Table of contents for June 12, 2017 in TIME Magazine

N.J. town pays out over mosque A mosque denied planning permission in a New Jersey town in 2015 will go ahead as planned, after Bernards Township settled a pair of lawsuits over religious discrimination. The town will also pay the local Islamic society $3.25 million. Tamir Rice killer fired from police The police officer who fatally shot 12-year-old Tamir Rice in November 2014 was fired from the Cleveland force after an investigation of more than two years into the child’s death. Officer Timothy Loehmann was dismissed for inaccuracies on his job application, not for the Rice shooting. Trudeau: Pope should say sorry Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau urged Pope Francis to travel to Canada to apologize for the Catholic Church’s role in placing thousands of indigenous children in residential schools,…

Chile has long been southamerica’s goodnews story, but the narrative has taken some twists and turns of late. During Michelle Bachelet’s first presidential term, more than a decade ago, when emerging markets were booming, Chile’s GDP rate hit 5%. Then came a devastating earthquake in 2010 just as Sebastian Pinera came to power. Pinera raised taxes to help pay for reconstruction, but global economic conditions soon began to take a toll. Demand for Chile’s commodity exports slowed, and higher taxes and sluggish growth made Pinera unpopular. In Chile, Presidents can’t serve consecutive terms, and Bachelet was again elected President in 2013 on pledges of free higher education, steeper business taxes and tighter regulation. Government for the people, not for the bankers and corporations, she promised. But keeping those promises became…

Summer haSn’t even officially begun and sightings of great white sharks in shallow waters have already forced beach closures on both U.S. coasts. In a post-Jaws world, it seems only natural that shark warnings should send swimmers running. But that hasn’t always been the case. For most of history, in fact, sharks simply weren’t on most people’s radars as something to fear It’s not all Hollywood’s fault, either. Experts point to July 1916, when a series of shark attacks on the Jersey Shore killed four people and left one injured, as a turning point. People were so afraid of what became known as the “Jersey man-eater” that President Woodrow Wilson held a Cabinet meeting at which he advocated for killing all sharks on the East Coast. The reason for the…

THIS IS NOT A NORMAL TIME. It is not normal to see a President of the United States decrying “so-called judges.” It is not normal for the leader of the country that invented what is our First Amendment to degrade and even threaten journalists. And it is not normal to see the head of the FBI fired summarily because he was investigating connections between Russia and the presidential campaign of the very man who fired him. No, there is nothing normal about this moment, and there is nothing American about it, either. But I’m old enough to have seen a movie like this, maybe a time or two. And that’s why, about this part of the story at least, I’m actually an optimist. I remember watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. I…

indian auThor arundhaTi Roy attained instant literary fame with her 1997 debut novel, The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker Prize, topped international bestseller lists and became required reading for high school and college students, cementing its status as a modern classic. Roy has published more than a dozen nonfiction books in the 20 years since but hasn’t produced another novel. Until now Like its predecessor, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a complex, nonlinear narrative that blends the personal and political. But unlike The God of Small Things, which focused on a pair of twins whose tragedy was familial, this is a novel of conflict on a grand scale. Although the plot spans 50 years, leading up to the present day, and encompasses a vast cast,…

AS RURAL AMERICA EMPTIES out, houses that were once homes make the sad transition to abandoned buildings. Virginia’s Accomack County, once the wealthiest rural county in the nation, had 800 such forelorn structures in November 2012. Months later, 70 of them had gone up in flames, one at a time, always at night. The arson investigation takes in a lot. But the propulsive pleasure of American Fire rests in author Monica Hesse’s decision not to force a thing. The book has the brisk diligence of bigcity journalism (Hesse writes for the Washington Post) and the languid chattiness of the small town where she lived while researching it. One chapter begins, “Arson is a weird crime.” Another is titled “What Happened Next.” And you want to know. The culprits are revealed…

‘We want to live another day, we want to live another month.’ TERESITO SUGANOB, Catholic priest in the Philippines, pleading for help in a video statement claiming that ISIS-linked militants have taken him and 200 others captive and are demanding that the nation’s military withdraw troops from the besieged city of Marawi; it was unclear when the video was made 7 Hours waited by some to take the new Guardians of the Galaxy ride, which debuted on May 27 at Disney California Adventure Park 5,995 Points scored in the NBA playoffs by LeBron James as of May 25, the night he topped Michael Jordan’s 20-year record of 5,987 ‘I would shoot him in selfdefense.’ MATT RINALDI, Republican Texas state representative, responding on Facebook to allegations he threatened to gun down…

