The brother goes on vision quests. The sister is a former English major. Together, they defected from OpenAI, started Anthropic, and built (they say) AIs most upstanding citizen, Claude.

Advancements in computing and robotics are changing how people live. Here are our favorite prosthetics, smart glasses, exoskeletons, and fitness trackers.

Carmakers are likely to face higher costs regardless of how they respond to President Trumps 25 percent tariffs on cars and auto parts.

MacworldSome people use their Macs to drive enormous HDTVs, letting them access a wide range of audio and video apps on a Mac and streaming video services while also retaining the security of the Mac operating system. However, its easy to run into a problem: the interface elements on the external display can wind up so small that you have a hard time making them out.You have a few ways to improve this situation, though readers have found that not all work in their circumstances.Set the display size to Default or Larger TextIn > System Settings > Displays with your large display selected, the default settings shown have a Use as section with at least four choices. Larger Text and Default cause macOS to act as if the display is lower resolution relative to the typeface and interface element used.However, whats rendered on the screen, like typefaces, images, and video, continues to use the devices native resolution. This is often the easiest and best solutionif it works for your display.Set your display to show larger text sizes using standard options in Displays.You can choose among a greater range of sizes and demonstrate the effect of higher-resolution rendering to yourself by clicking the Advanced button in Displays and then enabling Show resolutions as list. This reveals all resolutions for which the native display density is retained even as the size of interface elements changes.If you enable Show all resolutions, you will see some resolutions show with (low resolution) after them. If you select one of those and compare it to the same option without the label, you can see how the rendering differsthe jaggies are quite obvious at low resolution.You can see all resolutions, including ones that render at a lower resolution than the displays true capability.Work with Accessibility settingsIn System Settings > Accessibility > Display under the Text and Pointer sections, you can adjust the size of type systemwide, increase the menu bars size, and make the pointer easy to see or spot (when jiggled). Not all apps support the Text size setting, but its likely youre using only a fewor just the TV and Safari appswith your external display.Accessibility options may help with legible text and pointer sizes on a large external display.Turn to a third-party app, BetterDisplay ProMany readers suggestBetterDisplay Proas a more complete set of options for scaling the Macs user interface elements relative to the size of the display without causing other issues. This utility lets you unlock high-definition rendering (HiDPI) when the display doesnt meet Apples more restrictive set of resolutions for which it lets you set bigger user interface elements.The developers wikihas a detailed pageon how to customize this feature. However, it mostly involves installing the app, turning on Edit the system configuration of this display model and Enable flexible scaling and then clicking Apply for the display you want to control.Using BetterDisplay Pro, you can tune the way in which user interface and display resolution interact.BetterDisplay has a free and a Pro version; the Pro version is required to unlock the HiDPI feature. However, the developer offers a 14-day free trial, which allows you to test whether the option solves your problem. To keep using it, the cost is $19.99 or 19.99, depending on your region.This Mac 911 article is in response to a question submitted by Macworld reader Andy.Ask Mac 911Weve compiled a list of the questions we get asked most frequently, along with answers and links to columns:read our super FAQto see if your question is covered. If not, were always looking for new problems to solve! Email yours tomac911@macworld.com, including screen captures as appropriate and whether you want your full name used. Not every question will be answered; we dont reply to emails, and we cannot provide direct troubleshooting advice.

Generative AI (genAI) companies are starting to do real damage to the internet.One of the internets main purposes is to serve as a global network for free and open communication and information exchange between scientists, academics, and the public and to be an uncensorable place for the expression of free speech.(One of the most dangerous threats to the internet is recent bipartisan support for repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which, if actually repealed, would seriously harm free speech online. Thats an issue you canread about on the EFF website.)The purest expression of the internets purpose is the world ofOpen Access (OA) websites. These are sites that provide free and unrestricted access to scholarly information such as research articles, books, data, and educational resources. Open Access allows users to get content without technical barriers. It provides legal permissions for reading, downloading, copying, distributing, and reusing content with proper attribution. And its part of the broader Open Science movement.But now, OA sites are under attack. AI bots, or AI crawlers, constantly scanning for data to add to training data sets for genAI chatbots and related services, are overwhelming OA websites and others, straining resources and leading to outages.Of course, there are many different kinds of bots, which collectively generate more traffic on the internet than humans. DesignRush says thatbots now account for80%of all web visits.Bot types include search engine bots, SEO and analytics bots, social media bots, malicious bots, and web scraping bots.But AI crawlers are by far the fastest-growing kind of bot. According to DesignRush, the crawlers from one companyOpenAIs GPT botsnow account for about13% of all web traffic and make hundreds of millions of requests per month.Their mission is to take data and essentially replace the original source. For example, instead of using Google to find scientific articles on a subject, the AI crawlers seek to take those articles and present a new article for the user cobbled together from many articles and many sites, incentivizing the user to ignore the source sites and get their information from the chatbots.To oversimplify the problem, harvesting more data from OA sites makes chatbots faster and more convenient to use. However, the harvesting itself makes the OA sites slower and harder to use.While much digital ink has been spilled decrying the taking of content, its also important to know that the chatbot companies are overwhelming many of the sites theyre copying content from, much like a daily DDOS attack.Different kinds of bots affect different types of websites indifferent ways, but they can have a huge impact on OA sites.Fighting backCloudflare is now deliberately poisoning large language model (LLM) training data, fighting back against the AI companies that are taking data from websites without permission. (The company offers content delivery networks, cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and web performance optimization.)Heres the problem Cloudflare is trying to solve: Companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity have been accused of harvesting data from websites, ignoring robots.txt files on the sites (originally designed to tell search engines which files were off-limits for indexing), and taking data anyway. In addition to these big names, all kinds of smaller, less legitimate companies are capturing data without permission from the rightful owners.Cloudflares solution is a feature available to all customers called AI Labyrinth. The program redirects incoming