Índex per September 26, 2016 a TIME Magazine

POWER OF EXERCISE "Thank you for a fantastic article," wrote cancer survivor and self-described exercise "evangelist" Phyllis Dubinsky of Playa del Rey, Calif., in response to Mandy Oaklander's Sept. 12--19 cover story on the healing power of movement. Dexanne Clohan, president of the Foundation for Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, called the piece "life-changing" but noted that she would have liked more attention paid to those with disabilities who also need "safe and consistent access to recreation and sport." Meanwhile, Peter Billard of Glastonbury, Conn., lamented the lure of the ever-present home couch: "The exact opposite of mental, social, spiritual and physical activity and personal improvement." TRANS PREGNANCY Some readers were upset by Jessi Hempel's Sept. 12--19 article about her brother Evan, a transgender man who recently gave birth to his…

DMITRY GUDKOV Gudkov, 36, is currently the sole liberal opposition lawmaker in the Duma and has been called "Putin's nemesis." He's running for re-election after his pro-Kremlin party expelled him for backing the 2011 protests. MARIA BARONOVA The activist, 32, is an independent candidate for a Moscow seat. She is one of 18 candidates supported by Open Russia, a reform movement launched by exiled tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. BULAT BARANTAYEV One of the first openly gay men to run for a seat in modern Russian history, the 33-year-old doesn't expect a win but hopes the campaign will inspire the LGBT community to stand up to bigotry. He also wants Putin jailed.…

In our relentless quest to live healthier, happier, more productive lives, we often overlook a powerful tool within us: our internal sense of timing. The human body is genetically designed to coordinate the "when" of almost all aspects of life--sleep, work, sex, even having fun. And we're all wired differently. People with certain lengths of PER3 genes prefer morning activity, while those with other lengths prefer activity later on. Historically, those differences allowed humans to divide tasks by what they were best suited to. But that's no longer true in an age when artificial light and long-distance travel allow us to divorce ourselves from solar days and nights. Today the timing of our daily events often unfolds with little or no regard for our natural rhythms. This can be annoying,…

On the Apothecary's shelf in the Northeastern Chinese city of Dandong sit small bottles of "frog oil"--a traditional Chinese remedy collected from female frogs' egg sacs. "It's very good for blood circulation," says the Chinese shopkeeper. But he has a sourcing problem--the frogs come from neighboring North Korea, where business takes a backseat to geopolitics. "The sanctions have hit my business hard," he says, requesting anonymity for fear of running afoul of the government. "Before I could easily get 50 kg [110 lb.] of frog oil--now, only 5 kg [11 lb.]." Perched on the Yalu River, which forms most of China's border with North Korea, Dandong is about as close as you can get to the Hermit Kingdom. The city of 2.5 million is famed for rare North Korean contraband…

A movie about a whistle-blower can be an exhilarating, galvanizing experience--unless it's Snowden, Oliver Stone's sincere, methodical yet almost completely lifeless account of how erstwhile CIA employee Edward Snowden turned over classified National Security Agency information to a series of newspapers in 2013, beginning with the U.K.-based daily the Guardian. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Snowden, bespectacled, low-key, unnervingly bright: you feel for him when, as a deeply patriotic young man, he's told he can't serve in the Army after suffering a series of leg fractures. It's always a challenge to play a recessive character, and not even a perceptive actor like Gordon-Levitt can reach Snowden's core. In telling the story of this man's angular shift from dutiful, politically conservative government employee to left-leaning antisurveillance champion of whistle-blowers, Stone has made a…

Lady Gaga surfaced as a fully formed pop star in the summer of 2008, fusing ironclad hooks with a theater nerd's avant-gardist sensibility. Her meta-narrative was all about celebrity, which is exactly what she became when a string of monster hits elevated her to icon status in a matter of months. In recent history, no other artist has had such a dizzying ascent to the top of mainstream music's pyramid, a success she sustained with a string of killer albums. But the past three years have seen Gaga, born Stefani Germanotta, step away from churning out chart toppers. Instead she has made jazz music, including a well-received duets album with Tony Bennett (2014's Cheek to Cheek), and delivered a Golden Globe--winning performance on American Horror Story. The Sept. 8 release…

