Innholdsfortegnelse for August 5, 2019 i Time Magazine International Edition

SOMETHING’S MISSING RE “GAUDÍ’S GREAT TEMple” [July 8]: When I entered the Sagrada Familia seven years ago, I felt something bizarre, like emptiness or hollow air. In Japan, we believe that when shrines are being rebuilt, during the construction phase the deities do not reside inside. I hope that after the Sagrada Familia’s completion in 2026, people gathering there can feel the dignity inside. Minoru Umahashi, TOKYO MOST OF THE SAGRADA FAmilia looks like a foolish forgery of Antoni Gaudí’s architecture. If he came back to life and saw it now, he would immediately die of a heart attack. Jose Maria Caballero, MADRID TRUE BELIEVERS RE “THE EVANGELICAL REpublic of Fear” [July 8]: As an evangelical Christian of long experience, writing from England, I can say that Christians here have…

CONFIRMED Mark Esper FOR THE FIRST TIME IN nearly seven months, the Defense Department has a Senate-confirmed Secretary of Defense, thus ending the longest period in the nation’s history that the Pentagon has gone without one. Mark Esper received overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate with a 90-8 vote on July 23. Esper, 55, has political and military experience—including more than a decade in the Army, time working on national-security issues for Republican lawmakers on Capitol Hill and a period lobbying for one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers. He also previously served as Army Secretary since late 2017. His confirmation capped a rocky 204-day period in which the Defense Department went through three Acting Defense Secretaries following James Mattis’ departure. Business continued at the Pentagon, but without an authoritative…

STUMBLING THROUGH CHOKING smoke, Antoine-Marie Préaut was on a divine mission. The conservator of the 4,000 or so historic monuments in the Paris region made his way through the burning Notre Dame cathedral on April 15 to rescue from a locked chest the Crown of Thorns that Jesus is said to have worn to his Crucifixion. The minutes were ticking by, and there was no certainty Préaut and the firefighters accompanying him would succeed in recovering the priceless relic. “I barely had any consciousness about what was happening,” he says. Then he heard a roar from the huge crowd that had gathered on the square outside the medieval masterpiece in the heart of Paris, and his heart sank. “We heard the cries of all Parisians outside,” he says. “We said…

STORIES DON’T REALLY END ANYMORE. AS LONG AS THERE’S earning potential in them, they get revived or rebooted or upgraded to multiplatform universes. Yet for every hundred unnecessary sequels and comebacks, we get one that transcends the whole cynical business: Black Panther. Mad Max: Fury Road. Twin Peaks: The Return. And now the fourth season of Veronica Mars, which comes to Hulu on July 26. Canceled after just three seasons on the CW and its predecessor UPN, creator Rob Thomas’ (Party Down, iZombie) smart teen drama about a high school girl who moonlights as a private investigator had a limited audience during its original mid-’00s run. But it was precisely the kind of brilliant-but-canceled show whose legacy flourished in the age of streaming—a critical darling and cult favorite whose star,…

$20,000 Maximum award that customers affected by the 2017 Equifax data breach could receive for time and money spent remedying identity fraud, per a settlement announced on July 22 ‘I could win that war in a week.’DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President, claiming in the Oval Office on July 22 that “Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth” if he pursued his unspecified plan to end the war there ‘I won’t be intimidated. We continue to do our jobs.’ MARIA RESSA, editor of the news site Rappler and a 2018 TIME Person of the Year, ahead of a July 23 hearing opening the libel trial she faces in the Philippines; human-rights organizations have condemned the case as politically motivated NADLER:‘DID YOU ACTUALLY TOTALLY EXONERATE THE PRESIDENT?’MUELLER:‘NO.’CHAIR OF THE HOUSE JUDICIARY…

MANY CULTURES HAVE NATIVE WORDS FOR unique experiences. In Spain, families and friends sitting around after finishing a meal are having a sobremesa. Germans enjoying the solitude of being alone in the woods experience Waldeinsamkeit. In Iceland one such word is isbiltur, which describes a road trip to get ice cream, a hallowed family tradition on the island nation. So when Icelandic Prime Minister Katrin Jakobsdottir visited London recently, she was persuaded to join TIME for a quick isbiltur—a short drive from her country’s modernist embassy in upmarket Knightsbridge to an Icelandic ice cream shop on the west side of town. “You know, I think ice cream walks may be more common today than drives,” she says as the town car crawls through London traffic, noting that her family prefers…

ON A WARM FRIDAY AFTERNOON IN JULY, JOE BIDEN STOOD under a tent on the banks of the Cocheco River in Dover, N.H., trying to rally a crowd of 200 behind his presidential campaign. Biden’s staff had handed him a speech and positioned teleprompters onstage. But he wasn’t in the mood to follow the script. So aides removed the prompters, and Biden tossed the printed speech aside. “I’ve got a nice speech here for you, but I’m not going to take the time,” he told the crowd. “I’m going to try to shorten this up for you.” And off he went, literally and figuratively, pacing the lawn over the course of a 36-minute riff. Instead of focusing on policy prescriptions, such as his call to triple federal funding for low-income…

IT’S 6 A.M., AND THE ALARM CLOCK IS BUZZing earlier than usual. It’s not a malfunction: the smart clock scanned your schedule and adjusted because you’ve got that big presentation first thing in the morning. Your shower automatically turns on and warms to your preferred 103°F. The electric car is ready to go, charged by the solar panels or wind turbine on your roof. When you get home later, there’s an unexpected package waiting, delivered by drone. You open it to find cold medicine. Turns out, health sensors embedded in your bathroom detected signs of an impending illness and placed an order automatically. Good thing you already knocked that presentation out of the park. THAT, AT LEAST, is the utopian version of the smart home that exists 10 years out.…

When I flew to Puerto Rico in 2017 and looked out at the damage caused by Hurricane Maria, I realized that the island on which I was born and raised would never be the same. The landscapes and topographies I knew so well were gone. I was confident that the island would recover, but I also knew that what would emerge would be something different. I just didn’t know how different. Now I know. On July 10, we woke up to the news that two prominent former cabinet members of Governor Ricardo Rosselló’s government had been arrested by the FBI for allegedly funneling over $15 million in contracts to business friends. Three days later, at least 889 pages of private chat transcripts between the governor and more than 10 others—government…

DAHABO MOHAMED, A FRESHMAN AT RICHFIELD HIGH NEAR Minneapolis, patiently waits in the school’s auditorium to meet her Congresswoman, Ilhan Omar. It’s a Tuesday morning in late May, and the line of students stretching ahead of Mohamed means she will lose part of her lunch period. But it is rare for her to see someone in a position of power who looks like her—a Muslim woman in traditional garb—so the free time can wait. “For people like me who wear a hijab, to see her doing what she’s doing is inspiring,” she says. Omar’s decisive victory last fall was a groundbreaking moment for American Muslims. The Congressman she was succeeding, Keith Ellison, had been the first Muslim elected to Congress, but she and her colleague Rashida Tlaib are the first…

YOU CAN’T CLEAN PEOPLE UP. YOU CAN’T ORGAnize them or kiss them goodbye, thanking them for their service when they no longer spark joy in your heart. There are these nagging, inconvenient things called feelings attached to people that you can’t bundle up in little boxes or toss. Decluttering is a fruitless fad. It’s a reaction to the confluence of all our technology-enabled connectivity and the gnawing feeling that we are wildly out of control of our bodies—overpowered by drugs and obesity—and as a planet, burdened with the fear that we’re one angry tweet away from nuclear war. By focusing on the order within our homes, we’re missing the point: life is messy, and so are people. Trying to manufacture control over either is a symptom of our desperation. These…