Inhoudsopgave van March 2, 2020 - TIME Magazine

ONE OF THE MOST REMARKABLE DOCUMENTS IN our archives is a letter that Martin Luther King Jr. sent to TIME founder Henry Luce upon being named what was then called Man of the Year. 1963, King wrote, will long be remembered as a period “that has carved for itself a uniqueness in history.” It was the year the civil rights movement entered a new stage—crowned by one of the most powerful and enduring speeches in American history. The moment King stepped off the podium in front of the Lincoln Memorial late that summer, it was clear the words he’d spoken there would resonate far beyond the hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the mall. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech has since been woven into the fabric of the…

SEEKING OUT HELP FOR DEPRESSION IS hard enough. It doesn’t make things any easier that it can take weeks, months or longer of trying different treatments to find something that works. Antidepressants can take at least four weeks to start working, and research has shown that only about 30% of patients respond well to the first drug they’re prescribed. “Right now, treatment selection is purely based on trial and error,” says Dr. Madhukar Trivedi, a professor at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. But promising new research published in February in Nature Biotechnology suggests that a simple brain test, paired with artificial intelligence (AI), can help. Trivedi and a team of researchers took data from a previous study in which more than 200 people with depression had an…

A few months into the Syrian conflict in 2011, I visited the Jordanian border at night, where shell-shocked Syrian families were crossing under cover of darkness to avoid sniper fire. A medic at the border post told me about a family who’d recently arrived. They carried with them their wounded 8-year-old son and his amputated leg. His leg had been severed in an airstrike. He’d begged them to bring it with them as they fled, in the hope that it could somehow be reattached. At the time, I hoped that stories like his might force the world’s rich and mighty countries to intervene to stop the violence. But now, nearly a decade later, it strikes me as a metaphor for the Syrian conflict itself: the shattered innocence of a generation…

FOR NEARLY 20 YEARS, DOLORES ACEVEDO-GARCIA HAS been collecting data on the access—and lack thereof—that children in neighborhoods across the U.S. have to necessities like healthy food and a good education. She and her team at the Institute for Child, Youth and Family Policy at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., manage diversitydatakids.org, a data project designed to guide the high-level policy decisions that affect childhood and equality. This information has helped local policymakers and institutions understand where to target programs to improve outcomes for their cities’ children. For example, last year researchers at Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago incorporated the data in an analysis of car-accident injury records. They found that injured children who weren’t properly secured in a car seat were more likely to live in neighborhoods that rank…

By this time next year, a devoted gamer may well have a shiny new console hooked up to the TV: upgrades to Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox are expected for the 2020 holiday season. But cry not for the PlayStation 4 or Xbox One—the best games tend to come during the final years of a system’s life span. These are the releases that promise what time remains is quality time: CYBERPUNK 2077 Off the success of The Witcher 3, developer CD Projekt Red is going from medieval fantasy world to the futuristic cyberpunk dystopia of Night City with Cyberpunk 2077. The open-world role-playing game promises a compelling story line rife with betrayal and revenge; computer-enhanced humans running amok; and an appearance from none other than Keanu Reeves, who plays…

BEHIND THE COVER A new picture of an American icon AFTER TIME CREATED A VIRTUAL REALITY version of the 1963 March on Washington, we asked artist Hank Willis Thomas how he would translate that immersive experience on the cover. At a Jan. 19 photo shoot, Thomas—a co-founder of For Freedoms, a platform for artistic civic engagement—put his answer into action. He photographed actor Ty Brittingham, who served as a stand-in for Martin Luther King Jr. A team of digital-human experts at visual-effects studio Digital Domain used those images as a foundation for posing and lighting the 3-D digital rendering of King from The March to create the image you see on the cover. Thomas says he was excited to make a portrait of one of his heroes, as well as…

IF YOU’RE FEELING ALL DREAMY ABOUT THE universe, here’s a pro tip: don’t tell Brian Greene. That guy can chill your cosmic buzz fast. I recently swung by the office of the Columbia University theoretical physicist full of happy, giddy questions and came away pretty much empty. Is there such a thing as a natural moral order? I wondered. Not in this universe, there isn’t. What about a purpose to the universe, then—the reason the whole 13.8 billion-year-old shebang with its hundreds of billions of galaxies and trillions of planets happened in the first place? Nope, Greene says, no such purpose, adding, “And that’s O.K.” Maybe for him it is. Surely, though, Greene will grant the existence of free will—that first item on the wish list of every freshman-year…

