Table of contents for August 17, 2020 in TIME Magazine

EUROPE’S LONGEST-SERVING LEADER, Alexander Lukashenko, is facing an unprecedented challenge as he runs for a sixth term as President of Belarus in elections on Aug. 9. A former teacher with no political experience, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya has emerged as his main rival, pledging to restore democracy. “For the first time in his 26-year rule, Lukashenko knows the majority don’t support him,” says Aleksandr Feduta, a former aide to the incumbent. BELORUSSIAN BULLY Lukashenko has ruled the former Soviet republic of 9.5 million people since 1994. His regime was dubbed “Europe’s last dictatorship” by President George W. Bush in 2005. He has jailed opposition leaders, repressed independent opinion polls and held elections deemed “severely flawed” by the European Parliament. Now, anger has mounted over his mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic (he…

Imagine spitting on a special strip of paper every morning and being told two minutes later whether you were positive for COVID-19. If everyone in the U.S. did this daily, we would dramatically drop our transmission rates and bring the pandemic under control. Schools and businesses could reopen with the peace of mind that infectious individuals had been identified. Michael Mina of the Harvard School of Public Health has been a major proponent of this idea, and has pushed the idea of a test that costs as little as $1, which the government could mass-produce and provide free of charge to everyone. In fact, these technologies exist today. Antigen tests are significantly cheaper and faster than the RT-PCR tests that are at the heart of America’s current testing infrastructure,…

IN THE 2020 THAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, NOBODY IS SICK AND POLITICS is the center of the universe. The Democratic Party has just nominated Joe Biden and his running mate at its mid-July convention in Milwaukee, while Republicans are gearing up to renominate Donald Trump in Charlotte, N.C. At his usual rallies, Trump is pointing to the roaring economy to make his case for re-election, while Biden struggles to stir up crowds with his plea for a return to normalcy. Trump’s allies continue to promote conspiracy theories about the Biden family’s entanglements in Ukraine, leading increasingly desperate Democrats to push for a second impeachment in the House. Both parties are campaigning furiously across the country, knocking on millions of doors to turn out voters in November. But in the 2020…

LONG BEFORE GEORGE FLOYD’S DEATH, EARLIE HUDNALL JR. was photographing the neighborhood where Floyd grew up. Houston’s Third Ward, like many Black enclaves, has suffered the long-term effects of systemic racism and inequity. But Hudnall, who has been documenting several historically Black neighborhoods in Houston for more than 40 years, does not focus on the hardships of poverty. Instead, his photos capture the everyday lives of residents, filled with moments of beauty and joy. “People need to know that you see things within what they call ‘the ghetto,’” says Hudnall. “It’s home where kids and people have to survive and live and coexist together.” Hudnall’s earliest notion of photography’s importance came from sitting on the porch with his grandmother Bonnie Jean in Hattiesburg, Miss., looking through an album she…

COVID-19 and its associated quarantine have disrupted pretty much every aspect of our lives. If you’re like plenty of people, that includes your sleep, with the pandemic bollixing up what might have been the most predictable and peaceful eight hours of your day. Unless, that is, you’re like plenty of other people, and the quarantine has led to some of the best sleep you’ve ever had. “There are upsides and downsides,” says Dr. Cathy Goldstein, associate professor of neurology at the University of Michigan Sleep Disorders Center. “We have more time, so we’re devoting more of it to sleeping—but we can also get too much.” At the same time, she points out, the pandemic might be causing other people to get too little. Sleep is governed by two systems: the…

‘He believed that in all of us, there exists the capacity for great courage.’BARACK OBAMA, former U.S. President, in a July 30 eulogy for Congressman John Lewis ‘Even the very worst among us deserves to be fairly tried and lawfully punished.’O. ROGERIEE THOMPSON, federal appeals-court judge, in a July 31 ruling that tossed out the death sentence facing Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and sent the case back to a lower court for resentencing 126 Number of items of Fyre Festival merchandise and other “minor assets” up for auction by the U.S. Marshals Service, according to a July 30 news release, three years after the music event stranded hundreds in the Bahamas; proceeds will go to victims of convicted ringleader Billy McFarland ‘WE FACE A GENERATIONAL CATASTROPHE.’ANTÓNIO GUTERRES, U.N.…

