Table of contents for October 16, 2017 in TIME Magazine

Millions saw shady ads on Facebook About 10 million people in the U.S. saw politically divisive ads on Facebook bought by Russia-linked accounts in the months before and after last year’s U.S. presidential election, the company revealed on Oct. 2. Moscow denied involvement in the ads, which cost $100,000. U.S. expels Cuban diplomats The U.S. ordered 15 Cuban diplomats to leave the country, after a series of apparent sonic attacks on the U.S. Embassy in Havana that left at least 21 U.S. diplomats with hearing and vision ailments. The U.S. earlier pulled 60% of its embassy staff from its Cuba mission. Final report on missing MH 370 jet In their final report on the incident, Australian investigators said it was “almost inconceivable” that Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, which disappeared with…

AUSTRALIANS ARE VOTING IN A NATIONWIDE poll on legalizing same-sex marriage, called the Marriage Law Postal Survey. Opinion polls suggest the result, expected on Nov. 15, will be in favor of marriage equality, but hurdles remain before that can be legalized. POSTAL VOTE On Sept. 12 every Australian who has registered to vote was sent a ballot asking, “Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?” The government, led by Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, has promised a vote on the issue in the parliament by the end of the year if the majority of voters opt for yes. But LGBT activists point out that lawmakers are not bound to vote along the lines of what the country says it wants. OPEN QUESTION The issue has divided lawmakers…

JELLY SANDALS The plastic shoes beloved by ’90s kids made a comeback during Alberta Ferretti’s Milan Fashion Week show in September, where they were worn by models Gigi Hadid and Bella Hadid. IKEA BAG Balenciaga also made headlines on the Paris runway in June 2016 when it debuted a $2,145 large blue leather bag that bore a striking resemblance to Ikea’s iconic 99¢ Frakta tote. DHL T-SHIRT When French design house Vetements showcased a $330 version of the yellow T-shirt worn by employees of German courier giant DHL at Paris Fashion Week in 2015, it quickly sold out.…

CLEAN-ENERGY PROMOTERS HAILED TESLA’S ANNOUNCEment of plans for a Nevada “gigafactory”—a reference to the unit for measuring energy storage—back in 2014 as the dawn of a new American industry. The $5 billion facility would eventually produce millions of lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles as well as energy storage on the grid. But behind the headlines, leading battery researchers and entrepreneurs say the gigafactory represents an exception to the rule in the fast-growing global industry for lithium-ion batteries. No matter what Tesla has planned, the U.S. is set to lag China in the battery race if current trends continue. Instead of manufacturing in America, entrepreneurs are increasingly looking to China to turn cutting-edge battery research into reality. The country is expected to capture 65% of the battery market by 2021, with…

Dear Las Vegas, You now belong to a club where membership is unwanted. The eyes of the world are upon you, but not because of your shining spectacles of lights and entertainment; no, the reason is far too bleak. Your sister cities, fellow members of the unsolicited club, know what you are going through. We see you. We feel for you. We are here for you. Many will come to your aid in this desperate time of need. You will experience insurmountable amounts of love and strength to push on. Many will also come for the show, and once deadlines are met and assignments completed, they will go on to the next story. But for you, this is not a scene that ends when the cameras roll out. Building community…

PHYSICAL ACTIVITY Exercising during treatment won’t be easy for everyone, but it can be worthwhile when women feel up to it. “Exercise is one of the best things women can do for themselves,” says Dr. Ann Partridge, director of the Program for Young Women with Breast Cancer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. “Walking three to five times a week can make a huge difference in how you feel during treatment.” It’s good for the brain too. A study of 87 breast-cancer survivors found that those who did 12 weeks of exercise scored better on some cognitive tests than women who didn’t exercise. HEALTHY EATING A healthy diet filled with lots of fruits and vegetables, which contain fiber and antioxidants, is good preventive medicine. When researchers in a 2016 study asked women…

