of white on her forehead, which contrasted starkly with the rest of her dark grey hair. It was sometimes told that the discolouration was not a sign of advancing age but dated from around the time of her first birthday. Left unsupervised, she had fallen, and blood had gushed out of her tiny head. The hair on the sunken part of her wounded skull had grown white ever since. Some of those who attended her demonstrations said that when she exerted her psychical powers, a cold breeze could be felt emanating from her vestigial cranial cavity, as though her past trauma had become a portal for spirits to travel into our world.

Curie felt Palladino’s hand shaking in his. Though she was not touching the table before her, the movements of her body vibrated through the wooden surface, which started rattling uncontrollably. Her face twisted and spasmed in what appeared to be an immense effort of concentration. She was now all grunts, moans, sweat, and convulsions. Some said that in this trancelike state she often appeared to glow an eerie blue, not unlike the radioluminescence emitted by the dangerous decaying substances the Curies studied in their laboratory. Suddenly, the whole table lifted thirty centimetres off the ground and hovered there for seven long seconds. Aside from the hand Palladino held flat on the table’s surface, Curie and the other assessors were almost certain that there were no other points of contact between the medium and the heavy object.

The sight they were treated to next was even more implausible. A shadowy arm slowly reached out from behind the curtain in the background, a space that had been empty when they entered the room. The official report later stated that five eyewitnesses, “Messrs Curie, Bergson, de Gramont, Komyakoff and Youriévitch,” had all seen it. Curie, who was closest to the curtain, felt the arm hit him, pull his hair, pinch and punch him, and even give him a few sharp slaps when he dared to move his face towards the source of the aggression. After that, objects hidden behind the curtain were thrown about by an invisible force, and one of the heavier ones levitated above the table for all of them to see. To end the session, Palladino tapped Curie’s shoulder twice, and a few seconds later two knocks were heard, echoing out of the table, beyond the medium’s reach.

You have just read an excerpt from my forthcoming biography of Bergson, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024 Basic Books).

You can order the book here.

Pre-orders are incredibly important for first-time authors like me because they help build anticipation, boost visibility, create early sales momentum, and garner support from booksellers. Your encouragement is therefore much appreciated!

There have already been two very nice reviews of Herald of a Restless World: Kirkus Reviews call the book “A solidly researched and earnestly accessible portrait of a creative, free-thinking intellect” and Publishers Weekly describe it as a “scintillating debut […] [w]ritten in graceful prose and drawing a clear analogy with contemporary techno-optimism and its discontents, this captivates.”

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you have a creative week!

Emily

I am very happy to share a second excerpt from my biography of Henri Bergson, Herald of a Restless World!

Get your copy here

And now, an excerpt from Chapter 8 of Herald of a Restless World, “Snowballing”:

One afternoon in the early years of the twentieth century, a young woman named Raïssa and her fiancé, Jacques, lost the will to live. Standing in the shade of a cedar of Lebanon in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, the two students had come to a grave conclusion: life without meaning was not worth living. They decided that if they could not discover whether existence was “an accident, a blessing, or a misfortune,” then “the solution would be suicide; suicide before the years had accumulated their dust, before our youthful strength was spent. We wanted to die by a free act if it were impossible to live according to the truth.” Raïssa later attributed their youthful despair to the unbearable dissonance they had perceived between what they had been yearning to understand about the universe and what their institution of learning, the Sorbonne, had been willing to teach them.

At seventeen, bursting with a desire to make sense of existence, Raïssa had enrolled at the Sorbonne’s Faculté des sciences, where she was to learn the principles of physiology, geology, and embryology. She was confident that her professors would teach her how to conduct her life based on “faultless truth” and help her understand her place in the universe. She later realised that these ambitions would have called for a more philosophical education, but at the time she “believed that the natural sciences held the key to all knowledge.” One day in class she boldly proclaimed that she wanted to understand nature “in its causes, in its essence, in its end,” only to hear her professor exclaim, horrified, “But, that is mysticism!” She soon learned that the metaphysical questions that animated her were held in contempt by most of her Sorbonne professors, who maintained either a materialistic philosophy that eliminated spirit from the world entirely or a cautious scepticism that did not allow for any kind of belief beyond empirical observation.

