New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jul 13, 2026 Biological Systems, Health and Healing Dean Radin, PhD, is chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Novato, California. He is author of The Conscious Universe, Entangled Minds, Supernormal, and Real Magic. Here he discusses a series of five research papers, published in conjunction with a group of colleagues, investigating “energy medicine” – a term he acknowledges is a misnomer, as it is neither energy nor medicine. 190 individuals with carpal tunnel pain were each treated by an energy healer during a half-hour laboratory session. Significant pain reduction was reported both immediately after the session and also three weeks later. Numerous other measurements were made to help better understand how this process works. Significant findings included quantum negentropic effects and alterations in the spectrographic analysis of water. Links to the actual research studies – https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…https://www.sciencedirect.com/science…https://www.sciencedirect.com/science… New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on December 16, 2020)
Researching Energy Medicine with Dean Radin
Carl Jung’s Red Book
Intueas In-Depth and Intueas Jul 9, 2026 True Self Discovery: https://intueas.tentary.com/p/tsd . . . Today’s in-depth episode uncovers the true significance of Jung’s Red Book as the hidden source of his entire psychological vision. It traces the period after Jung’s break with Freud, when visions, voices, symbolic figures, and inner dialogues led him into a sixteen-year confrontation with the unconscious. The episode reveals why the book was kept locked away for decades: not simply because it threatened Jung’s scientific reputation, but because it challenged the modern assumption that outer, measurable reality is primary while inner experience is secondary. Jung’s descent showed him the opposite—that the psyche shapes every experience of reality, that the unconscious is populated with autonomous forces, and that meaning can only be found through direct encounter with the depths. What emerges is a portrait of the Red Book not as a curiosity, but as a dangerous invitation: to open the locked room within yourself and face what has been shaping your life from beneath the surface. ???? New in-depth episodes daily. ???? Listen. Reflect. Subscribe. . . Sources & References: The Red Book — for Jung’s visionary descent, symbolic dialogues, illuminated manuscript, confrontation with the unconscious, and the raw material behind his later psychology. Memories, Dreams, Reflections — for Jung’s own account of his break with Freud, waking visions, inner crisis, Philemon, and the development of his later work. Symbols of Transformation — for the break with Freud, Jung’s expanded view of libido, and the shift toward meaning, myth, and symbolic psychic energy. The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious — for autonomous psychic figures, archetypes, the collective unconscious, and the deeper structures of symbolic experience. Psychology and Religion — for Jung’s view of the God-image, the religious function of the psyche, and the need for direct encounter rather than belief alone. The Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious — for the ego’s confrontation with unconscious contents, inner figures, individuation, and the movement toward the Self.
Helena Minginowicz Transforms Humble Paper Towel into Ethereal Paintings
July 13, 2026 (thisiscolossal.com)
“Civilizations are remembered through their monuments, but understood through the things they throw away,” says artist Helena Minginowicz, whose sensitive paintings interrogate our understanding of value. Using airbrushed acrylic, which can be built up in lightweight, translucent layers, the artist takes one of the most quotidian household items as a starting point: paper towel.
With its machine-embossed, moisture-wicking patterns, the absorbent paper comprises an instantly recognizable substrate. The precise, textured flourishes are aesthetically pleasing, and yet it’s hard to completely separate them from our associations with mass-produced paper products that are designed for one-time use and disposability. This dichotomy sits at he heart of Minginowicz’s practice, in which she explores “how changing the hierarchy of materials can reshape the way we perceive value, dignity, and the human experience,” she tells Colossal.
Minginowicz’s embossed pieces from everyday domestic material are one facet of a broader multimedia approach to materiality in which she creates paintings on canvas and also painstakingly embosses delicate tissues. The paper towel works, in addition to some that are made on supermarket-style plastic bags, are then presented between thick slabs of acrylic, transforming them into objects with substantial heft and dimensionality.
“Every civilization constructs its own hierarchy of values,” the artist says. “It decides what deserves to be preserved, admired, and passed on to future generations. Monuments, works of art, symbols, and myths preserve an image of humanity as we wish to remember it—strong, beautiful, enduring, and heroic. Yet every monument has its reverse.”
