Índex per October 7, 2019 a TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … THE NEW AMERICAN ADDICTION Jamie Ducharme’s Sept. 30 cover story on the popularity of Juul e-cigarettes among adolescents was eye-opening for adults. Julie Lori of Mequon, Wis., was keenly interested, as she has seen “the explosion of vaping among students” at the high school where she works. The story got John Dorgan of Spring Hill, Fla., thinking about why vaping appeals to young people, and he was left feeling that “the cool-looking cloud of vapor it produces” is key. Alan Remde, a doctor in Asbury, N.J., said he thinks that if scientific data proves Juul can help cigarette smokers quit, it should be prescription-only for use as part of an addiction-recovery program—but that if the stats aren’t there, e-cigarettes should be “illegal” because “they…

ON SEPT. 24, U.K. SUPREME COURT President Brenda Hale wore a large, spider-shaped brooch to announce that the court had found Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s suspension of Parliament “unlawful, void and of no effect.” Lawmakers returned to work the next day, three weeks earlier than planned, resuming their scrutiny of Johnson’s plans ahead of Britain’s scheduled exit from the E.U. on Oct. 31. And as Hale’s choice of jewelry became a viral hit, her words left Johnson even more entangled in a web of his own making. ROGUE DECISION On Aug. 28, Johnson announced plans to “prorogue” (or suspend) the sitting of both the upper and lower chambers of Parliament for five weeks. His plan was denounced by opposition lawmakers and many in his own party as a ploy…

COMPUTER BUG In 2018, scientists dubbed a genus of insect Kaytuesso, after a droid that joined the Star Wars universe in the 2016 movie Rogue One. The name is a phoneticized version of the robot’s name, K-2SO. STAR SPIDER Actor Tobey Maguire played beloved comic-book hero Spider-Man in three films—inspiring researchers to acknowledge him in 2015 by naming a newly identified species of spider Filistata maguirei.…

IT’S BEEN 84 YEARS SINCE A FIRST-TERM Canadian Prime Minister with a parliamentary majority lost a bid for re-election, but Justin Trudeau was in a position to shatter that record even before those photos hit the Internet. Blackface is a bad look for any candidate, but it’s especially unbecoming for an incumbent who has built his political brand on inclusion, immigration, multiculturalism and a liberal global order. Trudeau now finds himself defending not just the record of his four years in office but also his personal sincerity, all while fending off a Conservative challenger who is smart, likable, polished and even younger than he is. How seriously can anyone take his impassioned speeches about diversity now? “Actions speak louder than words,” Trudeau told me, in a follow-up to an…

A CHILD OPENS A BOX. He starts jumping and screaming with joy—not an unusual sound in the halls of Mattel’s headquarters where researchers test new toys. But this particular toy is a doll, and it’s rare for parents to bring boys into these research groups to play with dolls. It’s rarer still for a boy to immediately attach himself to one the way Shi’a just did. An 8-year-old who considers himself gender-fluid and whose favorite color is black one week, pink the next, Shi’a sometimes plays with his younger sister’s dolls at home, but they’re “girly princess stuff,” he says dismissively. This doll, with its prepubescent body and childish features, looks more like him, right down to the wave of bleached blond bangs. “The hair is just like mine,” Shi’a…

States sue over auto-emission rules Twenty-three states sued the Trump Administration on Sept. 20 over its move to revoke California’s authority to set its own vehicle-emission standards. The suit is part of a larger battle over the Administration’s attempts to roll back environmental-protection rules. El Salvador signs migration deal As the Trump Administration pressures Latin American governments to curb migration, El Salvador—one of the region’s most violent countries—signed a deal on Sept. 20 that would allow the U.S. to send asylum seekers back there if they passed through the country en route to the U.S. border. Facebook shuts down apps Facebook has suspended tens of thousands of apps for infractions including privacy violations, the social network said on Sept. 20. The decision followed an internal investigation that began in…

THE STREETS ARE SWEPT, THE SOLDIERS rehearsed and the stealth drones ready to be put on display. As Beijing prepares to celebrate the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1, even the trade war will suspend hostilities, with the U.S. delaying additional tariffs. Yet one key birthday wish will not be granted: an end to the protests that have rocked semiautonomous Hong Kong for over three months. The unrest could reach a turning point come National Day, as China’s ruling Communist Party vows to let nothing spoil its big parade. What began in Hong Kong as a protest against a controversial bill has spawned a rebellion against the city’s political masters in Beijing. The bill that sparked the dissent, which would have…

