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A Review of This is Not Real Life by Lauren Southern

Before the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook took the extraordinary step of banning a sitting U.S. president, before recommendation engines decided who deserved an audience, before the internet hardened into a set of gated timelines where each tribe watches its own curated reality, there was a brief, chaotic era of online media that felt radically open.

A loose coalition of independent journalists, pundits, comedians, and provocateurs built a parallel public sphere alongside (and often against) the mainstream media. The barrier to entry was low: a camera, an opinion, and the stamina to upload relentlessly. In return came virality, fame, and a kind of influence that traditional institutions did not yet know what to make of—let alone counter. In that ecosystem, “top charts” on platforms like YouTube were closer to what they claimed to be—rankings based largely on raw views rather than finely tuned behavioral targeting that operates today. A creator could rise to popularity because millions of people actively showed interest in their work and clicked, not because an algorithm decided the content fit a retention profile or a desirable political angle.

One of the most visible figures to emerge from that era was Lauren Southern, a young Canadian YouTuber who rose to prominence in her early twenties. In the mid-2010s, Southern often reached audiences in the millions, regularly rivaling and eclipsing the viewership of “legacy” giants like CNN or the Canadian CBC. She did it through a blend of commentary videos, on-the-ground segments, and documentaries—“content” designed to feel more immediate than studio news and more transgressive than polite opinion columns.

An Alt-Press Corps

Lauren Southern’s peers were the era’s rotating entourage of culture-war entrepreneurs and dissidents: some left wing or liberal, like Destiny (Steven Bonnell) and Tim Pool, but most a new-kind of conservative, among them Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio, Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, and many others. Collectively, they made the internet feel like a new kind of political machine. They produced street interviews and documentary films, wrote bestselling books (mostly self-published on Amazon), staged public debates, and toured college campuses like a counter-establishment roadshow. They cast themselves as outsiders “speaking truth to power,” and millions of viewers agreed—especially because mainstream institutions kept stepping on the same rake: a mix of selective coverage, performative moralizing, and a growing disconnect from how people experienced the world offline.

This was also the moment when online politics began to feel less like discourse and more like spectacle. The incentives were already there, with outrage and dunking performing better than nuance. But the rules had not fully tightened yet. And in that liminal period—between the old broadcast order and the algorithmic empires of the 2020s—figures like Southern could function as a new mix of celebrity, activist, journalist, personal brand, and political instrument.

Southern’s biggest hits followed a now-familiar template: pick a story the mainstream media either undercovered or framed in a way her audience distrusted, then package it as a mix of first-person journalism and activist theater. In her viral video The Great Replacement (2017), she covered demographic and cultural shifts driven by mass immigration, emphasizing differential birth rates, unsuccessful assimilation, and what she framed as elite ideology and policy choices disconnected from the wishes of the electorate. 

The Internet “freezes” people … locking them into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

In a documentary film Farmlands (2018), which garnered significant attention after then-President Donald Trump posted it on Twitter, Southern traveled through South Africa to build a portrait of a country in crisis. The film threads together interviews with volunteers who document farm-attack crime scenes (“Blood Sisters”), segments with preparedness-minded Afrikaner groups warning of civil conflict, and visits to places like Orania as an example of separatist self-governance, while also touching on post-Apartheid racial land reform and the ANC’s “Kill the Boer” anti-White minority rhetoric.

And in another one of her films, Borderless (2019), Southern moved beyond a single country case study to a route-based travelogue of Europe’s migration system. Filming across multiple locations, she built the story through interviews with migrants (often young men), smugglers, locals, and NGO workers. Throughout, she focused on the widening gap between the notion of “Europe as a promised land” and the brutal reality of camps and informal settlements—alongside recurring allegations about criminality and extremist infiltration among the migrants traveling to Europe from the Middle East and Africa.