It was at the Sorbonne that she had met her future husband Jacques Maritain, in whom she found a companion in her growing despair. He was studying the natural sciences to complement his philosophy degree, and they had bonded over their search for deeper meaning. Raïssa remembered that the various teachings they received at the Sorbonne had left them feeling desperately empty and hopeless:

“[We] swam aimlessly in the waters of observation like fish in the depths of the sea, without ever seeing the sun whose dim rays filtered down to us. . . . Being too weak to struggle against these giants of science and philosophy, or to defend the rightness of my deepest intuitions, I took refuge in sadness.”

But then, when they had almost given up all hope, something miraculous happened. On a Friday afternoon, encouraged by their friend Charles Péguy, a staunch critic of what he saw as the Sorbonne’s sclerotic ways, Raïssa and Jacques exited their official place of learning, crossed the rue Saint-Jacques, took a few steps down the rue des Écoles, and entered the Collège de France. What they heard that day in Bergson’s lecture theatre restored their faith in a meaningful existence. In a sense, the philosopher brought them back to life.

You have just read an excerpt from my forthcoming biography of Bergson, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024 Basic Books).

You can order the book here.

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you have a creative week!

Emily

My book, Herald of a Restless World. How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People, will be out in just under one month!

There have already been two very nice reviews: Kirkus Reviews call the book “A solidly researched and earnestly accessible portrait of a creative, free-thinking intellect” and Publishers Weekly describe it as a “scintillating debut […] [w]ritten in graceful prose and drawing a clear analogy with contemporary techno-optimism and its discontents, this captivates.”

I am beyond excited to share Bergson’s story with you! In that spirit, in the weeks leading up to publication day, I will be sending you a few excerpts from the book. Today I give you the final few pages of the introduction in which I touch upon the unique challenges that come with writing a biography of Bergson, my own personal path to his philosophy, and what I think the book is (not entirely an introduction to Bergson, not entirely an intellectual biography, but another secret third thing).

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UN-BERGSONIAN

Writing a biography is a highly un-Bergsonian exercise. The biographer usually unravels the story of a human life from birth to death. She might give her reader the impression that her subject’s life is developing before their very eyes, but in reality she already holds together all the events from start to finish. She looks at portions of a lived experience from the outside, moves them around, and cuts them up into interchangeable pieces. Anyone who is familiar with Bergson’s philosophy knows that such a process is at odds with his description of the flow of time as gradually ripening a person’s existence from within.

Perhaps the only thing more un-Bergsonian than writing a biography is writing a biography of Henri Bergson. On several occasions, including in the will he started drafting half a decade before he died, the philosopher demanded that he be remembered for his philosophy and nothing else: “I have always asked that my personal life be ignored, and that only my work should be examined. I have invariably maintained that the life of a philosopher sheds no light on his doctrine and is of no concern to the public.” He knew that after he died any traces of himself he left behind would be picked apart, that all manner of tributes (which he viewed as unwarranted) would be paid, and that all sorts of erroneous assumptions and preconceptions about his character and intentions would become set in stone. He knew that the wishes he stated in his testament would not be fully respected, and so, before he died, he made sure to quell all future attempts to study Bergson the man, beyond the work. He instructed his wife Louise, who had shared his life for over four decades, to destroy anything he left unpublished after leaving this world. Correspondence, miscellaneous papers, lecture notes, drafts of new ideas — Louise threw it all in the fire. A biographer’s nightmare.

Bergson often repeated that nothing can be learned about a philosopher’s ideas by studying their life. But what if it is precisely their life we are interested in?

MY BERGSON

At eighteen, I used the little I knew about Bergson’s philosophy in my baccalaureate philosophy exam. We were given four hours to write an essay on a single question: “Does language betray our thoughts?” So much of what I then knew of Bergson’s thought felt entirely beyond my reach, but his ideas about language resonated. Words, Bergson said, are mere labels we affix to things. We use concepts to tidy up the overwhelming diversity of reality into neat boxes. But in doing so, we often lose sight of what is special and particular about the different aspects of reality that our words describe, including our own inner lives. Beneath this monochromatic conceptual veil, our vibrant, unique self remains hidden out of reach, unless we know how to look for it. Bergson had implanted in me the idea that philosophy could serve as a window into the world beyond what is given.

