Noble in the sound which marks the pale ease of their dreams, they ride the bel canto of our time: the patient en- circlement of Narcissus & as he pines I too am wan with fever, have fears which set the vanished child above reproach. Cry as you will, take what you need, the night is young and limitless our greed. —Jeremy Prynne, “Love,” from White Stones

RIP J.H. Prynne.
Renowned for his difficulty and single-mindedness (I personally struggle with the last couple of decades) but that forgets how beautiful and lyrical much of his poetry is.
"Love" is one of the few poems I could recite by heart

TELESCOPE There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you've been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky. You've stopped being here in the world. You're in a different place, a place where human life has no meaning. You're not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity. Then you're in the world again. At night, on a cold hill, taking the telescope apart. You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false. You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing.

Louise Glück, born on this day in 1943

congrats 🎉

Seán Clancy: Where the Paths End Where the Paths End is a new album by one of the most exciting Irish composers of his generation, Seán Clancy. Bringing together works written between 2013 and 2025, the album explores lived experienc...

Probably the best thing I’ve yet done…

nmc-recordings.myshopify.com/collections/...

What if mental disorders aren’t just brain problems, but disruptions in how we make sense of the world?

I enjoyed speaking with Professor Sanneke de Haan about her work on the enactive approach to psychiatry in the latest Behind the Stigma episode :)

Listen here: www.buzzsprout.com/1402324/epis...

Don't be shy to take on a little two-week side project. These five months will be the most precious three years of your academic journey.

Strong Summer Palace energy

Corollary: Conservatism is just virtue signalling to dead people.

cool! thanks for the heads up!

Landing page for the AI-generated summary podcast for the "Identity, Culture, and Games for Social Impact" session at CHI. The top menu bar displays that this is the "Premium Edition" of the ACM digital library

Same landing page for the "basic edition" of the ACM digital library. The basic edition is free, but also offers no access to the AI-generated podcast summaries.

Not into the AI-generated podcast summaries of #chi2026 paper sessions – that authors *cannot* opt out of. But was thinking that perhaps this could make papers more accessible to the general public.

Turns out the AI-podcasts are only available to ACM premium members... wtf...

#CHI2026 today 12:03 P1 Room 132 (session: Getting Emotion) Susan Min Li will present Rough Meanings, her first CHI paper (!) on how tiny surface features shape emotion, colour, and language associations, moving cross-sensory interaction towards the realm of micro-structures #inclusiveXplay

and if you or someone you know is interesting in this sort of stuff and looking for a postdoc in cross-sensory fabrication and playful interaction? Ping me or anyone from the #inclusiveXplay project team for a chat:

www.bristol.ac.uk/jobs/find/de...

at the moment I am just discussing all that with them without pretending to know what the way out is.

exactly this..
there are things that it does well and things it does badly which you learn by using. Companies will hire based on that competence and we don't have levers to stop that. And relying on it enables deeply negative resourcing patterns. And the way it was constructed is deeply unethical.

Survey research is often interpreted as showing that belief in conspiracy theories can be surprisingly widespread, including belief in conspiracy theories that would be astonishing if true. For example, in The Atlantic we learn that “12 million Americans believe lizard people run our country”

fwiw im completely caught in how I should address this with my anti-AI gen z students. I think they probably will need some familiarity with these tools to get on as individuals, and I agree with them it will cause massive harm at societal scale. Prison guard's dilemma I guess.

of all the kids I know I think yours are going to be the most virtuously ungovernable.

Proceedings of the Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | ACM Conferences CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

The extended proceedings (containing all posters, demos, workshops and more) is also online: dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi...

Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems | ACM Conferences

The ACM CHI 2026 paper program is live on the ACM Digital Library, so please enjoy all the new 1702 pieces of science that #CHI2026 has for you: dl.acm.org/doi/proceedi... (cc @acm_chi ).
p.s.: You can read our welcome message at dl.acm.org/action/showF...

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real Bixonimania doesn’t exist except in a clutch of obviously bogus academic papers. So why did AI chatbots warn people about this fictional illness?

This is quite extraordinary- scientists set a kind of trap for AI chat bots by inventing a fake disease. AI told people it was real and… the deliberately bogus preprints started being cited in peer reviewed literature 🫣
🧪 #MedSky

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

I think that's the thing I was dumbly gesturing at: weird era of the virtuoso punk whammy pedal power duo.
Haven't spent enough time with Guttersnipe.

it's a great record. I miss the sound of whammys and too many notes. Need to dig this stuff back out.

I was not prepared to parse this, and I enjoyed that.

Back in the era when all a band needed was a drumkit, a bass, a whammy pedal, conservatory-level musical training and the endorsement of John Zorn.

Quietness, by Kepler Quartet from the album Ben Johnston: String Quartets Nos. 6, 7, & 8

Art music songs are tough to pull off, but this is an almost perfect piece of music. I ration it out for myself.
newworldrecords.bandcamp.com/track/quietn...

I won't say no to exciting. Thankyou!

Folks, if you have 20-30min to spare, please help out my master students! Play their game prototype and fill in a short online survey.

Rebalanced, by Ye Gods 8 track album

Digital pre-order for the YG Remix album featuring @mogwai.scot @snowbeasts.bsky.social @ghostcopnyc.bsky.social and a whole bunch of other people who aren't on here! Teasing the Mogwai remix today. Put listening in: yegods.bandcamp.com/album/rebala...

That's great - thanks so much :)