ABOVE THE ENTRANCE TO GRANT’S TOMB IN NEW YORK CITY, FIGURES representing Peace and Victory frame an inscription. The slogan’s brevity belies the difficulty of the idea: LET US HAVE PEACE. On a recent afternoon, the biographer Ron Chernow perched on a nearby bench to discuss his latest offering, Grant, a sweeping study of the Civil War general and U.S. President whose body lies within that monument. Gazing up at North America’s largest mausoleum, Chernow recalls that Walt Whitman dubbed Ulysses S. Grant and Abraham Lincoln the two “towering majestic figures” of the Civil War. “Most living Americans can’t understand why someone like Walt Whitman would have talked about Ulysses S. Grant in the same breath,” Chernow says. “If they came up here, I think most of them would be…

THE IDEA OF CHILDHOOD wonder was invented, after the fact and in their typical, boring way, by adults. Kids have no idea they’re feeling wonder—just feeling it is the thing. That’s the lightning in a bottle captured by director Sean Baker in The Florida Project. Six-year-old Moonee (the preternaturally joyous Brooklynn Prince) is an ebullient kid living with her chronically unemployed mother Halley (Bria Vinaite) in a purple budget motel on the fringes of Orlando. It’s called the Magic Castle, a non-copyright-infringing riff on Disney World’s nearby Magic Kingdom, though it may as well be a continent away. Moonee has no idea about that, and she lives her days as childhood days are meant to be lived, scampering around the sunny asphalt neighborhood with her best friends Scooty and Jancey…

“I HAVE A REALLY HARD time relaxing my mind,” TV producer Jane Sadler (Kyra Sedgwick) tells her young daughter Lake (Abigail Pniowsky) in ABC’s new crime drama Ten Days in the Valley. She’s not kidding— the moment is a brief mutual confession between mother and child before Jane heads to her writer’s shed for a session fueled by both uppers and downers. Somewhere in the haze, Lake goes missing. Jane, trying to get ahead of the situation, lies to the cops. Dissembling comes too easily to Jane, a character who we learn early on is battle-hardened by divorce and Hollywood. Both help explain why she doesn’t initially take her daughter’s disappearance with the appropriate gravity; she assumes her ex-husband (Kick Gurry) took Lake and—even as the mystery proves less easily…

‘It seems crazy, exciting and bizarre— but that’s probably how my life seems to most people.’ CHER, pop star, announcing The Cher Show, a musical about her career that will open on Broadway in the fall of 2018 $846,619 Amount of money that the original Breakfast at Tiffany’s script, annotated by its star Audrey Hepburn, sold for at Christie’s in London, setting a record for the highest price paid for a film script at an auction 2024 Year by which SpaceX founder Elon Musk says he will send a manned rocket to Mars 3.95 billion Age of a rock containing organic material found in Canada’s Labrador region, thought to be some of the earliest known life on Earth, according to new research published in the journal Nature ‘Dr. Seuss’s illustrations…

WORLD TRADE Metal producers are turning to recycling urban waste because of conventional mining’s high price tag. Currently 700,000 tons of recycled metals are traded a year, set to rise to 1.1 million within a decade. COST SAVINGS More valuable metals can be recycled from e-waste in a landfill than can be found in an average mine. The amount of gold in a single ton of printed circuit boards is the same as in 100 tons of gold ore. GOLD STANDARD Japan is leading the way in this kind of recycling. Last February organizers of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics said the Games’ bronze, silver and gold medals will be forged from recycled urban waste.…

Tokyo governor won’t challenge PM Tokyo Governor Yuriko Koike ruled out running against Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Japan’s Oct. 22 election. Koike launched her new Party of Hope on Sept. 25, just hours before the national election was called. It is thought she will run in the next election instead. No lawsuits for Black Lives Matter A Louisiana judge ruled that Black Lives Matter is a social movement— much like the civil rights, Tea Party and LGBT movements— and therefore can’t be sued. A police officer had anonymously tried to sue the movement after he was injured by a small object thrown during a Black Lives Matter protest in 2016. Refugee charged in Canada attack A Somali-born refugee, 30, was charged with five counts of attempted murder in connection…

