Table of contents for November 27, 2017 in TIME Magazine

Back in TIME Robot revolution Dec. 8, 1980 This week’s look at 2017’s best inventions (page 69) highlights gadgets meant to improve lives—a goal as old as technology itself. But then what? That’s what TIME asked in 1980 when the magazine examined how robots could alter the world. “This idea that man is destined for higher things than work— not necessarily a realistic idea or even a meritorious one—provides the green light at the end of the pier,” the piece noted. Read the story at time.com/vault HOW OLD ARE YOU NOW? With a new interactive from TIME Labs, you can enter your age and a U.S. city to see whether you’re older or younger than most of the people who live there—and where you fit within the whole U.S. population,…

Zimbabwean PresidenT roberT mugabe, 93, was placed under house arrest on Nov. 15 after the military seized control of the country overnight. The move brings closer to an end a power struggle that has gripped the country over who would succeed the world’s oldest head of state after his 37 years in power. TURF WAR The ruling ZANU-PF party has been locked in a battle over who should succeed Mugabe. On one side were supporters of his wife Grace. On the other were war veterans who freed the country from white-minority rule in the 1970s. Mugabe’s undoing began on Nov. 6, when he sacked Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who has close ties to the military, in order to clear his wife’s path to the presidency. But the purge proved too…

IN THE 1990S, LOS ANGELES HAD O.J., Washington had the Clintons, and New York City had the Trumps. Liz Smith, the Manhattan gossip columnist who died on Nov. 12 at 94, reported on all three. But she owned the divorce of Donald and Ivana. Her flair for conveying the skyscraping personalities in play elevated the story; it also epitomized an approach to gossip she had perfected. Smith’s namesake column ran variously in the New York Daily News, Newsday and the New York Post from 1976 to 2009. There, she combined insider access with an openhearted interest in her subjects that seemed to have followed her from her hometown of Fort Worth. She couldn’t be spun, but she was willing to be wooed. In today’s climate of mutual antipathy between star…

When it comes to making financial decisions and assessing value, what should matter is the real pleasure we receive from a purchase—not a host of other things that really don’t affect value: how we budget our money, the ease of payment, the list price, whether or not we already own something, how fair the price seems to be, the language describing it, our expectations about a purchase—and definitely not sales prices or “savings.” When we see a sale price, we shouldn’t consider what the price used to be or how much we’re saving. Rather, we should consider what we’re actually going to spend. Buying a $60 shirt marked down from $100 isn’t saving $40; it’s spending $60. We should also try not to think in percentages. The money in our…

ALY RAISMAN SAYS THE KNOCK CAME AT 8 P.M. THE FUTURE Olympic gold medalist was competing at the world championships in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, in her first year at the senior level, the group from which national teams are selected. She was thousands of miles from home, nervous about the competition and without her family. She opened the door and saw Larry Nassar, the USA Gymnastics team doctor. “I thought you could use a massage,” she says he told her. Shewas 16. It wasn’t the first time Nassar had appeared at her door at night, offering a massage under the guise of therapy. And it wouldn’t be the last, as Raisman disclosed in an interview with TIME and in her new book, Fierce. It first happened several months earlier, when…

VLADIMIR PUTIN APPEARS TO STRIDE THE GLOBE like a political goliath, a mix of Peter the Great and Joseph Stalin. Whether in Syria or Ukraine, the Russian President flexes his muscles and the world seems to quake with anxiety. There is now little doubt that Putin has skillfully maneuvered Russia back into a position of global prominence following the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, which he has called the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” He poured billions of dollars into modernizing his military machine and plunged into the exciting but murky world of new media technology, transforming it into a formidable weapon of political warfare. At home he has reached deep into Russian history, religion and mythology to strengthen his image and grip on power, associating himself with…

By late 2014, ChaBela lawrenCe wasn’t doing well. She had mostly stopped cooking and cleaning for herself and began, every so often, to get lost on her way home from the neighborhood coffee shop— the one she’d been to a least a hundred times. The following March, the 74-year-old former catering manager was diagnosed with dementia, and it was clear she needed help. But it was then that she ran headlong into one of the most crushing failures of the U.S. health system: there’s no good way to pay for extended long-term care. Medicare doesn’t cover it. Private health plans don’t cover it. And for most, paying roughly $80,000 out of pocket, the average annual cost for a shared room at a skilled nursing facility, is simply out of the…

