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CHATGPT HAS THROWN higher education into tumult. Universities were already using artificial intelligence technology for their own daily business: to remind students to pay off tuition balances, to answer questions about campus life, or even to check students’ work for plagiarism. But ChatGPT, an AI chatbot released to the general public last November, has turned the tables. Now a student can recruit it to generate a passable paper on just about any topic in seconds. Feminism in Virginia Woolf’s fiction? No problem. The heroic code in “Beowulf”? Done. The potential for cheating becomes immense.

Some universities, like Sciences Po in France, have banned ChatGPT for classwork, unless students have permission from instructors. Open Universities of Australia has offered students guidelines for using ChatGPT ethically. The University of Toronto advises instructors to specify which digital tools are allowed for assignments but warns the instructors against using unapproved AI tools to evaluate student work. Perhaps they read the tweets joking that teachers will soon use AI to come up with assignments, students will use AI to do them, and AI will grade the result—at which point everyone can leave education to the bots and go for coffee.

Not all educators are worried. “Students today need to be prepared for a future in which writing with AI is already becoming essential,” writes Lucinda McKnight for Times Higher Education. She also suggests various ways to integrate AI into the classroom. Students can use the technology to do basic research, she proposes, or they can analyze and compare the text produced on a given topic by different AI writers. They can even use programs such as Google’s Verse by Verse to turn out randomized poems—to what end remains a mystery.

For all the opportunities ChatGPT might bring, its greatest threat right now is to the teaching of writing. There are other ways to assess students’ knowledge: oral exams, multiple-choice tests, handwritten answers. So what is the university paper for? If students can use a chatbot to produce a draft in seconds, why have them write anything at all?

ON MAY 2, a draft opinion of the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade—thus permitting states to outlaw abortion—was leaked. Social media immediately filled with posts about the impact of this new reality. These concerns included the safety of our digital data. Users who had downloaded period-tracking apps on their phones were urged to delete them. The most popular of these apps—Flo, based in the UK, and Clue, created in Berlin—are free to download and track not only your next period but also your most fertile days of the month. In fact, depending on the information entered, the apps can predict the intensity of your menstrual flow, even your specific PMS symptoms. The fear is that such apps can also reveal when you’ve missed a period—effectively pointing to a possible pregnancy. In a post-Roe world, app users were worried their personal cycle information could be used to prosecute them. This fear is based in fact. Even before Roe was overturned, browser history was vulnerable to investigation. When, in 2017, a Mississippi woman experienced an almost-full-term stillbirth at home, prosecutors used the search history on her phone as part of their pregnancy termination case against her—and a grand jury indicted her for second-degree murder. (The case was dropped three years later.)

MANY CANADIANS AVOID sperm banks altogether, says Cohen, often because they can’t find a match through ReproMed or other banks. But this approach—when it involves strangers—comes with hefty risks.

Tanisha Lepine of Oshawa, who is white, was searching for a Black donor because she wants her children to look like her wife, who is Black. “I never want anyone to question my wife,” says Lepine, “or think she’s the nanny.”

Lepine and her wife wanted to use imported US sperm but found it too expensive. It was going to cost roughly $6,000 for three vials from a Black donor in the US, in addition to fertility-clinic fees. “I don’t have almost ten grand sitting around waiting when I’m trying to start a family,” she says.

Lepine found a free Canadian donor through a Facebook community and was able to inseminate herself at home using a disposable, needleless syringe—known colloquially as the turkey baster method.

This pandemic can help us prepare for the next one, says Catherine Hankins, co-chair of Canada’s COVID-19 Immunity Task Force It’s been said that SARS-CoV-2 is just the beginning of the new war on viruses. What do you think the future has in store? Researchers are looking into whether some people have a reduced susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. Could this explain why some have never been infected with it? What can genetic research poten­tially teach us about preventing or fighting infectious diseases in the future?

THE FIRST TIME I remember seeing a mansion, I was headed to the Assiniboine Park Zoo in Winnipeg with a friend assigned to me by a charity that paired adults with poor kids whose parents needed a break. I turned to this nice middle-class woman, who patiently tolerated my endless questions, and asked how many families lived in the giant houses we were passing. Their lawns could practically fit the entire government-run townhouse complex where I lived.

She laughed and said, “Just one.” And we both fell silent for a while as we took in what that meant.

EARLY ON THE MORNING of January 28, 2022, around twenty large vehicles came to be parked in front of the provincial legislature in Winnipeg. Dozens more would later join them for what would be a three-week-long occupation. The rows of semitrucks, tractors, and cars formed a dense and noisy cluster that stood in solidarity with a nationwide protest decrying vaccine mandates and pandemic lockdown rules—and the demonstrations seemed to stump police agencies in Winnipeg, Ottawa, and other major urban centres.

Police in Winnipeg faced competing demands from a broad range of community voices. Those in support of the convoy asserted their right to peaceful protest. Others accused officers of being soft on the protesters and demanded a harsher, faster response to the community disruption. Some questioned whether the police service’s approach would have been the same if the convoy hadn’t mostly been composed of white people. Across the country, others drew comparisons between the police’s response to the protests and their violence against members of Indigenous communities in prior incidents. The public’s trust in police, already dwindling in Manitoba for a few years, dropped across the country. Police had their backs against the wall, and their public relations teams felt the heat.

In the midst of it all, Winnipeg Police Service chief Danny Smyth green-lit something unconventional.

How a First Nation Rallied Against the Foster Care System - A six-year-old Gitxsan girl was removed from her community in northern British Columbia. The community brought her back

It was pulled from the market almost immediately after it was developed in 1998. Twenty-five years later, the painful disease is on the rise