FOR 44 YEARS, SPAIN’S FORMER DICTATOR Francisco Franco has shared a mausoleum with some 34,000 victims of the three-year civil war he started in 1936. Many of the dead who lie at the Valley of the Fallen, a sprawling monument outside Madrid, fought against his military overthrow of Spain’s democratic government and installation of a conservative Catholic autocracy. But his grave draws far-right sympathizers to the site, and each day a group of Franco supporters lays flowers there. That controversial situation will now end, after Spain’s Supreme Court, rejecting a legal challenge from Franco’s family, ruled Sept. 24 that the government of caretaker Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez may exhume Franco’s remains and rebury them in a public cemetery. The move comes after a long-simmering political battle that has divided…

THERE ARE TWO SMALL HOLES IN THE CHEST OF my black fleece, as if a vampire took a nip, but Rose Marcario, the CEO of Patagonia, does not think I need a new one. The outdoor-apparel retailer would make more money if Marcario pushed one of the supple pink and purple pullovers on sale for $119 in the Patagonia store downstairs. Instead she suggests a different idea. “You can just patch it,” she says, sitting near an open window at Patagonia’s camplike Ventura, Calif., headquarters, wearing brown Buddhist prayer beads on her wrist. It’s an odd statement for the head of a retailer, but she shrugs and says, “I’m not really a buyer of things.” Patagonia has long been at the forefront of what is now emerging as a…

FOR DECADES, nations have thought about the strategic triad as the integration of three systems to deliver nuclear weapons: land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles; long-range strategic bombers like the B-52, B-1 and B-2; and nuclear-powered ballistic-missile submarines. Together, these redundant delivery systems deterred an enemy from a first strike, providing a foundation of national military power. Because creating such systems was an incredibly costly process, required advanced technology and needed highly trained workforces, this strategic triad had extremely high barriers to entry. As this turbulent 21st century unfolds, a new sort of strategic triad is clearly emerging, recently illustrated by the sophisticated strikes on key Saudi oil fields in the Middle East, which knocked out 5% of the daily global oil supply with low-cost drones and likely used Google Earth…

The unredacted, declassified summary of Donald Trump’s July 25 telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky contains an express request that he work with Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, and it creates a powerful inference tying this request to the Ukrainian need for American Javelin missiles to assist in deterring Russian aggression. The sequence in the call is damning. First, in the opening moments of the call—just after Trump congratulates Zelensky on his election victory—he raises direct concerns that while the U.S. has been “very very good to Ukraine,” the nation not been “reciprocal necessarily” with the U.S. There is nothing wrong in the abstract with a statement like this. Nations do seek quid pro quos all the time in international diplomacy. The relevant question is what the U.S.…

LET’S GET THIS OUT OF THE WAY FIRST: JOKER, a stand-alone origin story about one of Batman’s biggest nemeses, has every right to exist. The movie, directed by Todd Phillips and starring Joaquin Phoenix, is marked by some unhinged brutality and more than a little hero worship of a villainous character. But art, of any sort, can’t and doesn’t cause violence. And if, as a culture, we’d historically made it a practice to censor violent, exhilarating movies, we’d have no Wild Bunch, no Bonnie and Clyde, no Pulp Fiction. But movies are also purely of their time. We can’t watch movies in a vacuum, and no matter how entertaining they are, they can’t blot out the larger world we live in. By now you may have read that Joker—which opens…

FOR ALL THE LIGHT THAT #METOO HAS SHINED into dark corners, many among us still swallow the destructive myth that most rapists are armed strangers lurking in alleys. The past two years have seen countless powerful examples of the truth: rapists are usually someone the victim knows, often quite well. But the stranger-danger emphasis that remains creates a shield, allowing perpetrators to avoid seeing themselves as doing real harm. Jeannie Vanasco, an English professor and a survivor, wanted to delve into the motivations and behavior of rapists. In her new memoir, Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl, she asks a question central to our national conversation about abuse: “Is it possible to be a good person who commits a terrible act?” Vanasco’s 2017 debut memoir, The…

Your new novel, The Dutch House, is about families who circle in and out of a grand house in Pennsylvania. Did you have a particular house in mind? No. It was important to me to only have a few details because I believe that everybody has one, if not several houses, that they are completely in love with that they’ve either been in or been past. The book was going to be called Maeve, and because I own a bookstore, I really did understand that The Dutch House was a much better title. The words Dutch and house have the same number of letters; I knew it would look really good. To me, the house is just symbolic of the life. It’s a book about wealth and poverty, and the…