The Week Magazine April 7, 2023

The shooter blasted through the glass doors of the Covenant School with an assault rifle and stepped past the broken glass. Dressed in military camo and armed with three guns, Audrey Hale, 28, began hunting the hallways for little boys and girls, swinging the semiautomatic rifle in a circle like a soldier searching for the enemy. Like nearly all mass shooters, Hale—who apparently identified as transgender—was declaring war on a world that had been indifferent to the killer’s suffering. To inflict maximum casualties, the shooter chose assault-style weapons, which rapidly fire high-velocity bullets that inflict horrific wounds. Over the past decade, nearly 60 percent of the deadliest mass shootings have been carried out with assault rifles. Not only do they run up the body count like a video game, AR-15s…

What happened Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was forced to “suspend” a bitterly contested plan to overhaul the country’s judiciary this week, after a massive civil uprising that brought the nation to a standstill. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis took to the streets after Netanyahu fired Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for calling for a pause in the plan, which would give Netanyahu’s right-wing government unprecedented control over the Supreme Court’s makeup and limit its authority. Tens of thousands of demonstrators waving blue-and-white Israeli flags gathered outside the parliament; schools, banks, and malls were shuttered; and Tel Aviv’s airport and main highway shut down. “This is the last chance to stop this move into a dictatorship,” said Matityahu Sperber, 68, who joined the throngs outside the Knesset, or parliament. Facing a…

What happened President Biden this week renewed his call for Congress to ban assault weapons in the wake of a school shooting in Nashville that killed six people, including three 9-year-olds. “As a nation, we owe these families more than our prayers,” Biden said. “We owe them action.” Republicans said further changes to gun laws were a nonstarter, noting that Congress already passed a bipartisan law strengthening background checks last year, after the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting. “I would say we’ve gone about as far as we can go,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who helped negotiate that bill. The Nashville shooter, identified by police as 28-year-old Audrey Elizabeth Hale, entered the Covenant School, a private Christian elementary school, armed with an AR-15–style rifle, a handgun, and a 9-mm…

Storm chaser Jonny Gabel was tracking a cyclone through the Mississippi Delta when he came upon the town of Rolling Fork just after it was leveled by the powerful tornado. He got out of his car and began rescuing trapped residents, including one family miraculously unharmed in their home’s collapse. Gabel, a professional carpenter, is now building a new home for the family, donating his own time and helping pay for the rest by raising donations. The 35-year-old calls the rebuilding “the most rewarding thing I’ve ever experienced.” A West African lioness that researchers have been studying for years suddenly disappeared—then was caught on camera in February with a new litter of three cubs. Florence, whom researchers affectionately call Flo, is the matriarch of the lions at Senegal’s Niokolo-Koba National…

Would anyone board a plane knowing that half of the engineers who built it gave it a 10 percent chance of crashing? If not, said Yuval Hariri, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin in The New York Times, why are we racing ahead with artificial intelligence? In a 2022 survey, half of 700 AI researchers surveyed put the odds of it causing “human extinction” at 10 percent or greater—and that was before the great leaps forward of Chat GPT-3.5 in November, and the even more dazzling and unsettling GPT-4 last month. In these “large language models” (LLM), “we have summoned an alien intelligence” that can digest every sentence, scientific study, image, song, and artwork that exists online and regurgitate it back to us in transmuted form. AI will soon be…

Good week for: Endless winter, after several key California ski resorts in the Sierra mountains announced that this year’s record-breaking snow accumulation of about 55 feet will let them stay open into June and perhaps as late as August. Previews, with the unveiling in Australia of a virtual-reality installation that gives users a simulated experience of dying of cardiac arrest and floating out of their bodies. If the simulation gets too intense, staff are on hand to “pull you out.” The transformative power of art, with the announcement by Ye, the anti-Semite formerly known as Kanye West, that watching Jonah Hill’s performance in the 2012 action-comedy 21 Jump Street “made me like Jewish people again.” Bad week for: Peanut butter, which was classified as a liquid by the Transportation Security…