Table of contents for August 31, 2020 in TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … THE PLAGUE ELECTION Tim O’Brien’s cover art for the Aug. 17/Aug. 24 issue, which accompanied Molly Ball’s story about the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on the 2020 election, was a hit on Twitter. User @tracychapmanfa1 tweeted that O’Brien is “a master,” while @RobinMcMee said it was one of TIME’s “best covers ever.” ‘There have been so many great TIME covers during the Trump regime.’@COLLEENKENNEALY, on Twitter Other Twitter users, including @pattypan and @robertstark79, thought the cover came at the President from too far left. But Kathleen K. Carfagno of Glen Mills, Pa., quipped that when she got to the last paragraph of the article, which ponders a future in which Americans “look back on this plague,” it took her “a nanosecond to realize [Ball] was…

HOLE IN THE HEAD A Russian man in his 30s reported hearing loss in 2018—and for good reason: surgeons removed a 2-in. nail from his skull. It had become lodged there in a home-renovation accident a few years earlier, which he said he’d forgotten as he’d been drunk at the time. BRACE POSITION After a 30-year-old Australian woman had intense stomach pains in 2017, doctors found a 2.5-in. piece of metal wire lodged in her intestine—part of her dental braces, removed a decade before. She hadn’t noticed swallowing the wire or felt any earlier side effects. HELLO OLD FRIEND In 2011, a CT scan revealed a felt-tip pen in the stomach of a 76-year-old woman in southern England. She had swallowed it 25 years earlier while trying to look at…

ON APRIL 26, 1607, THREE SHIPS CARRYING 105 men and boys landed on the eastern shore of what would come to be called America. They called themselves “adventurers.” But they had no interest in liberty or justice, and they were not seeking religious freedom or escaping from tyranny. They were part of the Virginia Company of London, which was essentially a private-equity-funded startup that hoped to turn a profit for the stockholders in Europe’s fastest-growing international moneymaking scheme: colonialism. Twelve years later, a 160-ton English privateer ship flying a British flag landed a few miles away. That ship, the White Lion, carried a product that would change everything those initial investors thought this colony could be. America became an economic superpower because that ship’s cargo opened up a market…

‘You can’t start in the middle when you’re trying to pass a policy. You have to be thinking strategically about where you want to go to make systemic change.’—Barbara Lee WHEN JAMAAL BOWMAN WON HIS June primary to represent parts of the Bronx and Westchester County in Congress, he became the latest young progressive whose election shook up Washington, D.C. But that new wave—whose most prominent member is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—is following in the footsteps of many elder leaders. Longtime Representative Barbara Lee has been a force on Capitol Hill for decades, first as a staffer and now as a member of Congress representing California’s Bay Area. Lee, who’s now in her 12th term, is one of the body’s most outspoken progressive lawmakers. The two met on Zoom to discuss…

Police arrest ship captain over oil spill The captain of a fuel carrier that ran aground on a coral reef off the coast of Mauritius in July, spilling about 1,000 metric tons of oil, was arrested on Aug. 17. Police in the island nation said Sunil Kumar Nandeshwar, 58, was charged with “endangering safe navigation.” Georgia gov drops Atlanta lawsuit Georgia Governor Brian Kemp withdrew a lawsuit Aug. 13 that had sought to block Atlanta’s COVID-19 restrictions and mask mandate. Kemp later issued an executive order limiting local mask requirements to government property to “protect Georgia businesses from government overreach.” Ground zero for COVID-19 holds festival Wuhan, the Chinese city where COVID-19 first emerged in December, hosted an outdoor music festival in a water park on Aug. 15. Images…

DIED Luchita Hurtado All-embracing artist LUCHITA HURTADO AND I MET IN EARLY 2017 AND SOON AFTER started to collaborate on an exhibition of her work for the Serpentine Galleries. My memories of her are ones of endless revelation. It was an incredibly intense dialogue. Each time we would speak, a new dimension of Luchita would become visible—the painting, the drawing, the photography, the poetry, the fashion. Luchita—who died Aug. 13, just months before her 100th birthday and only about a year after the opening of that show, her first international retrospective—connected in a holistic way to the natural world. She explored ecology in her painting and lived it in terms of not buying clothes but rather designing them herself. “We are a species, just like the dinosaurs, and just…

MY GREAT-GRANDMOTHER IDA B. WELLS WAS a suffragist. You probably have not heard her described this way before. She is most often honored for her journalism exposing lynchings in the South. To me, she is what great-grandmothers are to many: a teacher. From Ida, I learned that there is no end to a fight for justice. While most famous suffragists—Alice Paul, Carrie Chapman Catt—ended their fight in 1920, Ida did not. She continued to push for Black women’s voting access for the rest of her life, and taught me lessons that I take into my fight for suffrage. I, too, am a suffragist, because in 2020 many Americans still do not have access to the vote. I grew up hearing about Ida’s willingness to speak up against injustice, inequality…