bots to its own special-purpose websites, which are filled with huge quantities of factually accurate but irrelevant (irrelevant to the target website) AI-generated information.In addition to wasting the time of the companies in control of the bots, AI Labyrinth is also a honeypot, enabling Cloudflare to add those companies to a blacklist.The idea is somewhat similar to the Nightshade project from the University of Chicago; it was designed to protect artists work by poisoning image data. The project enabled digital image artists to download Nightshade for free and convert the pixels of their artwork in a way that made people see the same image but AI models to completely misread what the pictures looked like.One way to stop AI crawlers is via good old-fashioned robots.txt files, but as noted, they can and often do ignore those. Thats prompted many to call for penalties such as infringement lawsuits, for doing so.Another approach is to use a Web Application Firewall (WAF), which can block unwanted traffic, including AI crawlers, while allowing legitimate users to access a site. By configuring the WAF to recognize and block specific AI bot signatures, websites can theoretically protect their content. More advanced AI crawlers might evade detection by mimicking legitimate traffic or using rotating IP addresses. Protecting against this is time-consuming, forcing the frequent updating of rules and IP reputation lists another burden for the source sites.Rate limiting is also used to prevent excessive data retrieval by AI bots. This involves setting limits on the number of requests a single IP can make within a certain timeframe, which helps reduce server load and data misuse risks.Advanced bot management solutions are becoming more popular, too. These tools use machine learning and behavioral analysis to identify and block unwanted AI bots, offering more comprehensive protection than traditional methods.Lastly, advocacy and policy changes are being developed to make sure content creators have more control over how their work is used.In the meantime, something needs to be done about the impact of AI crawlers on OA websites, which offer some of the best sources of information on the internet both to people and to LLM-based chatbots.While the legality or acceptability of simply taking content is argued online, in the courts and in government, we cant let those same companies essentially sabotage, attack, and crush the same sites theyre taking from while the debate rages on.

This week, MIT Technology Review published a piece on bodyoidsliving bodies that cannot think or feel pain. In the piece, a trio of scientists argue that advances in biotechnology will soon allow us to create spare human bodies that could be used for research, or to provide organs for donation.If you find your skin crawling at this point, youre not the only one. Its a creepy idea, straight from the more horrible corners of science fiction. But bodyoids could be used for good. And if they are truly unaware and unable to think, the use of bodyoids wouldnt cross most peoples ethical lines, the authors argue. Im not so sure.Either way, theres no doubt that developments in science and biotechnology are bringing us closer to the potential reality of bodyoids. And the idea is already stirring plenty of ethical debate and controversy.One of the main arguments made for bodyoids is that they could provide spare human organs. Theres a huge shortage of organs for transplantation. More than 100,000 people in the US are waiting for a transplant, and 17 people on that waiting list die every day. Human bodyoids could serve as a new source.Scientists are working on other potential solutions to this problem. One approach is the use of gene-edited animal organs. Animal organs dont typically last inside human bodiesour immune systems will reject them as foreign. But a few companies are creating pigs with a series of gene edits that make their organs more acceptable to human bodies.A handful of living people have received gene-edited pig organs. David Bennett Sr. was the first person to get a gene-edited pig heart, in 2022, and Richard Slayman was the first to get a kidney, in early 2024. Unfortunately, both men died around two months after their surgery.But Towana Looney, the third living person to receive a gene-edited pig kidney, has been doing well. She had her transplant surgery in late November of last year. I am full of energy. I got an appetite Ive never had in eight years, she said at the time. I can put my hand on this kidney and feel it buzzing. She returned home in February.At least one company is taking more of a bodyoid-like approach. Renewal Bio, a biotech company based in Israel, hopes to grow embryo-stage versions of people for replacement organs.Their approach is based on advances in the development of synthetic embryos. (Im putting that term in quotation marks because, while its the simplest descriptor of what they are, a lot of scientists hate the term.)Embryos start with the union of an egg cell and a sperm cell. But scientists have been working on ways to make embryos using stem cells instead. Under the right conditions, these cells can divide into structures that look a lot like a typical embryo.Scientists dont know how far these embryo-like structures will be able to develop. But theyre already using them to try to get cows and monkeys pregnant.And no one really knows how to think about synthetic human embryos. Scientists dont even really know what to call them. Rules stipulate that typical human embryos may be grown in the lab for a maximum of 14 days. Should the same rules apply to synthetic ones?The very existence of synthetic embryos is throwing into question our understanding of what a human embryo even is. Is it the thing that is only generated from the fusion of a sperm and an egg? Naomi Moris, a developmental biologist at the Crick Institute in London, said to me a couple of years ago. Is it something to do with the cell types it possesses, or the [shape] of the structure?The authors of the new MIT Technology Review piece also point out that such bodyoids could also help speed scientific and medical research.At the moment, most drug research must be conducted in lab animals before clinical trials can start. But nonhuman animals may not respond the same way people do, and the vast majority of treatments that look super-promising in mice fail in humans. Such research can feel like a waste of both animal lives and time.Scientists have been working on solutions to these problems, too. Some are creating organs on chipsminiature collections of cells organized on a small piece of polymer that may resemble full-size organs and can be used to test the effects of drugs.Others are creating digital representations of human organs for the same purpose. Such digital twins can be extensively modeled, and can potentially be used to run clinical trials in silico.Both of these approaches seem somehow more palatable to me, personally, than running experiments on a human created without the capacity to think or feel pain. The idea reminds me of the recent novel Tender Is the Flesh by Agustina Bazterrica, in which humans are bred for consumption. In the book, their vocal cords are removed so that others do not have to hear them scream.When it comes to real-world biotechnology, though, our feelings about what is acceptable tend to shift. In vitro fertilization was demonized when it was first developed, for instance, with opponents arguing that it was unnatural, a perilous insult, and the biggest threat since the atom bomb. It is estimated that more than 12 million people have been born through IVF since Louise Brown became the first test tube baby 46 years ago. I wonder how well all feel about bodyoids 46 years from now.This article first appeared in The Checkup,MIT Technology Reviewsweekly biotech newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Thursday, and read articles like this first,sign up here.

Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood T.S. EliotChildhood violin + unsolicited advice (Issue #298)Published inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min readJust now--Next Tuesday marks the beginning of National Poetry Month here in the U.S., a holi-month that began in 1996, when the Academy of American Poets gathered a group of publishers and poetry lovers to strategize about how they might raise poetrys profile in culture. One of their first initiatives involved giving away 100K books of poetry to libraries, schools, and bookstores they also partnered with Amtrak to place paperback anthologies of love poems on passengers seats. (Id like to time-travel back to 1997 to pick up one of those.)With that in mind, Im sharing a story about poetry (and a love poem of sorts) that I found in the Medium archive: Michele Sharpes archival guide to how she taught poetry to college students. Sharpe shares a single poem My Papas Waltz, by former U.S. Poet Laureate Theodore Roethke and explains why her students debated endlessly over its meaning. The poem begins like this:The whiskey on your breathCould make a small boy dizzy;But I hung on like death:Such waltzing was not easySharpes students argued about whether it depicted an abusive or supportive relationship. (Words like waltzing and romped convey joy; words like battered and death imply the opposite youll see if you read the full poem.) As Sharpes students disagreed over the poems meaning, they eventually stumbled upon poetrys real lesson: words can have opposing meanings depending on context, and a poems job (or one of them) is to highlight the friction between them.Human beings are usually not one thing or another, wholly evil or wholly good, Sharpe writes. Complexity. Poetry can sing about that to us. All we have to do is pay attention to the words.If you have time this weekend, browse the Poetry topic page to find verses that deepen your understanding of language (heres one, featured recently in this newsletter, that stuck with me; I also recommend Scribe, a poetry publication on Medium). And, if you want to write a poem of your own? Here are a few pointers from Mary Oliver, via Kera Hollow: The poem is not a discussion, not a lecture, but an instance an instance of attention, of noticing something in the world. Harris Sockel Also todayA writer thinks back on the joys of learning violin as a child (and the sorrows of giving it up as an adult), specifically the rare occasions when technique and emotion aligned perfectly, when the violin felt less like an instrument and more like a particularly expressive limb (Eutaktos)Veteran Chief Technology Officer and author of The Managers Path, Camille Fournier, reflects on a decade of defining career ladders for engineers: You should not try to create a ladder that functions as a pure checklist or scorecard that guarantees promotion if people check enough boxes; promotions are as much about the needs of the organization as the skills of the employees. A dose of practical wisdomNever give unsolicited advice. Just ask: Can I give you some advice? first. (Jane Cobbald)

Jay Cheshes Photographs by sa SjstrmIn February 2013, the Moderna Museet, Stockholms national museum of modern art, opened a blockbuster show, Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction, heralding a then-obscure Swedish artista woman, a mysticwho painted at the turn of the 20th century. Believing her art carried spiritual messages that would benefit humankind, af Klint worked with non-figurative forms years before her male peers Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich were credited with inventing abstract art. In Stockholm, the show shattered the museums attendance records, and it eventually attracted more than a million visitors as it toured museums across Europe. Now, 81 years after her death, this once overlooked Swedish artist, her work barely shown in her lifetime, has become a posthumous global sensation and her countrys biggest art export. One should not overestimate how unbelievably unknown she was, Daniel Birnbaum, the former director of the Moderna Museet, who helped organize the show, told me in Stockholm recently.In the years since the Moderna Museet show, the booming interest in af Klints life and work has been dizzying: a feature film, Hilma, by acclaimed director Lasse Hallstrm; a comprehensive biography by the German art historian Julia Voss; a couple of operas; a childrens picture book; a historical novel, The Friday Night Club; even a comic book, The Five Lives of Hilma af Klint. An immersive af Klint virtual reality experience debuted in London three years ago, followed by a sale of unique digital reproductions known as NFTs that were backed by pop star Pharrell Williams. Cheap posters of her most recognizable works have become big sellers online. In addition to challenging the long-established story of the birth of abstract art, af Klint has become a cultural force, touted as an early feminist, a queer icon, a prophet, a witchwhatever your worldview wishes for her to be. There are millions of younger artists who adore her, Birnbaum says. You can almost say theres a Hilma af Klint school now. Johan af Klint, Hilmas great-nephew, points to Adelso, an island near Stockholm, where the artist spent parts of her childhood and grew to love the natural world. sa SjstrmAnd since 2013 her work has been perpetually on tour. The Moderna Museet show traveled to Denmark, Norway, Germany, Estonia and Spain. In 2018, af Klints work reached New York, with a large survey, Hilma af Klint: Paintings for the Future, filling the rotunda at the Guggenheim Museum, once again breaking attendance records and further cementing her status as an international art star. I very much felt that our ideas about abstraction needed to be more expansive than they were, Tracey Bashkoff, the shows lead curator, told me. Last fall, a sequel, even more comprehensive, with 220 artworks, opened at the Guggenheims outpost in Bilbao, Spain. Much of that work traveled to Japan this spring for af Klints first major show in Asia, on view at Tokyos National Museum of Modern Art through mid-June.This spring she also makes her solo debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, with Hilma af Klint: What Stands Behind the Flowers. The title is taken from a line in her notebooks, and the exhibition showcases a portfolio of 46 botanical drawings completed between 1919 and 1920, close studies of plant life mixed with diagrammatic abstractionsnever shown publiclythat were purchased from a private collection three years ago. We realized her story is an interesting one, says Jodi Hauptman, the shows chief curator, of MoMAs