Table of contents for April 8, 2019 in TIME Magazine

Members of the Syrian Democratic Forces prepare for a ceremony marking the “100% territorial defeat” of ISIS, at the al-Omar oil-field base in eastern Syria on March 23. In declaring that day that it had extinguished the extremists’ last Syrian stronghold, the U.S.-backed, Kurdish-led force noted that it had lost 11,000 fighters battling the militant group. And though ISIS no longer holds territory in either Iraq or Syria—places where its caliphate once ruled more than 7 million people—analysts remain wary of sleeper cells. The group’s shadowy leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, also remains at large. For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

ALMOST A CENTURY AGO, IN THE AFTERMATH OF the First World War, the journalist Walter Lippmann, then 32 years old, published an influential and disturbing critique of democracy and its future. The mood in the U.S. was anxious—about immigration, about race, about women, about the nation’s role in the world, about civil liberties, about religion, even about science (the Scopes trial was a few years off). The 1920 Census had found that more Americans now lived in cities than on farms, and the broad introduction of commercial radio at around the same time was reshaping the nation’s media landscape; such forces had helped lead to the founding of a second, widely popular Ku Klux Klan—a movement designed to protect Anglo-Saxon superiority in the face of shifting demographic trends. It…

IT’S A MADDENINGLY FAMILIAR SCENARIO: A YOUNG BLACK man (Damson Idris) driving on a deserted road gets pulled over by a white police officer. “Just like we always talk about—no attitude, just be respectful,” his mom Nina (Sanaa Lathan) anxiously reminds him from the passenger seat. Hoping to make it to his first day at a historically black college without incident, they endure the cop’s casual racism. But when the officer sees an old camcorder recording, he reaches into the car and a scuffle ensues. Just as a gunshot seems inevitable, Nina hits the rewind button, and she and her son are transported back in time. Welcome to the new Twilight Zone, which is very much what you’d expect from a reboot of the classic sci-fi anthology series helmed and…

‘Take my golden cage and give me the sky.’REEM, a Saudi Arabian woman known by a pseudonym for her safety, after she and her sister were granted emergency visas; they had spent months in legal limbo after fleeing what they called “slavelike” conditions in their wealthy homeland with its laws restricting women’s freedom ‘Only one medium-size torso can be made ready by Friday.’NASA, announcing that the first all-female spacewalk, planned for March 29, would not take place because there were not enough space-suit tops available in the size both astronauts wear ‘YOU HAVE TO DO MORE AND TALK LESS.’PETER TABICHI, science teacher, on his classroom philosophy; a Franciscan friar working at a rural Kenyan school, he won the Varkey Foundation’s $1 million 2019 Global Teacher Prize on March 24 ‘This…

The annual March Madness heist is under way. Let’s take a peek behind the curtain: while the cameras show supremely gifted college athletes delivering drama and thrills on the court, the NCAA has licensed every television broadcast to hoard a bonanza for people who never touch the ball. ¶ Well-meaning voices call for the NCAA to pay players, but this demand is misguided. No college should be required to pay athletes, and no pay structure needs to be planned. The central question is whether college athletes should have the bargaining rights that other Americans take for granted. On this point, the NCAA is deaf to persuasion. It will hang on to its windfall tenaciously. The NCAA system is not a creation of law. It’s a private compact of colleges and…

IT WAS A SOMBER DAY IN THE WASHINGton National Cathedral Dec. 5 as thousands gathered to mourn the death of former President George H.W. Bush. Beneath the glittering stained-glass windows, the crowd of political luminaries wistfully recalled the gentler era of bipartisanship the late leader represented. Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, took the moment to reconnect with Bush’s Attorney General, William Barr. Leahy had known the Republican power lawyer for decades. Speculation was swirling about whom President Donald Trump would ask to fill Barr’s old job after Jeff Sessions’ departure. Pulling him aside, Leahy urged Barr to take the post again. “Bill, we need you back,” Leahy said, according to a Justice Department official with knowledge of the conversation. (Leahy’s staff said the Senator…

BOOKS On being everything to everyone LATELY, I’VE TAKEN TO SAYING THAT MY GOAL is to luxuriate in the sweet interludes between moments of crisis. Let me warn my millennial friends now: If you have kids in your late 30s, there’s a good chance you’ll someday find yourself stuck at the intersection of elderly parents, erratic adolescents and the unsettling realization that you’re never going to cross everything off your lists—not the home-project list, not the bucket list. Time is short. Goodbyes are frequent. You’d better get good at emotional triage. Also: You probably won’t make it to the gym. This is the territory that Cathy Guisewite, creator of the Cathy comic strip, explores in her new essay collection, Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault. She debuted cartoon Cathy in…

“HOW WOULD YOU BEHAVE IF YOUR WHOLE LIFE was ripped out from under you?” Catherine O’Hara wants to know. I’m supposed to be asking the questions here, at the Manhattan hotel restaurant where the comedy legend is between appointments, cobbling together a late lunch of tapas (and urging me to try the stuffed peppadews). But I’ve just thoughtlessly referred to her character on Schitt’s Creek as selfish, and she’s politely defending the woman she’s spent the past four years portraying. O’Hara has a point. Her alter ego Moira Rose is more gracious than many would be in her four-figure shoes. A sweet yet sharp Canadian family sitcom that will end its fifth season in the U.S. on Pop TV on April 9, Schitt’s Creek follows the megarich Rose clan—Moira,…

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP HAD FINISHED A ROUND OF Sunday golf and repaired to his private quarters at his Palm Beach, Fla., club when the news arrived. After 22 months, the findings of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation were in. Moments before, around 3 p.m. on March 24, Trump’s White House lawyer Emmet Flood received a call from Attorney General William Barr’s chief of staff, Brian Rabbitt. The Department of Justice official said that after more than 2,800 subpoenas, nearly 500 search warrants and a similar number of witness interviews, Mueller had not established that the Trump campaign or its associates conspired with Russia during the 2016 election. In addition, Mueller declined to draw a conclusion about whether Trump had obstructed justice in the aftermath. Barr and Deputy Attorney General Rod…

THERE’S A PECULIARLY 19TH CENTURY sensibility at work in Dumbo, both the 1941 Walt Disney animated version and Tim Burton’s new live-action retelling. It’s as if once the workhouses were abolished, we needed to find new ways to build character in children: Why not just rake over their nascent emotions by introducing them to an adorable baby elephant who’s “different” and then fixating on his distress as his mother is carted away? Don’t stop there: Detail every twist of his precarious existence as he’s commodified and misused by people in power. That approach was pronounced enough in the original Dumbo. With this update, the once great, now not-so-great Burton revamps the story for a new generation, not that this new generation asked for it. Now we’ve got a Dumbo that’s…

THE PARTY HAD AN OPEN BAR, BUT BILLIE EILISH was nowhere near the free champagne. At 17, the evening’s star and musical guest was a good 10 years younger than most of the hip Manhattan crowd filling the cavernous Lower East Side gallery on a February night. The occasion? The launch of her magazine cover for Garage, created by the renowned artist Takashi Murakami. Eilish, a singer-songwriter beloved by Gen Z—she has 15 million Instagram followers—is not yet a household name. But with her debut album, When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?, out March 29, she’s well on her way. Even before its release, she has nearly 6 billion streams across platforms and is Spotify’s second most popular female artist this year. And she got there on…