For three decades, the most reliable feature of Lebanon’s government was its relentless decline. Here was a country so brazenly corrupt, the World Bank abandoned its usual diplomatic language in 2015, declaring it “increasingly governed by bribery and nepotism practices, failing to deliver basic human services.” Among ordinary people, the lived reality of Lebanese politics produced a gall that rose like the stench of the garbage that has accumulated on the capital’s streets because officials cannot figure out where to put it. In October, the announcement of higher taxes triggered gigantic daily protests across the country. But they have not yet led to any substantial change. The question now is whether the catastrophic explosion of Aug. 4, which wiped away more than 220 lives and the homes of 300,000 people…

I AM A MAGNET FOR KINDNESS. LIKE THE CENTER of a black hole, my body attracts every good deed from across the universe to the foot of my wheelchair. I move through parking lots and malls, farmers’ markets and airports, bookstores and buffets, and people scramble to my aid. O.K., so there are plenty of people who don’t seem to notice me, and some people who are actually repelled. They look down, pull their bag or their child closer to them, draw their legs up to their chest as I roll by. (Yeah, it doesn’t feel great.) But it’s the abundance of kindness that gets me all tangled. It’s the fly that won’t stop buzzing, won’t hold still long enough for me to swat it, won’t die. It’s harmless,…

‘Voting is by no means the only means of civic engagement. It is actively necessary to engage throughout the year in whatever way possible.’—Yara Shahidi ACTOR AND ACTIVIST YARA SHAHIDI WAS BORN IN 2000, THREE decades after Angela Davis began wielding her platform as a UCLA professor for radical activism. But their generational gap hasn’t stopped them from becoming friends or uniting in their efforts to dismantle white supremacy. The pair reconvened on Zoom to discuss the global nature of their struggle and the value of voting, regardless of ideology. Yara Shahidi: Many people are talking about how unprecedented what we’re going through is, when in reality there have been generations of precedent set. What is the importance of opening the conversation to involve many generations? Angela Davis: It’s…

‘We don’t need to reform health care. We need to transform health care. We need to change how we provide it. We need to change how we consume it.’—Dr. Otis Brawley DOUGLAS BROOKS SERVED AS THE HEAD OF THE WHITE HOUSE Office of National AIDS Policy during the Obama Administration as the first openly gay, HIV-positive African American to hold the job. He focused on addressing the health needs of those at higher risk of HIV infection, and is now executive director of community engagement at the biopharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences. Dr. Otis Brawley was chief medical and scientific officer of the American Cancer Society before becoming a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins, where he oversees a research effort exploring disparities in cancer rates and outcomes. Over a…

‘A lot of people think they have to go to Duke, Kentucky or UCLA. But if certain players take the HBCU route, it can change sports forever.’—Mikey Williams NAOMI OSAKA IS ONE OF THE TOP TENNIS PLAYERS IN THE world, having won two Grand Slam titles in the past three years. Mikey Williams, a rising high school sophomore, is one of the top-ranked basketball prospects in the country and made waves recently for expressing an interest in attending a historically Black college or university (HBCU), as opposed to a traditional NCAA powerhouse. They met on Zoom to discuss being shaped by the protests this year and their long-term goals off the court. Mikey Williams: You beat your favorite tennis player, Serena Williams. I’m not in that position yet—to where…

MISTAKES, IN ELENA FERRANTE’S new novel, are like prized family jewels, handed down from one generation to another. Both tend to cause strife and reveal weaknesses, but they’re also very hard to let go of. In The Lying Life of Adults, the latest work from the Italian author to be translated into English, Ferrante builds on the coming-of-age themes of her venerated Neapolitan series: the ferocious inner lives of young women, and how the things they inherit—be they beauty, brains or bracelets—are both a blessing and a curse. The first of the Neapolitan quartet, My Brilliant Friend, thrust Ferrante into the limelight 28 years into her career. An unlikely sensation even before it was published in English in 2012, the book generated a rare appetite for translated literary fiction. It…

WHEN DAMY LI BOUGHT A TICKET TO ATTEND the first concert of Eric Chou’s 2020 How Have You Been tour in Taipei on Aug. 8, she knew she’d have to wear a mask upon entry. What she didn’t know was that she’d win a lottery that got her a second one—a pink medical mask signed by the Mandopop singer-songwriter, who gave it to her onstage, a memento not just of Li’s first concert but also of how fundamentally COVID-19 has changed public life. That night, the 10,000-plus concertgoers at the Taipei Arena experienced what few have felt in nearly half a year: the energy of a packed house singing along with a beloved artist’s songs. That a concert of this size—larger than any other reported on since social-distancing measures…

