Table of contents for October 15, 2018 in TIME Magazine

‘Free and fair trade in North America ... is in a much more stable place than it was yesterday.’ JUSTIN TRUDEAU, Prime Minister of Canada ON THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL, DONALD TRUMP’S take on free-trade deals was clear. He promised to withdraw the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and reserved special ire for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which he called “the worst trade deal ever.” And sure enough, he withdrew the U.S. from the TPP within days of taking office last year, and on Sept. 30 his Administration announced that it had reached a deal with Canada and Mexico to replace NAFTA, which has governed trade between the U.S., Canada and Mexico since 1994, with a new pact called the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, or USMCA. “I…

ON OCT. 1, THE U.N.’S INTERNATIONAL Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled against forcing Chile to negotiate giving up a slice of its territory to provide neighboring Bolivia with a route to the sea. Gathered around giant screens in the capital, La Paz, Bolivians watched with dismay. To them, the country’s landlocked status is a historical injustice and an affront to national pride. The dispute began in 1879, when Chile invaded the port city of Antofagasta on its northern border with Bolivia as part of a dispute over taxes. Within a few years, Chileans had redrawn the map of South America by taking almost 50,000 sq. mi. of Bolivian territory, including its 250-mile coastline on the southern Pacific Ocean. Bolivia formally accepted this loss in 1904, when it signed a…

BY HIS OWN ESTIMATE, CHARLES AZNAVOUR, WHO DIED AT 94 on Oct. 1, penned more than 1,000 songs and sold about 180 million records. Yet he was never done. He packed concert halls in Japan in September and was preparing for six Paris concerts in November. His dream was to live to 100 and die singing onstage. Aznavour did not get his wish. But his huge body of work will long outlive him. Born to Armenian refugees in Paris, Aznavour began performing with the likes of Edith Piaf in the 1940s and ’50s and went on to write iconic ballads like “La Bohème,” “She” and “La Mamma.” Small and lithe, he poured raw emotion into lyrics about love and loss, leading some critics to say he could be syrupy.…

Even if Bolsonaro wins, Brazil is no banana republic. Despite its dysfunction, this is a country with strong political institutions THE PAST TWO YEARS have seen angry voters in the U.S., France, Italy, Mexico, Pakistan and other countries cast aside the familiar political establishment to embrace candidates who embody change. Now it’s Brazil’s turn. On Oct. 7, voters head to the polls for the first round of Brazil’s presidential election. The field includes 13 candidates. Two men have dominated the conversation this year. The first, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, is in prison and won’t be allowed to compete. The other is Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain and far-right candidate best known for his nostalgia for the military dictatorship that ran Brazil from…

The juxtaposition of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s and Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s demeanor was stark. Despite the stress, nerves and emotions that come with detailing her alleged assault publicly, Ford maintained a pleasant disposition, spoke steadily and was deferential. In Kavanaugh’s opening statement, the polite nature he had displayed in the hearings weeks before was gone. He was forceful, irreverent and loud; he stood up for himself. While Kavanaugh’s critics have said his behavior revealed a temperament unfit for the Supreme Court, it more importantly demonstrated the double standard for how men and women communicate. Had Ford spoken with the same tone and flippancy as Kavanaugh, she would have surely been described as unstable or combative. Women who hold elective office face these challenges daily. They often don’t speak out…

THREE OR FOUR TIMES A YEAR, DISNEY CEO AND chairman Bob Iger crosses from his office on the Burbank, Calif., lot with a couple of fellow execs to Disney Animation Studios, where rooms have been prepared for them. In each, they are pitched a movie. Sometimes the films are no more than an idea, and the room just has some art boards and a director with a 15-minute plot outline. Others are more elaborate—the room for Frozen 2 included a video from a research trip to Norway, Iceland and Finland, a “tone reel” and a wall of index cards detailing themes and emotional threads. Sounds like fun—except that each room represents a $150 million bet on what, in four or five years, audiences will pay to see. Iger, 67,…

‘MY GENERATION UNDERSTOOD THAT ONCE A HIPPIE, ALWAYS A HIPPIE ’ Your new novel, Hippie, is based on your experiences exploring South America and Europe in the 1970s. Why write this story now? We have lost the ability to hear what our neighbors have to say. We have polite conversations, but at the end of the day, we don’t hear them. There was a moment in time when we were full of hope and we thought that we were going to change the world. Do you think there was a dark side to hippie life? There were drugs and sex, but I wouldn’t call those things the dark side. A lot of money was spent in promoting how drugs were dangerous to the world. They…

