Table of contents for October 21, 2019 in TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … HER CASE Molly Ball’s Oct. 14 profile of U.S. Senator Kamala Harris left readers divided on how far the California Democrat will go in the 2020 presidential race. Fred Wirtz of West Bend, Iowa, said the story convinced him Harris makes decisions based on hard data, a trait that would make her a “very good President.” Yet some Twitter users doubted her national appeal, with @Cramirez6868 describing California politics as “a world away from the rest of the U.S.” and @dayalra tweeting that Harris’ 15 minutes of fame had passed: “She began with so much promise, then seemed to enter a long slide.” But while acknowledging that Harris “may not be today’s front runner,” @KimberlyEmerson argued the Senator deserved to be on the cover…

IN A MAJOR SHIFT IN U.S. FOREIGN POLICY, President Donald Trump ordered troops to vacate part of northeast Syria on Oct. 6, making way for a Turkish military operation against the Kurdish forces that control the region. Defending his decision, Trump said it was “time for us to get out” and let others “figure the situation out.” But critics accused the President of abandoning the Kurds, U.S. allies whose forces were pivotal in the battle to defeat ISIS in Syria. REPUBLICAN REBELLION Lawmakers in Trump’s own party criticized the President’s unexpected move. “We have sent the most dangerous signal possible—America is an unreliable ally,” said Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close confidant of Trump’s. His fellow GOP Senators Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney highlighted the risks…

POWER DOWN King Mohammed VI of Morocco dramatically reduced his own constitutional powers in June 2011, in response to the Arab Spring uprisings. He transferred executive powers to the office of Prime Minister. LINE OF TAXATION In June 2013, Belgium’s royal family had their incomes slashed and began paying income taxes for the first time, after the dowager Queen Fabiola was accused of attempting to evade inheritance taxes. RANKING WOMEN Female members of the U.K.’s royal family now take precedence in the line of succession over younger males, following a change in legislation in March 2015. The law also allowed royals to marry Catholics.…

For most of our history, women’s absence from positions of power and influence wasn’t newsworthy; it was normal. That we’re now talking about these inequities is a sign of progress. But there is no reason to believe this moment will last forever. That’s why, over the next 10 years, I am committing $1 billion to expanding women’s power and influence in the U.S. My company, Pivotal Ventures, will focus on three priorities: dismantling the barriers to women’s professional advancement; fast-tracking women in sectors with outsize impact on our society, like technology, media and politics; and giving shareholders, consumers and employees the data required to put pressure on companies and organizations to change. Although $1 billion is a lot of money, it’s only a small fraction of what’s necessary. That’s why…

“I’M FASCINATED BY THE GRANDEUR, the pompousness, the overmuch,” says Kara Walker. That sensibility fueled the American artist’s latest creation, Fons Americanus—a 13-m-high fountain unveiled Sept. 30 in London’s Tate Modern museum. With a cast of characters and iconography reflecting the intertwined histories of Africa, Europe and America, Fons Americanus presents the brutality of slavery in a subversively joyful setting. Walker is known for her ambitious work across mediums interrogating race, sexuality, slavery and identity; her 2014 installation A Subtlety was housed in Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory, attracting over 130,000 visitors to the main giant-sphinx sculpture. Fons Americanus is Walker’s fourth site-specific work, and it references classical British artists such as J.M.W. Turner and William Blake, as well as African-American historical figures including Emmett Till and Marcus Garvey. The…

On Succession, your brother suggests that your media-mogul character, Logan Roy, is worse than Hitler for giving airtime to climate deniers. How important do you think the rise of certain media has been in fostering the current political moment? I think majorly important. Nowadays truth is way at the back of the class. You’re dealing with massive obfuscation on a global scale. It’s a dark time, and this show reflects that time. This is a question you should never ask a parent, but on Succession, which of his vermin prodigy does Logan Roy feel the most sympathy for? The thing is, and this is the truth, he loves all of his children. He really does. But he realizes in order for them to succeed, they have to develop a tougher…

Protests ahead of Bolivian election Hundreds of thousands of people marched in protest against left-wing Bolivian President Evo Morales, calling for a stronger response to recent forest fires in the country. With elections scheduled for Oct. 20, polls show Morales may be forced into a runoff vote against a right-wing rival. School districts sue Juul Three school districts across the U.S. sued Juul on Oct. 7, saying the e-cigarette maker marketed its devices to children and left districts with the resulting costs. Facing a public backlash over vaping health concerns, Juul’s CEO stepped down on Sept. 25, and the company suspended all U.S. advertising. U.S. diplomat’s wife flees U.K. after crash On Oct. 7, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for Anne Sacoolas, wife of a U.S. diplomat, to…

