Kindle Edition, 2013 © Time Inc.

One Man.
With a single phrase, Martin Luther King Jr. joined Jefferson and Lincoln in the ranks of men who've shaped modern America

PHOTOGRAPH © BOB ADELMAN

THE VOICE KING AT SELMA, MARCH 25, 1965. HIS "DREAM" SPEECH HAD ESTABLISHED HIM AS THE MORAL LEADER OF THE NATION

Jon Meacham | 2829 words

It was not going well, or at least not as well as Martin Luther King Jr. had hoped. The afternoon had been long: the crowds massed before the Lincoln Memorial were ready for some rhetorical adrenaline, some true poetry. King's task now was to lift his speech from the ordinary to the historic, from the mundane to the sacred. He was enjoying the greatest audience of his life. Yet with the television networks broadcasting live and President Kennedy watching from the White House, King was struggling with a text that had been drafted by too many hands late the previous night at the Willard Hotel. One sentence he was about to deliver was particularly awkward: "And so today, let us go back to our communities as members of the international association for the advancement of creative dissatisfaction." King was on the verge of letting the hour pass him by.

Then, as on Easter morning at the tomb of the crucified Jesus, there was the sound of a woman's voice. King had already begun to extemporize when Mahalia Jackson spoke up. "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin," said Jackson, who was standing nearby. King left his text altogether at this point--a departure that put him on a path to speaking words of American scripture, words as essential to the nation's destiny in their way as those of Abraham Lincoln, before whose memorial King stood, and those of Thomas Jefferson, whose monument lay to the preacher's right, toward the Potomac. The moments of ensuing oratory lifted King above the tumult of history and made him a figure of history--a "new founding father," in the apt phrase of the historian Taylor Branch.

"I say to you today, my friends ... even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream," King said. "It is a dream deeply rooted in the American Dream"--a dream that had been best captured in the promise of words written in a distant summer in Philadelphia by Jefferson. "I have a dream," King continued, "that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.'"

Drawing on the Bible and "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," on the Emancipation Proclamation and the Constitution, King--like Jefferson and Lincoln before him--projected an ideal vision of an exceptional nation. In King's imagined country, hope triumphed over the fear that life is only about what Thomas Hobbes called the war of all against all rather than equal justice for all. In doing so, King defined the best of the nation as surely as Jefferson did in Philadelphia in 1776 or Lincoln did at Gettysburg in 1863.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character...

I have a dream today.

Fifty years on, no matter where one stands on the political spectrum, it's all too easy to be glib about the meaning of the March on Washington and the movement's victories: the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. For some conservatives, the civil rights movement belongs to a kind of antiquity. In striking down a key section of the 1965 voting-rights legislation (a bill consistently renewed by Congress, including as recently as 2006 for an additional 25 years), Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that "our country has changed" and that the discriminatory world where African Americans were blocked from the ballot box no longer exists. On the other extreme, there are liberals who believe that racial progress has been so glacial--never mind gradual--that the shooting of a young man like Trayvon Martin (and the subsequent acquittal of his killer) is all too often the rule rather than the exception in America.

The prevailing reality--and a crucial legacy--of King's speech to the nation 50 Augusts ago may have been best captured this summer, in the wake of the Martin verdict, when a particular African American calmly enumerated the daily acts of racism that still shape our national life. "There are very few African-American men in this country who haven't had the experience of being followed when they were shopping in a department store. That includes me. And there are very few African-American men who haven't had the experience of walking across the street and hearing the locks click on the doors of cars. That happens to me, at least before I was a Senator. There are very few African Americans who haven't had the experience of getting on an elevator and a woman clutching her purse nervously and holding her breath until she had a chance to get off. That happens often."

A gloomy report. And yet, and yet: the black man making these observations in the James Brady Briefing Room of the White House was the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama, who was a toddler when Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to the podium at the march in 1963.

The most obvious observation about life since August 1963 is also the most accurate: we have traveled far, but not far enough. Revisiting King's speech, the religiously infused culture from which it sprang and the political moment in which he delivered it suggests that he, for one, wouldn't be especially surprised by the ambivalent state of affairs in the America of 2013. Like our more familiar founders (Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson), he was a practical idealist, a man who could articulate an ideal but knew that human progress, while sometimes intoxicatingly rapid, tends to be a provisional enterprise. The march, he said that day in Washington, was not an end; it was but a beginning. We live in a world King helped create. We do not yet live in the world he helped all of us dream of.

It is tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the known and the unknown nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced--and often paid--the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed or color. The true honor we can give to King and his comrades is not to render them as fantastical figures in a Manichaean struggle but to see them as human beings who summoned the will to make the rest of us be the people we ought to be.

The death of Jim Crow is an epic story, but it is no fairy tale, for the half-century since the March on Washington has surely taught us that while African Americans are largely living happier lives, no one can sensibly say that everyone is living happily ever after. The dream of which King spoke was less a dream to bring about on this side of paradise than a prophetic vision to be approximated, for King's understanding of equality and brotherhood was much likelier to be realized in the kingdom of God than in any mortal realm. In Washington to demand legislative action, King spoke as a minister of the Lord, invoking the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount in a city more often interested in the mechanics of the Senate.

However unreachable King's dream seems to be on this side of paradise, though, we must try. Like the promises of the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address or FDR's First Inaugural ("The only thing we have to fear is fear itself"), the promises of King's "I Have a Dream" sermon can be kept only if the nation is mindful of what Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." In his words to the March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. gave us a standard against which we could forever measure ourselves and our nation. So long as his dream proves elusive, then our union remains imperfect.

A WEDNESDAY IN WASHINGTON

White Washington had expected mayhem. Few bureaucrats or lawyers who worked downtown in the capital showed up for work on Wednesday, Aug. 28, 1963. That many blacks? In one place? Who knew what might happen? Even the ordinarily liberal New York Times was wary. "There was great fear there would be rioting," recalled the Times' Russell Baker, who was assigned a front-page feature on the march, "so the Times chartered a chopper." Boarding the helicopter early in the day, Baker grew so bored by the peaceable spectacle that he asked the pilot to fly over his house so he could check on the condition of his roof. "Finally," said Baker, "I had him land at National Airport and went to the Lincoln Memorial."

It was, it turned out, not only orderly but also integrated. Baker wrote of Bob Dylan, Charlton Heston and Marlon Brando; the paper took note of the series of speeches and songs, including Jackson's "I Been 'Buked and I Been Scorned," a spiritual delivered with such power that Baker reported Jackson's voice seemed to echo off the far-off Capitol. Speaker after speaker--the young John Lewis, the aged A. Philip Randolph--made the case for racial justice. "For many, the day seemed an adventure, a long outing in the late summer sun--part liberation from home, part Sunday School picnic, part political convention, and part fish-fry," James Reston wrote in his piece for the Times the next day.

Watching King's speech in the White House, Kennedy listened with appreciation, then readied for a meeting with the march's leadership to discuss the practical steps ahead to push legislation through a Congress still dominated by white-segregationist Democrats. The ensuing session did not produce much in the way of progress. Kennedy feared moving too quickly, and as they had said again and again all afternoon, the civil rights delegation from the Mall believed the time for action was at hand. Yet King, who craved forward motion, had spoken of delay and of dreams deferred. The pilgrimage would be long, he had told his listeners, and the pilgrims had to maintain the moral high ground they had so effectively claimed through nonviolence. "And that is something that I must say to my people who stand on the worn threshold which leads into the palace of justice," King had told the crowd. "In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds ... We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline." If the politicians were too slow, well, that meant there had to be yet more dignity and yet more discipline.

The Times' Reston, a reliable barometer of Establishment opinion, however, believed the day had in fact accomplished something, even if JFK was less than enthusiastic late that afternoon. "The demonstration impressed political Washington because it combined a number of things no politician can ignore," wrote Reston. "It had the force of numbers. It had the melodies of both the church and the theater. And it was able to invoke the principles of the founding fathers to rebuke the inequalities and hypocrisies of modern American life."

FREEDOM--SORT OF--AT LAST

Kennedy had not met with king and his comrades alone on the afternoon of Aug. 28. In the President's party was his generally unhappy Vice President, Lyndon Johnson.

It's a tragic irony of American history that a people enslaved by white men finally became equal before the law not because of the nonviolent courage of millions of people of color but because of the murder of a single white man. The horror of the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Ala., on Sept. 15, 1963--an attack executed by Klansmen that killed four young girls--loomed large in the national consciousness, particularly when the violence of the crime was contrasted with the nonviolence of the March on Washington. Yet there is no escaping the fact that the moral case King made before the nation in August 1963 was given legislative force only after the assassination of Kennedy in Dallas three months later elevated Johnson to the presidency. The passage of the landmark bills of 1964 and 1965 was possible because LBJ was determined--but a determined realist. "Even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over," he said after Selma in March 1965 as he proposed voting-rights legislation.

It would, though, be a battle won. From the Brown school-desegregation decisions in 1954 and 1955 through the Great Society bills of the mid-1960s, Jim Crow was fatally wounded--so much so that the phrase is now anachronistic. Long-term research cited by Stanford's Gavin Wright shows that educational integration in the South has produced positive economic results for African Americans, including increases in "graduation rates, test scores, earnings and adult health status, while reducing the probability of incarceration."

That's the good news. "One generation removed from the civil rights movement, we went from a country where a majority of the people believe in racial hierarchy, believed in the idea that there was one type of person who was fully deserving of citizenship, to a country where a majority of people reject that idea," says Sheryll Cashin, a Georgetown law professor and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. "Because of the civil rights movement, we became a country where a majority of people really embrace the idea of equality as an American ideal. It's seen as un-American to be discriminatory or racist. That's a major achievement, despite the fact that we still have inequality."

A LEGACY AT RISK

In a new report, the national Urban League is using the mark of 50 years since the march to measure the state of black America. In terms of education, the league notes that the high school completion gap has closed by 57 points, the number of African Americans in college has tripled, and there are now five college graduates for every one in 1963. When it comes to standards of living, the percentage of African Americans living in poverty has fallen 23 points (the figure for black children is 22%), and homeownership among blacks has increased 14%.

Then there are the all-too-familiar failures. "In the past 50 years," the Urban League reports, "the black-white income gap has only closed by 7 points (now at 60%). The unemployment-rate gap has only closed by 6 points (now at 52%)." (Only at 100% will the gap have disappeared.) Overall, the racial unemployment ratio is unchanged since 1963, at "about 2-to-1--regardless of education, gender, region of the country or income level." These numbers, as well as enduring inequalities in the criminal-justice system and the recent Supreme Court ruling on voting rights, suggest that neither the march nor the movement is really done.

The end of Jim Crow did not mark the beginning of what John Lewis, since 1986 a Congressman from Atlanta, calls "the beloved community"--a philosophical ideal of a world that transcends racial, ethnic, economic and gender barriers and is suffused by love. "Citizenship and equality are broader conceptions" than civil rights alone, says Darrell Miller, a professor at Duke Law School. "The civil rights movement was about ending segregation but also about being able to enjoy the fruits of being an equal citizen in all aspects of life, both public and private."

On that August Wednesday, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial--the spot on which he stood is marked there now, a sacred slab hidden in plain sight in the middle of the capital of the most powerful nation the world has ever known--King drew from Scripture as he joined the ranks of the founders. In the beginning of the Republic, men dreamed big but failed to include everyone in that dream, limiting liberty largely to white men. Speaking in 1963, King brilliantly argued for the expansion of the founders' vision--nothing more, but surely nothing less. In doing so, a preacher from the South summoned a nation to justice and won his place in the American pantheon. "I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and every mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together." He paused, then pressed on: "This is our hope. This is the faith that I will go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope." Transforming that hope into history remains the work at hand, this August and always.

One Speech.
Casting aside his script, King reset every standard for political oratory. Presidents ever since have been trying to match his words, power and moral authority
Richard Norton Smith | 1976 words

On Aug. 28, 1963, no one followed Martin Luther King Jr.'s oratorical tour de force more closely than the President of the United States. "He's damned good," murmured John F. Kennedy as King's triumphant image faded from the television screen. Left unmentioned was King's introduction on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial as "the moral leader of the nation."

But it must have stung so astute a student of presidential history as Kennedy. Sooner or later, fairly or not, every occupant of the Oval Office is judged by his use of the bully pulpit, invented by Theodore Roosevelt to shame purveyors of tainted meat, promote simplified spelling and trumpet the conservation of nature in opposition to a money lust recognizable to any viewer of CNBC's American Greed. Since then, a century's worth of richly symbolic gestures--from T.R.'s White House dinner invitation to Booker T. Washington, the first of his race to be so honored, to Barack Obama's painfully personal testimony about racial profiling in the wake of the Trayvon Martin verdict--have demonstrated a President's capacity to foster change through his moral advocacy.

Appearing briefly in the White House pressroom on July 19, Obama supplied the latest teachable moment in the nation's 400-year seminar on race. An obvious reluctance to let the issue define his presidency only lent added weight to Obama's comments. So did their juxtaposition against the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. To its organizers, the first great Washington protest of a transformative decade was as much about unfinished business as unkept promises. Movement veterans like A. Philip Randolph and Roy Wilkins had vivid memories of an even earlier demonstration scheduled for July 1, 1941, and aborted at the last minute when FDR issued Executive Order 8802, which desegregated the nation's war industries and established a Fair Employment Practices Committee to monitor workplace discrimination.

The alternative--100,000 black protesters marching to the Lincoln Memorial--held scant appeal for a President whose congressional prospects rested with Southern Democrats committed to American apartheid. Reserving his powers of persuasion for the threat posed by fascist dictators in Europe and Asia, Roosevelt tossed the hand grenade of civil rights to his outspoken wife Eleanor. When the Daughters of the American Revolution denied the celebrated contralto Marian Anderson the use of Constitution Hall on account of her race, Mrs. Roosevelt resigned her membership in the group. She gave her blessing to local activists who were seeking a highly symbolic change of venue.

April 9, 1939, dawned cold and blustery in the nation's capital, though it didn't prevent a crowd of 75,000 dressed in their Easter finery from assembling before the Lincoln Memorial to hear Anderson's emotionally charged "My Country, 'Tis of Thee." Among the millions listening via radio was a 10-year-old preacher's son in Atlanta named Martin Luther King Jr. In a high school speaking competition he won several years later, King described the concert as "a new baptism of liberty, equality and fraternity." The same event redefined a monument whose mixed message reflected a national habit, where race was concerned, of editing the past to avoid discomforting the present. At its formal unveiling in 1922, former President William Howard Taft described Abraham Lincoln's Greek Doric temple as "a shrine at which all can worship."

Yet the throng to which he addressed those words was rigidly segregated. So was the history being commemorated. Tuskegee Institute president Robert R. Moton had his remarks edited lest he offend Lincoln's son, President Warren Harding and other dignitaries assembled to pay homage to the 16th President--for what? Architect Henry Bacon spelled it out in the memorial's epitaph: "In this temple as in the hearts of the people for whom he saved the Union the memory of Abraham Lincoln is enshrined forever." To African Americans, however, starting with Frederick Douglass, preserving the Union took second place to ending slavery. Their Lincoln was found in the second Inaugural Address justifying the war, and over 600,000 related deaths, as divine retribution for the crime of human bondage.

'A GREAT CHANGE IS AT HAND'

After 1939, the brooding man of marble supplied a backdrop to both Presidents and protesters as they prodded the conscience of white America. In June 1947, Harry Truman became the first Chief Executive to appear before the NAACP when he addressed 10,000 of the group's members from the memorial's steps. That Truman--a product of small-town Missouri who was known to employ the N word in private conversation--should risk splitting his party by desegregating the armed forces and sending the first civil rights message to Congress since Reconstruction lent his actions a moral majesty consistent with Lincoln's outgrowing of the racist society that had produced him. That Truman also embraced civil rights because he couldn't hope to win the 1948 election without black votes simply married pragmatism to principle.

