Table of contents for May 22, 2017 in TIME Magazine

Charges in frat hazing death Eighteen Penn State fraternity brothers were charged on a range of counts including manslaughter in the death of student Timothy Piazza, 19, after he was pressured to drink toxic levels of alcohol during a hazing ceremony. The fraternity members resisted getting help for Piazza for nearly 12 hours, police said. U.S. arms Kurdish fighters President Trump approved a plan to arm Kurdish forces in Syria with heavier weapons ahead of an offensive on the city of Raqqa, a key ISIS stronghold. The decision was condemned by Turkey, which says the YPG militia is linked to a terrorist group. Sanctuary-city ban signed in Texas A bill signed into law by Texas Governor Greg Abbott requires police to cooperate with federal immigration agents even in cities that…

PAKISTAN Actor Veena Malik was sentenced to 26 years in prison for blasphemy in 2014 after she re-created a scene from her Muslim wedding on TV. However, the Kashmiri court ruling was only enforceable in the local region, and Malik never spent time behind bars. EGYPT Adel Imam, the country’s most famous comic actor, was handed a three-month jail sentence in 2012 and fined about $170 for playing characters deemed offensive to Islam, including a bumbling terrorist. He was acquitted on appeal the same year. GREECE Austrian cartoonist Gerhard Haderer was given a six-month suspended sentence for blasphemy by an Athens court in 2005 over his depiction of Jesus as a nude, potsmoking surfer in a satirical picture book. He too was later acquitted on appeal. DIED…

“SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.” Although Darwin didn’t come up with that phrase, it has come to define his theory of evolution: that traits that improve a species’ odds of staying alive are specifically favored to be passed on. (Consider the Galapagos finches, whose beaks have changed over time to crack open different kinds of seeds.) But in The Evolution of Beauty, ornithologist Richard O. Prum argues that superficial desires play a role as well. Take, for instance, the male clubwinged manakin, a bird whose ornate feathers have evolved to produce a “song” while they fly (thanks to a series of bumps that vibrate in the wind) that attracts females. Far from making them fitter, these feathers—and the bigger bones required to support them—actually slow the manakins down, suggesting that, as…

A roundup of new and noteworthy insights from the week’s most talked-about studies: 1 SWEARING MAY MAKE YOU STRONGER A small study presented at the British Psychological Society’s annual conference found that participants who repeated swear words while biking or squeezing a hand grip used more power than when they didn’t curse. Previous research has suggested that swearing can activate a body’s fight-or-flight response. 2 BLACK AMERICANS STILL DON’T LIVE AS LONG AS WHITE AMERICANS The death rate for black Americans was 16% higher than the rate for white Americans in 2015, according to the CDC. However, that mortality gap has shrunk from 33% in 1999. 3 YOGA MAY ALLEVIATE PERIOD CRAMPS AND PMS A review in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine found that regular yoga practice reduced…

The comedian, 54, wrote, directed and stars inHandsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie (out now). He plays a befuddled detective seeking answers to a gruesome crime alongside a mirthful cast. You’ve been in comedy for decades. Have comedians had to become more sensitive in their approach? I’m conscious of the fact that so many things can be said that upset people today. I find it ridiculous, to be honest with you. Let’s be empathetic. But especially in comedy, it’s got to be irreverent. Where did the concept for Handsome come from? The way it works in my career is, I think of it and I go do it. I love murder-mystery shows like Columbo. I thought it would be fun. So there you go. And it was! What was it like…

KING ARTHUR: LEGEND OF THE SWORD proceeds from the assumption that someone’s got to jazz up that moldy old Arthurian legend, and Guy Ritchie is just the one to do it. Charlie Hunnam stars as Arthur, who, as a child, was saved from the clutches of demonic King Vortigern (Jude Law) and spirited to safety. Later, he’ll return to Vortigern’s kingdom and pull that stubborn Excalibur from the stone. But the path to that moment is a morass of scenes soldered together with Ritchie’s trademark chop-shop editing and scrappy, streetwise dialogue— even if the streets in question are muddy paths in mythical 5th century England. It’s all more wearying than fun. Except for Law, whose courtly sangfroid can elevate even the dumbest roles. As power-mad Vortigern, he’s like a medieval…

NOBODY TELLS YOU HOW MANY TIMES YOUR HEART WILL stop when you have kids. If you knew how terrifying even the almost-tragedies are, you might not have children in the first place. The time your newborn rolled off the bed and there was a harrowing silence before she started to cry. Or when you grabbed her just before she walked into traffic. And the ballooning panic of not being able to find her in a crowd. When they become teenagers, the mission becomes more complicated. Their bodies are their own. But the thought of them getting hurt, really hurt, is still unbearable. And the thought of them injuring themselves deliberately is painful on a level for which there are no measurements. That’s probably why there’s been such an outpouring…