Not all of Southern’s breakout content was packaged as “field reporting” or documentary. A substantial share of her reach came from shorter, more playful—and strategically lightweight—culture war videos that borrowed the tone of early YouTube commentary pioneered by atheist YouTubers like The Amazing Atheist and Jaclyn Glenn: jump cuts, jokes, deliberately cheeky provocation, and a posture of “I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking.” Her viral Why I’m Not a Feminist video, for example, worked less as formal argument than as identity signaling and onboarding for her fan base. She framed feminism as humorless, status driven, and hostile to ordinary women; “common sense” gender politics as rebellious; and positioned herself as the fun, sane dissenter against an earnest, scolding establishment.

Those less serious pieces functioned as a sort-of gateway genre. They lowered the stakes, widened the tent, and translated abstract ideological disputes into personality-driven entertainment built on parasocial attachment to a charismatic influencer. In the precensorship internet, this was exactly the kind of content that could travel beyond explicitly political circles, letting her funnel viewers toward more overtly political work.

That mattered because Southern was also selling a new kind of right-wing politics, at a moment when the term “alt-right” was still contested and fluid in online usage. Southern—alongside creators like Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich—often tried to frame it as a countercultural, punk-adjacent style of politics: irreverent, secular, and “common sense,” rather than religiously conservative or explicitly ethnonationalist. That definitional fight didn’t last. The label quickly became associated, in public discourse, with something far more specific—and far more radioactive. And then the environment changed altogether.

The purges and policy shifts arrived in waves, sometimes justified, sometimes sloppy, and often propelled by a genuine fear that the internet had become an ungovernable amplifier for extremism. Social media platforms, under pressure from governments, advertisers, and activist campaigns, began to police content more aggressively and deplatform more readily.

Southern, like many of her peers, disappeared—at least in the way that matters online. That is why her return, through a memoir rather than a rebrand as an influencer, feels unusually revealing. This Is Not Real Life (self-published, 2025) is a firsthand account of the foundations (or early saplings) of this decade’s political psychosis: a period when online identity, partisan performance, and media incentives fused into something that looks, in retrospect, like the dress rehearsal for our current zeitgeist. Southern’s story is not only about her personal arc; it is also about the characters, factions, and forces that shaped that era. The book reads like a guided tour through a lost internet, one that helped build the world of today, even as it vanished from view.

It also offers something rarer than punditry: a case study of what the internet does to the people who rise to popularity within it.

Audience Capture

At its core, This Is Not Real Life is about identity—how it is formed, negotiated, and, in Southern’s case, outsourced. She traces how the persona she crafted online spun out of her control, taking on a life of its own in the minds of her audience. Over time, she describes becoming a “false performative identity”: a self that exists primarily to satisfy external expectations, calibrated to audience appetite and platform incentives. This is also where Southern’s memoir becomes more than gossip or political archaeology and becomes a portrait of how online media influences its influencers.

This is not unique to one creator or one ideological lane, as Southern writes, but more of a structural feature of online fame. Influencers are not simply people with opinions—they are feedback machines. They quickly learn what draws approval and what triggers punishment. They start to anticipate the crowd’s desires before the crowd expresses them. Their content becomes a kind of real-time referendum on their worth.

One of the book’s most interesting threads is Southern’s retrospective account of how the views she helped amplify—many of which she says she no longer holds, including immigration-critical sentiment—often did not originate as reasoned disagreements about policy, nor simply as heroic “speaking truth to power.” In her telling, they crystallized through the following dynamic: a young creator with missionary energy builds a massive audience in near-total isolation, without the editorial friction of peers or institutions; she then learns what “lands” not from a discussion or debate, but from the most fervent slice of her audience—the perpetually online commenters and quote-tweeters. Over time, that feedback selects for certainty and narrows the range of permissible nuance. The content becomes increasingly one-sided not necessarily because the creator set out to radicalize anyone, but because the attention economy (even in its infancy at the time Southern was professionally active) rewards the strongest signal and punishes hesitation.