decision to spotlight her work. She brings up all sorts of other narratives of abstraction that have to do with interest in alternative spiritualities and the intersection of spirit and science.But af Klint might have just as easily faded into obscurity, her work forgotten, her spiritual messages dismissed as a cranks. For decades after her death, in 1944, some in the art world certainly viewed her that way. In 1986, a few of her pieces found their way into a group show called The Spiritual in ArtSubscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99This article is a selection from the April/May 2025 issue of Smithsonian magazineInfinite Change, a sculpture by Oleg Nourpeissov, in Angelsberg, Sweden. The pyramid recalls af Klints monumental Altarpiece paintings. sa SjstrmNow her posthumous fame has unleashed a tangled knot of conflicting artistic, financial, cultural and personal interests that threatens to overshadow the work itself. A bitter battle is underway for control of the Hilma af Klint Foundation, which was founded 53 years ago to safeguard her legacy and possesses nearly her entire esoteric output, opening a litigious rift over who has the right to show her work, who should see it and who should benefit from what she left behind. And new materials unearthed recently about af Klints wider spiritual circle, as well as new information found sifting through her own prodigious writings, have begun to challenge established narratives about who made the work. Was Hilma af Klint a singular visionary, alone with her thoughts, as early biographers wrote? Or has she been mistakenly credited with the achievements of a collective of women, sharing ideas and creative output in search of enlightenment?Af Klint was born in 1862 into an affluent, noble Swedish family with a nautical lineageboth her father and grandfather were high-ranking officers in the Swedish Navy. Af Klint and her three siblings (a fourth had died in infancy before Hilma was born) were raised in Stockholm, and they spent their summers on the familys pastoral estate on the island of Adelso, west of the city. As a young woman she showed a natural affinity for art. After taking classes at Stockholms Technical School, at 19 she secured a spot at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts, among the first art schools in Europe to admit women full time.It was a period of cultural, scientific and political upheaval as the turn of the 20th century approached. Across Sweden women were starting to chart their own path in life. And a fascination with the occult was brewing in the upper echelons of Swedish society. Af Klint began dabbling in sances even before art school, communing with the spirit world while grappling with the devastating loss of her younger sister, Hermina, who died suddenly, at 10 years old, in 1880. A 1919 nature study by af Klint showing European larch, blackthorn, Norway maple, English oak, a rivulet moth and a red-tailed bumblebee. The watercolor was part of an uncompleted project focusing on the natural world The Museum of Modern Art / Licensed by Art Resource, NYAfter graduation from art school, af Klint found work painting conventional portraits and landscapes. And with her classmate Anna Cassel, the daughter of a wealthy industrialist, in 1896 she joined the Edelweiss Society, a womens spiritualist group that gathered regularly to conduct sances. Af Klint, Cassel and three other membersan experienced medium, Sigrid Hedman, and sisters Mathilda Nilsson and Cornelia Cederbergsoon broke off to form their own splinter group, the Five, as they called themselves. Meeting weekly in each others homes, af Klint and her friends used a psychograph, a strange new device said to enhance psychic powers, to help them communicate with spirits. Messages arrived in words, written in collective notebooks, and in images delivered as automatic drawingstheir hands, guided by the spirits, they believed, creating jerky, jagged, non-representational forms that they all signed as a group.They heard from a regular collection of voices. The High Ones, as Voss describes them in Hilma af Klint: A Biography, first published in German five years ago, were spirits from distant times and exotic places, including Ananda, who shared the name of the Buddhas closest disciple, and a medieval priest, Gregor, who seemed locked in an eternal battle against heresy in the Catholic Church.New esoteric spiritual movements had begun sweeping across Europe. Af Klint and Cassel found their way to Theosophy, which mixed Eastern and Western spiritual thought, and later followed Austrian guru Rudolf Steiner to its more Christian offshoot, Anthroposophy, which he founded in 1912. Af Klint kept a meticulous record of her spiritual journey, in what would grow to thousands of pages of handwritten notebooks. Though the Five continued to meet as a group, af Klint also heard voices on her own. The spirits, she believed, had been reaching out to her directly since the 1890s. And they told her to paint. She recorded one such message in 1907: Take your palette and begin. Expect a surprise! Strange forms poured out of herbig looping flowers, organic spirals, cubes of contrasting primary colors. Af Klint as a student at the Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in 1885. Courtesy of Stiftelsen Hilma af Klints VerkBy 1915 she had completed a whole body of work, 193 otherworldly paintings in a mix of abstract, symbolistic and figurative forms, all done in series: Primordial Chaos, Eros, Evolution, among other cycles exploring metaphysical themes. The most monumental pieces, simply called the Ten Largest, were dramatic tempera pigment works on paper more than ten feet tall and had been completed in a frenzied nine-week period in 1907. Altogether the collection formed what came to be known as the Paintings for the Temple. She dreamed of a physical space, a temple, that would one day house her art, and she sketched plans in her notebooks, even pinpointing potential locations. In her mind the paintings were more religious icons than classic artworks, carrying sacred messages, and were commissions, she wrote, from the astral plane. Ulf Wagner, an artist and art historian who oversees the Hilma af Klint Foundations archive, told me, Not one of these paintings is signed, because from her point of view it was not art. It was something else.Every shape, every color seemed to have a secret meaning. But in her notebooks, her writing often as portentous as scripture, even af Klint didnt seem to fully understand what story they told. By the time she completed the Paintings for the Temple, she had developed a fixation with Steiner, seeking his spiritual guidance and