Innholdsfortegnelse for 06/08/2018 i Newsweek International

A FEW MONTHS INTO THE TRUMP administration, former CIA Director Michael Hayden took a reconnaissance mission of sorts to Pittsburgh, where he grew up in a blue-collar, Roman Catholic family and worked summers in Steelers training camps. He’d asked his brother to gather a couple dozen people to talk politics in a sports bar “over some Iron City beer,” a local brew. “I knew many of the participants, indeed had grown up with several,” Hayden writes in his troubling and important new book, The Assault on Intelligence: American National Security in an Age of Lies. “But we could have been from different planets.” Virtually everyone in the crowd, he recalls, were supporters of the erratic New York business mogul who had improbably won election and moved into the White House…

30,000 feet The height ash soared when Kilauea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, erupted on May 17. Groundwater and hot rock had interacted, a combination the U.S. Geological Survey says can produce dramatic—though not huge—explosions. 1983 The year Kilauea—about 14 percent of the Big Island’s land area—began its current phase of continuous eruptions. 1,300º Lava’s temperature range when first ejected. 2,200º The eruption temperature at Kilauea is about 2,140º FAHRENHEIT 500 number of active volcanoes in the world, not including those on the ocean floor. Many are located in the Pacific Rim’s “Ring of Fire.” About 500 have erupted in recorded history. NINETY–TWO THOUSAND The most fatalities from a single event, after Indonesia’s Tambora erupted in 1815. Starvation was the major cause of death, though the worst incidents (like Italy’s Pompeii)…

THE UNIVERSE BEGAN nearly 14 billion years ago as a vast and dark mix of protons and electrons. Hydrogen formed gradually, along with helium and some lithium. That was the extent of variety in the universe until the first stars emerged. It would take those nuclear fusion machines to create oxygen and all the other, heavier elements that make up life. So pinpointing cosmic dawn—the time when the first stars formed—has long been a quest for astrophysicists. Now, they are one step closer. Stars explode when they die, at which point the oxygen forged inside them merges with the gas in the rest of its home galaxy. But light is an escape artist; it always leaves its source. That means astronomers can spot the glow of oxygen even from very…

THREE YEARS AGO, SELAHATTIN Demirtas was celebrating a political revolution in Turkey. Alarmed by the increasingly autocratic rule of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the Kurdish former human rights lawyer had formed a new political party—the People’s Democratic Party, or HDP—and led it to victory in a historic election. For the first time, the country’s long-suppressed Kurdish minority was poised to take seats in Parliament, depriving the divisive president’s party of a majority and curbing his plans to expand his executive powers. “As of this hour, the debate about the presidency, the debate about dictatorship, is over,” Demirtas declared on election night in June 2015. “Turkey narrowly averted a disaster.” The victory was short-lived. Erdogan challenged the results, and five months later he regained his parliamentary majority in a snap election. Violence…

A new study from the University of Helsinki found that expressions of gratitude are infrequent in many languages. Among more than 1,000 samples of conversations in eight languages from five continents, people expressed thanks for a request granted just 5.5 percent of the time. Even among the most verbal thankers—English speakers—the rate was only 14.5 percent. The absence does not mean that people aren’t thankful, say the authors, but simply that we expect to cooperate with one another. “Care should be taken,” the authors write in Royal Society Open Science, “not to conflate the emotion of gratitude with the act of expressing it.”…

TAE WON YU RECEIVED A CASSETTE TAPE IN the mail. It was 1991, when bootlegs flowed freely through the postal service, like pollen in springtime. Vanilla Ice had the top-selling album in America, and Nirvana was months away from breaking through to the mainstream, but the underground scene was vibrant. Yu, then the guitarist for a rock duo called Kicking Giant, frequently received homemade tapes from musicians he knew in the indie fanzine world: Bratmobile. Bikini Kill. Daniel Johnston. This particular cassette was special. The songs—bracing and raw—had been recorded at home by Yu’s friend, an unknown 23-year-old songwriter named Liz Phair. “It was astounding and fully formed—both the sound and the ease of her lyrical dexterity,” says Yu. “I felt very lucky and also jealous of my friend.” For…

“Every day people tell me my name is ridiculous. There are subreddits dedicated to that!” TUC ED INTO THE A-LIST-LOADED CREDITS FOR THE ALL-FEMALE OCEAN’S 8 (Sandra Bullock, Cate Blanchett, Anne Hathaway, Rihanna...) is a name that might throw some for a loop: Awkwafina. The New York–raised Asian-American rapper, born Nora Lum, is best known for her 2012 video “My Vag,” a tongue-in-cheek ode to exactly what it sounds like. (“My vag a chrome Range Rover/Yo vag hatchback ’81 Toyota.”) But her career, simmering since with small roles on TV and in film (Girl Code, Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising), is about to boil. On June 1, she dropped her second EP, In Fina We Trust; the blockbuster-assured Ocean’s, about a jewel heist, opens June 8; and in August she’s playing…