IN THE SUMMER OF 1985, S.I. Newhouse, chairman of Conde Nast publications, the newspaper and magazine empire he co-inherited from his father, offered me a lift back to the office in his limo after our monthly lunch. Small, shy and nebbishy, Si, as he was known, was the only power that counted at Conde Nast. What was unique—and most endearing—about Si was that he never behaved like a media mogul. As we drove back to the office, he suddenly said, “You know, there’s no such thing as real power in America.” “What do you mean?” I said. “Well,” he said, “the President has no power. Congress can thwart him. I’m supposed to have media power, but I can’t get arrested!” “You have power,” I said, “but you sometimes choose not…

BETWEEN TURKEY DINNERS AND FAMILY reunions, Canadian Thanksgiving—observed on the second Monday in October—can look pretty similar to its U.S. counterpart. But in fact, part of the reason Canadians first petitioned for the holiday was to celebrate their luck at not being American. In the wake of a crisis of faith catalyzed by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Canadian religious leaders began in 1859 to petition the colonial government for an official day to thank God. Initially, they thanked God for plentiful harvests. But over the next decade, they became even more grateful that they were spared the bloodshed of the U.S. Civil War. “It was a solemn, holy day in the middle of the week when people would go to church,” says historian Peter A. Stevens, “and…

Another mass shooting in America, another round of questions. Was the shooter a terrorist or a lone wolf? (Read: “Was he Muslim?”) Did he have a political agenda? Was he mentally ill? Why would someone do this? One question we never ask: Was the shooter a man? The answer is always the same. Of the 134 mass shooters who have preyed on Americans since 1966, three have been women, making mass shooting a 98% male enterprise. Ninety percent of murderers are men—firearms are used in close to 70% of homicides. Plenty has been written about the relationship between masculinity and guns: how gunmakers center advertising campaigns on macho status, how a startlingly high proportion of mass shooters have a history of abusing women, how more than half of mass shootings…

THE ANNOUNCEMENT FROM JULIA LOUIS-DREYFUS that she has been diagnosed with breast cancer came with both a revelation and a warning. Her tweet revealing her diagnosis also contained some important reminders: that breast cancer is the most common type of cancer among women in the U.S., affecting 1 in 8 over their lifetime, and that while the disease does not discriminate, screening and treatment strategies, especially in the U.S., often do. A cancer diagnosis is one of the most personal experiences a woman can go through. Yet the strategies that doctors have used for detecting and treating the disease are only just beginning to be optimized for individual women. It wasn’t until 2009, for example, that recommendations for breast-cancer screening with mammograms were changed from ones that broadly called for…

I WAS A CANCER EXPERT LONG BEFORE I WAS A PATIENT: in control and invulnerable. Yet all of that changed with one phone call. Seeing the familiar number from my university’s radiology department, I knew it would be a “finding of concern.” With a pang of sadness, I wondered which of my patients I would soon be calling with bad news. But the bad news was about my recent mammogram. Nothing prepared me for the sickening sense of foreboding and fear that gripped me that day. At 48, I was not ready for breast cancer. For me, unlike most of my patients, the decisions about which treatments to choose were the easy parts. I never doubted that a double mastectomy was the right choice, since I had a strong family…

M MORE THAN anything, Blade Runner is a story about the end of empire, capitalism at its grim logical conclusion. That is the case for both the 1982 classic directed by Ridley Scott and the long-awaited sequel, Blade Runner 2049, starring Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling. The profit motive has destroyed the environment; the wealthy have fled to interplanetary colonies; and those who remain on Earth— humans and androids alike—live in dense squalor congested by pollution and garish advertisements. And yet, in the hands of director Denis Villeneuve (Arrival), it’s also beautiful. He spoke to TIME about making the film. This is a sequel to one of the most celebrated sci-fi films of all time. What did you want to preserve? In the first movie, you were seeing layers of…