At the Sorbonne, I majored in philosophy. In an ocean of Western classics, Bergson’s name bobbed up once in a while alongside Plato, Descartes, and Kant, but I wanted to find out more. Towards the end of my third year, I decided to read his works on my own time, in chronological order. I was met with difficult but beautiful texts that delved into scientific debates for which I had little context. Like so many of his contemporaries, I found that his book Creative Evolution was the one that stood out to me. I was so fascinated by this early twentieth-century philosophical interpretation of biological evolution that I applied to do a master’s degree in the history of science to better understand what was at stake. My curiosity got the better of me, and I ended up writing a PhD thesis at the University of Leeds on the reception of Bergsonian evolution among the biologists of his day. It was only then that I started learning about Bergson’s life, beyond his theories, the life the philosopher himself did not want anyone to study.

I was captivated. Parts of his story read like an adventure novel. Other parts reminded me of the most deranged aspects of our current celebrity culture. As I unravelled the various threads of my research, I realised that there was almost no area of early twentieth-century culture that this soft-spoken, bald-headed French philosopher had not touched. For a time he had been the most talked-about person on the planet, but as I would learn, his name meant very little to most of the academics I encountered in the anglophone world. It has always seemed unbelievable to me that such an extraordinary figure and his incredible story could have been almost entirely forgotten.

This book is not an introduction to Bergson’s philosophy. There have been many of those, hundreds even. The ones I have found the most helpful throughout my studies and research are listed in the “Beginner’s Guide to Bergson” at the end of the book. But naturally, over the course of this book I introduce many of Bergson’s key ideas, as they constitute pivotal “moments” in the philosopher’s journey. This book is not strictly what one might call an “intellectual biography” either. I do not purport to find within the events of Bergson’s life the germs of his ideas. As the philosopher Gabriel Marcel wrote about Bergson: “Did he not teach us how important it is to be wary of a posteriori reconstructions that so profoundly alter the creative process they claim to describe?”

Instead, I like to think of this book as the product of three intertwined and inseparable portraits. A portrait of a man, with aspirations and contradictions. A portrait of his philosophy, which, in various ways, changed the world around him. And a portrait of the world in which the man and his ideas evolved. A portrait is, by nature, a point of view taken on a subject. My own interests, idiosyncrasies, and blind spots will therefore be reflected in my depiction of Bergson’s life, times, and philosophy. But it is my hope that this book will highlight just how profound, interesting, and important Bergson was and why he deserves to be remembered.

It would be a mistake to dismiss Bergson as a mere historical curiosity. In the early years of the twentieth century, his defining of life and consciousness in terms of freedom and creativity reassured those who worried that new discoveries in biology had reduced human existence to a cold mechanical process. His critique of the static symbolism of science resonated deeply with those who had grown suspicious of what they viewed as the excesses of rationality and technology.

New facial recognition and artificial intelligence technologies have us fearing for our freedom and humanity. With the current climate crisis, the survival of our species depends on our ability to come up with creative solutions to unprecedented challenges. Who better to turn to than the thinker of radical change and creativity?

You have just read an excerpt from my forthcoming biography of Bergson, Herald of a Restless World: How Henri Bergson Brought Philosophy to the People (2024 Basic Books).

You will find pre-order links for the book here.

Pre-orders are incredibly important for first-time authors like me because they help build anticipation, boost visibility, create early sales momentum, and garner support from booksellers. Your encouragement is therefore much appreciated!

Thank you so much for reading and I hope you have a creative week!

Emily

When I started the research for my book, I needed to get a sense of who Bergson was beyond his ideas. What was it like to be around him? What kind of impression did he make on those he met? I compiled every description of him I could find and, soon enough, interesting patterns started to emerge. Many of those who frequented the philosopher noted the musical cadence of his speech, others were disarmed by his almost pathological levels of humility or by the expressiveness of his light blue eyes. But all — and I mean every single person who committed a description of Bergson to paper — were struck by one of the philosopher’s features: his forehead.

Allow me to demonstrate:

Bergson’s forehead is repeatedly described as “enormous,” “powerful,” “huge.”

One of his former students writes:

"The forehead was the most striking thing about [Bergson], a broad, bulging forehead, which one might qualify as enormous when compared to his slender lower face".

Here is another how another person came to terms with the philosopher’s massive brow:

What was most striking about him was his very broad forehead, which extended the curve of his skull, and his blue eyes, sunken under thick eyebrows, extraordinarily expressive.

