Innehållsförteckning för November 18, 2019 från TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … THE SECRETARY OF OFFENSE Vera Bergengruen and Brian Bennett’s Nov. 11 cover story, about President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, left reader Eugene Ely of San Jose, Calif., horrified by a dynamic in which he sees Giuliani and Trump “feeding off of each other and egging each other [on].” David D’Adamo of Woodcliff Lake, N.J., said Giuliani was unrecognizable compared with when he was New York City’s mayor. On The Late Show, host Stephen Colbert joked that the image of Giuliani on the cover, a photograph by Spencer Heyfron, would have made a scary Halloween mask, but others, like Leo Latonick of Severna Park, Md., thought the picture was unfairly unflattering compared with the “leader-like” photos of Democratic presidential candidates on previous 2019 covers.…

THERE ARE PERKS TO BEING AN 8-FT.-TALL canary. Everyone recognizes you and wants to be your friend. On the other hand, our world is not built for 8-ft.-tall canaries. Inside a television studio, for example, tail feathers will brush up against camera rigs. A head that high up can get awfully close to the lighting. So it’s a good thing the world’s most famous 8-ft.-tall canary (8 and change, actually) knows his way around a set. Big Bird, his yellow plumage bright as always, his eyes ever gentle, has spent the past 50 years on one: Sesame Street debuted on Nov. 10, 1969. Its next season kicks off Nov. 16—4,935 episodes later—and the show will celebrate the milestone with a special that airs Nov. 9 on HBO and Nov.…

YET ANOTHER MAJOR trade deal is on the cusp of being completed, and no one deserves more credit for that than President Donald Trump … whether he likes it or not. On Nov. 4, it was announced that the 10 countries that make up the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) will join with Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Korea and China to sign a new free-trade agreement called the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). China took a major interest in RCEP after Washington began championing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal in 2013. Under President Barack Obama, TPP was envisioned as a way of reining in China’s ambitions by offering Asian countries an economic alternative to signing up with Beijing. Trump withdrew the U.S. from the trade pact…

AS THE U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES HURTLES toward impeachment ahead of the holidays, it is appropriate to consider, in as dispassionate a way as possible, what really is at issue for the country to decide. One must begin with the words of the Constitution. The removal of the President from office necessarily proceeds only with a determination, through House impeachment and upon conviction by a two-thirds majority in the Senate following trial, that “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors” have been proved. What constitutes a “high” crime? Alexander Hamilton provided the answer in the Federalist papers: only those offenses within Congress’s appropriate jurisdiction that constitute “the abuse or violation of some public trust.” So while it is fashionable at the moment for some to argue that President…

What did you think of the Doctor Sleep adaptation? I like it a lot. He took my story, which was the sequel to The Shining, and basically did a seamless weld to Stanley Kubrick’s film, which is probably one of the reasons why Warner Bros. was eager to do it. I always felt that the Kubrick film was rather cold, and director Mike Flanagan warmed it up. There have been seven adaptations of your work in 2019 alone. Have you had any thoughts to what it takes to make a successful adaptation? I think that in most cases, the shorter fiction has been more successful than the longer fiction. That way the filmmakers can stick to the story, pretty much. I think that the more that you stick to the…

9 members of Mormon family killed Nine members of one family, including six children, were killed on Nov. 4 in an ambush on their car convoy in northern Mexico. The victims were U.S. citizens living in a Mormon community in Chihuahua, a Mexican border state currently being fought over by rival gangs. Cohabitation tops marriage in U.S. Fifty-nine percent of American adults ages 18 to 44 have lived with an unmarried partner, now surpassing the 50% who have been married, according to a Pew Research Center analysis released on Nov. 6. From 1995 to today, the percentage of adults of all ages who are currently married declined from 58% to 53% while the percentage of those cohabiting rose to 7%. China hints at a tighter grip on Hong Kong…

DIED Walter Mercado Star of the stars WALTER MERCADO, WHO DIED IN HIS LATE 80S ON NOV. 2, WAS a giant in the field of astrology, having made his forecasts understandable and instantly useful to a wide Spanish-speaking audience. My hat goes off to him, because he did much to start the modern interest in astrology. His horoscopes and predictions—presented with his warm, optimistic style—were syndicated daily throughout Latin America, attracting the dedication of millions of fans for more than three decades. Although I never met him, his mark on our field was inescapable. The many publications for which he wrote included People en Español here in the U.S., and I had the pleasure of working on my book Planets and Possibilities with someone who had been at the…

What does your election victory mean to you? The significance will be measured over time. Are we able to attract investments, improve our schools, our neighborhoods? Can we [be the] city that we want to be, as opposed to a city that we have been? What do people get wrong about Montgomery? People tend to think of Montgomery and parts of the South as being a place that is still in the ’50s and ’60s. We’ve been at an origination standpoint, and now we want to be a destination, a place that people come to finish things. How will you acknowledge the city’s history during your term? We’re always looking to do that. But we want to make sure we’re not just a museum for the rest of the country.…