THE 89-YEAR-OLD BELGIANborn filmmaker Agnes Varda (The Gleaners and I, Cleo from 5 to 7), one of the few female directors to be associated with the French New Wave, has been working steadily since she began making documentary shorts in the 1950s. Her latest, Faces Places, co-directed with 34-year-old French street artist JR, is as vital as anything she’s ever made. It’s a wondrous work that connects people with the landscape they inhabit—and carves out a small place in that landscape for the artist. Varda and JR travel the French countryside in JR’s truck, a roving mini portrait studio outfitted to print very large pictures, meeting people and listening to their stories. The jumbo portraits they snap are then mounted by JR and his assistants— with Varda’s eye as a…

JENNIFER EGAN JOINED THE WHO’S WHO of American letters in 2011 when she won a Pulitzer for A Visit From the Goon Squad, an interlinked-story-collection-as-novel that bucked more than a few conventions. Her new novelManhattan Beach is more conventional in that it’s a linear, historical narrative set circa World War II. It’s a less inventive book, but many readers will find it more satisfying. Manhattan Beach, named for the neighborhood in Brooklyn, begins when Anna Kerrigan is almost 12 years old, tagging along with her father to a mysterious man’s seaside home. Already there is a plucky danger about her. When the narrative shoots ahead seven or eight years, we find her at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, working along with the other wartime women to measure construction parts. Soon, she…

THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL IS IN REAL TROUble. Signed in July 2015 by Iran, the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China and the E.U., the agreement waived nuclear-related economic sanctions on Iran in exchange for limitations on its uranium-enrichment program. International inspectors say Iran is keeping its end of the deal. But the Trump Administration must certify the country’s compliance every three months, and the President has hinted that he won’t recertify the agreement by the next deadline of Oct. 15. Trump wants a better deal. He wants to extend the time frame on Iran’s compliance. He wants expanded access to military sites. He says it must stop testing ballistic missiles, which were not part of the deal, and halt its support for organizations that Washington classifies as terrorist groups,…

HUGH HEFNER, WHO died at 91 on Sept. 27, lived a dream and knew it. After he created Playboy in 1953, the magazine and its bunnyemblazoned empire limned a glossy world of fun for the sophisticated modern man, embodied by Hef himself. There was no shame but lots of sex, personified by nude centerfolds. But the bunnies who populated the Playboy realm weren’t a dream; they were real women. Though Hefner touted the progressive work he did to free women from sexual repression, he also proudly objectified them and, in later decades, some shine came off the cocktail glass. Many saw the Playboy fantasia as dated or worse, and business took a hit on the other side, partly due to a proliferation of raunchier options. And yet Hefner never gave…

ARE YOU REALLY IN CONTROL OF YOUR own mind? Not exactly, argues cognitive psychologist John Bargh, whose new book, Before You Know It, explores the unconscious factors that influence how we think—and act. Consider a study Bargh and his colleagues performed in which participants were told to hold either a hot or cold cup of coffee before assessing five personality traits of a fictional character. Those who held the hot coffee found the character more likable, suggesting that merely being hot or cold can influence our judgment. Or consider another study, in which participants were asked to rate different kinds of strawberry jam, either by their gut reaction or by careful deliberation. More often than not, the gut reactions correlated with the better-quality jams. “The unconscious can lead us astray…

1 MEDITATION MAY BE GOOD FOR YOUR HEART In its first statement about the effects of meditation, the American Heart Association said evidence suggests meditating may lower risk factors for heart disease by lowering high blood pressure or stress hormones. 2 A WEEKLY HOUR OF EXERCISE COULD PREVENT DEPRESSION A study in the American Journal of Psychiatry of more than 33,000 people who initially didn’t have depression found that those who didn’t exercise were 44% more likely to develop depression within 11 years of follow-up than people who exercised one to two hours per week. 3 NO BREAKFAST COULD BE BAD FOR ARTERIES A study of more than 4,000 people in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that those who had under 5% of their daily calories…