constant approval. She hoped he might eventually help her decipher the work. And, increasingly convinced of her prophetic gifts, she eventually widened the circle of women around her to 13. The number had significance. The collective soul is a conglomeration of several souls, she wrote in her notebooks. When such a conglomeration has reached a certain stage, its task is to send the strongest of the group to Earth, the one we call the Thirteenth. Many of the women played a role in her artistic creations. They prayed, they had sances, they had love affairs, they did many things together, Birnbaum said. But she was the motor behind the painterly project. Thats what I believe. Johan af Klint, 85, inspecting a portrait of a child painted by his great-aunt that now decorates his apartment in Stockholm sa SjstrmBut operating outside the art world, af Klint struggled to find a wider audience for her work among either art lovers or spiritual believers. Upon her death in 1944, childless and never married, she left behind some 1,300 works of art and a mountain of writing26,000 notebook pages. These were bequeathed to her nephew Erik af Klint, a vice admiral in the Swedish Navy. She came to believe that future generations might one day grasp the work, and, according to Voss, she indicated in her notebooks that many of her most cherished works should be locked away until 20 years after her death.True to her wishes, this remarkable trove remained hidden for decades. The art had been collected from her last studio, on the island of Munso, just across a narrow strait from Adelso, then rolled up in crates and stored in an attic atop the apartment building in central Stockholm where Erik moved with his family after the war. One day in 1966, accompanied by his youngest son, Johan, he finally began to unspool and photograph his Aunt Hilmas work. He hoped hed find a permanent home for it in a Swedish museum. But at every institution he visited, beginning with the Moderna Museet, he was roundly dismissed.In those days it was taboo to talk about the spiritual and painting, Johan, now 85 and retired from a career in finance, told me one morning last fall, at the dining room table of his antiques-filled Stockholm apartment. Johan honed his sharp English diction living abroad in New York, California, London and Southeast Asia, where he picked up an abiding interest in Buddhism. On the walls of his apartment hung paintings of old sailing ships along with some of af Klints more conventional art: coastal landscapes, a portrait of a young boy, each painted in oils before her psychic visions began to radically reshape her work. The 1915 painting Group X, No. 1, Altarpiece, one of 193 monumental works af Klint hoped would one day decorate a temple dedicated to her esoteric faith. incamerastock / AlamyIn 1972, frustrated by museum rejections, Johans father, Erik, launched the Hilma af Klint Foundation, donating her entire oeuvre to the organization, hoping it would help keep the work safe. Johan took over as chair in 2011, when preparations for the Moderna Museet show, which would audaciously reframe af Klint as an artist of world-historical importance, were just beginning.The museum had earlier snubbed an offer of a huge af Klint bequest, but it had begun to see her work in a new light, responding to broad cultural shifts in the historically male-centered art world. Even before planning the show, the institution had been maneuvering for more gender parity in its permanent collection. In retrospect, Birnbaum told me, the af Klint shows subtitle (A Pioneer of Abstraction) was always intended to provoke. Shes not only abstract, he said. There are moments when theres no other word for it, but it was never the endgame. I mean, she invented, or at least she discovered, abstraction as a possibility in a more complex way to work.As a painter, af Klint came of age just as a rush of new artistic movements were emerging in Europe, as Post-Impressionism mixed with Art Nouveau, and Cubism and Fauvism were producing avant-garde art stars. Norwegian Expressionist Edvard Munch showed his work in Stockholm, rising to prominence just as af Klint began finding her own artistic voice. She was surely aware of the broader cultural context, according to Voss, her biographer, but she kept the art world at arms length, focusing her efforts on reaching a spiritual audience. (When some of the Paintings for the Temple traveled to London in 1928, it wasnt for a gallery or museum show but for the World Conference on Spiritual Science, organized by the English Anthroposophical Society.)Working in relative isolation, she produced an often-bewildering body of work, laden with symbolism, endlessly open to interpretation. Af Klints real intentions remain elusive, buried in the labyrinth of her elliptical writing. Its very hard reading, says Johan, of her notebooks. Its not a straight line, where you come to a conclusion. She writes in circles. And theres little personal context to frame her spiritual writing. Af Klint edited her own notebooks later in life, rewriting or destroying entire passages and exorcising biographical details. In 1930, she took away everything that has to do with her in the notebooks, Johan says. So, we in the later generations have a hard time finding out who she was. Anna Cassel, af Klints art school classmate, fellow spiritualist devotee and lifelong friend. Recent findings suggest she played a large role in creating af Klints celebrated art. G. HertzbergJohan said he remembers meeting his great-aunt a few times as a child. She left him a mission, he claims, two years before her death, when he was just 3 years old. She gave us a task, my brother and me, that when you grow up you should protect my work and you should also disclose unreliability around the works, people you cant rely on, he said. Hes been doing his best to honor that commitment, by working with other family members to unleash a flood of litigationand wage a public relations campaignagainst other members of the Hilma af Klint Foundation board who he feels seek to profit from his great-aunts intellectual property. For example, the af Klints allege that NFTs released by a London-based company, Acute Art, under the creative direction of Birnbaum, were commissioned without the familys consent, and, in their commercial nature, ran counter to both Hilma af Klints spiritual intent and the interests of the foundation. (The works theyre based on have been in the public domain since 2014, when copyright protections ran out.) Birnbaum, who was on the foundations board, has stepped down. They now claim that everyone else is taking advantage, he told me.Johan and his allies have also fended off