Table of contents for June 17, 2019 in TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … THE EQUALIZER Readers learned about more than just the Women’s World Cup from Sean Gregory’s June 3/June 10 cover story on women’s professional soccer. John R. Clark of Boulder, Colo., said the story provided insight into not just the athletes but also the world of the sport and “soccer games, past and future.” The issue of the gender pay gap in the sport prompted an outcry from readers like BuzzFeed news reporter Molly Hensley-Clancy, who said her tweet about the story was “composed in rage.” “My daughter is presenting this article to her 5th grade class to bring awareness,” @DarbyDoug tweeted. Jeff Woll of Mason, Ohio, however, wished the article’s discussion of wage differences had gotten deeper into how the men’s and women’s teams…

IN MAY, THE DIRECTOR REED MORANO WAS supposed to fly to Georgia to scout locations for a new show for Amazon Studios called The Power. The drama series is adapted from a novel by Naomi Alderman, in which young women suddenly develop the power to release electrical jolts from their fingers. At least two scouts hired by the show had been prepping for the director’s arrival for months. But when Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed the state’s “heartbeat” bill on May 7, which effectively bans abortion after six weeks, Morano canceled the trip, pulled the scouts and shut down any possibility of filming in Georgia. “There is no way we would ever bring our money to that state by shooting there,” Morano, who won an Emmy for directing three…

George Orwell delayed crucial medical care to finish 1984, the book still synonymous with our worst fears of a totalitarian future—published 70 years ago this month. Half a year later, he was dead. Because he believed everything was at stake, he forfeited everything. But today we are haunted by a question: Did George Orwell die in vain? Orwell sought to awaken British and U.S. societies to the totalitarian dangers that threatened democracy even after the Nazi defeat. In letters before and after his novel’s completion, Orwell urged “constant criticism,” warning that any “immunity” to totalitarianism must not be taken for granted: “Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.” Since 1984’s debut, we have assumed with Orwell that the dangers of mass surveillance and social control could originate only in…

EMMA THOMPSON AND I ARE SUPPOSED to be shopping for sneakers. I’ve primed her with visions of the kinds of “trainers”—if you’re British, and she is—we’ll see on today’s tour of Los Angeles’ hip streetwear stores, guided by me, a person who knows about neither Los Angeles nor the fresh kicks for which the cool kids will sleep on the sidewalk but never actually wear. Problem is, the first three sneakerhead meccas I’d mapped out had their graffitied gates down. And I don’t have the heart to tell her I’ve lost hope, because I’ve never seen a person greet so many closed doors with such certainty that the next one will be, must be, open. Thompson, two-time Academy Award winner and Dame Commander of the Order of the British…

HOW DID SPENDING TIME ON A FARM AS A CHILD SHAPE YOUR VIEWS ABOUT ANIMALS AND MEAT? I grew up in the city, in Washington, D.C., and College Park, Md. But my dad grew up in the country and bought a farm to start a weekend dairy operation with less than 100 Holstein cows. I fell in love with life outdoors and the animals that surrounded us. I began to question the difference between animals in the agricultural system and the ones we kept as pets. And as I became an adult, I understood that it was a cultural, and not biological, justification for the difference. You began your career in renewable energy around the time of the California energy crisis in 2000. What brought you from fuel cells to…

DIED Leah Chase Chef who changed a city WHEN SHE MADE ROUX FOR HER SHRIMP-AND-SAUSAGE GUMBO (1 cup peanut oil and 8 tbsp. flour) in her joyfully elegant restaurant in the Tremé neighborhood of New Orleans, Leah Chase, who died on June 1 at age 96, stirred very slowly with her wooden spoon until it blended to the color of café au lait and could bind together all the diverse ingredients. So, too, did the binding magic of her roux and her smile extend to people. During the 1960s, local civil rights leaders gathered regularly at Dooky Chase’s, the art-filled epicenter of Creole cuisine that she and her husband founded in the 1940s, to meet not only with Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King, but also with members of…

OVER THE COURSE OF six weeks in 1989, Chinese students and those they inspired gathered in central Beijing in Tiananmen Square. It began as a spontaneous outpouring of respect and grief following the death of reformist leader Hu Yaobang, but the event then took on a life of its own as mourning became protest against corruption and repression and a call for greater political freedom. The demonstrations expanded to other Chinese cities. As the crowds swelled, some within the Communist Party leadership began to fear that the protests might continue to expand and to threaten the Communist Party’s political dominance. A cat-and-mouse game began as the state tried to find ways to move security forces into the square to end the Tiananmen occupation and as the protesters looked for ways…

GIVEN THAT MORE THAN 70% OF THE BRITISH PEOPLE dislike President Donald Trump, his outsize state visit to the U.K. was a rare uniting force in the midst of the civil war over how to say F.U. to the E.U. His presence offered some ironic consolation that the past three years of furious argument in Britain are linked to more global nationalist fevers of which Trumpism is only the biggest, blimp-size expression. Yet the nervous breakdown in Britain has had its own unique loony flavor of a country trying to remember what it stands for. For decades the loss of empire was compensated for by the victory of World War II, celebrated with such pageantry in Portsmouth this week. The postwar generation was consumed by the earnest task of building…

YOU HEAR HER BEFORE YOU SEE HER. LESS than three minutes into the second season of Big Little Lies, as images crescendo into violence, a familiar, mellifluous female voice whispers the first line of the premiere: “Celeste.” As Nicole Kidman’s Celeste awakens, screaming, from her nightmare, cool gray eyes peer down at her through wire-rimmed glasses, radiating calm, concern and a hint of menace; the small mouth puckers determinedly. And in TV’s most anticipated character debut of 2019, Meryl Streep arrives in Monterey. It’s not as if Big Little Lies was suffering from a lack of star power. The female-driven HBO miniseries, whose popularity and awards appeal catalyzed an absorbing second season that premieres on June 9, was a product of the friendship between two of its executive producers…

THE CANNABIS PLANT CONTAINS MORE than 100 compounds known as cannabinoids. Of them, one—cannabidiol, or CBD—presents the U.S. with unique potential in public health and business, as well as a good deal of political and legal confusion. That much was clear at the Silver Spring, Md., campus of the Food and Drug Administration on May 31, as over 120 people spoke to a standing-room crowd at the agency’s first public hearing for information about cannabis-derived products—a number that was whittled down by lottery from the 400 who applied to testify. Backers say CBD has health benefits ranging from curing insomnia to relieving joint pain. Those claims remain unproved, but the CBD business in the U.S. has nevertheless tripled in the past three years; analysts project the industry will be worth…

OCEAN VUONG READ FROM HIS POETRY AT the Los Angeles public library two years ago. I was onstage with him as his interviewer, and what struck me about Vuong was his marvelous combination of vulnerability and strength. His frame is petite, his voice almost ethereal, and his moving poems explore the pain of being queer, a refugee, a poet and a member of a working-class family deeply impacted by the Vietnam War. The poems from his book Night Sky With Exit Wounds expose raw hurt, love and joy, and in performing them, he demonstrated the confidence required to reveal himself. Vuong does the same in his compelling, emotional first novel, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, written as a letter from a Vietnamese-American narrator to his mother. The protagonist is known…