Newsweek 09/28/2018

1981 The biggest drama on TV was General Hospital, a daytime soap opera grabbing 14 million viewers every weekday afternoon. That’s 4 million more than watched HBO’s biggest hit, Game of Thrones, once a week for six weeks in 2017. “Sociologists analyze it; college students rhapsodize over it,” Newsweek declared of the soap’s success, driven by “super couple” Luke (Anthony Geary) and Laura (Genie Francis)—a relationship that began, disturbingly, with a drunken rape scene. (According to the story, women sometimes greeted Geary with cries of “Rape me, Luke!”) Later that year, 30 million would watch their wedding. 1949 The divinely inspired Elsa Schiaparellifamous for, among other things, designing a hat in the shape of an upturned shoe—was Coco Chanel’s chief rival in Paris when Newsweek celebrated her first U.S, collection. She “is a…

In one of the world’s more curious festivals, young men, covered in grease, splash one another on September 6. The annual Cascamorras festival celebrates a tradition dating back to the 15th century, when a worker from Guadix nicknamed Cascamorras is said to have uncovered a sacred image of the Virgin Mary in Baza, setting off an ownership dispute. Although the icon remains in Baza to this day, the town allows a representative of Guadix one opportunity every year to claim it—if the person can reach the church perfectly clean.…

Lane Pittman takes a lone, oddly patriotic stand against Florence, defying wind and rain on deserted Ocean Boulevard on September 14. After making landfall as a Category 1 hurricane and slowing to a tropical depression, Florence assaulted the Carolinas with overwhelming rain and wind, leaving catastrophic flooding. Three days later, at least 23 people were reported dead. Meanwhile, Typhoon Mangkhut battered the Philippines and triggered a series of devastating landslides. Dozens were killed in the storm. IVAN PISARENKO/AFP/GETTY; DARRIN ZAMMIT LUPI/ REUTERS; RANDALL HILL/REUTERS RANDALL HILL…

IN 2009, JILL LEPORE WAS REPORTING ON THE Tea Party movement for The New Yorker. At a rally, she encountered a woman carrying a sign that read, “I want to live in 1773.” Lepore was appalled. “How can anyone say that? Do you want to die in childbirth? Life in the 1770s was horrible!” That experience, she says now, gave her “a heightened awareness of the problem of public discourse having no shared past,” she says. “The idea that you could turn back the hands of time and collapse the distance between the past and present? We happen to be vulnerable to political manipulation around imagined histories right now.” Where, Lepore wondered, was the comprehensive narrative of America that tied together our past and present? She decided to write it herself. The…

ON A BLAZING HOT AUGUST DAY on Germany’s Baltic Sea coast, a few hundred tourists skip the beach to visit the “Fascination Offshore Wind” exhibition, held in the port of Mukran at the Arkona wind park. They stand facing the sea, gawking at white fiberglass blades, which at 250 feet are longer than the wingspan of a 747 aircraft. Those blades, they’re told, will soon be spinning atop 60 wind-turbine towers bolted to concrete pilings driven deep into the seabed 20 miles offshore. By early 2019, Arkona is expected to generate 385 megawatts, enough electricity to power 400,000 homes. “We really would like to give the public an idea of what we are going to do here,” says Silke Steen, a manager at Arkona. “To let them say, ‘Wow, impressive!’” Had the…

EVER SINCE SHE WAS A YOUNG girl growing up in the rough suburbs of Mexico City, Citlalli Hernández had big political dreams. “I always thought that something was wrong with the country, that I had to do something to transform it,” says the 28-year-old. “I wanted to be the first woman president.” In a country that ranks 81st in the world for gender equality, according to the World Economic Forum, such ambitions have been far-flung: When Hernández was growing up in the early ’90s, women held just 8.4 percent of seats in the lower house and 4.7 percent in the Senate. “In Mexico, it’s still hard for people to understand that women can have power,” she says. “Unfortunately, in politics, men have always had greater opportunities.” But Hernández was undeterred. In 2014,…