Honestly today’s event kind of sucked a little bit, there weren’t that many people and the people at my table did not feel like they were at all close to my energy. Thankfully I went with a friend that I met earlier and if it wasn’t for that I would’ve had a much worse time. At least from the people afterwards it seemed like they’re just weren’t too many people in my age range that worked to this event and I kind of worry that I’ve more or less exhausted my pool of people to meet from 222. I know that I’m tired and not exactly feeling the greatest today so I’m not too worried about it or really giving it too much thought, but it is a little bit scary, thinking about how I may have to start meeting people again through another way that I don’t yet know about. But I guess it will be OK because I am resourceful and I do have other avenues.

夕方、コンビニの前で缶コーヒーを飲みながら、木みたいなおじさんになりたい、と思った。でも、木みたいなおじさんという言葉以外では説明できなかった。

年輪を重ねて、どっしりしていて、地面に根を張っている感じ。多少押されたくらいでは倒れない。押されても、ゆっくり元に戻る。そういう存在。歳を取った人の肌って、だんだん木の皮みたいな色になっていく瞬間がある。乾いていて、でもちゃんと生きている感じがする。

友人にそれを話すと、 それってもう木じゃん、と言われた。

たしかにそうかもしれない。地球から直接栄養を吸っているみたいな顔をして、季節を黙って受け止めているおじさん。そういう木のおじさんになれたらいいのに、と思った。

でも相手は、俺はおじさんになりたくない、と言った。おじさん嫌いだもん、と。

理由を聞くと、沼みたいだから、と言う。ズブズブ沈んでいく感じがするらしい。

個体を液体で表現するなよ、と思わず笑った。

でも、その言い方は少し分かる気もした。年齢って、気づいたら足を取られているものなのかもしれない。昨日まで岸に立っていたはずなのに、いつのまにか膝まで沈んでいる。

お前はおじさんを沼だと思ってるんだな、と言ったら、少し黙ったあとで、どっちも森にあるね、と返ってきた。

その瞬間だけ、木と沼の違いが急に曖昧になった。

The fifty-minute hour has always been a negotiated fiction. A patient talks, a therapist listens, and somewhere between them a third thing forms: a clinical relationship dense with attention, memory, and the particular quality of being heard. For more than a century, that triangle contained only two people. It no longer does.

Open the laptop of a typical American psychologist in the spring of 2026 and the odds are better than even that an AI tool is already running. It might be an ambient scribe quietly listening to the session and transcribing it into a SOAP note by the time the patient reaches their car. It might be a risk-screening dashboard that flags linguistic markers of suicidality in a client's intake forms. It might be a real-time coaching tool that whispers a reframe into the clinician's earpiece when a silence stretches too long. The American Psychological Association's Practitioner Pulse Survey, the results of which landed in March 2026, is unambiguous: AI has moved from fringe novelty to routine infrastructure in clinical practice. Fifty-six per cent of the 1,742 psychologists surveyed said they had used an AI tool to assist their work in the past year. Twenty-nine per cent use one at least monthly. In 2024, seventy-one per cent said they had never touched the stuff. That is a generational shift compressed into twelve months.

What the APA did not find, and went out of its way to say it did not find, was a professional consensus on any of the hard questions. Not on disclosure. Not on patient rights. Not on what a therapist owes a client before flipping on a machine that will listen to their most intimate disclosures and then ship the audio to a vendor in a different state, possibly a different country, for processing. The technology has outrun the ethics, and the ethics have outrun the law, and the patient, sitting on the couch, is the last to know.

This is the part of the story that does not get a press release. When somebody talks about AI in mental health, they usually mean the chatbot, the thing a lonely teenager might befriend at three in the morning. That conversation has had its reckoning in courtrooms and congressional hearings, and it is not the one that matters most for the several million people who still see a human therapist each week. The interesting question is quieter and harder. If the clinician sitting across from you, the one you were referred to by your GP or your insurer, is quietly running an AI in the background of your treatment, what exactly are they obliged to tell you about it? And does the research support the idea that adding the machine makes the therapy better, or only cheaper to provide?

The Ambient Scribe Enters the Room

The single most common entry point for AI into clinical practice is also the most banal. Therapists hate paperwork. They always have. The running joke in any psychology department is that nobody went into the field to write insurance justification letters, and yet everyone spends roughly a third of their working hours doing exactly that. A standard therapy session runs fifty minutes. The documentation attached to it, progress notes, billing codes, risk assessments, treatment plan updates, can eat another thirty. Over a week, the arithmetic is brutal. A therapist seeing twenty-five clients is writing for twelve and a half hours on top of their clinical load. Much of that work happens after dinner.

Into this grim calculus walked a class of product nobody would have predicted five years ago: the AI therapy scribe. Blueprint, founded in 2020 and now one of the category leaders, offers an ambient listening tool that records sessions, transcribes them, and spits out a structured progress note in under sixty seconds. The pitch is seductive. The company claims average documentation times can fall from around 4.7 hours a day to 1.2, a reduction of roughly seventy-five per cent. Upheal, a Prague-based competitor, promises essentially the same thing with a slightly different feature set: SOAP, DAP, BIRP, or GIRP notes generated to a therapist's preferred template, with the model learning the clinician's writing style over time. Both companies advertise HIPAA compliance, SOC 2 certification, Business Associate Agreements, and end-to-end encryption. Blueprint automatically deletes its recordings after transcription. Upheal deletes audio too, though it retains transcripts for clinician review.

These are not marginal products. Blueprint says it is used by tens of thousands of therapists across the United States. Upheal reports a comparable footprint. They have competitors: Freed, Mentalyc, Twofold, Heidi Health. They have pricing tiers aimed at solo practitioners and at group practices, and in some cases at the in-house compliance officers at hospital systems. They have venture capital behind them. They have, above all, momentum.

And they sit at the centre of an ethical problem most of their users have not fully reckoned with. When a client walks into a therapy session, their spoken words are, under ordinary confidentiality rules, legally and ethically protected to a very high standard. Therapy is the paradigm case of a privileged communication. What happens when those words are transmitted in real time to a third-party vendor for algorithmic processing, stored in a cloud they cannot see, and used, in most contracts, to improve the vendor's underlying model? The HIPAA answer is that the vendor becomes a business associate, that a Business Associate Agreement must be in place, and that appropriate safeguards must be documented. The ethical answer is considerably more complicated. It turns on whether the client has any meaningful understanding of what is happening, and any meaningful ability to say no.

What the APA Actually Said

The March 2026 APA findings, laid out across the association's Monitor on Psychology coverage and the underlying Practitioner Pulse Survey data, painted a field in the middle of an uneven, improvised adoption curve. The most common AI uses reported by psychologists were administrative: drafting emails, summarising documents, generating content, and dictation or note-taking. These are not, for the most part, tasks that touch clinical judgement. They are the grinding logistics of running a practice. But a growing minority of respondents reported more ambitious uses: treatment planning support, risk assessment augmentation, and, in the most contested category, real-time prompting during sessions.

