Inhoudsopgave van November 11, 2019 - TIME Magazine

AFTER 40 DAYS ON THE PICKET LINE, General Motors autoworkers voted Oct. 25 to accept a new contract that offers salary increases and other concessions. The agreement may offer relief for more than 48,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) members after the longest nationwide strike against GM in nearly 50 years, but the standoff cost both the company and its workers dearly. CHANGING GEARS The new contract scraps the company’s bisected salary structure, under which workers hired after 2007 were paid less and had no way to reach the top salaries of longer-serving employees. The company will also invest $7.7 billion in U.S. factories, including $3 billion at a Detroit plant that had been scheduled to close in early 2020. But not all workers came out ahead. The agreement allows GM…

LEONARDO DA VINCI WAS NO STRANGER TO France. He spent his final three years in the country, dying at 67 in a Loire Valley château exactly 500 years ago. His Mona Lisa, which has hung in the Louvre Museum since the French Revolution, virtually defines Paris as a city of art treasures. And so it is Paris—not, to the irritation of many Italians, Leonardo’s native Florence—that’s marking that anniversary by hosting the largest collection of his work ever shown. After all, the Louvre already owns five of his 15 paintings that remain. “Leonardo da Vinci,” which opened Oct. 24 and runs for four months, is a runaway hit, with more than 410,000 advance tickets sold by day five. Walking through the dark rooms, one can see why. The nearly 120…

“MY FIRST REACTION WAS TO BE ANGRY,” SAYS JOANN Wooding. “I’ve gotten over that, and frustration is more the word right now.” Wooding’s husband Peter, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2016, was among the more than 3,200 people with the disease who volunteered to test a promising drug called aducanumab. In earlier study results released the same year, the drug, developed by Biogen, a U.S. biotech company, and Eisai, a Japanese pharmaceutical manufacturer, seemed to accomplish a number of firsts for people with Alzheimer’s. It appeared to shrink deposits of the protein amyloid accumulating in the brains of patients and, perhaps more important, also slow the cognitive decline resulting from their buildup. No drug for the disease had shown such dramatic effects before. The study in which Peter…

Millennials are swiftly gaining political power: enter Katie Hill. Millennials are also navigating a volatile new landscape of technology, sex and power: exit Katie Hill. The California Congresswoman, who stepped down on Oct. 27 over nude photos, may be the first millennial lawmaker to leave office for that reason, but she won’t be the last. In the election last November, Hill was one of 20 millennials who won seats in Congress, increasing the generation’s representation sixfold and giving voice to the second largest bloc of eligible voters. Now, after nude photos of her “throuple” relationship with a female former campaign staffer were released without her consent, and after she came under a House ethics investigation for an alleged relationship with a male legislative aide, she has resigned. Hill’s case lands…

BRITTANY WYATT, WHO GOES BY BEE, AND HER husband Kevin had been living together for a few years when they had the fight that nearly finished them. Bee needed to buy a car, but her credit had been demolished by her divorce, so she asked then boyfriend Kevin to guarantee the loan. He declined. She took this as a sign that he didn’t trust her. To Kevin, however, it was just a sign that he didn’t believe in loans. He’d never taken one out. Even after he agreed to be a guarantor, the Melbourne, Fla., couple still had money squabbles. “We couldn’t match up with money,” says Bee, 33. They combined bank accounts when they married but have often differed over how their funds should be used. In early 2018,…

LOGJAM A California farmer found a satellite’s fuel tank lodged in a tree in his walnut orchard in October 2018. The satellite’s owner, Iridium, was unable to say how the debris survived its journey back to earth. LOST IN SPACE Russia lost track of a $45 million weather satellite in November 2017 because the rocket that carried it into space had been programmed using coordinates belonging to the wrong launch site. BLASTOFF American company Swarm Technologies launched four tiny SpaceBEE satellites on an Indian rocket in January 2018 without U.S. government approval, which earned the company a $900,000 FCC fine.…

Peter Keup can still remember how it felt to hold deutsche marks in his hand. “It was special to even touch this money,” he recalls. “It felt solid. The East German mark was thinner, flimsier.” As a boy growing up in East Germany, he was sometimes sent West German currency by his grandparents on the other side of the border, be it as a birthday gift or a reward for good school grades. Keup pored obsessively over the notes, minted with the mysterious-sounding titles and images of unknown cities and historical figures. “Names from behind the Iron Curtain, an invisible world,” he reflects. Their worth to him was far more than simply financial. In any case, there was only so much the 16 million citizens of the communist German Democratic…

