Índex per June 7, 2021 a TIME Magazine

I WAS CATCHING UP THE OTHER DAY WITH A FRIEND, WHO ASKED HOW REMOTE WORK HAD been going, and I mentioned that sometimes late in the day, when my youngest child has had it with the closed door in the attic office space I share with my wife, I slip into the kids’ backyard treehouse to finish my Zoom calls. We both laughed, and marveled at how much the pandemic had changed work and life. “I’m sure you’re the first editor of TIME to work out of a treehouse,” he said. How much has changed? That’s the question Joanne Lipman explores this week, with cities and businesses across the U.S. finally beginning to reopen. Distancing and mask requirements are being loosened for vaccinated people (though of course it’s hard…

VACCINATED AMERICANS WILL BE ABLE TO visit Europe this summer, after E.U. leaders agreed to open the bloc’s borders to foreign tourists on May 18. Although the E.U. hasn’t set an exact date for the reopening, the news is a boon for the air-travel industry, which suffered plunging revenues due to COVID-19 restrictions. Bookings for highly lucrative transatlantic routes have surged, and executives are enthusiastically touting the concept of “revenge travel,” predicting passengers will fly more than usual in 2021 to make up for months of being grounded. But revenge on the virus comes at a cost for the climate. The pandemic succeeded at something policymakers and campaigners have been powerless to do: ending decades of almost uninterrupted rapid growth in aviation’s carbon dioxide emissions, which fell by a record…

This May, in recognition of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, TIME held its first Uplifting AAPI Voices Summit—a celebration of the diversity and achievements of the AAPI community that brought together Senator Mazie Hirono, designer Prabal Gurung, actor Constance Wu, performer Lea Salonga and other influential voices for conversations on identity, creativity, leadership and equity. Highlights from the summit—which can be viewed at time.com/aapi-voices—are presented here alongside a new essay from author Nicole Chung.…

JOHN C. YANG President and executive director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice “Let’s be clear, we can’t legislate away racism; we can’t legislate away bigotry … We need to think about the community solutions. What is it that we can do to address racism, because a lot of this can’t be on the policy level. It really has to be done on a community level, through hard conversations.” “If you think about what the ‘model minority’ myth is all about … it’s used to divide us against other communities of color. So part of solidarity has to be understanding how all of these different structures work potentially to operate against us, [and] deconstructing these structures.” TAVAE SAMUELU Executive director, Empowering Pacific Islander Communities “We know that oftentimes when [the term]…

THE FIRST MISSILE ATTACK from Gaza on Tel Aviv began at around 8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, May 11. The teenage patients at the Geha Mental Health Hospital were just getting ready for bed when the alarms started. For most of them, this came as a complete surprise. For kids struggling with the mental-health conflicts that led to their hospitalization, the national political conflicts remained vague. None of them were aware of the tear gas and stun grenades shot by Israeli forces into al-Aqsa Mosque early on May 10, injuring 300 people. But when the sirens started and the sky filled with echoes of explosions, it was clear even to the patients that something was going on. Anxiety levels began to soar. Soon after, parents started calling the ward, concerned…

‘I will never forget the way my heart sank. You have to buy your own baby back almost.’SHYANNE KLUPP SHYANNE KLUPP WAS 20 YEARS OLD AND HOMELESS WHEN she met her boyfriend in 2009. Within weeks, the two had married, and within months, she was pregnant. “I was so excited,” says Klupp. Soon, however, she learned that her new husband was facing serious jail time, and she reluctantly agreed to start looking into how to place their expected child for adoption. The couple called one of the first results that Google spat out: Adoption Network Law Center (ANLC). Klupp says her initial conversations with ANLC went well; the adoption counselor seemed kind and caring and made her and her husband feel comfortable choosing adoption. ANLC quickly sent them packets of…

