Table of contents for September 24, 2018 in TIME Magazine

I WAS RAISED TO BELIEVE THAT THERE ARE NO HIGHER professional callings than health care and teaching, no duties more sacred than the welfare and education of our kids. And yet, as TIME’s Katie Reilly reports in this week’s cover story, more than half of all states are spending less per student than before the Great Recession, and annual pay for America’s public-school teachers has barely budged in three decades. In 2017, teachers made nearly 20% less than comparable college-educated professionals. The education of future generations is not solely the job of teachers, however. All of us have a part to play, including those of us in the media. A few weeks ago, TIME’s Katy Steinmetz took a deep look at a critical educational challenge that is particularly close…

ON SEPT. 10, U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY adviser John Bolton launched a broadside against the International Criminal Court (ICC), the body mandated by most of the international community to prosecute genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. In a speech to the conservative Federalist Society, Bolton announced that Washington would “use any means necessary” to push back against the organization’s influence. The ICC was established in 2002 in response to human-rights abuses in countries such as Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. Supported by 123 nations, it was intended to act as a “court of last resort,” to step in when nations’ legal systems fail. Since then it has succeeded in convicting several war criminals, even as critics have slammed its slow bureaucracy and its toothlessness in prosecuting crimes outside Africa.…

IF YOU WENT TO THE MOVIES IN THE DECADE THAT FOLLOWED 1972, you couldn’t avoid Burt Reynolds: his role in that year’s thriller Deliverance jump-started a seemingly unstoppable career. Reynolds, who died at age 82 on Sept. 6, was the affable anchor of action films and comedies—The Longest Yard (1974), Smokey and the Bandit (1977)—that weren’t always taken seriously by critics. But he was marvelous in them, a charismatic, low-key gentleman rogue. He riffed on that persona in TV talk-show appearances of the day; when he showed up on Johnny Carson’s show in a slightly absurd maroon suit with white piping, it was to let the audience know he knew just how ridiculous it was. But he looked amazing in anything and nothing: in 1972 he posed naked on…

This is how these cases seem to go: One person speaks out, or maybe two or three talk to a reporter. Only after the initial accusations are made public do the floodgates open. This cascading effect—that it’s tough to get anyone to speak out first, but it appears almost inevitable that more voices will then follow—illuminates some of the remaining challenges of combatting sexual harassment across our culture. We now seem to expect that a harasser will have a long list of victims, regardless of whether he (or she) is famous. But there are consequences to that assumption. It inevitably makes it harder for a single accuser to have her claims heard. When part of validating a claim is seeing who else has had a similar experience, a dearth…

What is the central argument of your book? That we live in a time of extraordinary generosity by the winners, but also a time in which those winners use generosity to protect the system that continues to cause many of our biggest problems and shut most Americans out. How do those winners think? I found there was a spectrum. On one end, people you run into in finance in New York are aware, privately over a whiskey, that a lot of what they do is incompatible with an economy that works for most people. On the other end, typified by Silicon Valley, people are committed genuinely to changing the world but wish they would be left alone—and end up being blind to the fact that they are the new…

1 Doctors collect samples of the mother’s bone marrow, the spongy tissue inside bones 2 Blood stem cells, which can become all types of blood cells, are separated from the marrow and processed 3 The stem cells are injected directly into the umbilical vein, which supplies the fetus with blood from the placenta 4 The mother’s stem cells should continue to produce healthy blood and immune cells, hopefully throughout the child’s life…

JUST LIKE THERE’S OFTEN A SONG OF THE summer, there’s usually a video game of the summer too. This year that game is undeniably Fortnite Battle Royale, an online free-for-all that every teen in America suddenly seems to be playing. It’s not just kids, though—everyone from rapper Drake to Los Angeles Laker Josh Hart is a fan. That groundswell of support has propelled Fortnite from a simple video game into a cultural sensation, with hundreds of millions of fans worldwide who play the game, wear the gear and even learn the characters’ victory dances. “Fortnite is another in a long line of games like World of Warcraft or Guitar Hero or Minecraft that is changing everything underfoot,” says Mat Piscatella, a video-game industry analyst with research firm NPD Group.…

