Table of contents for August 6, 2018 in TIME Magazine

IT HAS DEFIED A THOUSAND OBITUARIES, THE region that winds from Virginia to Texas, through the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Smokies to the Delta, past the world’s largest peach, the Astroturf grave of Hank Williams and the gates of Graceland. The “No South” is how Louisiana novelist George Washington Cable envisioned it in a commencement speech to the University of Mississippi’s class of 1882. Books with names like An Epitaph for Dixie followed. Hodding Carter III, a son of Mississippi (and an early mentor of mine), carried the theme forward in a 1990 essay for TIME: “The South as South, a living, ever regenerating mythic land of distinctive personality, is no more,” he wrote, declaring single-party politics dead and noting the emasculating effects of mass culture on regional…

DUTCH MESS Former Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands married German diplomat Claus von Amsberg in 1966—sparking protests because he had been a Hitler Youth member and fought for Germany in World War II. ABDICATION Edward VIII took the British throne in 1936 but abdicated soon after, in order to marry Wallis Simpson, an American divorcée, a move that was against royal rules. They stayed married until his death. NORWEGIAN WOULD Norway’s Prince Haakon Magnus shocked his country when he said in 2000 he would marry Mette-Marit Tjessem Hoiby, a commoner and single mother. The two originally met at a music festival.…

I FIRST SAW SEVEN SAMURAI AT some small theater in downtown Pittsburgh, and it took me to another place. The writing by Shinobu Hashimoto, who died on July 19 at 100, working with Akira Kurosawa and Hideo Oguni, was so beautiful and poetic and powerful and heartbreaking. It was all about justice, it was all about sacrifice, and it made me want to be one of those guys. I came from a rough area, and I had my own version of watching poor people getting pushed down—whoever the person was who had the power, they would come in and take from other people. And when I saw The Magnificent Seven, a direct take on Seven Samurai, again, I found myself wanting to be one of those guys. So when…

PRIME MINISTER of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu hasn’t had an easy time of it lately. Israeli police have recommended bribery charges against him in two cases. In one, he’s accused of accepting cigars and champagne in exchange for political favors. In another, he’s accused of pushing legislation to undermine a newspaper in order to gain more favorable coverage from one if its commercial rivals. Several of his aides have been arrested. In June, prosecutors indicted his wife, a frequent media target for her alleged mistreatment of staff, on fraud charges. So far, Netanyahu has kept his head above water. It seems he’s learned a trick or two from relative political newcomer Donald Trump. Netanyahu has long relied on a confrontational style to antagonize the left and beat back challenges from…

FLORIDA’S 26TH HOUSE DISTRICT Two-term Republican incumbent Carlos Curbelo is a moderate in a swing district that’s mostly Hispanic. Democrats are attacking him for being too conservative on immigration. TENNESSEE SENATE Democrats have a rare pickup opportunity in the Volunteer State after recruiting popular former governor Phil Bredesen to run against Marsha Blackburn, a conservative Congresswoman. VIRGINIA’S 10TH HOUSE DISTRICT Two-term Republican Barbara Comstock is vulnerable in an affluent Northern Virginia district where more than 1 in 4 voters are Hispanic or Asian, and more than half have a college degree.…

TIM MCGRAW I love the food in my home state. Any little local place, like Ray’s PeGe in Monroe, that serves home-cooked Louisiana food works for me. MCGRAW IS A GRAMMY-WINNING COUNTRY SINGER ELI MANNING Few things beat a lunch of BBQ pork chops with butter beans, green beans and jalapeño cornbread at the Ajax Diner in Oxford, Miss. MANNING IS A QUARTERBACK FOR THE NEW YORK GIANTS JASON ISBELL Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, which has finally been returned to its former glory, is where I first played my songs for the Drive-By Truckers. More important, it’s where “I’ll Take You There,” “Wild Horses” and “Kodachrome” were recorded. Irreplaceable. ISBELL’S LATEST ALBUM IS THE NASHVILLE SOUND…

It has been said that college football is a religion, and Saturday is its High Holy Day. So I was not surprised when I found myself at synagogue in Knoxville in September on Kol Nidre, the Friday evening start of Yom Kippur—the most solemn day of the Jewish year—and the rabbi asked who I favored in the next day’s Georgia-Tennessee game. Of course he did. If college football is America’s lay religion, the South is its ecumenically evangelical center. Nowhere is the passion more intense than on the campuses of the 14 colleges of the Southeastern Conference and among their fans. The fervor traces back to 1926, when the University of Alabama beat Washington in the Rose Bowl and gave Southerners something to celebrate on the national stage for…