Minginowicz’ imagery draws on the style of Renaissance paintings, especially focusing on expressiveness, intimacy, and the idealized female figure. One might think of Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or aristocratic portraiture of the era. “For centuries, painting monumentalized what civilizations wished to remember: saints, heroes, gods, victories, myths, and ideals. I use that same language to ask a different question: Who deserves to be remembered with dignity? Not only heroes. Not only the victorious. But every human being.”
Minginowicz is currently working toward a solo exhibition at Galerie Prima in Paris, which is slated to open on October 8. Follow updates and see more on Instagram.
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
Word-built world: coprology
Artist’s Shit No. 014, 1961
Metal, paper, and artist’s shit. Art: Piero Manzoni / MoMA
A.Word.A.Daywith Anu Garg
coprology
PRONUNCIATION:
MEANING:
noun:
1. The scientific study of excrement.
2. Pornographic material.
3. Language, literature, or art dealing with excretory matters in a prurient or humorous manner.
ETYMOLOGY:From Greek kopro- (dung) + -logy (study). Earliest documented use: 1856.
Michel Foucault: Les hopitaux sont des endroits où l’on devient malade.
Foucault, c. 1970 (en.wikipedia.org)
- Google AI Overview
In English, this concept from Foucault is typically translated as: “The hospital… creates disease by means of the enclosed, pestilential domain that it constitutes.” [1]
This observation is found in his 1963 book, The Birth of the Clinic. Foucault argued that early hospitals—intended to protect and heal—actually spread and multiplied illness by enclosing sick people in concentrated environments. [1, 2]
Explore Foucault’s broader ideas on the history of medicine through this overview on Wikipedia or read a breakdown of the text on the University of North Carolina discussion page. [1]
The Medical Gaze (Le Regard Médical)
In The Birth of the Clinic, Michel Foucault introduces the “medical gaze.”
This concept describes a fundamental shift in how doctors look at patients. In the late 18th century, medicine stopped asking “What is the matter with you?” and started asking “Where does it hurt?”
- The Patient as a Case: The medical gaze separates a patient’s body from their personal identity.
- The Body as a Machine: Doctors began viewing patients as biological puzzles to be solved.
- The Power of Knowledge: This gaze gives doctors absolute authority, turning the patient into a passive object.
- The Spatialization of Disease: Illness was no longer seen as a abstract force, but as a localized problem hidden inside the flesh.
Carceral Institutions: Prisons and Asylums
Foucault saw the hospital as just one part of a larger network of institutions designed to control human bodies. He explored this in his other major works, including Madness and Civilization (1961) and Discipline and Punish (1975).
- The Asylum: Mental illness was historically integrated into society. Foucault argues that the modern asylum was created to isolate the “mad” from the sane, defining sanity by what it excludes.
- The Prison: Punishment shifted from public, physical torture to private, psychological discipline. The goal became “re-educating” the soul rather than breaking the body.
- The Panopticon: Foucault popularized this prison design where inmates might always be watched from a central tower. Because prisoners never know when they are being watched, they control their own behavior.
Biopolitics: The Ultimate Goal
Ultimately, Foucault argues that hospitals, prisons, and schools all serve biopolitics—the state’s management of populations through public health, hygiene, and social order. These institutions do not just punish or cure; they train individuals to become docile, productive citizens.
(Courtesy of Madame Renée Morel)
Mr Nobody Against Putin
Madman Films Nov 6, 2025 Pavel “Pasha” Talankin loves his job as a teacher in the small Russian town of Karabash – until his country invades Ukraine. He is outraged by the new government propaganda in the curriculum, not to mention the school’s being used as a military recruitment ground. In class, Pasha finds ways to playfully protest the regime; more crucially, he becomes a whistleblower, secretly filming the alarming shifts under the guise of his work as school videographer. He risks his life to send the footage overseas to filmmaker David Borenstein – while also planning his own escape. Winner of Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Special Jury Prize, this hugely daring and noble collaboration is one of the strongest docs of the year. Our Website: http://www.madmanfilms.com.au
Democracy Now! Mar 16, 2026 Latest Shows Support our work: https://democracynow.org/donate/sm-de… “Mr Nobody Against Putin” won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature on Sunday. Democracy Now! recently spoke with co-director David Borenstein and the subject of the film, the Russian teacher Pavel “Pasha” Talankin, who personally documented Russia’s use of wartime propaganda. “I need for as many people as possible to see what is happening inside of Russian schools,” says Talankin. “Putin is forcing propaganda into their schools, and [the children are] absorbing all of this.” Democracy Now! is an independent global news hour that airs on over 1,500 TV and radio stations Monday through Friday. Watch our livestream at democracynow.org Mondays to Fridays 8-9 a.m. ET. Subscribe to our Daily Email Digest: https://democracynow.org/subscribe
Convincing proof that Mitch lives!
