Table of contents for April 15, 2019 in TIME Magazine

GETTING REGULAR BREAST SCREENings is one of the best ways to lower a woman’s risk of breast cancer. Scans can detect early tumors and help women get treatment before growths spread and become harder to control. But for the nearly half of American women over age 40 who have dense breast tissue, abnormalities are harder to spot. Now, for the first time in more than two decades, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is proposing changes to its mammogram regulations in order to better serve these women. 65% Percentage of women over 40 who had recent mammograms The most significant change would require doctors to inform women if they have dense breast tissue. For years, doctors disagreed on what denser tissue meant for women’s risk of breast cancer, since…

VERY FEW AMERICANS COULD FIND TINY MONTENEGRO ON A MAP. FEWER STILL COULD OFFER A COGENT DESCRIPTION OF THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SLOVENIA AND SLOVAKIA. Most can’t name the three Baltic countries. Yet thanks to Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s charter, which was signed 70 years ago in Washington, every American is bound by law to defend with blood and treasure each of those nations, and 22 others to boot. To many who lived through the Cold War, the alliance may seem like an obvious good deal. By binding Europe’s democracies together, NATO decreased the chances of the brutal conflicts that dominated the continent through the end of World War II. NATO provided a strong counterweight to Russia, and communism more broadly, helping defeat that ideology virtually…

FOR MOST OF THE PAST DECADE, TV NETWORKS have been trying to replicate Mad Men. (Remember NBC’s The Playboy Club? ABC’s Pan Am?) But these imitators never seemed to understand that beyond the 1960s styling, Mad Men resonated because of its deep insight into creative work and the havoc it can wreak on the personal lives of people who devote themselves to it. So it’s a minor miracle that FX has managed to create something close to Mad Men’s spirit in Fosse/Verdon—a miniseries, premiering on April 9, that shares both its lush midcentury setting and its ambitious themes. You don’t need to know much about musical theater (I don’t!) to enjoy this eight-episode account of the romantic and professional partnership between legendary choreographer and director Bob Fosse (Sam Rockwell) and…

‘I think I’d probably say no.’BARBARA BUSH, former First Lady, when biographer Susan Page asked her in 2018—shortly before Bush’s death—whether she still considered herself a Republican ‘Are we really going to help fund the murder of innocent citizens?’GEORGE CLOONEY, actor, calling for a boycott of hotels owned by the Brunei Investment Agency, in response to a new law in the Asian nation that legalizes the stoning of LGBTQ people and adulterers ‘I DON’T WANT TO HAVE A HEART THAT IS BOILING LIKE A VOLCANO.’FARID AHMED, a survivor of the March 15 New Zealand mosque attacks, on why he forgives the shooter; Ahmed spoke at a remembrance service in Christchurch on March 29 ‘In 2020, induct more women.’JANET JACKSON, Grammy-winning recording artist, in a speech at the March 29 Rock…

For most American households, April showers bring May flowers and, even better, tax refunds. In 2018 roughly 73% of individual income tax filers received money back, averaging a refund of $2,899. In many ways, that’s a good thing. But it also means that millions of households are together missing out on billions of dollars. Despite worries earlier this year about shrinking refund checks, the latest IRS statistics suggest that the share of taxpayers receiving refunds and the size of their checks are roughly in line with where those figures stood at the same time last year. This is encouraging news: our tax system functions much more smoothly when the majority of taxpayers are due a refund at filing time. The catch is that the IRS does not pay interest to…

DURING AN INTERVIEW WITH CHRIS ROCK FOR MY PBS SERIES African American Lives 2, we traced the ancestry of several well-known African Americans. When I told Rock that his great-great-grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman had served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War—enrolling on March 7, 1865, a little more than a month after the Confederates evacuated from Charleston, S.C.—he was brought to tears. I explained that seven years later, while still a young man in his mid-20s, this same ancestor was elected to the South Carolina house of representatives as part of that state’s Reconstruction government. Rock was flabbergasted, his pride in his ancestor rivaled only by gratitude that Julius’ story had been revealed at last. “It’s sad that all this stuff was kind of buried and that…

YOU MIGHT NEED TO BE SOMETHING OF AN ENGLISH-HISTORY nut to truly love Peterloo, Mike Leigh’s somber and ambitious film about the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, in which 18 people were killed and many more were injured when cavalry soldiers charged a group of roughly 60,000 citizens who had gathered peacefully in Manchester’s St. Peter’s Field to campaign for parliamentary reform. But even if you’ve never heard of the Peterloo Massacre, this picture—beautifully staged and shot, with a you-are-there urgency—will reward your patience. Peterloo focuses partially on one family, that of a young Manchester man named Joseph (David Moorst), an army bugler who has recently returned from the Napoleonic Wars with a case of PTSD. Joseph’s mother, Nellie (Maxine Peake), is a careworn but persistent woman who sells meat pies…

THE DESK IN ROBERT CARO’S OFFICE HAS A rounded notch, a clean little half circle that lets him snug his wooden chair into his custom-made workstation. Instead of legs, the top rests on a pair of sawhorses. Shims raise the surface to where his elbows naturally rest when Caro’s pen rolls across the white legal pads on which he writes the first drafts of his epic biographies. The height was calibrated by President John F. Kennedy’s personal physician, Janet G. Travell, M.D., a specialist in back pain whom Caro sought out after hurting himself playing basketball. Travell decided to assess his condition by watching him work. “So she sat on the floor in my office, and she said to me, ‘Do you know you sat at your desk for…

EVEN IN THE WORST OF TIMES, RUSSIA HAD BEEN A RELIABLE FRIEND TO THE SUDAN OF OMAR AL-BASHIR. IT CONTINUED SELLING HIM WEAPONS DURING THE ATROCITIES HIS REGIME CARRIED OUT in the Darfur region from 2003 to 2007. And when the International Criminal Court indicted al-Bashir in 2009 for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity, issuing a warrant for his arrest, Russia went its own way. Instead of detaining al-Bashir when the Sudanese leader landed in Sochi in 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin received him at his official residence and put the meeting on state television. As it turned out, Russia’s enduring friendship was about to pay off. The outlaw President had arrived with an offer: “Sudan,” he told Putin, “can be Russia’s key to Africa.” What he…

IT WAS A HISTORIC—AND HORRIFYING—CASE OF GAS lighting. One hundred thirty Mennonite women and children were drugged and raped in their Bolivian colony over a period of four years, starting in 2005. Their abusers, men in their own community, told the victims, 3 to 60 years old, that their attacks had been perpetrated by ghosts. Miriam Toews fictionalizes this ugly chapter of history in her latest novel, Women Talking. In her version of the story, eight Mennonite women, also in Bolivia, begin to hold secret meetings after suffering repeated violations in 2009. They have just two days before their fathers and husbands return from a trip to a nearby city to bail out their accused attackers, and they must meet in secret to evade those around them who remain loyal…