The perils of espionage ground The Angel, a Netflix thriller about Ashraf Marwan (played by Dutch actor Marwan Kenzari), a real-life Egyptian agent who spied for Israel in the 1970s. After the death of Marwan’s father-in-law, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, he becomes an aide to Nasser’s successor Anwar Sadat. Marwan is torn between his personal relationships and what he believes is right: his advice to cooperate with the U.S. in order to avoid war with Israel proves unpopular, so Marwan decides to enter the conflict from a different side, by feeding Israel classified information. After a couple of false starts, the spy alerts Israel that Egypt plans to wage war on Yom Kippur. At the same time, he convinces Sadat that weakening Israel will make it more open…

‘Donald Trump ... is a symptom, not the cause.’ BARACK OBAMA, 44th U.S. President, in a Sept. 7 speech at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, calling out the President by name for the first time since leaving office $3 million Amount Jocelyn Bell Burnell earned as part of a Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, which she plans to use to fund scholarships for underrepresented groups in the field; her work earned a 1974 Nobel Prize, but the award went to her supervisor as she was a graduate student at the time 2045 Year by which California vows to rely 100% on renewable energy, per a bill Governor Jerry Brown signed Sept. 10 ‘I’M SORRY IT HAD TO END LIKE THIS.’NAOMI OSAKA, tennis player, after the U.S. Open;…

Brazil far-right candidate stabbed Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate in Brazil’s Oct. 7 presidential elections, is in intensive care after being stabbed in the abdomen during a Sept. 6 campaign rally. Bolsonaro’s injuries mean he is unlikely to recover fully before the election. Former Trump aide given 14 days in prison George Papadopoulos, a former Trump campaign adviser, was sentenced on Sept. 7 to 14 days in federal prison for lying to the FBI about his communications with Russians during the 2016 campaign. He was the first Trump aide to be sentenced in the special-counsel investigation. Putin contests U.K. take on poisoning Russian President Vladimir Putin said Sept. 12 that two Russian men suspected of using the nerve agent Novichok to poison ex-spy Sergei Skripal in the U.K. in…

MCDONALD’S Romans protested when the golden arches first appeared in the Piazza di Spagna in 1986, but by 2017, McDonald’s had opened over 560 branches across Italy. The chain has stores on six of the seven continents. TACO BELL The Mexican-themed chain has many global locations but has repeatedly failed in Mexico. When it first tried to open in Mexico City in 1992, locals were confused by its food names; a 2007 attempt didn’t work out either. CHICK-FIL-A When the fast-food company said in July that it planned to open its first franchisee-owned store outside the U.S., in Toronto, the news sparked online backlash among critics of its ties to conservative causes.…

IT’S A RAGS-TO-RICHES story that encapsulates a resurgent China. When Jack Ma started an online-trading company from his apartment in 1999, he’d been rejected from 30 jobs and was eking out a living as a teacher. Today Ma, 54, is China’s third richest man. The firm he founded, Alibaba, is worth over $400 billion. Its online-shopping platforms hawk everything from sneakers and laptops to pygmy hedgehogs, dispatching 55 million packages a day, and subsidiaries have expanded to cloud services and mobile payments On Sept. 10, Ma revealed he would step down as Alibaba’s executive chairman next year. Daniel Zhang, 46, the firm’s current CEO, will then take charge. Zhang shares Ma’s gift for fusing commerce with entertainment. He’s credited with turning China’s Nov. 11 Singles Day into the world’s…

