Or, to paraphrase one of Henry James’s shorter sentences: ‘Here it is, the undistinguished thing’. (To be fair, it was one of his last.)

The Independent launched on 7 October 1986, so has just passed its 40^th birthday. It had a cryptic crossword from day 1. My first appearance was at no. 1,033 on 3^rd. February, 1990, though I’d been told it was going to be a week later. Here we are thirty-six-and-a-half years later – there must be a pretty good chance that I am their longest-standing contributor.

No. 12,500 on 30 October 2026 was my 1,789^th puzzle – 14.3% of the total, or one in seven. I started out fortnightly, but at various points I appeared twice a week, once on consecutive days[1]. This was often because Mass (Harold Massingham) cleaved rather too closely to a ‘just-in-time’ approach, particularly for someone who was mailing his puzzles from Spain. He was also the setter the Independent accounts department most often chose to pay instead of me, and vice versa – I have quite a collection of Spanish postcards recording our sorting that out.

Learning from Harold, I have always tried to work a few puzzles in hand, so that an editor has several to choose from. This also gives a degree more freedom with vocabulary. There was a fortnight in the 90s when the puzzle contained LOCH NESS MONSTER three times. It stuck in my mind because – well, guess what word I had coming up in the puzzle I was working on just then.

The editor from the early 90s was Louise Levene, who was also the paper’s ballet critic, with an assistant called Aoife (though the satisfaction at remembering how to spell her forename has wiped her surname). After Louise moved on Brian Greer took over, working remotely from the US (ah, these far-flung contributors…), and I dare say he could give you insights into the differences between editing an anonymous puzzle with a house style and a puzzle with pseudonyms reflecting different styles.

The editor for the longest period and he contributor who is losing the most from the cancellation is Mike Hutchinson, who has been in place for twenty years or so, and will be stepping down as the longest-serving editor in the broadsheets. Mike has been a very light-touch editor, picking up mostly on errors in GK and typos and letting my own style come through. He has his foibles – such as a dislike of composite anagrams – but even there he let one through for me, as a treat, just last month. (Brickbats were not hurled.) Thanks to Mike for his shepherding of the puzzle through difficult times. I will miss being 23^rd on the round robin ‘Merry Christmas’ email that he sends out just as I’m going to bed on Christmas Eve so that I don’t receive it till the following morning.

Back in the day, puzzles and clues were constructed by hand and written in notebooks (I had a job lot of ones with squared paper). These days I construct grids using software, but the clues are generally still written by hand. The Independent has been the exception – that puzzle has largely been clued on an iPad in a single session in bed on a Sunday morning. I’m not sure what difference that makes, but Phidays will follow that pattern (definitely not iPad-shy, if I may coin an anagram).

I have a reputation for Ninas and themes. I now play up to it, but when it first emerged it came as a surprise to me. Putting old puzzles up here on the site has clarified things a little as I’ve found quite elderly puzzles with hidden themes, mainly perimeter messages at the outset.  I was also said to be the originator of the term ‘Nina’, which isn’t true (Jon Deflin, I think) though I could have been: it was familiar when I first heard it as I’d seen some of Al Hirschfeld’s drawings and had heard the legends associated with them. One of the Wellington cinemas has a picture in a toilet cubicle – a poster for Mary Poppins (I think) with the Nina detectable in some frills on Julie Andrews’s costume.

When I started the pay was £85 a puzzle, which went up to £100 sometime in the 90s – and there it has stayed, so that the paper is spending far less on this obviously extravagant bit of frippery than its rivals (including the Church Times). They have occasionally saved even more by forgetting to pay it at all.

There was always the risk that a pastime dependent on actual paper could struggle in an online-only environment. But there are now several pieces of software supporting both the creation and solving of crosswords, and the Independent’s main rivals all allow for online solving on dedicated puzzle sites. To be fair, so does The Independent, if you can find the puzzle. There are clearly a few good ways to transition to the online world, and then there’s throwing a whole load of puzzles on to a single unstructured website and hoping people find what they want. But for the paper that first took the step to go online only it seems a curious decision just when crosswords are having their online moment.