The concerns practitioners reported were granular and serious. Sixty-seven per cent worried about data breaches. At least sixty per cent flagged concerns about biased inputs and outputs, inaccurate outputs, lack of rigorous testing, and unanticipated social harms. Thirty-eight per cent worried that AI would eventually render some or all of their job duties obsolete. The APA's accompanying health advisory, issued in tandem with the survey, was blunt: AI chatbots and wellness apps lack the testing and safety measures needed to provide quality mental health support, and such tools cannot replace qualified clinicians. The advisory did not, however, tell therapists what to do about the AI already running quietly in their own offices.

That gap was partially filled by the APA's Ethical Guidance for AI in the Professional Practice of Health Service Psychology, a document released in mid-2025 and refined through the end of that year. The guidance articulates what, in theory, any American clinician using AI is obliged to do. It is worth dwelling on, because the clarity of the guidance stands in such contrast to the murk of actual practice. Clinicians must obtain informed consent. They must clearly communicate the purpose, application, and potential benefits and risks of the AI tools they are using. They must disclose AI use to individuals receiving direct care, to other relevant providers, and to any third party who might be considered a client. The disclosure must cover the type of AI tools involved, their effect on treatment, the flow of data, the role of third-party vendors, and the cost implications of AI-assisted care. Crucially, clients must be able to opt out, and where feasible be offered a human-only alternative. AI must augment, not replace, professional judgement. The psychologist remains responsible for every decision, and must not defer blindly to a machine-generated recommendation.

This is an admirably complete list, and for anyone who has sat through the five-minute consent ritual in a modern clinic, a slightly fantastical one. The average informed consent form in private practice is already a dense three-page document that clients sign while their therapist fetches water. Adding a granular disclosure of AI usage, one that specifies which vendor, which data paths, which retention policies, and which opt-out mechanisms apply, pushes the document towards something no reasonable client will read. And yet the APA is right that the alternative, a disclosure so thin it amounts to a rubber stamp, betrays the therapeutic relationship's foundational trust.

The Psychiatric News Point/Counterpoint in January 2026 surfaced the tension openly. One camp argued that AI disclosure should be patient-empowering by default, with consent forms that actively invite clients to ask questions about the technology in the room. The other argued for a stricter standard rooted in the principle of non-maleficence: if the clinician is not prepared to answer detailed technical questions about the tool they are using, they should not be using it. Somewhere between those two positions sits the average working therapist, using a scribe because it saves them six hours a week, with only a dim understanding of where the audio goes after the session ends.

The Evidence Problem

Suppose, for a moment, that every clinician disclosed every AI use with flawless clarity. Suppose every client understood, in appropriate detail, what was happening. The question underneath the disclosure question would remain: does any of this make therapy better, or does it simply make it cheaper to deliver? Here the literature is much thinner and much less flattering than the marketing materials suggest.

The most comprehensive recent answer came from a scoping review of reviews published in January 2026 in Frontiers in Psychiatry, which examined the state of AI in mental health care across the field. The review's core finding was that most clinical AI models in mental health remain proof-of-concept. They achieve impressive headline numbers, AUCs of up to 0.98 and accuracies reaching ninety-seven per cent, but those numbers come overwhelmingly from internal validation on small cohorts. When the same models are tested against independent data, performance degrades, sometimes substantially. External validation is sparse. Where it exists, AUCs typically settle into a more modest 0.80 to 0.88 range, and often lower. The review concluded that the gap between demonstrated performance in the laboratory and deployed performance in the clinic had not meaningfully narrowed.

This matters because the business case for clinical AI assumes the headline numbers. A risk-screening tool that correctly identifies suicidal ideation with ninety-five per cent accuracy in a training dataset might flag a tenth of that in practice. A treatment-planning assistant that suggests evidence-based interventions might do so using a corpus that over-represents certain populations and therapies. None of this is to say AI cannot help. It is to say that the current evidence base for routine clinical deployment is not yet what the confidence of the product demos implies.

The picture is worse, and better documented, for consumer-facing therapy chatbots, which remain distinct from clinician-supporting tools but share an underlying technology and some of the same pathologies. The Stanford study that has become the most frequently cited reference point in this debate, presented at the ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency and led by Jared Moore, Declan Grabb, and Nick Haber of Stanford with collaborators from Carnegie Mellon, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Texas at Austin, delivered a particularly uncomfortable finding. The researchers evaluated five popular therapy chatbots, including 7cups' Pi and Noni and Character.AI's Therapist, against a set of clinical criteria. Licensed human therapists responded appropriately ninety-three per cent of the time. The chatbots responded appropriately less than sixty per cent of the time.

More damning still, the researchers found that the chatbots exhibited more stigma towards certain mental health conditions than others. Alcohol dependence and schizophrenia drew more negative responses than depression. Newer and larger models did not perform better than older or smaller ones. In scenarios involving suicidal ideation or delusions, where a trained clinician would gently push back or help the client reframe, the chatbots sometimes enabled the dangerous thinking rather than interrupting it. The Stanford team was careful about what they were claiming. Their argument was not that chatbots could never be useful. It was that the specific failure modes they documented, stigma reinforcement and crisis mishandling, are particularly dangerous precisely because of the kind of user who seeks out an AI therapist in the first place.

There is a subtler finding layered underneath. If the chatbot reinforces stigma about schizophrenia, and the user of the chatbot is someone with a family history of schizophrenia who has not yet sought formal care, the effect of the interaction is to push that person further from the clinician they actually need. The AI therapist, in certain configurations, does not merely fail to help. It delays the real help.

The TikTok Problem

A second category of failure sits adjacent to the clinical AI question, and is probably more consequential at a population level. It concerns the recommendation algorithms that sit on the social-media platforms where vulnerable people now habitually go looking for mental health information. An arXiv pre-print published on 16 April 2026 by a research team auditing TikTok's mental health recommendations brought the issue into sharp focus. The paper, titled “Seeking Help, Facing Harm”, used thirty simulated accounts that interacted with TikTok's For You feed over a seven-day period in January 2026, collecting 8,727 videos. The audit varied two dimensions: whether the initial search framing was distress-initiated or help-initiated, and whether the account's interaction strategy leaned into the content or away from it.

The finding was that engaged accounts saw their feeds saturate with mental health content, roughly forty-five per cent of daily recommendations. Avoidance and passive viewing reduced the exposure but did not eliminate it, with mental health content still comprising between eleven and twenty per cent of recommended videos. Crucially, TikTok's algorithm did not appear to meaningfully distinguish between a user expressing distress and a user seeking help. Both were treated as a single mental health interest cluster. The consequence is that someone who types “how to stop feeling suicidal” gets treated roughly the same as someone who types “romanticising depression”. Recovery-oriented intent is conflated with distress consumption, and vulnerable users get served content that may exacerbate rather than mitigate harm.

The TikTok finding matters for the therapy-room question because it changes the context in which the therapy happens. The client who walks into a session at five o'clock has spent the preceding weeks, often the preceding years, consuming algorithmic content that actively shapes their sense of what their condition is and how it should be treated. Eating-disorder content, trauma content, ADHD content, grief content: all of it flows through the same engagement-optimised pipe. When the therapist then introduces an additional AI tool into the session, even a benign one like a scribe, they are not doing so in neutral territory. They are doing so on ground already extensively ploughed by algorithmic influence. The disclosure question is no longer just about the scribe. It is about the whole ecosystem of machine-mediated attention the client arrives with.