A WEAKENED TREATY The U.S. is the world’s largest economy and its second greatest polluter. Experts worry that if the U.S. abandons its public commitment to combat climate change—a move that could negatively impact the global effort to lower carbon emissions—it may trigger other countries to follow suit, weakening the accord. LOST ECONOMIC OPPORTUNITY In 2016, there was a nearly $300 billion global investment in clean energy—a figure that was expected to grow with the accord, since fighting climate change means embracing renewable energy. A U.S. withdrawal from the Paris Agreement could signal to investors that the U.S. has little interest in capturing that market. GLOBAL ALIENATION A U.S. withdrawal will likely be seen as an affront to U.S. allies in Europe, weakening key relationships. It will put the U.S.…

TO UNDERSTAND ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, you first had to grasp his distrust of Moscow. Even until his death on May 26 at age 89, the Polishborn, Harvardcredentialed former National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter remained among the rarified ranks of celebrity scholars, up there with Henry Kissinger, a predecessor to whom he was always compared. Zbig, as his friends knew him, worked for Democrats, although he was to the right of many Republicans when it came to the Soviet Union. To curb communism, he tacitly backed Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia and favored the Islamic militants battling the Soviets in Afghanistan. Milestones An adviser to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson earlier, Brzezinski gave a critical eye to the six Presidents that followed Carter. While he chose his words…

‘AMERICA CAN’T OPT OUT OF A NETWORKED WORLD. TO SUCCEED, ALL OF US HAVE TO OPT IN.’ —PAGE 20 MOST GIRL SCOUTS SPEND THEIR time learning survival skills and selling cookies. But Cassandra Levesque, 18, spent her last year in Girl Scouts drafting and then campaigning for a bill that would raise New Hampshire’s minimum marriage age from 13 to 18. Under New Hampshire law—as in most other U.S. states—minors can marry as long as they have parental consent and a judge signs off. “Every girl dreams about what their wedding is going to be like,” says Levesque, “but some girls are having a wedding that they never dreamed of. They’re being put into relationships that they’re not ready for.” Last year Levesque contacted her state representative Jacalyn Cilley about…

Northwestern law professor Tonja Jacobi and student Dylan Schweers used transcripts to analyze the Supreme Court’s oral arguments from 2004 to 2015 and created a data set of all the interruptions by Justices or advocates. Here are some of their findings, as reported in the online journal Aeon: 24% Average percentage of female Justices on the Court bench over the 12 years studied 32% Percentage of interruptions that happened to female Justices 4% Percentage of interruptions made by female Justices 3x Factor by which female Justices were more likely to be interrupted than male Justices from 2011 to 2015 —J.Z.…

As the trump AdministrAtion wrestles with locAtions, numbers and missions for American combat deployments globally, one perennial has re-emerged near the top of the list: Afghanistan. Famously called the “Graveyard of Empires” to reflect the successive defeats of Alexander the Great, the British Raj and the Soviet Union, Afghanistan continues to vex U.S. military planners and political leaders. After perhaps a $1 trillion investment and thousands of casualties, another ask for troops is particularly unwelcome. The question on the table is simple: How many troops do we need in Afghanistan? When I was the Supreme Allied Commander at NATO for global operations, I had strategic responsibility for the fighting in Afghanistan and a total NATO force of more than 150,000. Over my four years in command, I had four brilliant…

Life is short, and writings about Israel and the Palestinians can be very, very long. So it’s a good thing there’s Nathan Thrall. An American analyst with a severe allergy to conventional wisdom, Thrall has lived in Jerusalem since 2011, writing dense but rich reports for the International Crisis Group, and now The Only Language They Understand. It posits that the key to resolving the conflict lies not in negotiations but in force—which history shows is what produces change. Force doesn’t have to mean violence. Jimmy Carter’s coercive threat to end military aid to Israel pushed that nation onto the road to peace with Egypt. But violence cannot be ignored, Thrall says. Only after staggering military losses did the Palestine Liberation Organization reduce its territorial demand to land lost in…

