The text explores ‘Black Box Music,’ an artistic research experiment investigating human–technology relations in musical improvisation. The authors describe performances in which each musician plays an unfamiliar, complex, custom-built instrument designed by another team member. These ‘black box’ devices – ranging from AI-based systems to assemblages of analogue devices – cannot be fully understood or controlled, thus foregrounding questions of agency, sense-making, and aesthetic experience. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, phenomenology, and philosophies of technology, the authors show how performers, instruments, and audience form a dynamic network of actants whose roles and intentions remain ambiguous. Players initially struggle to ‘read’ the instruments’ behaviour, shifting from reactive analysis toward proactive improvisation. This process blurs embodiment and alterity: the instruments alternately function as transparent extensions of the body and as quasi-autonomous others. Such ambiguity invites anthropomorphisation and even ritualised interaction, echoing historical entanglements of music, magic, and spirituality. Audience members, too, encounter indeterminate agency and must negotiate aesthetic meaning without clear attribution of sound to human or machine. The project demonstrates how complexity and unpredictability destabilise traditional notions of control, revealing improvisation as collective, participatory sense-making and highlighting the emergent, co-creative agency of both humans and technological instruments.

Automation anxiety is reshaping British game development at a moment when generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is being positioned as both creative catalyst and labour-displacing threat. Grounded in anthropology and in dialogue with social theory and memory studies, we examine how developers experience ‘life on the edge of time’ in a sector tasked with future-making amid intersecting constraints and expectations. Through ethnographic vignettes, we contend that anxiety operates as a temporal orientation, one that is fundamentally polytemporal: a condition that folds together industry memories of past technological surges, intensifies present pressures, and animates competing projections of what comes next. We show how automation anxiety exceeds individual experience to function as a collective, industry-wide condition, revealing how industry memory operates as both repetition and interpretive resource in moments of technological upheaval. By situating automation anxiety at the intersection of media rhetoric, collective memory, and technological innovation, this article advances a sociocultural account of anxiety as a polytemporal orientation capable of both constraining and catalysing possible futures.

Regional-scale glacier mass-balance (MB) estimates are essential for understanding the impacts of climate change on alpine hydrology but remain challenging to obtain. Remotely sensed phenology metrics, such as the cumulative melting index (CMI) derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, are increasingly used for MB estimation; however, the strength of this relationship varies across glaciers. This study analyzes the relationship between the MODIS-derived CMI and glacier annual MB across 88 alpine glaciers globally and investigates sources of variability. By standardizing CMI values, we reduce interglacier variability in CMI–MB relationship. Principal component analysis (PCA) and Gaussian mixture model are employed to classify glaciers into six climate-based clusters. Cluster-specific linear regression models improve MB estimation accuracy. When glacier predictions from the cluster-specific models are combined across all 88 glaciers worldwide, the overall root-mean-square error is 511.0 mm w.e., compared with 571.4 mm w.e. using a single regression model. Applied to 616 glaciers in the European Alps, the model estimates a 20 year (2002–21) annual average mass loss of −981.9 ± 11 mm w.e. a−1. These findings highlight the potential of MODIS-derived phenology metrics for scalable glacier MB estimation and emphasize the influence of regional climatic controls on glacier sensitivity to climate variability.

This article analyzes variation in and metalinguistic commentary surrounding the primary stressed vowel of the place-name ‘Chicago’. Sociolinguistic interview data with fifty-six lifelong Chicagoans from two adjacent neighborhoods reveal both social variation and apparent time evolution in the phonetic manifestation and phonemic patterning of the CHICAGO vowel. Contrastive metalinguistic ideologies substantiate this variation, as different speakers map ‘authentic’ versus ‘inauthentic’ Chicagoness to opposite phonemic variants. While previous work on place-names proposed linkages between place identity and linguistic material that can articulate stances toward geographic areas, we document inverted semiotic mappings among residents who otherwise share the same positive orientation to their neighborhood. We draw upon locally constructed chronotopes to account for the inverse polarization characterizing the CHICAGO vowel. We ultimately argue for dynamic conceptions of place-based linguistic features that attend more closely to the ideologically productive nature of local identity. (Authenticity, place, race, sociolinguistic variation, differentiation, chronotope)

Faith-sensitive depression therapies address a core aspect of cultural values but are not specifically promoted within global mental health policy. This study evaluated a culturally adapted Behavioural Activation intervention for Muslim patients (BA-M) compared with standard treatments across diverse settings. A patient-level meta-analysis combined data from two randomised controlled trials and one feasibility trial, comparing BA-M with cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) and, in the UK, social interventions. The primary outcome was post-treatment depression severity (PHQ-9) and retention was analysed using Poisson regression alongside qualitative evaluation. A total of 266 participants were recruited (Turkey: 22; Pakistan: 103; UK: 141), with no baseline differences in depression severity between groups. BA-M produced significantly greater reductions in PHQ-9 scores, with an adjusted mean difference of −2.72 (95% CI: −3.93 to −1.51). Engagement was also higher in BA-M (IRR: 1.30; 95% CI: 1.18–1.44). Qualitative findings (n = 66) indicated strong support among patients, therapists and service managers, highlighting increased patient motivation and engagement in both Muslim majority and minority contexts. Participants emphasised the importance of religious identity in recovery from depression. The faith-adapted therapy BA-M demonstrates superior effectiveness to CBT and social interventions, supporting the integration of faith-sensitive approaches into global mental health practice.