The termgenius is often reserved for freakish insights into fundamentals of nature. But what about an event unique in the history of our species? After many great chemists failed to find a practical process to convert nitrogen gas into ammonia for fertilizer, Carl Bosch managed. This may not seem like the romantic, flash-of-pure-thought type of genius, but it revolutionized the way humans grow food. In large part because of Bosch, our species surpassed 1.8 billion people in 1913 before rising to 7.5 billion today. And once we had sufficient crops, we were able to have more wealth and less violence per capita, and start distributing knowledge on a wider scale. Church, a geneticist, helped pioneer the gene-editing technology CRISPR…

Hockney’s art assures his place in the history of imagemaking, but I believe he will be remembered at least as much for changing the way we view that history. Sixteen years ago, his paradigm-shifting book Secret Knowledge presented his rediscovery of the use of optics in painting, and his continuing research and experiments show us that however much we have convinced ourselves that we see the world as a camera does, we do not. We visualize our world in terms of fixed perspective because of the dominance of photography (a dominance that he reveals began hundreds of years earlier than we had thought). Like a character in a science-fiction story granted special insight, he has broken free from our camera-derived prejudice to offer the truth: the development of images throughout…

FOR THE THIRD YEAR IN A ROW, Star WarS Fans will be able to start the holidays with a trip to a galaxy far, far away. And this time for a new kind of adventure. Director Rian Johnson has promised that this year’s installment, titled The Last Jedi, will be darker. Here’s what to expect: Budding Jedi Rey (Daisy Ridley) finds her idol, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), isolated and despondent on a faraway planet. Her friend Finn (John Boyega) comes out of a coma questioning whether he should continue to fight in the rebellion. And General Leia (the late Carrie Fisher, in her last Star Wars film) is mourning the loss of Han Solo (Harrison Ford). The Last Jedi, out Dec. 15, will also introduce new characters, including Laura Dern’s…

In this sequel to the 1995 Robin Williams smash Jumanji, an awkward teen is catapulted into the world of an old-school video game and suddenly finds himself looking a lot like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Here, the action star talks about wrestling as a training ground for comedy—and about how to get away with a pink tutu. You’re kind of a big guy, yet you have such a light comic touch. Is there a secret to that? I think the secret is gathering the writers in a room and threatening them with bodily harm if they do not write great jokes for me and put in scenarios where I can make a lot of people laugh. Look, I’m kidding. Sort of. I don’t know if it’s a secret. I just…

FRANCE’S EMMANUEL MACRON When France’s President granted a rare sit-down interview with a U.S. news outlet for Vivienne Walt’s Nov. 20 cover story, it generated wallto- wall French media coverage. An editorial in the newspaper Libération deemed the headline (“At Home in the World”) particularly spot-on, as a reflection of the feeling that Macron seems at home on the global scene but is unable to make himself heard in his own country. Although radio network Europe 1 told its audience the story’s framing wasn’t flattering to Macron, one American reader said the insight into his hopes for the future helped “brighten” her outlook. “I admire [him],” wrote Ann Winn Johnson of Jonesborough, Tenn., “and wish for many of the same objectives in our USA.” ‘He is the only one…

BY THE NUMBERS The U.N. estimates that up to 1.7% of the world’s population is intersex, or born without typical male or female sex characteristics, which involve hormonal, genetic or anatomical differences. DECADE OF CHANGE Nepal is believed to be among the first to legally recognize a third gender in 2007. It is one of at least eight countries, including Malta and Australia, that have agreed to recognize more than two genders on passports and ID cards. UP NEXT Scotland has now proposed creating a third gender, ahead of the rest of the U.K. Thailand’s constitution recognizes a third gender, but it is not yet an option on government documents. IN THE U.S. California recently became the first state to offer a third gender choice on official state ID. Oregon…

THINGS AREN’T GOING THERESA MAY’S WAY. Britain’s Prime Minister was already struggling to unite a Cabinet divided over how best to pull the country out of the E.U. Now she’s contending with a sexual-harassment scandal that has implicated several of her Conservative lawmakers and forced Defense Secretary Michael Fallon to resign. Some 40members of Parliament from her party have signed a letter of no confidence in her leadership. Events are spinning beyond her control. All of this has fed speculation that Brexit might still be reversed. Yet there’s no compelling evidence that those who voted for divorce have softened their stance on reclaiming control of British law and borders from bureaucrats in Brussels—or their belief that the E.U. has a bleak future. Britons can see that European leaders want member…

