Índex per January 17, 2022 a TIME Magazine

HE’S PRESIDED OVER THE ROLLOUT OF $2 trillion in health care funding and stimulus payments, seen the unemployment rate drop to 4.2%, made COVID-19 vaccines available for free to everyone in the country over 5 years old, and signed a trillion-dollar infrastructure law. But voters, fatigued by the uncertainties of the ongoing pandemic, have seemed reluctant to give the President credit; Joe Biden enters the New Year down in the polls, with nearly a quarter of Americans still hesitant to get vaccinated, and a recovering economy strained by inflation and an unpredictable supply chain. That puts him in a precarious position at the start of 2022. With an evenly divided Senate and a narrow majority in the House, Democrats may lose control of Congress in the midterm elections on Nov.…

France plans to ‘piss off’ unvaccinated As his government seeks to pass legislation tightening rules surrounding vaccine passes, French President Emmanuel Macron drew criticism on Jan. 5 after the publication of an interview with the newspaper Le Parisien, in which he said that he “really [wants] to piss off” people who remain unvaccinated. Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes guilty Holmes, founder and CEO of failed biotech company Theranos, which raised billions for devices that promised to test for hundreds of diseases from a drop of blood, was found guilty on four of 11 federal fraud charges on Jan. 3 after a months-long trial. She faces up to 20 years in prison for each charge. Outrage in India over ‘auction’ site Mumbai police on Jan. 4 arrested two people accused of organizing…

CHEF MASSIMO BOTTURA DIDN’T BRING HIS chef’s jacket to the photo shoot. Which is just as well, considering that simple chef’s whites could never convey what this exuberant bon vivant has become since opening the doors of his three-Michelin-starred, two-time winner of the best restaurant in the world, Osteria Francescana in Modena, Italy, in 1995. His culinary empire now extends from Dubai to Beverly Hills, with a new hotel in Modena that serves as an extension of his own home, with walls hung with works by Ai Weiwei, Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. He is the author of two books and one of the stars of Netflix’s cult foodie docuseries Chef’s Table. But out of all those successes, Italy’s most celebrated chef says the pinnacle of his achievements is Milan’s…

I KNOW “THE REVEREND AND the rock star” sounds like the start of a joke, not the description of a friendship. Improbable as it was, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died on Dec. 26, and I did have a friendship, and it’s been one of the blessings of my life. Not just to know him, but to have the chance to learn from him and to try to get a grip of the radical Christianity he preached even, at times, against the orthodoxy of his own church. He taught me that prayer is not an escape from real life, but a passage to it. And his understanding of scripture demanded he afflict the comfortable as surely as he comforted the afflicted. “Do it!” he once chided me, “or I will personally…

BELL HOOKS WAS A RADICAL FEMINIST, SCHOLAR AND author who spent the ’90s publishing about a book a year. Like a lot of young Black women, I thought of myself as part of her army. Daughters of her thought, ready to integrate her text into our public and personal lives. I fought to have my name published in lowercase letters like hers. Her seminal Ain’t I a Woman was a field guide toward a liberation that not only considered gender but centered it. Like the Black feminist scholars who’d informed her, giants like Audre Lorde, hooks—who died Dec. 15 at 69—produced work that provided tools. She devoted entire books to Black interior life and love, the kind of work feminist scholars avoid, lest they risk not being taken seriously. And…

IN 2022, INVESTORS WHO WANT TO address climate change should focus on one simple but essential goal: active stock ownership. They should engage with companies on both sides of the energy transition—those heading in the right direction and those falling woefully short—and move away from blame and toward responsibility. Engine No. 1 spent the first six months of 2021 in a fiercely contested proxy battle with ExxonMobil, trying to place four new members with industry expertise and experience in transitioning away from fossil fuels on a board lacking in both. We were successful in winning three of those seats, and the company’s behavior has begun to change. Before we launched our campaign, Exxon was aiming to increase oil production from 3.7 million barrels per day to 5 million by 2025.…

