Table of contents for December 4, 2023 in TIME Magazine

Things are looking up for Vladimir Putin. Ukraine’s much-vaunted counteroffensive has made little progress, heightening fears in the West that U.S. and European taxpayers are bankrolling an increasingly costly stalemate. Russian counterattacks have accomplished little, but the ability of well-entrenched Russian forces to absorb Ukrainian blows without buckling leaves the Kremlin in control of about 18% of Ukraine’s land. Russia has expanded its missile strikes to the highest levels this year and boosted its domestic production of missiles and ammunition. Significant material support from North Korea and more drones from Iran are helping. Putin can also celebrate the fallout from Israel’s war with Hamas Putin can also celebrate the fallout from Israel’s war with Hamas. The U.S. and Europe are mightily distracted by the carnage in Gaza, which is…

STEPHANE GERMAIN ‘WE MUST TRACK CARBON LIKE WE TRACK SUGAR INTAKE. IF EVERY PURCHASE DECISION WE MADE CAME WITH A LABEL, LIKE WE HAVE FOR SUGAR ON FOOD PRODUCTS, WE COULD ALL MAKE INFORMED CHOICES.’ Germain is founder and president of GHGSat, which operates the world’s leading constellation of greenhouse-gas-monitoring space satellites. Its data help industries and companies better measure and control their emissions. MINA HASMAN ‘Direct air capture urgently requires more investment and policy support. If applied universally across the built environment, [pulling CO2 from the atmosphere] could be transformative.’ Sustainability director at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), the architectural firm behind One World Trade Center and the Burj Khalifa. This year, Hasman’s team launched a system that measures carbon emitted during a building’s construction and throughout its…

Nikki Haley had heard worse than the snipes from one of the three men standing to her left onstage. As a candidate for governor of South Carolina in 2010, she was attacked with anti-Indian-American slurs. Three years later, the state Democratic Party chairman said she should go “back to wherever the hell she came from,” ignoring that she was born in South Carolina’s Bamberg County Hospital. When she was the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., the Secretary of State allegedly deployed sexist words that begin with a B and a C. To her face. But in Miami on Nov. 8, when the presidential candidate found her daughter’s social media usage a topic at the third debate of second-tier GOP contenders, Haley stood on the verge of boiling over. “Leave my…

Have you ever felt numb, overwhelmed, or excessively agitated after seeing the torrent of suffering shown on the news, internet, and social media? I know I have—and I recently learned that this feeling has a name: compassion fatigue. For decades, researchers have studied compassion fatigue among health care workers, therapists, social workers, veterinarians, and other people who are frequently exposed to other people’s trauma at work. Over time, practitioners can develop emotional exhaustion or even PTSD-like symptoms—including difficulty sleeping, anxiety, and feeling triggered by troubling stories or memories—as a result of immersing themselves in the problems of others, studies show. While compassion fatigue hasn’t been widely studied among the general population, experts I interviewed agreed that it can affect anyone, even those who are witnessing trauma from afar. That…

For a taste of the United Arab Emirates, try the cappuccino at Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel. At around $25, it’s a quality cup of coffee, but the gold flakes that come sprinkled on top are its primary selling point. Every turn in the Palace, one of the most expensive hotels ever built, radiates opulence: marble from floor to ceiling, more than 1,000 crystal chandeliers, gold trim, and a choice of Michelin-starred restaurants on site. Just across the street is the source of the immense wealth that created this place, and transformed the UAE from a desolate patch of desert to a country with a higher GDP per capita (adjusted for purchasing power) than the U.S.: the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, or ADNOC. In contrast to the lavish hotel,…

PAUL DICKINSON ‘LIKE CIGARETTES, WE SHOULD BAN THE ADVERTISING OF HIGH-CARBON PRODUCTS.’ Dickinson is founder of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), a leader in encouraging corporate transparency on climate and environmental impact, whose system is used by more than 20,000 companies. In 2023, the CDP announced it will add plastics to its disclosure framework. BILL GATES Gates is the founder of Breakthrough Energy (BE), considered among the most influential early-stage venture-capital funds in the energy and decarbonization space. This August, BE began raising $1 billion for its third venture fund, with the aim of increasing the number of companies it invests in by 40%, bringing it to a total of 140 initiatives across a variety of industries, from energy to agriculture. As Gates told TIME last year, “The innovation…

RACHEL L. LEVINE ‘CLIMATE CHANGE IS A PUBLIC-HEALTH CRISIS. EVERY DOLLAR INVESTED IN PREVENTION, PREPARATION, AND RESILIENCE IS A VITAL STEP TOWARD A HEALTHIER FUTURE.’ Levine is Assistant Secretary for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, where she oversees the Office of Climate Change and Health Equity and the Office of Environmental Justice, which are aimed at helping the U.S. health sector decarbonize. MELINDA FRENCH GATES French Gates co-leads the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which at the end of 2022 announced it would invest $1.4 billion by 2025 to help farmers in lower-income countries adapt to climate change. As she wrote when introducing a white paper released this summer on reforming global finance to help those most vulnerable to climate impacts, “This is about more than…

