TIME MagazineJune 15, 2020的目錄

MANY GOVERNMENTS RESISTED TOUGH social-distancing measures and then saw their countries’ COVID-19 cases explode. In Peru, it’s a different story. The nation entered a strict lockdown on March 15, when it had just 71 confirmed cases—earlier than some European countries. But now this nation of 32 million has one of the world’s highest per capita rates of new infections per day, with more than 4,500 reported daily in the week leading up to June 2. Experts say socioeconomic conditions undermined the quarantine. That’s a bad omen for the rest of Latin America, the new center of the pandemic. LOCKDOWN LIMITS Whatever quarantine rules say, it’s hard for many Peruvians to stay home. Roughly 70% work in the informal employment sector, with little job security and no sick pay. Nearly 44%…

PRESIDENT TRUMP’S plans to host a summit of leaders of the G-7 group of industrialized nations this month was put to rest when German Chancellor Angela Merkel waved him off. Coronavirus concerns made it impossible for her to confirm her attendance, she said. Trump then announced the gathering would be delayed until September, and if the story had ended there, it wouldn’t have made much news. But this was not going to be an ordinary G-7 summit. Instead, the U.S. President also announced plans to rewrite the guest list. “I don’t feel that as a G-7 it properly represents what’s going on in the world,” Trump told reporters. “It’s a very outdated group of countries.” He has a point. Gone are the days when the U.S., the U.K., France,…

AFTER FINDING A PARKING SPACE, I SHIFTED MY MINIVAN into park. I sat still for a moment, a moment that allowed me to take a breath in relative silence. I checked to make sure the money was still there. Three crisp $100 bills. It was the week before Christmas. My wife was still dead. Rachel and I married in the fall of 2003. We had two children together, a son in 2016 and a daughter in 2018. Rachel died on May 4, 2019, at the age of 37, two weeks before our daughter’s first birthday. A half hour before my arrival at the parking lot, I was on the phone with a medical provider to whom I owed money. Was the remaining balance after the insurance payment negotiable? The…

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ELISABETH MOSS, OFTEN DRAWN TO portraying either vaguely or totally unlikable characters, has no vanity and no fear. In Josephine Decker’s Shirley, she plays a fictionalized version of eccentric, reclusive novelist and short-story writer Shirley Jackson—perhaps best known for her chilly 1948 groupthink parable “The Lottery”—and once again her instincts prevail. Her Jackson is a tyrant with cold, inquisitive eyes, her skin dotted with age spots, her tummy thickened with padding. Moss melts into this disguise like a poisonous but dazzling color-changing salamander, beckoning us for a closer look, if we dare. Jackson died in 1965, at age 48, and Shirley, based on a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell, takes place roughly within the last decade of her life. Eager, aspiring academic Fred (Logan Lerman) and his wife Rose (Odessa…

‘To suggest that there aren’t racial challenges and patterns is for someone to be blind.’TIM SCOTT, the only black Republican U.S. Senator, in a June 1 interview on CBS; a day before, National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien denied the existence of systemic racism in the nation’s law enforcement ‘The first aim is to break these infection chains throughout the whole population.’PAUL WILMES, spokesperson for Luxembourg’s coronavirus task force, as the country on May 27 initiated a nine-week effort to test every single one of its roughly 625,000 residents, plus cross-border workers, for COVID-19 2,700 Age, in years, of a temple in Israel in which researchers discovered evidence of ancient cannabis use, according to a paper published May 28 $146,000 Sale price of a bottle of vintage cognac from 1762, at an online…

A VIDEO SCREEN IS OF COURSE JUST THE PLACE to meet up with Chris Wallace. That arched brow and knowing smile have existed as pixels since the 1970s, when he began a television news career that took him from NBC to ABC to Fox, where he has hosted Fox News Sunday since 2003. But the face on Zoom is not the strangely ageless one known to viewers, as indistinct at its edges as the features of an infant. Without makeup, Wallace even at 72 hardly qualifies as craggy. But at least there are lines on his face. “I’ve always in my career been the Kid,” says Wallace, who at just 34 became NBC’s chief White House correspondent. “I’m kind of the elder statesman now, which I kind of enjoy.”…

