Table of contents for July 31, 2017 in TIME Magazine

DONALD TRUMP JR.’S EMAILSDavid Von Drehle’s July 24 cover story about Donald Trump Jr.’s involvement in the ongoing Russia scandal drew praise from comedian James Corden, who tweeted that the cover design, which displayed the text of Trump’s emails, was “utterly brilliant.” But Peter Boam of Roseville, Calif., disagreed, arguing that the design— which he said made the businessman look like “a mobster headed to arraignment”—was unfair given the lack of proof of a crime. Meanwhile, Nora Baladerian of Los Angeles was struck by the “contrast in values” represented by the cover story about the scandal and the back page of the issue, which featured Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai. Aww, Junior’s first @TIME cover, Donald must be so proud.’ GEORGE TAKEI, on Twitter VIRAL ANGERReaders such as…

Australian woman killed by U.S. cop Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he is “demanding answers” after a Sydney native was fatally shot by a Minneapolis police officer for undisclosed reasons. Justine Damond, 40, was killed by a single gunshot after police responded to a 911 call she placed to report a possible assault. Six activists jailed in Turkey Six human-rights activists, including Amnesty International’s local director, were jailed, pending trial by a Turkish court for alleged links to a terrorist group. The government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has detained 50,000 people since a failed coup in July 2016. R. Kelly denies he held women in ‘cult’ The R&B singer R. Kelly denied claims in a BuzzFeed report that he has been holding aspiring female musicians against their will…

Some student debts could be wiped out Tens of thousands of people in the U.S. who are behind on paying off their private student loans could see their debts erased. The National Collegiate Student Loan Trusts has been unable to prove legal ownership of at least $5 billion in defaulted loans. Abuse of German choirboys rampant At least 547 members of a Catholic choir for boys in Regensburg, Germany, were physically or sexually abused by church members over 70 years, according to an investigation. Georg Ratzinger, brother of former Pope Benedict XVI, ran the choir from 1964 to 1994 but denies being aware of any sexual abuse. Iran sentences U.S. student for “spying” A U.S. grad student was sentenced to 10 years in prison in Iran after he was accused…

1 People who consume the most artificial sweeteners may also eat more processed food overall, which is linked to a higher risk for obesity or heartrelated problems. 2 Sweeteners may interfere with a person’s microbiome, a collection of gut bacteria crucial for the absorption of nutrients. 3 Regularly eating or drinking sugar substitutes may cause people to crave sweeter foods more often, thanks to how the brain’s “sweetness receptors” respond to artificial sugars.…

BUYING INTO THE NEXT FACEBOOK OR Netflix before it goes public may seem beyond the reach of all but those with the deepest pockets. But as Jason Calacanis explains in his new book, Angel, anyone can become an angel investor—as long as they’re prepared to lose it all. (It’s “the highest-risk investing in the world,” he warns.) There are ways to mitigate risk, though. To start, Calacanis suggests joining an angel syndicate like SeedInvest, FundersClub or AngelList (which he uses), where you can contribute as little as $1,000 as part of a group funding effort. As for picking the right company? Calacanis says to look for other notable investors, at least two founders (as insurance against one of them quitting) and proof that the company can keep itself going for…

1 PEOPLE DON’T PUT ON ENOUGH SUNBLOCK A study presented at the British Association of Dermatologists’ annual conference found that people miss 9.5% of their face on average when they apply sunblock, usually skimping around their eyes. Most basal-cell carcinomas, the most common form of skin cancer, are found on the face and neck. 2 COFFEE HELPS PEOPLE LIVE LONGER While previous studies looked predominantly at white participants, a study in Annals of Internal Medicine found that African Americans, Japanese Americans, Latinos and whites who drank coffee every day were 12% to 18% less likely to die than non–coffee drinkers during 16 years of follow-up. 3 A SENSE OF PURPOSE CAN HELP YOU SLEEP A new study in Sleep Science and Practice found that people who reported having a strong…

