Table of contents for August 20, 2018 in TIME Magazine

THE NIGHT BEFORE HER PRIMARY ELECTION, HALEY Stevens rang the doorbell at a neat brick house in Canton, Mich. It was pouring rain, but the Democratic candidate in the state’s 11th Congressional District was still canvassing. The homeowner, Marybeth Levine, recognized Stevens immediately: she had received a robocall from Hillary Clinton endorsing the former chief of staff of President Obama’s auto task force, and she was planning to vote for Stevens and a handful of other Democratic women on the ballot. “All the blue women,” Levine said, “are coming to fix the stuff the men broke.” If there was a message from the spate of elections in five states on Aug. 7, it’s that Democrats are heading into November with the wind at their backs, led by a record-setting…

THE POSSIBILITY OF THE U.K.’S LEAVING THE E.U. without an explicit understanding of what comes next—a “no deal” Brexit—is beginning to look increasingly likely. On Aug. 3, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, called the level of risk “uncomfortably high.” Two days later, Britain’s International Trade Secretary Liam Fox said that Britain’s leaving with no deal was the most likely scenario, causing the pound to plummet to an 11-month low against the dollar. Prime Minister Theresa May, most U.K. lawmakers and the country’s business leaders say Britain needs a deal. The E.U. is Britain’s biggest trading partner, accounting for 44% of all U.K. exports; as a member state, Britain can enjoy free trade and zero customs restrictions with the 27 other members. When Britain leaves, that…

IN 1996, INDRA NOOYI WAS all set to go run European operations for PepsiCo. Her house was rented, her kids were in school. But then CEO Roger Enrico forbade it. He had plenty of executives to manage profit and loss, he said. He needed her for something bigger: reconceptualizing the whole company. Nooyi ended up as CEO, serving a 12-year stint—but announced on Aug. 6 that she would leave the beverage and snack giant in 2019. Famously averse to sleep (she claims to rest four hours a night and “get up every hour and answer email”), Nooyi, 62, said she’s tired and wants to attend to her mother. Under her watch, PepsiCo became a more global operation, increased its social-consciousness footprint and adopted some healthier options into its chip-and-sip…

THERE’S NO MYSTERY as to why U.S. policymakers and politicians use sanctions. Targeted intelligently and implemented effectively, they can compel other countries to do things they wouldn’t do without war. They can push governments of smaller countries like Iran and North Korea to negotiate and separate terrorists from sources of funding. They can raise the cost of undesirable actions to larger countries like Russia, even when they can’t quickly change behavior. They can help politicians seem tough while relieving pressure for high-risk, high-cost strategies. Sanctions can’t force countries to renounce core interests ... Iran may think it easier to simply wait out the Trump presidency Sanctions on Iran helped President Obama and European leaders push Iran’s leaders toward a nuclear deal. Now that President Trump has withdrawn from…

Academics are still trying to understand all the ways we are vulnerable to misinformation on the Internet. Readers report being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of content they encounter online on a daily basis. Here are some of the reasons we’re susceptible to believing dubious claims—and why we play a role in spreading them. INDECENT EXPOSURE MIT cognitive scientist David Rand has shown that simply being exposed to fake news makes people more likely to believe the claims. This “illusory truth” effect works even when such claims run counter to the reader’s political ideology. This may be because we subconsciously rely on cognitive shortcuts, known as heuristics, to make quick decisions about what to trust online. These habits of the mind can lead people to assume, for example, that…

Hurricane Harvey Models accurately predicted landfall, giving coastal Texas much-needed time to get ready. On top of high winds, a historic 60-plus inches of rain caused deadly flooding Hurricane Irma Five days before hitting Florida, models showed Irma going east. As it veered west, so too did evacuation orders. All told, a third of Floridians were mandated to leave Hurricane Maria The collision with Puerto Rico was well projected, but models struggled to predict its rapid intensification. Inadequate response contributed to a devastating aftermath NOTE: MARIA’S DEATH TOTALS ARE IN DISPUTE. SOURCES: NOAA, NEWS REPORTS. TIME GRAPHIC BY EMILY BARONE AND LON TWEETEN…