What the Patient Is Owed

So: if AI is now embedded in what remains one of the most intimate and trust-dependent professional relationships most people will ever have, what disclosure obligations should apply? The answer is not a single sentence, but it is a reasonably short list.

First, a client has the right to know, in plain language, that AI is in the room. That starts with whether a scribe is recording the session, but it extends to whether any automated system is generating, drafting, or shaping the treatment plan; flagging risk signals that will influence the clinician's judgement; or processing session data after the fact. The disclosure should happen at the start of treatment, not buried in a stack of intake forms. It should be revisited when tools change.

Second, the client has the right to understand the data path. Not every technical detail, but the substantive answers to the questions any thoughtful person would ask. Where does the audio go? Who stores it? For how long? Is it used to train a model? Can it be accessed by anyone other than the therapist? What happens if the vendor is acquired, goes bankrupt, or suffers a breach? These questions are answerable, in most cases, from a vendor's published documentation. If the therapist cannot answer them, the therapist does not yet understand the tool they are using.

Third, the client has the right to opt out. This is the hinge of the whole disclosure regime. A disclosure that comes with no meaningful alternative is not consent; it is notification. The APA's guidance is explicit that, where feasible, a human-only alternative should be offered. The qualifier “where feasible” is doing a great deal of work, and it is precisely the word that clinicians and practice managers will lean on when it becomes inconvenient to honour the principle. A patient who says “please do not record the session” should not have to become a problem case.

Fourth, the client has the right to know what the AI is not doing. Most people, when told an AI is involved in their care, will assume more than is actually the case. They may assume the AI is making diagnostic judgements it is not making. They may assume the therapist has abdicated more authority than they have. They may also assume the AI is doing less than it is. The disclosure should be honest in both directions.

Illinois, in August 2025, became the first US state to write this logic into statute. Public Act 104-0054, known as the Wellness and Oversight for Psychological Resources Act, prohibits the use of AI to provide therapy directly, to make independent therapeutic decisions, to interact with clients in any form of therapeutic communication, or to generate treatment plans without clinician review. It permits AI for administrative and supplementary support, provided the patient has given specific, written, revocable consent. Violations carry civil penalties of up to $10,000. Illinois will not be the last state to legislate this territory. Governing AI in Mental Health, a fifty-state legislative review published in late 2025, identified similar proposals in a growing number of jurisdictions. The Federal Trade Commission, having opened an inquiry in September 2025 into AI chatbots acting as companions, is circling the consumer end of the problem. The HHS approach is more deregulatory, aimed at promoting adoption through pilot programmes, but the direction of travel on disclosure is fairly clear.

In the UK, the regulatory movement has been quieter but real. The British Psychological Society has endorsed a Global Psychology Alliance guidance document on AI in psychology. The Health and Care Professions Council, which regulates practitioner psychologists in the UK, collaborated with four other regulators in February 2026 on a joint statement on AI in education and training. Neither document carries the specificity of the Illinois statute. But the principle is being worked out in comparable terms: disclosure, consent, clinician oversight, and meaningful alternatives.

The Economic Gravity

The harder question, and the one the industry would prefer not to answer, is whether the motivation for AI adoption in therapy has more to do with clinical improvement or with cost reduction. The available evidence suggests the latter is doing most of the work.

Start with what the data says about outcomes. A randomised clinical trial of a conversational AI agent for psychiatric symptoms, published in late 2025, found meaningful reductions in anxiety and depression symptoms compared to group therapy and control conditions. Meta-analytic work on AI-driven interventions has found moderate effect sizes, broadly comparable to low-intensity clinician-delivered treatments, particularly for cognitive behavioural approaches to mild or moderate depression. The therapeutic alliance literature suggests users can form surprisingly strong bonds with AI agents, sometimes within three to five days, and that these bonds correlate with engagement and symptom improvement. None of this should be dismissed. For someone who would otherwise get no care at all, a decent AI-mediated intervention is clearly better than nothing.

Now set that next to the economic reality of how therapy is paid for. Insurers routinely deny around fifteen per cent of mental health claims even when prior authorisation has been obtained. Therapists in network spend roughly a third of their working week on documentation and billing. The average productivity gain from an AI scribe, across published implementation studies, is a reduction in documentation time of roughly seventy per cent. That saving does not, in general, accrue to the patient as a lower fee. It accrues to the practice as either higher clinician throughput, a reduction in administrative overhead, or both. In the most straightforwardly commercial model, the clinician sees more clients per week because each one requires less paperwork, and the practice's revenue per clinician rises.

This is not inherently sinister. More clinician availability in a field with chronic workforce shortages is a genuine social good. But it reshapes what AI is for in a way the consent forms rarely acknowledge. The AI is not principally a clinical tool; it is a throughput tool. It makes it economically viable for the therapist to do more of what they already do. Whether it makes what they do better is a separate question, and the answer so far is: perhaps slightly, and only in certain narrow domains, and only where clinicians actively engage with the output rather than letting it substitute for their attention.

The managed-care angle is where this becomes politically charged. If AI scribes and AI treatment-planning aids allow a clinician to see, say, thirty per cent more patients per week, an insurer looking at its network will be tempted, over time, to recalibrate reimbursement rates on the assumption that AI productivity gains will absorb the pressure. The savings that flowed to the practice in year one flow to the payer in year five. The patient's out-of-pocket cost does not decline, but the amount of clinician attention per dollar declines quietly. This is the pattern that radiology, primary care, and coding specialities have already been living through for a decade. Psychotherapy is a latecomer to the trend, but there is no obvious reason it will be immune.

There is a further and more disquieting possibility, which the APA's guidance gestures at without quite confronting. If insurer incentives push towards AI-augmented therapy, and AI-augmented therapy can be delivered at higher throughput, the marginal therapist may find it increasingly difficult to operate without the AI. Not because the AI makes them a better clinician, but because opting out becomes economically untenable. The clinician who refuses the scribe sees fewer patients, generates less revenue, and becomes less competitive in the market. The right to opt out, from the therapist's side, begins to erode under the same logic that is already eroding it on the patient's side.

The Alliance Question

The single deepest concern, and the one hardest to measure, is what all of this does to the therapeutic alliance itself. The alliance, in the clinical literature, refers to the particular quality of collaboration and bond between client and clinician that consistently predicts outcomes across therapeutic modalities. It is not a decoration on therapy; it is substantively what therapy is. The studies on AI-mediated interventions suggest the alliance can form with a machine as well as a human, which is a finding both reassuring and unsettling. A recent Journal of Medical Internet Research integrative review on the digital therapeutic alliance identified five components, goal alignment, task agreement, therapeutic bond, user engagement, and the facilitators and barriers that mediate them, and found each was at least partially achievable in digital contexts.

