The Nation July 11/18, 2022

THE SYSTEM WORKED; THE GUARDRAILS HELD. EXCEPT THEY ALMOST DIDN’T. BUT thanks to a cadre of white Republican men, we still live in a free country. That was the ultimate message of the first three days of the January 6 Committee hearings. I know: The decision to rely on former Trump Republicans was a calculated one. And I am vastly underselling these hearings, on one level. We got photos, videos, and devastating testimony we hadn’t seen or heard before. Clearly, the guardrails almost failed. The testimony of Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards—“I was slipping in people’s blood”—will stay with me forever. President Donald Trump, who would soon be impeached for the second time, “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” in the words of…

IN RECENT WEEKS, AN UNLIKELY DRAMA HAS UNFOLDED in the media. The center of this drama isn’t a celebrity or a politician, but a sprawling computational system, created by Google, called LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). A Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, was suspended for declaring on Medium that LaMDA, which he interacted with via text, was “sentient.” This declaration (and a subsequent Washington Post article) sparked a debate between people who think Lemoine is merely stating an obvious truth—that machines can now, or soon will, show the qualities of intelligence, autonomy, and sentience—and those who reject this claim as naive at best and deliberate misinformation at worst. Before explaining why I think those who oppose the sentience narrative are right, and why that narrative serves the power interests of…

Lieutenant governors are like airbags: designed to be ignored except in the case of a crash. Perhaps that’s why so little attention has been paid to the contest that will take place on June 28, when New York’s Democratic voters will pick a nominee (which in this state usually means the eventual winner). That’s a shame—and not just because New York governors seem unusually crash-prone. (Incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul was herself deployed after Andrew Cuomo’s career as a serial sex pest finally caught up with him; Cuomo’s predecessor, David Paterson, took office after Eliot Spitzer resigned during a prostitution scandal). At least 11 of the state’s lieutenant governors have moved up, including Herbert Lehman (after Franklin Roosevelt became president) and Mario Cuomo. New York is also one of just six…

3,000 Number of pregnant people in prison Eleven states allow shackling during labor: Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Wisconsin, Wyoming It’s time for every state to end this cruel practice.…

WHEN ELIZABETH WARREN RECENTLY STUMPED IN Wisconsin for the progressive US Senate candidate Mandela Barnes, she reminded crowds that Barnes is not a billionaire who can “just write a check” to pay for his campaign. The Massachusetts senator was picking up on a major theme for Wisconsin’s 35-year-old lieutenant governor in his bid for the Democratic nomination, in one of the highest-profile Senate races of 2022. With Warren at his side, Barnes told supporters in Madison, “I don’t have millions and personal wealth.” Unlike a pair of wealthy rivals in the August 9 Democratic primary—Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry and Wisconsin State Treasurer Sarah Godlewski—and the Republican incumbent, Ron Johnson, Barnes can’t fund his own campaign. Raised in one of Milwaukee’s most economically depressed neighborhoods, he is the son of…

IN NOVEMBER OF LAST YEAR, I FROZE 16 EGGS. I HAD met the man I now plan to marry a few months earlier, but if the relationship hadn’t worked out, I was prepared to become a solo parent. I was tired of feeling like I’d fucked up by failing to find a suitable romantic partner during my peak childbearing years. The women of my generation have more education and workforce participation (pre-pandemic) than at any time in history, but none of the social affirmation or infrastructure to support our ambitions. Even the heterosexual millennial men who are our peers aren’t necessarily interested in a financially or professionally successful partner if she doesn’t put his career first. And I wasn’t terribly interested in doing that. The prime reason women elect to…