PULLING EQUAL WEIGHT Contributor Irin Carmon’s Oct. 8 story on what the U.S. can learn from Sweden’s gender-equality policies sparked a Twitter debate about the cover design, which added the words AND WOMEN to the Declaration of Independence’s avowal “that all men are created equal.” Some felt that such a tweak was redundant, as “all men” can be interpreted to refer to humankind; @Android3D3 wrote that “if we believe” those words should apply to everyone, “then so be it.” Others like @RyanJArthur thought it wasn’t good enough to rely on interpretation, suggesting that in the case of the Constitution it would help to amend such language to match “the views of today.” But David Pat in San Diego noted that changing laws and language can only do so much…

LAZARUS LIZARD Everything we knew about the terror skink, a predatory lizard with curved teeth, came from an 1870s sighting in New Caledonia in the South Pacific Ocean. Scientists rediscovered it there in 2003. STILL BITING Cuban scientists thought they would never see another solenodon, a shrew-like mammal with venomous saliva. But in 2012, after a decade-long search, Japanese and Cuban researchers managed to find one. HOPPING BACK The Hula painted frog lost its home in the 1950s when marshlands in Israel were drained. But in 2011, 15 years after becoming the first amphibian declared extinct, it reappeared in a patch of swampy undergrowth.…

ON AUG. 7, WHEN ELON Musk tweeted that he had “funding secured” to take Tesla private, the tweet didn’t just drive up the automaker’s stock price. The missive also drew the attention of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Faced with a securities-fraud charge, Musk is stepping down as chairman of Tesla as part of a Sept. 29 deal with the agency. Though Musk will remain CEO, he and the company will each pay a separate $20 million penalty. Tesla will also appoint two independent directors to its board and form a permanent committee to monitor Musk’s statements. The electric-car manufacturer’s troubles also include a Justice Department inquiry and an ongoing SEC inquiry into the company’s past statements on production goals. The company did meet its quarterly goal…

Weeks ago, in Afghanistan, the Taliban marked the Eid al-Adha holiday with a surprise attack. It sought to demonstrate that 17 years of effort by the U.S. forces were for naught—and to inspire the American public to bring its troops home, as the Tet offensive playing out on U.S. TVs did during the Vietnam War. There was just one problem. Almost no one noticed. Yes, the Taliban seized much of Ghaznia strategic city just 75 miles from Kabul. But while U.S. troops and their local allies battled for days to regain what they lost, few Americans back home were paying attention. When U.S. forces first deployed to Afghanistan in October 2001, the war was conveyed in the same way as conflicts past. Journalists followed the troops in, filing stories…

You’re the third woman to receive this award, the first in 55 years. What are the most significant obstacles to women in the field? More and more people are realizing that it can’t just be women saying, “We need this.” Men have to get on board, and the majority are. Sometimes it’s just inertia. A prominent nuclear scientist recently said that physics was “built by men.” What is your response to that? Over the last 300 years, men worked and women stayed home. But certainly it isn’t that women weren’t able to do it. [Recipient of the 1963 Nobel Prize] Maria Goeppert-Mayer didn’t even get paid to be a scientist. And yet she was doing Nobel Prize–winning work. How ridiculous is that? You were a graduate student when you…

There she was: a professional blond woman, speaking carefully, trying to say only what she knew to be true. There he was: an angry and red-faced man, shouting accusations about partisan conspiracies. Her allies asked why a man accused of sexual assault should sit in one of the most powerful seats in the nation. His found reasons to ask if this woman could really be trusted. It was like watching a re-enactment of the 2016 election, all in one day. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about her alleged sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh and the judge’s furious rebuttal dredged up all the questions about truth, gender and power that defined the 2016 battle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. Two years after an election that…

THE IDEA OF TWO PEOPLE coming together to create new life is wonderful—until it becomes a mania that drives them apart. That’s the ground writer-director Tamara Jenkins covers in Netflix’s Private Life: Kathryn Hahn and Paul Giamatti play Rachel and Richard, a middle-aged New York couple striving, and failing, to make a baby, even after several intense (and costly) rounds of fertility treatments. In desperation, they enlist a family friend (Kayli Carter) as an egg donor, triggering a complicated emotional entanglement and a harsh reckoning. Jenkins (The Savages, Slums of Beverly Hills) finds dark striations of humor in an experience that’s largely unfunny. Scrolling through a site filled with photos of cheerful-looking egg donors, Rachel observes drily, “It’s like eBay for ova.” In their pursuit of procreation, Rachel and…