‘ACTING IS ABOUT THE ABILITY TO PUT YOURSELF IN SOMEONE ELSE’S SHOES. AND THAT DOESN’T NEED TO BE SEPARATED INTO TWO CATEGORIES.’ EMMA WATSON, actor, accepting MTV’s first gender-neutral acting award at its 2017 Movie & TV Awards on May 7 for her role as Belle in Beauty and the Beast ‘I will be a President for all the people.’ MOON JAE-IN, newly elected President of South Korea, accepting the win after a corruption scandal led to the impeachment of his conservative predecessor; the liberal human rights lawyer has advocated for dialogue with North Korea Morning Joe MSNBC co-hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough announced their engagement GOOD WEEK BAD WEEK Morning eats Aunt Jemima recalled frozen pancakes and more, fearing contamination 3,543,467 Number of Twitter users who retweeted (as…

Troop surge in Afghanistan? The White House is considering proposals to send as many as 5,000 new troops to join the 8,400 troops who are now in Afghanistan, NBC reported. If the plan is approved by President Trump, it would reverse former President Obama’s efforts to limit the U.S. military role in the country. Seattle mayor quits re-election bid Seattle Mayor Ed Murray announced he will not seek re-election and instead will retire from politics when his term ends on Dec. 31, following allegations that he sexually assaulted four teenagers more than 30 years ago. Murray denies the claims. Aussie gays wed in New Zealand More foreign couples had same-sex weddings in New Zealand in 2016 than did locals, according to official statistics. The trend was driven by gay couples…

NEBRASKA SENATOR BEN SASSE IS NOT YET running for President, and his new book, The Vanishing American Adult, is not about politics, policy or his own life story, all of which someone like him would normally write about if he were thinking about running for President. “I’m pretty certain the President is never mentioned at any point in this book,” Sasse, a Republican, told me when I asked him about Donald Trump as we recently sat outside a cafe a few blocks from the U.S.Capitol. “I want to move upstream from politics to have that conversation about all the things that we should want for our kids.” But jump-starting a postpartisan national conversation about what the nation should want for its children is exactly the sort of thing someone…

TELEVISION HISTORY IS DIVIDED INTOTWO ERAS: BEFORE TWIN PEAKS, AND AFTER. in 1990, David Lynch and Mark Frost created a surreal show built on a scaffolding of impending dread, dream logic and bizarre aesthetics. Twenty-six years after Peaks ended, Showtime is reviving the series (May 21). Here’s how the original inspired some of today’s most influential showrunners: ‘Everything was mysterious. I don’t mean, “When did the perp kill the vic?” I mean the weather, the trees, the doughnuts. The dream sequences were more nightmare-like than anything I’d seen before— Fellini, Hitchcock. Lynch dug them up from the bottom of his unconscious. Anybody making one-hour drama today who says he wasn’t influenced by David Lynch is lying.’ DAVID CHASEThe Sopranos ‘So much of filmmaking is information delivery, but Twin Peaks created…

THE SEATTLE-BASED MUsician Perfume Genius, real name Mike Hadreas, came to national attention with 2014’s acclaimed albumToo Bright, a meditation on being queer in a straight world. On lead single “Queen,” he intoned, “No family is safe when I sashay.” His new album, No Shape, out now, is more about transcending the physical. These songs morph from lean ballads to textured, messy soundscapes as bubbly synths get punctured by reverb-heavy guitar and slim percussion builds to exploding chords. On the interlude “Choir,” an eerie violin piece narrated by Hadreas, he groans, “I can’t dream/ Something keeps melocked.” But there are lovely moments of peace too. “Did you notice babe everything is all right?” he asks in “Alan,” a tender lullaby to his longtime partner and bandmate Alan Wyffels. “I’m here,…

MOVIES Starring Amandla Stenberg (The Hunger Games),Everything, Everything (May 19) adapts the like-named Nicola Yoon romantic novel about a teen with an illness who falls in love with the quirky boy next door. MUSIC The Mountain Goats pivot to woodwinds and piano on the band’s moody 16th album, Goths (May 19). The indie-folk quartet contemplates the titular subculture with an eerie album. Recorded live, Goths is a follow-up to their last thematic album, which explored wrestling. TELEVISION Decline and Fall (May 15) is an English comedy that faithfully reconstructs the 1928 novel of the same name. The tale of an unfairly expelled Oxford student forced into a teaching job streams on Acorn TV. BOOKS Author Garrett Graff’s Raven Rock (out now) explores nuclear panic during America’s ColdWar– era doomsday preparations.…

PRESIDENT HASSAN ROUHANI The moderate incumbent won in 2013 pledging to solve the nuclear dispute between Iran and world powers. Although he did just that in 2015, the economic rewards he promised have not materialized. Although his critics say he has sold revolutionary ideals short, he’s favored for re-election. MOHAMMADBAGHER QALIBAF Running for President for the third time, the conservative Tehran mayor is trying to win support as a populist advocate for lower classes. He has dared to attack government officials as well as affluent Iranians, calling them a 4% minority sucking blood out of the 96%. EBRAHIM RAISI The conservative cleric is the race’s hard-liner, campaigning as a proponent of economic equality who will fight corruption. He has never held elected office, however, and has been…

