COVER STORY This issue: How a kid from the Midwest became the leader of the Catholic Church.  “I’m ticked,” says John Prevost, the retired Midwestern high school principal who is now, abruptly and without warning, globally famous and in demand. “I didn’t want to be, but I’m so angry.” He’s sitting at the table of Denise and Rob Utter, who have invited a bunch of people from their local Catholic parish about 45 minutes south of Chicago, to talk about their friend and John’s kid brother Bob…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Once an auto underdog, China’s electric-vehicle boom now powers it tech rise. At Nio’s design workshop in surburban Shanghai, engineers spread billets of clay onto an aluminum frame of a basic car. A robotic arm with a mechanized drill bit then carves a series of grooves into the clay corresponding to a designer’s sketch. The rough surface is then painstakingly smoothed with palette knives before aluminum foil is pasted on top. Finally, the sleek looking metaliic model is rolled into a sunlit courtyard where every curve and camber is scrutinized…

The enhanced games aims to be the alternative Olympics—a multisport competition without the drug testing. When Kristian Gkolomeev woke up one morning in February, the last thing he expected to do was to break a world record in the pool. The Greek swimmer and four-time Olympian, who finished fifth in the 50-m freestyle in Paris and Tokyo, had gone to Greensboro, N.C., to take part in the preview of something called The Enhanced Games, a new start-up that plans to stage an Olympic-style competition…