Table of contents for March 4, 2019 in TIME Magazine

FARMING FLOP In 2015, an Alabama couple decided to hold an essay contest with a $150 entry fee after failing to sell their goat farm for its $345,000 asking price. But the contest fell through after not enough people entered. GOOD INNINGS A married couple took home the keys to a Maine inn in 2015 after winning an essay contest held by its previous owner. Other entrants complained the handover was rigged, but law enforcement found no impropriety. WRITE-OFF In 2017, a family-run restaurant in Montana was offered as the prize in an essay competition. The owners hoped that 3,333 people would pay $150 each to enter. In the end, it was canceled; only 30 people wrote in. LAKE LOTTERY In January, a Canadian woman said she would use…

JOHN DINGELL OF MICHIGAN was the longest-serving member of Congress—ever. But he never cared too much about breaking records. Instead, he cared about what he did with that record-breaking time. And what a doer he was. The heart of this fearless lion of Congress stopped beating at 92 years on Feb. 7. During his 59 years in the House, it beat through what he called his proudest vote, for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It beat through his many votes to protect our air, our water and our land. It beat through his gaveling Medicare into passage. His cause was working people; his downriver district was braided with autoworkers, Catholics and conservationists, lovers of Polish paczki, the University of Michigan and the Democratic Party. He traversed its streets and…

TO RIVAL CAMPAIGNS, one of the clearest signs that kamala harris could be a formidable candidate was not her early fundraising haul, the endorsements she’s racked up or the crowd of 20,000 that cheered her announcement speech in oakland, calif. it was the hiring of an obscure adviser named dave huynh. Back in the 2016 primary contest, Delegate Dave, as he was known around Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn headquarters, was charged with ensuring that no stealth Bernie Sanders backers were hiding in Clinton’s delegation to the Philadelphia nominating convention. The Howard University School of Law grad then spent much of 2017 helping to rewrite the rules of the Democratic Party. Now Harris has enlisted him to vet, befriend and monitor the roughly 3,800 “pledged delegates”—a collection of Democratic activists and…

MORE THAN ANYTHING—more than policy or charisma or age or race or gender—Democratic voters say they care about whether a candidate can beat Donald Trump. The problem is nobody knows how to beat Trump in an election, because nobody’s ever done it. Trump’s 2016 opponents tried everything. His Republican primary rivals tried ignoring him. They tried reasoning with voters, pointing out that he wasn’t a traditional conservative. Some tried ridiculing him; Marco Rubio insulted the size of his hands. Ted Cruz tried aligning himself with Trump, which was good enough for second place. In the general election, Hillary Clinton pounded Trump’s character and warned that he posed a danger to U.S. security. Like Cruz, Clinton built a data-driven, voter-targeting operation with expensive staff, offices and technology, but these state-of-the-art…

LINDSAY LOHAN’S BEACH CLUB IS A GIFT FROM the gods of trashy reality TV. It’s a repugnant yet addictive confluence of fame and infamy, spontaneity and contrivance, hedonism and consequences, aesthetic beauty and interpersonal ugliness. Among the schlocky treasures this new MTV series offers are a house—sorry, villa—full of hot young “VIP ambassadors” who are often half naked as hosts at the titular establishment, stunning Greek seascapes, lots of booze and, of course, tabloid magnet Lohan herself as ringmistress. There’s even a breakout jerk, Brent, a hunky, type-A narcissist who meets, insults, dates and splits with poor, pretty Sara within the first five episodes. The only alleged adults in sight are Lohan and her brusque business partner Panos Spentzos, mercurial bosses who bring about as much expertise to the…

When Althea and her husband, restaurant owners in a small Michigan community, are imprisoned for fraud, their family must reshape itself to fill a painful void. In Anissa Gray’s highly anticipated debut, The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls, the couple’s teen daughters are left in the hands of Althea’s sisters, each suffering in her own way. Lillian is haunted by demons from her youth, while Viola is separating from her wife and relapsing into bulimia. The aunts must confront their struggles in order to care for their two nieces, both reeling from the sudden change in their lives. Gray, a journalist, draws on her life experiences, including her struggle with an eating disorder, to develop the central characters in a novel that is already drawing comparisons to…

