Indice dei contenuti per August 2, 2021 in TIME Magazine

WHAT YOU SAID ABOUT … A GAMES LIKE NO OTHER Readers found themselves limbering up for the Tokyo Olympics with the stories in TIME’s July 19/July 26 issue. Mike Karpfen of Hesperus, Colo., said the “fascinating” series of athlete profiles inspired him “to watch the Games for the first time in years.” Tennis player Naomi Osaka’s essay reflecting on mental health and self-care in the sports world sparked a particularly passionate response. “Thank you for continuing this important conversation about mental health awareness in the workplace,” New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray wrote on Twitter. “Doesn’t she have the right to a sick day like everyone else without disclosing the details to the public?” tweeted Lisa Johnson of Boston. “Yes. Of course!” ‘Every good wish for this young…

CHANTING “FREEDOM!” AND “ENOUGH!” thousands of Cubans marched on July 11 in the island’s largest antigovernment protest in decades. The pandemic’s impact on the state-run economy, already struggling under Trump-era sanctions, has sparked the nation’s worst food and medicine shortages in 25 years. Empty supermarket shelves, rising COVID-19 infections and recent access to social media, where Cubans now openly share their outrage, all helped foment unprecedented protests against the communist regime. ONLINE DISSENT President Miguel Díaz-Canel quickly blamed the demonstrations on the U.S.’s “policy of economic suffocation.” Since then, police have erected checkpoints across Havana and the government has restricted access to social media and messaging apps like WhatsApp and Facebook, highlighting the critical role Internet access played in the unrest. “This couldn’t have happened a few years ago,”…

DIED Gloria Richardson THERE ARE MANY LEADERS from the civil rights era who remain all too often overlooked, despite their work carrying significant weight in the fight for racial equality. Gloria Richardson, who died on July 16 at 99, is one such figure. Richardson was heavily involved in civil rights activism in the city of Cambridge, Md.—where she was captured in an iconic photograph (above) pushing away a rifle in the hands of a National Guardsman during a 1963 sit-in protest—and helped organize demonstrations championing issues like housing, jobs and health care access for the Black community. She has often been credited as the first woman to lead an extended grassroots movement outside of the Deep South. “Racism is ingrained in this country,” Richardson told the Washington Post in…

“EMPATHY IS ONE OF THE VALUES WE’VE HAD from our founding.” That’s what Chelsea MacDonald, SVP of people and operations at Ada, a tech startup that builds customer-service platforms, told me when we first got on the phone for this story in June. When the company was in its early stages, with about 50 people, empathy was “a bit more ad hoc,” because you could bump into colleagues at lunch. But that was pre-pandemic, and before a hiring surge. Now, MacDonald says, empathy is built on communication (as many as five times a week, she communicates in some way to the entire company about empathy), through tools (specifically, one that tracks whom people communicate with most and who gets left out), through intimacy (cultivated through special-interest groups) and through…

‘I’m a fighter.’ Growing up in San Francisco, Victoria Eng, left, and her brother Andrew Eng, top, pictured in Pacifica, Calif., on June 15, learned that respecting their elders was part of their Chinese culture. And they had frequent chances to express that value, as their grandparents picked them up from school nearly every day and cared for them while their parents worked. When violence against Asian-American elders rose drastically during the pandemic, Victoria was appalled—and when her own grandmother was attacked, she felt helpless. On May 4, Chui Fong Eng, center, ventured into Chinatown for the first time in over a year to buy groceries. While waiting at a bus stop, the 84-year-old was stabbed through her right arm with a blade that then entered her chest and punctured a lung. The Engs clung to…

‘IT SENDS A MESSAGE OF TOTAL INTIMIDATION: DON’T REPORT. DON’T TELL THE TRUTH.’SWATI CHATURVEDI, Indian investigative journalist whose phone was targeted in the Pegasus spyware hack that affected media figures, politicians and activists, in an interview with TIME published July 19 ‘I’m writing this not as the prince I was born but as the man I have become.’PRINCE HARRY, in a July 19 statement announcing the 2022 publication of a “definitive” and “wholly truthful” memoir 2 Number of Americans, a father and son, sent to prison on July 19 for their role in the 2019 escape of former Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn from Japan, where he is wanted on charges of financial misconduct that he denies ‘As a society, we must dare to stop and ask ourselves why we want…

More officials report ‘Havana syndrome’ The U.S. State Department is now “vigorously investigating” reports from two dozen spies, diplomats and other officials based in Vienna of symptoms—including headaches, vision issues and vertigo—similar to those previously reported by U.S. officials in Havana in 2016 and 2017, the New Yorker reported on July 16. U.S. life expectancy drops in 2020 Driven mostly by the COVID-19 pandemic, the average American’s life expectancy fell by 1.5 years from 2019 to 2020, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on July 21. The decrease was especially pronounced among Black and Hispanic populations. Hungary’s PM calls for vote on LGBTQ law Prime Minister Viktor Orban proposed a referendum on a new law banning LGBTQ educational content on July 21, to ask the Hungarian…

IT’S A WILDLIFE EXPEDITION THAT HAS CAPTIVATED THE globe: a herd of 15 rogue elephants trekking more than 300 miles from their home in Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, near China’s border with Laos. On their journey, they have pilfered from grain stores, scoffed mountains of corn and pineapples, and caused over $1 million of damage as they amble slowly through farmland and villages. The elephants’ antics have been highly engaging. Millions across China—and all around the world—have followed 24-hour livestreams shot by a dozen swarming drones. One popular stream showed a calf trying to clamber out from under a snoozing adult during a group nap; another calf, trying to drink water, plunged headfirst into a pond. Particularly popular footage showed some of the herd appearing drunk after feasting on fermented…