When tolerance is intolerant “We are quick to demand tolerance but loath to extend it to others,” writes Senator Orrin Hatch. He argues people should recommit to pluralism, which “recognizes that there is not just one way to achieve the good life but multiple— and it does its best to accommodate for each.” The costs of paranoia Psychologist Michele Gelfand, author of the new book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers, writes that societies have historically responded to threats by sacrificing liberty for social cohesion. The trouble today, Gelfand says, is that America is doing the same in response to manufactured or exaggerated concerns. After being banished “I’m not a criminal or a radical,” writes NBA player Enes Kanter, who says he was barred by the Turkish government from going to…

In all of the years I have spent as a senior policymaker, I have never seen our prestige as a nation at such a nadir THE CONTINUING MELTDOWN IN WASHington, D.C., has profound and challenging domestic implications. But far more dangerously, the obvious chaos throughout the Executive branch—emanating from the President himself—is weakening our allies’ faith in America’s ability to lead. The thinking of the President, recently immortalized as “crazytown” in a quote ascribed to White House chief of staff John Kelly in Bob Woodward’s meticulously researched book, Fear, is at present a mystery to the world at large. The book’s release and the near simultaneous appearance of an anonymous op-ed by a “senior official in the Trump Administration” in the New York Times, which described a serious…

AS EVENING FELL ON THE TOWN OF ALZANO LOMbardo in northern Italy one Sunday in early September, about 2,000 people crowded into a marquee tent. Anticipation grew as the announcer blared through a loudspeaker over the music, “Il capitano sta arrivando!”—The captain is coming! Il capitano was Italy’s Matteo Salvini—the far-right Interior Minister whose rocketing rise over just six months has jolted Europe’s establishment and threatens to finally upturn a political system that has reeled under a populist surge for the past three years. When Salvini finally burst onto the stage after dark in jeans and his trademark green sneakers, the crowd was spellbound. For nearly two hours, a beer in one hand, he told the audience he would seize back control of their lives from the European Union’s…

Broadly speaking, the wave of economic transformation produced by reform and opening up in China over the past four decades has swept across the country from south to north. The development of certain regions, from Shenzhen in Guangdong Province to the Pudong New Area in Shanghai, has served as a powerful centrifugal force, exerting influence on surrounding areas and beyond, and grabbing headlines around the world via rapid economic progress in the process. Now, it seems to be time for northeast China’s Liaoning Province to assume the spotlight. At the end of August, a three-day event for China’s top 500 private enterprises was held in Shenyang, the province’s capital. Representatives from Fortune Global 500 companies, as well as some of the most prestigious business figures in China, joined the…

Already a best seller in her native England, Olivia Laing’s debut novel documents an impending marriage and consternations of love amid the “fire and fascism” of the current era, written in the guise of the late post-punk writer Kathy Acker. The events of Crudo move quickly. Acker grapples with the idea of lifelong commitment as she and her soon-to-be husband travel from Tuscany to the English countryside. Throughout the narrative, biographical fragments of the real Acker’s life mix with reflections on a world teetering on disaster, all while keeping a sense of humor. Laing, the acclaimed author of The Trip to Echo Spring: On Writers and Drinking, wrote the compact novella over seven weeks during the summer of 2017, documenting news and social-media flare-ups as they happened. Major events…

‘I VIEW MUSIC THE WAY A HEALTH-SCIENCES PERSON LOOKS AT DNA ’ The first music you ever performed was Bach, and now you’re playing his cello suites on a solo tour and recently released an album of his compositions. Why do you keep returning to him? At each stage of your life, you go back and discover new things. The way I understand Bach now is with the analogy of a river. It’s like you’re touching a living stream of water that keeps flowing, and by touching it or listening to it or playing it, you are in touch with something much bigger than yourself. It changes from day to day, from season to season and from year to year. A pillar of your tour is the…