Dwight Eisenhower's hidden-hand style of leadership avoided rhetorical flourishes. (Ike once groused that if words alone defined a President's performance, Americans should elect Ernest Hemingway to the job.) Though accompanied by the requisite Oval Office address, his 1957 deployment of Army troops to escort nine black children into a formerly segregated high school in Little Rock, Ark., spoke for itself. Three years later, Kennedy's impromptu phone call to Coretta Scott King expressing concern over her husband's jailing for his part in an Atlanta protest may well have supplied Kennedy's razor-thin margin over Richard Nixon in their race for the White House. Yet civil rights went unmentioned in Kennedy's Inaugural Address, the new President giving priority to Cold War dangers much as FDR a generation earlier had stressed the threat from overseas.

To be sure, the Kennedy Administration sent federal marshals to protect Freedom Riders who challenged segregation on interstate transport. In 1962 a plainly frustrated JFK mobilized federal troops so that James Meredith could attend the University of Mississippi. As history accelerated in the first months of 1963, the charismatic young President was betrayed by television, the latter-day bully pulpit custom-tailored to his casual eloquence and ironic wit. Pictures, not words, aroused a nation's conscience that May. From the front pages of newspapers they spilled onto television screens by the millions: jaw-dropping images of black children in Birmingham, Ala., savaged by high-powered water hoses and police dogs answerable to commissioner of public safety Eugene "Bull" Connor.

At the White House, Kennedy said the pictures made him sick. He furtively lobbied Birmingham business executives to compromise with King and his Children's Crusade. When Alabama Governor George Wallace attempted on June 11 to keep two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama in a confrontation staged for television, Kennedy's detachment crumbled. That night he went on the air with an improvised speech to rally support for a civil rights bill that had yet to be written. "A great change is at hand," the President told his audience, "and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame, as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right, as well as reality."

In shedding the chrysalis of political calculation, Kennedy achieved his own profile in courage. Yet even then, fearing the impact on his re-election prospects, he initially held back from endorsing the proposed March on Washington. Armed with FBI wiretaps, he worried that King's entourage might include Communist sympathizers. Otherwise his concerns duplicated those voiced by FDR in the same office to the same organizers in the autumn of 1940. Why risk alienating potential supporters through tactics of intimidation? On the day of the march, John R. Lewis, the 23-year-old firebrand who was newly elected to lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, saw his text purged of language upsetting to the white audience by march leaders, much as Robert Moton had in consecrating Lincoln's shrine four decades earlier.

King's speech concluding the day's program quickly assumed legendary status. "I have a dream," JFK said, greeting King as he arrived for a postmarch meeting in the Oval Office. The immediate political payoff was more disappointing. Senator Hubert Humphrey lamented that the march had failed to convert a single colleague to support civil rights legislation. Three months later, Kennedy's assassination conjured memories of another martyred President, succeeded by another Southerner named Johnson, whose white-supremacist dogma had set back by a hundred years the cause of racial justice. Determined to validate his presidency born of tragedy, Lyndon Johnson would employ the bully pulpit with heroic disregard for the political consequences. "There goes the South for a generation," Johnson reportedly observed in signing the landmark 1964 Civil Rights Act. It was a rare instance of Johnsonian understatement.

A year later, on a March Sabbath christened Bloody Sunday, 600 demonstrators demanding equal access to the voting booth assembled on the outskirts of Selma, Ala., where they were clubbed and teargassed by state troopers and local police. What followed was perhaps Johnson's finest hour. "What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America," he told a joint session of Congress. "It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too, because it is not just Negroes but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome."

Johnson's words that night moved King to tears. They echo with unmistakable relevance half a century later, when the right to vote is once more being tested. In the finest tradition of the bully pulpit, they illustrate the difference between a President who preaches at us and one who undertakes to explain us to ourselves. That said, the pulpit isn't what it used to be. Long gone are the days when a presidential address from the Oval Office automatically commanded a television audience of 70 million, countered only by the lonely voice of Eric Sevareid offering what the three television networks labeled instant analysis. Today, Obama is lucky to be seen in the cable universe, shouting into the wind of millions of self-appointed Sevareids twittering their impressions of his speech as he delivers it.

Likewise consigned to memory are the Frank Capra--esque exploits of Ronald Reagan instigating a flood of calls to Capitol Hill, enough to shake loose dozens of Southern Democrats needed to pass his economic program. The fragmentation of the modern media guarantees it. So does the disappearance of Southern Democrats. These days the loyal opposition couldn't care less about jammed phones; they're too busy jamming the operations of government itself. Meanwhile Obama, our putative instructor in chief, is ensnared in a political culture that defines success not as forging consensus but as preventing it. The President has been criticized for not employing his persuasive powers more forcefully. This sidesteps the question: How does a President persuade congregation members who have tuned him out, disputing his legitimacy and reserving their attention for rivals who reinforce their existing beliefs and prejudices?

That is precisely what makes the President's remarks following the Trayvon Martin verdict so compelling. In sharing bitter memories of car doors being locked in response to his mere presence, Obama offers a postmodern version of the bully pulpit. Less theatrical than T.R.'s bluster, less elegant than JFK's belated conversion to freedom as every American's birthright, less urgent than LBJ's moral imperative, Obama's parking-lot epiphany is as chillingly authentic as it is impossible to dismiss.

Neither Kennedy nor King, this President appears less interested in directing a national conversation on race than in sparking interior dialogue, a discussion beginning not with his standing before Congress but with the rest of us figuratively staring into our mirrors.

Smith is a presidential historian and scholar-in-residence at George Mason University

One Dream.
In some ways, America has exceeded King's visions. In others, however, his to-do list remains far from finished
Michele Norris | 2354 words

I have spent much of the summer talking to people who witnessed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech 50 years ago this month. While reaching back through time to understand that day, I collected a series of photographs of King on my computer. At some point I noticed something in these images. In most of them, King's arm is outstretched toward the crowd, hand held high, palm open. The way you might raise hands over someone in church who is standing in the need of prayer. As my reporting took me back to 1963--a year of tumult and bloodshed in the fight for racial equality--I realized that as King was reaching out over the crowd, he might as well have been reaching up to touch the sun.

The things he mused about in that speech were the stuff of fantasy in 1963. You needed more than just the audacity of hope to imagine that states "sweltering with the heat of oppression" could be "transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice." Even things that seem routine today--the idea that "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers"--were well outside the bounds of reasonable expectations in 1963. So how far have we come since that hot August day when thousands flocked to Washington? Has King's dream been achieved?

In some ways the America of today has even exceeded what he allowed himself to envision. Fifty years after King delivered his speech, another black man will stand at the Lincoln Memorial to address the masses--this time at a lectern embellished with a presidential seal. And the crowd assembled to hear Barack Obama will include women, minorities and immigrants who have climbed a ladder of upward mobility that simply did not exist five decades ago. There will also be people in that crowd who can look into their own past and remember a time when they once enforced or embraced segregation, not necessarily out of hatred but because that is just the way it was. Rabid segregationists may have been the pistons that kept Jim Crow segregation humming, but apathy and the go-along-to-get-along mentality fueled the engine of racist America.

King knew that, and it is why throughout 1963 his speeches, his interviews and his "Letter From a Birmingham Jail" were aimed not just at dispossessed blacks but also at "do nothingism" among moderate whites who he said were "more devoted to 'order' than to justice." His words at the Lincoln Memorial were directed not only to the assemblage but also to the much larger and largely white audience that would be listening on the radio or watching black-and-white TVs. When you look at those two historic tent poles spanning a half-century--the preacher and the President--it is clear that irrefutable aspects of King's dream have been realized. King's lawyer Clarence Jones, who helped draft the March on Washington speech, said those who worked closely with King "never contemplated the possibility of a black President in our lifetimes."

But as we measure progress since that sweltering day in August, are we using the right mile stick?

America twice elected a President who is black. That's one for the history books--but so too was the day that same President visited the White House briefing room to remind America that while the world rises up to meet him as leader, as a black man he might have a hard time hailing a cab outside the White House. Speaking of the not-guilty verdict in the Trayvon Martin case, Obama said, "I think it is important to recognize that the African-American community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away." With that statement, the distance between the preacher and the President was much like an image in an automobile's side-view mirror: OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR.

It can often seem that King's dream has almost completely upstaged his to-do list. The full name of the 1963 event was the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the organizers realized that if thousands of people were flocking to the nation's capital, then the demands ought not be fuzzy. Planners distributed organizing manuals that detailed the reasons for the grand effort. "What We Demand"--the manual stated. The answer was a 10-point plan that included "dignified jobs at decent wages," "desegregation of all school districts" and a ban on discrimination in "all housing supported by federal funds."

"Why We March"--the manual spelled that out too. "To redress old grievances and to help resolve an American crisis ... born of the twin evils of racism and economic deprivation."

That last bit got lost over the years. How does one assess the current state of King's dream without also examining the items on that wish list that have yet to be realized? There is little doubt that had he lived, King today would be concerned about prison rates, murder rates, wars and persistent racial inequality--the so-called opportunity gap. That specific list of demands for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom also suggests that King would be particularly upset about the growing wealth gap.

Consider the cruel irony in a now familiar image. King's name adorns major thoroughfares in many American cities, and most often the name of the civil rights icon is attached to streets that run through communities of color. But those streets are too often boulevards of broken dreams and limited opportunities. While the black and Latino middle class is growing, financial stability still remains beyond reach for a large sector of society. Since the mid-1970s, the unemployment rate for blacks has consistently been roughly double the unemployment rate for whites. Even the concept of wealth is relative when assessed in black and white terms. The median wealth of black families in which the head of household graduated from college is less than the median wealth for white families whose head of household dropped out of high school. Eighty-five percent of black and Latino households have a net worth that falls below the median wealth for white households. Closing the gap would require black and Latino households to save 100% of their incomes for three consecutive years. Talk about trying to touch the sun.

In the decades following the March on Washington, much of the work focused on integration. It was often about terrain: Who got to go to what schools or live in what neighborhoods? Who had access to the management track? There were busing, affirmative action, equal-opportunity programs and diversity training. The result of all those efforts can be summed up quite powerfully in six simple words: "We wanted equality. We got integration."

Those six words recently arrived in my inbox from Rondrea Danielle Mathis of Tampa. For the past three years I have been collecting six-word stories on race and cultural identity at the Race Card Project to help foster a dialogue on differences and to better understand the experience around race in America. More than 30,000 people have shared their stories, and collectively they provide potent lessons for us all. One of the things I have come to realize during this summer retrospective is that the equality King called for involves not physical terrain but the geography of the mind. What kind of baggage do we carry? What assumptions do we make? What kinds of boxes do we check off or put people in ... or even create for ourselves?

Try this exercise. Read the following descriptions and visualize the people from these scenarios in your mind: A banker. A chief of staff at a hospital. A law-school valedictorian. A family out on a Sunday afternoon hoping to purchase a new home. A man who spends his retirement fly-fishing. The woman who is juggling family, work and aging parents and still trying to make a weekly yoga class.

Now be honest. What did the people look like? Did they resemble members of your family or people in your community? Were the images based on what you see and hear in your life or in the media? Did that bank president have a South Asian name that included so many syllables that it seemed to dance across the tongue? Did that law-school valedictorian have a deep Southern accent, or did she give a shout-out to grandparents in the audience who have prospered in America but do not speak fluent English?

Most likely the answers are no. But by 2023, the majority of children under 18 in this country will be minorities. And yes, that will call for a new terminology--but also a new way of thinking. The socioeconomic indicators that once marked people for automatic privilege are shifting. The next generation of 18-year-olds isn't going to look or sound like the last. If America is to prosper, kids who listen to reggaeton, eat kimchi, celebrate their quinceañeras, work weekends at the small-town Dairy Queen and wear oversize hoodies have to believe in the promise of King's dream. The geography of the mind requires that we challenge our assumptions and see past differences to place all kinds of people in a category marked "bound for success." While it is regrettable that King's "unfinished" list is still too long, the brilliance of his riff on the dream was that it challenged us to think differently.

King could see the future from where he stood. The March on Washington is remembered as a civil rights protest, and many of the historic images show closeups of brown faces. But the massive crowd that day was largely integrated. People of all colors flocked to Washington. The U.S. press did not linger on that fact, but the international press was awestruck by the diversity. It was a central theme of the foreign coverage. Decades later, it is still a focal point when people look to the U.S. from overseas. Our diversity is seen as one of the best things America has going for it. Perhaps we should recognize that too.

Norris is a special correspondent for National Public Radio and director of the Race Card Project (theracecardproject.com)

One March.
They planned and organized, led and inspired. From Harry Belafonte and Joan Baez to John Lewis and Julian Bond, 17 participants in the March on Washington recall that historic day
Interviews By Kate Pickert, Harry Belafonte, Hank Thomas, Rachelle Horowitz, Bob Zellner, John Lewis, Doris Derby, Robert Avery, Julian Bond, Nan Orrock, Rachel Robinson, Joan Baez, Peter Yarrow, Maxine Allen, Johnson Wood, Marcus Garvey Wood, Clarence B. Jones, Bob Adelman, Jerome Smith | 5184 words

HARRY BELAFONTE

Singer and activist

At the end of the Second World War, those of us who had participated in that conflict were under the impression that if we were triumphant over fascism and the Nazis, the men and women who returned from that conflict would be celebrated and honored by our nation. Many of us went off to that war and didn't have the right to vote. Many of us went off to that war and didn't have the right to participate in the American Dream. We didn't really think about this thing as a dream until Dr. King articulated it.

HANK THOMAS

Freedom Rider

We did not see this as simply a civil rights issue. It was a human rights issue. We were then beginning to connect our struggle with the struggles of people all over the world and especially the struggles in Africa, and it took some people a little bit aback that we would say we are fighting for our freedom. Because as far as most Americans were concerned--most white Americans--how can you connect segregation here with the totalitarianism and the dictatorships of Europe? To me it was the same thing. And we were saying to the world, This land of great opportunity, this land of liberty has an asterisk beside it. It is a land of freedom for everybody else except black people. This great March on Washington was our way of calling attention to it.

BELAFONTE: As a kid, there was not much I could aspire to, because the achievement of black people in spaces of power and rule and governance was not that evident, and therefore we were diminished in the way we thought we could access power and be part of the American fabric. We who came back from this war having expectations and finding that there were none to be harvested were put upon to make a decision. We could accept the status quo as it was beginning to reveal itself with these oppressive laws still in place. Or, as had begun to appear on the horizon, stimulated by something Mahatma Gandhi of India had done, we could start this quest for social change by confronting the state a little differently. Let's do it nonviolently, let's use passive thinking applied to aggressive ideas, and perhaps we could overthrow the oppression by making it morally unacceptable.

RACHELLE HOROWITZ

March on Washington transportation director

A. Philip Randolph, the leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the dean of civil rights leaders, had initially called for a march in 1941. He postponed that march because Franklin Roosevelt gave him partially what he wanted in an Executive Order. Randolph never stopped dreaming and knowing that he had to have one.

BOB ZELLNER

Field secretary, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The feeling was that after 1961 and '62--those really tremendous years of a lot of action, starting in Greensboro, North Carolina, with the lunch-counter sit-ins, followed the next spring by the Freedom Rides--it was really kicking the movement into a new gear beyond the more passive but tremendously courageous boycott of the buses in Montgomery. It was a new phase of the movement. And there was a feeling that we would not be able to break Mississippi. We would not be able to break the Deep South. That March on Washington in '63 was to be the culmination of all of this intense organizing and bring the country to a realization that it has to not be a regional battle. It has to not be a young people's battle. It really has to be a moral crusade for the country.