That literature, however, is mostly about stand-alone digital interventions. The live question for the clinician-with-AI case is whether introducing a machine into the room between two humans changes the alliance those two humans are building. Common sense suggests it must. If the client knows that a transcript of the session is being processed by a vendor, that knowledge will shape what they say. Certain topics, abortion, substance use, past legal trouble, contemplated self-harm, may come up more tentatively or not at all. The therapist's assurance that “the system is HIPAA compliant” will not, in most clients, fully dissolve the awareness that a machine is listening. Awareness of surveillance, even benign surveillance, changes speech. That change is precisely what good therapy exists to undo.

There is a further dynamic on the therapist's side. When a clinician is using an ambient scribe, a small part of their attention is necessarily devoted to what the machine is picking up, whether it is capturing the important moments, whether the resulting note will require heavy editing. That split attention is subtle, but it is not zero. A significant body of attentional research suggests that the perceived presence of a recording device changes how the recorder behaves. Whether that change, summed across a caseload of thirty clients per week, is large enough to measurably degrade therapeutic outcomes is an open empirical question. Nobody has yet designed the study that would answer it cleanly.

The Shape of an Honest Practice

If the current moment is a kind of frontier, a period in which adoption has raced ahead of norms, what does an honest AI-augmented practice look like? A few things are becoming clear.

It looks like disclosure written in plain English and revisited as tools change, not a legal boilerplate tucked into the intake packet. It looks like vendor contracts the clinician has actually read and can summarise for a curious patient in three sentences. It looks like genuine opt-out alternatives, including for the administrative AI, with no penalty for the patient who takes them. It looks like clinicians who can articulate what the AI is doing and, more importantly, what it is not doing. It looks like practices that do not quietly shift the productivity dividend of AI into more intense caseloads without acknowledging the trade-off. It looks like professional bodies that enforce their guidance, rather than publishing it and moving on. It looks like regulators, at the state and federal level, who treat psychotherapy as a high-risk domain and set the bar for deployment accordingly.

It also looks like a willingness, on the part of the profession, to resist the parts of this technology that do not serve the patient. Real-time therapeutic prompting, in which an AI listens to the session and suggests what the clinician should say next, is the category where the ethics strain hardest. There is a plausible account of it in which a supervisor-in-the-ear helps less experienced clinicians avoid mistakes and improves overall care. There is a much less flattering account in which a clinician becomes a kind of animatronic front-end for a model whose reasoning is opaque, whose training data is proprietary, and whose accuracy on this particular patient has never been validated. The Illinois statute's prohibition on AI-driven therapeutic communication without clinician review reflects a judgement that the risk outweighs the benefit at the present state of the art. Other jurisdictions will have to make the same call.

The research agenda, too, has to catch up. The Frontiers scoping review's conclusion that most clinical AI in mental health remains proof-of-concept is not an argument against the technology. It is an argument for external validation studies, for pre-registered trials comparing AI-augmented care to unaugmented care on the outcomes patients actually care about, for longitudinal work on therapeutic alliance in hybrid settings, and for harm-reporting infrastructure of the kind that exists for drugs and devices but does not yet exist for software that mediates clinical relationships.

The Patient Still in the Room

Return, finally, to the room. A client arrives for a fifty-minute hour. They sit on a couch that has accommodated many lives before theirs. They are about to tell a therapist something they have never told anyone, or something they have told many people but never in quite this way. The question the APA report in March, the Frontiers review in January, the Stanford chatbot study, and the TikTok audit in April all circle without quite naming is whether that room is still the same room it was before the machines moved in.

The answer, probably, is that it is not, but that it can still be a good room, provided the people responsible for it are honest about what has changed. The therapist who discloses the scribe and offers the alternative, who reads the vendor contract, who does not pretend to their client that the AI is neutral or invisible, is not being paranoid. They are doing the oldest job in their profession, which is the protection of the therapeutic relationship against whatever threatens it, including the tools the therapist themselves brought in.

The patient, for their part, has a right the culture has not quite caught up with: the right to ask, and to get a real answer. Not a legally defensible reassurance, but the answer a friend would give if they happened to know the technology. Whether the profession can make that kind of answer routine is probably the question that will decide, more than any regulation, whether AI makes therapy better, or simply makes it cheaper to deliver, and quieter in its cheapness.

References and Sources

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20. Bipartisan Policy Center. “Paying for AI in U.S. Health Care.” https://bipartisanpolicy.org/issue-brief/paying-for-ai-in-u-s-health-care/
21. Kelley Drye and Warren LLP. “AI Chatbots Face Rising Legal and Legislative Scrutiny.” https://www.kelleydrye.com/viewpoints/blogs/ad-law-access/ai-chatbots-face-rising-legal-and-legislative-scrutiny
22. Nixon Law Group. “How States Are Enforcing New AI Laws in Healthcare and Why It Matters.” https://www.nixonlawgroup.com/resources/how-states-are-enforcing-new-ai-laws-in-healthcareand-why-it-matters
23. NPR. “AI in the mental health care workforce is met with fear, pushback and enthusiasm.” 7 April 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/07/nx-s1-5771707/mental-health-care-workforce-artificial-intelligence-ai
24. Manatt Health. “Health AI Policy Tracker.” https://www.manatt.com/insights/newsletters/health-highlights/manatt-health-health-ai-policy-tracker
25. Governing AI in Mental Health: 50-State Legislative Review. 2025. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12578431/

---

Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * I'm happy to say that a full afternoon of watching PGA Championship Golf has been as relaxing as I'd hoped.

Between now and an early bedtime I intend to work on the night prayers with a background of relaxing music playing. Hopefully this will lead to a deep and restful sleep. At least, that's the plan.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 234.90 lbs. * bp= 148/89 (66)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 07:50 – 1 banana * 08:45 – 1 seafood salad sandwich * 12:30 – fried salmon, egg plant, bitter melon, steamed rice, boiled egg, diced tomatoes

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 07:30 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 07:55 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, * 08:20 – stock newly deliveed groceries * 11:45 – tuned into a preview show for this afternoon's golf coverage * 12:00 – Now following CBS coverage of PGA Championship Golf: third-round play in the 108th PGA Championship from the Aronimink Golf Course in Newton Square, Pa. The broadcast will air in my area from Noon to 6:00 PM. * 12:30 – eat large lunch (early dinner!) at home with Sylvia.

Chess: * 18:25 – moved in all pending CC games

A story from a few months ago. Everything happened so fast. Thirty seconds, maybe less. But I can’t stop thinking about it.

I was walking in a city. Was it Tirana? Or maybe Skopje, or Belgrade. Doesn’t matter. About to cross a busy street, waiting at the traffic lights. And then I see a man walking on the road along the traffic, who drew my attention immediately.

The man looked strange. Fairly old, grey hair, quite thin. He was wearing an old costume, too big for him, but well looked after. It didn’t exactly go along with the slippers he was wearing. Medium length hair, a bit messy but seems clean. He was walking with a hand stretched forward with a hat. Not really pointing it towards anyone, kind of ignoring the passing by cars. More like begging the universe I suppose.

What was most striking in this man — he was singing. To be honest, it is quite a stretch to call it singing, it was honestly bad. Not that I can judge, my singing makes crows ashamed. But this man didn’t really care. He was just walking forward with determination on his face, kind of detachment, and singing something sounding like a folk song in his language. That is how I would imagine people sing when walking to execution — as a rebellion against the world they know will not listen, but sing anyway.