DONALD TRUMP’S BROKERING OF A LANDMARK deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates could not have come at a better time for the President. With less than three months to go before Nov. 3, the agreement to normalize relations delivers Trump’s flagging re-election campaign a much needed foreign policy win—and a chance to woo back disgruntled Christian and Jewish voters in the final weeks of the race. Under the “Abraham Accord,” in exchange for Israel’s suspending controversial plans to annex West Bank territory, the UAE has pledged to move toward diplomatic recognition of the Jewish state. That would make it only the third Arab nation after Egypt and Jordan to do so since Israel’s founding in 1948. Though the deal isn’t yet done and has already been broadly condemned…

A GRAD STUDENT IN FLORIDA WAITED 11 days. Positive. A 14-year-old in California waited 24 days. Negative. When a New York writer took to social media, it had been four days with no word. As the U.S. struggles with COVID-19, people across the country are using Twitter to point out the absurdity of receiving results so stale they seem pointless. Testing is crucial to containment, but one July study found it’s only really useful when results are available in a day or two. Meanwhile, Department of Health and Human Services data show that in July, only 45% of lab tests were completed in three days or less. When TIME set out to map average test-result wait times across the country, we found that wait times are a product not…

LAST YEAR, I PUBLISHED KNOW MY NAME, A MEMOIR ABOUT my experience being sexually assaulted on Stanford’s campus in 2015 and the trial that followed. For three years before the book’s release, I wrote while remaining anonymous, known to the public only as “Emily Doe.” Every day I typed alone in the quiet, my sole job being to extricate the story. In March 2019, I finished the manuscript. It was satisfying to have tied off loose ends, but I still had one dangling string. The decision sat heavy before me: keep hiding or disclose my name. I was warned that stepping into the public would have permanent repercussions. You will be branded for life. Every eruption that had occurred during the trial would happen again, amplified. More reporters at…

‘People don’t expect athletes to really get involved in the product. They just expect you to be a figurehead.’—Naomi Osaka ‘The pandemic has been terrible for educational inequality. We need massive investments in these communities to mitigate what’s going on.’—Geoffrey Canada ‘When people don’t allow you to use your voice, you make your own way. I love seeing Black kids running around now with orange hair and paint on their fingernails.’—Tyler, the Creator FEATURING Kenya Barris Jamaal Bowman Tyree Boyd-Pates Dr. Otis Brawley Douglas Brooks Geoffrey Canada Angela Davis Danielle Geathers Michael Harriot Imara Jones Janaya Future Khan Rep. Barbara Lee Naomi Osaka Yara Shahidi Nikkolas Smith 21 Savage Tyler, the Creator Mikey Williams…

‘If we want America to fully live up to its ideas, we have to tell an unapologetic interpretation of American history, told from those who were on the ground to experience it.’—Tyree Boyd-Pates GEOFFREY CANADA AND TYREE BOYD-PATES BOTH KNOW that American education is deeply flawed—and they’ve each spent their careers working to correct different facets of it. Canada, an elder statesman of education policy, is the longtime president of the Harlem Children’s Zone, which has provided holistic support to dozens of thousands of underserved students. The millennial Boyd-Pates has curated exhibits with a focus on untold Black history, and this summer he distributed an antiracist tool kit called the Freedom Papers. They met on Zoom to talk about America’s dark history and the potentially catastrophic effects of the…

‘I still have to ask for permission to do stories about my people … We get five stories. Why can’t we tell our stories?’—Kenya Barris TYLER, THE CREATOR, AND KENYA BARRIS BOTH GREW up in the same suburban area of Los Angeles. As an independent rapper and hip-hop agitator, Tyler has spent a decade creating music that pushes boundaries and buttons. As a writer, director and producer behind shows like Black-ish and the movie Girls Trip, Barris has won accolades from audiences and critics alike. Both share a desire to shape a culture where everyone can find the freedom to be themselves. Kenya Barris: One of my security guards does security for your store Golf Wang [in L.A.]. I was looking at your tweet about Black fury after the…

As head of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, what was your reaction to Senator Harris, a graduate of Howard, another HBCU, as Joe Biden’s running mate? Senator Harris embodies so much that is important and worthy about historically Black universities, and it is truly a historic moment to see one of our graduates included on the Democratic ticket. We join our friends at Howard in their celebration of this extraordinary development. How have HBCUs fared under the current Administration? HBCUs have fared well in federal funding over the past three years. Title III support has increased. Eighty-five million in annual STEM funding for HBCUs was made permanent, and year-round funding for Pell Grants was approved. Passage of all of those reflect positively on the President and his Administration.…