HOROWITZ: Bayard Rustin was a civil rights activist who had played an instrumental role in developing the whole concept of nonviolence as protest action. He himself had been arrested about 20 times. He believed very deeply in something that A. Philip Randolph also believed in, and that is that the struggle for freedom in the United States had to eventually move to Washington, D.C., that it had to move to the center of power, to where the President and the Congress were--that no matter how many demonstrations took place in Montgomery and in Birmingham and places all around the South, until you could change the central government and have it legislate for all of the country, significant things wouldn't happen.

Randolph's contribution to the civil rights movement was a belief in mass action. Bayard added an organizer's ability, a concept of the strategy of mass action and also of nonviolence. He had a mind that went to every aspect of organization. No aspect of organizing was too small, and nothing was too large. He would worry about the kinds of sandwiches that would be there, the nature of the sound system, how one dealt with the President of the United States.

JOHN LEWIS

Chairman, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, 1963--66; U.S. Representative from Georgia

I remember so well the first meeting that we had with President Kennedy in the Oval Office of the White House. We told him we were going to have a march on Washington, and you could tell by the body language of the President, he didn't like the idea of a march on Washington. He said, in effect, If you bring all these people to Washington, won't there be violence and chaos and disorder?

BELAFONTE: The conversation that I had with the White House and with the Justice Department was to say, Look, you know, this will not erupt into violence regardless of what J. Edgar Hoover and others say they see in our mix. We have a very solid group of citizens here. And part of that image was that the most trusted of our citizens, the most highly profiled, the most revered as celebrity will be there. So you'll have Burt Lancaster, and you'll have Paul Newman, and you'll have Marlon Brando and people like James Baldwin and other writers, and Lena Horne.

HOROWITZ: At the beginning of the march, when it was in its planning stage, Bayard started to get a series of letters from people who were friends of civil rights--Senators. The letters all had the same theme. They went, "Dear Bayard, We really think that passage of the civil rights bill is the most important thing. We have supported the struggle for freedom. But have you considered the difficulties of having a march on Washington? Will there be enough toilets for the people there? Will there be enough water fountains?" Bayard eventually called them latrine letters. And while we laughed about them, he took them seriously. So we rented toilets, and we rented fountains so that people could drink water.

DORIS DERBY

Volunteer, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

Our committee met every week, and we said, O.K., what do we need to move this really large group of people from all over, to bring them in? We needed public relations. We needed to have a medical corps of nurses and doctors on hand. We needed to have porta potties, arrange transportation. Once we had charter buses, regular buses coming in--what's going to happen to those? Where are people going to park?

HOROWITZ: It was a massive amount of phone calling, getting cards ready to be mailed, negotiations with various bus companies. Then we turned to trains and airplanes. Eventually we tried to charter everything that was charterable. We tried very much to help those people who were coming long distances to get trains for them. We actually had to raise a lot of money for that, because it was expensive and it was a Wednesday. It meant people had to take a day off from work. So we did a lot of fundraising. And we had what we called Freedom Trains from the South, which involved some negotiations with the Southern Railway.

ROBERT AVERY

March on Washington volunteer

I just turned 15 at the time, and there were a lot of things that were going on, of course, in the South, with demonstrations and the marches and picketing. But there was this great march they kept talking about that was going to happen in D.C., and myself and two other guys, we were sitting there talking about it, and we wanted to go. But of course we didn't have the money to catch the bus. So one of the guys said, Well, let's hitchhike. I looked at the other guy, and I said, Oh, yeah, that's great, let's do that--because we thought he was just talking, and the more we talked, we realized he was serious.

BELAFONTE: We had Broadway shutting down, and we had large delegations of artists and celebrities coming from New York and from Boston and other places. It was not just in the world of cinema and theater. We had a lot of musical artists and record artists.

HOROWITZ: It is also a mark of Bayard's commitment to nonviolence and his organizing ability that at some point he realized that New York City policemen were required to carry their guns 24 hours a day. He said, Nobody is bringing a gun to this march. And he went to see Mayor Wagner or whoever the police authority was, and for that one day, New York City policemen were allowed to leave their guns home. The Justice Department also offered him the Army, the police, anything he wanted. And he said, No, if you want to do anything here, keep your troops on the periphery of the crowd and keep them watching for counterdemonstrators. We will monitor ourselves. You worry about provocateurs, racists, Klan members.

JULIAN BOND

Co-founder, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

The city of Washington almost went crazy. They canceled all elective surgery. They put surgeons and doctors on full time, waiting for something bad to happen. They put policemen on 18-hour shifts. They just went out of the way to prepare for what they thought would be some kind of massive riot. They couldn't imagine this many black people coming together without some awful, awful disturbance in the streets.

HOROWITZ: Somebody at the National Council or the Red Cross said that the sandwiches had to be peanut butter and jelly. And Bayard came back to a staff meeting, and he said, O.K., we're writing this manual, and we have to tell people to bring peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, no mayonnaise. Somebody said, But Bayard--And he said, This is not debatable! It became this sine qua non. Clearly what everybody was worried about was that you didn't want egg salad and mayonnaise spoiling on the road and people getting sick.

AVERY: We were there a week ahead of time, so they put us to work. Our job was to put together those signs. All of those signs that you see in the film clips--it was our job to staple them and put them together, then take them over to the parade grounds and unload them. I would imagine I probably touched every last one of those signs in some fashion or form. We probably put together, I don't know, 10,000 or more before we got to the parade ground. And of course, that morning people started coming in, and those signs were gone in a few minutes, and we had to get to work again putting more signs together.

BELAFONTE: In my instruction to my fellow artists when we met several times discussing strategy for what to do, I said, The more we can find ourselves in the heart of the people gathered at the event, the more we are seen and identified with the everyday citizen, the more we are all linking arms together, not just celebrity to celebrity but a truck driver, a dentist or a housewife, and we're all linking arms together, the more powerful that imagery becomes. My task was to make sure that we salt-and-peppered the afternoon into the early evening to look that way.

THOMAS: We were there to guide people, tell them where to go, what were the gathering points for the march, because obviously the vast majority of people had never been in D.C. before. So we had to direct them. A very large percentage of them came by bus, but there were other people who drove their automobiles. It was a question of showing them where to go in, how to get to the reflecting pool, into the Lincoln Memorial and to be of assistance to them in case we'd have any medical emergencies. That was primarily my job and the job of the marshals. We all owned distinctive armbands so people knew who we were.

I think it was about 7 o'clock that morning when we took our stations, and we didn't see anybody, and then within the next hour, people started pouring in, and it was just a wonderful sight.

AVERY: I don't really think they expected that many people. The word around the office was, when we were putting the signs together, If you get 35,000 or so, you're going to be O.K.

LEWIS: We came across Constitution Avenue, coming from the Senate side going down to the bottom of the hill, and we looked toward Union Station. There was a sea of humanity coming from Union Station, and the people were already marching, and it was like saying, There go my people. Let me catch up with them.

HOROWITZ: The chairmen were up on Capitol Hill meeting with the leaders of the House and Senate, and people at the Washington Monument had decided they were ready to go to the Lincoln Memorial. They formed lines, and they began to march, singing, and an orderly march began spontaneously to the Lincoln Memorial so that by the time the march chairmen came, somebody had to stop the march, and they had to be put in front of what was really not the front of the line, just so they could lead it.

NAN ORROCK

March on Washington attendee; Georgia state senator

It was an incredible experience being in a gathering of that size. It just felt like we were part of a glacier moving down the avenue.

AVERY: I became a participant like everybody else once the march started. Hey, if you need a sign, you've got to go put your own sign together--we're gone.

LEWIS: You saw signs from all over America: political signs, religious signs. People representing different faiths. Churches from the heart of the Midwest, the far West. People coming from all over the country to bear witness, to participate. Many of the people were well dressed. It was like going to church or temple or synagogue. People then, when they went out for a protest, they dressed up.

BOND: The interracial nature of the crowd is remarkable. You look at these pictures, and you see this is not a black crowd. This is black and white people. This is Americans saying, I don't like segregation. I want it to stop.

RACHEL ROBINSON

Widow of Jackie Robinson; founder of the Jackie Robinson Foundation

The spirit in the whole setting was so exciting, so positive, so hopeful that something was going to happen. We felt very enthusiastic about everything. We were happy to wait and find a seat, and delighted when we found a seat up front so we could see the procedure and we could hear the speeches. It turned out to be an extraordinary experience for all of us--for the children and for Jack and I--because we had never worked on anything of that magnitude or seen that kind of support for equal opportunities, which is what we had been hoping for for many years.

LEWIS: I was 23 years old at the time. I remember A. Philip Randolph introduced me as he had introduced others. He stood and said, "I now present to you young John Lewis, the national chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee." I stood up, and I said to myself, This is it. I looked to my right: I saw hundreds and thousands of young people, many of the young volunteers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. I looked to my left, and I saw many young people, young men, in the trees trying to get a better view of the podium. I looked straight out. And I started speaking.

It was an unbelievable feeling to see hundreds and thousands of people, black and white, sitting together, cheering. Many young people, men, women, they're taking off their shoes and putting their feet into the water to cool off. It was a hot day. It was very hot in Washington on Aug. 28, 1963.

JOAN BAEZ

Singer and activist

I remember it was hot. I remember what I was wearing. I remember singing. And I remember that ocean of people. I'd never seen anything like that. I remember the electricity in the air.

PETER YARROW

Singer and activist

We sang "If I Had a Hammer." They knew it, and they sang. And the moment was created not by the three of us in a performance but by a quarter of a million people gathering together and singing with us and saying, This moment belongs to us together. That's what singing together can do.

BELAFONTE: On the platform when these highly profiled, successful artists performed, it wasn't just that they were sympathetic and very much involved in the ideals of the struggle, it was that that's who they really were. They were artists, and they were superstars, and you could be both a powerfully received force and you can say the right thing. You can have a moral point of view.

BOND: I was giving Coca-Colas to the movie stars, and I can remember till my dying day giving a Coca-Cola to Sammy Davis Jr., and he said, Thanks, kid.

YARROW: Joyful doesn't really describe it for me. It was like the physicalization of love. It was ecstatic perhaps, but it was not giddy and silly or "let's have a good time." It was a far deeper kind of joy. It went beyond joy. It was hard to describe, but it was the antithesis of fear, and it propelled us all into another channel in our lives.

ORROCK: I was overwhelmed with the sense that I was in the presence of courage. So often you read about courage in books. To be face to face and side by side with people who had made profound decisions to put at risk their own personal safety, their job, their home, the ability to support their family to go up in the face of the police-state atmosphere of the Deep South in order to get change was an overwhelming thought to me--the raw courage of people, to face police jailing you and beating you to the ground for the right to vote. So that was an overwhelming thing. I was so moved to think of the courage that it took for the people I was marching with to do what they were doing with their lives in very dangerous places, breaking the color line.

THOMAS: I was 21 years old, and I had this tremendous responsibility of helping to get this thing done. By the time the program started, I couldn't get as close to the Lincoln Memorial as I wanted to, because I had a job to do. Our job was to keep walking around, make sure there are no problems, because we knew of some of the things the FBI had done in the civil rights movement, putting in an agent or provocateurs.

MAXINE ALLEN JOHNSON WOOD

March on Washington attendee

Many of the speakers were people whose names were familiar, but you never would get the chance to see them. You're talking 50 years ago, so we didn't have the prominence of media. There wasn't any instant replay or quick exposure. So when you saw names like Harry Belafonte--he was listed as one of those speakers--or you saw the names of the civil rights leaders, and there were many of them who spoke before Martin Luther King, you were proud to be there and glad to be there.

MARCUS GARVEY WOOD

Seminary classmate of King's

I just felt for King as he sat there waiting to be introduced. I knew that the way they listened to people who were making speeches in rallies like this one, there was always somebody in the background trailing that speech with printed material. And I knew that somebody had a pencil following every word to see whether King would make a mistake or not repeat what he had placed there on paper. And I couldn't get to him to wink my eye or say to him, "Mike"--as we called him during the days of seminary--"come on, come on, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it."

CLARENCE B. JONES

Speechwriter for King

A lot of care and thought was given as to the kind of speech that he should give. We knew that people were coming from all over the country, and they were looking for political leadership. They were looking for direction, particularly after Birmingham. Black fury had broken out in 36 states and over 200 cities, and people were coming. So we felt that Dr. King's role was to give them political direction and moral reaffirmation of the validity of our struggle.

Now, among his advisers, there were those who were suggesting, as Ralph Abernathy would say, Martin, people are coming to the March on Washington because they're coming to hear you preach!

MARCUS WOOD: When we were in seminary together, King would walk around the hall preaching. He had more experience in preaching than some of us, although I was nine years older than he was and pastoring a small church in West Virginia. But when he became very popular, he called us together and said, You all must stick by me, for I am going to dismantle this society. And we would jokingly say to him, King, if you try to dismantle this society that we're in now, somebody's going to shoot you. Somebody's going to bring you down, because society is so ingrained with segregation. The culture has been born into segregation, and therefore it's not going to change.

JONES: I'm standing on the platform about 50 feet behind him, and he is introduced by A. Philip Randolph in this sonorous voice: "At this time, I have the honor to present to you the moral leader of our nation. I have the pleasure to present to you Dr. Martin Luther King Jr." The place goes crazy! I mean it's just like an explosion of approval. I'm looking at the audience as he's looking at them. Then as he's speaking, Mahalia Jackson, who had performed earlier on the program and who was his favorite gospel singer, interrupted him: "Tell 'em about the dream, Martin. Tell 'em about the dream."

I'm watching him from the back. He takes the text of the speech that he was reading, and he moves it to the side of the lectern. And then he grabs both sides of the lectern, and I say to the person standing next to me--whoever that was--I said, These people don't know it, but they're about ready to go to church.

BOB ADELMAN

Photographer

I think it's when he starts to talk about the dream that like the greatest jazz musician, he just does an incredible solo.

BOND: His ability to summon from his memory and deviate from his written text was just remarkable to me. I make speeches all the time. I can't do without a piece of paper in front of me. But he could just draw these ideas, draw these images, paint these pictures. It was just a remarkable performance. I've never seen anything as good as this ever, and I doubt if I ever will.

JEROME SMITH

Freedom Rider

You know, at bottom, Dr. King is a musician. And if he was reciting the telephone book, the rhythms and transition to phrasing would bring you to an emotional acceptance.

AVERY: I get goose bumps when I think about it. He was at his best. That's all I can say. But in his talking, and my mind wandering back to what I had been through that summer, and when he started talking about his children, I felt like, Wow, he's talking about me. He's talking to me.

ROBINSON: We listened very carefully to the words as if they were almost like instructions. We all wanted to do something, and we wanted to have goals that we were going to work toward. And the speech gave a lot of ideas in terms of that. It wasn't just a spiritual thing. It was also very informative and instructive. We were looking for leadership, and he was offering it.

BOND: What was really wonderful about the March on Washington is this is the first time most white people watching this on television had ever seen Dr. King give a full speech. They'd heard snippets and pieces of his oratory, but he was such a wonderful speaker, and he made an argument for the rightness of black protest.

HOROWITZ: I think the biggest expenditure made was for the sound system. I remember Bayard being absolutely adamant that everybody on that Mall had to hear every minute of every speech. And it's sort of amazing to think about that now if you think that Dr. King gave that speech without a Jumbotron--250,000 people in the trees down the Mall watched him and listened to him.

MAXINE WOOD: That "I have a dream"--to hear it, initially, was an important experience. To hear him give that message made you believe you did have a dream, and it was very inspiring. A lot of people probably had not focused on those possibilities. We live in realities, but the image that he gave was a future.

JONES: If you listen to the speech carefully--and this is important as we reflect now 50 years back--if you listen to the syntax of his reference to the dream, he does not speak in the present tense. He speaks in the future tense. He's speaking in his hope and belief in America. "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Future tense.

