Table of contents for October 29, 2018 in TIME Magazine

LONG BEFORE IT OPENED IN U.S. DISTRICT Court in Boston on Oct. 15, the trial over the use of race in Harvard University admissions had all the makings of a landmark case. In fact, the case stands to reconfigure the place of diversity in the American educational landscape. At its center is the oft-debated subject of affirmative action in college admissions. Those policies traditionally benefit African-American and Latino students in an effort to offset centuries of racial discrimination, but the lawsuit alleges that Harvard’s implementation of those ideas discriminates against Asian Americans. Harvard, which has defended its “holistic” process, says the school strives for diversity as part of its educational mission but denies that any of its practices are discriminatory. “Harvard cannot achieve its educational goals without considering race,”…

IT WAS THE LAST THURSDAY IN SEPTEMBER when 22-year-old social-media icon Tara Fares was gunned down in Baghdad. It was a Thursday in August when a well-known beautician was found dead in her home, and the Thursday before that when a plastic surgeon nicknamed Iraq’s Barbie died in mysterious circumstances. Then a former Miss Iraq, Shimaa Qasim Abdulrahman, was told she too would become one of the so-called Thursday victims. The terrified pageant queen, who won the title in 2015, says she has repeatedly received threats from ISIS members. But it was the brazen assassination of Fares and a chilling warning—“you’re next”—that impelled Qasim into exile in Jordan to escape the fate of women “being slaughtered like chickens.” “They killed many people in broad daylight. I couldn’t wait to…

EVEN WHEN WE WERE IN HIGH SCHOOL, PAUL ALLEN COULD see that computers would change the world. Paul—who died on Oct. 15 at 65 of complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma—was instrumental in creating and building Microsoft, which we launched together in 1975. But the interests and knowledge he loved to share with those around him reached far beyond computing. Paul loved sailing, science, sports, making music and exploring the world. His generosity was as wide-ranging as his curiosity—he was passionate about ending elephant poaching, building smart cities and accelerating brain research. His impact was felt most strongly in Seattle. Paul loved our hometown. He helped build homeless shelters and promoted arts education. He established one of the neatest museums I’ve seen, the Museum of Pop Culture, and helped make sure…

DESPITE WHAT YOU may have heard from a certain U.S. President, trade wars are both difficult and hard to win. Even more difficult? Being invested in the outcome of a trade war with limited ability to affect it. Case in point: Japan, which is eyeing the unfolding trade drama between China and the U.S. with increasing concern. Should relations between China and the U.S. take a dramatic turn for the worse, Japan is on the sharp end of the spear According to Pew Research Center, just 24% of the Japanese population has confidence in U.S. President Donald Trump; their confidence in Chinese President Xi Jinping barely cracks double digits at 11%. But even if Japan had more faith in the principal players involved, Tokyo would have every right…

The apparent murder of Jamal Khashoggi presents a fundamental challenge to the civilized world. He was a Washington Post journalist and a respected member of the international community, in a NATO member country, trying to start a new life. If the Saudis admit to killing him and are not held to account, then it will give a green light to any thin-skinned ruler to go ahead and assassinate critics without fear of consequences. Although our policy tools are limited, there is a way to create consequences for this kind of atrocity: the Global Magnitsky Act. This piece of legislation gives us the power to freeze assets and ban visas of gross human-rights abusers from anywhere in the world. It was named after my Russian lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, who uncovered…

‘I wanted to write a lie. You wanted o read a lie. wrote this to you instead ecause I am ur child, and u are mine.’ KIESE LAYMON HOW DO YOU LOVE AUTHENTICALLY WHEN LIES FEEL SO FAMILIAR? That’s the question Kiese Laymon explores in his devastating personal story, Heavy: An American Memoir. Laymon begins the book with an earnest missive to his mother, a professor who raised him with the help of Laymon’s beloved grandmother. “I did not want to write about us,” he writes of his relationship with his mother. “I wanted to write a lie.” From there he delves headfirst into an unflinching examination of the complex relationship they shared as he came of age as a black man in 1980s and ’90s Mississippi. Laymon…

TRUMPISM BEYOND TRUMP Several readers wrote that they were spooked by the Oct. 22 cover illustration that showed many future elections’ worth of Trump lawn signs, as a metaphor for how the President’s ideology will endure. Michael Morris of Hamden, Conn., called it the scariest TIME cover since “Is God Dead?” in 1966, and Michelle Szabo of Austin said she was worried Trump would consider the image an endorsement for a perpetual presidency. ‘Must have been TIME’s Halloween issue ... The scariest cover I have ever seen!’ JOYCE DUDASH, Lorain, Ohio But Mitchell Hall of Cambridge, Mass., tweeted that the cover story by Sam Tanenhaus was an “encouraging” one. Tab Lyn Uno of Clearfield, Utah, argued that Democratic candidates would benefit from incorporating more of the economic populism…