DIED Herman Cain Conservative original AT A 1996 POLITICAL EVENT AT SYLVIA’S SOUL-FOOD RESTAURANT in Harlem, a man in the crowd shouted out something that changed Herman Cain’s life: “Black Republicans? There’s no such thing.” The remark so angered Cain, then an independent, that he switched his registration—and over the next quarter-century, the child of the segregated South and former head of the National Restaurant Association became one of the country’s best-known Black Republicans, even running for President in 2012. So committed to his party was Cain that he flew to Tulsa, Okla., for President Donald Trump’s June 20 return to the campaign trail, despite health warnings. As candidates, Cain and Trump were, in many ways, cut from the same cloth. Neither was elected to any political post before…

ABOUT A DECADE AGO, KAMALA HARRIS CALLED up Elizabeth Warren to ask for a tip. It was the messy aftermath of the Great Recession, and Harris, then California’s attorney general, needed a recommendation for someone who could handle the complicated job of overseeing the settlement money that big banks had paid for creating and bursting the infamous mortgage-backed-securities bubble. “I said, ‘Talk to Katie Porter,’” Warren recalls telling Harris. Porter, who was then a University of California, Irvine, law professor, had been a student of Warren’s at Harvard Law School. Warren remembered her as “Fully prepared. Ready to go. Leaning forward. All systems go.” Harris listened. In 2012, she appointed Porter to the role of California’s independent bank monitor, where the professor spent about two years overseeing more than…

OUR PRESIDENT WANTS YOU TO BELIEVE I AM A TERRORIST, a professional agitator stalking the Pacific Northwest. Four days before federal agents shoot me in Portland, Ore., I riffle through the garage, shooing spiders from my son’s snowboarding helmet. Will it buckle beneath a steel baton? I press my daughter’s swim goggles to my face, testing the fit. Can they repel tear gas? I run my hands over my husband’s life jacket. Can it stop a bullet? I don’t yet realize how many other moms are slipping oven mitts into backpacks (to minimize burns when tossing aside flaming grenades and tear-gas canisters), how many dads are hoisting leaf blowers from sheds (to clear tear gas), how many teens are gathering plastic toboggans to shield themselves from officers in combat…

JOYCE GREENBERG BROWN FIRST LEARNED ABOUT POLITICAL ORGANIZING from Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957, when he visited her youth group at a Philadelphia YWCA. She worked for George McGovern in Pennsylvania in 1972 and managed field offices in Florida for Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns. She was so dedicated to Hillary Clinton that after Clinton lost, she dyed purple and green streaks into her white hair—the colors of the original suffragist movement—to protest Donald Trump. If it weren’t for COVID-19, Brown would be working at a field office for Joe Biden in Florida, where she lives. But the pandemic has prevented the kind of campaigning she’s done for decades. There are no rallies in packed stadiums, no handshakes at parades, no photo lines or kaffeeklatsches. Instead, Brown, 76,…

Since the FDA added a black-box warning to Ambien and other sleep aids last year, signifying serious risks, insomniacs have begun looking for drug-free ways to sleep—and some musicians and scientists think music could be just as effective. Over the past few years, sleep music has slipped into the mainstream, with ambient artists collaborating with music therapists, apps churning out hundreds of hours of new content, and sleep streams surging in popularity on YouTube and Spotify. Scientists are delving deeper into the field; in September, the National Institutes of Health awarded $20 million to research projects around music therapy and neuroscience. And since the rise of the coronavirus, demand for sleep music has soared even higher. Through the mid 20th century, sleep music was mostly confined to the fringes…