What struck me most is the reaction of the people around. There was none. As if this man doesn’t exist at all. Cars passing by, people waiting at the traffic lights. I looked at a few folks around — staring in their phones, or just looking away, pretending they are not here.

I felt really sad for this guy. It looked like he stepped over his own dignity to go beg for money – and it was a big leap, not a small step.

The man is thirty meters away from the crossing. The green light shows, people start walking. And what do I do? I wish I could tell you a story of how I did something right, like talking to the person, offering help, or at least giving money. I was thinking about it of course, but then noticed I was just crossing the road with the crowd, walking away from this guy. I just went with the flow. I felt dirty. I was complicit. Ashamed of myself, I didn’t even look back.

What the hell happened to us? What happened to me?! Where was all my courage and rebel spirit I pride myself on?

When I was 6, I went to school. I was quite social and made lots of friends fast. But there was a guy with some clear developmental issues. He was talking in a weird way, stretching words. He really struggled with learning school material. Naturally, he became an outcast. Others were lightly bullying him, laughing at him.  It made me feel sad for him, and at some point I declared him my friend. Damn, it was so simple back then, you just said “now you are my friend”. I was spending most of my free time at school playing with him, protecting him from others, and getting into minor fights with boys trying to mess with him. After the first year, my family moved and I changed schools, never to hear from him again.

So... what the fuck happened to me?! How did I get from a little boy, instinctively knowing I must protect the weak and fighting for him – into walking past this old man?

I want to soothe myself saying it happened too fast for me to think it through and decide. That I was cheated by street scummers several times, seeing where it was going but still giving money, and then blaming myself later, when it became obvious I was fooled. It really hurts to understand my kindness was used against me. 

No matter the excuse, I did nothing. You did nothing. And the man keeps singing.

A few days ago, on a social media dating platform, I matched with this guy who put on his profile that he was “autistic and dumb”. My heart broke for him, and I was angry that he’d been allowed to internalize that kind of message about himself.

As a result, I proceeded to explain to him in so many words in the messaging area of that platform that being autistic doesn’t make him dumb or stupid. That it simply means that his way of being is significantly different from what is currently considered to be the mainstream “norm”. That autism is simultaneously a disability, but that it’s not bad to be disabled.

He asked me why I was telling him that, but unless he was doing so emotionally, I don’t know why, since he put it right there on his profile page! Okay, maybe he did mean it as a joke. But putting yourself down like that is not a good way to joke about yourself! At least not to me. It doesn’t make him very approachable, and it especially won’t make any women want to date him. Even if he did mean it as a joke, he’s obviously very insecure about himself.

A couple of years ago, I saw this older guy who lived a few doors down from me who would take his walks in the middle of the street wearing a t-shirt that said, “I’m autistic, therefore it’s okay to bully me”. The first time I saw that, I was enraged beyond description! I don’t even want to guess how or where he got it, and, again, I was heartbroken that he’d obviously internalized that kind of message about himself.

I’ve been misunderstood, dismissed as weird, standoffish, and sometimes even rude for my entire life. But that does not mean that I will go along with seeing myself as “dumb”, “stupid”, or as deserving of being bullied! One part of me already believes I/we are deserving of the latter, so I am also not about to further enable that.

Instead, I will use my acceptance of my autism to promote awareness/acceptance as well as self-awareness/acceptance and live more fully as myself.

Thank you very much for listening.    

 

Jagged Confusion about Emotions Early in My Life

*Name has been changed

Especially from when I was four until I was eight, both of my parents expected me to have an explanation for my every emotion. One would get angry and hit me when I didn’t, and the other significantly lacks empathy and doesn’t even understand it when people get highly emotional. And what little kid understands their emotions without being taught how to properly navigate them?

It wasn’t until these past few years when I started to finally believe that I’m autistic that I realized that part of the reason I couldn’t explain my sudden crying outbursts was that they were meltdowns. It wasn’t that I was doing it on purpose, the way my parents obviously thought that I was. Or that I wanted it to happen. It was that I couldn’t help it, and I didn’t understand what was happening to me or why.

No one else was there to provide me with any proper guidance, either. I also never had a meltdown when I was away at school or in public at that time that I can remember.

After the 1995 accident happened and my grandparents took over the meat of raising me, my maternal grandmother, to give her credit where it’s due, was the first to show me that emotions aren’t a bad thing. And was the first to point out that I tend to “bury my emotions too deep”, which she wasn’t wrong. But, still, and partly due to her own unhealed childhood trauma, my grandmother’s idea of being emotionally expressive was being a constant basket case, which annoyed the crap out of me and everyone else in my family!

But, still, there were times (never at a funeral, thank God!) when I couldn’t help but burst out laughing, not completely aware that everyone else around me couldn’t hear my thoughts. If anyone asked me what was so funny, I would immediately clam up, feeling as if I’d done something heinously wrong.

I know that some of my sense of humor is rather childish. To this day, I’ve never met anyone else who ever sang “Old McDonald had a toilet” or came up a joke like, “What do call scrubbing the floor with your butt? Useless!” that I know of. I also didn’t want to embarrass anyone with it.  My former “friend”, *Caitlyn, at some point, told me that I “laughed for no reason” and that was when I’d say, “what happened to just being happy?” But my laughter has, unfortunately, become less frequent with time and age.

Discovering my Alexithymia and The Beginning of Its Deconstruction

**To clear any confusion, no, I do not have any reason to believe that I have DID, as I do not dissociate into alter personalities. I’ve simply been doing inner child work since around 2021, building on the foundation of the “Depression Queen”, whom I first “met” at the start of my college days.**

Alexithymia wasn’t in my vocabulary until about my early or mid-30’s. As soon as it was, I knew almost immediately that it made so much sense for me. Especially the times when I was aware that I was feeling something, but couldn’t describe it. And that I’m often aware of my emotions only when they reach their almost- or maximum height.  

However, I didn’t realize just how much alexithymia I have until very recently, when I started an essay just a few days ago about my hatchet burial trip to Fairfield Bay, Arkansas, in 2024. It’s only been then that I’ve finally recognized that my pain doesn’t always show up as the stabbing sensation, but sometimes as a profound feeling of disconnection.

Lately, the more I’ve tried to navigate myself, the more disconnected I’ve felt. It’s only now that I’ve recognized it as a thick shield that I had no choice but to build in childhood for my survival. Into a month from my 40th birthday, I can say that I have never experienced a greater frustration than feeling blocked from myself.

However, one piece of success that I’ve had is finally being able to magnify what you would call my “inner child” (IC), or the emotional part of myself that’s heavily damaged and makes up a good majority, but not 100% of, my obsessive compulsive thoughts. I’ve been trying to convince IC to stop listening to and believing what “Depression Queen” says, and the horrific images-such as those of me being a victim of violent crimes- that Depression Queen often likes to dump.