Southern describes that feedback loop with unusual clarity. Likes, shares, and comments did not merely reward her; they shaped her. The constant attention created an almost irresistible pull toward escalation: more provocative, more polarizing, more engaging. Not necessarily because the creator becomes more knowledgeable or convinced, but because the system teaches the creator what “works.” And once a creator’s livelihood, status, and identity are bound up with that loop, “what works” becomes hard to distinguish from “what is true.” On a personal level, as Southern reflects, if you have been defined through the audience’s mirror long enough, the absence of that mirror can feel like erasure.

This brings to mind René Girard’s mimetic theory, which holds that desires do not arise spontaneously; they are borrowed, copied, and transmitted socially. What Girard described as mimetic contagion—our tendency to want what others want—maps unnervingly well onto online dynamics, where desire is quantified and broadcast. A trending topic is not merely information but a signal about what others crave. The comment section is not merely reaction, it is a template for what one is supposed to feel.

In one of the few interviews promoting her book, Southern said she was familiar with Girard and agreed that his ideas fit her experience. This is quite significant because it reframes the common story of internet radicalization, which is that creators manipulate audiences. The Girardian version is both more nuanced and more plausible: audiences and creators manipulate one another, locked in a mutual imitation of desire until both lose the thread of what they originally cared about. 

If the internet could do this to someone who “understood the game,” what is it doing to the rest of us who live inside the same machinery?

In contemporary terms, this resembles a mix of social proof (the tendency for people to look to others’ behavior to guide their own), intermittent reinforcement (unpredictable rewards create stronger behavioral persistence than consistent rewards), and group polarization (group discussion or interaction shifts opinions toward more extreme versions of the initial shared leanings)—mechanisms that produce escalation even without anyone consciously intending it.

In that light, the escalating cycle of political content begins to look less like a deliberate march toward extremity than like an arms race shaped by attention. Outrage becomes contagious because it is socially rewarded. Certainty spreads because it is easier to rally around. Humiliation becomes entertainment because it cleanly assigns winners and losers. “Truth” becomes whatever keeps the crowd together.

What makes this feel particularly tragic is that we already built systems such as editorial review, fact-checking, proportionality, and the routine exposure to dissenting perspectives, which are meant to interrupt exactly this process. Yet legacy journalism institutions failed twice in that era. First, by leaving obvious, emotionally charged topics undercovered or condescended to, and second, by responding late with a mixture of gatekeeping and moral panic rather than the kind of rigorous, evenhanded reporting that might have met the societal demand.

The book’s reception proves a point.

Both The New York Times and Rolling Stone chose to report only on the book’s most disturbing allegation: that in 2018 Southern was drugged and sexually assaulted by Andrew Tate, years before he became a manosphere celebrity. Whatever one makes of that claim, the way it has dominated coverage is itself revealing.

It illustrates a brutal rule of media, described in detail by Southern in her memoirs: complex stories are often reduced to a single high-gravity event. A memoir about identity, audience capture, self-radicalization, and the psychological costs of online fame becomes “the Tate allegation book” in the public imagination because that is the simplest headline and the most clickable hook. Even when a claim is serious and newsworthy, it can function like a trapdoor: everything else falls through it.

In that sense, the coverage becomes a meta-example of the phenomenon Southern is describing. Nuance is not merely unpopular but inconvenient.

You can’t escape it, so what do you make of it?

Southern’s rise belongs to a particular political and technological moment when social media still felt like a frontier. Creators like Southern and her peers often insisted they were correcting blind spots in mainstream coverage—immigration, crime, cultural conflict, and institutional hypocrisy. Sometimes they were. Sometimes they weren’t. But the more important point is that they convinced huge audiences that they were the only ones willing to say what everyone else was afraid to say. That posture—truth-teller against a corrupt establishment—became the core myth of the era, and it proved potent enough to mobilize electorates and reorder institutions, even if its direct persuasive effects are harder to measure.