North Carolina finds ‘ballot scheme’ Investigators found November’s Ninth Congressional District election in North Carolina involved a “coordinated, unlawful and substantially resourced absentee ballot scheme” to help Republican candidate Mark Harris. The state election board must decide whether to certify the results or call a new election. Accusations after Kashmir attack Following a suicide bombing that killed at least 40 Indian paramilitaries in Kashmir on Feb. 14, India accused Pakistan of having a “direct hand” in the attack and of sheltering the militants responsible. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan denied the charge and warned that Pakistan “will retaliate” against any Indian military action. Shooting suspect had illegal gun Five people were killed in a workplace shooting in Aurora, Ill., on Feb. 15. The shooter, who was killed by police,…

WHEN JOHN F. KENNEDY was assassinated in 1963, Lee Radziwill rushed to help her older sister, Jackie, as the First Lady dealt with her husband’s death. The role was familiar: Radziwill, who died at 85 on Feb. 15, spent much of her life in the shadow of her sister. But that wasn’t her whole story. Known for her role in shaping Jackie’s signature style, Radziwill established herself as a fashion icon in her own right. She pursued creative ventures ranging from acting to interior design, and for 15 years, she was also a princess—before her divorce from her second husband, Prince Stanisław Albrecht Radziwill, in 1974. The sisters’ relationship grew strained after Jackie married Aristotle Onassis, whom Radziwill had been involved with earlier. But Radziwill remained a society mainstay,…

Nicaragua activists get 200 years Nicaragua sentenced two opposition leaders to more than 200 years in prison on Feb. 19. A judge said the men plotted to kill four police officers and a teacher during anti-government protests in the town of Morrito in July, despite their being 125 miles away at the time. Protesters say the five died in a shoot-out started by police. Senate confirms William Barr as A.G. Senators voted 54 to 45, largely along party lines, to confirm William Barr as U.S. Attorney General on Feb. 14. As head of the Justice Department, he will now oversee the special counsel’s investigation into links between Russia and President Trump’s campaign in 2016. France protests anti-Semitism Tens of thousands of people, including high-profile politicians, joined marches in cities…

AS CORY BOOKER’S inner circle planned his presidential bid on multiple conference calls in recent months, talk inevitably turned to money. To win, the aides concluded, the Senator needed to build a grassroots fundraising network broad enough to generate hundreds of millions of dollars. So far, things appear to be going according to plan: since Booker jumped in, 81% of the campaign’s donors were new. “We’re going to power this election principally by low-dollar contributions,” Booker said on his first trip to Iowa. Left, right or center, the strategists advising candidates this cycle estimate successful ones will need about $100 million just to get to Iowa’s leadoff caucuses on Feb. 3 and an additional $50 million to reach Super Tuesday a month later. Top staffers at major campaigns tell…

IN EARLY 2018, FOLK-MUSIC TORCHBEARER Rhiannon Giddens decamped to Breaux Bridge, La., with minstrelsy on her mind. In her early work with the Grammy-winning bluegrass band the Carolina Chocolate Drops and across two solo albums and a role in the TV series Nashville, Giddens has been as much a historian as a singer and banjoist. She’s won acclaim, including a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, for her attention to America’s folk traditions, but she felt that minstrelsy, with its troubled history, remained relatively unexplored. “It had such a gargantuan effect on American culture, world culture,” Giddens says of the genre, which took root in the 1820s and ’30s. “This was the first time that tunes were written down. So I’ve been going at it from a musicology point of view,…

After Everybody Loves Raymond ended in 2004, viewers didn’t see you as often. But now with Get Shorty, your Netflix stand-up special and new movie Paddleton, our screens are wall-to-wall Romano. What happened? I’ve been working constantly since Raymond ended. It’s just stuff that some people see, some people don’t. I never stopped doing stand-up. And I’ve continued to do as much other stuff as I could—or as much as people wanted me. You were reportedly making $1.7 million an episode by the end of Raymond. Does being rich make you more choosy? Yes. Yeah. I enjoyed watching Parenthood, and I called the showrunner Jason Katims up. I left a message: “Hey, I’m loving what you’re doing and I’m unemployed, and whatever my agent tells you it’s going to…

