Table of contents for August 5, 2019 in TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … THE NEXT SPACE RACE The July 29 cover story by Jeffrey Kluger, about the future of human spaceflight 50 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, sparked a debate about priorities. On Facebook, Jatinder Singh Narula of Faridabad, India, argued that space exploration is key because “humankind’s quest for adventure and exploration of new horizons” has helped civilization develop. But Mohamed Salah of Alexandria, Egypt, said future generations should “care about food, water problems and global warming instead,” since “we can’t live in the moon.” And for Twitter user @Idon6661, the story’s takeaway was a warning that if formal rules aren’t established, “some multi-national conglomerate will end up owning the Moon.” The cover art proved less divisive, as readers like Twitter user Roberta Tommasdottir…

MORE THAN SIX WEEKS AFTER THEY began, protests in Hong Kong show no sign of easing up. Sparked by a proposed extradition bill that would allow suspected criminals to be sent to face trial under China’s opaque legal system, the protests took a darker turn on July 19, when police seized a cache of explosives and weapons at a warehouse and arrested three men allegedly linked to the protest movement. Two days later, a group of masked men attacked civilians at a train station, injuring dozens. FAULT LINES The city has become increasingly polarized, as protesters say Beijing is eroding the autonomy Hong Kong maintains under the “one country, two systems” model. Hong Kong’s Beijing-appointed leader, Carrie Lam, has declared the extradition bill “dead” but has not officially withdrawn…

They are both Democrats: Joe Biden, the 76-year-old former Vice President, and Ilhan Omar, the 36-year-old freshman Congresswoman. An old white man, with blind spots on race and gender and a penchant for bipartisanship; a young Somali-American Muslim who sees compromise as complicity. To Biden, Donald Trump is an aberration; to Omar, he is a symptom of a deeper rot. One argues for a return to normality, while the other insists: Your normal has always been my oppression. How to fit those two visions into one party is the question tying the Democrats in knots. What policies will the party champion? Which voters will it court? How will it speak to an angry and divided nation? While intraparty tussles are perennial in politics, this one comes against a unique…

THERE IS NOTHING TRADITIONAL ABOUT HANNAH Gadsby. A self-described butch lesbian writer-performer with autism, she engaged and enraged audiences in 2018 with her show Nanette, which Netflix premiered as a comedy special. In the set, Gadsby announced she was quitting comedy midshow, interrogating how the self-deprecating nature of the form had shaped her life. A moving meditation on trauma, gender and comedy as medium, Nanette made Gadsby—a longtime Australian comic with a style by turns dry and visceral—a star. She went on to win a Peabody and snag a book deal. With celebrity, of course, came the “haters,” who serve as one of the primary points of inspiration in Gadsby’s (surprise!) new show, Douglas. Her detractors, she points out, were mostly men: the straight white men who have established…

Ukraine leader shores up power Servant of the People, the political party of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—elected in April after becoming famous for playing a President on TV—comfortably won parliamentary elections on July 21, setting the stage for it to become the first party to secure a majority there since the fall of communism. Big Tech under antitrust review by DOJ The Department of Justice announced on July 23 that it is opening a broad antitrust review of large tech companies. The DOJ did not mention specific companies but said the inquiry would look into concerns about “search, social media and some retail services online.” Iran detains U.K.-flagged tanker On July 19, Iran seized a British-flagged oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz—the latest in a series of incidents…

STRAWBERRIES THAT TASTE LIKE A GLASS OF rosé or grapes that evoke the sweetness of swirled cotton candy sound like the stuff of fantasy. But they’re quite real. Horticulturists and fruit manufacturers have expanded the world of designer fruits in recent years, melding flavors and textures to create entirely new food experiences. This year, several grocery stores will see an influx of crossbred fruits like cotton-candy grapes, rosé strawberries and raspberries, and Cosmic Crisp apples—a new style of apple that comes from crossing Honeycrisp and Enterprise varietals—adding to established fruit hybrids like pluots (a cross between plums and apricots), tangelos (tangerines crossed with pomelos or grapefruits) and jelly-bean blueberries (a cross-pollination of Top Hat and Polaris blueberries, resulting in a sweet blueberry-jelly flavor). These “designer” fruits can be sweeter,…

EXACTLY A WEEK BEFORE BORIS JOHNSON became Prime Minister of the U.K., he stood on a stage in London waving a smoked fish above his head. “I want you to consider this kipper,” Johnson told his crowd. British manufacturers of the traditional breakfast treat were having their postage costs unfairly pushed up by E.U. regulations, he said. After Brexit, such red tape would be a thing of the past. “We will,” he said, “get our mojo back.” It was classic Boris, as he is widely known—soaring rhetoric on a patriotic theme, delivered with an attention-grabbing stunt. That the rules governing kipper shipments are in fact set by the U.K., not the E.U., was also characteristic, given Johnson’s long history of putting compelling narratives ahead of facts. After years of…

AS MILLIONS OF PEOPLE RECOVER FROM SWELTERing heat waves across the U.S. Midwest and East Coast, and with Europe facing a fresh round of high temperatures, this July is predicted to be the globe’s hottest on record. That comes on the heels of the hottest June. Heat waves aren’t new and weather isn’t the same as climate, but scientists say such extremes are expected to become more frequent—and that the pattern is the result of human-caused climate change. “Our climate is warming,” Ahira Sánchez-Lugo, a climatologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, tells TIME. “We have a new normal, we are in a new warmer climate. Just in the 21st century, we’ve set a new global world temperature record five times.” Global temperatures are going up—and heat waves…

PRISON IS JUST NOT AS ROMANTIC AS ALL THOSE ’70s exploitation movies made it out to be,” Nicky Nichols, an inmate played by Natasha Lyonne, says to Alex Vause (Laura Prepon) in the emotional seventh and final season of Orange Is the New Black. “I want my money back.” The joke works on multiple levels: Nicky and Alex are lesbians. They’re also privileged white women who couldn’t have foreseen what awaited them when they reported to Litchfield Penitentiary, the fictional upstate New York minimum-security prison where the show’s first five seasons take place. But the quip is a winking commentary on the expectations viewers have been projecting on the Netflix dramedy even since before its July 2013 premiere. Created by Jenji Kohan, the maverick writer-producer behind Showtime’s Weeds, and…

Your latest, Once Upon a Time in … Hollywood, like your 1997 movie Jackie Brown, is filled with affection for its characters and for Los Angeles. Do you see any connection between the two films? I do. In both cases, I was creating a Los Angeles of my memory. But also the fact that you’re dealing with more melancholy people. The characters in both movies are dealing with their own mortality. Things didn’t quite work out the way they wanted. And now there’s more behind them than in front of them. The film is set in 1969, a great time in Hollywood but also one marked by a truly grim event. Did you have any trepidation about using the Manson murders as a backdrop? I thought hard about it. To…