Saturday waS SingleS day. if youStill don’t know what Singles Day is, the time has come to learn. In short, it’s a 24-hour lonelyhearts celebration turned shopping extravaganza, hosted by Alibaba and its charismatic CEO, Jack Ma, that has become the world’s biggest shopping event, reaching a mindblowing $25 billion in sales this year and dwarfing Black Friday and Cyber Monday combined. As the Nov. 11 event ended in China, a live sales ticker showed 168 billion yuan in total sales, up 39% from last year, and more than the annual GDP of Iceland. And it’s not just an Alibaba thing. JD.com, one of its biggest e-commerce competitors, said it generated $19 billion from a rival event in the days leading up to Singles Day. Some analysts question the way…

WE HEAR A LOT ABOUT THE BIG THREE sexualities: straight, bisexual and gay. But there is a new kid on the block: the mostly straight male. To the uninitiated, mostly straight might seem paradoxical. Yet the evidence suggests that more young men identify or describe themselves that way than as either bisexual or gay combined. A 2011–2013 U.S. government poll found that among 18-to-24- year-old men, 6% marked their sexual attractions as “mostly opposite sex.” That’s nearly 1 million young men. Yet when these men were forced to choose between straight, bisexual or gay, about threequarters marked straight, because for them bisexual is too gay to accurately describe their identity. These young men, 40 of whom I spoke to for my new book,Mostly Straight, were left with no place to…

THE ALLEGED CHILD MOLESTER OR THE DEMOCRAT? Alabama voters face that choice in a few weeks’ time, and it’s not clear which they’ll find more odious. There are several reasons to think Roy Moore, the Republican nominee who has been accused of making sexual advances to teenagers, could lose the special Senate election scheduled for Dec. 12. But there’s one big reason to think he could still win. Washington Republicans were always leery of Moore, a crusading Christian conservative who was twice elected to the Alabama supreme court—and twice booted off it for refusing to abide by higher courts’ rulings on the Ten Commandments and same-sex marriage. But the recent revelations that Moore “dated” girls as young as 14 when he was an unmarried local prosecutor in his 30s have…

AS HER HUSBAND LAY MOANING IN PAIN FROM THE cancer riddling his body, Patricia Martin searched frantically through his medical bag, looking for a syringe. She had already called the hospice twice, demanding liquid methadone to ease the agony of Dr. Robert E. Martin. Afamily-practice physician known to everyone as Dr. Bob, the 66-year-old had served the small, remote community inWasilla,Alaska, for more than 30 years. But the doctor in charge at Mat-Su Regional Home Health and Hospice wasn’t responding. Staff said that he was on vacation, then that he was asleep. Patricia had waited four days to get pain pills delivered, but her husband could no longer swallow them. Now, they said, she should just crush the drugs herself, mix them with water and squirt the mixture into his…

I was surprised to discover that the biggest scare for caregivers isn’t getting your loved one to the hospital—it’s getting them discharged. Through my uncle’s years-long journey with earlyonset Alzheimer’s, I ironically felt most nervous when he was “stable.” Harried hospital nurses waited for us to choose where to fax my uncle’s 100- page medical record for review. From lists of addresses and phone numbers, we just chose the ones closest to home. The first to respond would win the case and the insurance dollars that followed. Every year this discharge process inadvertently directs more than $250 billion of Medicare spending to the most convenient post-hospital care providers, not the highest quality. MedPAC reports that 46.8% of patients went to providers that were outscored by five or more providers within…

Madame Curie is best known as the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. But I prefer to recognize Dr. Curie’s genius rather than her gender. In 1903, Curie and her husband Pierre won a Nobel Prize in Physics (alongside Henri Becquerel) for researching “invisible” atomic properties that appeared to challenge the laws of thermodynamics and led Curie to coin the term radioactive. In 1911, five years after the death of her husband, Curie won a second Nobel Prize, this time for discovering the elements radium and polonium and opening the door to the age of nuclear chemistry. Her research paved the way for brachytherapy, or using internal radiation to treat cancer. But Curie was more than a brilliant scientist. She was a passionate wife and mother to Irène Joliot-Curie,…