SOMETIMES CALLED “THE ANGEL OF DEATH ROW,” Scharlette Holdman was not everyone’s idea of angelic. She had a salty tongue and a wicked sense of humor and a temper that once moved her to heave a typewriter at a door. She had a rebellious streak so wide that it really wasn’t even a streak. Opposing authority was more like the core of her being— especially the authority of those granted the power to kill. After more than four decades of defending some of the most notorious—and some of the most faceless—killers in America, Holdman died on July 12, a fighter to the end. Although 70 is not particularly old, it might have surprised some people to know that she made it as long as she did. In the early years…

IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT, ELEANOR ROOSEVELT was lefToveRs onToasT. Culinary historian Laura Shapiro has memorialized one of the world’s most celebrated cooks in Julia Child: A Life and dissected American food culture in two other works. In her latest,What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women & the Food That Tells Their Stories, she studies the eating habits and hang-ups of significant figures. Probing biographies, archives and her subjects’ own writing, Shapiro argues that food and diet open revealing windows into character. “While extraordinary circumstances produce extraordinary women,” she writes, “food makes them recognizable.” ELEANOR ROOSEVELT The cuisine in the Roosevelt White House was widely known as “the worst in the history of the presidency.” A Depression-era mentality certainly contributed— Henrietta Nesbitt, the cook (the “most reviled” ever to serve)…

A YEAR AGO MAINSTREAM JOURNALISTS WERE insignificant—usurped by bloggers, tweeters, podcasters and selfies of women doing yoga. But now we’re getting into personal feuds with the President, a distinction once reserved for dictators, political rivals, union leaders and Donald Trump. President Trump spends more time on journalism criticism than Columbia’s graduate school. He’s insulted journalists I haven’t even heard of, and I’m a journalist. He has viciously taunted Glenn Beck, MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski, The View’s Joy Behar, Yahoo News’ Matt Bai and Lisa Belkin, and New York Times writers Charles Blow, Frank Bruni, David Brooks and Michael Barbaro. These are just the B’s. SO I FEEL DEEPLY INSIGNIFICANT, because Trump has not once threatened, mocked, discredited or belittled me, leaving me feeling like a washed-up celebrity in the front row…

9 Number of years Australian Senator Scott Ludlam served before recently realizing he wasn’t qualified to serve in the first place, because he’s a dual citizen of New Zealand; he’d been elected three times 57Ab Name of the newfound star that University of Cambridge’s Institute of Astronomy believes to be the smallest ever discovered; it’s approximately 2,000 to 3,000 times dimmer than Earth’s sun ‘We’ll first rip the heads off of these traitors.’ RECEP TAYYIP ERDOGAN, President of Turkey, condemning terrorists and plotters at a July 15 rally marking the one-year anniversary of an unsuccessful military coup against his government; more than 240 were killed and 2,000 were injured in the 2016 attempt ‘THERE’S NO SEPARATION OF POWERS, NO FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION.’ ISABEL SANTANDER, a 67-year-old retired auditor, explaining why…

IN THE LATE SUMMER OF 2015, SAMIR Hussain was walking out of a movie near his hometown in London’s outer suburbs when two men approached him. Charged words escalated into a fistfight, and suddenly one of them doused the 29-year-old in a liquid that he says felt “too heavy to be water.” It was sulfuric acid, which sears and blisters the skin on contact. “I could just about open one of my eyes, and I could see him smiling at me,” Hussain tells TIME of his attacker. “It was sinister.” Now Hussain wears a mask to help heal the scars that cover threequarters of his face. He will bear the marks for the rest of his life. The horrific attack is just one in what has become a disturbing trend…

