Table of contents for June 4, 2018 in TIME Magazine

AMERICA’S TAILSPIN Steven Brill’s May 28 cover story on how America’s problems were caused by baby boomers was “excellent,” tweeted activist and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader. “So accurate it gave me chills,” Jaimi Sorrell in Aiea, Hawaii, wrote on Facebook. But Stanford Law School professor Hank Greely called it “a bit overdone,” saying that crediting everything going on, good or bad, to one generation was in fact “classic boomer ego.” And Catherine Reinhard of Burke, Va., agreed that the blame was misplaced: “We have not ‘broken America,’” she wrote, “though it has done its best to try to break us.”…

APPROXIMATELY 1 BILLION people across the globe suffer from migraines, making the condition the world’s third most common illness, according to the Migraine Research Foundation. Not only that, many sufferers—a disproportionate number of whom are women—face doubt from doctors and peers who may downplay the pain. And yet the U.S. market has offered no drug expressly designed to prevent these debilitating headaches. That changed on May 17, when the Food and Drug Administration approved Aimovig, a drug from Amgen and Novartis. Users take a monthly shot that targets a molecule thought to play a role in migraines and has been shown in clinical trials to measurably reduce headache frequency for chronic sufferers. When the drug becomes widely available—which is scheduled to happen very soon—more sufferers will be able to…

The door to the world will be opened ever wider, with broadened market access, an improved investment environment, better protection of intellectual property rights, lower tariffs and expanded imports. The message sent by President Xi Jinping at the Boao Forum for Asia Annual Conference 2018 held in south China’s Hainan Province from April 8 to 11 has reaffirmed global investors’ confidence in China. Despite rising protectionism, “globalization won’t stop in China,” said Albert Ng, professional services provider EY’s Regional Managing Partner for Greater China, during a panel discussion on investment at the Penn Wharton China Summit 2018 held in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania in mid-April. “China will continue to play a key role in globalization,” Ng said. What cannot be overlooked is that foreign direct investment (FDI) in…

How social media distorts the vox populi Former Senator Joseph Lieberman shows that sites like Twitter and Facebook exaggerate the popularity of extreme views held by the public to elected officials and candidates, instead of accurately representing the opinions held by the majority of people, who are perhaps too busy to post about politics. The quiet pains of mental illness For Mental Health Awareness Month, actor Alyssa Milano shares her story of coming to terms with having generalized anxiety disorder. “Here’s the thing about mental illnesses,” writes Milano. “You don’t always look sick, and the answers are not always clear or black and white.” Defending women in Egypt Activist Azza Soliman—who writes that her fellow Egyptians have worked to defame and arrest her—describes the fight to make it safe…

WHEN THE BRITISH PRESS TAKES notice of a budding royal romance, there is usually a familiar theme. They spot the couple “getting flirty” at a polo match, for example, or leaving a nightclub in the early hours. But when it came to Prince Harry’s relationship with Meghan Markle, the first clue that there was something different was the tabloids’ unfamiliar, almost cryptic reaction. His new girlfriend was described as a “glamorous brunette” who was “something of a departure from Prince Harry’s usual type.” Markle, the public was told, was “not in the society blonde style of previous girlfriends.” This language was code for something the press was simultaneously obsessed with and uncomfortable addressing directly: Markle is a woman of color. Some references were less covert than others. A few…

TO HEAR PUNDITS TALK ABOUT THE ROYALS THIS SPRING, you’d be excused for thinking “The Royal Family” is a primetime soap opera, with viewers obsessing over new characters, story lines and how it’s doing in the ratings. Bets were placed on what Prince William and Kate Middleton’s new baby would be named, while commentators eagerly discussed whether the new character of Meghan Markle would manage to “save” the royal family by marrying Prince Harry. The answer to all this for most people around the world is simply: Who cares? The way Britain celebrated Harry and Meghan’s wedding was a curious reminder that the monarchy is rarely evaluated in terms of its actual purpose, which is to provide Britain with an effective head of state. Few pundits seem sure of…