AN UNUSUALLY FRANK STATEMENT FROM the Vatican announced on Oct. 13 that two retired Chilean bishops have been expelled from the priesthood for the “manifest abuse of minors.” Coming only a day after Pope Francis accepted the resignation of U.S. Cardinal Donald Wuerl over mismanaging past abuse cases, the move suggested that church leaders are recognizing the seriousness of the sprawling child-sex-abuse scandal—though it remains unclear whether the Pope will take the zero-tolerance stance that victims and advocates demand. BLAME GAME Over 100 clergy are under investigation in Chile, which has proved a weak point for Francis, the first Latin American Pope. In January, he caused an outcry by accusing victims of “slander.” Francis later apologized, saying he’d made “grave errors” with that reaction. In May, after a Vatican…

WEALTHY WHISKEY October also smashed the record for a bottle of whiskey, when a private collector in Asia who bid by phone snatched up a 60-year-old Macallan Valerio Adami 1926, sold by Bonhams, for over $1.1 million. COSTLY COGNAC A London bar sold a shot of cognac for over $14,000 on March 21; it was the first to be poured from a 124-year-old bottle distilled by French cognac house Jean Fillioux and discovered in its cellar in 2004. VALUABLE VODKA A bottle of vodka touted as the world’s most expensive—worth $1.3 million, with a diamond-encrusted cap—was found empty at a construction site after it was stolen from a Copenhagen bar on Jan. 2.…

WHEN RICHARD W. SEARS started a mail-order catalog business in 1888 with Alvah C. Roebuck, it sold only watches and jewelry. More than 150 years later, their time has stopped, for now at least: on Oct. 15, Sears, once America’s top retailer, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The catalog, which TIME once called “America’s family album,” launched during the golden age of railroads. That technology helped Sears provide customers with goods ranging from appliances to clothing—and, at one point, 35 lb. of gumdrops for $1.65. As cities and chains grew, Sears again took advantage of the changes, opening its first store, in Chicago, in 1925. As the economy boomed after World War II, so did Sears, which had more than 700 locations by the mid-1950s. But nimble competition…

The Palm, a $349.99 mini-smartphone announced on Oct. 15 by the makers of the PalmPilot, is meant to serve as a sidekick: a shrunken, separate phone on your existing wireless plan that Palm suggests you take when on the move (especially to escape your main phone’s superpowers). Instead, it reveals sad truths about smartphones today. Companies are abandoning small phones in favor of bigger devices that don’t fit everyone’s hands. Even the smallest new iPhone is nearly 2 in. bigger than Apple’s previously smallest offering. (Google’s just-announced Pixel phones are also large.) The Palm is hardly a solution: nobody should have to pay additional hundreds of dollars, plus monthly fees, for a comfortable device. Meanwhile, Palm claims the device can help people get “into their lives.” A “life mode”…

DIVYA NAG Putting a doctor on your wrist At not even 30, Nag is leading Apple’s special projects focusing on health. Nag’s team developed ResearchKit, an open-source app developer for doctors and researchers to share patient results and clinical data, and this fall it announced groundbreaking new tools for the Apple Watch: the Series 4 includes an emergency-response system, in case the wearer falls and doesn’t respond, and a medical-grade EKG heart-rate monitor. DR. ORRIN DEVINSKY Revolutionizing medical marijuana Thirty-one states have legalized medical marijuana, and in June, cannabis went even more mainstream: GW Pharmaceuticals’ Epidiolex became the first FDA-approved marijuana-derived drug. The epilepsy medication was spurred by Devinsky’s research at New York University proving that purified CBD, a compound in pot, can reduce patients’ seizure frequency without making…

I last saw Jamal Khashoggi in early July, over breakfast at our favorite London restaurant, the Wolseley. He and I first met 39 years ago in Jidda, but we developed a close friendship over regular breakfasts at this former automobile showroom on Piccadilly when he worked in the Saudi Arabian embassy in London in 2003. Everyone at the mission, including Jamal’s boss, Prince Turki, the Saudi intelligence chief turned ambassador, referred to him fondly as Uncle Jamal. And how he loved his scrambled eggs! As well as breakfasting, he and I spent a lot of time putting the world to rights, until the prince whisked him off to Washington to be his spokesman there. Jamal was always on the inside track, at some of the very highest levels—and the…