And my favourite:

The line of his eyebrows spread over the huge forehead like two metaphysical wings.

Since philosophers’ main activity is to think, and that in the West we tend to associate thinking, as well as consciousness in general, with the brain, it is perhaps not surprising that a philosopher’s skull would draw attention. After all, famous philosophers have been known to flex their foreheads:

However, the focus on Bergson’s forehead, and the brain hidden within, is somewhat ironic. In his second book, Matter and Memory, Bergson demoted the brain from organ of knowledge to a practical tool which evolved to allow us to navigate and act upon the material world. According to him, the brain was not the seat of consciousness nor was its function to create or store perceptions, memories and representations. Instead, it enabled organisms to link present stimuli with past perceptions and possible future outcomes. The brain could, in this regard, be compared to a “central telephone exchange”:

[I]ts office is to allow communication or to delay it. It adds nothing to what it receives.

The size of Bergson’s forehead, no matter how impressive, therefore had little to do with the subtlety of his thinking. But it appears to have had a lot to do with the strong impression the philosopher made on his hundreds of admirers. They could not help but read on the lines of face, in his luminous eyes, and on his gargantuan rounded skull, signs of their master’s genius.

There is a second reason I don’t like using the B-word: writing a biography of Bergson is a highly un-Bergsonian exercise. In the same way Bergson believed that examining someone’s brain would tell us nothing about their lived experience, he believed that studying someone’s life would do very little to inform us about their ideas.

But more about that in my book which I simply have to finish writing (no big deal, please stand by).

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I recently published these slightly emo musings on my blog. If you enjoy my writing you might enjoy some of my other posts there.

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At the end of a career of almost six decades, in the first pages of the last book he ever published, French zoologist Pierre-Paul Grassé compared Darwinism to an “incurable disease.” He wrote:

Everyone should know by now that Darwinism is an ideological system that does not account for evolution in the slightest.

Such a statement would perhaps not have been out of place in the decades around 1900, when Darwin’s theory of natural selection was still being widely contested. But Grassé wrote these words in 1980, when Darwinism had become the dominant view among biologists.

Indeed, between the 1930s and 1950s, a group of biologists combined the findings of genetics and the theory of natural selection. This ambitious enterprise, named “Modern Synthesis” was the result of the collective works of life scientists from different backgrounds (including genetics, embryology, ecology, zoology, palaeontology, and botany). The group, though dominated by English-speaking scientists, was fairly international. For the remainder of the 20th Century, this new Darwinism established itself as the main framework for thinking about organisms and their history.

But France did not get the Darwinism memo. The first French chair of genetics was created in 1945 – decidedly late in comparison to other Western countries — and the chair of “Evolution of Organised Beings” at the Sorbonne was held by a long line of anti-Darwinian biologists from its creation in 1888 until 1967, when Grassé retired.

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At a time when Darwinism was the dominant view in the scientific world, the vehemently anti-Darwinian Grassé was far from being marginalised in his home country. Au contraire, he was one of the most respected and institutionally powerful scientists of his generation. In fact, in the second half of the 20th century, he was among the main gatekeepers of his discipline, wielding so much institutional power that his monumental Traité de Zoologie, published in 48 volumes over the course of several decades, was, until relatively recently, an absolute reference for French biology students who simply called it “le Grassé.” 

Historian Jean Gayon cites a sense of “injured national pride” as one of the reasons for the widespread dismissal of Darwinism by French life scientists, from the publication of the Origin until the late 20th century. In 1959, while over two thousand international guests gathered in Chicago to celebrate the centenary of the Darwinian revolution, in France, the Revue d’histoire des sciences dedicated an issue to their own evolutionary hero Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck. In his contribution, Grassé promised to  “restore the truth”: the theory of evolution was not a British discovery, it was French. Lamarck was the true father of evolution, not Darwin! Two years later, one of Grassé’s colleagues, Albert Vandel declared:

Evolutionism would have known a better development if, fifty years after [the publication of Lamarck’s Philosophie Zoologique], Darwin hadn’t driven it down an unfortunate route where it almost got stuck.