RACHEL CUSK IS NOT A RADICAL—AT LEAST NOT anymore. Critics lambasted her as a “bad mom” when she asserted that marriage and motherhood deprive women of any sense of self in her memoirs A Life’s Work (2002) and Aftermath (2012). Years later, she’s still writing about the anguish of divorce and parenting, but those ideas have been better received as a trilogy of acclaimed novels: Outline (2015), Transit (2017) and, now, Kudos (June). “It took me a while to figure out why the memoir was malfunctioning,” Cusk says. “I realized if you use yourself as an example, people turn you into the exception.” She believes women will go to great lengths to disguise their own ambivalence about motherhood, and that by exposing their suffering with her own story she…

FLORIDA By Lauren Groff A dangerous energy, buoyed by rich and unsettling details, runs through the Fates and Furies author’s new collection as her characters face down snakes, hurricanes and their own self-destructive behavior. (June) DAYS OF AWE By A.M. Homes With dark humor and sharp dialogue, Homes plumbs the depths of everyday American anxieties through stories about unexpected situations—take, for example, an affair that unfolds at a conference on genocide. (June) GOOD TROUBLE By Joseph O’Neill The angst of modern life pervades the daily lives of the characters in these stories from the author of Netherland, whose subversive humor finds new angles on everything from facial hair to circumcision. (June) FIGHT NO MORE By Lydia Millet A real estate broker named Nina anchors these…

GUN REFORM #NEVERAGAIN By David and Lauren Hogg Parkland survivors David and Lauren Hogg crystallize their generation’s call for gun reform in this manifesto for a growing youth movement. (June) CYBERWARFARE THE PERFECT WEAPON By David Sanger Sanger, a national-security reporter, charts the global rise of cyberwarfare and examines how digital weapons are rapidly changing geopolitics. (June) FAKE NEWS THE DEATH OF TRUTH By Michiko Kakutani The Pulitzer Prize–winning critic traces the creeping forces that have allowed opinion to be treated with as much credibility as fact. (July) ECONOMY SQUEEZED By Alissa Quart This look at the financial burdens on the middle class argues that the costs of raising kids in the U.S. are too high for all but the wealthiest Americans. (June)…

TIME’s coverage of the British royal family spans every decade of the magazine’s existence, so head to the archives for further reading on the family into which Meghan Markle married when she tied the knot with Prince Harry. Find more at time.com/vault 1929 The future Queen Elizabeth II—then Princess “Lilybet”— at her third birthday 1930 King George V and Queen Mary, who made the cover amid a fight over tariffs 1937 Wallis Simpson, for whom Edward VIII gave up the throne, as Person of the Year 1949 Princess Margaret, dubbed “the most eligible partygoer in Britain” 1953 Newly crowned Queen Elizabeth II, Person of the Year, a symbol of the future 1957 Prince Philip in a feature about how he was faring as the Queen’s consort 1969 Charles is…

CONFIRMED Gina Haspel to lead the CIA, by the Senate on May 17, despite concerns about her role in the controversial interrogation of suspected terrorists after 9/11. She will be the first woman to direct the agency. DROPPED The U.S. fertility rate, to a record low for the second straight year, federal officials said on May 17. The number of births also fell in 2017, reaching the lowest level in 30 years. DENIED A request from President Trump to halt the defamation lawsuit brought against him by former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos, by a New York appeals court. FILED Cambridge Analytica, the political consulting firm at the center of Facebook’s privacy scandal, for bankruptcy on May 17. The firm and its parent company shut down earlier in May. RELEASED…