EVEN WITHOUT THE NOW ALMOST UBIQUITOUS modifier toxic in front of it, masculinity has become a dirty word. That’s as true in the world of film as anywhere else. White male directors—Who needs them? White male stars? Ditto. Old white male directors and stars? Let’s not even go there. The stories of white men have been told to death. And here comes Martin Scorsese with yet another film about gangsters obsessed with guns and status, a story in which women are mostly relegated to the sidelines. The Irishman may be the last thing you want to see right now. Yet even if The Irishman takes place almost completely in a world of men, it’s all about the limits of that world—and about how even the most thoughtless and ruthless men…

ON NOV. 29, 2017, SAVANNAH GUTHRIE AND HODA KOTB greeted Today viewers with the news that NBC had fired their co-host Matt Lauer amid reports of sexual misconduct. “We are heartbroken,” said Guthrie, in a speech that expressed sympathy for Lauer’s alleged victims as well as sorrow over the loss of a colleague. Both women appeared to be fighting tears. It was an arresting moment, one that felt raw and brave enough to cut through the daily onslaught of #MeToo revelations in the fall of 2017. But, as genuine as Guthrie and Kotb might’ve been, the announcement also functioned as a savvy attempt to reinstill trust in a news organization that had apparently failed to protect its staff from chilling abuses of power. That uncomfortable mix of real emotion and…

NAME A POLICY SUPPORTED BY A DEMOCRATIC PRESIDENtial candidate this year and odds are good it’s been passed into law in Seattle. The Emerald City has approved a $15 minimum wage (which Elizabeth Warren calls for); unveiled a domestic workers’ bill of rights (like the one Kamala Harris wants); and voted to tax the rich (a Bernie Sanders–backed plan), though that’s tied up in court. But Seattle’s business leaders are pushing back, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into an upcoming election in an effort to unseat the city’s progressive leadership in favor of contenders who, while still Democrats, take more moderate positions on fiscal issues. “There’s a basic feeling that [the city council] isn’t doing a good job, and we don’t want them to take actions that are going…

Uluru Australia’s sacred summit WHEN ASKED WHY HE WAS CLIMBING MOUNT EVEREST, George Mallory famously answered, “Because it’s there.” Australians, when asked why they don’t climb their land’s most notable natural feature, might answer, “Because it’s theirs.” On Oct. 26, Uluru, the brutal red inselberg almost smack bang in the center of the continent, was officially closed to climbers, marking the end of a long campaign to honor the wishes of its original custodians. One of Australia’s most iconic tourist spots—and the only reason anyone would linger in the Great Sandy Desert—Uluru, known for decades as Ayers Rock, has been withdrawn from public consumption slowly. In 1985, Uluru–Kata Tjuta National Park was returned to the Anangu people, who leased it to the parks department. Signs and brochures began to…

The Getty Fire, seen near the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles on Oct. 28, is just one of several California infernos that, as of that day, had forced some 200,000 people from their homes. As the state grapples with the aftermath of a drought that ended in 2017, warmer temperatures driven by climate change have turned dry forests into furnaces. Utilities shut off electricity for more than 2 million people to reduce the risk of sparking equipment. But officials warn that fires like the Getty—which preliminary findings indicate was started by a branch falling on a power line—are still likely to spread. “It only takes one ember,” Ralph Terrazas, chief of the L.A. Fire Department, said on Oct. 29. ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

THE BERLIN WALL, WHICH FOR DECADES HAD DIVIDED NOT just a city but a country, and all of Europe, fell in November 1989, and history accelerated its march. Such moments test the responsibility and wisdom of statesmen. The long overdue changes in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe had received a powerful impetus from the democratic process already under way in the Soviet Union. The demands of the people were getting increasingly urgent and radical. In the fall of 1989 the situation in East Germany—the G.D.R.—became explosive. Large groups of people were leaving the country; people were fleeing en masse through Hungary and Czechoslovakia, which had opened their western borders. In major cities, people took to the streets, protesting peacefully, but violence with consequences beyond anyone’s control could…

IN THE DAYS WHEN MOVIE STARS USED TO APPEAR IN MAINSTREAM melodramas made for grownups—when we used to have mainstream melodramas made for grownups—it meant something to watch suffering play out on a deeply familiar face. Joan Crawford, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck: surely, with their charisma and their carriage, these people couldn’t be as susceptible to emotional torment as we mere mortals are. But then you’d see their hearts being broken or their spirits being crushed, and the sting was acute. They reminded you that no one is too beautiful to feel pain. That’s the effect of watching Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver, two of our own most appealing modern movie stars, in writer-director Noah Baumbach’s devastating Marriage Story. Johansson and Driver play Nicole and Charlie, the two halves of…