These sentence pairs will serve as a means to evaluate machines' commonsense reasoning abilities under different extra-linguistic contexts.

A.1 Deriving the Optimum of the KL-Constrained Reward Maximization Objective In this appendix, we will derive Eq. 4. Analogously to Eq. 3, we optimize the following objective: max

In the United States, health insurance is a critical component of individuals' ability to access health care.

The rules-based world order no longer exists, the German Chancellor has warned at a major security summit. Opening the annual Munich Security Conference, Friedrich Merz told other world leaders that our freedom is not guaranteed in an era of big power politics, and that Europeans must be ready to make sacrifice. He also admitted that a deep divide has opened between Europe and the United States. The conference is taking place on the backdrop of US President Donald Trump threatening Denmark's sovereignty over Greenland by pledging to annex the Arctic territory and his tariffs on imports from European nations. US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who was listening to Merz and will deliver his own speech on Saturday, earlier spoke of a new era in geopolitics.

AI regulation requires harmonization between state and federal approaches, but fragmented policies risk undermining US competitive advantage in this critical technology.

This story appears in the March 2026 print edition. While some stories from this issue are not yet available to read online, you can explore more from the magazine . Get our editors' guide to what matters in the world, delivered to your inbox every weekday. America Isn't Ready for What AI Will Do to Jobs Does anyone have a plan for what happens next? In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting. The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. They were operating at speeds that the human body--an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes--simply wasn't built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there's a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things. Still, the machines pressed on. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. So Massachusetts created the nation's first Bureau of Statistics of Labor, hoping that data might accomplish what conscience could not. By measuring work hours, conditions, wages, and what economists now call "negative externalities" but were then called "children's arms torn off," policy makers figured they might be able to produce reasonably fair outcomes for everyone. A few years later, with federal troops shooting at striking railroad workers and wealthy citizens funding private armories--leading indicators that things in your society aren't going great--Congress decided that this idea might be worth trying at scale and created the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Measurement doesn't abolish injustice; it rarely even settles arguments. But the act of counting--of trying to see clearly, of committing the government to a shared set of facts--signals an intention to be fair, or at least to be caught trying. It's one way a republic earns the right to be believed in. The BLS remains a small miracle of civilization.

The people of Venezuela have spent years learning resilience in the face of censorship, disinformation, and repression. They now rely on those tools more than ever. In the early morning hours of Saturday, January 3, the roar of bombs dropping from the sky announced the US military attack on Venezuela, waking the sleeping residents of La Carlota, in Caracas, a neighborhood adjacent to the air base that was a target of Operation Absolute Resolve. Marina G.'s first thought, as the floors, walls, and windows of her second-story apartment shook, was that it was an earthquake. Her cat scrambled and hid for hours, while the neighbors' dogs began to bark incessantly.

The Doomsday Clock Is Now 85 Seconds to Midnight. Catastrophic risks are increasing, cooperation is declining, and swift action is needed from global leaders to correct course. The Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than ever. The Doomsday Clock has just been set to 85 seconds to midnight. Nearly 80 years after its creation, this time represents the closest the clock has ever been to midnight.

Two important things happened on January 20, 2025. In Washington, D.C., Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. In Hangzhou, China, a little-known Chinese firm called DeepSeek released R1, an AI model that industry watchers called a "Sputnik moment" for the country's AI industry. "Whether we like it or not, we're suddenly engaged in a fast-paced competition to build and define this groundbreaking technology that will determine so much about the future of civilization," said Trump later that year, as he announced his administration's AI action plan, which was titled "Winning the Race." There are many interpretations of what AI companies and their governments are racing towards, says AI policy researcher Lennart Heim: to deploy AI systems in the economy, to build robots, to create human-like artificial general intelligence.

Google DeepMind Staffers Ask Leaders to Keep Them'Physically Safe' From ICE A federal agent allegedly tried to enter Google's Cambridge campus in the fall, WIRED has learned. Now, staffers want policies that protect them from immigration officials. Employees at Google DeepMind have asked the company's leadership for plans and policies to keep them "physically safe" from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) while on the company's premises, according to screenshots of internal messages obtained by WIRED. On Monday morning, two days after federal agents shot and killed Minneapolis nurse Alex Pretti, a Google DeepMind employee sent the following message in an internal message board for the company's roughly 3,000-person AI unit: "US focused question: What is GDM doing to keep us physically safe from ICE? The events of the past week have shown that immigration status, citizenship, or even the law is not a deterrent against detention, violence, or even death from federal operatives."