The mid-20th century wife is such a vivid type in popular art that we think we’ve got her down cold; in our minds, she’s usually a June Cleaver cliché. But in real life the midcentury wife faced daunting expectations. She may have worked outside the home during wartime, but more often than not, the wife life changed all that. She was supposed to bear children and raise them to be cheerful, productive adults, all while keeping a spotless home and having dinner on the table by 6. Stressed out from all of that? Barbiturates, Benzos, and booze were the dysfunctional solution. The midcentury wife couldn’t win, though we all know of women who kicked free of those expectations, sometimes at great cost to themselves or those around them. These women…

Minnesota homemaker Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) has a nice, quiet life. Her husband (David Rysdahl) worships her. Their preteen daughter (Sienna King) is Dot’s whole world. The only apparent obstacle to her happiness is a haughty mother-in-law (Jennifer Jason Leigh), who owns America’s largest debt-collection agency and thinks Dot is trash. Then one day, a pair of thugs show up at the Lyons’ doorstep with the aim of dragging Dot back to a painful past she never disclosed to her family. She doesn’t go quietly. So begins the fifth season of FX’s Coen Brothers–inspired crime anthology Fargo. A follow-up to Season 4’s ambitious yet cluttered 1950s-set exploration of American identity, it’s a tighter, funnier return to form for creator Noah Hawley. This time, gender and class are the battlefields…

When you think of your childhood, is there anything that would help us imagine the life of an Iranian family? In Iran, family relationships are not only strong among close relatives but also with the extended family members. My mother’s family was politically active and engaged. In the 1979 revolution, a significant portion of my mother’s family and some members of my father’s family were among those imprisoned and executed. These events directly linked the world of my childhood to the world of struggle and resistance. Are there things about being an Iranian woman that people might not know? My mother refrained from even wearing black socks, let alone dresses. She wore lively and colorful clothing. The religious government forced us, as children of that happy mother, to wear dark…

Suella Braverman, the controversial Home Secretary in British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s Cabinet, was fired after making divisive comments about pro-Palestinian protesters. She will be replaced by James Cleverly, who had been Foreign Secretary, and former Prime Minister David Cameron will replace him. CROSSING DOWNING STREET The Nov. 13 announcement came after Braverman wrote an article in the Times of London in which she claimed that police were “playing favorites” and not enforcing the law when it came to pro-Palestinian protests, and referred to protesters as “hate marchers.” Braverman wrote on X on Nov. 14 that Sunak hadn’t honored policy agreements they’d made when she took the position, and said the protests were a breaking point: “I have become hoarse urging you to consider legislation to ban the hate…

You might be hard-pressed to find anyone who actually likes their power company; rates just keep going up even as many utilities drag their feet on allowing renewable-energy projects to connect to the grid. There’s a reason for that: utilities are among the last monopolies allowed in the U.S., so many consumers have no choice about what company sells them their electricity. But doing anything about your utility’s problems is a herculean undertaking, as Maine environmental groups discovered when they asked voters on Nov. 7 to replace the state’s investor-owned utilities, Central Maine Power and Versant, with a consumer-owned nonprofit utility called Pine Tree Power. Around 70% of voters voted no, a result that may seem surprising in a state where the two investor-owned utilities are widely reviled; Central Maine…

KARA HURST ‘WE’VE SEEN THAT JOB CREATION AND LOCAL ECONOMIC INVESTMENT ARE REGULARLY A RESULT OF RENEWABLE-ENERGY PROJECTS.’ Hurst is chief sustainability officer at Amazon, which leads the world in corporate renewables purchasing, and this year made significant investments in direct air capture technology, which pulls CO2 from the air. Hurst also spearheaded The Climate Pledge, a group of more than 400 companies that have pledged to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040. ROBIN ZENG Zeng is founder, chairman, and general manager of CATL, the global leader in battery design and manufacturing for electric passenger vehicles. The company makes up 37% of the global EV-battery market, supplying automakers including Tesla, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and Ford. Zeng has said that “innovation is in the genes of CATL.” As of this year,…

The previous evening’s storm clouds have cleared to bathe Tokyo in crisp sunshine. Tadashi Yanai, Japan’s richest man and the founder of $73 billion apparel empire Uniqlo, is perusing the art books that line his wood-paneled office, which, like most of his firm’s cavernous headquarters, commands sweeping vistas of the Sumida River. Finally, he retrieves one he believes will be of particular interest: a tome of historical photographs curated by TIME that features John F. Kennedy on the cover in deep conversation with his brother Bobby during the Cuban missile crisis. “I particularly like his saying ‘Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country,’” says Yanai, 74, carefully replacing the book in its stand. “That’s what I want to talk about today.”…