Table of contents for March 9, 2026 in TIME Magazine

It’s hard not to hear echoes of our history The last photograph I can find on my phone of the TIME newsroom before we were dispersed by the COVID pandemic is of a giant wall of magazine covers. For months, we’d been working on our inaugural Women of the Year project. The picture shows the scale of that work: 100 TIME covers, marking the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S. by representing the most influential woman of each year dating back to 1920. That project, led by Kelly Conniff and Emma Barker Bonomo, interrogated long-held beliefs about what influence looks like, and was supposed to be a break from our usual schedule. That photo reminds me of what we did not know in 2020—including that the original Women…

When a Hong Kong court handed media tycoon and pro-democracy leader Jimmy Lai a 20-year jail term on national-security grounds on Feb. 9, his son called it a “death sentence” given Lai’s age, 78, and deteriorating health. Others saw the same bleak implications for freedoms in Hong Kong—and a glimpse into what could be in store for others Beijing views as troublesome. TEST CASE The “one country, two systems” principle governing Hong Kong was actually designed with Taiwan in mind. Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping advanced the framework as a way for Taiwan to peacefully reunite with the mainland, while “respect[ing] the realities and the existing system there.” In a bid to make the principle more palatable to Taiwan’s government, China applied it to Hong Kong and Macau after the…

Getting cold feet is inconvenient in many situations—including when you go to bed. “Our body temperature leads our sleep cycle,” says Kenneth Diller, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin who has researched thermoregulation. “Your body does best when the central area is cooler, and the peripheral is warmer.” Decades of research suggest that people with warm hands and feet fall asleep faster than those whose extremities are cold. Here’s why—plus the best ways to put it into practice. THE SCIENCE OF SNUG When you’re getting ready for sleep, your body needs to cool down to signal that it’s time to rest. Ironically, warming your hands and feet helps that happen, because your body uses them as heat-release zones, Diller says. When your extremities are…

The Environmental Protection Agency’s Feb. 12 repeal of its “endangerment finding”—which underpins all of its noteworthy climate rules—was framed by the Trump Administration as a big win for American industry. It might better be described as an ideological project that will result in marketplace confusion. Lawsuits will abound. States will try to step into the void, generating more lawsuits and more confusion. Meanwhile, companies will need to decide to what degree they respond. The endangerment finding was never the first, best solution to tackle climate change. It came about through a series of contortions. In the early 2000s, after the Bush Administration refused to make climate policy, Massachusetts sued, saying the EPA wasn’t doing its job under the 1970 Clean Air Act, passed when climate change was more scientific curiosity…

Behind the cover TIME sent photographer Benedict Evans across the nation to make portraits of citizens taking a stand against AI. At every stop, usually a home or office, Evans meticulously measured the distance between the backdrop, chair, and lighting, replicating the arrangement to lend the series a quiet cohesion. In an era when artificial intelligence is swiftly being embedded into the fabric of work, this photo shoot was intended to portray an uncompromising salute to human authorship. “I’m deeply skeptical of artificial intelligence, so I found it fascinating to travel the country and discuss our future with people who, for each of their different reasons, have made opposition to it central to their lives,” Evans says. “It was a two-week solo trip, with quite a punishing schedule—10 U.S. cities…

For 15 years, Dex Hunter-Torricke worked near the pinnacle of the tech industry. He wrote speeches for Mark Zuckerberg, handled crises for Elon Musk, and most recently headed up PR at Google DeepMind, where he spun optimistic stories about how AI was leading the world toward a better future. Now he tells TIME that he “only told half the story.” AI, he now says, will likely lead to mass job losses, and geopolitical upheaval within the next decade. Tech leaders lobbied against major regulations and argued publicly that AI will unlock medical discoveries, empower individuals, and boost economic growth. But Hunter-Torricke—who helped engineer those narratives—says the industry downplays the chances that AI will erode democracy, increase economic inequality, and inflame international conflict. “We are sleepwalking into disaster,” he says, criticizing…