How the China Outsources Surveillance
Beijing relies on digital surveillance to detect and stamp out budding opposition before it spills into the streets. But rather than conduct this massive undertaking itself, Lynette Ong explains in the new issue of the Journal of Democracy, the CCP hires “corporations to sniff out ‘sensitive’ words with detection software, to flood the internet with propaganda, and to deal with troublesome posts and posters.”
Read Ong’s essay along with other Journal coverage of digital surveillance in authoritarian regimes, free for a limited time, plus our entire July issue before it goes behind the paywall on July 30.
How the CCP Outsources Surveillance
Beijing knows digital surveillance of the world’s most populous nation is technologically demanding. So the Party has hired corporations to occupy the “public-opinion battlefield” and spot the trouble before it spreads.
By Lynette H. Ong
China’s AI-Powered Surveillance State
The Chinese Communist Party is dreaming an authoritarian techno-dream that is a democrat’s nightmare: ever more fine-grained state control made possible by using AI networks to pry and spy everywhere. But human unpredictability remains a force the party-state cannot tame.
By Valentin Weber
President Xi’s Surveillance State
Chinese authorities are wielding facial-recognition software, big-data analytics, and other digital technologies to control China’s citizens by monitoring and assessing their activities, both online and off.
By Xiao Qiang
The Journal of Democracy is published quarterly in January, April, July, and October. Subscribe now for full access to the Journal of Democracy archives.
The Art of Dignity Beyond Pride: How to Move Through Heartbreak Like Frida Kahlo
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her exquisite insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” The price we pay for the risk is the great equalizer of humanity. In heartbreak, everyone is shorn of dignity, everyone follows the same pattern of self-prostration: the willful blindness to the first signs of being left, so obvious to any impartial observer; the pitiful petitions for the return of love; the bargaining for a different ending; the desperate denial of the end, until the end. And yet it is there, in the pit of helplessness and humiliation, that we may discover the greater dignity that comes from shedding the shiny exoskeleton of pride — the dignity of opening the heart fully and offering it completely, even as it is being flayed by the cool blade of indifference, broken on the blunt edge of an unrequited passion for the possible. (Though, of course, a heart is never broken.)
It is this kind of dignity, the kind found beyond despair, that emanates from Frida Kahlo’s letters to the lover who took her most famous photograph — the Hungarian refugee Miklós Mandl, who became Nickolas Muray upon landing at Ellis Island in the final year of the First World War with an English vocabulary of four dozen words and the unassailable determination to be an artist. He would go on to become a pilot, a pioneer of color photography, and a fencing champion, photographing some of the twentieth century’s greatest luminaries and competing twice for the U.S. Olympic team.
Nick and Frida. (Catalina Island Museum)
She was in her early twenties when she met him while traveling through the United States with Diego in the first years of their tumultuous open marriage. Frida and Nick remained epistolary friends, but as he spent more and more time in Mexico throughout the 1930s, they became lovers.
Although the love letter was her first great art, Frida’s letters to Nick are the most playful and most passionate of all her letters, and also the tenderest. She signed them Xóchitl — “flower” in the indigenous Náhuatl language — and it was at the peak of their love that she began painting her electrically erotic Flower of Life.
Frida Kahlo: Flower of Life, 1938-1943
In a fierce and winking letter penned from Paris, where she had just been introduced to André Breton and his coterie (“you have no idea what kind of bitches these people are”) trying to get her paintings exhibited, she writes to Nick in the last winter of peace before the war, addressing him as “kid” despite his being twenty-five years her senior:
Listen kid, do you touch every day the fire ‘whatchamacallit’ which hangs on the corridor of our staircase? Don’t forget to do it every day. Don’t forget either to sleep on your tiny little cushion, because I love it. Don’t kiss anybody else while reading the signs and names on the streets. Don’t take anybody else for a ride to our Central Park. It belongs only to Nick and Xóchitl. Don’t kiss anybody on the couch of your office. Only Blanche Heys [Nick’s friend] can give you a massage on your neck. You can only kiss as much as you want, Mam. Don’t make love with anybody, if you can help it. Only if you find a real F.W. but don’t love her.