ADRIENNE BARNARD HAS WORKED in human resources since 2004, and has seen all manner of concerns and requests from workers. But Barnard, now senior vice president of people operations at Boston tech startup Mainstay, recently found herself taken aback at how emboldened some employees had become. “There’s a sense of entitlement that’s building,” says Barnard, who’s had to deal with issues like remote workers expressing dissatisfaction with the system the company used to deliver them free lunches. “These employees are recognizing, ‘You need me, and if I leave, it’s going to be hard to replace me.’” Employees in many industries are in a position of power that they haven’t experienced in years, as the economy swiftly rebounds from the pandemic and businesses struggle to recruit and retain enough workers…

ON JULY 17, BRITNEY SPEARS TOOK TO INSTAGRAM for a broadside against critics of the spunky dancing videos she shares on the platform. The profanity-laced missive touched on how even though she’d been hurt by her support system, she still had hope. Not to be ignored were the two potent words I quit, emphasized by four exclamation points. It’s unknown whether Spears was quitting music or just over trying to please people. But the note echoed a statement by her now ex-manager Larry Rudolph, who wrote in his recent resignation letter of “her intention to officially retire.” While her plea for agency highlights recent revelations of her utter lack of it, both in her conservatorship hearings and in this year’s documentary Framing Britney Spears, it also brings up a…

PIA NEGRO’S FAMILY HAS LIVED IN A CASTLE IN Erftstadt, in western Germany, for 300 years. They have spent the past 30 years restoring it to its former glory. But they left it in minutes on July 15, evacuating at around 4 a.m. as the worst floods to hit the country in centuries rushed toward their home. “We couldn’t bring anything—not the very old furniture, not even photos that are highly emotional, just our phones,” says Negro, 32. The castle’s 40 inhabitants, including Negro’s family and renters, had spent the previous day moving furniture to higher floors and went to bed that night once the rains had stopped. But as they slept, muddy waters continued to rise in two nearby rivers. Soon after the residents evacuated, the castle and surrounding…

CLOSE TO 60 DEMOCRATS IN THE TEXAS house flew to Washington, D.C., on July 12 to stall the passage of two GOP-backed bills that would restrict access to voting across the state. As of July 21, the lawmakers remained in the capital, having met with Vice President Kamala Harris and members of Congress to spotlight the flood of restrictive GOP-sponsored voting bills nationwide and to urge congressional action to combat them. “We are holding the line,” state representative Trey Martinez Fischer tells TIME. “If Republicans are silencing our voices here [in Texas], they’ll do it anywhere in America.” The lawmakers’ plan hit a snag when six tested positive for COVID-19 after arriving in D.C., forcing the group to isolate. Among them is representative Celia Israel, who had planned to…

HEATHER MCGHEE WAS COOKING DINNER IN her Brooklyn apartment in January as she opened a YouTube link to watch Joe Biden deliver his first speech on race as the President. As she bustled around the kitchen, Biden recited a line that seemed so familiar that she nearly dropped her wineglass. “We’ve bought the view that America is a zero-sum game in many cases: ‘If you succeed, I fail,’” Biden said. But, he continued, “When any one of us is held down, we’re all held back.” McGhee’s first book, The Sum of Us, was about to hit shelves in February, and she’d shared copies of it with some Biden advisers. The book argues that Americans have been fed a “zero-sum story” that says progress for people of color will take…

Xue Vang had long known that his job deicing planes, loading bags and chocking wheels at the Missoula airport was dangerous, especially in the Montana winter, when blinding snow and rain obscure the spinning engines that can suck in a human body. But this past winter, the conditions at Unifi, which services planes for United and Delta, became intolerable. Because of the pandemic, understaffing was so bad that Vang was simultaneously handling two or three planes on the “ramp,” or tarmac, while making sure new trainees didn’t get inhaled into the engines. One day, Vang’s colleague Jared Bonney was complaining that he’d been promised a raise for years that never materialized. “I was like, ‘Join the club,’” Vang recalls. Bonney’s pay was capped at $10.40 an hour; Vang, whose job was…

HOLLYWOOD BEGAN TO TAKE NOTICE SOON after I published my debut novel Detransition, Baby—which follows a trans woman, a cis woman and a trans woman who has detransitioned as they try to form an unconventional family—in early 2021. One of the calls was from the actor Tommy Dorfman. I figured Tommy would ask about a role in a potential adaptation. But no—it turned out Tommy just wanted to connect with me as a fellow queer storyteller trying to navigate the waters of the film industry and a culture in flux. We talked for two hours: it was a rare, genuine call from an artist who simply wanted to bond over telling stories. Before then, I knew Tommy only by reputation, as the actor who rose to fame in 2017 in…

What was a typical day like for you as you prepared for the bee this year? I try to do about 13,000 words, which is about seven hours of spelling, a day. I do school all year, six days a week, six hours a day, so that leaves a little bit more time, especially compared to two [or] three hours of basketball. My flexible school schedule, because I’m homeschooled, has really been a big help in all of this. What was the key to your win? Luck. I can’t know all the words in the whole dictionary, but I know a good portion of them—like, most of them, probably. But still, I can forget a word now and then. So a bit of luck and also lots of skill. You’ve…