ON FEB. 10, ANNEGRET Kramp-Karrenbauer, the head of Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU)—and presumptive heir to the chancellorship—announced that she would be resigning as party leader, a position she narrowly won just over a year ago. AKK, as she is known, was Merkel’s preferred successor; the announcement marks the true end of the Merkel era. That should worry Europe a lot more than it does Germany. AKK’s short tenure as head of the CDU was marked by a number of unforced errors, and she never found traction among the German populace. But the final straw that forced AKK to step aside was the decision of the local CDU chapter in Thuringia to ignore her order to refrain from voting alongside the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) to elect a…

Nearly six decades after the civil rights act, black workers still have to hustle to get ahead WHEN YOU TEACH ABOUT RACIAL INEQUALITY FOR A living, as I do, you have a before-and-after story. The story broadly goes that before the Civil Rights Act of 1964, racial inequality was legal and normative. After the Civil Rights Act, racial inequality is illegal but normative. It is a linear story for a decidedly circular history, where advances thanks to the March on Washington in 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Lyndon Johnson’s Executive Order 11246 in 1965 (or “affirmative action”) and the election of President Barack Obama in 2008 have been met with resistance. We move forward, then get pushed back, forward, back. Today it is harder than…

TRACI BURTON IS 25 YEARS OLD, BUT COULD EASILY PASS for one of the seniors at Benton Harbor High School. Standing by the trophy case in the lobby, she’s small and youthful, dressed casually, like many of the students walking through the metal detector toward lockers painted with black and orange tiger paws, symbols of the school mascot. People here say they have Tiger Pride. Generations of Burton’s family have lived in Benton Harbor, a city of 10,000 on the shores of Lake Michigan. She went to a performing-arts-focused elementary school there and got a great education. But when the time came for middle and high school, she left for a neighboring district because everyone told her that would be better. Then she went to college, graduated and came home,…

THE WHEELS ARE STILL ATTACHED TO THE HOUSE trailer that Pamela Rush calls home, but the 49-year-old mother of two is trapped. A lifelong resident of Lowndes County, Alabama, she lives off disability checks, struggling to pay the bills on a ninth-grade education. It’s hard to attribute her situation to any one cause—she was born in one of the poorest counties in one of the poorest states and, like the rest of the county’s mostly African-American population, she wrestles with the legacy of slavery and systemized discrimination. Just down the road from her home are the sharecroppers’ quarters where she was born. Yet the most immediate source of Rush’s troubles is immediate: the puddle of sewage that has collected in her backyard, brewing with human feces. Whenever the toilet inside…

AMERICANS SPEND VAST SUMS ON HEALTH CARE. CERTAINLY, health care is expensive all over the world, and it makes good sense for rich countries to spend large amounts to extend their citizens’ lives and to reduce pain and suffering. But America does this about as badly as it is possible to imagine. Health care can sometimes harm people, through medical mistakes, or the overprescription of opioids. But there is also harm to people’s lives from its extraordinary and unnecessary costs. The percentage of national income that is absorbed by health care has grown over the past half-century, from 5% in 1960 to 18% in 2017, reducing what is available for anything else from 95% in 1960 to 82% today. The costs of health care contribute to the long-term stagnation in…

TUCKED AWAY IN AN OFFICE ON A QUIET LOS ANGELES street, past hallways chockablock with miniature props and movie posters, is a cavernous motion-capture studio. And in that studio is the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1963, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. Or rather, it was inside that room that the visual-effects studio Digital Domain captured the expressions, movements and spirit of King, so that he could appear digitally in The March, a virtual reality experience that TIME has produced in partnership with the civil rights leader’s estate. The experience, which is executive-produced and narrated by actor Viola Davis, draws on more than a decade of research in machine learning and human anatomy to create a visually striking re-creation…

ON THE DAY OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON, I WAS very excited about being able to speak to the crowd about civil rights. I was ready. A. Philip Randolph introduced me as “young John Lewis, national chairman, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.” I said to myself, “This is it. I must do my best.” I looked to my right, I looked to my left, and I looked straight ahead, and I went for it. I think often about “young John Lewis.” Today, I would tell him, “You got out there. You pushed and you pulled. You helped lead a movement to make things better for this generation and for generations yet unborn.” I come in contact with a lot of young people, a lot of young children. These kids are…

