COVER STORY this issue: France’s Leader Is Ready To Reset His Troubled Presidency. It’s a bright early September day inside the presidential Élysée Palace, and President Emmanuel Macron is reflecting on the grueling 12 months just past, with the so-called Yellow Vests (gilets jaunes) protesters raging across the country, many aiming their fury at him. That was surely enough to rattle any leader. Yet Macron, leaning forward on his leather couch, offers another view. “In a certain way, the gilets jaunes were very good for me” he says, as the afternoon shadows lengthened on the lawn outside. “Because it reminded me who I should be”…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

As President Donald Trump weighed how to respond to a Sept. 14 drone and missile attack on Saudi oil facilities, which temporarily cut the kingdom’s output in half and roiled markets, he had several options. One, U.S. officials briefed on the White House deliberations tell TIME, was familiar: a Pentagon plan to bomb Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps targets on Persian Gulf islands. Trump was offered that plan after the Iranians shot down U.S. Navy drone on June 20…

What people want in a mate. What do humans really want in a long-term partner? And how much of what we want is influenced by culture, as opposed to innate? In a new report out of Swansea University in the U.K., researchers got 2,700 college students from five countries-three from Western cultures and two from Eastern cultures-to progressively narrow down which characteristics were most important to them in a lifetime mate. “For men and women from both cultures, the most important trade, hands down, was kindness,”…