“A BRILLIANT AND POWERFUL BOOK ON THE MOST CRITICAL ISSUE OF OUR TIME: HOW DID AMERICA’S CORE VALUES GET HIJACKED BY A PRIVILEGED CLASS?*” “Everyone, left and right and center, should read it. It will open your eyes and challenge your assumptions.”—WALTER ISAACSON* “Tailspin does precisely what the daily torrent of news does not: make sense .... A unified (and persuasive) theory of everything.”—JEFFREY TOOBIN “A must read for all citizens troubled by the inequities, malfunctions and bizarre shape of our public and private sectors.”—TOM BROKAW “Fantastically reported, Brill shows how—and who—might restore some common sense and equilibrium.”—BOB WOODWARD…

Technological innovation Industrial robots Intelligent economy and AI industry Big data, cloud computing 5G Consumption upgrading Unstaffed retail Healthcare Education Leisure New energy Infrastructure Inter-city transportation High-speed railways Airports and communications hubs New economic zones Urbanization Infrastructure building Rural medical services and healthcare Financing and insurance Educational equality Manufacturing upgrading Made in China 2025 plan Process transformation, automation and informatization Shaking off labels of “copycat, cheap and low-end” Improving labor productivity Environmental protection Environmental science and technology Air, water and soil protection Nationwide carbon market (Source: EY China; designed by Pamela Tobey)…

ITALY HAS HAD 65 governments over the past 73 years. Even at that torrid pace, the country has never had a coalition quite like the one currently negotiating to take power together. On one end sits the Five Star Movement (5SM), a protest group turned political force. On the other sits Lega, a hard-right party that has made anti-immigration its calling card. It’s an unlikely pairing at first glance. Launched in the wake of the euro zone’s economic crisis in 2009, 5SM courted the young and disenfranchised with overt anti-Europe policies and rhetoric—much of which it has dropped as it has moved into the mainstream. But it never lost its anti-elitist, anti-austerity core. It was rewarded in the March elections with the most seats of any party in Parliament.…

THE LAST TIME A MEMBER OF THE BRITish royal family announced his intention to marry an American divorcée, there was a constitutional crisis, and the future of the monarchy seemed to be in doubt; indeed, King Edward VIII had to give up the throne in order to wed the woman he loved, Wallis Simpson, a native of Baltimore. When she began her affair with then Prince Edward, Simpson was married to her second husband, Ernest Simpson, whom she would divorce two years later. Both her nationality and marital history made her unacceptable as a royal bride to almost every section of society. The diarist Harold Nicolson remarked at the time, “The upper classes mind her being an American more than they mind her being divorced. The lower classes do…

TIARA Markle borrowed Queen Mary’s diamond bandeau tiara from Queen Elizabeth II for the occasion. Made in 1932, the headpiece contains a band of diamonds and platinum, with a removable center brooch studded with 10 diamonds. DRESS There are only six seams in the entire garment, helping create its simple, streamlined silhouette. Other key elements include a wide boatneck, slim three-quarter-length sleeves and a train filled with a voluminous underskirt made of triple silk organza. VEIL Clocking in at 16 ft., the silk tulle veil featured hand-embroidered flowers from each of the 53 countries of the Commonwealth as well as wintersweet from Nottingham Cottage (where she lives with Harry) and the California poppy, for her home state. NO ROYAL WEDDING GOWN IS just a pretty dress. In choosing a…

I LOVE THE IDEA OF SUMMER READING AND ALL THAT IT suggests: leisure, relaxation, the opportunity to lose one’s self in a good book. Maybe it’s a holdover from our school days. Winter reading was what our teachers assigned to us, summer reading—our choice! Maybe “summer reading” brings us back to those endless-seeming childhood months when school was out and (at least in my Brooklyn public library) we were allowed to borrow as many books as we could carry home. Or maybe summer reading is about vacation: reading is what we do when we’re temporarily set free from our jobs and their demands on our time, when we have the liberty to leave our familiar surroundings and enter the worlds created for us by books. I relish everything that…