IT’S BEEN THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES EVER SINCE the Cold War: U.S. officers detect a Russian missile taking flight, and they have just a few minutes to counsel the President on how to react. Under the treaties that govern nuclear arms, those officers have the information they need to help make the right call—and to avoid such scenarios from arising in the first place. But these safeguards are now in jeopardy. Two of the treaties that buttress the world’s post–Cold War security architecture—setting strict limits and enforcing transparency on both the U.S. and Russian arsenals—are in the process of unraveling. The Trump Administration said Feb. 1 that it would withdraw the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, on the grounds that Russia had been violating it for…

AS RHODE ISLAND SECRETARY OF STATE Nellie Gorbea leaned over a plastic table to roll a 10-sided die one morning in January, the crowd in the Providence warehouse cheered uproariously. The mood was festive, but the group’s work was serious. After 19 randomly selected others did the same, the number generated by their rolls was used to help pick ballots that had been cast in last November’s midterm elections. Those ballots were then checked as part of a review known as a risk-limiting audit (RLA), which uses statistics to see whether votes were counted correctly—a final fail-safe against a hacked election, all done in public view. “Democracy and elections are only as good as whether people trust them or not,” Gorbea tells TIME. With the U.S. election system under…

For decades, American foreign policy has rested on a consensus view about the U.S. role in the world. In an international order in which there is a single unrivaled superpower, foreign policy experts widely agree that American soldiers and taxpayer dollars are essential for preserving global stability. But that assumption is not necessarily shared by the American public, according to the findings of a new study, Worlds Apart: U.S. Foreign Policy and American Public Opinion, conducted by the Eurasia Group Foundation (EGF), an organization I serve as board president. No matter what party they claim allegiance to, Americans favor a foreign policy that resists entanglements abroad, the survey found—a view not limited to conservative libertarians on the right and liberal pacifists on the left. Respondents in every age group…

WINNING A PRESIDENTIAL PRIMARY isn’t magic: you figure out what voters want and then give it to them. But that’s no simple task for the Democrats seeking the White House in 2020. This isn’t the same party Bill Clinton or Barack Obama led. It’s not even the same one that nominated Hillary Clinton less than three years ago. The party’s base is more diverse and more female than ever before, with newly assertive feminist and racial-justice voices demanding representation and respect. New policy ideas are flying: one cycle after Clinton’s liberal incrementalism barely beat out Bernie Sanders’ socialist vision, the party’s politicians and policy wonks are debating a range of ambitious ideas. A resurgent democratic-socialist movement has a high-profile presence not just on Twitter and among activists but also…

ELIZABETH WARREN Senator, Massachusetts STATUS: Declared ADVANTAGES: A clear, progressive policy vision combined with a compelling personal story DISADVANTAGES: Big Business loathes her, she may be too liberal for moderates, and the flap over her Native American heritage doesn’t help CORY BOOKER Senator, New Jersey STATUS: Declared ADVANTAGES: A social-media darling and skilled speaker, the Rhodes scholar is pitching himself as a unity candidate DISADVANTAGES: Has run for federal office only once, after a mixed record as mayor of Newark, N.J. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND Senator, New York STATUS: Exploratory committee ADVANTAGES: The New Yorker has styled herself as a feminist champion who can still relate to red-state Americans DISADVANTAGES: Gillibrand’s metamorphosis from moderate to liberal strikes some Dems as insincere, while others blame her for the ouster of former Senator…

MAGIC IS DEAD My Journey Into the World’s Most Secretive Society of Magicians Ian Frisch Frisch, a journalist, is welcomed into the 52, a not-so-secret society for the world’s brightest magicians. He shares stories from his time spent with the group’s magnetic members as he recalls his own introduction to the art of deceit when, as a child, he accompanied his mother to casinos and watched her play poker. (Feb. 26) QUEEN BEY A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter Veronica Chambers Actors, academics and critics unpack the impact of a megastar in a collection of essays edited by Chambers. The group meditation on one of the world’s greatest living icons features pieces by writer-producer Lena Waithe, comedian Kid Fury and scholar Brittney Cooper and examines…