It’s no overstatement to call Max Bond the most influential African-American architect of his generation. I had long admired him for his success and dedication, and the breadth of his work across Europe, West Africa and the U.S. allowed me to imagine possibilities for my own career. But it was when we collaborated—during the last months of his life, on the competition for the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC)—that I came to understand his true genius: the instinct for the empowering capacity of the built environment. Whether as educator, designer or planner, Max had an ability to build networks and embrace communities. This unflinching drive to challenge marginalization is visible across his work. He was an architect of stories, rendering museums and housing equally with his…

MUDBOUND 11.17 Based on Hillary Jordan’s 2008 novel of the same name, this epic drama traces the intersecting lives of two families, one white and one black, living on the same piece of Mississippi farmland in the 1940s. ROMAN J. ISRAEL, ESQ. 11.17 Denzel Washington dials down his charisma and megawatt smile to play a disheveled legal savant forced into the courtroom when his more presentable partner becomes gravely ill. DARKEST HOUR 11.22 Gary Oldman disappears into the character of Winston Churchill in this drama about the leader’s abrupt rise to power as Nazi forces closed in on Western Europe in the early days of World War II. WONDER WHEEL 12.1 Woody Allen’s latest stars Kate Winslet as the wife of a carousel operator on Coney Island. She falls for…

JUSTICE LEAGUEb 11.17 The DC Extended Universe’s latest installment brings the whole team together— that’s Batman (Ben Affleck), Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), the Flash (Ezra Miller), Aquaman (Jason Momoa) and Cyborg (Ray Fisher)—to fend off the supervillain Steppenwolf. 24 HOURS TO LIVE 12.1 Ethan Hawke plays a hitman who’s killed on the job and then given one more chance at life—and redemption— when he’s temporarily resuscitated. THE BALLAD OF LEFTY BROWN 12.15 After witnessing the murder of his longtime partner (Peter Fonda), a cowboy (Bill Pullman) recruits a green gunslinger and a grizzled U.S. Marshal to avenge the slain man’s death, traversing the barren Montana landscape on their journey to deliver justice.…

‘The cover of a magazine … is an opportunity to show other dark, kinky-haired people, and particularly our children, that they are beautiful.’ LUPITA NYONG’O, actor, accusing women’s fashion magazine Grazia U.K. of editing out her ponytail for its November cover “to fit their notion of what beautiful hair looks like”; the magazine and photographer apologized $105,000 Value of two stolen photographs that security video shows a woman mailing back to the Museum of Modern Art’s Queens location days after they went missing, according to the NYPD 32 m.p.h. New world record for the fastest speed in an Iron Man– like body-controlled jet-engine-powered suit, set by Richard Browning at Lagoona Park in Reading, U.K., for Guinness World Records Day ‘I will not accept and reject accusations that I have ever…

Trump Jr. messaged with WikiLeaks Donald Trump Jr. corresponded with WikiLeaks via private messages on Twitter during and after the 2016 election, it emerged on Nov. 13. After the news broke, Trump Jr. shared the exchanges, showing that he had responded three times to multiple queries and pleas to publicize leaks. Australia backs marriage equality Australia voted in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage in a historic yet nonbinding postal survey. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull called on lawmakers to heed the “overwhelming” result when a bill creating marriage equality is considered in parliament this year. UCLA players arrested in China Three UCLA basketball players returned to the U.S. after they were arrested in China for shoplifting. President Trump confirmed that he had asked China’s leader Xi Jinping to help resolve the…

AUROCHS European scientists are attempting to revive this ancient breed of “supercow,” which died out in Poland in 1627, by breeding various cattle types and their offspring in an ambitious project launched in 2008. QUAGGA Using a combination of DNA extraction and selective breeding, a South African project is creating a herd of foals similar to those of the quagga, an ancient relative of the zebra that went extinct in 1883. GIANT TORTOISE Researchers hope to resurrect a species of giant tortoise from the Galápagos Islands that was wiped out in the mid–19th century by breeding tortoises with a similar genetic makeup.…

