Inhoudsopgave van September 21, 2020 - TIME Magazine

IN MARCH, AS THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC HIT NEW YORK, MY colleague Kat Moon decided—wisely, it turned out, given what was ahead for the U.S.—to decamp to her childhood home, Taipei. Despite its proximity to mainland China, where the outbreak originated, Taiwan has seen only 495 cases and seven deaths among its more than 23 million people, making its response to the coronavirus one of the most successful in the world. So successful, in fact, that last month it was able to host one of the largest public gatherings reported since social distancing began: a 10,000-person live arena concert, which Moon and photographer An Rong Xu attended and covered for TIME. As one U.S. reader put it on Twitter, “An arena concert taking place with corona restrictions honestly seems like it’s…

AFTER COVID-19 HIT, BRANDY WILCOXSON, A single mother in Atlanta, saw her weekly hours cut from 40 to around 13. Now, because she has to be home to supervise her two kids’ virtual learning, she can’t pick up more shifts at her job as a security guard, so she struggles to cover rent and food—and she also owes about $1,000 in electric bills. When she contacted her power company about entering into a payment plan, she says she was told she would need to pay $192 a month just to catch up, on top of whatever she will owe going forward. That’s money Wilcoxson, 42, does not have. “It would be robbing Peter to pay Paul,” she says. The stakes for people in Wilcoxson’s situation are about to get even…

THIS YEAR, MILLIONS OF YOUNG ADULTS have retreated to familiar territory: living at home with Mom and Dad. About 2.6 million 18- to 29-year-old Americans started living with at least one of their parents since February, bringing the total to 26.6 million in July—or about 52% of all young adults in the country, according to a Pew Research Center analysis, released Sept. 4, of Census Bureau data. This number shattered the previous record of 48%, set during the Great Depression. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the trend is inextricably linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, but that’s not the whole story. Among that wave of Americans moving back home was Mieka Van Scoyoc, a 27-year-old ad copywriter. While she loved living in New York City, she also had credit-card debt and limited savings…

THE TYPICALLY BUSTLING MAIN CAMPUS OF Pennsylvania State University is quieter than normal. Many students are tuning in to classes online from their dorm rooms. A town ban on gatherings of more than 10 people limits social life off campus. Mask requirements make recognizing faces and making friends more challenging. “I can tell that the university is trying their best to give returning and new students the full experience that Penn State has the potential to bring,” says Sophia Melocchi, 20, a junior. “It’s just not the same.” Across the country, colleges have taken a range of approaches to the fall semester. A Chronicle of Higher Education tracker of nearly 3,000 colleges found that of those with firm plans, 19% are opening primarily in person; 27% are primarily online;…

D’Angelo Sandidge was lying in bed and scrolling through Instagram on June 1, thinking about the ground sausage he was about to fry for breakfast, when he stumbled upon a video that he’d heard about but not yet seen. His anger intensified as he watched the footage of George Floyd begging for his life while a white Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck. By the time the video ended, after he’d watched Floyd, who was Black, call out for his mother and eventually fall silent, Sandidge had lost his appetite. “I felt sick to my stomach,” he says. Until that moment, Sandidge, who is also Black, had not been one to hit the streets in protest. But this was different. At 6 ft. 4 in. and 280 lb.,…

AFTER MONTHS OF WATCHING COMMENTERS FLOOD his office’s social-media posts with voting myths and fielding calls about election conspiracies from constituents, Brian Corley finally got fed up. In July, the supervisor of elections in Florida’s Pasco County decided to shut down his office’s Facebook and Twitter accounts to stop false claims from spreading. “I just got tired of the misinformation and the partisan bickering back and forth,” says Corley, a Republican with 13 years on the job. “I saw no value in it as an election administrator.” If 2016 showed how foreign operatives were exploiting social media to influence the U.S. election, the lesson of 2020 is already clear and even more worrisome: the greatest threat to a credible vote is homegrown. From the White House on down, Americans have…

AUGUST 2020 SAW NO SOCA FLOATS sliding along West London’s Ladbroke Grove. No pink feathered wings or giant plumes of headwear. The Notting Hill Carnival was canceled, like all mass gatherings in late COVID lockdown, the streets still spare, the air still choked with grief. No curry goat or jerk pan smoke rose up into the city trees. And the music, the great churning music of the Caribbean islands, of Black Britain, of Africa and the Americas, did not thump to the foundations of the neighborhood terraces, making them tremble. All of this would have been part of a normal summer for Edward Enninful while growing up in the area in the 1980s. His mother Grace might look out of the window of her sewing room in their house right…

IT’S SEPTEMBER 2017, AND AN UNNAMED middle-aged writer attends a lecture at a college. Her ex-boyfriend, an author, is speaking about the bleak future of humankind. He presents the growing threats to civilization—cyberterrorism, climate change, global jihadism—and offers no sense of hope. “It was too late, we had dithered too long,” he says. “Our society had already become too fragmented and dysfunctional for us to fix, in time, the calamitous mistakes we had made.” When the lecture is over, the writer stumbles out of the auditorium in search of a drink, which she finds at a local café. There, she overhears a father and daughter discuss the recent passing of the daughter’s mother. The writer is a fly on the wall, listening closely to their intimate conversation. It’s these moments…