American Dialogue examines what George Washington, John Adams, James Madison and Thomas Jefferson might think about issues dividing the country today. Why did you address the present in this book? I began work on this book two years before Donald Trump was elected President. But the forces that produced Trump, our deeply divided society unsure of its future and deeply distrustful of government, were already visible. ‘ MY VIEW OF HISTORY IS THAT TRUSTING IN THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE IS A BAD BET ’ Do you feel like you have some answers now? Historians are really great at predicting the past. But the future is for prophets, and the track record of most prophets is dismal. Globalization, the Internet, the sheer size of…

‘Australia should be open-minded to this, and I am open-minded to this.’SCOTT MORRISON, Australian Prime Minister, on moving his country’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as the U.S. did earlier this year 60% Approximate percentage of Americans of European descent whose DNA could be identifiable through genealogy sites even if they aren’t registered users, according to a study in Science ‘I love him to death ... Party doesn’t separate us.’ MICHELLE OBAMA, former U.S. First Lady, on her friendship with former President George W. Bush; protocol dictates that they are often seated next to each other at official functions ‘NO LAUGHING MATTER.’THE CITY OF SAVANNAH, GA., in a Facebook post, after a vandal stuck googly eyes on its statue of Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene ‘I…

Warren releases DNA test results Massachusetts Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren on Oct. 15 released the results of a DNA test showing she has a Native American ancestor “6–10 generations ago.” President Trump has repeatedly mocked her claims of Native American heritage; she tweeted that the test was a response to his “racism.” China says its Muslim camps are ‘humane’ China broke its silence on Oct. 16 on the indoctrination camps where an estimated 1 million minority Uighur Muslims are being detained. China said the camps are a “humane” part of a “deradicalization” and education program, contrary to their characterization by groups like Amnesty International. Washington ends capital punishment Washington’s supreme court struck down the state’s death penalty on Oct. 11, citing evidence of racial bias in its use. Washington…

DIED William Coors, a grandson of the founder of the Coors brewery, at 102, on Oct. 13. A longtime leader of his family’s company, he was an outspoken proponent of conservatism. BEGUN Legal marijuana sales in Canada, on Oct. 17. Canada became the second country where pot is legal nationally, after Uruguay. ARRIVED Pastor Andrew Brunson on U.S. soil, after two years’ imprisonment in Turkey on terrorism charges, on Oct. 13. Brunson later met with President Trump. CONVENED A World Health Organization meeting on Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, on Oct. 17; the group decided not to designate the ongoing outbreak an emergency of global concern. CHANGED The name of the Indian city Allahabad to Prayagraj, which has Hindu associations rather than Muslim ones, by its state’s…

More Brexit dangers The possibility of creating a hard border between Ireland and Northern Ireland concerns George J. Mitchell, a former U.S. Senate majority leader who chaired the nations’ peace talks. Among other problems, he writes, it could undo “the intangible but important consequence of a steep reduction in negative stereotyping and demonization.” The pains of typecasting Zeeko Zaki, the lead actor of CBS’s FBI, wrote an essay describing his joy, as a Muslim American, to finally play a hero who practices Islam—and how Hollywood could create more such roles. “As series progress, writers adapt to their actors,” he writes. “But this should and can start from the beginning.” An Internet bill of rights U.S. Representative Ro Khanna described the 10 principles he helped devise for future laws that…

IT’S BEEN EIGHT YEARS SINCE SEO JI-HYUN SAYS she was sexually harassed, but it’s still painful to recall. “For a long time, I tortured myself by blaming myself for everything,” she tells TIME on a cloudy September morning in Seoul’s trendy Apgujeong neighborhood. Seo, a top-level prosecutor in South Korea, alleges that a senior male colleague repeatedly groped her at a funeral in 2010, while the country’s Justice Minister sat nearby. She reported the incident to her managers shortly after, but was subjected to performance audits that she describes as unfair and assigned to a lower-level branch outside Seoul—a move she says did not match her strong track record at work. (The Ministry of Justice did not respond to TIME’s requests for comment; Seo’s alleged harasser has said he…

EAT CARBS A study of 15,500 adults tracked for 25 years found that people who ate a moderate amount of carbs had longer life expectancies than people on low-carb diets and those who ate a large amount of carbs. DRINK COFFEE A years-long study of 500,000 people published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that people who drink at least one cup of coffee a day—including decaf and instant—had a reduced risk of premature death. And the more coffee people drank, up to seven cups a day, the more significant the benefits. TAKE CHARGE Simply feeling in control of their lives was shown to help elderly people feel younger and happier. Researchers guessed that their more youthful mind-sets inspired the participants to be more active, thus extending their life spans.…