TIME PICKS MUSIC Acclaimed British dream-pop trio London Grammar returns with a new album, Truth Is a Beautiful Thing (June 9), on which they team up once again with Adele producer Paul Epworth. TELEVISION After an ambitious fourth season, the Emmy-winning Netflix series Orange Is the New Black picks up mid–prison riot with a new season streaming on June 9. PODCASTS On new podcast Never Before, writer Janet Mock conducts in-depth interviews with unexpected cultural figures like Tina Knowles-Lawson, a.k.a. Beyoncé’s mom. MOVIES The period piece My Cousin Rachel (June 9), adapted from the Daphne du Maurier novel, tells the story of a young Englishman (Sam Claflin) plotting revenge against his mysterious sister-in-law (Rachel Weisz). WHEN BLEACHERS frontman Jack Antonoff arrives in your city on his current tour, he’ll have…

WeWomen and girls of The 21sT cenTury Wear our empowerment on our sleeves. But sometimes I think that all those We can do iT and girls rule T-shirts are meant as much for our own reassurance as they are brave declarations to the world—mantras we hope will carry us into a future that we keep insisting will be female. It’s little surprise that one of the summer’s hit films will beWonder Woman, a fantasy that brings those slogans to life. She’s a beautiful Amazon raised on an all-female island who can deflect bullets with her jewelry, lift a car, fend off a dozen armed men with acrobatic sword work and bring peace to a warring planet. And she does it all in a bustier, which might be the most daunting…

You discuss many writing evils in your book, from pleonasms to pesky pronouns. What kind of bad writing upsets you most?Writing that is deliberately designed to deceive— insurance policies, political statements. Business verbosity wastes money, confuses millions. I find myself getting much more angry about the moral question of obligation of fairness than I do about a misplaced semicolon. And you believe in freedom from the language police? The language police are a bloody nuisance, some linguists in particular. The English language got corrupted by pettifoggers. Do you know that word, pettifogger? It’s somebody who stumbles over a neck but misses the body lying on the floor. You lay out 10 rules for writing clearly. Orwell had only six rules. Did he forget some? Yes. I know that I did.…

Panama’s strongman He was known to His fans as elMan and to his critics as Pineapple Face because of his acne scars. Manuel Antonio Noriega, who died on May 29 at 83, was always a Janus, shifting from U.S. ally to enemy too often to keep track. When Noriega came to power in Panama as a military commander in 1983, he was seen by the U.S. as a bulwark against leftist influence in Latin America. But reports soon circulated of his involvement in drug and arms smuggling and selling U.S. secrets to Cuba. His behavior grew increasingly eccentric and brutal, and the U.S. invaded in 1989, in part to put an end to his reign. Noriega went from despot to convict, jailed in the U.S. for drug offenses and finally…

Board games Tend To feel timeless. But as Tristan Donovan argues in his new book, It’s All a Game, the ways board games evolve reflect the values of the time. Consider the game of Life, which began in 1860 “as a thinly disguised Sunday school sermon,” Donovan writes, with spaces on the board promoting virtues and punishing vices. A century later, as American industry boomed, it was remarketed with a capitalistic message. By the 1990s, the financial side still mattered, but the introduction of “Life Tiles” rewarded more intangible accomplishments. Games of the 1960s like Twister revealed changing sexual attitudes, while the German game Settlers of Catan (introduced six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall) valued open trade over command and control. “Wherever the future takes us,” Donovan…

When author Jeremy McCarter was in college, he became intrigued by a particular moment in American history: he noticed that, from around 1912 to 1913, young Americans were especially hopeful and engaged in progressive political issues. They were certain they had the answers to our problems. Then we entered World War I. McCarter’s new book, Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals, is about those idealists and “what happens when the world, which had seemed to be spinning rapidly in the direction of peace and social progress, falls to pieces.” McCarter (who previously collaborated with Lin-Manuel Miranda on the book Hamilton: The Revolution) chose five fascinating characters: Randolph Bourne, a social critic; Max Eastman, a poet and editor of an antiwar publication; Walter Lippmann, a political commentator who changed…

... under your beach umbrella ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE Gail Honeyman A woman with no filter and minimal social skills learns how to eschew her lonely lifestyle and make real human connections. Reese Witherspoon has snapped up the movie rights for this buzzy, life-affirming novel. ... at the watercooler (or on Slack) TOUCH Courtney Maum In this novel, a worldfamous trend forecaster who predicted “the swipe” realizes that, much to her employer’s chagrin, the world is ready to turn away from technology and reconnect person to person. ... at book club HUNGER Roxane Gay The Bad Feminist author’s new memoir explores her relationship with her weight and the trauma of her rape. She calls the brutally honest account “the most difficult writing experience of my life.” ... during graduation…