'This is all that I wanted--for them to let me be me.' Chelsea Manning, the transgender U.S. Army private serving a 35-year prison sentence for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, on being allowed to undergo gender transition surgery. Five days into her hunger strike, the Army agreed to the surgery; Manning said she attempted suicide on July 5 $325,000 Amount of money crowdfunded in four days for 89-year-old Chicago ice-pop vendor Fidencio Sanchez after a photo of him struggling to push his cart went viral online 'He takes us for idiots.' Colin Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State under President George W. Bush, writing about Donald Trump's treatment of black voters, in an Aug. 21, 2015, personal email that was among those leaked by DCLeaks.com on Sept. 13. In another…

DIED Prince Buster, Jamaican music legend, on Sept. 8 at age 78. The performer, born Cecil Bustamente Campbell, is widely celebrated as a pioneer of ska music. Eddie Antar, creator of the Crazy Eddie chain of New York--area electronics stores, on Sept. 10 at age 68. He was jailed during the 1990s for insider trading and fraud. DISCOVERED Giraffes are actually four separate species, not one, as scientists had long believed. Researchers say the finding may cause them to rethink conservation efforts. SIGNED Tim Tebow, to a minor-league contract with the New York Mets. If successful, the former Denver Broncos quarterback will join a select group of athletes who managed to play at the top levels of both baseball and football.…

In America, it's common for people to avoid strangers--out of fear, discomfort, annoyance or all of the above. But in her new book, When Strangers Meet, Kio Stark argues that random encounters can be surprisingly beneficial. Specifically: the kinds that occur when you strike up a casual conversation with someone in an elevator or ask for directions on the street (though it's important to respect the boundaries of people who clearly don't want to talk). It can be extremely rewarding--and even intimate--to talk to someone without encountering the kinds of preconceived notions that come with friends and spouses. Moreover, studies show that repeated exposure to and connection with people outside our bubble can make us more accepting of difference. That's good for society in general, Stark writes, because it leads…

A roundup of new and noteworthy insights from the week's most talked-about studies: 1 SOCIAL MEDIA CAN BOOST YOUR MEMORY A study from Cornell University found that people who posted about events online were more likely to remember those events over time, regardless of how significant they were. 2 MOST DEPRESSED PEOPLE AREN'T GETTING PROPER TREATMENT Analysis of a survey of over 46,000 adults published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that less than a third of people who said they were depressed had been treated for their symptoms and that many others who were on antidepressants weren't receiving the appropriate dosage. 3 MOST PROSTATE-CANCER TREATMENT DOESN'T SAVE LIVES A landmark study found no difference in survival in men who chose active surveillance--monitoring with no treatment--as opposed to surgery and radiation,…

Just as the fall of Lehman Brothers in 2008 heralded a much larger economic crash, the September shuttering of the ITT Technical Institute chain of for-profit colleges signals a broad crisis in higher education. ITT, which taught electronics, computer-based design, criminal justice and other careers to 45,000 Americans last year, had collected $5 billion in federal aid since 2010. Last month, citing failures of financial responsibility and federal fraud charges, the Department of Education tightened its oversight of ITT by requiring the school to boost its cash reserves. That ultimately led to its shuttering. For-profit schools are facing a reckoning after years of meteoric growth. Headline-making cases at these schools abound, including the continuing scandal around Trump University and allegations that Donald Trump paid off Florida's attorney general to nix…

It's been 12 years since we last saw Renée Zellweger as Bridget Jones, instructing Colin Firth's Mark Darcy to please propose after two movies' worth of indecision. When she returns in Bridget Jones's Baby, the third chapter in the film franchise, our heroine is 43, single again and facing a new predicament: she's unexpectedly pregnant and unsure whether the miracle fertilization of her "hard-boiled" ova resulted from a fling with an American tech mogul (Patrick Dempsey) or one with her now ex Darcy. The new movie departs from Helen Fielding's novels, which inspired the first two films. Rather than adapting her third book, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy--featuring a 51-year-old widowed Bridget--Fielding and her co-writers set the movie a decade earlier. Despite a long gestation and the withdrawal of…

LOVE IT Martha Stewart offered high praise for Snoop Dogg, who's co-hosting her upcoming dinner-party show: 'He's a cook, baker, candlestick maker, everything.' Sarah Paulson (left) is taking Marcia Clark--the real-life head prosecutor whom she is nominated for playing in The People v. O.J. Simpson--to the Emmys as her plus-one. An Australian food company is giving away pepper shakers that block wi-fi at the dinner table, in an effort to encourage conversation. Katy Perry surprised an Orlando shooting survivor on Ellen and offered to pay for his first year of film school. Starbucks is testing a weekend-only brunch menu that includes Belgian waffles and French toast. Nintendo's Mario franchise will make its long-awaited mobile debut in the form of a game called Super Mario Run; it will be released on…

