Newsweek 06/22/2018

There is an epidemic of suicide in the United States. Since 1999, it has risen nearly 30 percent; among people 35 to 54, it is the fourth leading cause of death. Such devastating statistics were recently shared across social media because of two high-profile suicides. The designer Kate Spade created a thriving fashion brand out of a whimsical line of handbags in 1993, enchanting a generation of women. She was 55. And Anthony Bourdain, the brilliant chef, author and globe-trotting TV host who had become a leading male voice of the #MeToo movement. He was 61. Both deaths were by hanging. Both produced shock and heartbreak. Spade died in her apartment and is survived by her 13-year-old daughter, Frances, and her husband and design partner, Andy. Bourdain was in a…

THE FIRST LETTER NAWAL EL-SAYED EL-SAADAWI ever wrote was to God. In it, the 7-year-old Nawal asked why—if God was just and fair—he had not made her mother and father equal. Since she had first learned to write, she had always written her mother’s name, Zaynab, next to her own. But her father said it was his name, Sayed, that she must use, along with that of his father, Saadawi. Saadawi never got an answer, and when her mother died—at just 45, having raised nine children—her name died with her. Unlike Saadawi’s father, who could expect 72 virgins upon arriving in heaven, her mother was due no rewards, according to Islam, the faith of her parents. “A woman is without worth,” she wrote in the first part of her autobiography, A…

He opens his bedroom door, “just so you can see there are no Russians hiding in here.” THE WORLD IS HAVING A ROGER Stone moment. I know this because Stone tells me so. “We live in the age of Stone,” he says, in the lobby of SiriusXM’s midtown New York office building. He repeats the line in an Uber uptown to his Harlem apartment and once more while he slurps down a martini. It’s a moment for sure. What kind of moment depends on whom you ask. The right-wing political consultant and lobbyist has been instrumental in the rise of Donald Trump. The two met during Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, and Stone would go on to advise the New York real estate mogul—formally and informally—on his casino deals and during Trump’s…

THE FIRST BLOW CAME WITHOUT warning. Pelon felt a metal ring crush his right cheekbone. He crumbled to the concrete floor of the garage as a man began a slow count. Uno! A kick to the head. Dos! A punch to the nose. Tres! A knee to the groin. Pelon lost track as a half-dozen men pounded away. It was a cool night in November 2013, and Pelon thought it might be his last. When the count reached 13, it was over. The group pulled back and cheered, “Welcome to the Mara!” The assault was an initiation. After months of running with his assailants in and around Boston, Pelon was now an official member of what many consider to be the most dangerous gang in America: La Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. Like…

“SLAVERY IS a very taboo issue—the government DENIES ITS EXISTENCE. EVEN WHEN THEY ARE freed, their situation does not get much better.” “WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, my mother told me every night that WE MUST RESPECT OUR MASTERS, because their caste is higher than ours, AND THAT THEY ARE SAINTS.” THE MAURITANIAN GOVERNMENT DOESN’T WANT YOU to know that 10 to 20 percent of its people are enslaved. Officials don’t want you to think about how the West African country was the last to abolish slavery, in 1981, and didn’t criminalize the practice until just over a decade ago, in 2007. They don’t want you to imagine the conditions of the former slaves, known as Haratin, who now form Mauritania’s lowest caste, living in extreme poverty under a regime that denies…

Teeth layers formed in the womb reveal how autistic kids metabolize chemicals differently. ANY HEALTH CONDITION REQUIRING SPECIAL care beckons us to ask why it happened. Understand the cause, and we’re closer to solving the problem. So it is with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which currently affects about one in 59 children—a jump from one in 150 children in 2000. That increase has led to a frenzied desire to find a cure. A new study focused on baby teeth offers some promise. Researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai wanted to examine how children process essential nutrients delivered in the womb. Before a child is born, his or her teeth grow new layers each day, and the layers record the elements wending their way through the body, much like…