In hindsight, it is tempting to treat this as an anomaly. Southern’s memoir suggests something else. That era did not end—it metabolized. Its tactics were absorbed into mainstream politics, marketing, and media. Its techniques—weaponized irony, clip-based outrage, identity branding, and audience capture—are now standard and universally adopted across the board. What changed is not that the internet became less political (quite the contrary) but that it became more managed. The memoir is compelling because it captures what it felt like before that consolidation, when people still believed the internet might replace the old gatekeepers rather than become gatekept itself.

It is thus, in a strange way, an elegy for a vanished internet. Not because that internet was healthier (it often wasn’t) but because it was less automated and therefore more visibly human. You could see the conflicts, the incentives, and the improvisation. With today’s algorithmic feeds, you often cannot even tell why you are seeing what you are seeing. The machinery has become controlled by systems that no one can fully audit or understand. Whatever one thinks of Southern’s politics, there is clear value in a firsthand account of how the early architecture of online influence helped produce the polarization and unreality that now saturate public life.

Southern’s narrative is also, unmistakably, a story about exit—her attempt to escape the chaos of online fame and reclaim a sense of self, grounded in reality and faith. That element will land differently depending on the reader. For some, the turn toward faith will read as an evasion. For others, it will read as the only coherent response to a world that offers only chaos, echoing recent public conversions by figures such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray.

But either way, the attempt “to exit” is central to the book’s thesis. Because the internet is not simply a platform; it is a metaphysical environment. Leaving that behind is not like quitting a job. It is more akin to leaving a country.

Southern describes the cost of living as part flesh-and-blood human, part digital persona long enough that the digital persona starts to feel more real than the human. That inversion, where the performed self becomes the “true” self simply because it’s the one everyone recognizes, may be the book’s most distinctive theme. The internet “freezes” people, she argues, locking them into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

For most people, the name “Lauren Southern” denotes one of those frozen identities: a digital fossil that cannot apologize or mature in the ordinary ways humans do. The audience doesn’t want a person. It wants a symbol. And symbols are not allowed to change. So fans still perceive Southern—now a mother in her 30s—as the same person she was way back then.

Most people will never become famous, but millions of people experience a smaller version of the same distortion: curating an online identity, monitoring feedback, adjusting beliefs and aesthetics to match the expectations of peers or employers. In that broader sense, Southern’s story is not only about the politics of the 2010s. It is about what happens when human identity becomes primarily legible through a digital world.

If you come to Southern’s memoir looking for a neat political conversion story—villain to redeemed heroine, or extremist to repentant moderate—you may leave unsatisfied. The book is a portrait of how an era produced certain kinds of people, and how many of those people struggled with what the era demanded, making it much more interesting.

A decade from now, many more public figures will publish memoirs like this—attempts to explain how they became characters in a story the internet wrote for them. Southern’s book arrives early enough to still feel like a dispatch from the source. It captures a digital world that shaped the real world (down to her testimony in the Canadian House of Commons) and then disappeared, leaving behind only artifacts, screenshots, and “frozen identities.”

The book also leaves the reader with an uncomfortable question: if the internet could do this to someone who “understood the game,” what is it doing to the rest of us—those who never chose fame, but live inside the same machinery all the same?

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“Peace for our time” was, of course, the phrase uttered by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on September 30, 1938 after he returned from signing The Munich Agreement with Hitler. That treaty allowed Nazi Germany to occupy the Sudetenland, part of Czechoslovakia, in return for Hitler’s promise to leave the rest of Czechoslovakia—and Europe—alone. That was a lie, of course, and Germany invaded Poland, beginning World War II, on September 1, 1939. Chamberlain, and other dupes who believed Hitler, had thought that the treaty would avert war in Europe.  Skeptics like Churchill disagreed, and Chamberlain resigned on May 10, 1940, giving the PM slot to Churchill.