Two years after earning their MFAs from the Institute of American Indian Arts, Tommy Orange and Terese Marie Mailhot have become significant emerging voices in American literature. Orange made a splash with a story in the New Yorker, excerpted from There There (June), his novel centered on 12 characters at an annual Oakland powwow. His book is one of the season’s buzziest. Mailhot, who interviewed her friend for TIME, published her best-selling memoir, Heart Berries, in February. Terese Marie Mailhot: How did you form your aesthetic? Tommy Orange: I wanted to create a fast-moving vehicle to drive somebody to some brutal truth. There’s so much information everyone could access about the realities of Native communities, and they don’t. So if you can convince people by giving them a good…

The 71st Cannes Film Festival wrapped up on May 19. Now that the tuxes and sequins have been put away, here’s what to know about this year’s showing. With Cold War, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida) introduces a superb East-bloc love story about a young singer (the stunning Joanna Kulig) and a pianist (Tomasz Kot, looking like a Polish Clive Owen) who tumble into a world of romantic torture. So tragic for them—but heaven for us. Spike Lee’s terrific BlacKkKlansman is loosely based on the life of Ron Stallworth (played by John David Washington, above ), a black undercover cop who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the 1970s. Lee approaches the story with a sense of humor, but his motive is serious: racism isn’t just black people’s fight;…

‘ MY FIRST DOG, INDEED ALL MY DOGS, HAVE BEEN DELIGHTFULLY SUSCEPTIBLE TO MY VOICE ’ You just released an audiobook, The Poems of T.S. Eliot. Your 2005 recording of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is considered by many to be the gold standard for audiobooks. Any recollections from the recording session? After I had been approached to record it, I discovered the company intended an abridged version. I felt, had Nabokov wanted it abridged, he would have written it shorter, and I suggested to his son Dmitri that he might insist we record it as written. When I arrived at the studio in North London, my producer told me we would need an extra day to record it in its…

Commencement 2018 It’s an American springtime rite: politicians, celebrities, business leaders and other notables offer their two cents to the nation’s graduates. A glimpse at this year’s wisest words so far: ‘Don’t ever confuse what is legal with what is moral ... You’re either principled or you’re not.’OPRAH WINFREY, chair and CEO of the Oprah Winfrey Network, at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism in Los Angeles ‘EMBRACE THE MESS ... YOUR LIFE WON’T ALWAYS UNFOLD ACCORDING TO PLAN.’BETSY DEVOS, U.S. Secretary of Education, at Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Fla. ‘THE QUESTION WE ASK OURSELVES IS NOT “WHAT CAN WE DO?” BUT “WHAT SHOULD WE DO?”’TIM COOK, Apple CEO, at Duke University in Durham, N.C., where he got his MBA ‘We’re the ones who decide,…

Rare cease-fire in Kashmir for Ramadan India said it would suspend military operations against rebels in Jammu and Kashmir state for the month of Ramadan—the first such cease-fire in 18 years. Fighting in the predominantly Muslim Himalayan region, to which both India and Pakistan lay claim, had escalated in recent weeks. Ozone-destroying chemical returns Emissions of the compound CFC-11 are up 25% since 2012, even though it was banned under the 1987 Montreal Protocol. Scientists warn that if they can’t find the reason for the rise, the chemical could delay the ozone layer’s healing by a decade. 16,000 born in Rohingya camps An estimated 693,000 members of the persecuted Rohingya minority have fled Myanmar in the past year after military violence in Rakhine state, and now UNICEF calculates that…

ALTHOUGH THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION (WHO) HAS said the ongoing Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of Congo does not yet constitute a public-health emergency of international concern, on May 17 the group announced that the situation had reached a new and worrisome stage. Whereas the outbreak had previously been confined to small villages, officials confirmed a case in Mbandaka, a city of 1.2 million people. Since then, three more cases have been confirmed in the city. Mbandaka acts as a hub for regional traffic, thus presenting a new possibility that the virus could be easily transported. Already, there have been 26 deaths reported during this latest outbreak of Ebola, which came just 10 months after Congo’s previous bout with the virus was officially declared finished. The international response…