THERE ARE TWO VERSIONS OF A BMW factory in the medieval town of Regensburg, Germany. One is a physical plant that cranks out hundreds of thousands of cars a year. The other is a virtual 3-D replica, accessed by screen or VR headset, in which every surface and every bit of machinery looks exactly the same as in real life. Soon, whatever is happening in the physical factory will be reflected inside the virtual one in real time: frames being dipped in paint; doors being sealed onto hinges; avatars of workers carrying machinery to its next destination. The latter factory is an example of a “digital twin”: an exact digital re-creation of an object or environment. The concept might at first seem like sci-fi babble, or even a frivolous experiment:…

You play a detective investigating the murder of a pop star (Dave Franco) at his high school reunion afterparty. It’s a whodunit but also a comedy. Was there a lot of improv? Yeah, they let me add icing on the cake. Like, I brought these cute little trinkets to the interrogations to make the suspects feel more comfortable. In one scene, Ike [Barinholtz, who plays a suspect] and I were messing around, and I was really getting mad at him for talking mess about Steve Urkel, who I had a crush on. And that’s in the show. Wait, you had a real-life crush on Steve Urkel? Girl, for years. Him and Mr. T were the only Black men I know of that had their own series. Did you know…

TIME’S PERSON OF THE YEAR picks always spark spirited conversations, and the magazine’s 2021 choice of Elon Musk was no exception. Perhaps the most notable back-and-forth occurred on social media, with U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, tweeting on Dec. 13: “Let’s change the rigged tax code so The Person of the Year will actually pay taxes and stop freeloading off everyone else.” Musk responded by claiming he will pay “more taxes than any American in history this year.” TIME’s other selections also got people talking: interim National Institutes of Health director Lawrence A. Tabak tweeted “well deserved” to the vaccine scientists being named Heroes of the Year for “developing a technology that has transformed the way we will prevent other diseases.” Civil rights lawyer Ben Crump applauded gymnast…

ON CHRISTMAS DAY, FRENCH GUIANA briefly became the center of the universe—or at least humanity’s understanding of it—when a European Ariane 5 rocket lifted off with a payload that represents $10 billion worth of hardware and 25 years of work, and on which the next generation of research into the origin of the cosmos depends. The spacecraft sent aloft that morning was the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s follow-on to the aging Hubble Space Telescope, widely considered the greatest space observatory ever built. Until now, at least. The Hubble’s work is best captured in the album of dazzling photos it has sent back over the years. But those pictures also reveal a shortcoming: Hubble sees in the ultraviolet and visible spectrums, allowing it to peer approximately 13.4 billion years back,…

THOUGH BETTY WHITE HAD BEEN A household name since the 1950s, it was her work on NBC’s The Golden Girls that cemented her status as an icon long before she died on Dec. 31 at 99. When the show premiered in 1985, White was a natural as the kindhearted Rose Nylund. She cleverly imbued Rose, an ever effervescent native of the fanciful St. Olaf, Minn., with a gullible naiveté, the perfect foil for her co-stars’ barbs and eye rolls. The Golden Girls aired for seven seasons, and White was nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Actress every year of its run. She won her third Primetime Emmy in its very first. Whether telling yet another St. Olaf story or doing one of her many selfless deeds, Rose just “wasn’t one…

In a sport that, more than any other in the U.S., doubles as religion, no other figure has shaped American football more completely than John Madden, who died on Dec. 28, at 85. “He was football,” said NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, in a statement that contained no empty platitudes or hyperbole, but only truth. As a coach, Madden—who led the Oakland Raiders from 1969 to 1978—won a Super Bowl and holds the highest winning percentage (at 75.9%) for an NFL coach with a minimum of 10 years on the sideline. As a video-game impresario, he connected new generations to football: his Madden NFL series, which debuted in 1988, has exceeded $4 billion in sales. And as a commentator, he explained the game to millions of viewers, while his own…