“The helpful Indians received, for their pains, a hatchet.” In this floating city, water soaks every aspect of daily life—from our car-insurance premiums to our music to our fears of the future—but you can go weeks without seeing it. The Mississippi River slouches behind the wharves that line most of New Orleans’ 12-mile length. The oceanic expanse of Lake Pontchartrain is available to anyone who clambers over the levee, but most New Orleanians rarely make it up there. You see plenty of water in a storm, when the sewers jam and the streets become streams. But otherwise it is easiest, and most lovely, to visit the ancient bayou that is responsible for the city’s very existence. Not long ago, Bayou St. John was best known for being a good…

Destruction after Laos dam fails At least 26 people died in southeastern Laos after a billion-dollar hydropower dam collapsed while under construction on July 23, flooding seven villages. Environmental groups have warned about the rapid pace of dam building as Laos seeks to become a major energy producer. Classified Carter Page files revealed The FBI and the Justice Department released previously classified files on the bureau’s wiretapping of Carter Page, a foreign-policy adviser to President Trump’s campaign. Legal experts say the files undermined claims Trump’s allies made about the wiretapping; Trump argued that they “discredited” the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Kenya slum bulldozed to build highway Authorities demolished the homes of some 30,000 people living in Kibera, Nairobi’s largest slum, to make way for a…

LONGLISTED Nick Drnaso’s Sabrina, for the Man Booker Prize—the first time a graphic novel has been up for the most prestigious U.K. literary award. ANNOUNCED A bid to chair the House Democratic Caucus, by Representative Barbara Lee, a vocal progressive. If she succeeds, she’d be the first black woman to hold a leadership position in a major U.S. political party. PLANNED $12 billion in emergency aid for U.S. farmers hurt by foreign tariffs imposed in retaliation for President Trump’s moves on trade, by his Administration. ASSUMED Ten seats in Colombia’s congress, by former FARC rebels on July 20, as part of a 2016 peace deal. Outgoing Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos welcomed them and urged lawmakers to protect the peace. FIRED Russian soccer player Erving Botaka-Yobama, whose parents are…

If you ask me a question, you expect my response to be truthful. Otherwise, why would you even ask? But according to research, the way you phrase a question can affect whether people offer up the truth. In a study from an article published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, my colleagues and I asked lab participants to sell a used electronic device that had a serious malfunction. When the fictitious buyers inquired, “What problems does it have?”, 89% of our sellers mentioned the malfunction. However, when asked, “It doesn’t have any problems, does it?”, only 61% of sellers did; when asked, “What can you tell me about it?”, the rate fell to only 8%. We found similar results in other contexts, like job interviews. So if you…

MIRANDA LAMBERT Float the Guadalupe River by day and listen to live music at Gruene Hall by night—it’s the perfect Texas outing. LAMBERT IS A GRAMMY-WINNING SINGER DREW BREES I love Audubon Park in New Orleans, watching my kids play, feeding the ducks, admiring the oak trees and watching the sun set on the water. BREES IS A QUARTERBACK FOR THE NEW ORLEANS SAINTS RHIANNON GIDDENS At K&W Cafeteria you walk in and see a cross section of the beautiful folks who make up Greensboro, N.C., and get some great Southern cooking. GIDDENS IS A GRAMMY-WINNING MUSICIAN…

PEOPLE TEND TO REMEMBER THE FIRST TIME THEY heard Stacey Abrams speak, and it’s easy to see why. On a Friday afternoon in May, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia is at a union hall in Augusta, telling a story about her father, a college-educated black man who was relegated by his race to working at a shipyard in southern Mississippi in the 1970s. The family had one car, so Robert Abrams would sometimes hitchhike home in the middle of the night. When he didn’t come home one time, the rest of the family set out to pick him up and found him half-frozen by the side of the road, having given his coat to a homeless man. They asked why he, a poor man on a lonely…

We need Elvis now more than ever. Growing up in Georgia and Alabama in the 1970s and ’80s, I always felt that the bad old days of Southern prejudice and ignorance had passed, that we were entering a new South built upon hard-won racial equality, charity and the sense that no one was better than anyone else. The country had a long way to go, but if the South had come so far in just a generation, then nothing could stop progress. I’m not so sure anymore. Lately, I feel like our moral compass has been broken, spinning to intolerance, greed, hypocrisy and a meanness that’s as thick as the humidity in July. In times of trouble, I put my faith in Elvis Presley, who represented the South’s better…

JOE SCARBOROUGH Our family regularly traveled north from Atlanta on I-85, racing past Gaffney’s giant peach across the heart of South Carolina’s High Country. The transformation of Greenville from a sleepy town into an international automotive and aerospace hub is an example of how free trade and ethnic diversity points the way forward for the New South. SCARBOROUGH IS A CO-HOST OF MSNBC’S MORNING JOE FAITH HILL On Highway 49 in Florence, Miss., just outside of Star, Donna’s #6 Produce has been run by one family for 42 years. Donna’s ice cream is the best. Even after I left home, Donna and her family checked in with my parents and made sure they had fresh produce—and they still do that today for my dad. HILL IS A GRAMMY-WINNING…