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … THE NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION After reading the essays and conversations about creating a better future for Black Americans that Pharrell Williams curated for the Aug. 31/Sept. 7 issue, readers agreed that the U.S. has a lot of work to do to live up to its founding promise of equality. Ron Armillei of Orlando said it’s time to accept that America has a caste system. As a way to help, Burton Garrett of Watkinsville, Ga., endorsed rapper 21 Savage’s idea to teach financial literacy in schools. ‘The visions collected by Pharrell are ones we can and should look toward.’H. STEVEN MOFFIC, Milwaukee Readers also had ideas for future dialogues: Ceil Lucas of Elkridge, Md., suggested extending conversations to include deaf Black people, while Ronald Burke…

THE FUTURE OF A 765-MILE PIPELINE being built to carry gas directly to Germany from Russia is now in question, as Berlin ramps up pressure on Moscow to investigate the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The Nord Stream 2 project would help Europe ensure a constant supply of natural gas as domestic production is expected to drop, but German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas warned Sept. 6 that the country might “change [its] stance” on the $11.2 billion pipeline if Russia fails to cooperate in looking into an attack for which Moscow has denied responsibility. PIPE DREAMS Owned by Russian state-controlled energy giant Gazprom, Nord Stream 2 is 94% complete and due to open in early 2021. Some European countries and the U.S. oppose it, fearing it could…

MASK CRUSADE Amid COVID-19 supply shortages, researchers at MIT and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston designed a sterilizable mask for health workers, made of silicone rubber that can stop viral particles. HAVING A BLAST Fireworks are fun, but they also produce trash and emit pollutants. An alternative called Rammaxx uses LED lights and reusable rockets to create sustainable light shows more than 300 ft. high. WASH AND GO Yes, reusable cloth toilet paper exists, and has for years. Its proponents see it as eco-friendly and cost-effective; health experts, however, caution that using it safely requires taking special precautions with your laundry.…

SOMETIMES WOMEN REPRESENT FRAGILITY AND innocence in horror movies, symbols of purity worth saving; what would King Kong have been without his tiny captive inamorata Fay Wray? Other times they’re sympathetic companions or spokespeople for misunderstood monsters. But their allure goes further and deeper than that—especially when it’s women who are doing the looking. Today the term the male gaze is thrown around more loosely than its originator, filmmaker and film theorist Laura Mulvey, intended. Even when there’s a man behind the camera, the lens doesn’t always simply cater to man’s desires. Women love watching other women; we identify, we admire, and sometimes we feel a frisson (or more) of desire. Other times we recoil, though that may only intensify our fascination. So what happens when women filmmakers take control…

Do you remember that there was a time in this country when people received little plastic discs in the mail in red envelopes? That’s crazy! We still have 2 million DVD members, because on DVD you get a comprehensive selection—we have all the HBO stuff, every movie ever made. And then of course it works in deep rural areas where we don’t yet have broadband. You built a company that transformed the global media landscape, yet you wrote a book on corporate culture, not the future of entertainment and technology. Why? We don’t want to give away our secrets in entertainment. When you were still building the company in the 2000s, I interviewed you and you were pretty combative, maybe even a brilliant jerk. If I came across that way,…

‘CHANGE YOUR LIVES OUT THERE.’JACOB BLAKE, who was shot seven times by police in Kenosha, Wis., speaking to the public from his hospital bed in a Sept. 5 video statement ‘Health care workers in India are already exhausted.’HARJIT SINGH BHATTI, a physician in the COVID-19 ward of Delhi’s Manipal hospital, speaking to the Guardian as India on Sept. 7 passed Brazil as the country with the second-highest number of COVID-19 cases 93% Proportion of U.S. racial-justice protests from May 24 to Aug. 22 that went forward peacefully, according to a Sept. 3 report from the nonprofit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project ‘Yes, this does break international law, in a very specific and limited way.’BRANDON LEWIS, U.K. Northern Ireland Secretary, responding to a question in Parliament on Sept.…

COVID-19 spike linked to biker rally A San Diego State University study linked August’s 10-day Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota to more than a quarter-million COVID-19 cases and about $12.2 billion in public-health costs. The event attracted nearly 500,000 people, many of whom packed into bars and restaurants without face coverings. Duterte pardons U.S. Marine Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte pardoned a U.S. Marine on Sept. 7, in a surprise move swiftly condemned by human-rights groups. Lance Cpl. Joseph Scott Pemberton was convicted of homicide in the 2014 killing of transgender Filipina woman Jennifer Laude in a motel northwest of the capital, Manila. Judge halts Census rollbacks In a Sept. 5 restraining order, a federal judge in California instructed the Census Bureau to temporarily stop winding down in-person counting…

THE CLEVEREST OF ENEMIES THRIVE ON SURPRISE ATTACKS. Viruses—and coronaviruses in particular—know this well. Remaining hidden in animal hosts for decades, they mutate steadily, sometimes serendipitously morphing into more effective and efficient infectious agents. When a strain with just the right combination of genetic codes that spell trouble for people makes the leap from animal to human, the ambush begins. Such was the case with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus behind COVID-19, and the attack was mostly silent and insidious at first. Many people infected with SARS-CoV-2 remained oblivious as they served as the virus’s new home and allowed it to establish a foothold in the global human population. These hosts were the perfect base camp for launching the attack that has upended social norms, economies, political systems and more all across…

WHAT ARE YOU HAVING?” I’D be standing in line at the post office or a movie theater, and I’d realize a stranger was staring at my belly. The kind person thought they were asking me a simple question with a simple answer: Is it a boy or a girl? If you want to get technical, my partner Brent and I had found out our child’s sex chromosomes in the early stages of my pregnancy, and we had seen their genitals during the anatomy scan. But we didn’t think that information told us anything about our kid’s gender. The only things we really knew about our baby is that they were human, breech and going to be named Zoomer. We weren’t going to assign a gender or disclose their reproductive anatomy…