Dallas police officer shoots neighbor Dallas police officer Amber Guyger fatally shot Botham Shem Jean, a black man, inside his home on Sept. 6. She claimed she mistook the apartment for her own and has been charged with manslaughter. The case has raised questions about whether the officer, who is white, received preferential treatment. Japan may lift commercial-whaling ban Japan has proposed an end to a 1986 ban on commercial whaling, saying the whale population is healthy enough for hunting to resume. Critics disagree. Japan kills 333 whales a year in the name of scientific research, though much of the meat is sold for human consumption. FEMA funds went to border crackdown The Trump Administration diverted nearly $10 million from the Federal Emergency Management Agency to U.S. Immigration and…

DIED Pittsburgh rapper Mac Miller, at 26 on Sept. 7. He connected with fans through lyrics about substance abuse and depression. REOPENED New York City’s Cortlandt Street subway station, which was destroyed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, on Sept. 8. It was one of the last parts of the World Trade Center to reopen. CONVENED A 2019 meeting of key bishops from around the world to discuss protecting children from sexual abuse, by Pope Francis, on Sept. 12. OVERTURNED India’s ban on sexual activity between same-sex couples, by the country’s Supreme Court, in a historic Sept. 6 ruling. HELD A military parade, by North Korea, to celebrate its founding 70 years ago. The parade, held Sept. 9, did not feature the long-range missiles at the center of negotiations…

It took 12 women to push one man from his perch. Leslie Moonves, the chairman and CEO of CBS, departed the company after a total of a dozen sexual-harassment and assault allegations were leveled against him—six over a month ago, then six more on Sept. 9 after weeks of discussions but little action on ousting one of TV’s titans. INSIDE WHY RUSSIA AND CHINA WON’T BE FRIENDS FOREVER THE U.S. PRESIDENT REACHES A NEW LOW IN THE EYES OF THE WORLD THE CASE AGAINST SUPERRICH PHILANTHROPISTS…

ON SEPT. 11, AN estimated 300,000 Russian soldiers—one-third of the country’s armed forces—began joint military exercises with Chinese forces in eastern Siberia. Called Vostok-18, Russia’s war games with China have been labeled a rehearsal for a “large-scale conflict” by NATO and will put the Pentagon on edge. Should Americans and Europeans fear that Russia and China are moving closer together? To be fair, this is less a joint exercise than a massive Russian drill with Chinese participation. Vostok-18 reportedly features 1,000 aircraft and 36,000 tanks, but only 3,200 of the troops and 900 of the tanks are from China. And Mongolia and Turkey were also invited to take part. Even so, this will be the first time the People’s Liberation Army has taken part in the quadrennial Russian military…

“PARTICIPATING IN FORD’S ‘THIRTY UNDER 30’ PROGRAM OPENED MY EYES TO THE FACT THAT FOOD ACCESS IS A HUGE ISSUE IN OUR COUNTRY. IT GOT ME THINKING ABOUT WHY.” WHEN NIHALA THANIKKAL GRADUATED FROM MIT in 2016, she had her pick of engineering jobs. But instead, she chose to make an impact on a small community in Ghana by designing a harvesting tank. After a year abroad, she accepted a job offer from Ford in Dearborn, Mich. “What stood out to me was the company’s mission—they give back to community,” she says. Thanikkal arrived in the U.S. at the age of nine months with her parents, who often sent money back to relatives in India. “The concept of giving back was ingrained in me at a young age,” she…

CARRIE UNDERWOOD BUILT ONE OF THE MOST CONSISTENT careers in country music on songs about other people. She named her last album Storyteller for a reason: she likes booming power ballads, rowdy revenge tales and slices of life from the American countryside. Her personal life has never been part of her appeal. (“I’m not a center-of-attention kind of person,” she told the Today show earlier this year.) But Underwood’s spent more time in the spotlight recently after suffering a devastating accident at home, one that left her with a broken wrist and serious facial injuries. “Even though I’ve had the best people helping me, I’m still healing and not looking quite the same,” she wrote to fans in January. “When I am ready to get in front of a…