Twin sisters Anna and Mizuki Nakajima founded their mobile-gaming company coly inc. in 2014 to solve a problem they saw with games in Japan. Too few were designed to appeal to women, and those that were featured flat story lines and unrealistic characters. “We think we’re creating human beings in a two-dimensional world, rather than two-dimensional characters that look and act like humans,” Mizuki says. But it’s not just the narrative-driven games that are different at the Nakajimas’ company: 25% of its board members are women, and women fill more than 70% of senior management positions. About 75% of coly’s 240 staffers are women. Those numbers stand out in corporate Japan, where women hold fewer than 15% of middle and senior management roles—one of the lowest rates among the world’s…

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … VISIONS OF EQUITY Readers found the feature package led by TIME’s BIPOC staffers in the May 24/May 31 issue enlightening, especially a curated list of “40 ways forward: Actionable steps for a more equitable America.” Robert Wheeler of St. Louis called it “a commendable wish list for an ideal society,” while retired teacher Gayl Woityra of Maysville, Ky., hailed in particular a proposal for changes to public-school funding, which she labeled “a major cause of inequality in our nation.” Some expressed concerns—amid a polarized political climate, as Alan Goldhammer of Berkeley, Calif., noted—as to how long it could take for such reforms to be implemented. “To eliminate discrimination there must be a change in culture” that “only time and knowledge can address,” argued William…

A COMMERCIAL FLIGHT FROM ATHENS HAD almost reached its destination of Vilnius, Lithuania, on the afternoon of May 23 when a Belarusian fighter jet sped toward it in midair, ordering its pilots to divert to Minsk, Belarus’ capital. Once the aircraft was on the ground, security agents forcibly removed journalist Roman Protasevich, 26, and his girlfriend, law student Sofia Sapega, 23, from the plane and detained them—an incident the airline later labeled “aviation piracy.” And for those fighting to end the 27-year rule of Belarus’ President Alexander Lukashenko, any sense of safety within the E.U. has since vanished. PRESS FREEDOMS The arrest of Protasevich, a co-founder of Nexta, a hugely popular news channel run by Belarusian dissidents on the Telegram platform, is part of a crackdown in recent weeks on…

ALL IT TOOK TO BREAK DOWN THE WORLD’S most vaunted COVID-19 defense was a little tea. After almost 18 months of nearly unblemished pandemic success, Taiwan is in the grip of its first major COVID-19 surge. Total cases more than tripled in a little over a week to more than 6,100 as of May 26. Many offices sent workers home, the streets of the capital, Taipei, cleared out, and the government began scrambling to secure vaccines and improve one of the worst inoculation rates in the developed world. The bulk of the surge can be traced back to two sources: a local Lions Club International gathering, and teahouses in a Taipei red-light district. The two clusters were at first thought to be unrelated—until a former Lions Club president revealed…

IN CONVERSATION WITH TIME SENIOR EDITOR LUCY Feldman, actor Constance Wu and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before author Jenny Han discussed their groundbreaking work both in front of and behind the camera, the need for nuanced AAPI representation and their love for a good rom-com. TIME: When the film adaptations of Crazy Rich Asians and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before first came out, there was a whole generation of Asian Americans who had never seen ourselves reflected like that. What did those films mean to you? And how did they change things? WU: I was in a unique position, having that happen to me with two big-profile projects: first there was Fresh Off the Boat, which was seeing yourself represented on network American TV. That…

I GREW UP in the Gaza Strip in a small town called al-Qarara, and went to medical school in Cairo before returning home in 2016 to begin a family-medicine residency and work in hospitals and clinics. Now I’m in my final year. Even before the latest round of Israeli airstrikes, Gaza’s health care system was exhausted. We already had a shortage of basic medications, lab and blood-bank needs, as well as surgical equipment, which was only exacerbated by the airstrikes. Because Gaza City is so densely populated, COVID-19 has ravaged the population. Israel is not fulfilling its responsibility of vaccinating Palestinians, even though the U.N. says that under international law the Israelis must give us access to shots. Then the war began. Gazans lived under continuous bombardment by Israeli airstrikes…

