Newsweek September 25, 2015

In the mid-2000s, Myanmar saw between 500,000 and 600,000 cases of malaria every year. So it wasn’t surprising when, in February 2005, a 23-year-old man in Myanmar came down with a fever, nausea, chills and a headache so severe he had to be taken to the local hospital. His doctors quickly determined he was, in fact, stricken with malaria. They prescribed him artesunate, an inexpensive anti-malarial regularly used by Myanmar’s health care professionals to treat the infectious disease. Typically, a patient’s symptoms will subside after a few days on the drug, but this young man grew much worse. He slipped into a coma, his kidneys showed signs of failing, and the concentration of malarial parasites in his blood grew higher. His doctors tried to give him fluids and a more powerful…

Before sunrise one morning in July, a day Ray Fryberg Jr. was scheduled to appear in court, someone smashed the windows of his car. He noticed the shattered glass on the pavement as he was leaving his home. He probably wasn’t too surprised. A month earlier, he had awoken to find that someone had broken every window in his house. Ray was once a respected member of the Tulalip Tribes, who occupy a reservation near Seattle. He worked for the tribal Natural Resource Department and led drum circles. But when he lost his teenage son Jaylen last year, the community turned on him. That sounds unspeakably cruel, but Jaylen’s wasn’t an ordinary death; he died in a murder-suicide that was the deadliest high school shooting in a decade, the second deadliest…

The markets are heaving over fears of a China-fueled global slowdown, but for American consumers there’s good news here: They will be paying less as a percentage of disposable income for their energy than they did in 1960. This year, American households are expected to pay an estimated $700 less on average for energy expenditures than in 2014—a windfall that is expected to last through 2016, according to economists at the Energy Information Administration (EIA), the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Energy. “We’re forecasting the average retail price of gasoline will be $2.11 a gallon in the last quarter of this year,” says Timothy Hess, with the EIA’s petroleum market analysis team. “And gasoline prices are expected to stay below $3 for all of 2016.” After that, the market is…

Telecom analyst Susan Welsh de Grimaldo knows better than to watch a presentation by John Legere when her daughter is nearby. “Mommy, he’s swearing again!” the girl said the last time she saw the wild-haired man in the black leather jacket in a video on de Grimaldo’s home computer. Legere is the CEO of T-Mobile, and if it seems like some aging biker now occupies the company’s corner office, the grownups at Deutsche Telekom, T-Mobile’s majority owner, probably feel the same way; the 57-year-old Legere once opened a speech at DT’s headquarters in Bonn, Germany, by saying: “I got a lot of shit on my mind.” Legere is good at running his mouth, but he’s been even better at running T-Mobile. Over the past three years, his attacks against wireless providers…

Been to the movies this summer? Then you probably noticed that sequels, prequels and remakes dominate the box office, while original films are scarce. Define an original movie as any film not directly based on another movie or a TV series (it doesn’t have to be an “original screenplay”—book and comic book adaptations are OK, if not previously adapted for the screen), and the numbers are striking. Take the top 10 highest-grossing movies of the past summer. Only four of them are original by this definition, and only one of those cracks the top five. The top 10 summer movies pulled in $2.8 billion, according to figures from Rentrak, but the four “original” movies of the bunch generated only $828 million of that, much of it from the Pixar insta-classic Inside Out.…

On the 2016 campaign trail, immigration has been a flash point unlike any other. But as Donald Trump pushes his scheme to build a wall across America’s southern border and Hillary Clinton promises to go further than President Obama in protecting migrants without documentation, a major immigration reform a half-century ago is a reminder that policy changes often don’t go as planned. For today’s politicians, perhaps the biggest takeaway of the Immigration and Nationality Act is to expect unintended consequences. It was back in 1965, during the depths of the Cold War and the peak of the civil rights movement, that the United States overhauled its immigration laws. Working with liberal Democrats and liberal Republicans (who existed back then), President Lyndon Johnson pushed a bill that did away with the “national…