[Gavin] Francis consistently challenges the labelling effect of standard diagnostic manuals, and the danger of “diagnostic creep”. “If we were able to hold the labels more lightly, aware of the human tendencies they oversimplify, would we be able to create a society more accepting of difference? Might it be less stigmatising, but also more hopeful, and more open to recovery?”

Religion appears from time to time. People who attend religious services evidently have a 20 per cent lower rate of depression than others. There is something priestly in the role of psychiatrist, “in that it concerns questions of doubt, faith and love”. More fundamentally, the author conveys a marvellous sense of wonder at the miracle and mystery of the human body and mind: “Wonder fosters humility, compassion and reverence for life — the cornerstones of all the major world religions, and fundamental qualities for the effective practice of medicine.”

Those involved in pastoral care can learn much from Francis’s account of his practice, and not least his insistence on the central place of kindness and compassion.

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"Those involved in pastoral care can learn much from Francis’s account of his practice, and not least his insistence on the central place of kindness and compassion"

📚 Philip Welsh welcomes a GP’s reflections on mental-health issues#books https://t.co/LHAmMaRnUM

— Church Times (@ChurchTimes) July 7, 2026

Someday real soon, most of us — starting with young adults — will carry an always-on AI. This agent will help us navigate our journeys, answer our questions, tutor and teach us new skills, remember people we have met before, remind us of what we once knew before, offer advice and recommendations, do simple errands, and remember everything we say and do. Before long, it will know us better than we know ourselves. It will be our exoself.

While we will use more than one agent, we’ll primarily favor just one that knows us best. Always-on means this agent is listening, watching, tracking, present during all our waking hours, and maybe even while we sleep. We will allow this intimate access to our inner life because it gives us superpowers: knowledge, judgment, decisiveness, confidence, and most important, speed. We will feel productive, creative, smart, capable, and on top of it when it is on. When it is off, we will feel amputated.

This entity is clearly not our self. But at the same time, this always-on AI will be so close to us, understanding us so well and so deeply — better than almost any human could — that it will not be an other, or an outsider either. It can model us too well to be an other. It will be an exoself: something in between our self and an other self. Neither us, but also not outside of us. A new category.

It won’t feel strange, because we don’t feel strange wearing eyeglasses all day, or hearing aids, or carrying a computer in our pockets. Machines like this have been moving closer to us since they were invented. Smart machines started out as room-sized apparatus, then moved nearer as appliances alongside a desk, then onto the desktop in front of us, then onto our laps, then into our pockets — and soon, they will sit on our skin, perhaps on our heads. We already see prototypes of smart glasses, where the exoself can perch, whispering into our ears and illuminating our eyes.

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I write about the controversial idea of an "exoself" as if it were inevitable: https://t.co/nds5pW2b0r

— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) July 7, 2026

As you read this sentence, circuits in your brain are adjusting your posture, controlling your breathing, and transforming lines and curves on the screen into recognizable words. Most of this processing is invisible to you. But some of what takes place in your brain you do have access to—an image that pops into your head, or a deliberate plan you make about where to go shopping. Neuroscientists and philosophers sometimes refer to the latter type of brain activity as “consciously accessible,” to distinguish it from all the other processing that goes on unconsciously. This activity has special properties: we can describe it, control it, and use it for deliberate reasoning, in contrast to all the automatic processing that goes on without our awareness.

In a new paper, we present evidence that a similar distinction has emerged in modern language models like Claude. We find that Claude has developed a small collection of internal neural patterns that, compared to all its other internal processing, play a special role.

We call the collection of these patterns the J-space—named after the technique we used to find them, involving a mathematical concept called the Jacobian. Each J-space pattern is linked to a particular word. But when one of these patterns lights up, it doesn’t mean the model is saying that word—just that the word is on its mind. If you’ve heard of language models having a “scratchpad” or “chain of thought”—text they write to themselves while reasoning—the J-space is something different. It operates silently, in the model’s internal neural activations, allowing the model to think about a concept without writing it down. Notably, the J-space wasn’t designed or programmed by us, but instead emerged on its own during Claude’s training process.

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Wow! Unexpected results from Anthropic's experiments in exposing the inner thoughts of Claude. They call its unconscious a J-space. The short video they made is good place to start. https://t.co/07cr8aJlxr

— Kevin Kelly (@kevin2kelly) July 8, 2026

The Ukraine war may be entering a dangerous new phase as an embattled Russia appears to be weighing whether to escalate the conflict with limited strikes or military incursions against European NATO countries such as the Baltic states or Poland — betting that the United States wouldn’t intervene.

“I’d say escalatory risk is real, and growing — mostly because [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is under growing pressure at home and losing on the battlefield,” said former CIA director William Burns in a message to me Monday. The United States has been sharing warnings about the growing danger with European allies for the past month, officials told me.

We’re watching a demonstration of how wars can leap the bounds of what strategists call “agreed battle” and become global catastrophes. With Russia caught in a meat grinder in eastern Ukraine, suffering more than 30,000 casualties a month to Kyiv’s drones, the danger is that Putin will try a breakout against the NATO alliance that he claims is his real adversary — at a moment when the United States is less engaged than at any time in the alliance’s history.

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Europe braces for a Russian provocationhttps://t.co/roGYB9LLbN

— Tarık Oğuzlu (@TarikOguzlu) July 7, 2026

God of grace and might, we praise thee for thy servants Priscilla and Aquila, whom thou didst plenteously endow with gifts of zeal and eloquence to make known the truth of the Gospel. Raise up, we pray thee, in every country, heralds and evangelists of thy kingdom, that the world may know the immeasurable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Today is the feast of Saints Aquila and Priscilla, early Christians who are mentioned in the New Testament. They lived, worked, and traveled with the Apostle Paul, who described them as his "fellow workers in Christ Jesus”. They are considered patrons of love and marriage. pic.twitter.com/5Y2z3Rq6iW

— Chess Valley RC (@ChessValleyRC) July 8, 2025

Almighty God,
send down upon your Church
the riches of your Spirit,
and kindle in all who minister the gospel
your countless gifts of grace;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

Good morning from the #WelshMarches. Already warm and the pasture looks baked and dry. A layer of mist in the distant valley. pic.twitter.com/ZbiWoNajQd

— Anne O'Brien (@anne_obrien) July 8, 2026

I am speaking the truth in Christ, I am not lying; my conscience bears me witness in the Holy Spirit, that I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brethren, my kinsmen by race. They are Israelites, and to them belong the sonship, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; to them belong the patriarchs, and of their race, according to the flesh, is the Christ. God who is over all be blessed for ever. Amen.

–Romans 9:1-5

Poppies at Little Bay Islands #photography pic.twitter.com/OgaYh0lJjo

— Mike Parsons (@mikep_lbi) July 8, 2026