AKWAEKE EMEZI HAS TAKEN OFF THEIR MASKS—the ones we all wear that grin and lie, as poet Paul Laurence Dunbar wrote. The ones that hide and shade more than our cheeks and eyes, camouflaging the traumas we’ve triumphed over. The masks we don to survive a white-supremacist world that simply can’t hold our Black, queer, trans and godly brilliance. The Nigeria-born, best-selling author of the critically acclaimed Freshwater, PET and The Death of Vivek Oji is simply no longer interested in projecting false versions of themself—even if disengaging with such a survival mechanism comes with costs. After all, true liberation is priceless. “Just to be able to talk to my own people is freedom,” Emezi says on a recent morning via Zoom, describing the ways writing for white audiences, or…

SITTING STILL DOESN’T COME EASY TO ANTHONY Ramos. The performer has spent his 29 years in constant motion: scrounging for dollar slices while living in Brooklyn as a kid, schlepping across America on musical-theater tours, staying up all night writing songs after eight-a-week Hamilton performances. “That’s always where my head’s at: think fast, make moves, bop bop bop bop bop,” Ramos says over a Zoom call in May. In fact, the only reason Ramos is stationary now is that he’s on a 14-day quarantine in Montreal before his next project: playing the lead in the next Transformers movie. While confined to his Airbnb, he’s already scheming about how to reshape a franchise driven largely by explosions, putting final touches on his second pop-R&B album and envisioning the concert tour to…

Many people, for good reason, do not wish to be reminded of the most horrific thing that happened to them when they were young. But Grace Tame, 26, has insisted on it. When Tame was 15, a teacher lured her into trusting him before beginning to sexually assault her regularly after school. After he was released from prison, he discussed the crimes on social media, attempting to downplay their seriousness. Tame, on the other hand, had to keep silent; regulations in Tasmania, Australia, prevented survivors of such crimes from identifying themselves. With the help of a local journalist, Tame challenged that law. The hashtag #LetHerSpeak took off, and the wave of stories it unleashed led to a re-examination of consent culture in some of Australia’s most vaunted institutions. She…

THE NEWEST STAR OF PARIS’ RESTAURANT SCENE has spent his 28 years enjoying big, noisy dinners. Raised by Malian immigrant parents in France, Mory Sacko and his eight siblings crowded at night around platters of their mother’s spicy West African cooking. “Dinner was always a party,” he says. Now the party has come to him. Sacko left school at 14 and later worked in some of the most renowned kitchens in the French capital, learning from haute cuisine masters at establishments like the Shangri-La and Mandarin Oriental. In September he opened his first restaurant, MoSuke, in the Montparnasse district, offering a fusion of African, French and Japanese flavors, the latter inspired by anime he watched on TV as a child. In the two months before a nationwide lockdown shut all…

You’ve been called a scene stealer for your appearances in several series and films. How does it feel to be in your first lead role in Together Together? It definitely is exciting, and it’s nerve-racking. I’ve never had to look at my face this much onscreen, which is its own hell. I’m trying not to over-obsess because I will get overwhelmed by anxiety if I do. In Together Together, your character Anna is hired as a gestational surrogate by Matt [Ed Helms]. What drew you to this story? I first thought the script was gonna be some sh-tty rom-com that does a lot of gross things and falls into a lot of these stomach-churning tropes I’ve seen a million times. When I read the script, it sets a lot of…

N.Y. grand jury convened for Trump probe Prosecutors in New York have convened a special grand jury to determine whether former President Donald Trump should be indicted on criminal charges related to his “business dealings,” the Associated Press reported on May 26. Trump has denied any wrongdoing. India seeks removal of ‘variant’ posts In a May 21 letter, India’s Information Technology Ministry asked social media firms to remove content on their platforms referring to the “Indian variant” of COVID-19, calling such references “false.” The World Health Organization has warned against location-based names for variants, but many place names have become widely used. CDC: Stop kissing your chickens The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said May 20 that recent salmonella outbreaks—including at least 163 illnesses and 34 hospitalizations…

DIED Yuan Longping Created a land of plenty with hybrid rice CHINA’S TRANSFORMATION FROM A LAND OF FAMINE TO ONE OF plenty owes much to plant scientist Yuan Longping, who died on May 22 in the central city of Changsha at the age of 90. Known as the father of hybrid rice, Yuan pioneered the world’s first hybrid varieties in the 1970s that increased yields by some 30%. Today one-fifth of the rice grown globally is hybrid, saving lives and boosting livelihoods, especially across Asia and Africa. Yuan received the World Food Prize in 2004, and the death of “Grandpa Yuan” sparked an outpouring of grief and gratitude across China. Yuan was a teacher at an agricultural college in the 1950s when Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward triggered modern history’s…