As the country reacted to the shooting, many people invoked words that we turn to when experience has slipped the bonds of description, when language seems to offer us mere thimbles to empty a well. A photographer at the scene said the carnage and chaos was “incomparable”— nothing could be relative. The shooter’s brother said he was “completely dumbfounded,” a word that means he felt destitute of the faculty of speech. Many people attempting to find something meaningful to say called the event “unspeakable.” Others said, “I have no words.” President Trump described the event by its indescribable nature too, saying we “cannot fathom” the feelings of the 59 families who lost a parent, a child, a brother or a sister. To fathom something, in the oldest sense, is to…

What happened that fateful Sunday evening in Las Vegas is beyond words. In the days immediately following the shooting, I intentionally avoided saying much, not because I didn’t have opinions, but because I feel that we as a society are often too quick to politicize a situation. The days after the shooting should have been spent grieving, coming together and looking for answers. Unfortunately that’s not what happened, and now I feel compelled to correct the record on some of the over-the-top rhetoric. As the Washington Post’s Fact Checker unit confirmed in 2015, practically none of the then existing legislation made a difference in recent attacks. That is particularly true when it comes to the left’s attacks on my sportsmen’s legislation (the SHARE Act), which among many other things reclassifies…

DESPITE HAVING MORE TREATMENT options, women with cancer in one breast are increasingly choosing to remove both breasts—even though experts say the procedure does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. A recent study published in JAMA Surgery found that the increase is driven in part by their surgeons. Doctors generally discourage contralateral prophylactic mastectomy—also known as CPM, or the removal of a healthy breast when the other has cancer—forwomen at an average risk for additional breast cancer. They do recommend it for women at a higher risk, like those with a mutation in the BRCA gene, which greatly increases the risk of getting the disease. Even so, the rate at which women with cancer in one breast chose to remove both increased nearly sixfold from 1998 to 2011, largely among…

Genes already reveal a lot about how breast cancer works. Doctors test for inherited mutations that can make women more vulnerable to developing the disease, such as those affecting BRCA1 and BRCA2. About 10% of people with breast cancer in the U.S. have at least one of these, and knowing that allows a woman to choose the most appropriate treatment for her. But perhaps the greatest value of genetic testing today is the ability to analyze the DNA of tumors themselves. Commercial tests as well as proprietary ones that major cancer centers have developed are increasingly used to scan dozens of genes for mutations that can predict how likely a cancer is to return. A genetic score that suggests a low chance of recurrence may help women choose less aggressive…

SO MANY MOVIES TODAY HAVE A million near-endings, each promising, “But wait, there’s more!” There are a million near-endings in Blade Runner 2049, Denis Villeneuve’s sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1982 future-noir Blade Runner, and some are O.K. Shot by cinematographer Roger Deakins, this is also a handsome picture: it echoes the first movie’s somber, rain-misted L.A., only with additional strata of despair and wistfulness. But there’s enough story here for three sequels, and not even the capable shoulders of its star, Ryan Gosling—as K, a future-world LAPD officer charged with seeking and destroying androids, or replicants— can carry all of it. Early on, K endures a bone-crushing encounter with one of his targets (Dave Bautista, who maximizes just a few slender minutes of screen time); reports back to his no-nonsense,…

IF YOU COULD SEE GRIEF ON A MAP, THERE WOULD BE RINGS of anguish radiating from whole regions of the U.S. right now. From Texas to Florida to Puerto Rico and Las Vegas, the hurt would expand with each person affected to the people they’re connected with in all parts of the country. No state would remain untouched by the events of 2017. The magnitude of the suffering over the past few months is unfathomable to those who haven’t spent time in a war zone or in countries where nature’s most brutal assaults are even more frequent. Houston and Florida are still reeling from sequential hurricanes. Puerto Rico hasn’t gotten to its feet in the wake of Maria. The people of Charlottesville, Va., watched hate march into town and take…