26% Approximate decrease in manatee deaths in Florida, from 824 in 2018 to 606 in 2019, per the state’s Center for Biological Diversity ‘Given recent national events, it is all the more important to learn from the mistakes of the past.’A RESOLUTION introduced by California assemblyman Al Muratsuchi, up for a vote Feb. 20, in which the state assembly apologizes to Americans of Japanese descent for its role in Japanese-American internment during World War II ‘I played and sang my heart out, until my voice could sing no more.’ ELTON JOHN, apologizing for ending a Feb. 16 concert in Auckland early because of walking pneumonia; shortly after, he postponed several shows ‘NOT SURE WHO WAS MORE EXCITED. GLAD SHEREMEMBERS ME AFTER A YEAR!’CHRISTINA H. KOCH, NASA astronaut, on a viral Feb.…

DECLARED Boy Scouts’ bankruptcy Barraged by sex-abuse lawsuits THOUSANDS OF MEN WHO SAY THEY WERE SEXUALLY ABUSED AS boy scouts may finally get restitution, though likely not in the form of a large payout. The Boy Scouts of America filed for bankruptcy protection on Feb. 18, meaning accusers will watch the once hallowed organization collapse, at least in its current form, under the weight of claims that the Scouts enabled generations of pedophiles. “It’s not about the money,” says James Kretschmer, 56, who has lived for 44 years with the memory of his Scoutmaster crawling into his sleeping bag and sexually abusing him. “It’s crucial that the world sees how widespread this was.” Since the January 2019 revelation that 12,254 children had reported experiencing sexual abuse in the Boy…

The presidential limousine, carrying Donald and Melania Trump, circles the Daytona International Speedway before the start of the Daytona 500, in Florida, on Feb. 16. Rain postponed the race, after 20 laps, until the next day. Driver Ryan Newman was on the verge of victory on the last lap, before his car was bumped while traveling almost 200 m.p.h.; it flew through the air before landing on its roof and catching fire. Newman was taken to a local hospital. On Feb. 19, he was released; Newman left the facility holding hands with his daughters. For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

I HAD MADE IT AS FAR AS THE STREET CORNER WHEN IT occurred to me that I hadn’t paid. I’d said goodbye to my friends at the restaurant and walked out. When I returned, embarrassed and apologetic, one friend mentioned that another had asked if I was O.K. “Of course she’s not O.K.,” she had answered. “She has a 4-month-old.” That 4-month-old was the reason I had to get home. I needed to pump—for the fourth or fifth time that day—and then I needed to go to bed as soon as I could, for however long I could, before attempting to look like a pulled-together professional for work the next morning. My husband and I had joked about how easy that week would be. Our older son was away…

THE WINNER OF THE 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION will depend not only on who votes but also on who doesn’t. Four years after 77,744 ballots in three states gave the White House to Donald Trump, state lawmakers are battling over voting rules that will determine whether millions of Americans get a chance to cast a ballot in November. So far this year, 29 states have introduced at least 188 bills to expand voting rights by making registration and absentee voting easier, and by restoring the vote to former felons. At the same time, legislators in 15 mostly Republican states have introduced at least 35 bills that would make it harder to vote, according to an analysis by the nonpartisan Brennan Center for Justice, often by imposing stricter voter-identification requirements. Key Electoral…

YOU KNOW MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.’S “I HAVE A DREAM” speech. Or at least you think you know it—you’ve read about it in textbooks, or heard politicians quote from it, or seen clips in classrooms or museums. But chances are, you haven’t heard the full 17-minute address from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and what you have heard failed to capture what made it the one of the most famous speeches in history. Even if you wanted to, despite its renown, it’s surprisingly hard to find. Online clips are removed swiftly, and those that evade detection crackle with white noise. But this month, there will be a new way to hear the speech. TIME is releasing The March, a virtual reality experience that takes participants back to…

IN BRANDON TAYLOR’S HIGHLY anticipated novel Real Life, protagonist Wallace—Southern, black and gay—has left behind his family and their fraught shared history to pursue graduate studies in biochemistry at a predominantly white Midwestern university. The novel unfolds over three long days spent in and out of the lab, diving into the daily indignities Wallace faces in a quietly toxic environment. Wallace finds himself stressed by the discovery that his experiment, breeding nematode worms, has been ruined by mold; we wonder, perhaps, if it was the work of a saboteur. Still, he chooses to celebrate the last weekend of summer with friends from his program. But as the only black person among this clique of academics, he maintains an uneasiness around the group, keeping largely to himself. He could make more…