There have been attempts to find an online or alternative home for the puzzle, but nothing has emerged at the time of writing (28 October), so I have, as announced last week, made moves to continue Phidays on my own website (originally set up to ensure the APEX Christmas puzzles I have been setting for 20+ years had a home). The first puzzle will appear on 6 November. I am still tinkering, but the format I’m working towards has a puzzle on the page, which you can copy and print off. But why would you, when there’s a PDF you can download, and an interactive version too. I am still working on how to present solutions.

You will, of course, be able to comment on the puzzle on my site, and I won’t have to lean in with hints as all will become clear the following week.

Thank you to those who have already signed up and supported the venture. I have, optimistically, also adopted the facility where you can set up a subscription via the Buy Me a Coffee button. It would be good to see more of you along in due course, but the Seventh Cavalry do tend to arrive only at the last minute, and perhaps you’re still awaiting an announcement that the puzzle has been saved.

Cryptical, who I mentioned last week, have a puzzle from me for you to purchase. I’ve also written them some standalone clues – all new and unpublished elsewhere – which they are going to put up as ‘Clue of the day’ on Phidays. We are also trialling making the Phiday puzzle available on Cryptical every Friday – the site is an additional way in to solving crosswords for people dipping their toes into the water. Happy to see you coming along to my site, of course – where you could Buy Me a Coffee as well (down there on the right – did I mention I’d be promoting it relentlessly?). There was considerable commitment expressed on the idea of paying for the Independent puzzle to continue – here’s an option.

The new weekly regimen will have some impact on my hitherto fortnightly updates on the site. I think I will reduce the blog posts (plus puzzles from the archive) to once a month, though the weekly Phiday announcements may contain the occasional comment.

The Independent isn’t the only game in town, though it has felt that way in recent days. The start of November is quiet in my other outlets – the December BBC Music Magazine goes on sale on 5 November (but I quite understand if you want to save yourselves for Phidays 1 the next day), with a Pangakupu Quiptic in the Guardian on Sunday 8 November.

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[1] 10 and 11 February, 1999, including one of Pedro’s three Independent appearances, all in February and March that year

Lifting sanctions on Russian diesel may provide Americans a little relief from high energy prices. The same economic logic applies to the thousands of other sanctions Washington continues to enforce.

Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind
by Gad Saad
New York: Broadside Books, 2026
255 pp. $32.99 (Kindle)

During a burglary, sixteen-year-old Travis Lewis murdered Sally Snowden McKay, age seventy-five, and her nephew, Joseph Baker. Lewis was found guilty and sentenced to twenty-eight and a half years in prison. Sally’s daughter, Martha McKay, forgave Lewis, visited him while he was imprisoned, and petitioned for his early release. She also offered him a job in the same house where he had murdered her mother and cousin. Lewis then murdered Martha, too.

According to Gad Saad, a professor and evolutionary behavioral scientist, this is an example of “suicidal empathy,” the phenomenon that gives his book, a New York Times bestseller, its title. Saad is not against empathy. Although he notes that it “has up to forty-three distinct definitions within the academic literature,” he doesn’t say what definition he’s using (2). Nevertheless, he believes that empathy is a “noble virtue” and that it “helps promote prosocial behavior. . . . But our empathy must be tethered to rational boundaries rooted in reciprocity” (163). More specifically, one’s empathy “must be invoked at the right time, in the right amount, and to the right targets” (166). In short, “empathy must be deployed in a strategically discriminating manner” (100).

Although this implies that we have control over how we empathize, Saad also argues that we have an “empathy module” that can malfunction or “misfire” (a term he uses eighteen times in the preface and first chapter). Empathy turns suicidal when it’s excessive and directed at the wrong targets. Examples of this, Saad claims, include empathy for certain felons, rapists, and murderers but not their victims; empathy for squatters but not the homeowners who can’t remove them; empathy for transgender athletes but not the disadvantaged women who must compete against them; empathy for homeless drug addicts setting up encampments in public parks but not taxpaying park users and their children.

Suicidal empathy, Saad writes, “spreads akin to an emotional contagion throughout an entire society, and its effects are long-lasting” (xiv). These effects include a broad range of outlandish behaviors, systems, and policies. If suicidal empathy is “not properly contained, it will destroy the West” (xiv).