What's significant about your new appointment? Being the first female and the first African American means that the legacy of the 14 Librarians of Congress will include diversity--and also a female in a female-dominated profession. What's your favorite item in the collections? One is the life mask of Abraham Lincoln. My family's from Illinois, and in fact most of my relatives are buried in the same cemetery as Abraham Lincoln. It's just part of our legacy. As a child I spent every summer in Springfield, Ill. So to actually see the life mask of Abraham Lincoln, it resonated. You are the first Librarian of Congress appointed in the digital age. Why does digitizing the collection matter? Because it can provide access to people who would never get to come to…

On Sept. 9, North Korea violated international sanctions by conducting its fifth underground nuclear test, apparently its most powerful to date, and some experts say another test explosion may well be in the works. Washington wants Beijing, which has grown frustrated by Pyongyang's defiance, to apply more pressure. South Korea has warned that it would respond to preparations for a nuclear attack by flattening Pyongyang. This test marks one more step toward the day when no one will be able to believe that the problem can be managed with another round of sanctions. We've had five sets of those from the U.N. already, and Kim Jong Un's scientists are still hard at work on making a nuclear warhead small enough to mount on a ballistic missile. That would make it…

The numbers are staggering: Each year in the U.S., $162 billion worth of food ends up in a landfill. Each U.S. household tosses out 1.2 million calories' worth of food annually at a cost of nearly $650 per family. All told, about 40% of all food is wasted--the majority of it fruits and vegetables. Some grocers are trying to chip away at the waste: Walmart and Whole Foods, for instance, have started selling "ugly" fruits and vegetables--perfectly nutritious but odd-looking produce--at a discount. Dana Gunders, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, says there are simple things you can do to save money (and food) at home too. "It doesn't take a lot of effort or time," she says, "and it has direct impacts." 1. PICKLE YOUR PRODUCE With…

The idea that Donald Trump might become President of the United States is unthinkable, but it is no longer implausible. Hillary Clinton has made it possible. This is not to say that she will lose. The electoral map and Trump's reflexive ugliness--witless and witting--still favor her. And we're in a pause now before the most crucial events of the campaign: the debates, where I assume her knowledge and demeanor will unmask Trump for the vanity candidate that he is. But Clinton has appeared so wobbly lately--and I'm not talking about her health but her political sense--that she has, amazingly, come to seem an even more wounded candidate than her dreadful opponent. Her week from hell began with the NBC Commander in Chief forum, where Matt Lauer replayed all the same…

You have a very pronounced Queens accent in the movie. Yeah! Deborah's accent is Jewish Queens. She has a Jewishness in the way she talks. There's a kind of call-and-response--like a Talmudic thing. My son's grandparents are from Brooklyn and they're Jewish, and I had their wonderful accents in my mind and had to get them out. Were you raised Jewish? Not religious, but culturally. My dad was born in Budapest and my mom in Vienna. She left Austria two weeks before the war broke out. It was talked about a lot in my family because both my parents fled the Nazis. But this film isn't really about the Holocaust. It's about the insanity of trying to put fact on trial. I think screenwriter David Hare was inspired by Donald…

When Lauren Collins left her provincial North Carolina hometown, she writes, "no one would have guessed that I would become an American living in Switzerland with a Frenchman I'd met in England." But that's exactly what happened. And when one falls for a Frenchman, one must learn French. In her emotional, erudite memoir When in French, the New Yorker writer documents her linguistic labors, including the missteps--she accidentally tells her mother-in-law she gave birth to a coffeemaker--on the road to mastery. At times she expounds on the history and philosophy of language; at others, it feels like catching up with a clever friend you haven't seen since college. But the most intriguing question posed is as much about identity as language: Are you someone else when you speak and live…

Like a lot of women of a certain age, I've taken up yoga. And because I don't go halfway on my clichés, I've done immersion yoga weekends, learned the Sanskrit names for various ways of being upside down and at least once referred to "my practice." Someday I'll wake up at an ashram in India only to discover that half the people there are from Brooklyn or some other stressed-out part of the U.S. So it's no surprise that when I went on vacation earlier this month I ended up in a corner of upstate New York with lots of superserious yoga classes, the kind with a little statue of a Hindu god in the front of the room. One day I attended a class on what the teacher…