Table of contents for April 12, 2021 in TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … SILENT NO MORE Readers of the March 29/April 5 issue thanked TIME staff writer Cady Lang and senior editor Lucy Feldman for their reporting and personal insight into anti-Asian racism and rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings. “During these already difficult times in America, it is important that we band together and support one another,” tweeted Delicia Pitt on the rise in anti-Asian discrimination and violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. “We must stop placing blame on others, and we must stop the hate.” Lenore Valenti of Staten Island, N.Y., agreed, writing of her concerns that America is “going backward, not progressing. Have we not learned from history?” ‘Asian Americans deserve to live without fear of going about their daily lives.’RANDALL…

AS MARCH 31 MARKED THE ANNUAL Transgender Day of Visibility, LGBTQ advocates in the U.S. warned that a flurry of legislation targeting access to gender-affirming health care and sports participation for young transgender people will have significant and harmful effects. Over 100 bills attacking transgender people have been introduced in state legislatures since 2020, according to the ACLU, with over 60 currently in consideration across the country. HEALTH CARE BANS On March 29, the Arkansas senate passed a bill that would ban access to gender-affirming health care for transgender youth. If signed into law by Republican Governor Asa Hutchinson, the state would be the first to ban such access. Chase Strangio, deputy director for transgender justice at the ACLU’s LGBT & HIV Project, called it “the single most extreme…

DIED G. Gordon Liddy Watergate planner ONE COULD ARGUE THAT G. Gordon Liddy, who died March 30 at 90, was always ruthless. According to an oft-repeated anecdote from his childhood, he once ate a rat dragged in by his sister’s cat “to demonstrate to myself my lack of fear.” Thirty years later, while serving in Richard Nixon’s Administration, the lawyer was a member of the White House “Plumbers,” a secret unit tasked with doing whatever it took to stop leaks—a job that led to a role in the Watergate burglary that eventually brought about Nixon’s 1974 resignation. Liddy’s refusal to testify led to his serving the longest prison term of any of the scandal’s personae. But after getting out, he had no problem talking, moving into a lucrative speaking career.…

HER $90,000 IN STUDENT DEBT TRAILED JILL WITKOWSKI Heaps for decades, like a pesky private eye, as she moved from New York to Fort Myers to New Orleans to Annapolis, always hovering to remind her of her negative net worth. And then one day, while sitting in a coffee shop near Buffalo, she learned it was gone. “Congratulations!” the email from her loan servicer, FedLoan, said. “You qualify for loan forgiveness.” Her balance was now $0. First, Heaps cried. Then she texted her husband. Then she logged onto the FedLoan website to make sure the email wasn’t some sort of cruel joke. “It was like I won the lottery,” says Heaps, a 43-year-old environmental lawyer whose loans were forgiven under the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, which is supposed to…

Amber Capone had become afraid of her husband. The “laid-back, bigger than life and cooler than cool” man she’d married had become isolated, disconnected and despondent during his 13 years as a U.S. Navy SEAL. Typically, he was gone 300 days of the year, but when he was home, Amber and their two children walked on eggshells around him. “Everyone was just playing nice until he left again,” Amber says. In 2013, Marcus retired from the military. But life as a civilian only made his depression, anger, headaches, anxiety, alcoholism, impulsivity and violent dreams worse. Sometimes he’d get upset by noon and binge-drink for 12 hours. Amber watched in horror as his cognitive functioning declined; Marcus was in his late 30s, but he would get lost driving his daughter to…

LOCKDOWN HAS DISTORTED OUR PERCEPTIONS OF time, making months of mandatory monotony congeal into a goo of boredom and malaise. In fact, one of the only reliable ways of marking time during this pandemic year has been through the series of buzzy documentaries that bound us together in isolation. The clock started, of course, with Tiger King last March. April brought ESPN’s ratings smash The Last Dance, a retrospective of Michael Jordan’s final NBA season that hit the spot for fans in live-sports withdrawal. HBO kicked off summer with an adaptation of late crime writer Michelle McNamara’s book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark and ended it with The Vow, an inside look at the NXIVM “sex cult” that set Twitter ablaze weekly. Nature doc My Octopus Teacher, now…

IF YOU PAY CLOSE ATTENTION, YOU CAN HEAR IT: there’s a new lushness in the opening banjo twangs, and an extra beat when she sings the lyric “Just say yes.” But the difference between the 2008 version of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story,” which helped propel Swift to pop stardom, and the 2021 rerelease of that same song is pretty subtle. Called “Taylor’s Version” on streaming platforms, the new mix will soon be followed by rerecordings of Swift’s back catalog, beginning with the rest of her album Fearless, which arrives April 9. In all these rerecordings, the lyrics and production haven’t changed that much: it’s Swift’s business that’s shifted. Now 31, Swift has gone full indie pop—as shown by her Grammy-winning turn on her recent album Folklore. But beneath those dreamy…

Mexico police under fire over custody death Protests in Mexico and El Salvador have followed the March 27 death of Victoria Salazar in Tulum. Authorities have confirmed Salazar, a Salvadoran woman, died of a broken neck while in police custody. The Quintana Roo state prosecutor said his office is preparing femicide charges against four officers involved in her arrest. GOP Rep. in sex-crime investigation The Department of Justice is investigating whether Republican Florida Representative Matt Gaetz violated federal sex-trafficking laws over an alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl, the New York Times reported March 30. Gaetz has strongly denied the charges. Jailed Kremlin critic declares hunger strike Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny said in a March 31 Instagram post published by his lawyers that he will be…

