Mark Honigsbaum

In the last six weeks, Europe has seen Biblical levels of rain, exceeding the 40 days and nights described in the Book Genesis.

When will the deluge end, many have been asking? But what if it has only just begun?And what are we going to do about it?

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The first Mandelson scandal When Peter Mandelson bought a house in the street where I grew up, I suspected something didn’t add up. Pity then that my editor killed the story.

When Peter Mandelson bought a house in my street, I wondered how he could afford it. Pity then that all it took was one call to my editor from the ‘Prince of Darkness’ to kill my story.

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Max Hastings: Never forget that they lie Max Hastings: Hutton's charitable vision of our rulers flies in the face of experience.

I think you’ll find Max gave a different version to Guardian, saying Mandy first rang him to complain about my questions in 1997, which is how I remember it. Robertson loan revelation was following year. www.theguardian.com/politics/200...

Yes, I seem to recall our editor at that time accepting Mandy’s word as “an honourable man” that he’d financed the loan himself. He wouldn’t be the last to be taken in…

Committee for Academic Freedom on X: "Only a handful of tickets left for Wednesday’s Covid Lockdown panel at Worcester College, Oxford. Join us for a discussion on what Britain got right — and wrong — in its pandemic response. 📍 19 Nov, 5:30pm 🎟️ Free tickets (including drinks reception): https://t.co/6aV6xKfV5B" / X Only a handful of tickets left for Wednesday’s Covid Lockdown panel at Worcester College, Oxford. Join us for a discussion on what Britain got right — and wrong — in its pandemic response. 📍 19 Nov, 5:30pm 🎟️ Free tickets (including drinks reception): https://t.co/6aV6xKfV5B

To Oxford to debate the Covid Lockdowns this evening with Sunetra Gupta, Hugh Montgomery & Toby Green. What did we get right and what did we get wrong? And what should we do differently next time?

x.com/comacfreedom...

The new Netflix miniseries Death By Lightning based on the 1881 assassination of president James Garfield by a deranged office seeker is highly pertinent to our troubled times.

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COVID vaccines may have averted thousands of hospital stays in infants, pregnant women over 18 months

Study in JAMA Pediatrics estimates that vaccinating pregnant women against COVID-19 prevented 7,000 hospitalizations in infants and 3,000 in pregnant women from January 2024 to May 2025. 
#Medsky
www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/cov...

Some thoughts on the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, and what the litany of campus shootings say about our violent, blood-soaked times.

markhonigsbaum.substack.com/p/meridian-t...

Sam Harris: Log Off Charlie Kirk’s assassination lit a fuse. Social media turned it into a bonfire, writes Sam Harris.

www.thefp.com/p/sam-harris...

Sage advice from Sam Harris:-

Get off social media.

Read good books and real journalism.

Find your friends.

And enjoy your life.

Opinion | Charlie Kirk’s Killing and Our Poisonous Internet

Charlie Kirk’s Killing and Our Poisonous Internet www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/o...

“While the internet’s rot once felt safely bottled…within a digital realm, this act of political violence may have punctured whatever barrier once existed”.

Murphy’s Gift What the death of my beloved goldendoodle taught me about empathy and the dangers of spending too much time online.

When my beloved goldendoodle of 15 years died this summer I was overwhelmed with grief. Then something extraordinary happened: I took a hiatus from social media and began engaging with people in real life.

markhonigsbaum.substack.com/p/murphys-gift

FDA official pressures YouTube into removing a channel for posting his own vaccine comments Whether you agree with the censored channel or not, it is wrong and hypocritical for Vinay Prasad to silence his critics in this way.

My worst nightmare is coming true. I am turning into Jay Bhattacharya. @reason.com is writing articles calling me a silenced and censored scientific dissident.

What have I done to myself. 😅

reason.com/2025/09/03/f...

I am happy Gov. Kathy Hochul took action to defend COVID vaccine access in the face of the anti-science attacks from Robert Kennedy Jr. and his crank allies like Marty Makary and Jay Bhattacharya.

But I note that it’s only for ages 3 and up. The CDC’s original guidance was 6 months and up.

Today, parakeets are a common sight in public parks. But in 1930 the birds sparked a worldwide panic when it was discovered their faeces contained a deadly bacterium.