The book discusses examples of suicidal empathy across a wide range of issues, including immigration, COVID policies, climate activism, the welfare state, the criminal justice system, and more. It also includes a chapter on what Saad calls “forbidden knowledge,” meaning facts, ideas, and research that some want to suppress because they might offend certain groups—a mindset Saad characterizes as, “If the truth lacks empathy, reject it!” (xii). One example is the “fat acceptance” movement, which seeks “to elevate the sense of self-worth of overweight people, even if it means espousing pure fiction” (30). In the closing chapter, Saad explains how to inoculate oneself against suicidal empathy.

An important subtheme of the book is the destructiveness of emotionalism, the doctrine and practice of placing emotions above facts, logic, and reason. “Our emotions,” Saad writes, “can lead us astray when they are deployed in contexts when it would serve us best to invoke our reasoning faculty” (10). When people succumb to suicidal empathy, he explains, viewing the world through “the prism of maximizing empathy now,” they focus only on “first-order effects” while ignoring the “disastrous long-term consequences” (158–59).

Although this subtheme is valid, and although Saad detects a real problem in our culture, his theory of suicidal empathy has significant flaws.

To start, “suicidal empathy” is not the appropriate name for his theory. It is more accurately one of misdirected sympathy or compassion than of empathy. Merriam-Webster’s dictionary defines empathy as “the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another.”1 By this definition, Saad’s view that one can empathize with the “wrong targets” is incorrect. One might, for example, empathize with a criminal (i.e., try to understand why he did what he did and to feel what he feels). But that does not necessarily mean that one cares about the criminal, excuses his behavior, or thinks he deserves one’s help. (For consistency with the quoted material, I will use the word “empathy” as Saad does for the rest of the review. But keep in mind how he uses it: Although he doesn’t explicitly define empathy, his usage suggests that he means not only understanding and sharing another person’s thoughts and emotions but also wanting to alleviate that person’s distress.)

The theory is also ill-defined. Saad presents no principle or criteria for determining when empathy crosses the line from merely inappropriate to suicidal. This omission becomes evident as one reads through his numerous examples and anecdotes. Many are questionable, as they are not obviously motivated by empathy, much less “suicidal” empathy.

Consider two. First, Saad describes a Jaguar advertisement from late 2024 featuring “a bunch of weirdly dressed people of color (including some apparent nonbinary and transgender folks) sashaying around.” This “suicidally empathetic advertising campaign” destroyed Jaguar’s “massive intergenerational brand equity” (133). Although the campaign triggered a backlash, its purpose was to rebrand the company for the ultra-luxury electric vehicle market. Jaguar’s sales did collapse, but mostly for reasons unrelated to the ad. Running it was a miscalculation, but I could not find any evidence that it was motivated by empathy.

The second example is the Laken Riley case. José Ibarra, a Venezuelan immigrant who was in the United States illegally, attacked Riley, a twenty-two-year-old nursing student, while she was jogging. He attempted to rape her, then murdered her after she resisted. “A key reason that the death penalty was not sought,” according to Saad, “is because of a suicidally empathetic progressive district attorney named Deborah Gonzalez who does not believe in the death penalty” (35). Instead, she pursued life without parole with the Riley family’s support. One might strongly disapprove of Gonzalez’s decision, but even if it was motivated by empathy, locking up a murderer for life cannot reasonably be considered “suicidal.”

Saad’s questionable examples aside, his others do illustrate problems that point to a common underlying cause. But invoking misdirected empathy, although it may play a role, is an unsatisfying explanation. The crucial question is: Why do some people have empathy for the wrong targets?

Saad provides a couple of answers, though he places little emphasis on either. First, he says that suicidal empathy is “driven by misplaced existential guilt. . . . The suicidally empathetic person feels guilty that they were born in the West, whereas others were not as fortunate” (19). But this raises a further question: Why would one feel guilty about that?

His other answer, which is much less clear, is “parasitic ideas” (a phrase he borrows from his earlier book, The Parasitic Mind). These ideas include “woke social justice” (xiv), intersectionality (32), cultural relativism (47, 81), doomsday environmentalism (102, 104), and social determinism, the doctrine that “all life outcomes are due to external forces” (17). In most cases, however, he doesn’t explain exactly how these ideas connect to suicidal empathy. And when he does address it, his accounts are inconsistent. For example, he says, “the West’s intelligentsia . . . is infected by a mind parasite that causes its empathy module to misfire” (xi). Later, he suggests that the causation runs in the opposite direction: “Parasitic ideas . . . are driven by misguided empathy” (15). In yet another place, he implies that they are merely associated, neither clearly causing the other: “Parasitic ideas . . . flourish best when coupled with a narrative of empathy” (xiv; emphasis added).