A DOMESTIC FOCUS for both the U.S. and Chinese governments lowers the odds of a big international conflict in 2022, but it leaves less potential leadership and coordination to respond to emerging crises. That’s bad news in a year that will be dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic, climate change and a number of regional geopolitical crises. 1. NO “ZERO COVID” We’re done with the pandemic, but it’s not yet done with us, and the finish line depends on where you live. Critically, China’s “zero COVID” policy will fail. In the developed world, the end is near. The highly transmissible Omicron variant is colliding with highly vaccinated populations that are bolstered by highly effective mRNA vaccines and COVID-19 treatments. That’s why the pandemic will likely become endemic for advanced industrial…

IF VIRUSES KNOW NO BORDERS, THEY have an equal disdain for human holidays. On Thanksgiving 2021, Dr. Rochelle Walensky shut off her phone for about 45 minutes and placed the turkey on the dining table to enjoy the holiday meal with her husband and three sons. When she turned the phone back on, she found, among the messages that had piled up, warnings that SARS-CoV-2 had morphed into a potentially dangerous new variant, identified in South Africa. Health officials there predicted that what would become known as the Omicron variant was much better at spreading than previous variants, and Walensky knew it was only a matter of time before Omicron cases would appear in the U.S. As director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Walensky’s job…

You’re starring in Michael Bay’s newest action thriller, Ambulance (April 8). Are the sets of his films as big and chaotic as the movies themselves? Mike reminds me of a 15-year-old kid with an unlimited imagination and an unlimited budget. He’s excited to show you his new cameras. He has a passion that I truly have not seen before. That’s saying a lot, because I just came from working with Lana Wachowski on The Matrix Resurrections. I’m really just making my rounds with eccentric directors in Hollywood. You play a veteran who can’t afford to pay his wife’s medical bills, so you and your brother (Jake Gyllenhaal) decide to rob a bank. When things go wrong, you hijack an ambulance carrying a wounded cop and an EMT. There are…

FIONA AND JANE JEAN CHEN HO Bonded by their shared experience of coming of age in Los Angeles in immigrant families, Fiona and Jane find their friendship challenged over the years by distance, romantic relationships and betrayal. (Jan. 4) OLGA DIES DREAMING XOCHITL GONZALEZ Prieto is a rising star in New York City politics and Olga is a wedding planner to the local elite, but their lives are turned upside down when their mother, a radical activist for Puerto Rico’s independence who left them as kids, returns to Brooklyn. (Jan. 4) TO PARADISE HANYA YANAGIHARA Tracing three narratives across distinct timelines, To Paradise follows the lives of characters who, despite being separated by centuries, find connection through the shared space of a Manhattan townhouse. (Jan. 11) MANIFESTO BERNARDINE EVARISTO Evaristo…

The Lost Daughter contains such emotionally complex, intricate material. Did you choose it specifically for the challenge? I chose it because Elena Ferrante spoke to me. When I first read her, I got a kind of shock. She was saying things that felt so true, things that as a culture we’ve agreed not to talk about. It was disturbing—and comforting. I thought it would be interesting to create a communal experience where you could actually hear these words spoken out loud. The movie directly confronts that which is truly disgusting—like when Leda (Olivia Colman) discovers the bowl of fruit in her room is rotten. What is the appeal of exploring the gross yet unavoidable aspects of life? I’m trying to get in touch with the unconscious—the character’s unconscious, the…

THE LAST TIME THE U.S. BOYCOTTED THE Olympics, China joined in—withdrawing from the 1980 Moscow Games along with at least 44 other nations. (The Soviet Union and its allies withheld athletes in turn from the 1984 Games in Los Angeles.) Four decades later, China is now the subject of a boycott. In December, the U.S., U.K., Canada and Australia announced a “diplomatic boycott”; no government officials will attend the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, though their athletes will still compete. OLYMPIC OUTCRY Calls to boycott the Beijing Games over China’s human-rights record came to a head in November after Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai leveled a sexual-assault allegation against a former top official of the Communist Party and then disappeared from public view, sparking international concern for her safety. Peng later…