IT’S A PICTURE-PERFECT DAY ON MARTHA’S VINEYARD. Families stream by on a heavily foot-trafficked thoroughfare, while white men in cargo shorts dock their boats and crack open their beers. In the middle of it all is Spike Lee, sitting on a bench, delivering an earful of Saturday-afternoon real talk. “Agent Orange is in office,” he says. “If this isn’t a motivation to get off our asses and register to vote, I don’t know what is.” It soon becomes clear why Lee picked this spot. He wants to talk about President Trump and Barack Obama and Colin Kaepernick and the Ku Klux Klan. But why do that in private when you could do it loudly, outside, for everyone to hear? Lee is on the island to shoot scenes for the…

ST. VINCENT On indie-rock experimentalist St. Vincent’s fifth album, 2017’s Masseduction, the artist—born Annie Clark—balanced tender balladry with punk-spiked melodies. COURTNEY BARNETT Grammy-nominated Aussie rocker Barnett is known for her witty, folksy songwriting and straightforward delivery, as on her 2018 album, Tell Me How You Really Feel. FLORENCE + THE MACHINE British vocalist Florence Welch became a superstar with 2009’s anthemic “Dog Days Are Over”; 2018’s High As Hope sees her reach new emotional heights.…

DON’T BE PUT OFF BY THE OVERLY adorable title: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, streaming on Netflix, offers the kind of cushiony stealth charm that’s easy to sink into. Lily James (most recently seen in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, as a younger version of Meryl Streep’s Donna) stars as Juliet, a young London novelist who has found great success just after World War II, though she’s also reeling from grief: her parents were killed in the war, and she has no place she can call home, literally or emotionally. Then she strikes up a correspondence with a pig farmer, Dawsey (Game of Thrones’ Michiel Huisman), from Guernsey, a place still recovering from its own recent wartime horrors: the Germans who occupied the island have…

LOVE IT A 10-year-old swimmer named Clark Kent Apuada broke a 100-m butterfly record set by Michael Phelps 23 years ago A herd of about 100 goats went viral after they were spotted descending on the lawns and gardens of a neighborhood in Boise, Idaho, and eating everything in sight LEAVE IT “I will keep fighting.” DEMI LOVATO released a statement thanking her fans for their support nearly two weeks after being hospitalized for a reported drug overdose Movie-ticket subscription service MoviePass is limiting subscribers to seeing just three movies per month, rather than one per day, in an attempt to burn less cash and stay in business…

ZOMBIES, AN ISLAND LOCALE AND AN elusive spouse—Laura van den Berg’s new novel The Third Hotel contains all of the ingredients for a classic work of horror. But van den Berg is up to so much more than that, so she has no trouble pointing a big neon sign at her signifiers: protagonist Clare visits Cuba for a film festival headlined by a movie called Revolución Zombi. Clare’s husband Richard, killed in a hit-and-run, was a noted scholar of horror cinema. She has taken his scheduled trip to the festival, hoping to feel close to him. Weirdly, her hope is realized when she spots Richard out of the corner of her eye near a museum. Clare herself has taken a room in the third hotel she contacted, a grubby…

‘YOU HAVE TO LET YOUR SUCCESSES GO IN THE SAME WAY YOU LET GO OF YOUR FAILURES ’ Why did you want to direct Blaze, a movie about country musician Blaze Foley? The trouble with most music biopics is that the subject is always wildly famous. And in real life, 98% of musicians are met with indifference. I was more interested in Blaze’s life. There was no place for him in the commercial world. Did Blaze help you work through your own views about how the pursuit of fame can be destructive? Absolutely. A lot of Blaze’s music grew out of love for his wife. But later he drew on self-destructive behavior. Both of those experiences can create good art, but…

‘This issue should be read in every school in the country.’ ADELLE ABRAHAMS, Phoenix THE SOUTH ISSUE The Aug. 6/Aug. 13 special issue on the American South spoke to readers from the region and beyond. Bill Tuminello of Fort Collins, Colo., said his view of the South had been “guided by the stereotypes,” so he was “amazed at the diversity” and “the many reasons why people love the area.” Jeff Klein of Arlington, Va., hailed Jesmyn Ward’s accompanying essay for managing “to pluck poetry from prejudice and pain.” But Alphonse Kolodziejczak of Williamsville, N.Y., found David French’s characterization of Southern politics and the Democratic Party “simplistic.” And Brandon Simmons of Forney, Texas, critiqued what he saw as undue emphasis on progressive politics in the issue, as many of…