‘What is yes ?’MARIA SHAFER, accepting a marriage proposal from Jeopardy! contestant Michael Pascuzzi in the middle of a recent episode ‘They bullied me backstage. They said, “Don’t go out there with that hat on.”’ KANYE WEST, rapper, during his appearance on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, for which he wore a red “Make America Great Again” cap; NBC declined to comment 74 Years between the death of U.S. Army Private First Class Willard “Bud” Jenkins on Sept. 20, 1944, and the repatriation of his remains; DNA testing helped identify the body, which had been buried in the Netherlands as that of an unknown soldier 61,000 Number of structures dating back to the Mayan civilization discovered in northern Guatemala during recent archaeological scans of the region’s…

Trump taxes return to spotlight Starting from childhood, President Donald Trump reportedly helped his parents avoid taxes and participated in possible fraud in the process of receiving at least $413 million in today’s dollars from them, according to a New York Times investigation published Oct. 2. Trump’s lawyer denied the claims. Colombia tightens drug laws Colombia’s new President, Iván Duque, signed a decree on Oct. 1 allowing police to confiscate even small amounts of drugs, citing an “alarming increase” in substance abuse. Colombia decriminalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana and cocaine in 1994. Chicago schools lose grants over abuse claims The Department of Education is withholding $4 million in grants intended for Chicago public schools, alleging in a Sept. 27 letter to the district that schools have…

DIED Chicago blues legend Otis Rush, at 84, on Sept. 29. He suffered complications from a 2003 stroke. ▷ Peggy Sue Gerron Rackham, the inspiration for Buddy Holly’s song “Peggy Sue,” on Oct. 1 at 78. She had at one point been married to the drummer from Holly’s band. CHARGED Four men connected to a California white-supremacist group, with rioting at last year’s rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Oct. 2. AWARDED The Nobel Prize in Chemistry, to Frances H. Arnold (right), George P. Smith and Gregory P. Winter, for their work using evolutionary biology to design molecules. Arnold is the fifth woman ever to win that prize. UNVEILED The detection of the Goblin, a dwarf planet located far beyond Pluto, by astronomers, on Oct. 2. ANNOUNCED The extension…

The ‘he said, she said’ myth “When two people tell different stories,” writes Allison Leotta, an ex-assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted sex crimes, “we can use common sense, reasoning and investigation to ferret out the truth.” She explains that our thinking otherwise is rooted in laws targeted at rape victims and designed by men in medieval times. A Cy Young for common sense Data, argues TIME’s Sean Gregory, has helped reveal what measures of success in baseball are fair. “The metrics that matter are those that strip out factors that the players cannot control,” he writes. “Pitching wins do the near opposite”—and should be a smaller factor when awarding MLB’s biggest prizes. Christian unity’s origins “For you are all one”—that’s what Jesus’ first followers heard when they were baptized,…

THE 2018 LIST 23ANDME AGRIPROTEIN AIDOC AIRBNB AMAZON APEEL SCIENCES APPLE AWAY BABYMIGO BIRD BITLAND BRCK BUMBLE CAMEO CLUE COMMONBOND DISNEY DJI DOMINO’S DUOLINGO EPIC GAMES EVERLANE FENTY BEAUTY GOFUNDME GW PHARMACEUTICALS HOUSTON ASTROS IMPOSSIBLE FOODS INTERMEDIA LABS LISHTOT LOCKHEED MARTIN MERCK NETFLIX NIKE NINTENDO OBVIOUS OCULUS ONA OPORTUN PAYTM PELOTON PINTEREST SINGAPORE AIRLINES SLACK SPACEX SPOTHERO SPOTIFY VOLVO WEWORK WONDERBAG XIAOMI IMPOSSIBLE FOODS MAKING MEAT OBSOLETE Stanford biochemist Pat Brown was on sabbatical when he resolved to take on what he calls “the most destructive technology on earth”—livestock rearing, which uses about 80% of the world’s agricultural land and produces more greenhouse gases than transport. But he concluded that getting people to go vegan was unrealistic. So he founded Impossible Foods and engineered a plant-based meat substitute that…

GROWING UP IN AUSTRALIA, MARKUS Zusak would ask his mother and father—post–World War II immigrants hailing from Germany and Austria, respectively—to tell him the same stories about their lives over and over. Zusak’s own stories have been in print since his first novel, The Underdog, was published in 1999. But it was his 2005 global YA hit, The Book Thief, inspired by threads of those family tales, that made him a literary sensation. “Sure, we’re made of biological, physical things, but what really makes us is our stories,” says the author, 43, speaking on the phone from his home in Sydney. “If you took our stories away from us, there wouldn’t be much left.” In Bridge of Clay, Zusak’s sixth book, it’s stories that bind the five rowdy Dunbar…