LIU XIAOBO DIED A PRISONER after a life spent seeking human rights and political reforms for his 1.3 billion compatriots. The academic and activist, who died on July 13 at age 61, first came to prominence in 1989 after helping lead the Tiananmen Square uprising, then averting bloodshed by convincing occupying students to withdraw. He was jailed for 21 months. But Liu was not to be quieted. He continued his activism and wrote books and poetry that were largely banned in his homeland. After he helped write Charter 08, a petition calling for legislative democracy and a new constitution, the authorities had had enough. He was given an 11- year jail sentence in 2009 that he would not live to complete. The Nobel Peace Prize he won the following year…

IN TUNISIA, CHANGE CAME GRADUALLY AND THEN suddenly. When a police officer confiscated the goods of an unlicensed vegetable seller in December 2010, the merchant drenched himself in gasoline and set himself alight. During the 18 days it took Mohammed Bouazizi to die, his story spread across the Arab world. Public anger grew, and protests swelled. On Jan. 4, 2011, Bouazizi died. Ten days later, the 23-year dictatorship of President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali was brought to its knees. The Arab Spring advanced to Egypt and Libya, toppling and threatening autocrats across the region. The aftershocks continue six and a half years later. Libya remains divided, Syria is mired in civil war, and the Egyptian and Saudi governments have taken a hard line on political Islam. Tunisia, meanwhile, has become…

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3. HISTORICAL RESEARCH Nolan and vanHoytema pored over photos like these as well as newsreel footage and firsthand accounts. But they avoided direct replication. “If you come up with a language that is not self-conscious and that feels pure,” says van Hoytema, “you enter a scene and just believe it.” Nolan, 46, has built a career making smart films that are also blockbusters. His 10th feature,Dunkirk, is the British-American director’s most ambitious yet. He spoke to TIME about how and why he made this film now Over the past decade, you’ve made movies that take place in the DC Comics universe, within the human subconscious and out in space. Why come back to earth, to history? Dunkirk is one of the great untold stories in modern cinema. Having made a…

MOVIES Former Daily Show correspondent Jessica Williams steps into her first leading role: a playwright dating on Tinder and blooming in the rom-com The Incredible Jessica James (Netflix, July 27). POD CASTS On A Piece of Work (out now), Broad City’s Abbi Jacobson explores MOMA, discussing works by Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol with curators and guests, including RuPaul, Questlove and Hannibal Buress. MUSIC Retro-pop singer Lana Del Rey returns in all her nostalgia-tinged glory with the breathily romantic Lust for Life (July 21), with assists from Stevie Nicks and the Weeknd. BOOKS In The Unwomanly Face of War (July 25), Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich stitches together interviews with women who fought with the Red Army during World War II.…

RYAN GATTIS’ NEW novel, Safe, pits two narrators against each other— both of them bad guys trying to be good. Ricky Mendoza Jr., a.k.a. Ghost, a former addict who cracks safes for the DEA, has decided to go rogue in a “ghetto Robin Hood” plot to steal from gangsters to pay off mortgages of those in need. (It’s 2008, and the financial crisis looms.) This puts him at odds with Rudolfo “Rudy” Reyes, a.k.a. Glasses, a powerful gangster’s right-hand man who hopes to inform on his boss and start life fresh. At times, Gattis overexplains these men’s motivations. He needn’t— the pathos of their problems is inherently compelling. This macho, faster-than-a-speedingbullet novel benefits from the extensive research Gattis has done on the L.A. gang scene—his previous novel, All Involved, was…

Why release An Inconvenient Sequel now? Ten years after the first movie seemed like an appropriate time to check in on what’s changed—and as it turned out, a lot has changed. The climate-related extreme weather events are unfortunately way more frequent and way more destructive, but solutions are available now. In a growing number of regions, the electricity from solar and wind is now cheaper than electricity from burning fossil fuels. You met with President Trump after his election. Have you been disappointed by what you’ve seen since? I’ve certainly been disappointed. I really thought there was a chance he would come to his senses and keep the U.S. in the Paris Agreement. I was wrong. But I’ve been gratified that the entire rest of the world has redoubled its…