DIED Actor Charlotte Rae, best known for her role on the hit sitcoms Diff’rent Strokes and The Facts of Life, on Aug. 5 at 92. INDICTED New York Representative Chris Collins, on insider-trading charges, by federal prosecutors on Aug. 8. Collins, the first sitting member of Congress to endorse President Trump, turned himself in to the FBI. FINED A 28-year-old woman in Denmark, after she refused to remove her niqab when police asked her to do so on Aug. 3. She became the first person in the country to face a fine for violating a new law banning full-face veils in public. NAMED Jean-Henry Céant, as the new Prime Minister of Haiti, on Aug. 5, weeks after violent protests forced the country’s previous Prime Minister to resign. LAUNCHED An…

Images of suffering children have a unique power in politics. They forced the Trump Administration to end its policy of ripping migrant children from their parents at the southwest border. In 2015 a photo of a dead 3-year-old who drowned trying to reach Greece also inspired policy changes across Europe. But the goodwill did not last. Three years on from that awful image of the late Alan Kurdi lying facedown on a Turkish beach, the wave of sympathy in Europe has almost entirely vanished. The politics across the Continent are now more toxic and divisive than they were before. Italy’s hard-line Interior Minister Matteo Salvini insists that his country’s ports are closed to all new arrivals. Angela Merkel’s 2015 decision to open up Germany’s borders to hundreds of thousands…

Pope Francis’ change to the Catholic Church’s position on the death penalty on Aug. 2, deeming it completely “inadmissible” and violative of a person’s “dignity,” follows the sharp decline of capital punishment worldwide. Just five countries—China, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan—carried out more than 90% of last year’s executions. But the Vatican’s message may be least influential in the 60 or so countries that retain it. Many are authoritarian, and others reject the Pope’s human-rights frame as a Western project inimical to indigenous cultural or religious commitments. In the U.S., the only Western democracy that still exacts the death penalty, the Supreme Court’s test for when a punishment becomes “cruel and unusual” is whether it violates “evolving standards of decency.” The Pope’s new position may well bear significantly…

MARGARET DAFFODIL GRAHAM TRIES to live a healthy life, particularly since she has a health issue that requires constant attention. Like more than 100 million other Americans, the 74-year-old from Winston-Salem, N.C., has high blood pressure, and she has been taking medication to control it since she was in her 30s. So when she read that her nearby hospital, Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center, was looking for people with hypertension to volunteer for a study, she quickly signed up, knowing the doctors would monitor her blood pressure more intensively and hopefully lower her risk of developing heart disease and stroke. What Graham didn’t realize was that by joining the trial, she wouldn’t just be benefiting her heart. The study, called SPRINT MIND, was designed to test whether aggressively lowering…

The idea of conversion therapy is so inhumane that it could be some alien race’s idea of a sick joke. When it comes to whom we love and why, who can presume to declare what’s a sin? That’s the question at the heart of The Miseducation of Cameron Post: Chloë Grace Moretz plays a 1990s teenager who’s packed off to a special school called God’s Promise in an effort to “de-gay” her. Directed by Desiree Akhavan and adapted from Emily M. Danforth’s novel, the movie wears its good intentions proudly. The problem is that Cameron and her God’s Promise friends—played, wonderfully, by Sasha Lane and Forrest Goodluckare so well-adjusted that there’s not much room for dramatic tension. Still, these kids get to you. They’re waging a battle they shouldn’t…

‘He would never admit to me what he was doing, because he loved me so much.’ ALIA GHANEM, Osama bin Laden’s mother, to the Guardian, in a rare interview about the sponsor of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks 38 days, 6 hours and 49 minutes Time it took Cincinnati teacher Bryce Carlson to row solo across the Atlantic from St. John’s, Newfoundland, to St. Mary’s in the Isles of Scilly in southwest England, setting a record for west-to-east crossing ‘I accepted what my body wanted to be.’ BEYONCÉ, singer, on life post-pregnancy in the September issue of Vogue ‘Well, that’s enough.’ ROBERT REDFORD, actor, on his decision to retire from acting after six decades; the 81-year-old Oscar winner confirmed to Entertainment Weekly that the upcoming The Old Man &…