But, so far, unfortunately, I haven’t had much success. IC just keeps putting up the old wall screaming that I/we don’t deserve to be loved, that we do deserve to be abused, pillaged, etc., ETC! I have found it somewhat helpful to approach IC with the “okay, let’s say for argument’s sake that’s true” angle. So, as much as IC is very glad to finally be seen, unfortunately, Depression Queen still has IC right where she wants IC-still in her clutches. I’ve tried to get IC to spend more time with my “inner parent” who is called Anamalie 2.0 (pronounced like a combination of Anna and Molly) or my wise, discerning self, and other safe “selves”. But no matter how hard I’ve tried, IC just keeps going right back to Depression Queen.

Considering that I’ve been almost nothing but disappointed in love in all forms, IC is very afraid to try to love again. IC has absolutely no trust in humanity, and for that matter, neither does Depression Queen. The difference is that Depression Queen doesn’t necessarily believe in undeservingness of love as much as she wants IC to believe that in order for her to stay halfway alive.

Where this new deconstruction of alexithymia is going to go from here, I don’t know. But one thing I do know is that this work is necessary. If I am going to do the healing work that I know I need to do to have the chance to live the life that I know I’m meant for. I need to be reborn, and I cannot let anything stop that from happening anymore.

 

Thinking clearly is an illusion.

I have never been afraid of being alone. By myself. In fact, there is a real power in spending time in the absence of others.

The quiet. The thinking.

Time stops when there is no expectation or planned event waiting ahead. Being solo is akin to a social isolation tank: freeing and awakening in certain ways.

So when I say lonely, I do not mean it in the general sense of: “I wish I had people around me. Any people.”

I mean that I miss one person in particular.

A person whose thoughts and words are more than eager banter and coy smiles shared so freely.

A person who helps shift me from lost to centered. When my attention slips, she helps me turn my gaze forward again, reminding me that we are both marching toward some grand goal.

Something distant...

though we cannot measure how far, we somehow sense the destination is close.

Just around the bend.

Surely, this time, we land.

Her absence feels like a cruelty. A loss. Loneliness in the sense of incomplete.

And so I, a starving man, crawl and scrimp at the edge of the table of her presence, fixating on every crumb that slips unnoticed to the floor.

We are describing two souls that seem impossibly calibrated for one another.

A special case.

For weeks I have spoken of ghosts, doorways, weather, breathing, God.

But desire is sometimes much simpler than language.

If she were here, I would pull her against me until all this lonely holiness finally broke apart into sound.

---

#poetry #wyst

Recently, while in a discussion, I was reminded of a book that I read. The book that helped me understand a lot about the world. Most importantly it helped me move on in life, from things that I was holding onto for emotional reason rather than practical ones.

One quote from the book, that, everytime I read takes me back to the days when I was sitting on the hostel roof, slight rain looking over the horizon and seeing the cars going over the expressway.

• दुःख सबको माँजता है और— चाहे स्वयं सबको मुक्ति देना वह न जाने, किंतु जिनको माँजता है उन्हें यह सीख देता है कि सबको मुक्त रखें।*

• Sorrow refines everyone, and—though it may not know how to grant liberation to all itself—it teaches those whom it refines to set everyone free.*

Agyeya has a way about him that I haven't been able to find in any of the writers I have read. Only “The Idiot” from Dostoevsky probably comes close.

I remember when I read this book for the first time, almost every line would make me sit and think about it. It took ages to finish the book because of that.

Once done, I knew I had to gift this book to a friend of mine. I generally don't think about other people's in that sense. I think I am not equipped for that kind of social life.

Anyway while discussing the book, I referred to book as a lesson on how not every store in your life needs to have an end. Sometimes the incompleteness of the story itself is a completeness. You take the jacket off once it's not cold. it doesn't make sense to keep on holding to it because it helped you during cold.

And then the organiser gave a simile for the book for a movie called: Hamari adhoori Kahani. I thought at the moment and what!! the movie that I found cringe is so close to my favorite book!

what a life!!!

I had a nightmare last night

I dreamt there where these ”regular”board games, a type of which people who aren’t interested in board games play

And I got a phone call from what looked like Nick Cave but with the bald man wig, resembling that inventor’s from back to the future: a bald head with white hair on the sides, but as a wig.

And his eyes were lunatic’s eyes.

Yellow eyes

And he wasn’t up to no good

I don’t remember what he said to me over the phone but something deeply unsettling

I remembered the details more vividly as it woke me, but I feared it would bridge the gap between dream and waking world were I to write it down then,

And I was too scared to go back to sleep because I didn’t want the dream to continue

So I went to the bathroom

And finally I slept. If I dreamt, I have no memories of that.

As I can barely recollect this frightful dream just described,

Strange

#blog #nsfw

Note: just know this is not a fully proof-read professional article. These are just my raw thoughts as I blog about my experience with porn and linux

So if you don't already know, Microsoft has just become a cluster when it comes to the user experience. 'Recall' was a big one. Copilot infecting every corner like Clippy on cocaine, their 'accidental' temporary ban of Wireguard development, and who knows other countless little nit-picks that are becoming anti-consumer. And let's not talk about 'privacy and telemetry.' I own a smart phone, so I'm not going down that rabbit hole. I'm just going to focus on how my porn centered lifestyle has leveled up switching to Linux.

This is not my first time going into Linux as my primary PC, but this year was when I decided to fully commit to figure out my porn addicted workflow.

You see, (and you already know this), but I'm a deep lifestyle pornosexual gooner. I download, collect, multi-monitor setup, stream, play videos constantly write about it, talk to friends about it.. it's a very real obsession that is barely contained. often only stopping when my home needs something important or my job needs me. But everything else, is basically porn.

The hardest part I had to solve for was how the hell do I play videos bordeless, frameless, and looping forever from my local collection. My life changed when I figured out how to do this with Pot Player on Windows. The settings were all continued inside the app. And then I encountered my first hurdle with Linux.

Basic Assumptions about this post.

This will not be a step by step guide. I will use terms new-commers will not understand. (sorry, not sorry). But basic assumptions include you know how to make bootable iso files, and you know how to start windows “from scratch” and understand basic troubleshooting techniques.

I'm writing this form the point of view of PC-centric gooning experience. This means my primary gooning activity occurs at a desk with a tower pc. No mac, no laptop, no phones, or portable devices.

I'm also writing this based on someone that values local porn over streaming everything. In my opinion real lifestyle gooners prioritize collecting and fully owning their porn, not relying on internet always being uncensored to reach your favorite fix. (keep an eye out on all the US internet laws.. for example)

I am not going to discuss distros and different flavors in Linux. However, I am biased to running Debian based setups over Arch. My Linux skills have not gotten to the point of building up what I want from bare Debian. Currently, I run Mint and Ubuntu server for context though.

With that out of the way, lets talk about gooning on Linux.

Know things can be done. Just not the way you expect

A lot of new users coming into Linux from windows will miss certain things or just certain items and situations that you are just used to after years of being in their ecosystem. I won't get into all of the specifics, but a combination of window border mods/toggles, and few minor tweaks to VLC player got the results I wanted. That first major step was accomplished.

Investment in Time

I consider myself and intermediate Linux user. I have been running command line Ubuntu Server for years to manage my porn backup stack, and a few other things i won't mention for privacy. So understanding the command line and some basic visual workflow without a GUI is almost essential to really start maximizing your experience.

