Table of contents for PEOPLE Yearbook 2021 in People

“WHEN BEN REACHED OUT TO JENNIFER, THE TIMING WAS RIGHT FOR BOTH OF THEM”—A SOURCE CLOSE TO THE COUPLE “THEY HAVE BOTH MATURED, LEARNED FROM MISTAKES AND ARE STILL VERY ATTRACTED TO EACH OTHER”—A MUSIC SOURCE BENNIFER REBOOT! APRIL It’s sweet. It’s fizzy. It’s back. No, not the newly reformulated Coke Zero (though that, too, happened this year). Bennifer! Seventeen years after Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck broke off their engagement, the two are once again pouring on the PDA from Miami to N.Y.C., L.A. to Venice. “They are madly in love,” an insider told People in July. “They are the loves of each other’s lives.” The couple, who first met making the ill-fated 2003 rom-com Gigli, reconnected in April, the same month that Lopez and retired New York…

SCORCHING HEAT WAVES, droughts and devastating wildfires in the Pacific Northwest and southern Europe. Biblical floods in Germany and China. Record-shattering rains in the Northeast U.S. from back-to-back hurricanes Henri and Ida. Clearly 2021 was a year climate change—exacerbated by human activity—got real for millions of people around the world. “It was impossible to ignore,” Rachel Licker, a senior climate scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, told CNN. “This is what we can expect more of, especially if we don’t get off fossil fuels and invest in measures to build our resilience as soon as possible.” As Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Tayhoe noted to National Geographic, “The numbers are horrifying… the deadly German floods… were nine times more likely as a result of a changing climate. With…

CICELY TYSON | 96 “I was determined to do all I could to alter the narrative about Black people,” Tyson wrote in her 2021 memoir Just As I Am, “to change the way Black women in particular were perceived, by reflecting our dignity.” She did precisely that for 60 years. Born in New York to West Indian parents, Tyson was a young, divorced mother and a model before acting. After a string of small parts, she broke out as Rebecca, the heart of a sharecropper family in 1972’s Sounder, earning an Oscar nod. She breathed life into historical dramas: The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), as a formerly enslaved centenarian, and Roots (1977)—both Emmy winners. Onscreen she was Harriet Tubman and Coretta Scott King but also a crime boss in the 1997 gangster flick Hoodlum. (Offscreen, she was…

FRIENDS REUNION MAY 27 Could fans be any more ecstatic? Nope. After a 17-year TV absence—let’s say that they were on a break—the cast of Friends reunited for the first time on HBO Max. One by one, David Schwimmer, Lisa Kudrow, Jennifer Aniston, Matt LeBlanc, Courteney Cox and Matthew Perry strolled onto the meticulously re-created Burbank Friends sets. “Does Courteney still have her lines written on this table?” asked LeBlanc in Monica’s kitchen. The gathering revealed many such private insights—among the juiciest: that Schwimmer and Aniston had a real-life flirtation—but it also reminded fans why they loved the landmark sitcom, which ran from 1994 to 2004. Most essential (besides tissues for the teary-eyed former castmates) was the obvious camaraderie the six fell into immediately despite, as viewers were told,…

THE WORLD WAS RIVETED on Hennepin County Courthouse in Minneapolis on April 20 as jurors weighed the fate of white ex-police officer Derek Chauvin, charged in the death of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. Viral video taken by then-17-year-old Darnella Frazier had captured the shocking incident on May 25, 2020: For nine minutes and 29 seconds, a handcuffed Floyd, 46—arrested for allegedly passing a counterfeit $20 bill—lay face down while Chauvin knelt impassively on his neck. As Floyd’s life ebbed away, he cried out for his dead mother and repeatedly gasped, “I can’t breathe.” The footage fueled a national reckoning on social justice, race and police brutality, galvanizing the Black Lives Matter movement and propelling millions of people of all backgrounds into the streets to protest. During three…

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FOR MORE THAN two centuries U.S. presidential candidates have accepted election results without violence. And in only rare instances would an outgoing President or a defeated rival fail to show up for the Inauguration ceremony that not only swears in a new Administration but also celebrates the endurance of American democracy. But as he demonstrated for four precedent-thwarting years, Donald J. Trump is not like others who have held the nation’s highest office. On Jan. 6, 2021—the day Congress met to count the Electoral College vote with then-Vice President Mike Pence presiding—Trump spoke on the White House Ellipse to a crowd of supporters. “We won,” he told them, repeating a falsehood that had been his mantra since election night. “We won in a landslide.” A refresher: In the November…

THE QUEEN CARRIES ON SPRING With the dignity and sense of occasion that she has shown throughout decades on the throne, Queen Elizabeth said goodbye to her husband of 73 years, Prince Philip, who died April 9 (see page 96). COVID protocol dictated that no more than 30 guests attend the April 17 funeral at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle. And though she was seated by herself for safety reasons, the sight of the monarch as a new widow in a pew all alone had a particular poignancy. “Her way will be to remain as steady and calm as possible,” predicted former palace spokesman Charles Anson. And sure enough, within two weeks the Queen had returned to official duties and was seen smiling warmly during virtual audiences with…

IN AUGUST AMERICA’S longest war came to an end: President Joe Biden ordered the last 2,500 U.S. troops out of Afghanistan after almost 20 years, $2 trillion spent and approximately 170,000 dead, including 2,400 U.S. service members and 47,000 civilians. Polls showed Americans favored leaving Afghanistan about as strongly as they had supported the war when President George W. Bush launched it in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The goal then was to rout al-Qaeda, whose founder Osama bin Laden had based operations there, and to topple the Taliban government that shielded the terrorist group. By December 2001 the Taliban was in retreat and a president, Hamid Karzai, was in place. But America’s presence dragged on amid civil war between the U.S.-backed government and a…