IT’S HARD TO STIR UP CONTROVERSY when you’ve been dead for tens of thousands of years, but 15 protohumans did just that in 2015, after their fossils were found in Johannesburg. They were hard to place on the human evolutionary ladder, with a jumble of relatively modern skeletal features but a brain as small as a gorilla’s. Many questions arose over their estimated age—a matter that was at last resolved on May 9, when it was revealed that they are roughly 236,00 years old. That matters a lot, because it means that the prehumans might have been living right alongside early modern humans, or Homo sapiens. Taken together with what we already know about Neanderthals and Homo sapiens’ coexisting, it essentially debunks the old idea that modern humans evolved from…

‘ANIMAL BEAUTY STANDARDS CAN BE AS IRRATIONAL, UNPREDICTABLE AND DYNAMIC AS OUR OWN.’ —PAGE 18 JENN JARMULA, AN ELEMENTARY-and middle-school teacher in Chicago, recently hung a sign outside her classroom. this is a Fidget spinner Free Zone, it read. Fidget spinners—which dominate Amazon’s top-selling toys and games list—are nothing more than gadgets with three weighted prongs that spin, spin, spin on the fingers of sixth-graders like tiny ceiling fans. They’ve existed in some form since 1993, but lately they’ve grown so popular that retailers can barely keep them in stock. In order to keep up with demand, Toys “R” Us has chartered jets to ship spinners to its stores. Jarmula says they’ve become disruptive in the classroom. She recently confiscated four spinners from a single student in one class period,…

THE IDEA MAY SEEM OBVIOUS—CELEBRATE moms!—but the origin of Mother’s Day is surprisingly murky. The most common story is that it began in 1908, when a young woman named Anna Jarvis staged a Mother’s Day at her West Virginia church. It was a ceremony meant to honor all mothers, especially her own, who said before she died that she wished such a holiday existed. At least that’s how Jarvis, who by 1912 had quit her advertising job to boost the idea full-time, told it. The part she often skipped was that her mother Ann had already organized her own mom-centric events. But those events were far more somber than celebratory. Of the 13 children borne by the elder Jarvis, four lived to adulthood. Her experience was not uncommon; up to…

Now if only everyone else would see it that way. A TIME exclusive In a few minutes, President Donald Trump will release a new set of tweets, flooding social-media accounts with his unique brand of digital smelling salts— words that will jolt his supporters and provoke his adversaries. Nearly a dozen senior aides stand in the Oval Office, crowding behind couches or near door-length windows. This is the way he likes to work, more often than not: in a crowd. He sits behind his desk finishing the tasks of the day, which have included watching new Senate testimony about Russian involvement in the 2016 presidential election, by signing orders in red folders with a black Sharpie. When he held the job, Barack Obama tended to treat the Oval Office like…

LOG LADY A sign that something was amiss: the townie who cradled a log like a puppy while prophesying CHERRY PIE FBI agent Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) waxed poetic about pie, rendering even the mundane bizarre TIBETAN METHOD Not your average hero cop, Cooper tapped into the supernatural to solve crimes ONE EYED JACK’S This brothel and drug den symbolized the darkness hidden in even the most wholesome of towns THE RED ROOM Lynch captured dream logic perfectly when characters entered this room of riddles ONE-ARMED MAN The show’s selfmutilating mystery man was part innocent bystander, part malevolent spirit…

DAVID J. GARROW’S RISING STAR: THE MAKING of Barack Obama, a 1,460-page haute-tabloid tome, came under critical fire before it was even released this month. One glaring issue for the author of a Pulitzer-winning Martin Luther King Jr. biography: his treatment of the race and love life of the 20-something who would go on to become President. The author relies heavily on interviews with a former girlfriend, Sheila Miyoshi Jager, with whom Obama lived in the 1980s, as if that relationship were the key to understanding his personality. Obama’s split from her is framed as a rejection of white women (Jager is half-Japanese) in favor of the optics that would come from having a black wife. Although Garrow details the sexual chemistry between Obama and his white girlfriends, the former…

“LIVE LONG ENOUGH, AND life teaches you that God is not your lucky rabbit foot.” So says Nora Rafferty in J. Courtney Sullivan’s new novel, Saints for All Occasions. She should know: Nora and her sister Theresa emigrate from Ireland to the U.S. in the 1950s, recalling Colm Tóibín’s 2009 best seller, Brooklyn. When Theresa gets pregnant, Nora quickly gets married and persuades her husband to raise the baby boy as their own. Fifty years later, their son’s true parentage remains a secret to almost everyone in the growing Rafferty family. By then, plenty more secrets have accumulated. The Raffertys love one another, but their secrets turn them into strangers. Misunderstandings ricochet through the family’s generations like so much shrapnel. Sullivan lets readers in on these secrets even as most…