To the extent that “parasitic ideas” and “existential guilt” contribute to suicidal empathy, they are, at best, intermediate causes. But Saad fails to identify the fundamental cause because he is looking in the wrong place. Consider his examples involving squatters, certain criminals, and the welfare state. In these and other cases, the persons receiving empathy are deemed weaker, needier, or otherwise less powerful. But what about the aggrieved parties? For example, empathizing with a squatter while dismissing the burden imposed on the homeowner implicitly assumes that the squatter’s need gives him a moral claim on what belongs to someone else. The underlying premise here is that those more fortunate should yield their rights, property, or security to those less fortunate. This goes deeper than mere empathy (suicidal or not); it is a moral demand for sacrifice.

According to ethicist Peter Singer, “we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility. . . . This would mean, of course, that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.”2 On this view, if anyone is worse off than you are, then to be moral, you must sacrifice your wealth, values, and interests for his sake. As philosopher C. D. Broad writes,

each of us is often under an obligation to sacrifice his own happiness, and sometimes to sacrifice his own development and life, for the benefit of certain other persons and groups, even when it is doubtful whether more good will be produced by doing so than by not doing so.3

The morality Singer and Broad are conveying here—the morality that demands self-denial, self-abnegation, and self-sacrifice, the morality of subordinating the lives of some people to the needs of others—is altruism.

The example with which I opened this review clearly displays this morality. Martha McKay sacrificed justice, common sense, her safety, and ultimately her life for the sake of helping the man who murdered her mother and cousin.

But one might wonder: Aren’t altruism and empathy essentially the same? Although often associated, they are categorically different. Altruism is a morality; empathy is an emotional-psychological capacity and skill. Unlike altruism, which provides ethical guidance, empathy alone doesn’t tell you how to act or how to judge others.

The morality of altruism, not misdirected empathy, is the root cause of the unhinged—and sometimes suicidal—behaviors, systems, and policies that Saad is trying to explain. In any issue or situation, when some people automatically side with whomever they consider weaker, needier, or less powerful while evading any relevant facts, altruism is the implicit moral premise behind this pattern of judgment. After all, if those more fortunate are morally obligated to sacrifice for those less fortunate, then why shouldn’t we always side with the latter—even when they harm, threaten, or burden the former? (Siding with the needier party may be right, but not simply because they’re needier.) By elevating need above all other considerations, altruism provides a moral rationalization for dismissing the rights, interests, and liberties of anyone whose quality of life exceeds that of Singer’s Bengali refugee.

Saad writes, “A behavioral outcome of empathy is the human capacity to be altruistic,” a capacity he describes as a “noble reflex” (6). Although he stops far short of taking altruism to its logical conclusion, as Singer does, Saad’s favorable view of it likely explains, at least in part, why he fails to identify the deeper moral issue.

Besides the problems with Saad’s central argument, some of his claims about specific issues are highly dubious. Because of this and his occasionally snarky, hyperbolic tone, his writing often reads as an attempt not to persuade skeptical readers but to pander to a conservative audience.

For example, he writes, “The newly formed Department of Government Efficiency [DOGE] headed by Elon Musk has . . . eliminated a breathtaking amount of corruption, waste, and fraud” (144). A breathtaking amount? DOGE’s initial goal was to cut $2 trillion in federal government spending, which it lowered to $1 trillion, then to $150 billion (a paltry 2 percent of federal spending). DOGE claimed estimated savings of $215 billion, but this figure could not be independently verified. A Government Accountability Office audit found significant problems with DOGE’s calculations and methodology, suggesting that the cuts fell short of even its own $150 billion unbreathtaking goal.4

Despite factual overstatements such as this, Saad’s attempt to formulate a theory that explains a broad range of personal behaviors, cultural issues, and political policies is both ambitious and admirable. Unfortunately, it fails, as his theory is misnamed, ill-defined, and a poor fit for many of his examples. Most important, he doesn’t look in the right place (morality) for the fundamental cause of the phenomena his theory is trying to explain.