Much of the criticism leveled against globalization today is related to the idea that it enriches the few, leaving the many behind. The people making this argument frequently advocate for the wholesale abandonment of globalization—which would put the very existence of an international agenda at risk. It is understandable that policymakers are responding to their electorates’ grievances. While some people have benefited from globalization, large pockets of society have suffered—from farmers in the developing world to manufacturing and industrial workers in the West. But these frustrations have less to do with the ideal of globalization itself than the lite version that politicians have implemented over recent decades. Regrettably, governments across the globe are pivoting today toward lesser political and economic models. These will offer quick wins but over the…

What do scientists believe psychedelics can offer people, especially those with certain types of mental illness? These chemicals allow us to essentially reboot the brain. If the brain is stuck in these grooves of thought—whether it’s an obsession or a fear or the story you tell yourself—all those deep grooves [can be] dissolved and temporarily suspended in a way that allows us to break those patterns. Has your personality changed after taking the drugs? I think my wife would say that I’m more open and more patient, that I deal with emotional situations with a little more availability. Spending this much time observing my mind does have an effect—the same as 10 years of psychoanalysis probably would, although it didn’t take me nearly that long. Did psychedelics change your…

THE ROYAL FAMILY CAN TRACE ITS ANCESTRY AT least as far back to the Anglo-Saxon King Alfred the Great, who reigned from A.D. 871 to 899. The May 19 wedding marked the intertwining of the House of Windsor and the Markles, as well as the first time a prominent royal has married an American since 1937. BEFORE THE CEREMONY ON MAY 17, MARKLE CONFIRMED HER FATHER WOULD NOT ATTEND THE WEDDING, SAYING HE NEEDED TO “FOCUS ON HIS HEALTH” DURING THE CEREMONY DIANA’S SISTER LADY JANE FELLOWES GAVE A READING AT THE WEDDING TO COMMEMORATE HARRY’S MOTHER, THE LATE PRINCESS…

The Incendiaries By R.O. Kwon Phoebe, reeling from the loss of her mother, arrives at college and finds herself enticed by a religious cult with ties to North Korea. When the group commits an act of terror, she vanishes—and her boyfriend becomes obsessed with uncovering the truth about her involvement. (July) Small Country By Gaël Faye Faye, the son of a French father and a Rwandan mother, draws from personal experience with conflict and exile for his debut novel, already a best seller in France. In the book, 10-year-old Gaby’s idyllic childhood slips away when war and genocide erupt in his home of Burundi. (June) Ohio By Stephen Markley All the sweaty angst of high school and teenage relationships surges back when four former classmates return…

WITH HIS SLOW-BURNING, HONEST-MA-it-wasn’t-me grin, Alden Ehrenreich, as the junior version of Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story, looks more like a young Dennis Quaid than a sapling Harrison Ford. But no matter: he’s appealing anyway, and that’s key to any pleasure you might draw from Ron Howard’s wobbly foray into the Star Wars universe. The picture starts out slow, even though Howard and father-son writers Lawrence Kasdan and Jonathan Kasdan try to goose it with a few aircraft battles. But it’s all too generic to mean much. Worse yet, the first half of the picture looks dim and murky, as if the thing had been shot through a scrim of dust motes. (The cinematographer is Bradford Young, who has shot some gorgeous movies, like Arrival.) And…

1. Grill like a pescatarian Cooking most meat at temperatures above 300°F can produce potentially cancer-causing chemicals called heterocyclic amines (HCAs), according to the National Cancer Institute. But fruits and vegetables like corn, peaches, peppers, eggplant, pineapple, squash and watermelon hold up well on the barbecue and don’t form HCAs when they’re cooked. And though most types of fish produce HCAs when prepared at high temperatures, certain seafoods—including shrimp, scallops, oysters, crayfish and lobsters—don’t seem to form the compounds, says J. Scott Smith, a professor of food chemistry at Kansas State University. 2. Don’t overcook your entrée In addition to being carcinogenic, some of the toxins produced by grilling meat may also increase your risk of developing Type 2 diabetes. They do so by interfering with processes that regulate…