Major earthquake hits Indonesia A 6.9-magnitude earthquake on Indonesia’s Lombok island left at least 131 people dead and nearly 1,500 seriously injured, with those numbers expected to rise. Officials said the Aug. 5 quake destroyed 80% of buildings in the mountainous northern region, home to 200,000 people. Apple reaches $1 trillion valuation Apple became the first publicly traded American company to be worth more than $1 trillion. Analysts had considered Amazon to be its main competitor in reaching the milestone. While Apple got there first—on Aug. 2—Google’s parent company, Alphabet, is also close behind. Crackdown follows vote in Zimbabwe Days after narrowly winning Zimbabwe’s first elections since the removal of Robert Mugabe last fall—a result that his electoral opponent Nelson Chamisa called “fraudulent”— President Emmerson Mnangagwa launched a crackdown…

LIÈVRE À LA ROYALE—THAT’S THE DISH I REMEMBER FROM MY first time at Joël Robuchon’s Jamin. It was 1982, so the restaurant was still new. He had only the one Michelin star. By the time Robuchon died on Aug. 6 at age 73, he had won more than 30. In the classic version of the dish, wild hare is rolled and stuffed with foie gras and truffles. But Robuchon had shredded the meat and made the dish more subtle. It was still classical but reinvented. That’s what he would become known for: reinventing French cuisine while respecting its traditions. He was known to be very demanding; if you chose to go work with him, you knew it wasn’t going to be a family-style restaurant. It was a no-pain, no-gain…

Resigning from Homeland Security Ex-Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman explains why she stepped down from the department’s Advisory Council: “That the U.S. is frightened today by the presence of an additional 2,000 or so children and parents from Central America is laughable and appalling.” Lost lessons from tragedy For her novel The Daisy Children, Sofia Grant studied the deadliest school disaster in U.S. history—a 1937 explosion in Texas—and found that back then, bystanders more frequently had to become first responders. She suggests that visceral connection may have had benefits: “It’s hard to look at the victims and survivors closely—but to remember them better, we must.” What changed after Lewinsky Author Jill Filipovic read Monica Lewinsky’s 1998 grand-jury testimony and saw how our vocabulary for sex and power has grown: “[We] understand…

1 Collect data Instruments on Earth and in space constantly measure temperature, pressure, cloud cover and other weather metrics 2 Sort conditions The global data is synced every six hours. In the next-gen model, it gets divided into a grid of more than 200 million cubes 3 Calculate changes Supercomputers integrate atmospheric physics equations to predict how weather evolves across the cubes 4 Visualize results The computer translates data into visuals showing the storm’s direction, rainfall, sea-level pressure and other elements 5 Forecast Meteorologists interpret the data to produce forecasts and decide when to issue watches and warnings for dangerous weather…

ALCOHOL Drinking in moderation can lower the risk of heart disease and Type 2 diabetes. But it’s less clear how alcohol affects the brain. Some studies have found that moderate drinking may be good for the brain, but these have focused on elderly people and their recent drinking habits, making it hard to draw any conclusions about lifetime drinking patterns. However, in a new study of more than 9,000 middle-aged people who were followed for 23 years in the U.K., researchers found that those with an excessive drinking habit or none at all had a higher risk of dementia than those who drank moderately. People who imbibed more than 14 units of alcohol a week—the equivalent of eight glasses of wine in the U.S.— increased their risk of dementia…

‘When you don’t see an example of something, it’s very hard to imagine it.’ MITSKI MITSKI MIYAWAKI DIDN’T HAVE THE MONEY TO fly home for the holidays. It was late 2017, and the raw-edged indie rocker, who performs under her first name, was fresh off a two-year world tour that ended in Australia. Instead, she took herself to nearby Malaysia. Lonely, devoid of instruments and itching to turn her frustrations into music, she went to a local Toys “R” Us and bought a toy piano. On that piano she wrote “Nobody,” a glittering single off her new album, Be the Cowboy, out Aug. 17. Beneath its disco-ready chords, “Nobody” is a song about a young woman grappling with isolation. “For a long time, I didn’t believe I could…

Governments lie, but grunts live the truth. The (correct) premise of C.J. Chivers’ The Fighters: Americans in Combat in Afghanistan and Iraq holds that the essence of those wars can be related through a handful of the Americans who fought them. It starts slow, dutifully introducing men who will, a few pages later, command both your attention and your breathing. The events that befall a medic, a commando, a helicopter pilot, a soldier and a platoon leader come out of nowhere and stay forever. Chivers, a Marine before he was a reporter, inhabits his protagonists so vividly in real time that the death of one is an almost physical shock. There is an uprightness to The Fighters that’s partly solidarity with its dads, patriots and drunks, and partly a…