Why don’t you try just being quiet?If you can find some silence, maybeyou can listen to it. How it worksis interesting. I really can’texplain it, but you know it whenit’s happening. You realizeyou’re marveling at apple blossomsand how they’re clustered on the treeand you see the bees meticulouslyattending every blossom there,and you think the tree is kind of sighing.Such careful beauty in the making.And then you think, it’s really quiet,but I am not alone in this world.That’s how you know it’s happening,there’s something solemn and wonderfulin the quiet, a slow and steady ease.Whether the tree is actually sighingis beside the point. It’s better to wonder,you needn’t be precise with quiet,it just becomes another thing.It isn’t a science, it’s an art,like love, or a dog who’s pretty good,asleep in the…

THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS WAS CUT IN HALF BY something called a Tronc. That sounds like the sort of thing you’d find in a tabloid, and there it was in the July 23 edition of “New York’s Hometown Newspaper” on page 2: “News cuts staff. Half laid off in retool . . .” Tronc turns out to be not a monster from the future, but a company from the past, Tribune Publishing, which renamed itself in a bid to remain relevant in a profoundly inhospitable present. That newspapers are a casualty of the Information Age may qualify as irony, but there are deep veins of tragedy involved, especially for communities that used to have a lot more people paid, by the local paper, to pay attention to what…

IN THE 45 YEARS SINCE PRESIDENT RICHard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act (ESA) into law, conservationists have used the landmark legislation to protect millions of acres of land and bring animals—including the grizzly bear and the American alligator—back from the brink of extinction. But despite its successes, the law is controversial, particularly for a range of industries that have argued for decades that that compliance places too high a cost on companies. Because the ESA specifies how humans can use land in ways that harm threatened or endangered species’ habitats, some companies say its strict regulations are unnecessarily burdensome. On July 19, the Trump Administration delivered for those interests. In 118 pages of technical documents, the Department of the Interior proposed making it harder to protect new land,…

“IT IS THE COLDEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR,” BEGAN ONE OF Jonathan Gold’s 2006 reviews, “and I am driving along Olympic Boulevard in East Los Angeles, ravenously hungry, looking for one of the itinerant flame-throwing taco carts that sprout in that neighborhood around midnight.” Those words would help Gold become, in 2007, the only food critic ever awarded a Pulitzer Prize. But they also convey something of the man himself: unpretentious, lyrical, enthralled by his hometown, and always, always hungry. Gold, who died on July 21 at 57, changed American food writing. In his long career reviewing for L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times, he brought his intellect and experience not only to the city’s tony dining rooms, but also especially to the no-name taquerias, Thai curry joints…

Why dogs love humans TIME’s Jeffrey Kluger recounts the history of humanity’s special bond with canines—one that is so great that we understand what they’re barking about. “Think that’s not a big deal?” he writes. “Then answer this: What does a happy bird look like? A sad lion? You don’t know, but dog talk you get.” The overuse of breathing machines Intrusive breathing tools are often used on older patients who may be nearing death, writes Dr. Kei Ouchi of Brigham and Women’s Hospital, even though that may not represent their wishes: “Most patients would [not] consider this arrangement an acceptable way of living . . . yet so many of them experience it as their final form of life.” Breaking the breastfeeding stigma Photographer Gina Brocker shares her…

Department officials meeting with their German counterparts described an elaborate Iranian operation that the Americans had uncovered. For several years, Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had been using German front companies to buy advanced printing machinery, watermarked paper and specialty inks in violation of European export controls. The IRGC had then printed counterfeit Yemeni bank notes potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars and used them to help fund its proxy war against the beleaguered pro-U.S. government in the capital of Sana‘a. German companies, the Americans said, were being used as a cover by the Iranians to finance the world’s worst humanitarian conflict. The evidence, uncovered by U.S. illicit-finance investigators, was meant to sway the Germans, but not just in hopes of countering Iran’s moves on the…

When he tells the story nowhe’s at the center of it, everyone else in the housefalling into the backdrop— my mother, grandmother,an uncle, all dead now—props in our story: father and daughtercaught in memory’s half-light. I’m too young to recall it,so his story becomes the story: 1969, Hurricane Camillebearing down, the old house shuddering as if it will collapse.Rain pours into every room and he has to keep moving,keep me out of harm’s way— a father’s first duty: to protect.And so, in the story, he does: I am small in his arms, perhapseven sleeping. Water is rising around us and there is nohigher place he can take me than this, memory forgedin the storm’s eye: a girl clinging to her father. Whatcan I do but this? Let him tell…