Click on my Substack to read my new post on the Great Parrot Fever Pandemic of 1930.

markhonigsbaum.substack.com/p/the-green-...

When tears ran down her face... We may never know what sparked Rachel Reeves's visible anguish in the House of Commons on Wednesday but the Chancellor's distress is likely to be remembered long after her tears have dried.

Despite putting on her ‘happy face’ at the launch of Labour’s 10-year plan for the NHS this morning, the British public are unlikely to forget Reeves’s visible anguish at PM’s questions in a hurry.

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Speaker: Mike Jay — EGA Garden States: Regeneration 𝗚𝗮𝗿𝗱𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝘁𝗮𝘁𝗲𝘀: 𝗥𝗲𝗴𝗲𝗻𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 Speaker: Mike Jay (UK) Mike Jay is an author and historian known for his extensive writing on the history of science and medicine, with a focus on the mind, consciousness...

www.gardenstates.org/conference-u...

When tears ran down her face... We may never know what sparked Rachel Reeves's visible anguish in the House of Commons on Wednesday but the Chancellor's distress is likely to be remembered long after her tears have dried.

Despite putting on her ‘happy face’ at the launch of Labour’s 10-year plan for the NHS this morning, the British public are unlikely to forget Reeves’s visible anguish at PM’s questions in a hurry.

open.substack.com/pub/markhoni...

Hate and the dangers of empathy Whether or not the British rapper Bobby Vylan's call for"death to the IDF" at Glastonbury constituted hate speech, the crowd's reflexive adoption of his chant is deeply worrying.

Sultan’s death is terrible but re: Vylan affair, two wrongs don’t make a right. #whataboutism

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When tears ran down her face... We may never know what sparked Rachel Reeves's visible anguish in the House of Commons on Wednesday but the Chancellor's distress is likely to be remembered long after her tears have dried.

@mrjamesob.bsky.social @lbc.co.uk To judge by James O’Brien’s call-in on LBC radio today, sympathy for the Chancellor as the architect of her own misery was in short supply.

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When tears ran down her face... We may never know what sparked Rachel Reeves's visible anguish in the House of Commons on Wednesday but the Chancellor's distress is likely to be remembered long after her tears have dried.

No one knows what sparked Rachel Reeves’s visible anguish on Wednesday, but for a moment at least she showed that she was human.That is something the public will likely remember long after her tears have dried.

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The idea that you can debunk your way out of a conspiracy theory is disproven over and over again. Better imo to ask people with an alternative point of view what their single strongest piece of evidence is and discuss that in depth. For "lab leak" those conversations don't last long.

Thanks for that Zach - clearly, you have put in the work!

Not exactly. I’m saying that it’s incumbent on scientists who are confident that it wasn’t a lab leak that they inform themselves about opposing points of view if only to debunk them from a position of authority

If you check you’ll see I posted a link to my Substack on the thread. I assumed that was what you were responding to. My mistake.

Hate and the dangers of empathy Whether or not the British rapper Bobby Vylan's call for"death to the IDF" at Glastonbury constituted hate speech, the crowd's reflexive adoption of his chant is deeply worrying.

2/ The point I was trying to make is how the enthusiastic way his chant was taken up by the crowd shows how empathy for one group can exclude empathy for another and skew our moral compass. Did you bother to read my Substack post?

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1/ I agree with most of the points the author is making. Vylan's comments may not meet the threshold of hate speech as defined by law, particularly as it will be difficult to prove Vylan intended by them when he made them. But that does not make his words any less hateful or incendiary...

2/... This is concerning as lab-leak proponents cite DEFUSE as evidence that there was a “blueprint” for creating the virus... Scientists who purport to speak from a position of knowledge and expertise should make sure they put in the work, otherwise they risk providing fuel for their critics!

1/ On average, respondents assigned a 77% probability to a zoonosis... However, only 22% of respondents said they were familiar with a 2018 research proposal known as DEFUSE, submitted by EcoHealth Alliance and partnering with the US labs and the Wuhan Institute of Virology...

RFK Jr claims Ralph Baric developed a "seamless ligation" technique to hide the laboratory origins of a manipulated virus, as if its use were nefarious.

But its scientific point is to enable mutations to be precisely introduced, including making sure that one can introduce no mutations at all.