There is no doubt that we are now in the midst of an AI-driven revolution in how organisations and their employees work with information. The power of recent GenAI and other deep learning technologies to absorb and process massive amounts of data as well as generate new information in response to natural language prompts has obvious implications for knowledge work. The current developments in more autonomous agentic AI systems alongside the commodification of large language models (LLMs) and reduced barriers to entry for application developers will drive a second wave of innovation over the coming five years. This will cause disruption for many organisations and the workers within them, but such changes seem inevitable. Preparing now to work with these technologies and the opportunities they present as well as mitigate the problems they bring is essential. The opportunities for many information professionals are significant as effectively managing data assets holds the key to competitive advantage in this rapidly changing environment. Here Dr Martin De Saulles, a technology analyst and writer (see page 123 for a review on his new book The AI and Data Revolution: Understanding the New Data Landscape), goes through some of the key points relating to the evolution of AI in relation to those who work with information.

For Chinese Generation Z fans, the reperformances of musical theatre have empowered them to realize self-transformation while performing in public—without the constraints of formal physical training or special creative ability. By reperforming musicals with the themes of idealism and revolution, these youth re-create song-and-dance gestures as a rite of passage in everyday life, striving for individual idealized identities while playing disciplined social roles under the control of official ideology.

The Global Health Security Agenda (GHSA) provides a foundation in global health law to support legal preparedness across nations. This column examines the legal authorities necessary to meet the objectives of the GHSA Legal Preparedness Action Package and advance national law reforms to prevent, detect, and respond to public health emergencies.

In recent years, there has been increased interest in a variety of ways that private actors, especially actors in the business world, broadly understood, can contribute to addressing important social problems and persistent injustices. In this essay, I aim to articulate and begin to answer what seem to me to be some of the most important and challenging normative questions arising with regard to social entrepreneurship as a mode of economic activity aimed at addressing social problems or promoting justice. I focus on questions about the relationship between the pursuit of social entrepreneurial activity, the satisfaction of obligations to promote justice, and claims to income and wealth produced by successful social entrepreneurial ventures. I argue that there are reasons to think that social entrepreneurial activity can be a way that individuals (attempt to) satisfy at least some of their obligations of justice, but note that there are moral risks involved in attempting to satisfy these obligations in this way. And I suggest that there are at least some reasons, including recognition of the grounds on which we might sometimes prefer that people in a position to take these risks do so, to think that only those who accept broader moral views that are very demanding can consistently deny that social entrepreneurs who successfully generate substantial profits are morally entitled to retain them.

This article, written by Catherine Parkin, Academic Librarian for Law, Leeds Beckett University, provides an overview of library anxiety, with specific reference to how this might manifest itself amongst law students in UK higher education. The article is a preliminary exploration intended to stimulate dialogue. It discusses several measures in place at Leeds Beckett University which could potentially alleviate library anxiety amongst students and suggests other possible solutions and areas for further research.

How can an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism be refashioned into a tool for building Soviet internationalism? This article tells the story of the bandura—the musical instrument constructed in the nineteenth century as an icon of romantic Ukrainian nationalism—and its fraught integration into the culture of Young Pioneers in early Soviet Ukraine. Focused on the shift in cultural policy from Leninist korenizastiia to Stalinist socialist realism, this article examines how the emancipatory and universalizing claims of Soviet internationalism became premised on Russified culture that inhibited the possibility of non-Russians’ full assimilation into the project of Soviet revolution. In the hands of Young Pioneers, who were appointed as Soviet “revolutionary agents” and as targets of the state’s pastoral care (“Stalin’s flowers”), the bandura became a particularly vexed symbol, epitomizing the irreconcilable tensions and the apparently inevitable violence inherent to nationalities policies in Soviet Ukraine. Following the intergenerational saga of a family of bandurists, the article shows how the disciplining technologies of Soviet musical-political education yielded often unexpected results.

In his paper “Moral Permissibility and Desert in the Therapy-Enhancement Distinction,” Ozan Gurcan takes a fresh look at the therapy-enhancement distinction and argues that, while the distinction does not establish rigid moral boundaries, it nevertheless serves an important purpose because it differentiates between interventions that are, generally speaking, owed to individuals as a matter of justice (i.e., therapies) and those that are not (i.e., enhancements). Because therapies help to promote justice in society, therapies are always permitted and, in many cases required, whereas enhancements may be, at best, permitted. In this commentary, I argue that we would be concerned about the morality of genetic enhancements even if they did not raise issues of social justice and I propose that other key moral ideas, such as the concept of human nature, may also be important in establishing the boundary between therapy and enhancement.