People PEOPLE Yearbook 2022

2022: What Was New SHARED SONGS, FILMS AND SHOWS HELPED WITH A FRESH START Is everybody back up in the building?/ It’s been a minute, tell me how you’re healin’. After a grim few years, people were ready for uplift, and stars like Lizzo (who wrote the above lyrics in this year’s “About Damn Time”) and Beyoncé obliged. When Bey’s Renaissance invited listeners to “release ya wiggle,” it felt like a cultural reset. It didn’t change the fact that in 2022 America passed the milestone of 1 million lost to COVID. But amid that tragedy, people were ready to start feeling normal again. Top Gun: Maverick proved a $1.5 billion draw back to movie theaters. As offices refilled, the series Severance offered an eerie vision of work-life balance and strategic forgetting. The…

A turbulent show for turbulent times, the dark hit Euphoria has in two seasons captured an HBO audience second only to that of Game of Thrones. It has also earned nine Emmys, including two for Zendaya (in stripes, with the cast at the January premiere) for playing narrator Rue Bennett, a teen who evades rehab efforts. A beautifully shot maelstrom of one California town’s ugly realities—drug addiction, self-harm, mental illness, family dysfunction, toxic masculinity and violence—Euphoria became Twitter’s most-discussed show, with critics bemoaning the nudity, uninhibited sex and glorification of drug use, while others felt it was compulsively watchable entertainment. From the set, some extras complained about long hours and poor conditions. (“There were never any formal inquiries raised,” noted an HBO spokesperson.) Jacob Elordi, who plays Nate, told The…

“THESE ARE THE SECONDS OF PURE HAPPINESS, WHEN YOU JUST FEEL THAT YOU’VE DONE THE ABSOLUTE BEST AT THE RIGHT TIME”—ANNA SHCHERBAKOVA, 2022 WOMEN’S FIGURE SKATING GOLD MEDALIST THE OLYMPICS TELL TALES of triumph and heartbreak, as athletes train exhaustively—then rise or fall in a fleeting spotlight. At the 2022 Winter Games in Beijing, that glare burned on 15-year-old Kamila Valieva of Russia. Favored to take gold in the marquee event of women’s figure skating, she had tested positive at the trials for a banned heart drug, trimetazidine, which may enhance endurance. After a suspension, Valieva won reinstatement on appeal—she claimed she might have been contaminated by her grandfather’s meds—and tested negative in Beijing. Still, Olympic organizers said they would not hold a ceremony if Valieva earned a medal. She didn’t.…

THE 94TH ACADEMY AWARDS ceremony swung from the inspiring to the embarrassing: Ariana DeBose became the first openly queer woman of color to win an acting Oscar when she took Best Supporting Actress for her dynamic Anita in Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, and Troy Kotsur’s warm supporting turn in Best Picture winner CODA made him the second deaf actor to win an Oscar (his CODA costar Marlee Matlin was the first). “Don’t worry, Marlee, I won’t drop any F-bombs in my speech today,” Kotsur joked in a moving acceptance delivered in ASL. Sadly these achievements were less talked-about than the first known physical assault in Oscar history. After Chris Rock made an awkward joke about the 1997 film G.I. Jane and Jada Pinkett Smith’s shaved head—the actress suffers from…

“THE FIGHT IS HERE; I NEED AMMUNITION, NOT A RIDE”—VOLODYMYR ZELENSKYY, WHEN THE U.S. OFFERED TO EVACUATE HIM AFTER THE INVASION ON FEB. 24, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a “special military operation” in Ukraine. In fact, it was a full-scale invasion of an independent democracy that had left the Soviet Union in 1991. The two countries had waged intermittent war since the Ukrainians toppled their corrupt Moscow-backed government in 2014. Now Russia was launching missiles and air strikes across Ukraine, followed by a massive ground invasion. Many analysts—and Putin—thought the David-Goliath mismatch would end in a matter of days. Indeed, Russia made early gains, reduced historic cities like Mariupol and Kharkiv to rubble piles and sparked Europe’s worst refugee crisis since World War II, as 7.4 million Ukrainians fled. There…

“I AM HERE STANDING ON THE SHOULDERS OF GENERATIONS OF AMERICANS WHO NEVER HAD ANYTHING CLOSE TO THIS KIND OF OPPORTUNITY”—KETANJI BROWN JACKSON MERRIMENT IS RARE AT Senate confirmation hearings, which more often feature partisan posturing, wonky policy discussions and answers best described as judicious. But when Ketanji Brown Jackson faced the Judiciary Committee as President Joe Biden’s choice to succeed retiring Stephen Breyer as the 116th justice—and first Black woman—on the U. S. Supreme Court, a New York Times photographer captured an image of unbridled joy: Jackson’s daughter Leila, 17, beaming proudly at her mom. The moment encapsulated a new promise for generations of aspiring legal minds to come. A cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School who served for eight years as a U.S. District Court judge in Washington,…