“ Lies are often much more plausible, more appealing to reason than reality, since the liar has the great advantage of knowing beforehand what the audience wishes or expects to hear. ” Hannah Arendt, Lying in Politics (1971).
Trust, the thread that holds democracy together, is fraying. Politics is polarised, the online world breeds misinformation, and many bedrock institutions have been found wanting. But without honesty and trust we cannot work together to solve the big political and scientific issues facing humankind.
Former teacher Gill Arbuthnott is a writer and science communicator. Her first book for children was The Chaos Clock (2003), inspired by seeing the Millennium Clock in the museum in Edinburgh. She has since written picture books, children’s novels, teen novels and children’s science books. Olive Heffernan is an award-winning science journalist and author of The High Seas: Ambition, Power and Greed on the Unclaimed Ocean . Her work has been published in Nature, WIRED, National Geographic, Salon, Scientific American and BBC Wildlife, among other outlets. Patchen Barss is a Toronto-based science journalist, author, and speaker. His acclaimed biography, The Impossible Man: Roger Penrose and the Cost of Genius , was a New Yorker and Globe and Mail best book of 2024, and named one of the top science and technology books of that year by Kirkus Reviews, The Financial Times, and The Telegraph.