INA GARTEN Host of Food Network’s Barefoot Contessa DO: Cook your stuffing separately from the turkey to avoid overcooking the bird. DON’T: Deep-fry your turkey. “Nobody wants a trip to the hospital. It’s dangerous. You’re dealing with a huge cauldron of hot fat, and you’re lowering this turkey into it. Just put it in the oven.” MASHAMA BAILEY Chef at The Grey in Savannah, Ga. DO: Remember Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday for macaroni and cheese. “I don’t really indulge in that dish often. But somebody has to make it.” DON’T: Give up on Thanksgiving traditions, like watching football with family—the people you love won’t be around forever. “I don’t get to break bread with my family and friends often. Not to be corny, but just be in the room…

NASCAR IS NOT THE FIRST PLACE ONE WOULD LOOK TO FIND a voice of the resistance. Yet after Donald Trump railed against NFL players’ kneeling during the national anthem, the biggest name in the sport took to Twitter with a rebuttal. “All Americans R granted rights 2 peaceful protests,” Dale Earnhardt Jr. posted, adapting a John F. Kennedy quote to 140 characters. “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” This was not exactly a popular sentiment among a fan base that tracks closely with the voting bloc that put the President in office. Indeed, Richard Petty, a former NASCAR star and current team owner, said the protesting players “ought to be out of the country. Period.” But Earnhardt, 43, has long been willing to take stands…

My dad was a little vain. Even at 80, he wore clothes with the ease of a man who had always been handsome and slim. When I was a kid, he would often wear ascots and tweedy jackets to drive me to work at the McDonald’s in the tiny rural town next to our tiny rural town. Dad had grown up with money and behaved as if that were still true, no matter how little we had at the time. This wasn’t always a good thing, but it was endless fodder for jokes. When we moved him into an assisted-living place near my apartment in Brooklyn, he introduced himself to every aide by bowing and pretending to kiss the tops of their hands. And because of dementia, he’d forget meeting…

BEING A GENIUS IS DIFFERENT THAN MERELY being supersmart. Smart people are a dime a dozen, and many of them don’t amount to much. What matters is creativity, the ability to apply imagination to almost any situation. Take Benjamin Franklin. He lacked the analytic processing power of a Hamilton and the philosophical depth of a Madison. Yet with little formal education, Franklin taught himself to become the American Enlightenment’s best inventor, diplomat, scientist, writer and business strategist. He proved, by flying a kite, that lightning is electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised clean-burning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream, bifocal glasses, enchanting musical instruments and America’s unique style of homespun humor. Albert Einstein followed a similar path. He was slow in learning to speak as…

What if genius is knowing the thing you are meant to do in life, and then doing it without regard for the time it will take? When Jane Goodall was a child in England, she knew she was meant for animals, for Africa. She traveled to Kenya, met famed anthropologist Louis Leakey and was soon chosen to study the chimpanzees in Gombe. Without a university education, or fear, she headed into the jungle with a notebook, sat atop a grassy knoll or climbed a tree, and waited. Genius built on the ability to wait seems particularly female: curiosity dovetailed with patience. The chimps had rarely been studied long term in the wild; she gave them her limitless attention. Much of her early work was filmed, and when we see the…

THERE ARE AT LEAST FOUR FEATS OF MOVIE MAGIC IN director Guillermo del Toro’s new film The Shape of Water. First, there’s the fact that the lead speaks no lines: Sally Hawkins plays Elisa, a mute woman who works as a cleaning lady at a Cold War–era government laboratory. Second, there’s the monstrous yet alluring sea creature the scientists have captured from the waters of South America, rendered as a towering, scaly brute with human sensitivity. Third, there’s the sexy, wordless romance that develops between Elisa and the creature. And finally, there’s Octavia Spencer, who, as Elisa’s talkative, down-to-earth work friend Zelda, makes it all believable. Spencer has found success before in 1960s-era roles with performances that bring great dignity to characters who, as black women in that period, were…

‘I remember, as a child growing up in London, thinking of Churchill as the man who won the war. He was our savior.’ What appealed to you about playing Winston Churchill? For me there was a personal element. My mother lived through the Blitz, in London. My father was in the Royal Navy and fought in World War II, so he was obviously under Winston’s command. So it felt like there was a connection. I remember, as a child growing up in London, thinking of Churchill as the man who won the war. He was our savior. Was it a challenge to play such an iconic figure? It is a very iconic silhouette you have to work toward. He had the cane, the Victorian clothes, the Homburg hat, the cigar.…