sz-da has added a photo to the pool:

De weggelopen Lamia hoopt in 1991 de klok stil te zetten door een taart te bakken voor de Iraakse dictator. ‘The President’s Cake’ blikt met enige nostalgie terug op een verloren land.

A senior diplomat warned that the U.S. and its allies seek to take control of the region’s strategic resources and transportation corridors.

Aphantasia (the inability to visualize) is one of those things that I find endlessly fascinating; I’ve written about it a few times since 2016, most recently in response to Larissa MacFarquhar’s 2025 piece for the New Yorker: Some People Can’t See Mental Images. The Consequences Are Profound.

Many of his correspondents, he learned, had discovered their condition very recently, after reading about it or hearing it described on the radio. Their whole lives, they had heard people talk about picturing, and imagining, and counting sheep, and visualizing beaches, and seeing in the mind’s eye, and assumed that all those idioms were only metaphors or colorful hyperbole. It was amazing how profoundly people could misunderstand one another, and assume that others didn’t mean what they were saying—how minds could wrest sense out of things that made no sense.

Some said that they had a tantalizing feeling that images were somewhere in their minds, only just out of reach, like a word on the tip of their tongue. This sounded right to Zeman—the images must be stored in some way, since aphantasics were able to recognize things. In fact, it seemed that most aphantasics weren’t hampered in their everyday functioning. They had good memories for facts and tasks. But many of them said that they remembered very little about their own lives.

Psychoanalyst Jamieson Webster read the piece and realized she was aphantasic. Webster recently interviewed MacFarquhar for Cultured: What Not Having Mental Imagery Implies for Psychoanalysis, Trauma, and Our Sense of Self, which I read with a lot of head-nodding. Like:

I didn’t have a lot of memories, which I always sort of chalked up to trauma, but I got memories back over the course of analysis. I realized while reading your piece that my memories were always spatial. I would remember a space or placements of things. I was always reconstructing a landscape, but without it really being imagistic.

And this is exactly how college was for me:

When I realized I had aphantasia, I reflected on how I always thought I had a photographic memory. For example, when I took tests, I would make notes, and I could see what I wrote on the page because I knew where I had written it. But it’s not a photograph; it’s a spatial memory.

As I said last year:

The more I read about this, the more I think that for those at either end of the phantasic scale, their inability (or extreme ability) to see things in their minds is a major component of what we think of as personality. Even just thinking about myself, there are all sorts of behaviors and traits I can connect to not being able to visualize things in my head that clearly. In some ways, it might be one of the most me things about me.

(via @timoni)

Tags: aphantasia · Jamieson Webster · Larissa MacFarquhar · memory · psychology · science

Riding the coattails—or perhaps it would be more apt to say the gown trails—of the monumental retrospective exhibition in 2023 in Paris at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, the Brooklyn Museum is about to open the striking new edition of Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses. Building upon the previous presentation’s emphasis on the way fashion meets art, this show also includes recent collections like Sympoeisis, reaffirming Iris van Herpen’s one-of-a-kind approach to sustainable, sculptural couture.

Van Herpen is known for her elaborate dresses that incorporate high-tech processes and materials, such as laser-cutting and Plexiglas, while also embracing the rhythms and patterns of biological and celestial realms. At this year’s Met Gala, for example, Olympic skier Eileen Gu arrived in a dress titled “Airu,” which was not only coated in plastic bubbles but also emitted real ones. In the “Living Algae” look from her 2025 Sympoeisis collection, van Herpen even incorporates real Pyrocystis lunula, a type of algae that forms a crescent shape and glows in the dark.

“Fascinated by the complexity of nature and the power of science, van Herpen transforms scientific concepts into visionary fashion,” says a statement. “Drawing from wide-ranging fields spanning mathematics, neuroscience, marine biology, paleontology, mycology, mineralogy, astronomy, and more, her haute couture designs seamlessly merge art, science, and technology—evoking the often unseen structures of nature, from coral reefs and branching systems of fungi to the vast patterns of planetary motion.”

Sculpting the Senses features more than 140 haute couture designs, plus the works of numerous artists like Kenny Nguyen, Wim Delvoye, Agostino Arrivabene, 目[Mé], Katsumata Chieko, Tara Donovan, and many others—several of whom have pieces in the Brooklyn Museum’s own collection. The experience is also complemented by a multi-sensory soundscape created by Dutch composer and music producer Salvador Breed.

The show opens on May 16 and continues through December 6 in Brooklyn. See more on van Herpen’s Instagram and YouTube.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Bubbles, Algae, and Plastics Go Haute Couture in ‘Iris van Herpen: Sculpting the Senses’ appeared first on Colossal.

A US commercial bank just tattled on itself to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) for plugging a bunch of customer data into an unauthorized AI application. Community Bank, which operates in southwestern Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, filed an 8-K with the regulator on Monday, saying it launched an investigation into the internal cockup, which remains ongoing. It felt compelled to submit the filing "due to the volume and sensitive nature of the non-public information." This included customer names, dates of birth, and Social Security numbers, but the filing provided no further detail about the incident. Community Bank did not specify what this "unauthorized AI-based software application" was or how it was used. However, the disclosure of data such as SSNs, which in the US are generally categorized among the most sensitive types of data that organizations can store on behalf of customers, is protected under several federal and state laws. One possibility is that the data was entered into a generative AI tool outside the bank's approved systems. If so, that could raise questions about whether the information was transmitted to a third-party provider and how it may have been retained or processed. The Register asked Community Bank for more details and will update this story if it responds. The bank confirmed that it suffered no operational impact and customers were not prevented from accessing their accounts or payment services as a result. "The company is evaluating the customer data that was affected and is conducting notifications as required by applicable federal and state laws and regulatory guidance," Community Bank stated in its cybersecurity disclosure. "The company has been, and continues to be, in communication with relevant banking and financial regulators regarding the incident." It also promised to continue its remediation efforts, take action to prevent future failures, and gave the "we're committed to protecting customers' data" line that always goes down so well. ®

Moby