EIGHT DAYS AFTER I WAS FULLY VACCINATED, I BOARDED MY first flight in 16 months. What a moment. I settled into my seat and took a deep breath, sucking in my mask to give it that nice, sealed plastic-wrap feeling. Then I combed my fingers through my hair and ignited a fire on the right side of my scalp. What was this? I gently patted my head, which remained cool to the touch. Slowly, I walked my fingertips into my hairline and discovered one bump, two bumps, three bumps. I raised my right eyebrow and felt the sting of a dozen bees. Shingles. Because, why not? It ended up being a mild case, but I didn’t know that then. What I did know was that everyone in my daughter’s…

Watching President Biden sign the COVID-19 Hate Crimes bill into law on May 20 was a momentous day for the AAPI community. We were very happy, but also know full well that a law does not change the hearts and minds of those who bear animus toward the AAPI community. There’s more work to be done. Discrimination against our community and other marginalized groups has never been far below the surface, from the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II to the travel ban targeting Muslims. During the pandemic, we have seen a huge rise in hate crimes against AAPI [people]. That’s why it was so important for the Senate and the House to say: We stand with you; we see…

WHEN KYRA CONDIE WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL, boys said a six-pack on a girl was “gross.” They said she was ugly. They taunted Condie, a vegetarian, about her diet; one day, she says, they chased her from the school bus waving cold cuts. She scrambled up a tree to avoid them. She got the last laugh. Condie, 24, will represent the U.S. at the Tokyo Olympics this summer, as sport climbing makes its debut at the Games. And she’s using her elite status and social media platform to reach for more than a medal. Growing up near St. Paul, Minn., Condie was a climber practically from birth. She’d scale her crib. Her mother Cathy shares a picture of her daughter perched on a refrigerator she had ascended; she was…

A COMPULSIVE NOMAD WHO DRAWS INSPIRATION from the people he meets on his travels, South African photographer and visual artist Trevor Stuurman, like most of the world, had his wings clipped by COVID-19. But with his habitual whirlwind schedule of fashion weeks, cover shoots and styling projects suspended, the 28-year-old film-school graduate had time to think. He knew that the next generation of creatives would benefit from access to a catalog of contemporary African culture—but, he wondered, what was the best way to record and preserve such a multifaceted subject? “We are only able to see how far we’ve come by looking back,” he says by video call from his home in Johannesburg. “I wanted to document our lived experiences in Africa, in real time.” Then, in April, a fire…

EVEN IF THE SLOGAN “FAIR AND BALANCED” HAS been retired by the conservative news network that used it for years, the damage caused by its shifty logic endures: There are two equally valid sides to every story. Every warped viewpoint must be weighed seriously for any grain of truth it might contain. If you shout loudly enough, down is actually up. We’re now stuck with this legacy, and it’s so ingrained that it shows up even in the most unlikely places. In particular, you’ll find it in the villain origin story, a long-simmering trend that exploded with Todd Phillips’ 2019 Batman-nemesis apologia Joker. This month, Craig Gillespie’s Cruella hops on the backstory bandwagon. Cruella devises a biography for the 101 Dalmatians villainess Cruella de Vil, she of the spotted…

THREE WORDS CAME TO CASEY McQuiston while she was taking a bath: magic subway lesbians. The author has always been drawn to romances that seem a little impossible—ones that show that the power of love can transcend anything, even time and space. “I know that sounds very corny,” McQuiston says, gazing at the Manhattan skyline from a picnic table across the East River. But so what if it’s corny? Corny can be nice. Corny can make you feel good. Which is what McQuiston, 30, has set out to do with her fiction. Her 2019 debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, about the relationship between the Prince of Wales and America’s first son, was an instant and unexpected success: the book found an eager audience without any of the conventional…