Over the years, (mind you, I am almost 40 at this point and I have spent decades deep in computers) I had already started dabbling in scripts and automation with my computers for various porn related tasks. Recently, thanks to coding with ai, I can make custom processes that always update my porn playlists. I can just drop new porn in a folder, wait for it to sync and next time I start my video player, new porn is in my playlist. Now I don't have to manually manage my playlists. Drag and drop can get tedious if you had a very productive day of gooning and collecting.

Linux won't replace everything.

Don't be ashamed to admit defeat. Linux has a super small market share overall. There will be some tools that are windows specific that will not run well on Wine (or Proton) or whatever translation layers there are out there. My goal is to get my windows use down to a bare minimum. I don't see anything wrong with having a windows 'utility' computer i fire up for short tasks or apps. My video editing program is a prime example of “need to have it.”

Curiosity

This is why I say porn doesn't make you dumb. I have explored and tried new technical concepts to maximize my setup and gooning experience. After all of these years I have started exploring computers more than I have in a long time.

My mindset has gone from “This is just how windows is,” to “Maybe i can change or fix or make this better,” thanks to the wide open perceived freedom you can achieve with Linux.

This is never going to “replace windows.” Not everything will “just work.” There may be something you break along the way. But this is the best day and age to find all the answers you need (not just Linux and Gooning). It's up to you to maximize your life experiences and expand what matters most to you.

The Lions of Al-Rassan est un roman de Guy Gavriel Kay publié en 1995, parfois considéré comme le chef d’œuvre de l’écrivain canadien et l’un des meilleurs romans de fantasy historique.

Hauntingly evocative of medieval Spain, a deeply compelling story of love, adventure, divided loyalties, and what happens when beliefs begin to remake – or destroy – a world.

The ruling Asharites of Al-Rassan have come from the desert sands, but over centuries, seduced by the sensuous pleasures of their new land, their stern piety has eroded. The Asharite empire has splintered into decadent city-states led by warring petty kings. King Almalik of Cartada is on the ascendancy, aided always by his friend and advisor, the notorious Ammar ibn Khairan – poet, diplomat, soldier – until a summer afternoon of savage brutality changes their relationship forever.

Meanwhile, in the north, the conquered Jaddites' most celebrated – and feared – military leader, Rodrigo Belmonte, driven into exile, leads his mercenary company south.

In the dangerous lands of Al-Rassan, these two men from different worlds meet and serve – for a time – the same master. Tangled in their interwoven fate – and divided by her feelings – is Jehane, the accomplished court physician, whose skills may not be enough to heal the coming pain as Al-Rassan is swept to the brink of holy war, and beyond.

Al-Rassan qui donne son titre au roman, c’est évidemment un miroir d’Al-Andalus, le nom que les historiens donnent à la péninsule ibérique sous domination musulmane à l’époque médiévale. Le récit se situe à une époque similaire à celle suivant la chute du califat de Cordoue et sa désintégration en plusieurs royaumes rivaux. C’est une période d’incertitude et de déclin faisant suite à ce qui peut être vu comme un âge d’or.

Compte-tenu de ce décor, on se sera pas surpris que le roman soit porté par une ambiance nostalgique, empreinte de mélancolie. On a le sentiment que c’est la fin d’une époque, qu’un chapitre glorieux se ferme et que le prochain sera sanglant, tragique. C’est la fin d’un monde, la lente agonie d’une civilisation qui a illuminé par sa culture, son art, son architecture et qui a vécu en quelque sorte entre deux mondes, si ce n’est trois.

Peut-être entre trois mondes car dans l’univers imaginé par Guy Gavriel Kay, trois religions se partagent les âmes des habitants de cette région. Ces trois religions reflètent les trois principaux cultes monothéistes de notre monde : pour l’Islam, les Asharites, qui vénèrent les étoiles ; pour le Christianisme, les Jaddites, qui vénèrent le soleil ; pour le Judaïsme, les Kindath, qui vénèrent les deux lunes. La religion occupe une place importante dans l’univers de ce roman. Même si tous les personnages ne sont pas des croyants, ils appartiennent tous à une culture liée à l’une des religions.

Puisque l’on parle des personnages, c’est l’occasion pour moi de signaler qu’ils sont incroyablement bien écrits. Je garderai longtemps le souvenir de Jehane, Rodrigo, Alvar, et évidemment Ammar, mais aussi de certains personnages secondaires remarquables. Tous à leur façon nous parlent de loyauté, d’allégeances parfois contradictoires, et des choix qui en découlent. Doit-on être fidèle à un monarque, à un royaume, à sa famille, à ses amis, à sa foi, à des valeurs ?

Tout au long du roman, Guy Gavriel Kay place et déplace ses personnages comme des pièces sur un jeu d’échecs. On sait que la confrontation finale est inévitable, que son issue sera forcément tragique, mais l’auteur parvient tout de même à nous surprendre. J’ai lu les derniers chapitres et l’épilogue en retenant ma respiration, presque en apnée, tellement j’étais époustouflé et ému par ce que je lisais.

En quelques semaines et après avoir lu quelques uns de ses romans, Guy Gavriel Kay est déjà devenu l’un de mes auteurs de fantasy préférés. Il était temps que je plonge dans ses œuvres, et je vais poursuivre cette découverte dans les semaines qui viennent.

Exiled Iran crown prince Reza Pahlavi interviewed for a live podcast at the Politico Security Summit in Washington, D.C. 12 May 2026.

New photos from the Politico Security Summit this week are now available exclusively from the Technewslit portfolio at the Alamy photo agency. At the event, Politico journalists interviewed current members of the U.S. House and Senate from both parties overseeing national security matters, as well as former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.

Also, several technology leaders at the U.S. Defense Department answered questions about new drones and artificial intelligence projects. And German parliament member Roderich Kiesewetter advocated for increased support for NATO and Ukraine’s continuing battle against Russia.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) at the Politico Security Summit in Washington, D.C. 12 May 2026.

Lockheed Martin sponsored the event. At a few points in the program, protestors against Lockheed Martin and American policy in the Middle East broke out from the audience, with security literally dragging out the protestors kicking and screaming. More photos from the summit, including the protestors, are in a gallery at the TechNewsLit Smugmug collection.

Copyright © Technology News and Literature. All rights reserved.

This afternoon I'll be following CBS coverage of PGA Championship Golf: third-round play in the 108th PGA Championship from the Aronimink Golf Course in Newton Square, Pa. The broadcast will air in my area from Noon to 6:00 PM.

For those keeping score, I never did get to the yard work yesterday as I'd earlier intended. The thought was in my mind when I woke, but when I started moving around the house I realized I had no business stumbling around the front yard pushing the lawn mower. Maybe tomorrow.

And the adventure continues.

The census occurs in Canada every five years no matter who is in the government at census time, or what they have been up to. So weird to see stories of people using it as a way to protest. I thought that participating was common sense. I suppose each time it comes around there are likely a handful of people who find a way to get mad about it. Those same people likely have a computer, a cell phone, a watch, a television, and a car that are all collecting data about them 24/7. A lot more data than is on the census form. They are cool with the oligarchy compiling data about us for malicious purposes, but are not cool with the government collecting data about us for useful purposes.