BRI AND LINDSEY LEAVERTON HAD THEIR DREAM WEDDING all planned out. In April, they were going to get married at a century-old mansion in downtown Austin, with their guests sipping cocktails on a veranda by the pool. Instead, they found themselves 20 miles south of town, tying the knot at a drive-in on a dirt road surrounded by cows. A formation of cars blasted their horns in delight. “When our wedding planner asked us about getting married at a drive-in, we looked at each other and said, ‘That sounds insane,’” Lindsey says. The coronavirus has upended countless minor and major life events over the past few months. While many of these plans were canceled, a surprising share migrated to the drive-in movie theater, where social distancing, via cars and…

DOWNTOWN BEIRUT WAS A MESS of rubble, glass and twisted rebar after a colossal explosion tore through the Lebanese capital on Aug. 4. The apparent accident left at least 135 people dead, wounded some 5,000 others, and damaged so many buildings in the city that hundreds of thousands were left homeless. Lebanese authorities blamed the blast—so powerful it was felt 150 miles away in Cyprus—on the detonation of 2,750 metric tons of ammonium nitrate at Beirut’s port. Throughout the night of Aug. 4, radio presenters read out names of the wounded and missing as relatives scrambled to locate loved ones. Dozens were still missing at press time. The disaster added to the agony of a nation in its worst financial crisis since its 15-year-long civil war ended in 1990.…

IN 1974, HUMORIST ERMA BOMBECK PUBLISHED A syndicated newspaper column that looms over the lives of American mothers whether they’ve read it or not. In “When God Created Mothers,” Bombeck describes God making a mother with the help of an angel. “She has to be completely washable, but not plastic. Have 180 movable parts … all replaceable,” God tells the angel. “Run on black coffee and leftovers. Have a lap that disappears when she stands up. A kiss that can cure anything from a broken leg to a disappointed love affair. And six pairs of hands.” My mother, who homeschooled eight children, saw that column as a mark of her valor. Not only did it hang on our wall at home, I grew up hearing it quoted in church…

THE WORLD IS CONFUSED AND FRIGHTENED. COVID-19 infections are on the rise across the U.S. and around the world, even in countries that once thought they had contained the virus. The outlook for the next year is at best uncertain; countries are rushing to produce and distribute vaccines at breakneck speeds, some opting to bypass critical phase trials. Meanwhile, unemployment numbers remain dizzyingly high, even as the U.S. stock market continues to defy gravity. We’re headed into a global depression—a period of economic misery that few living people have experienced. We’re not talking about Hoovervilles. Today the U.S. and most of the world have a sturdy middle class. We have social safety nets that didn’t exist nine decades ago. Fortunately, that’s true even for developing countries. Most governments today accept…

IT STARTS ON A CRISP WINTER NIGHT. OUTSIDE IT’S dark and cold, the grass already coated with a thick, white layer of hoarfrost. Inside I sit—wrapped in a blanket, drinking my hot chocolate, surrounded by the orange glow of candlelight, with lavender incense diffusing into the air—slowly and purposefully crafting a tale. One designed to send millions of people, like you, drifting off to sleep. It sounds like a peaceful scene. One so soporific I might send myself off to dreamland before I’ve finished my story. But it hasn’t always been this way. Earlier in the day, everything was frantic. With deadlines looming, calls to make and emails to answer, it was like my phone was alive, lighting up with job after job, demanding my attention with high-pitched alerts…

EVEN AS OUR POLITICAL LANDSCAPE HAS BECOME OVERLOADED with ridiculously wrongheaded pronouncements, comic absurdity in the movies—dumb, or even smart, stuff that just makes you laugh—feels more precious than ever. We’ve all become worried Victorian orphans facing our glum future. RIP delight; it was nice while it lasted. But wait! Seth Rogen as an early 20th century pickle-company grunt who falls into a vat of brine and emerges, perfectly preserved, in modern-day Brooklyn? Did someone actually conceive that as a movie idea—let alone get the thing made? The good news for you and for me, my fellow wan Victorian orphans, is that An American Pickle is a real movie, and it’s delightful. Sometimes a logically indefensible premise is the only thing that makes life seem logical. Rogen plays a dual…