Table of contents for 09/28/2018 in Newsweek

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…

MYTHOLOGY HOLDS THAT THE goddess Pele, in a fit of jealous rage, transformed the man she loved into a gnarly evergreen called the ohia. That’s the tragic tale behind the beautiful tree that, in its many forms, makes up most of Hawaii’s forest canopy. (It also grows as a shrub or an epiphyte—a tree that grows on other trees.) It would be hard to imagine the archipelago without the ohia, but some worry that day could come. Few were concerned when ohia trees started dying from blight in 2010. In recent years, however, “rapid ohia death,” as the disease is called, has spread across more than 135,000 acres on the Big Island and jumped to the nearby island of Kauai. Scientists and public officials are now in a desperate effort…

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.…

IT WAS LATE JULY, AND Teresa Tindal, a 39-year-old administrator for a consulting firm, was describing the incident that made her a believer: a round, golden object hovering in the evening sky over Tucson, Arizona. Weather balloon? No way. It could only be one thing: a UFO. This kind of certainty had brought her—and 400 other people—to the Crowne Plaza hotel in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium, the “premiere UFO event of the year,” according to its literature. They had gathered to talk about extraterrestrials, UFOs and how to avoid being abducted by an alien mothership (hint: yelling at it doesn’t work). “There are too many people that have seen things,” Christine Thisse, 44, a soft-spoken mother from Michigan, told Newsweek. There were the…

It’s a tradition of science to adopt pop culture names, including the Kate Winslet beetle and Frank Zappa snail.” IN THE 1987 MOVIE PREDATOR, an alien stalks a team of Special Forces commandos, led by “Dutch” (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who cuts vines and sharpens sticks to build traps and take down the titular creature. Some of Dutch’s techniques were recently adopted by a group of scientists, who happen to be fans of the film. They were in pursuit of a real-life predator, a new genus of goblin spider, which, like Dutch’s band of extraterrestrial hunting soldiers, fiercely dominate their ecosystems. Instead of snare traps and miniguns, the scientists set pitfall traps: PVC tubes filled with a mix of formalin preservative and detergent. They buried the traps just below the surface of…

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.…

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.…

“Anytime Danny DeVito gets naked is pretty amazing. And alarming.” THE FXX SITCOM IT’S ALWAYS SUNNY IN PHILADELPHIA HAS BEEN RUNNING for 13 seasons—that’s two more than the classic comedy Cheers and four more than Seinfeld. Like Cheers, it’s about a gang of people who frequent a pub-style bar, Paddy’s; as in Seinfeld, the friends never grow or learn anything. Intentionally cheap and anarchic, the show (sometimes called Seinfeld on crack) features a group of sociopathic alcoholics: volatile Mac (co-creator Rob McElhenney), illiterate Charlie (Charlie Day), degenerate patriarch Frank (Danny DeVito) and his delusional twins, Dennis (Glenn Howerton) and Deandra “Sweet Dee” Reynolds (Kaitlin Olson). Since its debut in 2005, the shameless Dee has dabbled in blackface, lured her friend into cocaine addiction for her own financial gain and held…