As churches debate whether to allow gatherings, I find myself caught between two viewpoints, both of which seem right. I understand that we need to be responsible and scrupulously careful. Church buildings are not an escape from the world but a bridgehead into it. I am appalled by reports of would-be devout people ignoring safety regulations because they believe that as Christians they are protected against disease. But equally, by temporarily abolishing corporate worship and joining with others only on livestreamed services, Christians may seem to be agreeing that we are just like-minded individuals pursuing an arcane hobby. Part of the answer to this conundrum might be to recognize the present as a time of exile. We find ourselves “by the waters of Babylon,” confused and grieving for the loss…

IN A WEEK THAT SAW THE OFFICIAL DEATH TOLL FROM the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States surpass 100,000, when the number of applications for unemployment insurance exceeded 40 million and Americans were protesting in dozens of cities, President Trump launched an attack against social-media platforms, most notably Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. If it were to survive inevitable legal challenges, Trump’s Executive Order would enable government oversight of political speech on Internet platforms. An order that claims to promote freedom of speech would actually crush it. The Executive Order is a mistargeted approach to a serious and nuanced problem. Trump has long argued—without evidence—that Internet platforms are biased against conservative voices. In reality, conservative voices have thrived on these platforms. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube have consistently allowed conservatives…

As the coronavirus has spread through America’s meatpacking plants amid a growing recognition that overcrowded factory farms are risk factors for other diseases, some people have wondered whether we’ve reached a tipping point. Might Americans finally be ready to go easy on their beloved hot dogs and steaks? Simply put, no. It is true that some Americans have had to adapt during the pandemic. Some slaughterhouses shut down as the virus ran rampant through the workforce. One Tyson Foods pork-processing plant closed after more than 20% of its employees tested positive. Hundreds of Wendy’s locations ran out of burgers. Grocery stores put limits on how much meat customers could buy. But while Eating Animals author Jonathan Safran Foer took to the New York Times to declare, “The end of meat…

The images and the sounds of George Floyd continue to haunt. Media play them over and over again. It’s part of a ritual practice, a way the nation manages its racist sins. People declare their outrage. They, mostly white people, wonder how could this happen in today’s America. The right-wing media decry it all as the violent nature of people who refuse to take personal responsibility. They defend the police. They condemn the violence. Civility matters more to them than justice. I watched the video of George Floyd’s murder and completely lost it. The stress of the times, combined with the cruelty of the act and Floyd’s desperate plea, broke me. I found myself, which I rarely do, burying my head in my hands. Weeping. I thought about all the…

Richardson later watched the video of Floyd’s death in horror, like millions of others. She wasn’t surprised when her hometown erupted in mass protest soon after. For years, a tireless network of local activists and organizers have been fighting against systemic police brutality they say is symptomatic of broader racial-injustice issues that go back generations. They’ve held press conferences. They’ve gone to city-council meetings. They’ve lobbied the state legislature. And they’ve cautioned about what could happen if officials didn’t tackle the twin crises of economic disparity and police aggression. “If you talk to enough people in Minneapolis, it wasn’t if this was going to happen. It was when,” says Richardson. “You can only demean people so much until they respond.” When the Black Lives Matter movement took off after Eric…

THE PROTESTERS DIDN’T EXPECT TO BE BACK ON THE STREETS SO SOON. Life in Hong Kong had only just started to resemble a new normal after the threat of the pandemic subsided. But there they were again on May 24, dressed in black, ready for the storm brewing. “This is a fresh hell,” says Sukie, 25, who asked to use only her nickname for safety reasons. After almost a year of widespread, sometimes violent pro-democracy protests in the former British colony, China had announced sweeping new security measures that will prevent and punish any secession, subversion, terrorism or foreign interference in Hong Kong. Successive city leaders refrained from passing such a law in fear of demonstrations, and so Beijing bypassed the legislature to impose the bill itself. In the rest of China,…

IT MAY HAVE TAKEN A PANDEMIC FOR AMERICANS TO EXPRESS our collective appreciation for health care workers, but they’ve always had an outsize presence on TV. Shows like ER, Grey’s Anatomy and M*A*S*H have galvanized generations. As broadcast networks flail, their doctor dramas remain crowd-pleasers. And yet, I’ve never seen anything like Lenox Hill before. The eight-part Netflix docuseries follows four physicians at the titular New York City hospital over the course of several months on the job. By choosing the doctors they profile there with care, director-producers Ruthie Shatz and Adi Barash capture the astounding range of personalities, specialties and styles of care within the medical profession—and do justice to the heroism that takes place behind hospital doors. For neurosurgery department chair Dr. David Langer and his vice chair,…