attempts to sell or disperse af Klints work, now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, to private buyers or museums. All of a sudden, people want to come in and grab them, Johan says. And a few years ago, he helped derail plans for a Hilma af Klint museum on the Anthroposophical Society compound outside Stockholm, where the Hilma af Klint Foundation once stored her art, objecting to the design, location and mission, and alleging that the museums main champion, Anders Kumlander, the Swedish Anthroposophical Societys former secretary general, had personally profited from buying and selling af Klint works. Kumlander, who is also a member of the af Klint Foundation board, denies any wrongdoing. Its enough with fighting, Kumlander told me.And the battles continue under Johans 58-year-old nephew Erik af Klintnamed after his grandfathera medical doctor and Christian preacher who heads the board today. Johan and Erik have been allies on the legal front, but they have different views of af Klints art. Johan picks up on Buddhist symbolism in the work, as filtered through theosophys Eastern influences, while Erik sees biblical themes. (Af Klints notebooks cover a broad spectrum of spiritual thought.) If you know the Bible, you can understand her art, Erik insisted when I met him one morning, over coffee and cardamom cake in his spare, almost monastic apartment in Stockholm. A notebook page dated July 1919, when af Klint, living on the island of Munso, was engaged in her close study of the natural world. Volgi archive / AlamyErik believes af Klint never intended for her Paintings for the Temple to reach a broad audience. He says his grandfather wrote the foundation statutes to make that clear. The board shall keep the work accessible to those who seek spiritual knowledge, the provision begins. Erik argues that the many museum exhibitions in recent years all violate that intent, and he is working to block future shows. He hopes af Klints work will eventually inhabit the temple she dreamed of, open only to true believers. The foundation board should make an effort to show it to the right type of people, he said, of af Klints esoteric work. It has to be a spiritual seeker who wants to support what Hilmas spiritual guides were trying to tell her.But Erik is alone on the board in pushing to retroactively lock af Klints work down. He seems to recognize this is one battle hes not likely to win. Not even Johan supports the idea. If you dont show the paintings to everyone, how can you influence them? Johan asked me, rhetorically.The foundations legal infighting provides a sensationalist art-world dimension to af Klints sudden posthumous fame. But art historians and biographers are at least as swept up in the revelations emerging from what is essentially the brand-new field of Hilma af Klint studies, as scholars get to work digging through a mountain of previously neglected historical materials. Four years ago, for instance, Kurt Almqvist, an independent scholar and book publisher, found Anna Cassels journalssome 60 notebooksin a storage cubby on the Swedish Anthroposophical Society compound. The discovery has opened a dramatic new chapter in the hunt for insights into af Klint and her universe. Biographers have often portrayed af Klint as the lone artistic force behind her work, but Almqvist, who found Cassels notebooks in an unmarked box, has another perspective. The difference here is its a spiritual group, and its very explicit that this is a common work, he says. Almqvist heads the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for Public Benefit, having married into the industrial dynasty behind it. The private think tank has a broad purview and deep pockets, organizing conferences on art, culture, history and political thought. His first brush with af Klint came 12 years ago, when Birnbaum invited him to organize a series of academic seminars tied to the Moderna Museet show. He found himself drawn into the mystique surrounding af Klint and her work. The pictures are enigmatic, he says. You dont know what they mean. They contain a riddle you have to figure out. Marie Cassel, Annas great-niece, seated, with Birgit Lamke, left, and Kerstin Friberger, relatives of Mathilda Nilsson and Cornelia Cederberg, members of af Klints circle. sa SjstrmSince then, through his familys publishing house, Stolpe, Almqvist has overseen an array of books on af Klint, including a monumental seven-volume catalogue raisonn, published three years ago. And in 2023, he published Anna Cassel: The Saga of the Rose, a book, co-edited with Birnbaum, that focuses on Cassel as an independent artist and showcases her own esoteric paintings. Provocatively, the book included an essay, Who Created The Paintings for the Temple? by Hedvig Martin, a PhD student at the University of Amsterdam who is completing a thesis on af Klint and the women around her. Martin argues that Cassel played a much larger role in the creation of af Klints sprawling masterpiece than previously acknowledged. Among other things, she has identified stylistic differences in some paintings attributed to af Klint that indicate they were in fact painted by Cassel. Af Klints brushstrokes tended to be more expressive and free-form, for example, while Cassels were more careful, even meticulous. And af Klint herself wrote about Cassels role in the work. The two of us will work out a full series; our efforts will complement each other, she wrote in 1914.Its not only that Anna Cassel painted some of the Paintings for the Temple, Martin told me. But in almost every series there are several women working with Hilma. We dont know if they were assistants or were working independently, because the notebooks dont reveal that much. But the narrative used to be that Hilma worked alone, against all odds. The manor house owned by Cassels family. Scion of a wealthy industrialist, Cassel helped finance af Klints career; in time, financial tensions simmered between them. sa SjstrmThe material has raised new questions about attribution in museum circles, though af Klint is still widely credited as sole author of the works. Hauptman, the curator of MoMAs upcoming show, told me, To me, it only makes it more interesting that these women were working together. It doesnt lessen the work. Of course, many celebrated artists across history, from Rembrandt to Warhol, worked collaboratively while retaining the spotlight. It doesnt feel like a conflict, really, Bashkoff, of the Guggenheim, says. It also feels a little likeif this were a man, we wouldnt really be talking about this. The lone creator is a myth that goes back a long time in art history. It doesnt shake me to the core.For his