You lived in Topeka, Kans., for a time growing up. What’s it like to go from a central place in African-American history to running a history museum? I went to the church where Linda Brown of Brown v. Board of Education played piano and sang beautifully, so I was really aware of history all around. One of the things I moved to D.C. is a pew from that church. Having one reminds me of that upright feeling that that space provided, and history does that. The museum does the same thing. It puts a bone in the back and helps you think about this rich history of struggle and song. What parts of the museum move you the most? The first known photo of Harriet Tubman, you get to stare…

MOMENTS AFTER GOVERNOR BRIAN KEMP signed a sweeping overhaul of Georgia’s election law, state representative Park Cannon, a Democrat, knocked on the door of his office. Kemp was making an announcement inside, and law-enforcement officials told Cannon to stop. She continued, and was swiftly dragged down a corridor of the state capitol by two Georgia State Patrol officers. “All we asked is for her to be able to see [Kemp] sign a bill that is signing our rights away,” state representative Erica Thomas, a Democrat who watched Cannon’s arrest, said in a video posted on Instagram. “And you arrested her.” What Kemp was signing on March 25 was among the first in a spate of new restrictions on voting, igniting a political battle over the future of voting rights in…

IN THE SLEEPY SOUTHERN TOWN OF BESSEMER, ALA., A brigade of Amazon warehouse workers has challenged one of the largest retail organizations in the world to a unionization battle. If a simple majority of the roughly 6,000 workers have voted for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU) to represent them by the March 29 deadline, they will be the first group of Amazon employees to form a union in the U.S., after several failed attempts at other plants. While the RWDSU faced an uphill battle—before voting started, Amazon organized mandatory antiunion meetings at the warehouse—a vote for unionization could spur more workers at the company and beyond to seek bargaining power, marking an increase in private-sector union membership that has been in decline for decades. If the…

ONE OF EVOLUTION’S CLEVEREST tricks was giving us a sense of shame. It’s a miserable feeling—low, humbling, publicly discomfiting—but it’s supposed to be: if you do something lousy you ought to feel something lousy, so you don’t do it again. In theory, when so many of the strategies for beating the COVID-19 pandemic depend on abiding by social distancing and other rules, shaming people who don’t ought to be a powerful way to bring us back in line. But increasingly, experts believe, the opposite is true. “The thinking has been that the more you shame people the more they will obey,” says Giovanni Travaglino, an assistant professor of social psychology at Kent University. “But this turns out to be absolutely wrong.” Last month, Travaglino and Chanki Moon, an assistant professor…

COVID-19 has taught us many deadly lessons, among them how dangerous it is to approach a health problem as a political problem. We have lost lives, jobs and an imagined future because scoring political points became more important than following the science. For decades, we have made the same error about firearm injuries. We have approached gun deaths as an issue of politics instead of seeing it as a public-health problem. As a result, we have not just failed to contain gun injuries and deaths, we have seen them increase substantially in number and horror. For most Americans, “gun violence” surfaces only when there is a mass shooting, as was tragically the case in Atlanta and Boulder, Colo. The fact is, gun-related injuries are far more common than we think.…

Having wreaked havoc on their final year of high school, the pandemic proceeded to disrupt the Class of 2021’s postgraduation plans. Some students answered the uncertainty by applying to more colleges than they’d previously planned, perhaps aiming higher. Others saw their best chance at higher education slip away, undone by financial catastrophe the virus brought with it. School counselors, tasked with guiding students through applications and keeping them on track to graduate, also bore witness. ‘I worry about their mental health. I worry about their stress level. I worry about them having a senior year. My heart just really goes out to them because they are working so hard … I want to make sure that they know that there’s always help. I worry that they’re on the other…

THE DAY FRANÇOISE BROUGHER WAS FIRED FROM Pinterest began like so many of her workdays. It was April 2, 2020, and the company’s chief operating officer—with her rescue dog Dogbert nearby—was a few weeks into the pandemic and remote work, managing her team of 750 from her home in Silicon Valley. The gentlest social media site, built for “pinning” visual inspiration to virtual boards, appeared to be in equilibrium. Brougher wasn’t giving much thought to the recent brief but irritating meetings and calls she had had with Todd Morgenfeld, the company’s chief financial officer. On a recent Friday, she had texted their mutual boss, Ben Silbermann, the CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, about what she describes as a particularly dismissive interaction she had with Morgenfeld where he had hung up…

MORGAN JERKINS DELIGHTS IN FINDING the fantastical within the familiar. In her new novel, Caul Baby, everyday life takes on a surreal glow: a bodega covertly peddles mystical talismans; a brownstone visibly embodies its owners’ secrets. And on that border between our world and her imagination, fantasy reveals a sometimes harsh truth about reality. No element of Caul Baby better illustrates Jerkins’ ability to spin magic out of the mundane than the titular caul, the amniotic membrane that surrounds a baby in the womb. In the novel, members of the miraculous Melancon family—three generations of Black women living in Harlem—carry this thin, translucent layer of skin with them throughout their lives. Their cauls provide them with physical invincibility—and, later, income, when they begin selling pieces for profit. The caul’s supposed…