Nick Cave on the two pillars of the meaningful life themarginalian.org/2026/06/1…

Cicely Saunders fell in love with a dying man. London, 1948. David Tasma, a 40-year-old Polish Jew who escaped the Warsaw Ghetto, was dying of cancer in agonizing pain. Cicely, a 30-year-old medical social worker, sat with him for weeks. He told her there was no proper place for people like him to die with dignity. Before he died, he gave her his life savings — £500 — and said: “I’ll be a window in your home.” She built that home. Born June 22, 1918, in north London, Cicely trained as a nurse during WWII and witnessed hospitals abandon the dying — isolating them, leaving them in pain, treating death as failure. After a back injury, she became a medical social worker, then, at 33, entered medical school on a doctor’s challenge. She qualified as a doctor in 1957. At St Joseph’s Hospice, she pioneered regular morphine dosing to control pain without addiction or drowsiness, and developed the concept of “total pain” — addressing physical, emotional, social, and spiritual suffering. In 1967, she opened St Christopher’s Hospice in Sydenham — the first modern hospice combining expert care, teaching, and research. David Tasma’s £500 seeded it; a plain window honors him. She pioneered home care, outpatient services, and bereavement support. Her words: “You matter because you are you, and you matter to the end of your life.” Her model spread globally, birthing the modern hospice and palliative care movement. Cicely married Polish painter Marian Bohusz-Szyszko in 1980. She worked at St Christopher’s into her late 80s and died there of breast cancer on July 14, 2005, at 87 — cared for by the principles she created. Before Cicely, the dying were forgotten. She turned love and grief into a revolution of dignity that has comforted millions. Every hospice on Earth owes its light to her window for David Tasma.

One of the most mind blowing 10 minutes of video Christianity has ever produced.

My review of Acting (dir. Sophie Fiennes) is up here: theguardian.com/film/2026/ju…

Artificial intelligences do not undergo experiences, do not possess a body, do not feel joy or pain, do not mature through relationships, and do not know from within what love, work, friendship or responsibility mean. Nor do they have a moral conscience, since they do not judge good and evil, grasp the ultimate meaning of situations, or bear responsibility for consequences. They may imitate or even simulate, but they do not understand what they produce, for they lack the affective, relational, and spiritual perspective through which human beings grow in wisdom. #MagnificaHumanitas