Now we are told by Trump and others that we’re close to peace for our time in Iran; here’s Trump’s announcement, bereft of details, from Truth Social:

It doesn’t say much about Israel except Trump had a “very good call” with Netanyahu. Israel is being shoved aside in Trump’s hell-bent desire to get some kind of peace with Iran. But what kind will we get? We can see more details in The Times of Israel. which partly quotes the NYT (headings below are mine, extracts from the ToI are indented, and my words are flush left):

Uranium:

Iran has agreed to give up its stockpile of highly enriched uranium as part of an agreement with the US to end the war, two US officials tell the New York Times.

According to the officials, Iran has committed in a general statement to giving up the uranium, rather than reaching an agreement with the US on exactly how it will relinquish it. Instead, the exact details will be worked out during the negotiations that will begin once a deal is reached.

The report comes days after Iranian sources claimed that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, had issued a directive that the near-weapons-grade uranium should not be sent abroad.

Iran has a stockpile of more than 400 kilograms of highly enriched uranium in its possession, which Israeli officials have said is sufficient for 11 nuclear bombs if enriched further.

Earlier this month, a senior Israeli military official said if the uranium wasn’t removed, the war launched in February could be considered “one big failure.”

More on uranium:

And, reports the Times, the officials say issues relating to Iran’s nuclear program will be put off, to be negotiated within 30 to 60 days.

The Times adds the caveat that it is “not clear if the proposal Iranian officials said they had agreed to was what President Trump was referring to in his post on social media.”

Citing Middle East officials, The Times also says the leaders of Arab and Muslim-majority countries with whom Trump spoke in a conference earlier today told him that they support the proposal and urged him to accept it.

The Strait of Hormuz:

While Iran’s Fars news has derided President Donald Trump’s talk of a deal being nearly done, with the Strait of Hormuz to reopen, three senior Iranian officials tell the New York Times that Tehran has agreed to “a memorandum of understanding that would stop the fighting and reopen the Strait of Hormuz.”

The deal would release $25 billion in Iranian assets frozen overseas, the officials are quoted as saying.

The Times says the officials say the agreement “would halt fighting on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”

They add that its terms focus “on opening the strait— including lifting the US naval blockade against Iran and allowing free commercial traffic without Iran charging any tolls.”’

. . .Iran’s Fars news agency says the Strait of Hormuz will remain under Iran’s management under the provisions of the latest exchanged text for a deal between Iran and the US.

Fars, a semi-state outlet close to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, dismisses as “incomplete and inconsistent with reality” Trump’s announcement two hours ago that the deal was now being finalized and would include the reopening of the strait.

Trump posted on social media that an agreement with Iran “has been largely negotiated.” He specified that the deal would include the opening of the strait, the key pathway for the global oil supply that Tehran has largely blocked since the beginning of the war some three months ago.

Regime change: 

None, of course. Although some in the Trump administration say there has been regime change, all that means is that the Ayatollah Khamenei is dead, his son, the Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, may be alive but isn’t doing much, and military hard-liners still run the country and the war. The Iranian people are no closer to freedom than they were before the war.

Lebanon and Hezbollah:

No information yet; see Segal’s excerpt below in which Iranian sources claim that the agreement would stop fighting in Lebanon (but would presumably not require Hezbollah to disarm).

As you see, not much is clear, and the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile—the reason Trump says we attacked Iran—remains unclear.

Over at It’s Noon in Israel, Amit Segal’s post about it is called “The art of a bad deal,” with the subtitle, “Trump’s proposed deal threatens to leave Iran stronger than it was before Operation Epic Fury.”  Excerpt:

t’s Sunday, May 24, and at the outset of Operation Roaring Lion, there were two definitions of victory on the table: capturing Iran’s enriched uranium or toppling the regime altogether. Given that regime change does not appear to be materializing and one of the parties appears hesitant to make the necessary investments for such an outcome, the sole remaining path to victory appears to be securing the uranium.