CLAIM The President’s attorney Jay Sekulow asked how the June 2016 meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and the Russians could be nefarious if it was “allowed” by the U.S. Secret Service. REALITY The Secret Service says it did not provide protection to Trump Jr. at the time of the meeting and did not screen his visitors. CLAIM President Trump tweeted that the Washington Post/ ABC News poll was the “most inaccurate poll around election time,” after it found his approval rating had fallen to 36% in July. REALITY It wasn’t the most inaccurate. The same poll, with a margin of error of 2.5 points, found Hillary Clinton leading Trump 47% to 43% just before the election. Clinton won the popular vote with 48% vs. Trump’s 46%.…

KENYA The Kenya Film Classification Board in June prohibited showings of a number of animated programs, including The Legend of Korra, Hey Arnold! and Adventure Time, claiming they glorified “homosexual behavior.” RUSSIA An episode of The Simpsons in which Homer Simpson plays Pokémon Go during a religious service was banned by a Russian TV network in May after the Orthodox Church complained that it was offensive. U.S. Martin Handford’s Where’s Waldo? was banned in U.S. libraries in the 1990s after someone complained about an illustration of a woman partially exposing her left breast in one of the busy beach scenes.…

THERE ARE FEW THINGS U.S. STUDENTS love more than summer vacation, that traditionally three-month break from school during June, July and August. But why does it even exist? A common theory holds that summer vacation was created for farm kids who needed to work. That’s only marginally true: students at rural schools did get time off for harvests, but those breaks fell in the spring and the fall. In fact, summer vacation was born in the city. Calls for a break began in the mid- 19th century, when many urban schools met year-round. Warnings about “overstudy” led reformers like Horace Mann to argue that time off would be good for kids’ behavior and mental health, says Kenneth M. Gold, author of School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American…

I’M A NUMBERS GUY. THEY’RE HOWI UNDERSTAND THE WORLD— what’s good and what’s bad, what’s working and what isn’t. After I stepped down as CEO of Microsoft and began getting more involved in philanthropy and civic advocacy with my wife, Connie, I realized that I had very little sense of the numbers behind the U.S. government. When I went searching for enlightening statistics, I found they were scattered or unavailable or incomprehensible—if I could even locate them. That’s what led to USAFacts: a platform, launched in April, that offers a look at the government by the numbers—about revenue, spending and outcomes—to create a common set of facts that can serve as a foundation for the type of informed debate that is essential to our democracy. So, to start those conversations,…

6 THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 (2014) Peter Parker (Andrew Garfield) unfortunately promised to leave his girlfriend Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) alone, robbing the movie of its best asset. 5 SPIDER-MAN 3 (2007) Director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies were full of angst and tears. The final installment went from weepy to surreal with its musical interludes. But the film’s heart wins out. 4 THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN (2012) This reboot forced the audience to watch Uncle Ben die all over again. But then-real-life couple Garfield and Stone’s chemistry buoyed the action. 3 SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING (2017) The newest entry is a joyous return to Spider-Man’s adolescence that smartly skips over Spidey’s origin story, favoring the character’s lighter side. 2 SPIDER-MAN (2002) This Spider-Man, equal parts muscle and malaise, helped launch the modern…

JASON BATEMAN IS AMONG the most recognizable TV stars of our time. His dry turn as the harried, dutiful scion to a family of petty crooks on Arrested Development, burnished by endless viewings on Netflix, hasn’t held him back from trying to become something more than just another comic actor. More may not be more interesting. Bateman’s skill for complicating the goodson act—he’s played up the narcissistic side of his Arrested persona in films like Horrible Bosses and Identity Thief—can go to places that are nasty, venal and real. But they can also be painful to watch. His new series, Ozark, pushes his impulse toward alienation to its furthest limit. Bateman’s portrayal of his character on the show is so nasty, you’ll forget you ever liked him. But is that…

TIME’S WEEKLY TAKE ON WHAT POPPED IN CULTURE ‘It’s just fabric, people.’ —KIM KARDASHIAN WEST,…