Table of contents for September 16, 2019 in TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … THE LEFT BEHIND ECONOMY Alana Semuels and Malcolm Burnley’s Sept. 2/Sept. 9 cover story on life as a tipped worker on minimum wage inspired readers with experience waiting tables to dish on the realities of the job. Walter V. Guittard of Fort Myers, Fla., thought he and his wife were “lucky” to retire from the restaurant industry at 65 after working for 35 years, but “waiting tables ain’t what it used to be.” Some readers who work in restaurants said they like relying on tips, which they feel allows them to earn more than they would with a set salary. Michelle Pendergrass, who was a server in Seattle and Bonita Springs, Fla., said she’d found people tip the same regardless of the minimum wage.…

WHEN INDIA’S NATIONAL REGISTER OF Citizens (NRC) was published on Aug. 31, after a six-year effort to catalog all legal residents of the state of Assam, some 1.9 million people—mostly Bengali speakers accused of being “infiltrators” from Bangladesh—were left off the list. Their exclusion, the first step in an experiment the Indian government says it wants to replicate nationwide, puts them at risk of statelessness. Rights groups warn it could also presage a humanitarian crisis in the world’s largest democracy. CITIZENS OF NOWHERE To be deemed a true citizen, residents of Assam had to provide documentation dating prior to March 24, 1971, the day before the eruption of a war with East Pakistan that spurred a wave of migration. Rights groups say that burden of proof is too high…

ANDY PIPER WAS WORRIED ABOUT THE Houses of Parliament. Not what goes on inside them, but the buildings themselves—the ornate debating chambers and wood-paneled rooms where the U.K.’s legislative body goes about its business. Chosen as design director for Parliament’s restoration program, Piper had the job of alerting lawmakers to the state of the houses of state. So in summer 2017, he took the then leader of the House of Commons, Conservative lawmaker Andrea Leadsom, on a tour of the building’s darkest corners. Piper hoped to show Leadsom a few fire hazards and maybe an unsafe cable or two. As the Cabinet member responsible for organizing government business, she could draw more attention to the issue. But when he unlocked the door to the parliamentary basement, the stench hit…

THE STOREFRONT ENTRANCE OF THE UNDERground Museum, on a busy street in central Los Angeles, is easy to miss. Inside, it feels like somebody’s stylish home: there are shelves lined with books, framed art and baskets of records. The museum was launched in 2012 with the mission to bring museum-quality art to a community—and neighborhood—that previously had little access to it. Beyoncé has been spotted, John Legend used the space to launch an album, and Barry Jenkins hosted a screening of Moonlight here. Michael B. Jordan has never been here before, but once he arrives—wearing a blindingly white T-shirt and a friendly grin—he can’t get enough. As we walk around, he pulls out his phone to make a note about one of the exhibits so he can look it…

Iran says no to bilateral talks with U.S. Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani said that he’d never hold bilateral talks with the U.S., and that dialogue on reviving a nuclear deal could resume only if the U.S. lifted all sanctions on Iran. His Sept. 3 announcement came alongside reports that French President Emmanuel Macron offered Iran $15 billion in credit to keep the old deal alive. Pence stays at Trump golf club in Ireland Vice President Mike Pence stayed at President Trump’s private golf club during an official trip to Ireland at Trump’s “suggestion,” Pence Chief of Staff Marc Short said on Sept. 3. Facing criticism of taxpayer funds going to the President’s business, the Vice President defended the move as “logical.” Italy leaves right-wing party out The anti-establishment Five…

HONG KONG’S PROtests continue. The unrest began in response to a proposed law that would allow Hong Kong to extradite its citizens to face prosecution in mainland China’s court system, a plan that stoked fears China could use the law to seize political dissidents and journalists deemed insufficiently compliant to Beijing. But when Hong Kong’s police launched a heavy-handed response to the demonstrations, the list of protester demands expanded to include police accountability and new protections for the territory’s democracy. On Sept. 4, Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s beleaguered chief administrator, finally withdrew the bill. For many it will be “too little and too late now,” in the words of Joshua Wong, a key figure in the protest movement. President Xi can take his time, confident in the knowledge that…