The most recent proposal—which Donald Trump claims is already “largely negotiated”—seemingly attempts to follow this path. According to a report from Channel 12, the agreement would reopen the Strait of Hormuz in exchange for the lifting of the naval blockade and substantial financial relief. However, the core issues regarding the nuclear program and the extraction of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile would not be resolved upfront; instead, they would be deferred for separate negotiations over a 60-day period. Critically, Senior Iranian sources speaking with The New York Times said the deal would release $25 billion in Iranian assets frozen overseas. They added that the agreement “would halt fighting on all fronts, including in Lebanon.”

If the enriched uranium is indeed surrendered to the United States, it is indeed a notable achievement, but there are two caveats:

The first caveat concerns the actual scope and reality of the nuclear concessions. According to current reports, the negotiations slated to follow the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz will focus exclusively on uranium enriched to 60 percent—the roughly 440 kilograms currently believed to be buried beneath the rubble of the Natanz facility. Meanwhile, the tons of uranium enriched to three percent appear destined to remain inside Iran, with any future restrictions on its enrichment left dangerously ambiguous. Compounding this uncertainty, a senior Iranian official bluntly told Reuters today that Tehran has not actually agreed to hand over any material at all, emphasizing that the preliminary agreement does not even formally address the nuclear issue.

The second caveat is procedural, but no less critical. The framework currently on the table is not a finalized treaty, but merely a temporary Memorandum of Understanding meant to serve as a baseline for future talks. All the thorny details regarding the nuclear stockpile are slated to be ironed out over a 60-day negotiation window. The official justification for this delay is logistical—that safely extracting highly enriched uranium from bombed-out, irradiated rubble is a highly complex operation. In practice, however, it is far more likely a calculated delay, offering Tehran an extended opportunity to rest and recover before entering their next phase of nuclear intractability.

Israel has greeted the news with deep skepticism and more than a touch of fear. The reported memorandum makes zero mention of ballistic missile restrictions. What began largely as a defensive shield for Iran’s nuclear ambitions has mutated into a formidable threat in its own right. Even without the ultimate deterrent of a nuclear warhead, an Iranian ballistic arsenal numbering in the tens of thousands is more than sufficient to paralyze any military action against the Islamic Republic. According to Channel 12, this critical issue—whether through an immediate American concession or a simple lack of interest—never even made it to the negotiating table.

The current form of the deal also leaves the Islamic Republic holding another critical asset: the Strait of Hormuz. While the strategic waterway is slated to reopen, it does so not by virtue of an American victory, but rather by Iran’s sufferance. The current framework temporarily ensures toll-free passage, but absolutely nothing in the agreement guarantees that Tehran won’t eventually set up a toll booth—or abruptly choke off shipping the moment they feel the subsequent 60-day negotiations are stalling.

A secondary, but equally pressing concern in Jerusalem is that the regime has not yet fallen. While never explicitly declared as a military objective, regime change has been the unofficial policy undercurrent of the entire conflict. So far, Tehran has successfully managed to cling to power. Yet, senior Israeli intelligence officials maintain that a collapse from within remains a distinct possibility—provided the crippling economic blockade is sustained through the end of 2026. If the blockade and economic warfare are traded away for a partial agreement today, that window permanently closes. Meanwhile, domestic repression continues apace; just this morning, Iran executed a man accused of sending information to the US and Israel during the war. Cutting this deal now would not just throw Tehran a financial lifeline—it would constitute a total abandonment of the Iranian protesters who began this entire conflict.

Segal also discusses Lebanon, where fighting has escalated but Israel has pretty much held its fire until Iran stopped fighting. Tehran wants to link the Iran peace deal to Lebanon, allowing Hezbollah to continue attacking Israel.  Israelis won’t stand for that, or so I think. Segal sums up the deal this way:

For a leader who has spent decades building his brand as the sole guarantor of Israeli security, accepting a deal that leaves the regime intact, Hezbollah armed, the ballistic missile program recovering, and Tehran flush with sanctions relief is electoral assisted suicide for Netanyahu. Hanging in the balance of these negotiations is the fate of more than one regime.

