Table of contents for May 13, 2019 in TIME Magazine

IN THE FLY SPACE ABOVE THE STAGE AT THE Metropolitan Opera and around and behind it, scenery waits to be called into action. An intricate system of pulleys and lifts allows quick changes. Today’s afternoon rehearsal for Dialogues des Carmélites, for example, will be followed only hours later by a performance of Rigoletto. And in a place of many moving pieces, Yannick Nézet-Séguin fits right in—even though he’s standing at the head of the orchestra in a T-shirt and sneakers while the singers are costumed for 18th century France. Nézet-Séguin, whose conducting of Francis Poulenc’s Carmélites will put a bow on his first season as music director at the New York City institution, is a man with many batons in the air. He fills parallel roles at the Philadelphia…

AS PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP WALKED OUT OF THE South Portico of the White House on April 26, a reporter asked him if he had ordered the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller nearly two years ago. In the question, Trump apparently heard an echo of President Richard Nixon’s 1973 firing of Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox, which came to be known as the Saturday Night Massacre and helped pave the way for Nixon’s eventual resignation. “I’m a student of history,” Trump said over the thumping blades of the waiting Marine One helicopter. “I see what you get when you fire people, and it’s not good.” If Trump is a student of history, though, Mueller’s recently released 448-page final report suggests the President has learned a different lesson from that…

The end of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s three decades in power came in early April, after four months of mass protests. But the celebratory aura around Khartoum has since faded, and the protests aren’t over. Weeks later, representatives of the ruling military council and civilian negotiators, tasked with forming a transitional government, remain divided over the role of the military. Here, on April 19, thousands of protesters gather outside military headquarters, demanding a swift transition to civilian rule. For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

EARCYLENE BEAVERS ALWAYS WANTED A LOT OF children, and she got her wish—just not the way she expected. Beavers, who’s in her 60s, gave birth to a daughter, but has mothered more children than she can count through the foster system. She currently has four at home, including one of the three she adopted, Jake, who has cerebral palsy. While the rate of child maltreatment has dropped in the past 30 years, U.S. child-protection authorities still get about 4 million calls a year. Research suggests that 1 in 8 American children is neglected or abused by the age of 18. It’s one thing to know the numbers behind the foster-care system. But it’s quite another to watch Denyshia, 13, one of Beavers’ charges, say matter-of-factly, “I was abandoned ……

A starry evening THE INFLUENTIAL INDIVIDUALS ON THE TIME 100 OFTEN say one of the best parts of being on the list is the opportunity to meet in person the people who, in turn, influence them at the TIME 100 Gala, held this year on April 23 at Jazz at Lincoln Center. When Sandra Oh started to offer a toast, she was briefly distracted by the Speaker of the House. “Are you kidding me? Are you kidding me? Nancy Pelosi! I literally glanced this way, and this is who I see,” she said. “It’s fantastic.” And Dwayne Johnson later reflected on Instagram that he was glad to now be “best friends” with Glenn Close. “So much love and respect for her,” he wrote. “And thank you for calling me the…

DIED John Singleton Cinema trailblazer THE “OSCARS SO WHITE” DEBACLE OF 2015 OPENED A GALVAnizing conversation about how filmmakers of color might carve out greater opportunity in Hollywood. But John Singleton, who died on April 29 at age 51 following a stroke, was at the forefront of that battle long before we had a hashtag for it, ushering in a new era of creativity and boldness among black filmmakers. Singleton’s 1991 debut, Boyz n the Hood, dealt frankly with inner-city violence, but to say it is “about” violence is to grossly oversimplify it. Singleton, barely in his 20s when he wrote and directed the film, told a story about the tragedy of black men killing one another, but even that was only a small story within a bigger one.…

Like the gunman who killed 50 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques in March, the man who killed one person in a Poway, Calif., synagogue on April 27 announced his intentions on 8chan, an anonymous online message board with a reputation for violent extremism. In the wake of these and other murders, calls to shutter such sites have only grown louder. Several Australian ISPs blocked 8chan right after the Christchurch, New Zealand, attack. There have also been suggestions for ways websites like Facebook could stop linking to these spaces, as well as demands for censorship or taking the sites down completely. But while these actions may prevent the spread of a video of a massacre in the short term, they may end up helping the ideologies responsible for these…

EVEN FOR THE WESTERN CAPE, A PROVINCE KNOWN for its stunning vistas, the view from the settlement of Imizamo Yethu is extraordinary. A panorama of rolling hills, sand dunes and stone cliffs unfurls to the sea. To one side is a fishing village that has gentrified into quaint cafés and handicraft shops; on the other are stately mansions, horse paddocks and the expansive campus of a prestigious private school. The view of Imizamo Yethu from the suburb below, Hout Bay, is also extraordinary, if for different reasons. This ramshackle settlement clinging to a rock escarpment is made up of small brick houses, corrugated-aluminum shacks and lean-tos constructed from old shipping pallets. The few paved roads intersect with a network of mud paths that reek of raw sewage in the summer…

“WHEREVER JUDY GOES, CHAOS TENDS to follow.” So says James Marsden in the Netflix black comedy Dead to Me. Taken together, his utterance (an early contender for my own epitaph) and the fact that a long list of embargoed spoilers prevents me from even writing his character’s name illustrate much of this addictive new show’s appeal. The story packs big twists into each half-hour episode—most of them driven by the kind but unmoored Judy (Linda Cardellini), who’s constantly ratcheting up the entropy. Created by Liz Feldman, a writer and producer of the broad CBS sitcom 2 Broke Girls, Dead to Me makes for a much sharper series about an unlikely friendship between two women. An uptight California real estate agent and mom of two boys, Christina Applegate’s Jen has recently…