I also used to think that common sense applied to vaccines. Turns out though that we live in a country where a lot of people believed what a bunch of truck drivers had to say about vaccines, over following the advice of people who dedicate their entire lives to science and medicine. Now measles has made a comeback. Should be interesting to see if their opinion about vaccines changes back when things like rubella or polio start to make a comeback like measles has. Measles can escalate for some people and kill them, but I think that most people fully recover. Rubella and polio are diseases that last a lifetime. They are highly contagious, and are preventable with vaccines that people are now refusing in the same way that they are refusing to do the census. Probably the same people. I guess the big difference would be that if they refuse the census they will have angrier letters arriving in their mailbox until eventually someone in a uniform will knock on their door. If they keep refusing at that point they will get fined $500. Refusing vaccines will cause a lifetime of illness and suffering for their babies.

Around the corner from the John Paul II mural on the same convent wall – discussed in an earlier post – someone has pasted a different kind of holy figure: naked, sitting on a low ledge, headphones on, eyes on her phone, a Lidl bag of May asparagus beside her.

It is not painted into the wall. It is a paste-up – paper cut to shape, glued onto the plaster, removable in minutes. The artist is Krzysztof Zbik Rubach, known locally as Vanzbik, a Wroclaw muralist whose work consists almost entirely of female nudes in public space. He has been doing this for years. Some of his pieces survive on tolerated walls; others, on more exposed spots like the bridge near Szczytnicki Park, have been destroyed without explanation. This one, for now, is intact.

The wall belongs to the Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, the nuns who agreed in 2022 to let football fans paint a five-by-twenty-five-meter John Paul II onto their building. That mural faces the entrance to Ostrow Tumski, Wroclaw's cathedral island; pilgrims and tourists pass it on the way to the dom. The Lidl Madonna faces the other direction – Wyszynskiego street, a tram and bus stop, the daily flow of commuters waiting in May 2026 weather. Same wall, two different audiences, two different rules about what counts as a picture.

The first thing the Lidl Madonna does is recognizable from any catalogue of Marian iconography. The seated posture, slightly turned, head lowered toward something held in both hands – this is the Madonna of Humility, the Madonna with Child, the Mater Dolorosa contemplating what she cannot let go of. Every traditional attribute has a substitute in the picture: a halo becomes over-ear headphones, the mantle becomes bare skin, the lilies and pomegranates of Marian symbolism become leeks, asparagus, and chard in a discount-store bag, the gold ground becomes a graffitied convent wall. There is no Christ child; there is a phone. The image does not announce any of this. It just builds a Madonna out of present-tense materials and lets you decide whether to see it.

But the iconographic operation is the method, not the message. What the picture actually says, it says along two lines: about the body it shows, and about the kind of attention the figure is paying to her phone.

The body first. This is a lived-in body. Mid-thirties, maybe early forties. Soft belly with the fold a normal torso makes when seated. Asymmetrical breasts of average size. Visible knuckles, real veins. Faint nasolabial lines, lips at their natural volume. Cropped hair under the headphones. Two tattoos – geometric across the shoulder, figurative on the ankle. No filtered glow, no flat midsection, no plumped cheekbones, no hyper-feminized posture. She is not arranged for the viewer. She is not even looking at the viewer. She is in herself, with her things, on her way home.

In 2026, that is a position. The visible female body in mainstream image production – advertising, platforms, fashion, increasingly daily life in big European cities – has been quietly rebuilt over the past five years. GLP-1 weight-loss drugs in the Ozempic family have moved from diabetes medicine to mass thinness therapy; lip filler, cheek volume, jaw contouring, the so-called Instagram face have settled into normal adult life; cosmetic surgery is a routine procurement decision in many milieus, with Poland both a destination for Western medical tourism and a growing domestic market. The threshold for an acceptable female body has shifted, and the shift is pharmacological and surgical, not aspirational. Not having done any of it is now a marked position. A body that has not been optimized has become a thing you have to choose to show.

Zbik shows it. The Madonna form gives that choice its weight. Traditional Madonnas are idealized: young, smooth, symmetrical, often barely anatomical – they were the long original of the optimized female body, centuries before Botox. The Lidl Madonna borrows their seated dignity and fills it with the opposite of their idealization. The sacred frame remains; the body inside the frame is unedited. It is a quiet refusal of the optimization economy, made without polemic, made by showing what an unaltered body looks like when you give it the same compositional respect you would give a saint.

Now the second line: what she is doing with her phone. She is in the pose of devotion. Head down, hands cupped around an object held in front of her body, the world tuned out by the headphones. This is what Marian contemplation looks like. The form has survived what used to fill it. What it now contains is not Christ but the open application on a screen – message, image, feed, song. The picture does not tell you whether that is tragic or natural. It just shows you that the form of devout absorption is still working, with a new center of gravity.

A hundred years ago Walter Benjamin wrote a short fragment arguing that capitalism is itself a religion – not because it replaces religion but because it is structured as cult: permanent, without a day off, producing debt and not redemption, with no outside. He never finished the argument. The Lidl Madonna lets you see what he might have meant. Devotion did not disappear when belief did. It found a new object that fits the old hand position perfectly. The phone is the right size, the right weight, the right shape to be held the way a child was held.

That is also why the Lidl bag matters specifically. Not Biedronka – the Polish discount chain locals nickname Biedra, from biedota, a word for the destitute, which gives the brand an undertone of being where you shop when you cannot do better. Not Epi, the Wroclaw premium grocer where the city's professional class buys imported salmon and small-batch wine. Lidl – the middle, German efficiency, weekly fresh aisle, ordinary May. The choice rules out two readings the picture refuses: it is not a lament about poverty, and it is not satire of aspiration. It is the regular consuming life of regular consumers, depicted with the same care a Renaissance painter would give to a Virgin with lilies.

Around the corner the John Paul II mural is doing different work. It is painted into the wall, not pasted on. It is twenty-five meters long, crowdfunded by the football ultras, signed collectively (kibice wroclawskiego Slaska), addressed to a collective (Poles, Catholics, the faithful, the patriots). It exists to say what we are. It fought a three-and-a-half-year battle with the city's heritage authority and won. The Lidl Madonna is not arguing with it. The two pictures are not in a debate. They live on the same wall because the wall has two sides and the two sides have different rules. The pilgrim side gets a question about identity; the tram-stop side gets a question about how a person lives now.

That second question is the one the Lidl Madonna actually asks. Not what we believe, not whom we belong to, not what we are willing to defend – but what we do with our bodies under pharmaceutical pressure, and what we do with our attention under platform pressure, and whether the old forms of holding something in your hands and looking down at it for a long time still work when the something is a phone and the body is unedited.

The picture is paste-up. It can be torn off any morning. Other Zbik works at less protected spots already have been. The convent wall, the nuns' tolerance, the heavy foot traffic of a tram stop – these are the accidents of survival that let this image exist at all. The argument the picture makes can only be made in a form light enough to be removable. That is not the picture's weakness. It is its condition.

You can walk past it on the way to the cathedral and never see it. You can wait for your tram and stare at it for ten minutes without registering what it is doing. Either is fine. The Madonna is patient. She is looking at her phone.