TIG NOTARO Sitting on the beautiful wraparound porch of Cat Island Coffeehouse in Pass Christian, Miss., overlooking the ocean, you can enjoy the tastiest coffee anywhere. The eclectic, Southern-centric collection of books is an added bonus. NOTARO IS AN ACTOR AND COMEDIAN DEION SANDERS Farmers Market in Fort Myers, Fla., has some of the best soul food I’ve ever had. It’s a must every time I go back home. SANDERS IS AN NFL NETWORK ANALYST BILLY REID The Shoals is a snapshot of all that is happening in the South, from artists who entertain the world with incredible music, cook amazing meals and design beautiful objects, to the serenity of a small cabin by the lake. REID IS A FASHION DESIGNER…

My mother grew morning glories that spilled onto the walkway toward herporch Because she was a woman with land who showed as much by giving it color.She told me I could have whatever I worked for. That means she was anAmerican. But she’d say it was because she believedIn God. I am ashamed of AmericaAnd confounded by God. I thank God for my citizenship in spiteOf the timer set on my life to writeThese words: I love my mother. I love black womenWho plant flowers as sheepish as their sons. By the time the bloomsUnfurl themselves for a few hours of light, the women who tend themAre already at work. Blue. I’ll never know who started the lie that we arelazy, But I’d love to wake that bastard upAt…

Nearly every morning in Gainesville, Fla., I tie on my sneakers and go for a run through my quiet neighborhood to the Hawthorne bike trail, then into Paynes Prairie for a wake-up jolt of beauty. Early in the morning, the light catches the fog rising up from the ground and the moisture hanging on the tips of the grasses, highlighting it all in gold. Clumps of damp Spanish moss hanging from branches above my head shine like dimmed lanterns. A fox or a deer trots across my path and vanishes into the pines and palmettos; a rat snake, a single shining muscle, lies in the sun and blocks my way; strange birds whir in the air above my head. I never go more than a few miles from the…

BRITTANY HOWARD Sabor Latino, in my hometown of Athens, Ala., has the best tortas. It started as a taco truck and grew into a storefront. Every time I go there, I am reminded that the American Dream is what you make it. HOWARD IS A GRAMMY-WINNING MUSICIAN SEAN BROCK Spending time with Glenn Roberts at Anson Mills, surrounded by the seeds and stories that are reshaping Southern food, is my biggest inspiration. BROCK IS A JAMES BEARD AWARD–WINNING CHEF ANN PATCHETT Percy and Edwin Warner Parks in Nashville. Getting lost in the nearly 3,200 acres of forest and valleys and hills, it’s easy to imagine what this state must have looked like a hundred years ago—beautiful. PATCHETT IS A BEST-SELLING AUTHOR…

MEGAN ABBOTT ISN’T AFRAID OF a little blood. Her new thriller, Give Me Your Hand, is soaked in it. The women wear red stockings and “placenta red” lipstick. Mostly, Abbott writes about period blood, a topic that would strike fear in the hearts of most crime writers. But Abbott isn’t just any crime writer. She earned a Ph.D. from New York University studying noir literature and has built a blockbuster career subverting the genre’s tropes. Her murderers aren’t femme fatales; instead they’re young athletes, ruthless gangsters and, in this book, hypercompetitive scientists. Her victims are always men. It’s nothing personal, she explains over cold-brewed coffee at a bakery nestled between Tudor houses in her neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens. “It wasn’t conscious,” she says. “But I never wanted…

PEOPLE WHO READ A LOT, OR EVEN JUST A LITTLE, OFTEN HAVE internal memory banks full of potentially useful facts and quotes, ready to be resurrected brilliantly at a moment’s notice—yet still, in the clutch, most of us are like amnesiac squirrels in wintertime, asking, “Where did I put that nut?” Michiko Kakutani is the squirrel who remembers the nuts. Her slender, fiery new book, The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump, appearing less than a year after she left her perch as the chief book critic at the New York Times, could have been written only by someone who reads more, and retains more, than most mere mortals. A President who spreads outright lies on Twitter nearly every day, a swath of GOP…

IMMIGRANT, MONTANA By Amitava Kumar A young man leaves India in 1990 to attend college in New York City and eventually finds himself engaged by intellectual and romantic pursuits. Throughout this story, inspired by the author’s own, the narrator struggles to feel like he belongs. FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE By Ingrid Rojas Contreras This debut novel switches between the perspectives of a privileged young girl and her family’s maid as the two grow up in Colombia during the era of drug lord Pablo Escobar. BROTHER By David Chariandy A sobering account from the present day as well as flashbacks to the sweaty—and violent—summer of 1991 in the Canadian city of Scarborough form this searing novel about the two sons of Trinidadian immigrants who dream of…