DIED Diahann Carroll Sophisticated star TODAY, WEARING GOWNS, JEWELS AND FURS HARDLY SEEMS like a radical act. But for Diahann Carroll, who died on Oct. 4 at 84, it was: in the early 1950s, when Carroll was just starting out as a nightclub singer, she cultivated an aura of elegance that endured for the rest of her life. At a time when images of African-American glamour were still relatively rare, Carroll stepped out with bravado, bringing confidence to others in the process. And with her boldness, Carroll—who made her film debut in Otto Preminger’s 1954 Carmen Jones—made the world pay attention. She was the first black actor to win a Tony for a leading role, for the 1962 musical No Strings. In 1974, she earned an Oscar nomination for…

U.K. Stormzy Ambassador for grime MIDMORNING IN A LEAFY SUBURB ON the outskirts of southwest London, and Stormzy is feeding Enzo. The 26-year-old rapper bought the Rottweiler a year ago, when soaring fame made personal security a necessity that a very big dog could address while also giving a new celebrity a chance at staying grounded. Michael Omari, better known as Stormzy, is one of Britain’s most successful musicians and an ambassador for grime, a genre of music that emerged from the streets of multicultural London in the early 2000s and that is characterized by frenetic urgency. In 2017, an academic from the University of Westminster said it was on track to be “as disruptive and powerful as punk.” The genre’s most famous songs hurtle by at 140 beats per…

IT’S STANDING ROOM ONLY IN EDDY’S KITCHEN, a tiny deli with mismatched floor tiles and laminated menus in North Plainfield, N.J., when Democratic Congressman Tom Malinowski begins explaining why he supports the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. “What is the difference between the United States of America and Russia? What is the difference between the United States of America and Venezuela?” he asks. American politicians, he says, “put their duty to their country, to their people first—ahead of their duty to themselves.” Trump, Malinowski charges, broke that pact when he asked the Ukrainian President in a July 25 phone call to do him a “favor” by investigating one of his political rivals: “Not ‘us, America’ a favor,” he says, “but ‘me’ a political favor.” As Washington gears up…

WHEN THE U.S. SUPREME COURT announced on Oct. 4 that it plans to take up its first abortion case since the appointment of two new conservative justices, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, the news gave some court watchers déjà vu. The case, June Medical Services, LLC v. Gee, is about a Louisiana law that requires doctors performing abortions to have admitting privileges at a nearby hospital. In 2016, the court reversed a Texas case involving admitting privileges in a 5-3 decision, saying reducing the pool of doctors permitted to conduct the procedure exerted an “undue burden” on a woman’s right to have an abortion. In the wake of the Texas ruling, the Supreme Court refused to hear similar challenges involving laws from Wisconsin and Mississippi but has agreed to consider…

ON OCT. 4, DARYL Morey—general manager of the NBA’s Houston Rockets—hit send on a tweet expressing solidarity with pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. He didn’t do this in an official NBA capacity; his tweet nevertheless set off a firestorm in China, which promptly set off alarms at NBA headquarters in New York City. Morey took down the tweet, and to contain the fallout, the NBA issued two press releases, one in English and one in Chinese that was decidedly more apologetic. It’s as if NBA officials were unaware that the Internet exists in 2019. If the NBA wants access to the Chinese market, it will now need to play by Chinese rules, and in today’s world those rules don’t just stop at China’s borders Uproar ensued, in both China…

ANG LEE ALREADY KNOWS HOW YOU FEEL about 3-D movies. “It gives you a headache—of course you don’t like it!” the Academy Award–winning director says at an editing studio in midtown Manhattan. “The projection is bad. It’s too dark.” Complaints like these have driven many moviegoers and filmmakers away from the medium over the past decade. To many, it’s little more than a gimmick for superhero blockbusters, a quickly receding novelty. But Lee, long an iconoclast, still believes in 3-D. In fact, he’s doubling down: his latest effort, Gemini Man, was shot in 3-D and at 120 frames per second, a far higher rate than the usual 24 frames per second. The visual effect is one of extreme fluidity, more like a video game than a traditional feature film. The…

TOSSING UNEATEN LEFTOVERS OR slimy lettuce may feel like no big deal. But a recent report from the sustainability-focused World Resources Institute (WRI) says food waste is responsible for 8% of annual greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile, 25% of agricultural water use and a land area about the size of Canada go toward producing food that ultimately goes uneaten. If it were a country, according to WRI, food waste and loss would release more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any nation except the U.S. and China. Cutting back on food waste could help the environment in a few ways. Most obviously, it would save the resources and energy that go into producing unneeded food at every step of the supply chain, from farming to packaging to shipping. But as food rots…