More so than simple awareness, sentience can be defined as the ability to feel feelings, to be moved and driven by those feelings and, importantly, to be aware of others and their feelings. It’s possible that LaMDA met that last criterion (it seemed to know that it was speaking to a specific Google engineer), but whether it’s able to feel emotions is contested, to say the least. LaMDA was only doing what it was taught to do, make calculations to put a sequence of words together to form a response. Besides, it’s not the only AI of its kind with these types of capabilities.

It is also difficult to enforce this law with Supreme Court justices, since there is no higher judicial body in the country that can review the justices’ actions. Congress could pursue impeachment of a justice for violating this law. But, as is the case for other government officials, if the House of Representatives votes to impeach a justice, removal from office still requires a two-thirds Senate vote – a very tall order.

During Nixon’s reelection bid in 1972, Martha Mitchell made multiple statements to the press about the underhanded tactics used by his reelection committee. She made waves because women in politics were discouraged from being outspoken, especially in front of the press. When the Watergate story broke, she wasn’t shy about criticizing Nixon and those close to him. The documentary does a good job of showing the viewer the kind of person Mitchell was. She was an animated character in the dry, boring world of humdrum politics. 

While West and Cohen’s documentary never discusses Highland Park, Uvalde, or any of the other 3,800 mass shootings, it is undoubtedly about them. Their anger is palpable, yet the documentary wisely chooses not to dedicate much of its runtime to the January 8 shooting, instead opting to focus on Giffords’ recovery, her family, and activism against gun violence.

A steady stream of mourners visited the scene of former Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe's assassination in the western city of Nara on Saturday as a motorcade carrying the late leader's body arrived in the capital, Tokyo. Japan's longest-serving modern leader was shot while making a campaign speech on Friday morning by a 41-year-old man, in a deed decried by the political establishment as an attack on democracy itself.

Will these remakes continue to feel like repackaged nostalgia? Almost certainly, and that’s the point. They’re meant to be consumed as nostalgia, and because that works so well with the current base of Millennial consumers, they will be successful. The Y2K bug is still going strong now, and there’s no end point in sight, because of the sheer amount of content that is now being produced and repurposed and that will, eventually but inevitably, be remade for a nostalgic audience.

There is also growing momentum for some states to make it easier to get an abortion, by allocating taxpayer funding for abortion services, for example, or mandating insurance coverage with no additional cost. In recent years some states, such as Maine, Illinois and Virginia, have changed their laws to allow medical professionals who are not doctors, like nurses, to perform surgical abortions. Eight states, including California, New York and Washington, have laws that guarantee the right to get an abortion.

This desire for quality products from accountable businesses cuts across industries, with brands from the fashion and food sectors to those in technology and transportation showing it is possible to do things differently. More than ever, brand communications are revealing the authenticity, transparency and integrity that are essential ingredients to today's conscious consumers. One way to verify that a brand operates responsibly is through a trusted third-party certification, like the nonprofit B Lab’s B Corp Certification.

The Democratic Unionist Party, the largest party representing the Unionist community, who want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, is refusing to enter the assembly because of the standoff over the part of the Brexit Agreement known as the Northern Ireland protocol. This has left Northern Ireland subject to some European Union trade regulations, to avoid the reintroduction of a hard border between the North, which is part of the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the EU.

In fact, Americans question whether dialogue with other Americans, a necessity for the cultivation of social capital, is even worth their time. In 2020, Bahman Fozouni, a professor emeritus in the Political Science Department at California State University, Sacramento, asked, “Should we find ourselves in the company of the Trumpies, does it make sense to engage them in a political conversation?” A year earlier, filmmaker Michael Moore argued that liberals have “all tried at Thanksgiving dinner to convince the conservative brother-in-law of the wrongness of his ways, but he’s three years deep into pro-Trump. He’s lost."