Grassé rejected the Neo-Darwinian idea that the accumulation of accidental genetic mutations, in conjunction with natural selection, could give rise to complex structures such as the eye or the human brain. There was, according to him, an element of directionality in evolution. Such intricate organs could not be the result of pure chance. He also tied his anti-Darwinism into his reactionary politics. He believed that “ideologies” like Darwinism, in which chance prevailed over deeper meaning, had made Western society deeply sick. Other causes of this sickness included television, women using contraceptives, existentialism, and a basic loss of catholic values.

For all his criticism of Darwinism, Grassé never provided a robust counter-explanation for evolution that could replace natural selection. So, to establish himself as legitimate alternative, he found himself resorting to different strategies, some more historical than biological. Without making any attempt to disguise the nationalistic character of his narratives, he insisted that evolutionism was a proud French tradition linked to French thinkers like philosopher Henri Bergson, Jesuit palaeontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and of course Lamarck. The rival Anglo-American tradition, to which the Modern Synthesis belonged, had on the other hand given rise to considerably fewer geniuses.

As the representative of the “intellectually superior” French tradition, Grassé saw himself as a naturaliste. Like Buffon, Cuvier, and Lamarck before him, he prided himself in possessing encyclopaedic knowledge about all aspects of the natural world and mastering numerous scientific disciplines. The Neo-Darwinians of the Modern Synthesis, on the other hand, glorified a different kind of scientist, one who had emerged at the end of the 19th century: the specialist. According to Grassé, the Darwinian scientist lacked the intellectual depth that only a genius having devoted their life to the study of nature could possess. In 1968, he wrote:

The foundations of science were built by lone men. A Lamarck […] contributed more to the progress of science than any industrious but unimaginative army.

By ignoring the legacy of great, French, natural historians of the past, the architects of the Modern Synthesis were, he believed, unable to produce a true synthesis; instead they proposed a superficial aggregate of isolated and badly coordinated, specialized knowledge. To the figure of the Darwinian specialist, Grassé opposed the Lamarckian naturalist, a human encyclopedia, whose life was devoted to the production of a “true” synthesis upon which future naturalists could build.

Grassé’s attacks never elicited a response. The “unimaginative” Darwinian scientists were well assured that their work would allow them to carry biology into the future. They saw no need to engage in a debate they had already won.

Everyone is familiar with the truism (likely falsely) attributed to Winston Churchill according to which “history is written by the victors.” Here we have an interesting case of a historical “loser” constructing a narrative to write himself into the history of science.

Grassé’s Lamarckism, and his resistance against the notion that there was ever anything like a “Darwinian Revolution,” was part of a strategy to establish himself as the representative of a legitimate tradition of evolutionary thought. When scientific arguments failed him, he resorted to historical narratives in which he was the hero of his own Lamarckian story. Grassé believed evolutionary biology was still awaiting its revolutionary moment and that it was up to him to set the record straight.

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If you want to learn more about Grassé and weird French science, I recently published a chapter on this very subject in a recent volume Imagining the Darwinian Revolution (edited by Ian Hesketh) I will happily send you a pdf of my chapter. If you need any of the references I can also provide them via email.

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First of all, to thank you for subscribing (or if you haven’t subscribed yet, to thank you for reading this), here is a photo of my dog Maddy:

If you find yourself reading this, you probably follow me on the fast crumbling bird site. Hopefully this will be a nicer (less musky) way for me to share updates about my current writing projects and a way for us to keep in touch if Twitter does end up completely collapsing.

So, what will the Well-Read Herring newsletter be about?

As you perhaps know, I am writing a book about the life of French philosopher Henri Bergson for Basic Books. Before that, I was writing a PhD thesis on the links between Bergson’s philosophy and early 20th-century biology. In my research, I am always coming across fascinating stories, figures and ideas which don’t quite fit in my various projects. I always put them aside hoping I will one day find a home for them. I have decided this newsletter could be just that: a place for me to share all the interesting finds which would otherwise just sit collecting digital dust in a poorly organised file on my computer.

I hope to send you these once a month (perhaps more realistically once every two months). This week, I will be sharing the first one, the story of two French zoologists who tried to bring down Darwinism in the second half of the 20th century.

If that sounds good, and you haven’t already, why don’t you subscribe? Come on, what have you got to lose? Nothing! What do you stand to gain? Some very niche facts!

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I hope you have a fabulous day/evening!

Emily

P.S. Did you know Henri Bergson is an anagram of Herring bones?