RACHAEL PACELLA HAD BEEN DOING BETTER. NO LONGER DID ANY LITTLE SOUND—THE BUZZ OF A CELL PHONE, A DOOR OPENING—CAUSE HER TO TWITCH. SHE WASN’T FREEZING IN CROSSWALKS. The therapy and medication helped. So did a pottery class. Anything to take her mind off that day. Then Pacella retraumatized herself. In February, she testified before a state legislative committee in support of a bill that would regulate rifles and shotguns. It was an unusual situation for an environment reporter, but then Pacella works for the Capital newspaper of Annapolis, Md. She related how on June 28, 2018, she was in the newspaper’s office, heard a pop and saw a glass door shatter. How she crouched under her desk. How she made a run for it, but slipped and slammed…

“IF SANITY AND INSANITY exist, how shall we know them?” So begins a landmark 1973 study by Stanford psychology professor David Rosenhan, who persuaded eight healthy people to feign hallucinations and commit themselves to mental asylums. Once inside, they would have to prove their sanity to get out. The study’s impact was explosive, demonstrating that even trained professionals struggled to tell the difference between the mentally ill and the mentally healthy. It was so pivotal in reshaping our understanding and diagnosis of madness that 46 years later, it is still taught widely. In The Great Pretender, journalist Susannah Cahalan turns her investigative skills to this famous experiment. Her interest in the trauma of being labeled insane is personal: at 24, she was hospitalized with symptoms including seizures, hallucinations and psychosis—an…

THE CHAIR OF THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL Committee, Tom Perez, looked out at a jubilant crowd on the evening of Nov. 5. “Two years ago,” he said, “you here in Virginia taught America that we Democrats could win again. Tonight you’re going to finish the business.” Perez’s prediction proved accurate. Democrats seized control of both houses of Virginia’s state legislature for the first time in more than two decades, aided by high turnout. It was an intensification of the trend that began in 2017, when Virginia’s off-year election provided early signs of the backlash against President Donald Trump that helped Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018. In a college-campus brewpub here, a diverse crowd of Democrats cheered, hugged and cried as the results rolled in, exceeding their most…

THIS SUMMER, 48-YEAR-OLD DYLAN JONES walked into a gallery in his hometown of Caersws, Wales, and was drawn to a collection of photos depicting the olive harvest in a small West Bank village—the gray skies and golden landscapes, the piles of purple olives, the men and women reaching toward the tree branches. A few months later, Jones was on a plane, headed to join a global brigade of volunteers who assist Palestinian farmers during the October-November harvest season. In the West Bank and Gaza Strip, 45% of agricultural land is planted with olive trees, with the olive-oil industry making up a quarter of the region’s gross agricultural income. Groves are often passed down through families, and the olive tree—which has symbolic value across Islam, Christianity and Judaism—represents peace and…

GINA HOLLENBECK SAID SHE DID “EVERYTHING RIGHT.” The Tennessee nurse and mother of two avoided cigarettes all her life. She ate organic food. She ran half marathons and played competitive tennis. But in 2015, she developed a persistent cough and rapidly lost weight. She didn’t have a primary-care doctor, so she consulted several specialists. For months, none could identify what was wrong. Finally, she paid out of pocket for chest X-rays and took them to an emergency room, where she was referred to a pulmonologist who diagnosed her with advanced lung cancer. “I was like, ‘This is a cruel joke,’” says Hollenbeck, who is now 42 and still not in remission. “Everybody kept saying, ‘There’s no way that you could possibly have lung cancer.’” Hollenbeck represents a worrying caveat…

IMAGINE IF IT HAD WORKED. Imagine if our President had leveraged his role as Commander in Chief to persuade a foreign power to open an investigation into his political opponent. Imagine if the President’s rival lost the primary because news broke that he was under investigation. Imagine if that meant the President faced a weaker candidate in November 2020—and won re-election as a result. Imagine if our President owed his victory to a foreign power and we never found out. Imagine how much influence the leaders of that country would have on our foreign policy decisions. Imagine how easily they could blackmail our Commander in Chief. Imagine what our President would do next, knowing he could subvert our democracy without paying a price. Now, imagine if, eventually, we did…

THISTLES, A KIND OF FLOWERING PLANT OFTEN covered in prickles, are probably not an ingredient in your go-to recipes. But Katrina Blair wants you to try eating them anyway. “I love to take the root, fresh or dry, and blend them into a chai,” she says. Blair, 50, is the founder of Turtle Lake Refuge, a nonprofit that advocates for foraging and eating weeds and other plants most people consider a nuisance, not lunch. Foraging is having a renaissance, driven in part by people like Blair seeking to make better use of local natural resources. Foraging how-to videos have racked up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube, while millions of foraging-related photos have been shared on Instagram. One public park in the U.K. reportedly had a 600% spike…