Dr. King's speech at the March on Washington was an affirmation of his prophetic belief that America had the capacity to be the best that it could be. The "I Have a Dream" speech was a summons, a call, to the collective conscience of America, that we can be better than this. We can be better than this!

BAEZ: There are some times when you know something is going to be historic. I was just at Woodstock--went back and revisited the place--and we knew that. And certainly by the time this few hundred thousand people had gathered, you knew that whatever it was you were going to say or do was going to be recorded as part of history.

ADELMAN: When I hear that speech--I mean this is what, 50 years later?--I still cry. It's so extraordinary, but when he finished speaking, I really had a profound sense that it was now almost inevitable. Such a force had been unleashed that history was moving. He had spoken in front of Lincoln's likeness, and I said, This is going to happen.

SMITH: It was a ritual--it was a procession of church. It was never, ever a march. It was a congregation that was answering the call.

YARROW: It changed the course of our lives. It gave us not only an internal sense of what we believed in being validated, but it gave us a sense of the community of commitment that was to change America. Not only in terms of African Americans, but to be able to say that ordinary human beings can gather together in large numbers, and if they gather together with heart and strength, they can change the course of history.

ORROCK: Think about this: The average white kid, to the degree they thought about it, we were taught all about democracy. You're taught all about what we stand for, one nation, and undivided, liberty and justice for all, all those words we'd been taught. But those words applied to the white people. And we would all chant them and cite them and read them and study them and hear them from our teachers and not face this enormous contradiction that this doesn't apply to everybody. Everybody's not equal. Everybody can't vote. Everybody can't get a job when they apply for one, can't live where they want to, doesn't have the same shot at raising a family with a future.

BOND: If the goal was to normalize the civil rights movement, then the goal was achieved. Not everybody in the country said, Oh, I understand. But many people then understood what they had not understood before, that black people were dissatisfied, that the segregation system they faced was untenable. It could not be maintained, and it had to be changed.

BELAFONTE: In the end, the day was a complete win-win. The Kennedys heaved a huge sigh of relief that there was not one act of violence. And to see at the end everybody singing "We Shall Overcome" and all the arms linked--we've said it often, but it's worth saying as often as necessary: there wasn't a dry eye in the house. And it was all of America. All of it. You went through that crowd and you couldn't find any type missing, any gender, any race, any religion. It was America at its most transformative moment.

AVERY: The closing was--I couldn't believe it. I'd been there for a whole week, and we worked in the office, we'd done all these things, and now this great march--it was just unbelievable.

THOMAS: It brought our struggle to the attention of the world. That was the most important impact that I thought it had. But insofar as me personally? I was going to continue to work. It was a motivating factor, but it just added to the amount of motivation that I already had.

ORROCK: Years later, I got a very special letter from my mother. Years later--after I'd been very involved and a full-time civil rights worker and always talking to my mother about what needed to change and why I was doing this--she wrote me a letter that she was really proud that I had understood this long before she did and long before most people like us had understood it, and that I had stood with Dr. King and with the civil rights movement, and that I had done the right thing, and that she was very proud of me.

LEWIS: After Dr. King had spoken, we went back down to the White House. President Kennedy invited us back down, and he stood in the door to the Oval Office and greeted each one of us. He was like a proud beaming father that everything had gone so well. He said to each one of us as he shook our hand, You did a good job, you did a good job. And when he got to Dr. King, he said, And you had a dream.

TO HEAR MORE ABOUT THE MARCH, THE SPEECH AND THE LEGACY, VISIT time.com/onedream

What the Dream Means to Me

Malala Yousafzai, Jesse Jackson, Theodore B. Olson, Shonda Rhimes, Marco Rubio, John Conyers, Elijah E. Cummings, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Geoffrey Canada, Sonia Sanchez, Wang Dan, Colin Powell, Maya Angelou | 2536 words

I HAVE A DREAM TOO

BY MALALA YOUSAFZAI

Martin Luther King Jr. inspired millions of people, including me, to dream. His words--still so powerful after half a century--empower us to continue the journey to our destination of peace and equality. He was, of course, a great human-rights activist and leader. He stood up against segregation and inspired America to be a country for people of all colors and creeds. He raised his voice for freedom with honesty. He dreamed and changed the world with a few unforgettable, powerful words.

His legacy is that those words reached far beyond America's shores and far beyond the generation to whom he spoke. They are relevant today. They are relevant to me, a girl born almost 30 years after he died, from a country more than 7,000 miles away.

My dream is to see every child with a book and pen. I dream that every woman in the world will be treated with dignity and equality. Fifty years on from his famous oration in Washington, D.C., I have a dream too.

Yousafzai is a Pakistani activist

WE'VE GOT TO KEEP MARCHING

BY JESSE JACKSON

In many ways, the March on Washington was a culmination of actions from Dec. 1, 1955, to Aug. 28, 1963. We were on the dawn of a new day, and it had taken daylight a long time to come. The essence of Dr. King's speech was not the dream; it was the broken promise.

We had been promised the accommodations of full citizenship, the right to vote. We had been promised equal protection under the law and equal opportunity. Yet in our quest for citizenship, the promise was broken.

The spirit at the march was that we were winning, and we were doing it together. Blacks, whites--we were a multiracial social-justice coalition. That was before we had the public accommodation and before we had the right to vote. But those victories were in sight.

We had this sense that we were winning; we were rising up. We had overcome fear. That speech was an early indication that if we keep marching, if we keep pushing, we're going to win this battle. It was a dawn-to-daylight speech, and we won.

Now we have the sense that we're at dusk, moving toward midnight. One thing we can learn from Dr. King is that the forces of equal protection should neither sleep nor slumber. We got the right to vote in 1870 after 200 years of slavery. In 1965 we got the Voting Rights Act, but in 2013 the Supreme Court eviscerated it. The struggle for democracy and equal protection will never be a past-tense discussion.

We've got to keep marching.

Jackson is a minister and civil rights activist

MANIFESTO FOR AMERICA

BY THEODORE B. OLSON

Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech should be required reading for every American. Like the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address, it is an elegant, passionate and unforgettable distillation of the aspiration and inspiration of America. In just a few paragraphs, King expressed his anguish at unfulfilled promises, the urgency facing America to live up to its ideals and his abiding faith that it could and would do so.

King pronounced the time for patience to have expired and shared his deeply rooted conviction that his dream would, at long last, coalesce. He made clear that the need for action was immediate and compelling, while exhorting blacks to renew their faith in America. There has been no greater reminder of what this nation held itself out to be and no greater plea for us to attain those ideals. No greater invocation of the spirit of Jefferson and Lincoln. No greater manifesto for America.

Olson is a Republican advocate for same-sex marriage

TEETERING ON A TIGHTROPE

BY SHONDA RHIMES

I've known large parts of this speech by heart since before I could read. My father likes to quote the words of great men at the dinner table. King's definitely qualified.

To me, a child born in the '70s, the words of his speech seemed vaguely confusing. What was the fuss? King had a dream, and it came true: I held hands with the little white girl next door almost every day when I went out to play. As I got older, I came to realize that while King's dream had become something of a reality in small pockets of America, in the larger world it was more ethereal.

We are living in a strange time in terms of race in this country. We're teetering on a tightrope between greatness and madness. A man of color can be President of the United States. A man of color can be shot for wearing a hoodie. We haven't gotten to King's promised land. There's still work to be done.

Rhimes is a writer and producer

KEEPING OUR PROMISE

BY MARCO RUBIO

A half-century has passed since Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to awaken our nation's conscience. His vision was simple yet profound: that America must fulfill the promise made in her founding documents by allowing every citizen to access their God-given rights.

Dr. King helped bring hope to men and women of all backgrounds who wished to contribute to American exceptionalism. That included immigrants like my parents, who made a new life here after coming from Cuba. They immigrated in 1956--the year Dr. King led the Montgomery bus boycott--and raised my siblings and me in the wake of his legacy, telling us our dreams were possible regardless of the circumstances of our births.

I have taken my own children to the Lincoln Memorial and shown them where Dr. King spoke to the unfulfilled promise of our nation. Standing in that place, I was filled with pride to know my children live in a nation where the cultural landscape is dramatically different from the one that Dr. King saw just 50 years before.

Dr. King reminded us that opportunity and freedom are American ideals, belonging to no singular demographic. His message and legacy must live all around us and his dream must continue to lead us as we move toward America's brightest days.

Rubio is a Republican Senator from Florida

THE PATH FORWARD

BY JOHN CONYERS

I am proud to say that I owe my political career to the inspiration that came from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I first met Dr. King and his wife Coretta in the early 1960s. After the Supreme Court upheld the principle of "one person, one vote," Michigan was required to create a new congressional seat in Detroit, which I ran for in 1964. Thanks to the recommendation of my good friend Rosa Parks, I became the only congressional candidate ever endorsed by Dr. King.

I was proud to cast one of my very first votes in Congress for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. That document, along with the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 Fair Housing Act, is a crown jewel of our civil rights laws. They represent the very spirit of King's "I Have a Dream" speech (a phrase he first used in the Freedom March in Detroit, two months earlier).

Despite the historic election of our first African-American President, the challenges remain daunting. In June the Supreme Court weakened the Voting Rights Act at a time when many states are adding onerous new voter-ID requirements. Affirmative action is under assault in the courts. Our schools are becoming resegregated. But these challenges are not insurmountable. Through a renewed commitment to the teachings of Dr. King, we must keep the struggle alive.

Conyers is a Democratic Congressman from Michigan

DARING TO DREAM

BY ELIJAH E. CUMMINGS

As I was growing up in a low-income family in Baltimore, my biggest exposures to the world beyond the borders of my community were my family's black-and-white TV, the movies I went to see and visiting relatives. From these glimpses I learned there were places we couldn't go, things we couldn't do and dreams we shouldn't have.

At age 9, I joined a group of children organized by local NAACP leaders in a march from the tiny "colored" wading pool to the Olympic-size "white" pool a few blocks away. We marched under the threat of violence--not to change the world but because we wanted to swim. Dr. King's speech, delivered shortly after we integrated the pool, gave our march context and empowered me. I was just a kid, but even then I knew that things would have to change. His speech gave me the hope to believe that they would.

Cummings is a Democratic Congressman from Maryland

VOICE TO THE VOICELESS

BY CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT

As thousands stood on the Mall in Washington, D.C., I was sitting in a small office on West 43rd Street in New York City, where I was positioned to fulfill my own dream. Thanks to the work of some of those in the crowd--black professionals from Atlanta who moved to realize the promise of the Supreme Court decision outlawing school segregation--I was able to walk through the doors of a university, all white for 176 years, to prepare for a career I had dreamed of since childhood.

Now, three months after graduation, I was glued to a television screen at the New Yorker, where I had been given a job as an editorial assistant. On that August day, I unashamedly shed tears listening to John Lewis and Dr. King. I took to heart their words, vowing that I would use the realization of my dream to give voice to the voiceless and tell their stories in the pages of the New Yorker and wherever else the "lift of a driving dream" would take me. It is a promise I continue to try to fulfill. Thanks to the example of the tireless marchers in Washington, I try to "keep on keepin' on" and "don't feel no ways tired."

Hunter-Gault is a journalist

EDUCATION IS THE KEY

BY GEOFFREY CANADA

Fifty years ago, the No. 1 issue for African Americans was blatant discrimination. Due in part to Dr. King's powerful words, the country passed legislation that led us away from Jim Crow and moved us toward embracing our differences and seeing them as a source of strength.

Today, though, we still have a black-white achievement gap in education and deeply troubling statistics about incarceration, substance abuse and unemployment. They tell us Dr. King's dream has not been fully realized. Our country has come a long way in terms of civil rights, but we still have a long way to go.

Education is the key to achieving the dream. Our public-education system, the step up for so many Americans, is failing to prepare huge numbers of our children for the future. That threatens the dream for all of us.

Canada is president and CEO of the Harlem Children's Zone

REMEMBERING BROTHER MARTIN

BY SONIA SANCHEZ

How to tell you about this aristocratic word sorcerer with a commoner's eye? How to make you hear our tears as he welcomed our souls and held our hearts in his hands? This Martin Luther King man was a cante jondo, a deep song of Africa. The South. The Americas.

He came toward us with the staccato speech and rhythm of the spirit. And his passion entered this American bloodstream. He no longer spoke for himself. Something began to move through him. He levitated language and we wept, laughed, hummed till time stood still. He had summoned the duende, the spirit of all of our ancestors who had suffered and yet survived, and did it with dignity and grace and order and beauty.

He told us that we had affirmed life, that our eyes had abandoned death, defeat. That our feet were dancing silver.

In August 1963, we heard the thunder of angels.

Sanchez is an author and a poet

DREAMS OF DEMOCRACY

BY WANG DAN

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, he must have known that very few people believed such a vision could come true. Nevertheless, he did not hesitate to stand up and speak. Throughout history, idealists have been willing to commit to dreams that seem impossible. But dreams are more powerful than doubt or violence. When I helped lead the peaceful student protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989, critics said our movement was doomed. The tanks rolled in and many people were killed. I am now in exile. But I know that our hopes for a democratic China will eventually be realized. History allowed Martin Luther King's dream to prevail. China also deserves to dream.

Wang is a Chinese democracy-movement leader

A WAR OF MORALS

BY COLIN POWELL

I was in Vietnam in August 1963. I was not able to see or hear Dr. King's speech, and in those days the news to Vietnam traveled slowly. My wife Alma was in Birmingham with our infant son. During that ugly summer, my father-in-law stood guard to protect my family while I was fighting for our country 8,000 miles away.

I returned home to find America embroiled in a second Civil War, one led by Dr. King. It was a war of morals, righteousness and the aspirations of our Founding Fathers. The "I Have a Dream" speech held up a mirror for all Americans to look deeply into the spirit and soul of our country.

The "Dream" speech, along with the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act that followed, finally broke the bonds of segregation and Jim Crow that had imprisoned our finest dreams. Not only were African Americans given a berth of freedom, but white America had a horrible burden removed from its back. Fifty years later, we have seen great progress. But we are not yet where we need to be. Education, jobs, health care and good housing for all Americans must remain our goal. We all must work together if Dr. King's dream is to be fully realized.

Powell was U.S. Secretary of State from 2001 to 2005

THERE IS STILL HOPE

BY MAYA ANGELOU

It was 50 years ago when the Rev. King had that dream and dared to say so, that little black children in Florida and in Mississippi and in Georgia and in South Carolina would stand with little white children and hold hands, that they themselves would dream the dream. What a dream. Can you imagine if we did not have this undergirded hate and racism, prejudices and sexism and ageism? If we were not crippled by these idiocies, can you imagine what our country would be like?

This is not to say we have not had progress--in fact, tremendous progress. After the lives and deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X and the Kennedys and Fannie Lou Hamer--young people may say, You mean it is no better? But it is better.

There is still hope. If there were not, there would be no reason to get up in the morning. There is hope. Sometimes you need to be jarred into finding it, jarred into sharing it. I remember a statement of the Rev. King's that you ought to believe something in life, believe in something so fervently that you will stand up with it until the end of your days. I think we all have to believe that the day will come that we do not have to be saddled; we will not be crippled with all this idiocy. I hope for that. I am still working for it. I am still writing for that. I speak of that. I sing about that. I pray about that.

Angelou is an author and a poet

'People then, When They Went Out for a Protest, They Dressed Up.'

JOHN LEWIS | 25 words

'PEOPLE THEN, WHEN THEY WENT OUT FOR A PROTEST, THEY DRESSED UP.'

JOHN LEWIS

U.S. CONGRESSMAN AND ONE OF THE CHIEF ORGANIZERS OF THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

'Tell 'em About the Dream, Martin. Tell 'em About the Dream.'

Mahalia Jackson | 27 words

'TELL 'EM ABOUT THE DREAM, MARTIN. TELL 'EM ABOUT THE DREAM.'

MAHALIA JACKSON

GOSPEL SINGER, TO MARTIN LUTHER KING JR. DU RING HIS SPEECH AT THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON

'1963 is Not An End But a Beginning.'

Martin Lut, Her King Jr. | 21 words

'1963 IS NOT AN END BUT A BEGINNING.'

MARTIN LUT HER KING JR.

IN HIS "I HAVE A DREAM" SPEECH, AUG. 28, 1963

10 Questions.
Head of the World Food Programme Ertharin Cousin on feeding millions, food security and foul-tasting cookies

COUSIN: ADAM AMENGUAL FOR TIME

Belinda Luscombe | 607 words

The U.N. World Food Programme (WFP) will spend about $4 billion this year. How many people can you feed for that?

More than 95 million. Some of them are refugees, but they are all what we describe as the hungry poor, the most vulnerable.

And what does the U.S. get for the $1.4 billion it provides?

The U.S. gets food security around the world. As the President of Niger said, Food security is security. You can't talk about creating a secure world when mothers can't feed their children, when fathers have no access to the financial resources that are necessary to feed their families.

Is there going to come a time when the planet can't produce enough food for everyone?

No. There are some who disagree with me because of population growth. But humans are very innovative, and we have the ability to increase the yield of small farmers in places where food didn't grow 50 years ago. We can feed the entire population, but it's going to require sustained investments.

So why are people still going hungry? It can't be that there's not the public will.

The global community tends to invest during times of crisis and emergency. We saw it in Haiti. What we need is a recognition that in order to change things, we need to give people the ability to feed themselves. But the media don't cover these kinds of stories. They don't cover the opportunity--they cover the crisis.

How much of the problem is a lack of trust? Three years ago, a U.N. report said that the food aid from the WFP wasn't getting to the hungry.

I am not so naive as to suggest that you don't have crime and diversion of food. But it's such a small percentage--it's less than 1% of what we deliver.

Are there any new advances you're excited about?

Drip irrigation, which ensures that farmers who don't have access to water or mechanized irrigation systems can use very simple tools to grow fields in places where there's no food. And RUSF [ready-to-use supplementary food], a paste we give to children in addition to breast milk. Studies show that a lack of micronutrients from conception until the age of 2 means a child will likely be stunted both physically and mentally in irreparable ways.

What keeps you awake at night?

The growing cost of Syria and the potential detrimental impact that has on everything else we do in the world. Right now we're projecting that we'll feed 4 million people inside Syria by December and 2.8 million people outside Syria in five neighboring countries by year-end.

As a kid, you were bused from the west side of Chicago to a white school. Are you a busing success story? I am a success story, but I laugh because I have a sister who is younger and didn't get bused, and she's a managing director for IBM in Paris.

You were in the Clinton Administration, and Hillary was an early champion. How did you vote in the 2008 primaries?

I supported Barack Obama. Barack was my neighbor before he was my state senator. [Obama senior adviser] Valerie Jarrett lived in 9A. I lived in 9B. These are relationships that are very long. The Clintons understood that.

I have a colleague who lived on WFP cookies for five days in Haiti. He said they taste nasty. Can you get on that?

We try to provide food that the community is accustomed to eating. But when you go in an emergency, Day One you're providing what's available. Taste is secondary. So apologize to him, and let him know it's something we're working on.

FOR VIDEO OF OTHER INTERVIEWEES, GO TO time.com/10questions

Join Us at the Picnic!
Iowa wins, no matter who runs

ILLUSTRATIONS BY BROWN BIRD DESIGN FOR TIME; WALKER, CRUZ: AP (2); PAUL: REUTERS; JINDAL, BIDEN: AFP/GETTY IMAGES; SANTORUM: ZUMA PRESS; RYAN, KLOBUCHAR: GETTY IMAGES (2); RUBIO: CQ ROLL CALL/GETTY IMAGES

Zeke J. Miller | 625 words

Does any state have a better understanding of the real intersection of money and politics than Iowa, the land of corn, soybeans and caucuses? If so, it's hard to imagine: though its caucuses are still 29 months away, the Hawkeye State is already renting cars, booking hotel rooms and serving up platefuls of pork chops to White House hopefuls and the reporters who follow them.

It amounts to more than a cottage industry. The state is likely to take in tens of millions over the next 2½ years even as Iowa's first-in-the-nation contests become less of a predictor (remember, Rick Santorum topped the GOP field in 2012). Yet still they come: veterans like Santorum, who turned up in the same pickup truck he used two years ago, and newcomers like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who has already made two pilgrimages and has a third on the docket.

Democrats have been slower to pay homage, though Vice President Joe Biden is due. Hillary Clinton doesn't have anything booked yet--but that's likely to change. "It seems like it starts earlier and earlier," says Iowa Governor Terry Branstad, a remark that could have been made anytime after 1976, when Jimmy Carter turned the little-known caucuses into a springboard to the Democratic nomination. Adds Branstad: "We appreciate the attention." And the economic boost that comes with it.

HAWKEYE HUSTLE: THE CAMPAIGN IS ALREADY ON IN IOWA

A fundraiser lured Rubio just 11 days after the 2012 election

NOV. 2012

1,452 DAYS AWAY FROM THE 2016 ELECTION

NOV. 2016

MARCO RUBIO

11/17/12 Florida Senator Marco Rubio has the distinction of being the first visitor to the Hawkeye State in the 2016 cycle. The immigration-reform advocate addressed Iowa Governor Terry Branstad's birthday bash last November--not two weeks after Mitt Romney lost the election.

SCOTT WALKER

5/23/13 Maybe he's just seeing old friends? The Wisconsin governor, who addressed the Polk County Republican Party's spring fundraising dinner, spent several years in Plainfield, Iowa, as a child.

TED CRUZ

7/19 8/10 10/25 The freshman Senator from Texas has visited more than any other 2016 hopeful, courting conservative pastors in July and evangelical activists in August. He'll have a broader audience this fall, when he speaks at the Iowa Republican Party's Reagan Dinner in Des Moines.

RAND PAUL

7/19 Kentucky Senator Rand Paul appeared at the same July gathering of ministers as his fellow outspoken first-term colleague Cruz. Family ties should provide a boost if he runs: the state GOP is controlled by supporters of his father, former Representative Ron Paul.

BOBBY JINDAL

8/3 The Louisiana governor is betting on back-scratching, skipping a meeting of the National Governors Association to attend a fundraiser for Branstad. The Iowa governor joined Jindal at the event and a party hosted by local GOP donor Bruce Rastetter.

RICK SANTORUM

8/8--10 The former Pennsylvania Senator is replicating the barnstorming strategy that led to his 2012 Republican-caucus win, unofficially kicking off his campaign with a three-day, 400-mile road trip through the state filled with meetings, speeches and a visit to the state fair. If it ain't broke ...

AMY KLOBUCHAR

8/16 Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar has been cultivating Iowans since the 2012 Democratic National Convention, where she spoke at the state Democratic Party's breakfast. Her visit to the North Iowa Wing Ding fundraiser makes her the first potential Democratic contender to hit the state.

JOE BIDEN

9/15 The Vice President is following in his boss's footsteps, speaking at Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's annual steak fry in September. In 2006, then Senator Barack Obama used the high-profile event to build a reputation in the state that helped propel him to the White House.

PAUL RYAN

11/16 Mitt Romney's running mate is scheduled to speak at Branstad's birthday party--the same event Rubio attended last year. "This is the nice thing about being from Iowa," Branstad says of his ability to attract White House aspirants to his annual fundraiser.

Briefing

CLINTON: AP

272 words

THE WEEK

EGYPT DECLARED AN EMERGENCY

'WE HAVE A LOT OF POLITICIANS WHO HAVE REALLY SMALL BRAINS AND REALLY BIG HEARTS.'

RAND PAUL, U.S. Senator, criticizing supporters of Obamacare, which he says will cost citizens enough to outweigh its good intentions

13 lb. 11 oz.

Weight (6.2 kg) of the biggest baby ever born naturally in Spain; remarkably, her mother used no epidural

'Anyone who says that racial discrimination is not a problem in American elections must not be paying attention.'

HILLARY CLINTON, calling for election reform in the first of a series of speeches that have fueled speculation that she will run for President in 2016

OpenTable

News of a partnership with Facebook sent the dining app's stock price up

GOOD WEEK

BAD WEEK

Samsung

A court ruling said it infringed on two Apple smartphone patents

'They will not be secure day or night, during 'Id or other times.'

AL-QAEDA, after its bombings killed at least 70 Iraqis on the Muslim holiday marking the end of Ramadan in retaliation for the government's arrest of suspected militants

'For me, golf is a little bit more boring. I hit it in the fairway or I didn't.'

JASON DUFNER, PGA champion, on why he didn't show much emotion--unlike football, baseball and basketball players--after winning a major tournament

800 m.p.h.

Estimated speed (1,287 km/h) of the Hyperloop high-speed rail system proposed by Tesla Motors founder Elon Musk

48%

Percentage of Web users who share their password with others, according to a recent survey by Google

'The President is like a child playing with building blocks.'

YEVGENIY ZHOVTIS, Kazakh human-rights activist, criticizing President Nursultan Nazarbayev (right) for spending billions on the capital city, Astana, despite widespread national poverty

Sources: The Daily Show; CNN; Reuters; AP; the Atlantic; Chicago Tribune; BBC

Whitey Bulger
Brutal Boston Mob boss

BULGER: STUART CAHILL--BOSTON HERALD/POLARIS

Nate Rawlings | 188 words

For nearly three decades, starting in the early 1970s, James "Whitey" Bulger led the Winter Hill Gang, a brutal confederation of the Irish Mafia in South Boston. He fled town in 1994, tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent that he was about to be indicted, and remained one of the most wanted fugitives in America until he was found in 2011, living under an alias in Santa Monica, Calif. He was then brought back to face trial in the city he once terrorized.

On Aug. 12, Bulger was convicted on 31 of 32 counts--including extortion, conspiracy, money laundering and murder. In a trial that exhumed some of the grimy interconnected history of the Boston underworld and the FBI, the federal jury found Bulger responsible for killing 11 people--including strangling a young woman. While the verdicts brought relief for many, the families of some victims are still raging. "Thirty-eight years ago when my father died, we always knew who killed him," said Connie Leonard, daughter of Francis "Buddy" Leonard, after the jury didn't find enough evidence to link Bulger to her father's death. "We still can't get any justice."

World

EGYPT: AHMED ASSADI--EPA

Security forces stand next to protesters arrested during the clearing of Nahda Square in Cairo on Aug. 14

Jacob Davidson, Andrew Katz, Ashraf Khalil | 713 words

Carnage in Cairo as Egypt Cracks Down On Protests

BY ASHRAF KHALIL

After issuing repeated warnings, Egyptian security forces on Aug. 14 raided two protest sites in Cairo that for weeks had been occupied by the Muslim Brotherhood and supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi. Carnage followed. Inevitably, police and Islamists accused each other of firing the first shots, but the majority of the protesters were unarmed. By day's end, the official death toll had exceeded 200 and was climbing fast. The violence also spread to other parts of the country.

The crackdown had been coming since July 24, when General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi, the military chief, called for backers of the military-led government to stage rallies in support of using force against "terrorists," his euphemism for pro-Morsi groups. International appeals for restraint only temporarily stayed al-Sisi's hand.

The interim government says the crackdown will allow it to start preparing for parliamentary and presidential elections to be held sometime next year. But the clashes could mark the start of a long period of unrest and military rule. Already, there is dissent among those who backed the military coup against Morsi. Interim Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei, a noted liberal, resigned after the government announced a monthlong state of emergency. Perhaps the Nobel laureate sees a future for Egypt that looks uncomfortably like its past: the last time a military-led government declared a state of emergency--in 1967--it lasted, with one 18-month break, for almost 45 years.

DATA

WORLD'S CHEAPEST LUXURY HOTELS

Luxury-Hotels.com ranked top hotels on the basis of their lowest average per-night double-occupancy rates. (No suites!)

$1,824

Hotel Romazzino (Italy)

$1,929

Le Réserve Paris (France)

$1,987

Amankora (Bhutan)

$2,040

Canouan Resort (St. Vincent and the Grenadines)

Explainer

How Africa Developed A Drinking Problem

According to the World Health Organization, Africa has the world's highest proportion of binge drinkers. Here are some reasons why:

HIGH UNEMPLOYMENT

A significant share of Africa's teenagers and young adults don't have jobs--about 65% in Kenya, for example--and are not educated about the dangers of alcohol abuse.

LAX LAW ENFORCEMENT

Many countries have laws restricting the sale of alcohol to minors, but critics say stronger policing is needed to ensure that vendors obey them.

MOONSHINE MAYHEM

Poor Africans have historically made their own booze, using dangerous ingredients like battery acid and methanol to increase its potency.

SWIRLING MULTINATIONALS

Major brewers like Diageo and SABMiller are starting to target Africa's rising middle class, spending billions on ads and manufacturing.

Roundup

When World Leaders Go Undercover

Norwegian Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg recently disguised himself as an Oslo cabdriver to learn how voters--some of whom were reportedly paid to participate--really felt about his government ahead of Sept. 9 elections. But he's hardly the first political figure to go incognito.

HAROUN AL-RASHID

According to legend, the 9th century Caliph donned civilian garb and walked through the streets of Baghdad to learn about his subjects.

HENRY V

In Shakespeare's Henry V, the King disguises himself as a regular soldier to mingle with his troops and gauge their morale before battle.

PAVEL BEM

Prague's former mayor posed as an Italian tourist to verify claims that local taxis were ripping off foreigners.

PRINCE WILLIAM

The heir to the British throne once spent a night sleeping on the streets of London to experience firsthand the hardship of homelessness.

RICHARD CODEY

In 2012 the former governor of New Jersey donned a beat-up hat and a fake beard to investigate Newark homeless shelters.

An 'Id to Remember

LIBYA

Men dressed in folk costume ride horses during 'Id al-Fitr in Benghazi on Aug. 9 to mark the end of the holy month of Ramadan. The holiday this year was marked by the closings of U.S. embassies and consulates across the Middle East, Africa and Asia because of threats that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula was planning an attack--with Yemen as the perceived target. The attack never materialized.

GERMANY

$1,330

Reward offered for finding a large snapping turtle thought to have attacked a boy in an Irsee lake

ZIMBABWE

'Those who can't stomach the defeat, you can commit suicide.'

ROBERT MUGABE, Zimbabwean President, to supporters of Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai, after Mugabe bested him in the July 31 vote

Trending In

+

MUSIC

U.K. singer Adele will reportedly make her feature-film debut in the 007-style flick The Secret Service

HISTORY

Archaeologists in Guatemala unearthed a large, well-preserved stucco frieze depicting Maya gods and leaders

SCANDAL

Oprah alleged racism after a Zurich shop clerk said a $38,000 handbag was "too expensive" for her; the store called it a misunderstanding

SPORTS

The World Athletics Championships in Moscow were marred by low attendance

LightBox

Photograph by Mohammed Abdel Moneim--AFP/Getty Images

41 words

The Protector

An Egyptian woman stands in the path of a military bulldozer as it bears down on a wounded man near the Raba'a al-Adawiya mosque during deadly skirmishes in eastern Cairo on Aug. 14

FOR PICTURES OF THE WEEK, GO TO lightbox.time.com

Frisked and Stopped

BABY: GETTY IMAGES

Eliza Gray, Nate Rawlings | 244 words

New York City It's a jarring statistic: some 4.4 million people, most of them black or Hispanic, were stopped by New York City police from 2004 to 2012 under a crime-fighting tactic known as stop and frisk. Mayor Michael Bloomberg argues that the practice contributed to the more than 30% drop in major crimes during his 12-year tenure. But that wasn't enough to overcome the doubts of a federal judge, who found that the NYPD engaged in "indirect racial profiling" and declared the practice unconstitutional on Aug. 12. The ruling does not end stop and frisk; the judge appointed a monitor to oversee reforms to the program, like having some officers wear cameras. And it may compel police departments around the country to re-examine their tactics. A legal battle is likely--Bloomberg has vowed to appeal, though it will be up to his successor to continue the fight or accept federal oversight when the next mayor takes over in January. "This is a first step in a chess game that is going to have a hundred different moves throughout governments and police administration," says Frank Zimring, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, law school. "It could work out well. It could go badly."

Is the Senate Any Place For a Star?

BOOKER: EDUARDO MUNOZ--REUTERS

Jay Newton-Small | 304 words

It's a Cakewalk that raises a question. Newark Mayor Cory Booker easily won the Aug. 13 Democratic primary for New Jersey's vacant Senate seat. But why does a rising star with a huge social-media following, a deep fundraising network and a gift for retail politics want to be a U.S. Senator?

The Senate is a tough place for impatient people. It was a great, if brief, résumé builder for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama--not to mention two of the latest Republican presidential hopefuls, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. But to do anything important there, you have to accrue seniority over decades. Just ask John Kerry: it took him 24 years to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. There's a reason it's called the world's greatest deliberative body.

If Booker prevails against a weak GOP field in an Oct. 16 special election, his prize will be a backbench seat and the expectation that he dim his wattage, at least for the short term.

Booker's energy and hands-on style are better suited to running a city or to visiting Iowa, New Hampshire and the other stomping grounds of a presidential candidate--something the ambitious politician may aspire to be someday. So why detour through the famously cloistered Senate? Because Governor Chris Christie, the only other New Jersey politician as popular as Booker, is blocking the more traditional path to the White House.

A Senate run may not have been Booker's first choice, but it's safer than taking on Christie and more promising than sticking around stubbornly depressed Newark--a sitting mayor has never been elected President.

"When he inevitably runs for President, Booker will claim executive experience from Newark and national expertise via the Senate," says Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Politics. "Somehow, I doubt Booker plans a terribly long Senate stay before his next move."

Unhappy Warrior
Boxed in by security threats and politics, Obama fights on

PETE SOUZA--THE WHITE HOUSE

Michael Crowley | 626 words

It wasn't so long ago that barack Obama found widespread government snooping disturbing. In 2007, then Senator Obama co-sponsored a bill that would have reined in government surveillance programs by limiting the bulk collection of U.S. telephone records with a requirement for narrower and better-justified data searches. When the House of Representatives considered a similar amendment in late July, however, Obama's White House succeeded in killing it.

Now Obama is playing the role of reformer. Edward Snowden has escaped his Moscow-airport purgatory and apparently stopped letting new details trickle out about the National Security Agency's activities. But after Congress returns from its summer recess next month, it will again tackle the question of how far government should go in the fight against terrorists. Speaking to reporters on Aug. 9 before starting his own vacation, Obama said he welcomes congressional action.

That doesn't mean the NSA's sweeping data-collection powers are likely to change much. Once again, when it comes to fighting terrorism, Obama has found himself stuck with policies he previously decried but that he now can't--or won't--get rid of.

Congress will take some kind of action on the NSA surveillance programs this fall. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein has announced hearings on the NSA's data collection, and Senators and staff are preparing legislation. Feinstein's ideas are modest, however: they include requiring the annual release of the number of times the government searched the NSA's database of telephone records and reducing the time that phone records are held from five years to two or three years. The Republican-led House may be less amenable to civil-liberties concerns. A liberal-libertarian alliance featuring the likes of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Kentucky Senator Rand Paul might stage a revolt, but leaders in Congress are more focused on appeasing public outrage than imposing limits on NSA spying. "We are of the mind that these programs are effective and lawful and ought to continue--but in a way that has greater support from the public," says one congressional staffer.

That echoes the tone the President struck in his Aug. 9 news conference, at which he proposed his own set of rather modest reforms in the name of sustaining the surveillance programs. Obama summed up his goal perhaps too neatly when he said, "The question is, How do I make the American people more comfortable?" It was a far cry from the operational limits Obama supported as a Senator.

Obama has jawboned Americans on other counterterrorism programs recently too. In late May he delivered a long speech in which he announced stricter rules governing drone strikes and vowed to close Guantánamo Bay. "This war, like all wars, must end," Obama said then. But this month's Yemen-based al-Qaeda terrorism alert, coupled with the stinging memory of last year's deadly attack in Benghazi, Libya, underscores how little progress Obama has made in curtailing his counterterrorism programs. Closing Gitmo, for instance, requires transferring dozens of Yemeni detainees, but after a 2009 al-Qaeda plot that originated in Yemen, the process was halted and is not likely to commence anytime soon. And after a lull in drone activity over Yemen, the U.S. has conducted at least nine strikes there since late July.

Even in May, before Snowden revealed the scope of NSA surveillance, Obama was struggling to reconcile his old civil-liberties views with his current security positions. Critics in Congress were upset that federal agents hadn't followed up more aggressively on tips about the Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev. In his speech, Obama assured the public that he would protect civil liberties. But, he said, he would be "reviewing the authorities of law enforcement, so we can intercept new types of communication." What would the Obama of 2007 say?

Home, Smart Home
New gadgets bring household automation into the smartphone era

ILLUSTRATION BY TODD DETWILER FOR TIME

Harry McCracken | 423 words

In 2011, a startup called nest introduced a new thermostat. With its sleek design, circular color touchscreen and approachable interface, it felt more like an iPod than a piece of HVAC equipment. Which makes sense, since Nest was co-founded by Tony Fadell, Apple's longtime iPod head honcho.

By proving that something as mundane as a thermostat doesn't have to be mundane, Nest helped inspire a generation of home-automation products that are now arriving in force. Other distinguished alumni of the consumer-electronics business are joining the fray, including industrial-design guru Yves Béhar, known for fashionable gizmos like the Jawbone headset. He's one of the minds behind August, a front-door lock that lets you use your phone as a key without so much as bothering to remove it from your pocket.

Whatever their purpose, these household products use wireless networking for easy installation and Internet connectivity. No need to rip up your walls and run cabling. They're as much about elegant software as they are about capable hardware--especially software that runs on smartphones, allowing you to use your handset like a remote control.

And unlike such strictly utilitarian forebears as gas meters, devices in this new wave aren't eyesores. "It's hard to understand why others have not focused on this. I mean, this is for a home," says Adam Sager, a 15-year veteran of the security industry whose new project is Canary, a tabletop home-monitoring system. Gleaming and cylindrical, the final product looks as if it might be some sort of audio player. Security may be serious business, but that doesn't mean it can't be stylish too.

Not-So-Private Practice
The group checkup arrives

ILLUSTRATION BY MICKEY DUZYJ FOR TIME

Alice Park | 452 words

"As soon as I mention shared medical appointments, everybody pictures a room full of people in their underwear," says Dr. Richard Kratche, a family physician at the Cleveland Clinic. Actually, most people could picture a lot worse, but despite that, Kratche is one of a growing number of doctors who conduct group visits for routine physicals--and his patients are part of a growing number of folks who are fine with that.

Since 2005, the percentage of U.S. family-medicine practices offering group visits has doubled, from 6% to 13%. And with major provisions of the Affordable Care Act set to be implemented next year, medicine en masse is becoming an attractive cost saver too. While your private moments remain private, consultations are conducted as a group, and that requires divulging personal information in front of strangers (albeit ones who have signed confidentiality waivers).

Still, some patients like the appointments because they can learn more about preventing disease and avoiding expensive treatments, and doctors like them because they streamline the way they deliver care. Rather than repeating the same advice about lowering blood pressure or keeping glucose levels in check to individual patients, physicians see up to a dozen patients at once for about 90 minutes. Each gets some one-on-one time with the doctor before the group discusses every member's progress.

Such sharing isn't for everyone, however, and some doctors fear patients may be discouraged from discussing important health issues in a group setting. But among those who try shared visits, about 85% don't go back to individual exams for everything from diabetes to weight loss and skin-related issues.

No national studies have yet documented whether these visits are improving health outcomes, but patients say they learn more from them than they would after 15 minutes alone with a doctor. Bruce Moore, who gets an annual physical with six other men at the Cleveland Clinic, lost 48 lb. (22 kg) and brought his blood pressure under control after seeing his unhealthy numbers posted on a board during his first shared visits. "Office visits can be intimidating, but the group is almost like extended family who support you and wish you well," says Moore.

FOR MORE IDEAS FOR THE FUTURE, VISIT time.com/breakthrough

William Clark
Reagan's right-hand man

CLARK: RICH LIPSKI--BETTMAN/CORBIS

Alex Altman | 190 words

In 1981, Ronald Reagan asked his former aide William Clark to come to Washington and serve as Deputy Secretary of State. The confirmation hearing was a disaster. Tasked with helping tame the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, Clark couldn't even define détente. "I had to start pretty much from ground zero," he admitted after getting the job.

But the self-effacing Californian, who dropped out of two colleges and became a state supreme court judge despite not having a law degree, spent his career confounding expectations. His time in Washington was no different. Clark's rapport with Reagan earned him influence; his loyalty and work ethic won him trust. As National Security Adviser, the foreign policy hard-liner pushed the President's "peace through strength" doctrine and urged the fractious Administration to "let Reagan be Reagan." Clark, who died Aug. 10 of Parkinson's disease at age 81, was a leading advocate of ramping up U.S. military involvement in Central America to stem the spread of communism. But it was his close relationship with the President that led TIME to name him, in 1983, the "second most powerful man in the White House."

Milestones

GORME: CBS/LANDOV

152 words

SENTENCED

Jesse Jackson Jr., former Democratic Congressman from Illinois, to 30 months in prison for spending $750,000 in campaign funds on personal expenses. His wife Sandi received a one-year sentence for her involvement.

DIED

Eydie Gorme, 84, Grammy Award--winning pop singer who found success during the mid--20th century, both with husband Steve Lawrence and as a solo act.

CHARGED

Ex--JPMorgan Chase traders Javier Martin-Artajo and Julien Grout with fraud, as part of an investigation into the $6.2 billion "London whale" trading losses.

DIED

Karen Black, 74, acclaimed character actress who starred alongside Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider and also appeared with Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces.

FILED

A lawsuit challenging the proposed merger between American Airlines and US Airways, by the Justice Department. The consolidation of the two companies would create the world's largest airline.

DIED

Jack Germond, 85, longtime political columnist and prominent TV commentator who was a staple on The McLaughlin Group and covered 10 presidential elections.

The End of TV as We Know It
While cable companies and networks bicker, consumers are staging a video revolution

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK: NETFLIX

Rana Foroohar | 825 words

Imagine a world in which the producers of buggy whips and the distributors of buggy whips are engaged in a vicious fight over who gets what percentage of whip-sale profits--even as more and more of their customers trade in horses for cars. That's a lot like what we've seen lately as CBS, the U.S.'s most popular broadcast network, has faced off against Time Warner Cable, the nation's second biggest cable company, over retransmission fees, the money paid by cable operators to ESPN, A&E and other channels for programming. While the giants have been busy arguing about how much pipe owners should pay content creators for top shows, viewers have begun unplugging. They are increasingly watching TV over the Internet, where they can get what they want for free (or for a lot less than the $100 or more some shell out for cable and satellite).

It's a phenomenon known in the business as cord cutting, and it signals the biggest change in media consumption since the Internet began killing newspapers over a decade ago. The nearly 1 million households that have cut their cords in the past 12 months represent a fraction of the overall television market, according to a new report by Moffett Research. But that's double the number that bailed the previous year. What's more, pay-TV subscriptions, which have fallen for the past few years, had been expected to rebound as the housing market improved, since people often order service when they move into a new home. But now housing is up, and pay-TV penetration is still falling. "Cord cutting used to be an urban myth," says telecom analyst Craig Moffett, who is advising clients to sell a number of cable and telecom stocks, including Cablevision and Verizon. "It's not a myth anymore."

It reminds me of the tipping point several years ago when people realized they no longer needed a telephone landline and would do just fine with their cell phones. According to Forrester Research, 32 million consumers are already getting video over their televisions using Internet devices--including game consoles like Microsoft's Xbox, connected Blu-ray players and smart TVs made by electronics giants like Samsung and LG, and set-top boxes from companies like Apple. As these devices proliferate, the pace of cord cutting will accelerate. A recent study by the Diffusion Group found that consumers with Internet-connected TVs were twice as likely as other consumers to cancel their pay-TV services. Even those of us who have bundled TV and broadband-Internet subscriptions from telephone or cable companies increasingly use them to binge-watch Netflix shows like Orange Is the New Black on an iPad (in bed while enjoying a pint of salty caramel ice cream--not that I would know) rather than flip through 500 channels to find nothing on. As we've seen for decades, media-consumption habits evolve much faster than old media do.

Television is now being disintermediated by the Web, just as print was. The transition has taken longer; television was starting from a bigger, richer base. But now that the technology is maturing, the shift will speed up. Already, you can see players like Liberty Media's John Malone scrambling. They hope to consolidate the cable industry and hold on to pricing power in negotiations with broadcasters and new players like Netflix that require Internet access for streaming. But analysts like Moffett believe that the window is closing and that federal regulators won't allow mergers that threaten the viability of streaming-video firms. None of this means that cable companies will go out of business. Indeed, they are still the only option for broadband Internet in much of the U.S. But unless they can begin to charge broadband customers on a usage basis, they will have no mechanism to recoup lost revenue as their video businesses erode.

This transition will also create new pressures--and opportunities--for content creators. When CBS wants to double what it charges for shows, it won't be able to hide behind Time Warner Cable anymore. If you click on Dexter and have to pay more, you'll know exactly who is charging you. New content creators, like Netflix and the YouTube production studio in L.A., are adding to the competition. As the click-to-watch model becomes ubiquitous, the real winners may be technology companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon that operate across entire ecosystems, selling content and also designing devices and controlling lots of consumer information. Amid all this disruption, it's worth noting the other Big Media story of the moment: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' purchase of the Washington Post for a song. If cord cutting is any indication, the story of television and the story of newspapers may have very similar endings.

Let There Be Light
Plans to grow genetically modified plants ignited a firestorm at Kickstarter. They shouldn't have

SHIELDS: SCOTT HEAVEY--GETTY IMAGES

Virginia Postrel | 771 words

Whether lit by Fairies in a children's book or special-effects magic in Avatar, the sight of plants glowing in the dark has a special charm. We respond to lighted plants with wonder and joy.

So it's not surprising that a plan to produce glow-in-the-dark plants proved wildly popular on Kickstarter, the crowdfunding website. In 44 days, the project raised more than $484,000--more than seven times the goal of $65,000--from 8,433 donors. Using genes from bioluminescent bacteria or fireflies, the project aims to create a glowing version of a small, inedible plant called Arabidopsis, often dubbed plant biology's lab rat. The organizers then plan to move on to roses.

To reward donors, they offered seeds, plants and glowing roses for different amounts of money. Although Kickstarter steadfastly maintains that it's not a place to sell products, most successful projects attract donors who want a version of whatever the organizers are producing, whether that's the DVD of a documentary film or a watch made from an iPod Nano. Thousands of people, it turned out, wanted seeds for glow-in-the-dark plants.

The result was a culture war that has nothing to do with the usual red state--blue state split. It's a conflict between two cultural tribes within the generally left-of-center "creative class" that constitutes Kickstarter's core audience. On one side are the expansive techies, represented by the organizers and backers of the glowing plant. This tribe believes in the power of ingenuity and artifice to solve problems and generate delight. They embrace world-changing entrepreneurship and DIY tinkering. They tend to favor open-source solutions that share intellectual property--whether computer code or new DNA sequences--so that others can build on and improve new creations. This tribe supports such big-money Kickstarter projects as the 3-D printer that raised $2.9 million, and it accounts for Kickstarter's frequent coverage on such high-traffic websites as Wired and TechCrunch.

On the other side are the hipster artists, represented by Kickstarter's founders. While the techies hack bits and atoms, the artists hack culture, telling stories, making pictures, singing songs, cooking meals. They too have a DIY ethos, but it's driven less by a desire for mastery (though that's there) than by a suspicion of distant specialists. They value localism and small-scale enterprise, instinctively opposing disruptive technologies and global commerce. One of their most lucrative projects, which raised more than $1 million, was a hoodie designed to last a decade--an antifashion statement about history, craft and permanence. Among this tribe, genetically modified organisms are a food taboo, embodying anticorporate values and ideas of natural purity common in their circles, not the next wave of DIY innovation.

Until recently, the two tribes coexisted peacefully on Kickstarter. The techies didn't wage a campaign to wipe out a documentary opposing biotech food, and the artists didn't attack 3-D printing. But when the glowing-plant project came along, antibiotech groups sprang into action, calling the project "genetic pollution" and charging that its organizers had "hijacked" Kickstarter from its artistic intent. DIY genetics, they warned, could be dangerous. Even worse was the project's seed giveaway--the "deliberate release into the environment" of a product of synthetic biology.

Never mind that arabidopsis isn't a dangerous plant or a weed, and that the genes for luminescence are benign and well understood. In fact, the project's biggest pitfall is that the light may not be bright enough for today's light-accustomed eyes to notice that the plant is glowing.

But the hysteria had the desired effect. It blew up Kickstarter's modus vivendi. Although the company, which takes a 5% revenue cut, let the glowing-plant project proceed, its management has quietly slipped a new no-no into its ever-growing list of prohibitions: "Projects cannot offer genetically modified organisms as a reward." In the company's only public comments on the controversy, in an interview with The Verge website, co-founder Yancey Strickler suggested that the change is modest, because it limits only rewards, not projects themselves. But everyone knows that rewards are crucial to success. People don't want T-shirts of glowing plants. They want glowing plants.

The truth is that the company has picked sides. Instead of maintaining a neutral forum or hiring enough staff to screen projects one by one, Kickstarter has chosen to pander to fearmongers. With its blanket prohibition, it has betrayed the technologists who embraced it, promoted it and accounted for some of its most successful and profitable projects. It may be happy to take their money, but it isn't comfortable with their kind.

Postrel is the author of The Power of Glamour, to be published in November

What You Said About ...

BELAFONTE: SANDRO BABLER

627 words

Disappearing Bees "This is not a world in which we want to live," wrote Earth Eats, a public-radio show, posting Time's Aug. 19 cover on Instagram (which featured the cover line A WORLD WITHOUT BEES). Bryan Walsh's story on the demise of honeybees, the pollinating force of nature behind $15 billion in U.S. crops, led to commentary from Salon, where Lindsay Abrams lamented the lack of "promising solutions." Meanwhile, American bees got short shrift, wrote Carol Davit of the Missouri Prairie Foundation. "The approximately 3,500 species of native bees in North America ... help the survival of native bees and honeybees alike."

Ted Cruz The Texas Senator's comments on President Obama (who Cruz said has "profoundly dangerous" ideas) in Alex Altman's profile prompted analyses at the Washington Post, USA Today and Huffington Post and lively responses from readers. "Please, please, please let Republicans like Cruz do their crazy best. Makes the elections in 2016 a cakewalk," wrote Sunflower52 on TIME.com. Commentary editor John Podhoretz frowned on Cruz's pop-culture IQ, tweeting, "His reference ... is Madonna and Sean Penn? They divorced 25 years ago!" On TIME.com, supporter TedPeters called Cruz a "brilliant" thinker who would create jobs, while conceding, "He's just not all that 'cool'--the paramount characteristic for the media and the young."

Tech-savvy kids Eliana Dockterman's story about the merits of kids' tech use sparked a debate on MSNBC's Morning Joe and some sighs from baby boomers. "To me, there's a big danger," said panelist Donny Deutsch. "You've got to pull kids away, they can't have their faces in these things." On Twitter, elementary-school assistant principal Terran Newman took a different view: "Shocked to learn that all parents may not support digital learning."

RED BORDER FILMS'

Harry Belafonte is one of 17 speakers featured in One Dream, a five-part docu-series from Red Border Films, TIME's new filmmaking unit and interactive digital platform.

TO WATCH, VISIT TIME.COM/ONEDREAM

BEYOND THE COVER

On April 30, when Harry Belafonte sat for a photo and video shoot with TIME filmmaker Marco Grob--part of our One Dream project commemorating 1963's March on Washington--the singer-activist recalled meeting Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time in the '50s after hearing him speak at a Harlem church. "He had said that we would take maybe 20 or 30 minutes to just talk," Belafonte says. "It was almost four hours when we finally broke for breath."

FROM LIFE.COM

As part of our multimedia One Dream package, LIFE.com has assembled more than a dozen galleries featuring critical moments--and some never-before-published images--from the civil rights movement. Among the subjects: the Little Rock Nine, the first black students to attend Little Rock Central High School in 1957, and the Freedom Riders, who risked their lives integrating buses across the American South.

The Little Rock Nine battled state National Guardsmen, bottom, to enter school

In 1961, Freedom Riders protested segregation on buses

FOR MORE ...

Every element of TIME's One Dream coverage--including the Life galleries, images from readers and interviews with March on Washington participants--is available at time.com/onedream.

Please recycle this magazine and remove inserts or samples before recycling

Do These Glasses Make Me Look Boring?
In which I try to top Google Glass as a lunch companion

ILLUSTRATION BY TOMASZ WALENTA FOR TIME; GETTY IMAGES (2)

Joel Stein | 806 words

Technology improves our lives but ruins those of everyone who hangs out with us. I spend nearly as much of my life waiting for people I'm with to answer a call, text back or finish a tweet as they do waiting for me.

I've already intuited that owning Google Glass--the eyeglass frames with a computer attached--will radically transform my life into a virtual reality exactly like moving my cell phone five inches closer to my face. What I need to know is what it's like to interact with someone who's wearing Google Glass.

I invited Heather Anne Campbell to have lunch with me and wear her Google Glass the whole time. Heather, a comedian who appears on the new Whose Line Is It Anyway?, is one of about 8,000 people Google chose via Twitter and Google+ to buy the $1,500 device before it's made available to the public. Heather said she'd wear Glass during an improv show. The bar for do-gooding gets pretty low when you make someone pay $1,500.

I did not think our lunch would go well, since I'm one of the few people who believe setting your phone to ring instead of vibrate should be limited to "surgeon on call" mode. To me, putting your phone on the table indicates that you don't think I can tell a story as well as someone without a face or body. It's like pointing a real-life remote control and yelling, "Entertain me, loser, or I'll change the channel!" No one else seems to mind any of this stuff, yet they already call some people wearing Heather's new technology Glassholes.

When Heather arrived, I noticed that while she is very attractive, she looks even better wearing her white Google Glass. I don't know if it's the design, the power Glass denotes or the fact that if a woman will put a computer on her face, God only knows what else she'll do.

Shortly after sitting down, Heather told me that she would never actually wear these glasses to a lunch. "It's a social threat," she explained, since by moving her head or saying a command, she could make the glasses shoot video or, worse, look me up on Wikipedia, which would definitely end lunch early. Besides, you can't be nearly as surreptitious with Glass as I assumed: I could detect when the tiny rectangular screen over her left eye was on, so I'd know immediately if she wasn't really paying attention. No one over 65 can complain about people wearing Google Glass since they all leave Fox News on when you come over.

The only disruptive part of the experience was that everyone came by our table and treated Heather like a celebrity because she was wearing Google Glass, except our waiter, who treated her like a celebrity because she's a celebrity. But after a while, I stopped noticing her Glass and focused on the endless amount of tech stuff Heather, who used to be an editor for a video-game magazine, told me I needed to buy, such as Google Chromecast and wireless speakers. Later, when I started talking a lot about my career, I asked Heather if she was tempted to secretly nod her phone to life and surf the Web. "I wouldn't," she said. "I'd do it on my phone. This is not a rich enough experience." Convinced, I went right back to talking about me.

I was discovering that my initial fears were no more than simple social insecurity. I'm sure that after Gutenberg cranked out his 180 beta versions of the printed Bible, people in Germany were worried that if they didn't deliver some interesting gossip, their rich friend who knew people up in Mainz was going to break out Deuteronomy. If anything, Heather and I decided, Google Glass might lead people to have fewer mediated experiences. Unlike fans watching concerts through an iPhone they hold aloft, parents seeing a child's first step through a lens or C-list celebs focusing less on their sex partners than on finding a flattering angle to film from, Glass wearers can record events and still see them too.

Right about then is when my totally outdated phone vibrated in my pocket. Worried it was my wife calling about my son or something even more pressing, like a celebrity more famous than Heather, I pulled it out to check. Heather, meanwhile, gave me her undivided attention. Before I could finish chastising myself and apologizing, my phone rang a second time. I checked again.

It's not the technology that makes the Glasshole; it's the person using the technology. There's a chance that by making the first Glass wearers submit plans on how they'd use them, they'll set a better example than the 1980s Wall Street jerks who yelled into the first cell phones at restaurants. Maybe, in fact, Google will be responsible enough to never sell me one.

Servant of Power.
Race in America through a man who tended Presidents
Mary Pols | 554 words

In November 2008, an octogenarian African American named Eugene Allen--a White House butler through eight presidential administrations--witnessed Barack Obama's election in joyful disbelief and became the subject of a poignant Washington Post story. A version of his life, shifted into dramatic overdrive, is told in director Lee Daniels' The Butler, a saga of 20th century civil rights as seen through the professional and domestic struggles of the fictionalized butler Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker, never better), whose job was to be invisible in one of the most visible places in the world. Wildly operatic and occasionally too obvious, The Butler is nonetheless, like Roots, an essential and deeply moving filmic rendering of African-American history.

Daniels and screenwriter Danny Strong have spun their story into a 20th century epic, opening in 1926 with young Cecil witnessing first his mother led from a cotton field to be raped by the landowner and then his mildly protesting father shot dead. The lady of the manor (Vanessa Redgrave) decides, perhaps in a fit of sympathy, to train Cecil as a "house n-----," a phrasing echoed during his job interview at the White House in 1957. As an adult, Cecil is the 1950s "good Negro" juxtaposed against the older of his two sons, Louis (the marvelous David Oyelowo), the "angry black man" who comes of age as a Freedom Rider in the '60s.

As in his earlier movies Precious and The Paperboy, Daniels places extreme emphasis on palette to establish mood. The movie burns in hues of red and amber, a nod to James Baldwin, author of The Fire Next Time, and those fires that raged--often literally--in American race relations. Oprah Winfrey, who plays Cecil's alcoholic wife Gloria, wears mostly coral, deep reds and pinks and makes you forget she's Oprah as she smokes and smolders her way through the role of a woman caught between her husband's and son's warring views on opportunity, equality and respect for authority.

The ugly images are myriad: two lynched men hang, Bruegelian, from a rope; chaos reigns on the Freedom Riders' bus as Klansmen attack. Yet there are moments of levity. "Since when did he start calling us Negroes?" head butler Carter (Cuba Gooding Jr.) murmurs as he watches Lyndon Johnson (Liev Schreiber), a regular user of the N word, speak in favor of civil rights on TV.

But Daniels falters in his stunt casting of the Presidents and First Ladies. As the famous faces parade through, from Robin Williams' Dwight Eisenhower to John Cusack's mortifying Richard Nixon, it begins to appear as if they were all hosting SNL and obliged to do a presidential imitation. That said, Jane Fonda's Nancy Reagan? More, please.

Daniels counters nearly every scene at the White House with one from the civil rights movement--the elegance of a state dinner contrasting with the savagery at a lunch counter; Cecil reading Madeline to Caroline Kennedy while the bad hats of the Klan gather in Alabama. It's as subtle as hammer to nail but effective. Those who dislike The Butler will accuse it of using both Cecil and Louis Gaines as Zelig-like props, placing them too obviously in harm's way on the railroad ties of time, from Selma to Vietnam. They'd be right, but plenty of real people were caught on those tracks, and The Butler's undeniable force stems from putting its characters--and us--there too.

An Apple Nerd Nitpicks Jobs The Way Steve Would Have

IPOD: GETTY IMAGES

Harry McCracken | 95 words

• At the start of the movie, when Jobs is telling Apple employees about a new music player, he calls it the iPod. It's like hearing Walt Disney refer to the Mickey Mouse.

• Jobs advocates--twice!--for the original Macintosh to sport more than 128 KB of RAM. It was more the opposite: he stuck to 128 KB, a mistake rectified by the 512 KB "Fat Mac."

• A Radio Shack TRS-80 is in a scene at the April 1977 West Coast Computer Faire, where the Apple II was launched. But the TRS-80 wasn't announced until that August.

Real Househusbands.
In Modern Dads, four guys lean in at home
James Poniewozik | 696 words

Can women have it all? still no. Can men? Nope, nor do many people bother asking. Last year Anne-Marie Slaughter started a hot topic with an Atlantic cover story lamenting, WHY WOMEN STILL CAN'T HAVE IT ALL--that is, a prestigious career and hands-on time raising kids. The New York Times Magazine recently checked in on mothers who "opted out" of high-powered careers. In Lean In, Facebook exec Sheryl Sandberg advised young women to double down on career before and through motherhood; when Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, ended the company's work-from-home policy, it was decried as an attack on moms.

And the dads? Statistics and the simple logistics of running two-income households say that more men would also like the option of working from home, or leaning out, or opting out. The proportion of stay-at-home dads in the U.S. has doubled (albeit only to 3.4%); some 20% of fathers are now primary caregivers. Yet even in well-meaning coverage of work-home balance, men tend to be afterthoughts who "help" raise their kids. The idea that a man would put home over career ambition is treated as a fringe lifestyle choice, like wearing mandals. (Disclosure: I speak as a dad who often works from home. Sometimes in mandals.)

There are reasons for the media's balance imbalance: stereotypes still hurt women more at work and at home. But they also limit men's opportunities to be anything but stereotypes. When work-life juggling is framed as women's stuff--as if men's lives are work--it reinforces the idea that in a heterosexual marriage, Mom provides the backup income, and Dad the backup parent.

Now reality TV is stepping in. On Aug. 21, A&E is premiering Modern Dads, about four stay-at-home dads in Austin: Nate, "the New Dad"; Sean, "the Stepdad"; Stone, "the Single Dad"; and Rick, "the Veteran." With any show about dads-as-caregivers (see last year's awful Guys With Kids), a good test is to ask, Would this situation be considered funny or entertaining if it involved moms? At first, Modern Dads looks doomed to fail. The credits use the hackneyed undercut-masculinity gag, familiar from The Hangover, of posing the guys in sunglasses with their kids at the playground. The ads feature a guy in a work shirt carrying diapers, a bottle and plush toys in a tool belt. "A good day at the office for them," says the show's website, "is just keeping their kids--and their manhood--alive." (Note to A&E: Kinda hard to physically father a child without manhood.)

But the first episode of Modern Dads is not as dumb as its publicity. It's essentially a sitcom in reality-show form, like A&E's Duck Dynasty, edited into sitcom-style A and B plots. (Stone's thinking about getting a vasectomy! Rick has to plan a princess party!) What's best about Modern Dads is what's not in it. The men, for instance, don't feel emasculated by being real househusbands. Staying at home, for anyone, is often an unaffordable luxury, and Austin ain't cheap. Sean, for one, is uncomplicatedly happy that his live-in girlfriend is a venture capitalist (who's also a whiz with power tools): "She brings home a lot of money. Life's pretty good."

