Table of contents for April 22, 2019 in TIME Magazine

THE CONTINUING REIGN OF KING BIBI IS ALL BUT GUARANteed. Benjamin Netanyahu was on track to a record fifth term as Israel’s Prime Minister on April 10 after challenger Benny Gantz conceded defeat in what at first appeared to be a close contest. Both Netanyahu’s Likud and Gantz’s Blue and White parties won 35 seats in balloting a day earlier. What made the difference—a telling one—was the surge by the right-wing and religious parties that Netanyahu calls “natural partners” in a coalition that will hold a Knesset majority. The outcome continues the transformation of Israel from a state dominated in its early decades by its leftist founding Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion to the country poised to see Netanyahu surpass him as its longest-serving Prime Minister. The election, framed as…

YOU MAY HAVE HEARD OF TIM RYAN’S COUSIN. Sitting on a barstool in an office-park brewery in West Des Moines, Iowa, Ryan tells the tale of how cousin Donny called him up two decades ago, shell-shocked and soon to be out of a job at the electrical-parts factory where he’d worked for seven years. The last thing Donny did was box up the equipment he’d been running to ship it to China, along with his job. It’s an anecdote that Ryan deploys often. It’s also one that could have come from the mouth of President Donald Trump, whom Ryan is now running against. An eight-term Democratic Congressman from a largely white, working-class part of Ohio, Ryan has just launched a presidential campaign built around the plight of the people…

WHEN THE TALIBAN SEIZED POWER IN 1996, IT WAGED a war against Afghan women. Girls’ education was banned. Women were confined to the home and denied the right to work. They were flogged, beaten, mutilated and stoned to death for supposed immorality. This is not ancient history. These are living memories for millions of Afghans. And they have become present concerns, as U.S. government representatives negotiate with the Taliban about a settlement that could see it return to a position of power and influence in Afghanistan. After the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan in 2001, ending Taliban oppression of women was frequently described as a goal second only to the eradication of terrorist safe havens. Today, nearly a third of the Afghan parliament and civil service are women.…

IRISH AUTHOR SALLY ROONEY STAKED her claim as the novelist of the millennial generation with her stunning 2017 debut, Conversations With Friends, which tells the story of a bisexual communist who expresses the emotions she can’t in person through emails and texts. It’s a nuanced portrait of modern romance, yet it closes on a surprisingly traditional, upbeat note—suggesting that our most familiar tropes die hard. Rooney, 28, mines similar territory in her latest love story, the equally engrossing but still more conventional Normal People. This book’s protagonists, Marianne and Connell, are in many ways opposites: She comes from a cold, wealthy family, he from one that’s cash-strapped but rich in love; she doesn’t care what others think of her, he does. But they share an anxiety about achieving “normalcy,” that…

‘I don’t think it should be the final season.’GEORGE R.R. MARTIN, Game of Thrones creator, on the red carpet at the NYC premiere of the final season of HBO’s adaptation of his books ‘While there are people who have a large number of Twitter followers, what’s important is that we have large numbers of votes on the floor of the House.’NANCY PELOSI, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, in an April 8 interview; the remark has been viewed by some as a dig at newer members of Congress ‘Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator.’PETE BUTTIGIEG, Democratic mayor of South Bend, Ind.—who is gay and a 2020 presidential hopeful—addressing Vice President Mike Pence’s policy positions on LGBT rights, at an April 7 event ‘We exist in a state of permanent…

IN THE HOURS LEADING INTO tip-off, the April 8 NCAA men’s basketball national championship game received about as much love as a blister on a player’s big toe. Pundits and the general basketball populace lamented that the matchup featured two of the best defensive teams in the country, Virginia and Texas Tech—the former of which plays at a notoriously plodding pace. But the Monday-night affair in Minneapolis, which Virginia won 85-77 in a riveting overtime victory, was so much more than the predicted snoozer. For the third straight game, Virginia trailed in the waning moments of regulation. But, once again, the Cavaliers made big plays to pull out a win. A year ago Virginia became the first top seed to ever lose to a No. 16 in men’s tournament…

THE DECISION CAME AS A SURPRISE. When the Nobel Committee awarded its annual Peace Prize in 2012, the betting markets had predicted a laureate involved with the Arab Spring. Almost no one expected the prize to go to a fusty institution that had transformed a continent of war to one of peace—the European Union. “War is as old as Europe,” explained Herman Van Rompuy, the first European Council president, accepting the award in Oslo in December that year. “Our continent bears the scars of spears and swords, cannons and guns, trenches and tanks, and more.” Today, Europe calls to mind bureaucracy. Instead of gunfire and the rattle of tank tracks, the soundtrack to the E.U. is the quiet rustling of papers in the hallways of its capital, Brussels. After…

IT’S TOO HOPEFUL TO think the Flint, Mich., water crisis is over. Five years ago this month, the city began using the corrosive Flint River as its main source of water, which ate away the city’s pipes and leached lead into the drinking water of thousands of residents. Eighteen months later, the city reconnected to Detroit’s clean water supply after studies confirmed what parents had been telling officials: that lead from their taps was poisoning their families. Since then, the state of Michigan has declared Flint’s water safe to drink. Thousands of lead-tainted pipes have been replaced. More than a dozen officials connected to one of the worst health disasters in U.S. history are facing criminal charges. But for many residents, the crisis continues. Flint’s families still stand in…

MODERN COMEDIES TEND TO RELY more on language than on sight gags to earn laughs. But Little—its basic plot conceived by 14-year-old Marsai Martin, of black-ish, who also stars in the film—earns its greatest laughs by riffing on visual contrasts of big and little, small and tall. Regina Hall plays Jordan Sanders, the head of a hugely successful Atlanta tech company: she’s rich, gorgeous, impeccably dressed—and unbearable. Her assistant, April (the marvelous Issa Rae, star and creator of HBO’s Insecure), endures Jordan’s tirades with increasing exasperation. But after Jordan berates a little girl who innocently tries to show her a magic trick, another kind of magic happens: she wakes up in the body of her 13-year-old self (Martin), and when she tries to live her life the usual adult way,…

WHEN ANNA KENDRICK GOES ON TALK SHOWS, SHE OFTEN gets asked to sing. The Pitch Perfect star has staged mini-musicals with James Corden and broken into show tunes with both Stephen Colbert and Conan O’Brien. But when Kendrick appeared on Showtime’s talk show Desus & Mero this week, she didn’t sing. Instead, she joined its eponymous hosts at the strip club. In a romp through the Bronx, Kendrick and the pair threw money inside the club and shot dice outside it, all while discussing baked goods and her approach to the craft of acting. Desus Nice and the Kid Mero, it’s clear, aren’t your parents’ late-night hosts. If other comedians dance right on the edge of the line, the Bronx natives stomp on all over it in their Timberland boots.…