He did.
By the end of spring, Nick was engaged to the other woman. Frida had just returned to Mexico when she received the news. Shattered, she wrote to him, first thanking him “a million times” for sending what would become her most iconic photograph, encoded with the bittersweet memory of a morning in the spring of their love, then pouring out her devastation without pride or pretense:
And then she adds a list of requests for how to honor her broken heart, touchingly human and almost childlike in its underlying wish for an undo button:
[…]
About my letters to you, if they are on the way, just give them to Mam and she will mail them back to me. I don’t want to be a trouble in your life in any case. Please forgive me for acting just like an old-fashioned sweetheart asking you to give me back my letters, it is ridiculous on my part, but I do it for you, not for me, because I imagine that you don’t have any interest in having those papers with you.
As she was writing this very letter, she was interrupted by a phone call from a mutual friend informing her that Nick had just gotten married. Frida acknowledges this plainly and adds:
Love,
Frida
Frida Kahlo by Nickolas Muray (Brooklyn Museum)
By that autumn, Nick was already having troubles in his new marriage as Frida’s relationship with Diego was deteriorating. In October, shortly after the divorce process began as Diego pummeled her with “the worst things you can imagine and the dirtiest insults,” she wrote to Nick:
Still addressing him as “darling” and “baby,” she adds:
I love you,
Frida
He never did forget her. She never stopped wishing the world for him, which may be the deepest measure of love — continuing to desire the other’s greatest happiness, their best possible life, even if it excludes you. It is a fallacy, a dangerous myth, that this wish should be dispassionate — letting go can be as passionate as love itself, as much an act of devotion, for only a rigor of feeling can ensure not the termination but the transmutation of a relationship.
Frida and Nick remained lifelong friends, on tender terms until the end.
Legendary Artist Sheila Hicks, at 92, on the Secret to Creative Vitality
By Maria Popova (themarginalian.org)
Art, Georgia O’Keeffe believed, springs from “the desire to make the unknown known… and keeping the unknown always beyond you.” We seem to have drifted lightyears away from that motive force, the majority of our epoch’s cultural production aiming to render the market maximally known — its profitably proven preferences, its self-interests, its moral fashions — in order to cater the creation to it, to virtue-signal enough to go viral.
In every era, there are those who do what they do from a place of exuberant creative vitality unconcerned with validation, those who refuse to mistake the conditions of their culture for givens and choose to make what they want to see exist — the singular, the untested, the unexampled — for the world to take or leave. The price is often profound loneliness, the reward profound peace.
Art from Sheila Hicks: Seize, Weave Space, Nasher Sculpture Center.
Sheila Hicks is a living emblem of that defiant, wildly countercultural courage to create rather than cater.
For the better part of a century — since before the splitting of the atom, before the signing of the Civil Rights Act, before the invention of laser and duct-tape and the Internet — she has been making koans out of fiber, material poems that reach something beyond meaning, something that, like nature’s needless beauty, simply is. Although her work has been exhibited in every major museum and she has been profiled by every major magazine, the recognition hover like an afterthought, agreeable and irrelevant as a stranger’s perfume, over her tactile universe of feeling.
Sheila Hicks: Fugue, 1969-1970 (silk, flax, cotton)
At ninety-two, Hicks opens the door to her life and work — which are so clearly one — in a feisty Time Sensitive conversation, in which she keeps pushing back against being classified as an artist. With an eye to how labels and categories invariably commodify what they contain, reducing process to product, she reflects:
It is a sentiment not dissimilar to what legendary cellist Pablo Casals, at ninety-three, articulated about the secret of creative vitality and what Rachel Carson advised an spiring writer: “If you write what you yourself sincerely think and feel and are interested in, the chances are very high that you will interest other people as well.”
Holding up a large baton completely covered in an intricate pattern of colorful fabric and thread, Hicks adds:
Sheila Hicks at her home in Paris. (Photograph: Agathe Karsenti for The Slowdown.)
Complement with some abiding advice on being an artist from Bowie, Beethoven, and M.C. Richards, then revisit Virginia Woolf’s classic existential epiphany about what it means to create.
For of Hicks, watch her singular spirit come abloom in this tender short film:
