COVER STORY This issue: How the NBA star reinvented the modern athlete over a historic 23 seasons. A PURPLE SMOCK ADORNED WITH SMILEY FACES CLOAKS LEBRON JAMES’ body around 7:30 a.m. one mid-April morning, as he’s groomed for a magazine cover shoot at the Los Angeles Lakers practice facility in El Segundo, Calif. Typically, this would be awful timing for a reflective talk with one of the world’s most famous people. James hasn’t been sleeping well. His speech is groggy…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Life once followed a familiar pattern. You’d go to school, get a job, build a family, and then, sometime in your 60s, retire, enjoying life for a few years until you grew too frail to live on your own. Then you might move in with family or check into a facility where you’d spend your “golden years”. A crucial part of that blueprint was an unsaid but universal assumption: that for the vast majority of people, life would not extend far beyond their 70s. That was based on the average lifespan when this still dominant picture of an American life arc…

HOW HUMANOID ROBOTS COULD TRANSFORM MODERN WARFARE—The Phantom MK-1 looks the part of an ai soldier. Encased in jet black steel with a tinted glass visor, it conjures a visceral dread far beyond what may be evoked by your typical humanoid robot. And on this late February morning, it brandishes assorted high-powered weaponry: a revolver, pistol, shotgun, and replica of an M-16 rifle.“We think there’s a moral imperative to put these robots into war instead of soldiers,”…