INSIDE A SUNNY CONFERENCE ROOM ON THE Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., a small team of employees is describing how technology can save the world. From technology. Microsoft’s Digital Diplomacy unit consists of two dozen policy experts who work on everything from the ethical use of artificial intelligence to protecting the 2020 presidential election from foreign cyberinterference. Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, sits in the middle of the table, sipping coffee from a mug bearing the name of his hometown, Appleton, Wis. The group updates Smith on a tech-industry initiative co-founded by Microsoft to combat terrorist messaging on the Internet. Smith pushes for more ideas. “We need something that will create a new mold,” he says. A few minutes later, he gets a demo of ElectionGuard, a new encrypted voting…

MARGARET ATWOOD WANTS TO KNOW MORE ABOUT The Bachelorette. We’re chatting in her publisher’s office in Toronto when I mention the dating show where 30-some men vie for the affection of a single woman, all on camera. She has questions: “Why are they even participating in this?” “What if they’re rejected?” “I’m wondering if she’s just pretending to go along with it?” There is an irony here, observing Atwood equate the show to Sartre’s adage “Hell is other people” come to life. She is, after all, known for a book that describes one of the most brutal mating rituals in the canon. In her landmark 1985 novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, a totalitarian theocracy has taken over the U.S. in the midst of a fertility crisis. Offred, one of few women…

TO MANUFACTURE FLAT-ROLLED STEEL, you need to start with a steel slab. For a company called NLMK USA, which makes carbon flat-rolled steel in Farrell, Pa., there’s nowhere to get those slabs domestically. That’s meant it has to source them from China—and pay a 25% import tariff—or find an overseas supplier exempt from the tariffs. Meanwhile, prices have climbed as companies in the same situation scramble to find new supplies. As its costs rise, NLMK USA is taking fewer orders and running fewer shifts. “It’s made it very difficult for us to compete,” says Bob Miller, president and CEO of NLMK USA. The Trump tariffs that have already led to cutbacks across the U.S. were joined on Sept. 1 by a new round of 15% levies on more than $125…

AFTER AN AUG. 31 MASS SHOOTING IN WEST Texas, as questions swirled about the event that had left seven people dead and 22 injured, Odessa police chief Michael Gerke declared that one question would remain unanswered: the shooter’s identity. “I’m not going to give him any notoriety for what he did,” Gerke said at a press conference on Sept. 1. Later that day, however, other law-enforcement officials identified the gunman, who had been killed by police. Police officers and media outlets are increasingly choosing to downplay the identities of perpetrators to avoid potentially inspiring others to carry out similar atrocities. Following an armed rampage in a Virginia Beach municipal center in late May that left 12 dead, Virginia Beach police chief James Cervera said authorities would mention the gunman’s…

JESSICA POST IS STUCK IN TRAFFIC 63 MILES SOUTH of Washington, D.C., when she pulls an iPhone to her ear. “How’s everything going with your family?” she asks a contender for Virginia’s state legislature this fall. “We are all in for your run. I was reading about your opponent the other day. He sounds like a real piece of …” Here, she remembers that TIME is tagging along. “Work,” she finishes. Calls like this consume a lot of Post’s time these days. The 39-year-old president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC) is leading an unheralded but critically important campaign to win back state offices for the party after eight years of deep losses during Barack Obama’s presidency. The consequences go far beyond which states may be prevented from…

RYAN MURPHY IS TAKING A RARE BREATHER. WE’RE in his tidy trailer on a set in Hollywood, at the end of the last day of shooting for The Boys in the Band, a play that Murphy revived on Broadway in 2018 and is now producing as a feature film for Netflix. Outside, the studio lot is surprisingly sedate. A golf cart whirs past. A colleague brings him a single shot of espresso. Murphy, 53, schedules his days into short intervals—15 minutes, or 30—and works seven days a week. “I say I can’t keep going at this pace,” he says. “But then I have a full physical, and it’s like, I’m fine.” For someone with at least 15 projects in the works, he’s unusually hands-on with all of them: writing,…

A popular notion has it that a human being’s most important sex organ is the brain. You say it’s our behavior that’s different; our brains are strikingly similar. Why? This goes all the way back to Charles Darwin, who said that women are inferior because they have inferior brains and therefore they do not have the right to assume a powerful role in society. But the bottom line is there is no consistent pattern or structure which reliably characterizes the brain so that we could say, “O.K., that’s a female brain and that’s a male brain.” But we don’t have to be talking about inferior or superior brains—just different brains. Absolutely. Some critics have called people like myself sex-difference deniers, like climate deniers. There are sex differences that we should…