part, Johan af Klint agrees that Cassel may have played a role in creating af Klints work, but he believes Almqvists book goes too far. He argues that Cassel was not with af Klint during most of the period when the Paintings for the Temple were made. She was with Hilma the first year, Johan said. Then she came back in 1912 or 1913five or so years laterand started to try painting as Hilma did. Of course, Anna Cassel should be recognized for what she was. I have no problem with that.Almqvist is now completing a new book, based on a close reading of af Klints writing and Cassels, exploring themes found in both womens notebooks, including discussions of sexuality that were progressive for the time. (For example, af Klint wrote about gender duality, the twin soul, and feeling like a man in a womans body.) You can start to compare, he says. What is the difference in their perspectives on the same time period? A 1908 automatic drawing signed collectively by the Five, af Klints spiritual group. The women believed that spirits controlled their hands to impart messages from another realm. Drawing: The Moderna Museet, Stockholm, SwedenAf Klint and Cassel seem to have had a complicated relationship. The best of friends in their 20sperhaps more than thatthey remained close throughout their lifetimes, even after tensions and disappointments, including a dispute about financing for af Klints studio. In her notebooks, af Klint recorded conversations with Cassel and other women in her spiritual orbit that she said took place after their deaths. She refused to let them go because they are karmically tied to one another, Almqvist said.One frosty fall afternoon, I visited Marie Cassel, Annas 72-year-old great-niece, a retired teacher and social worker who is now working with two friends on researching a book about her great-aunt. Marie laid out a generous spread of pork sausages and warm potato salad in her apartment in a Stockholm suburb. Anna Cassel was my grandfathers sister, she said. She died in 1937. I was born in 1952.Marie grew up hearing little about her great-aunt, picking up only a few fragments over the years. We knew she went to a royal academy, she said over lunch. And my aunts told me she had financed Hilmas work. And maybe they were lovers.She long wondered about Cassels life as an artist, and after seeing af Klints breakout show at the Moderna Museet, Marie said, she became convinced Cassel had played a role in the work. How likely was it that Hilma painted 1,000-something paintings and Anna stood and stared? she said. As af Klints fame grew, uncovering Cassels story became an obsession. And the more Marie learned, the more she wondered about other members of their spiritual group. Their stories had vanished, too. Im not angry with Hilma af Klint, she told me. I want the truth. And isnt it more interesting if we say the work was a group work? Kurt Almqvist, an independent scholar and book publisher, who discovered Cassels journals four years ago. Hes now working on a book about af Klint and Cassel. sa SjstrmMarie enlisted her ex-husband, an especially resourceful librarian, to help track down living relatives of the other women in the Five. They reached a descendant of Hedman, the medium. She inherited a stash of journals, she said, but is too spooked to share them. We understood she was afraid of the spirits, Marie said. They also found great-nieces of the sisters Mathilda Nilsson and Cornelia CederbergKerstin Friberger, 91, and Birgit Lamke, 85, who are also sisters.After lunch at Maries place, we drove a short distance to meet the sisters at Fribergers home. When Marie first reached out to them, she hoped theyd have more details, maybe even letters or journals, to share, but Friberger and Lamke had nothing. They hadnt even known of their relatives connection to af Klint. It was you who made us aware, Friberger said, a glass of white wine in her hand, looking over at her sister. Now, in old age, theyve started reading up on their ancestors. In the central library in Stockholm, they found copies of an esoteric magazine, Afterwards: Journal of Spiritism and Related Topics, which Nilsson had run, as editor and contributor, more than 100 years ago.By 1909, the Five had dissolved. The first 111 Paintings for the Temple, including the Ten Largest, were finished by then. Of the original group, only Cassel remained. Af Klint was collecting new disciples as she dove into Steiners writing and lectures. She took a four-year break from the Paintings for the Temple before completing the cycle in 1915. A few years later, she left Stockholm for Munso.I drove west to Munso on a rain-soaked Sunday morning with Johan af Klint and his niece Hedvig Ersman. To reach the island, a sprawling expanse of horse and cattle farms, we passed the Swedish royal residence at Drottningholm Palace, but I was most interested to see the lonely spot on the waterfront where af Klint built a studio in 1917, on a patch of wooded land owned by the family of a wealthy friend named Emilia Giertta, another member of her circle. Af Klint envisioned a residential community there, a sort of commune where she and her friends might live and work. The second in af Klints 14-painting Dove series, from 1915, which explored themes of divinity and cosmic harmony. Other Dove works include planets and astrological symbols. IanDagnall Computing / AlamyOn Munso af Klint began a new project, a close study of the natural world. First I will attempt to understand the flowers of the earth, she wrote in her notebooks. Finally, I will penetrate the forest, exploring the silent mosses, the trees and the many animals that inhabit the cool, dark undergrowth.The botanical drawings purchased by MoMA in 2022 appear to be part of that project, a botanical atlas, as Hauptman, the MoMA curator, describes it, that af Klint never completed. She had planned to build on ideas from Steiner, who devised the principles of biodynamic farming, a holistic system of crop production tied to the phases of the moon. In New York, Hauptman told me that for af Klint this study was tied to her larger spiritual project. This idea that the close observation of the natural world will yield information on the human condition, that you can look at that birch tree and if you really observe it, you can learn something about your own selfSteiner talks about some of that.Beginning in 1919, drawing in the blooming months, af Klint completed a cycle of work focused on the plant life around her. But the project never went beyond that, and in 1922, when af Klint turned 60, she moved in a new artistic direction, embracing a wet-on-wet style of watercolor painting she would continue to practice through the end of