No one's going to mistake Modern Dads for Mad Men--it has prominent pooping jokes of toddler and adult varieties--but it slips in bits of class awareness and insights about the physical work of parenting: "When I hit the pillow at the end of the day," Stone says, "it's the greatest feeling in the world." Word to your mother, or your father.

Overall, Modern Dads is a study in the trade-offs it takes to show social change on TV. On the one hand, some boys and young men out there will see hands-on dadhood as a viable option. On the other hand, it would be great if competent, stay-at-home dads weren't treated as a curious subculture, like polygamist sister-wives, toddler pageant queens or doomsday preppers.

But it's like they say: You can't have it all. Sometimes the road to nuance is paved with clichés. In its goofy way, Modern Dads illustrates the small, important idea that equality is not something women gain from and men lose from. Want to help women lean in? Tell men it's O.K. to lean out.

Inside Jobs
The tension between the tyrant and the visionary
Lev Grossman | 581 words

I have the extremely dubious distinction of once having kept Steve Jobs waiting for 15 minutes. I had an appointment with him at Apple headquarters, but somehow--I still don't know how--I got lost on the way. When I think about that day now, I find myself--after I'm through cringing with shame--wondering where the hell my iPhone was. But of course it hadn't been released yet. It was 2006, and Jobs was going to show me the first one.

Jobs, as it happened, could not have been more gracious about it, either because he genuinely didn't care or because it didn't suit his purposes to get pissed off at the press. But I'm glad that scene didn't make it into Jobs, the new biopic starring Ashton Kutcher. I have a feeling I wouldn't have gotten off that easy--Kutcher's Jobs suffers fools even less gladly than the original. Also I probably would've been played by Paul Giamatti.

Fortunately, Jobs doesn't get as far as 2006. It begins with Jobs unveiling the iPod, then free-falls back in time to his famously brief stint at Reed College, where we find him skipping class, sleeping around and dropping acid. Kutcher's take on Jobs is satisfying: if nothing else, he always looks like he's working hard. His Jobs walks the line between an impression and an actual performance, but he gets a lot right: the hunched shoulders, the slightly spavined gait, the oft-steepled fingers, that conspiratorial quarter-smile.

The movie frog-marches Kutcher through Jobs' eventful life roughly and at high speed, like a security guard escorting a fired employee from the building. In 1975, during his time-killing stint at Atari, Jobs spots a half-built computer in the living room of his friend, the gentle genius Steve Wozniak, and like an entrepreneurial cheetah he pounces, prototypes, productizes, capitalizes and incorporates. The set pieces showing Apple in its garage-chrysalis stage are the movie's best (though as a period piece Jobs is still beat hollow by the indie Computer Chess). We meet both Jobs the visionary, who saw our future in Wozniak's bare circuit boards and had the will to bring it to a market that didn't exist, and Jobs the asshole, who betrayed his friends and hectored his colleagues and kicked his pregnant girlfriend out of the house.

Why are we so interested in Jobs' life? It's certainly the stuff of fable, including the redemption of an abandoned child--abandoned first by his birth parents and then by Apple, which kicked him out when the Macintosh lost money. And Jobs has a hagiographic quality too: the lonely maverick, rejected and misunderstood, who never wavers in his vision. Yes, he parked in handicapped spaces and didn't bathe enough. But are not such flaws the prerogatives, even the hallmarks, of genius?

Jobs struggles with the Jobs conundrum: he was a furnace of rage who felt himself surrounded by idiots whom he felt entitled to subjugate; at the same time he created beautiful tools of empowerment and self-expression. Even those tools embody Jobs' obsession with control: his products are great engines of creativity but also masterpieces of commodity fetishism, glittering and irresistible, that bend consumers to Jobs' will. They're sealed against would-be tinkerers, who might dare to monkey with their perfection, and embedded in a closed, hermetic techno-ecology.

Did Jobs want to empower people or control them? Both, surely, and the task of any worthy telling of Jobs' life is to resolve that paradox. God knows I never figured it out. Jobs, as hard as it works, never does either.

Screen Saver
Drive-ins reboot just in time for a second act
Lily Rothman | 834 words

Picture the drive-in movie of baby-boomer America: a summer evening, the white of the screen against the rose of the sky, the incandescent glow from the concession stand, kids tossing a football as they wait for the show to begin, the smell of bug spray, the rows of cars with patrons draped across the roofs.

On a recent August night, the Wellfleet Drive-In Theatre in Wellfleet, Mass., seems to have kept up the classic elements. There's the warmth, the sunset, the popcorn, the families, the cars prowling for an open spot, the double feature of The Smurfs 2 and Grown Ups 2 that will start in a few minutes.

There's little evidence in Wellfleet that rising real estate prices and mall-based multiplexes will necessarily doom drive-ins. Across the U.S., however, the four-wheel format struggles with technical and financial hurdles even as talk of a renaissance bubbles up sporadically. The drive-in is at a turning point, the double feature of its history at intermission.

This summer marks 80 years since Richard M. Hollingshead Jr. secured a patent for a "novel construction in outdoor theaters whereby the transportation facilities to and from the theater are made to constitute an element of the seating" and opened the first such theater, in New Jersey. Drive-ins--also known as "ozoners" and "outdoorers"--proliferated in car-loving North America and left an indelible mark on the culture, preserved in such movies as Grease and The Outsiders.

Entrepreneurs like John Vincent, who owns the Wellfleet drive-in and is president of the United Drive-In Theatre Owners Association (UDITOA), are betting the drive-in will have a boffo second act. "We would not be here if we were not making money," he says. He'll also admit that his business is cast against type. There were 4,063 drive-ins at the industry's peak in 1958. Vincent says the wave of closings bottomed out in the '90s, but UDITOA's figures show that the theater count dwindled further in the past decade. Their latest estimate counts 357 survivors.

The most recent drive-in deathwatch has been spurred by the costly transition from film projectors to digital projectors. Soon, studios won't offer film prints. So if a theater can't go digital, it's done. About 40% of drive-ins have already converted, and to help others, Cinedigm--a digital-cinema company--and the National Association of Theatre Owners worked out a virtual print fee arrangement for drive-ins. Studios apply the money saved by not printing film to help theater owners repay loans for digital projectors, which cost about $70,000 per screen.

Not every drive-in will make the transition. Some are too small to get the numbers to work. Vincent, whose theater converted last winter, guesses another 40% of drive-ins will switch--or at least try. Banks are skeptical of funding drive-ins, he says, despite the fact that they often rank among the top 10 theaters in box-office sales for a given movie. Some drive-in owners have resorted to crowdfunding.

Maybe the bankers ought to motor over to the Coyote Drive-In, which opened this summer in Fort Worth, Texas. Although Brady Wood, its president and co-founder, says he tried to retain the old essence, the Coyote is no Grease-era ozoner. There's beer and wine and an upscale concession menu featuring hummus with warm pita. It's in a fairly urban area and was built through a public-private partnership. Wood is working on staging live concerts that could be simulcast to other digitally capable drive-ins. The business is a smash, doing an average of 10,000 tickets a week at $8 per adult and $6 per child.

The Coyote trades in hipness rather than in Americana, a fun experience rather than a flashback. "This is just a big happy generator," says Wood. "The immediate response is, 'Oh my gosh, I love the drive-in!' If you question them, you find out half of them have never been to a drive-in."

Nostalgia, after all, is not a business model. "It's fun. I love it," says Vincent, who remembers seeing Back to the Future at the drive-in he now owns right after he got his driver's license. "At the end of the day, the customers, though, are there for a great experience. If you don't have a great first-run movie for them, they're not coming."

Not that a little nostalgia doesn't help. The Schwimmer family hails from New York City, but Katherine, 40, has come to Cape Cod--and the Wellfleet Drive-In--since childhood. "I was telling the boys how you could lie down on the roof of the car," she says. "It reminds me of growing up." Riley and Tobey, 7 and 8, saw their first movie at a drive-in. Now, as ever, there's the fresh air. There's the picnic. There's the planetarium array of stars that emerge as the lights--as it were--go down. And there's only so much time to talk about it, Tobey reminds his parents, but not because of any grand predictions about the future of the format. There's the movie, he points out: "It's starting."

Summer Ski Blitz.
Why resorts want you to buy your lift tickets now

ILLUSTRATION BY MIKEY BURTON

Brad Tuttle | 410 words

After years in which both snow and the economy have been iffy, skiers and boarders have been booking winter vacations later and later--or sometimes not at all. So, to lock in dollars early, resort companies are pushing preseason deals that tempt enthusiasts with access to multiple mountains for a single discounted price, as long as they buy when it's still waterskiing season.

The market's biggest player is Vail Resorts' Epic Pass, which grants unlimited skiing at 12 U.S. mountains (half of which are in Colorado) for $689. If that sounds pricey, consider that a single-day ticket runs as much as $129 at Vail--meaning you'd come out ahead if you plan to ski or ride more than seven days this season.

Aggressive pass promotions guarantee cash flow for the resorts even if the snow stinks. If the powder is plentiful, pass holders can ski more, but the resort still wins because visitors spend money at local bars, shops and hotels. The strategy also whites out competitors. "After you've bought our pass, are you likely to go skiing elsewhere? No," says Kristen Lynch, Vail's chief marketing officer. "Passes really drive customer loyalty."

This cold war has its own arms race. The Epic Pass's main superpower rival, Mountain Collective, sold out its first round of passes, which offer up to 12 days each at top resorts like Squaw Valley, Aspen, Snowbird and Jackson Hole and 50% off lift tickets for subsequent trips. The price: $349. This year, Whistler Blackcomb, Canada's biggest resort, joined the collective. Vail countered by adding Utah's Canyons and throwing in access to five days' skiing in Switzerland and Austria.

A third, smaller competitor is the 12-mountain Powder Alliance. Buy a season pass with an ally such as Montana's Bridger Bowl or Colorado's Crested Butte ($599 and up), and you get three days each at the others.

Some skiers might not like the idea of paying long before snow falls, but the push is working. Once the domain of locals, season passes are snatched up by global ski tourists. Vail's 300,000 pass holders--who represent $207 million in revenue--come from 50 states and 78 countries. Sales have nearly doubled in the past six years, accounting for about 40% of the company's lift-ticket revenues. Mountain Collective started another round of sales (new price: $379) on Aug. 13. Most Powder Alliance members offer huge pass discounts if you buy by Oct. 31. The earlier you bite, the better the deal--and the sooner you can begin praying for snow.

Pop Chart

Nick Carbone, Kelly Conniff, Eliana Dockterman, Nate Rawlings, Lily Rothman | 895 words

POP-DIVA EDITION

GOOD WEEK/BAD WEEK

Katy Perry

Her new single, "Roar," raced to the summit of iTunes' top-selling-singles chart

Lady Gaga

Her new single, "Applause"--released a week early because of leaks--had to compete with Perry's

FAST FOOD

The Next Big Taco

Craving a taco at 8 a.m.? Taco Bell has you covered, kind of. Its new take on a breakfast sandwich--eggs, sausage and syrup wrapped in a waffle--was a top seller in five test restaurants, meaning it's on track for a national rollout. Your move, Pizza Hut.

QUICK TALK

Cuba Gooding Jr.

What's the worst thing about playing a butler? "That damn coat!" says the 45-year-old Oscar winner, who stars in Lee Daniels' The Butler (out Aug. 16). "We shot in New Orleans, and some of the wool tuxedos were so hot." Of course, a role this good--Gooding plays a co-worker of Cecil Gaines (Forest Whitaker), the real-life White House butler who served during the civil rights movement--was worth it.

--LILY ROTHMAN

How do you train to play a White House butler?

We had advisers on set, including butlers that worked around town. It's so funny. Whenever I'm working with an adviser, it isn't like I ask him questions.

What do you do?

I watch him. Because it's something he's doing when he's not advising that I want to steal for the character--the way he holds his chin, holds his posture, how he undoes his tie.

Have you been to the actual White House?

I've gone on a number of occasions, the last one being for the Red Tails movie that premiered there. Obama invited us.

What was that like?

It was awesome. Being in that all-red theater [the Red Room], knowing they watch movies in there--it's kind of cool.

Your character tells some great dirty jokes in the movie.

Some of which were Lee's!

I was going to ask you if you had a favorite, but we probably can't print it.

I've been playing ice hockey for 22 years. I've been in a lot of locker rooms across America. I've heard racier stuff than made the movie.

How about a favorite clean joke?

Why was six afraid of seven?

Because seven eight nine.

There you go!

HAVE A SEAT

Karl Lagerfeld may be best known as the head of Chanel--and the speaker of bons mots like "Sweatpants are a sign of defeat"--but he's also an accomplished photographer. His stark images, including a shot of Italian architect Gio Ponti's classic 699 Superleggera chairs, will be on view at the Cassina showroom in London Sept. 14 through 22 as part of the London Design Festival.

NOT-SO-HAPPY ACCIDENT

600

Age, in years, of a statue in Florence whose pinky finger was snapped off by an American tourist--a 55-year-old Missouri native who was reportedly trying to measure the figure's hand. The Museo dell'Opera del Duomo has said it will repair the statue, which is thought to depict the Virgin Mary.

ZOOPS!

When Animals Escape

Costa Rica's plan to close all public zoos as part of a new no-cage policy means that by the end of next year, its zoo animals will roam free. But elsewhere in the world, creatures have had to get much more creative to wriggle out of captivity.

Capone the Monkey

In 1935 he led 172 of his cohort at Frank Buck's Jungle Camp Animal Park on Long Island, New York, across a plank a zookeeper had accidentally left lying across the border moat

Evelyn the Gorilla

During the 1990s and early '00s, she escaped the Los Angeles Zoo four or five times; in one instance, she jumped onto another gorilla's back to hop over the wall

The Unnamed Egyptian Cobra

Although it's unclear whether this reptile actually escaped in 2011 (it was found hiding in the Reptile House at the Bronx Zoo), it caused panic and inspired a Twitter parody

Humboldt the Penguin

In 2012 the Tokyo Sea Life Park resident scaled a rock wall twice his height--especially impressive considering that penguins can't fly--and took refuge in a nearby river

Rusty the Red Panda

Last month he was found wandering in a residential Washington, D.C., neighborhood not far from his home at the National Zoo; officials speculate he climbed a tree to get out

AMERICANA THE BEAUTIFUL

As part of "American Modern: Hopper to O'Keeffe" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City--which highlights work from 1915 to 1950--the idyllic American countryside of Charles Sheeler's Bucks County Barn, right, will be displayed alongside scenes of bustling urban society from Walker Evans to show how contemporary realities clashed with rural nostalgia. The exhibit runs Aug. 2 through Jan. 26.

TRENDING

@SolWaveHouse

Most people jet-set to avoid the Internet. Not so at Spain's shoreside Sol Wave House. The world's first Twitter-themed hotel lets guests access its Twitter-powered community and even tweet things like "#FillMyFridge" for concierge service.

Not an actual Simpsons Lego--sorry!

SIMPSONS

Block Party

Homer and his clan already have a movie, a theme park and an edition of Monopoly. So this new line of Legos--due in 2014--seems like a natural next step in their ongoing quest for world domination. Already, however, some have protested that the snarky Simpsons may not be "appropriate" for Lego kids. D'oh!

3 THINGS YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT THIS WEEK

1. Sharknado's sequel toning down its campiness.

The TV movie will be called Sharknado 2: The Second One.

2. Bieber's ability to elicit eye rolls.

TMZ published photos of the pop star visiting his grandma's house wearing a guitar--and only a guitar.

3. Falling asleep on your Virgin Atlantic flight. For a limited time, flights from Heathrow to Edinburgh and Manchester will have comedy performers in the aisles.

FOR TIME'S COMPLETE TV AND FILM COVERAGE, VISIT entertainment .time.com