To me, this seems like a bad deal for the U.S. and especially for Israel. Nuclear enrichment could continue with the unenriched uranium possessed by Iran, it could eventually build a bomb, Hezbollah might persist as a threat to Israel, there is no regime change (we’re blowing a chance for one, says Segal), and the fate of the Strait of Hormuz remains unclear. Trump just keeps putting up deadline after deadline and then ignoring them, hoping that something will fall into place.

So I ask readers to weigh in by checking one box in this unscientific poll. I’ve given a deadline, but am just assessing reader sentiment here; so please check a box:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Once again I’ve stolen some photos (with permission) from the Facebook page of Scott Ritchie of Cairns, Australia. Scott has documented a trip to Queensland, and his text and IDs are indented. You can enlarge his photos by clicking on them.

Artemis Station, Cape York Peninsula, Queensland, Australia. The name that signifies excellence in Australian birding. This past weekend, I went on a wonderful camping trip with the Cairns Birders, led by Shane Kennedy and Doug Herrington, to Artemis Station. Doug then led us on a drive past Musgrave Roadhouse to Marina Plains. The last time I went up the Cape with Doug, we saw an adult Southern Cassowary with its chick at the top of the Kuranda Range. Well, lightning did strike twice.

Up the cape. It was magic. The weather was great, the sunsets so beautiful. The night sky was full on Milky Way. The sunrises were full of bird song. And the key “lifers”, the iconic Golden Shouldered Parrot (GSP) and the Red Goshawk, were on show. Here are some of my favourite photos from this trip.

My hat goes off to the staff of Artemis Station. Not only for hosting us, but for their heroic conservation efforts to save the last of the “termite” parrots in Queensland. Thank you Sue and Tom Shepherd, who own the station and tend to the parrots.

Adult Southern Cassowary (Casuarius casuarius). Great way to start the trip!:

And his chick!:

Galahs (Eolophus roseicapilla) were common, flying around in noisy flocks at dawn and dusk:

 

Galahs, in the outback!:

Patrick of Artemis Station shows us the ant (termite) mound used by Golden-Shouldered Parrots (Psephotellus chrysopterygius). They dig a tunnel in the mound. An electric fence barrier us used to keep out marauding snakes and monitor lizard. Great lengths are taken to maximise survival and production of these critically endangered birds.

The ant hill also has interesting camouflaged invertebrates, such as this cicada:

Female and male Golden-Shouldered Parrots (GSP) at a feeding station. Wild birds are provided with a feeding station of grass seeds to enhance survival:

An immature male GSP flies past a trail camera at the feeding station. They keep an eye out for predators, and to monitor bird health and numbers:

Another critically endangered bird, the Red Goshawk (Erythrotriorchis radiatus), also lives in Cape York. A male goshawk keeps a sharp eye on his partner:

. . .who is building a nest for the seasons brood:

“What do you think, is it sturdy enough?”:

 

We were greeted at the campsite by an Australian Boobook (Ninox boobook):

This cute owl kept a close eye on us for 2 nights.:

An Australian Hobby (Falco longipennis), a species of falcon, was seen regularly at a nearby pond:

Its long wings enable it to really crank it up!:

It seems having real-world responsibility has taught Dr. Jay Bhattacharya a valuable lesson- it’s better to try to stop dangerous viruses rather than play catch-up after a lot of people have already died.

The post My Sincere Message to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Welcome Aboard and Good Luck. We Are Rooting for Your Success. first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

By analyzing over 400,000 Reddit posts, researchers discovered that users of popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs frequently discussed unexpected symptoms like menstrual irregularities, chills, and hot flashes. The findings suggest AI could turn social media into a powerful early-warning system for spotting side effects that clinical trials may miss.