her life. She also devoted considerable time and energy to finding a home for her 193 Paintings for the Temple. She began spending extended periods of time in Switzerland, visiting the Anthroposophical Society headquarters in Dornach, hoping to convince Steiner to take them. In 1924, she wrote him a curt letter. Should the paintings executed by me between 1906 and 1920, of which you, Doctor, once saw several, be destroyed, or can they be used somewhere? Hedvig Martin, an art historian at the University of Amsterdam, argues that a number of women joined af Klint in painting works attributed to her, including some of the best-known. sa SjstrmSteiner advised her to hold on to the works. She spent the next 20 years working, in vain, to find a permanent home for them, and eventually came to believe the world was not quite ready for them. (In her notebooks, she called them paintings for the future.) Finally, in 1943, she received an offer from the Sigtuna Foundation, a Protestant organization, to build her a museum. She declined. Putting the work one day in the hands of people who do not have an Anthroposophical outlook might be problematic, she wrote.The following year, in October 1944, af Klint stepped off a streetcar in Stockholm. She tried to steady herself but faltered and fell, banging her head and bruising her arm. Weeks later, just shy of her 82nd birthday, she succumbed to her injuries. Much of her art was stashed in the studio on Munso, on property now owned by Gierttas son. He gave the elder Erik af Klint three months to clear everything out before he leveled the building.This was a new generation, with new ideas, Johan said, as we drove out toward the forest clearing where af Klints wood-framed studio had stood. The building was gone, but the stone villa where af Klint slept remained. Ersman, an architect, dreams of rebuilding the studio. It looked like an American barn, she said. The site is already a stop on an af Klint-themed tour shes led through the region.Below us, the road dead-ended at the waters edge, and we joined a line of cars awaiting the ferry across the strait to neighboring Adelso, where the af Klint family once owned vast stretches of pastoral farmland. After spending childhood summers there, af Klint returned later in life with her pencils and brushes. In her naturalistic paintings you can see where she was, Johan said as we drove off the ferry and passed under a tunnel of pine trees. You recognize the views. Ersman said, Hilma was living in a city always, but she was, all her life from childhood until the last year of her life, coming out here. On these lands she developed her sensibility to life, to botany, to birds. In her art, she was carrying these places with her always and coming back to them. A cultural center in Jarna, Sweden, where for years the Anthroposophical Society stored af Klints works in the basement. Cassels journals were found there in a storage cubby. sa SjstrmFour years ago, Ersman helped a friend, Anna Maria Bernitz, an art historian, organize the first af Klint tour herea Hilma af Klint Safari, they called it. They led a caravan of cars filled with af Klint groupies from the studio site on Munso onto the ring road around Adelso, past the former af Klint family estates at Hanmora and Tofta (sold off long ago), the Viking burial mounds, and the 12th-century church with the af Klint family plot.Hilma af Klint herself is buried elsewhere, interred with her parents in a small naval graveyard behind the maritime-themed Vasa Museum in Stockholm. The modest gravestone bears not Hilmas name but her fathers: Commander Victor af Klint Family Grave, it reads. There are no markings at all to indicate that Hilma af Klint lies there. In fact, youll find no public memorials anywhere in Sweden to her life and work, no commemorative statue or plaque, neither in Stockholm nor on the islands where she found inspiration.Last spring, Ersmans tours got a permanent home, taking over a historic rectory. She plans to open the building this summer as the Hilma af Klint Center Adelsopart cultural center, part artist residency. It wont be the temple af Klint dreamed of for her art, but it will be something. A lot of people come to Stockholm and wonder, Where do I go to see Hilma af Klint? Ersman said. At the moment there is no place.Get the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.Filed Under: Art, Art History, Artists, Painters, Painting,

Nintendo announces new lending feature for digital gamesDigital games will become Virtual Game Cards, can be lended to Nintendo Account family group membersImage credit: Nintendo News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on March 28, 2025 Nintendo has announced a new feature for the Switch and Switch 2 changing digital games to Virtual Game Cards.Set to launch in late April, users will be able to digitally eject and load games between two systems, and lend titles to Nintendo Account family group members as they would with physical game cards.Virtual Game Cards will be designated to a dedicated management screen, where users can load, eject, and manage which cards can be played on the system.It also allows digital games to be shared across two devices linked to the same Nintendo account.Local communication is required for the first time this feature is used, but after this step users will be able to pre-load and arrange which games are available to play on both systems.Lending games is achieved through a local wireless connection, enabling family members to play the game on their own system.Only one game can be borrowed at a time for a total of two weeks. Once that period ends, the game will automatically be sent back to the original owner.Save data will remain on the borrower's account, which can be accessed if they borrow again or purchase the game.

Nintendo launches Nintendo Today app on smart devicesFirm will use app to provide news and updates directly to consumersImage credit: Nintendo News by Sophie McEvoy Staff Writer Published on March 28, 2025 Nintendo has launched a new app for smart devices focused on bringing news and updates directly to consumers.The Nintendo Today app, announced during a Nintendo Direct broadcast yesterday, features a calendar providing daily updates about the firm's games, franchises, Directs, and in-game events.These features will be personalised to users, and the app will also provide updates about the upcoming Switch 2.The app is free to download from Apple's App Store and Google Play. A Nintendo account is required for consumers to use the app.Nintendo Today can be displayed on home screens with related widgets, and will also include comics and wallpapers from featured Nintendo games.