Today’s debate over the future of higher education is often framed as a choice between diversity and meritocracy, as if universities must choose between the identity and the quality of their students. But while that paradigm fits into the extreme partisan politics of today, a better question may center on the role of wealth in the admission process. What if we could design admission policies that are more meritocratic and increase socioeconomic diversity? The tension is reflected in TIME’s new ranking of the World’s Top Universities, in partnership with data firm Statista. The ranking places emphasis on the extent to which students achieve extraordinary success, for instance in patenting new inventions or rising to leadership roles in business. It’s structured around three pillars: academic capacity and performance (via statistics like…

The mark of a great, tough book may not be how many literature classes it’s taught in but how many film or TV adaptations you can drape on its branches without breaking them. Dramatizations are tricky business: no film-viewing experience can match the way an individual imagination—yours or mine—brings a writer’s words to life. Yet dogged faithfulness isn’t the goal, either. A film can be spiritually faithful to a book even when it jettisons whole shards of plot. A good adaptation is a lover, not a fighter; it entwines itself with a work, rather than clawing away at it. Emily Brontë’s 1847 wind-thrashed sycamore of a novel, Wuthering Heights, holds power even over those who haven’t read it. No wonder filmmakers have been drawn to it almost since the advent…

No other candidate on the ballot this year made a bigger splash simply by entering a race than Ken Paxton. The firebrand Texas attorney general and Donald Trump booster is giving U.S. Senator John Cornyn a serious threat in the GOP primary, which in turn has launched an increasingly nasty fight among Democrats who view Paxton as beatable. Now, with early voting for the March 3 primary under way, it’s not just the mudslinging that has insiders in both parties watching with high anxiety. The dynamics in this race may well propel the entire election cycle. And the next. For Senate Republicans, Texas was not supposed to be a problem child this year. The state has not elected a Democrat to statewide office in over three decades—since 1994. Cornyn, a…

DIED Robert Duvall Actor of distinction Some actors melt into their roles. But Robert Duvall, who died on Feb. 15 at age 95, didn’t—not quite. He was too much of a presence for that. From the silky-smooth fixer Tom Hagen in the first two Godfather movies (1972 and 1974), to Lieut. Colonel Kilgore, the outlandish lover of Wagner and surfing in Apocalypse Now (1979), to the true believer and redemption seeker Sonny in The Apostle (1997)—which he also wrote and directed—Duvall had a live-wire crackle distinctly his own. His eyes could be steely; they could also dance with light and joy. He played plenty of memorable jerks, like the supercilious surgeon Frank Burns in Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) or the slash-and-burn TV executive Frank Hackett in Network (1976). The characters…

Viktor Orban and his Fidesz party have led Hungary since 2010, long enough that they’ve become a kind of fact of European life. His trademark right-wing populism, his attacks on the E.U. and its liberal values, and his warnings that support for Ukraine risks conflict with Russia have become a familiar obstacle for efforts in Brussels to maintain E.U. unity. Over time, Prime Minister Orban has come to dominate Hungary’s official media and its courts, and he has built electoral advantages for himself and his party by gaming the country’s voting system to win more parliamentary seats with fewer votes via gerrymandering and other gimmicks. It’s striking, then, that Fidesz now looks likely to lose Hungary’s next national elections, scheduled for April 12. In part, that’s because a growing number…

It all started promisingly enough. French biologist Gabriela Lobinska had enjoyed her Ph.D. training, researching how organisms change over time. Arriving at Harvard Medical School in September 2024, she hoped for more of the same. She planned to look at how, over the course of a lifetime, healthy cells change into diseased ones. Donald Trump won the presidential election shortly after her arrival, and before long, things went downhill. In the spring, the grant paying her salary—along with thousands of others—was cut. In April, the White House proposed cutting by 40% the budget of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which is the largest public funder of biomedical research in the country. Then the government withdrew Harvard’s ability to provide visas for international researchers like Lobinska. While a court…

After your super-G race on Feb. 12, your boyfriend Connor Watkins proposed at the bottom of the slope. Were you surprised? You don’t get engaged to somebody in front of the whole world at the Olympics without them telling you a little bit. When we started getting really serious, I was like, “I always kind of had this concept of getting engaged at the Olympics.” In the end, the Italian President almost ruined the whole thing. He was coming down to the stadium, and then it was like, “Well, you can’t move. The Italian President’s moving.” You met on Bumble. He didn’t know you were a professional ski racer. Was that a good thing? We started talking. Then it’s like, “Well, what do you do?” And I was like, “Oh,…