DIED > Former Vogue editor Grace Mirabella, on Dec. 23, at 92. > Sarah Weddington, the lawyer who successfully argued Roe v. Wade, on Dec. 26, at 76. > Model and transgender activist April Ashley, on Dec. 27, at 86. RESIGNED Sudan’s Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok on Jan. 2 following mass pro-democracy protests criticizing a deal he made to share power with the military. RETURNED A man believed to be a North Korean gymnast to North Korea by way of the DMZ on Jan. 1, after previously defecting to the South in 2020, according to the South Korean military. PARDONED Homer Plessy—whose 1892 arrest for sitting in a whites-only train car in New Orleans led to the infamous “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling—by Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards…

The environmental crisis we’re facing can seem insurmountable. It’s true we’re falling behind in adapting to reality, and the window of opportunity is closing—but it’s also not too late. We just need to take concrete and immediate steps forward. To that end, we’ve asked industry and government leaders from around the world to share their thoughts on the 2022 goals that will help us avoid climate catastrophe. INSIDE THE TOP GEOPOLITICAL RISKS FOR 2022 PRO ATHLETES MUST STAND UP FOR FREEDOM AROUND THE WORLD HOW TO RETHINK THE RETURN TO THE OFFICE…

YOU BRING YOUR FEVERISH BABY TO THE hospital in the middle of the night. The nurse asks you to go home to get a flashlight. When the flashlight batteries give out, she resorts to a flickering candle to guide the insertion of an IV needle, delivering malaria medicine, into your baby’s hand. Maybe you don’t have a baby. Maybe you travel 14 miles a day by public bus to buy fresh fish to sell in your village. Every day, you must sell the fish before your ice melts and your inventory becomes worthless. In much of Africa, this is the norm. Almost half of the continent’s 1.3 billion population live without electricity, which destroys opportunities for education, jobs and adequate medical care. That’s why the U.N. has set the global…

No one really disputes the concept of political coattails: the biggest name on a ballot has some dragging fabric that can pull down-ballot contenders across the finish line. Well, it may turn out the favor goes both ways, and hyperlocal candidates can have a positive spillover on their colleagues up-ticket. In an analysis of seven must-win states from Democratic data nerds, it turns out that fielding down-ballot races has a statistically significant effect on boosting the headliners. In other words, having someone on the ballot for parochial races like school board can actually help the contenders for governor, Senator and even President. How much help they offer varies, from 0.4 percentage points to 2.3 percentage points, according to the BlueLabs analysis funded by Run for Something and For Our Future,…

Shonda Rhimes and I are deep into a conversation about what makes a healthy work environment when she has to stop me from saying something ridiculous. I’ve been waxing indignant about the professional world’s unfair assumption that employees with kids are not fully present at work. “But I’m not fully present at work,” Rhimes, who is TV’s highest-paid and, arguably, most successful showrunner, as well as a single mother of three daughters, interjects. We’re in the sitting room of a midtown Manhattan hotel suite that, with its tasteful cream-and-wood decor, feels like the natural habitat of Rhimes’ elegant Scandal heroine, Olivia Pope. I don’t need to have kids myself to sense she’s onto something, and I can see her mentally racing toward a more incisive read. “I don’t think anybody…

Your memoir chronicles your leukemia diagnosis in 2017, five years after losing your sister Nora to the same cancer. Throughout the book, you repeat this mantra: “You are not your sister.” Do you still find yourself saying that? I never said that to myself until I got sick and my doctors began to say it. They wanted me to believe that I could survive. Nora and I were so close. Being a younger sister, I tried to do everything she did when I was young. So the idea that they were saying to me, “You are not your sister” and I had to believe that, maybe, to survive, it was mind-blowing. I felt like I was betraying her. All they really meant was your disease under a microscope is…