Table of contents for August 8, 2022 in TIME Magazine

HOW LONG THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC will last is one of the biggest questions facing the world at present—and one of the major issues addressed at the TIME100 Health Summit that took place on July 15. At the summit, White House COVID-19 adviser Dr. Ashish Jha said this pandemic will end, just as all previous pandemics have ended, but that’s not likely to happen in the next few months. “We need to get to a point where we have vaccines that are truly variant-resistant,” he told senior correspondent Alice Park at the virtual event, which was sponsored by Fujifilm. He said such vaccines could still be three to five years away, though that timeline might be sped up with strategic investments, as the science is “moving very quickly.” The TIME100…

This summer, Iran will turn into a de facto “threshold nuclear” state—one with enough highly enriched uranium for one nuclear device and the technology to make it a weapon. The Iranians still need 18 to 24 months to polish their skills treating metal uranium and packing it into a missile warhead. But these steps can be executed in a small lab or workshop and cannot be easily followed, never mind stopped. In 2015, the U.S.-led agreement to delay Iran’s program failed to go far enough, but in 2018, when the U.S. withdrew from that same agreement, the mullahs were some 17 months away from threshold status. Today they could be as little as 17 days away. For unexplainable reasons, after the U.S. pulled out of the agreement, neither the…

THE U.S. SECURITIES AND EXCHANGE COMMISSION REPORTS that in the first six months of 2022, the word metaverse appeared in regulatory filings more than 1,100 times. The entire previous year saw 260 mentions. The preceding two decades? Fewer than a dozen in total. It increasingly feels as though every corporate executive must mention the metaverse—and, of course, how it naturally fits the capabilities of their company better than those of their competitors. Few seem to explain what it is or exactly what they’ll build. The executive class also appears to disagree over fundamental aspects of this new platform, including the criticality of virtual reality headsets, blockchains, and crypto, as well as whether it’s here now, might be soon, or is decades in the future. None of which has constrained investment.…

The Vasquez brothers aren’t used to visitors. Their farm lies in the remote Puna, a vast plateau region high in the Andes Mountains. The terrain, in the Argentine province of Catamarca, is rough and largely empty; fluffy, big-eyed llamas wander a miles-wide plain between mountains. Only sparse shrubs pepper the ground, glowing in yellow-green Technicolor under the close sun. But one day in 2016, a tall man in his 50s, speaking heavily Australian-accented Spanish, pulled up to the Vasquezes’ remote farmhouse. He told them that close by, under the otherworldly surface of the plateau, lay huge amounts of lithium—the white metal essential to making the batteries for electric vehicles and other clean energy technology—and he had a plan to extract it. Such arrivals are often bad news in the Andean highlands,…

Hours before dawn on Nov. 1, 1988, four suburban middle-school girls venture out to deliver newspapers and dodge threats from teen bullies slinking home after a long night of Halloween mischief. In search of the boys who stole their walkie-talkie, they bust into an under-construction house, come face-to-face with a pair of apparent mutants, and flee into deserted streets under an angry, unnaturally fuchsia sky. Instead of fighting bullies, they’re caught in some cosmic war. Paper Girls sounds a lot like Stranger Things—but for girls! And if that’s what gets you to watch, so much the better. But this coming-of-age sci-fi show, based on a comic written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Cliff Chiang, tells a more focused, character-driven story that is particularly refreshing on the heels…

THERE’S SO MUCH TO SKEWER IN the expensive-sneaker-wearing, podcast-obsessed, swipe-left culture of the young urban modern citizen that it’s a wonder any writer-director knows where to begin. But B.J. Novak covers a surprisingly wide swath of territory in his directorial debut, Vengeance. Novak himself stars as Ben Manalowitz, a New York writer who’s always hustling for the next story. He gets a call informing him that a woman he’d casually hooked up with, Abilene, has died. Because she’d led her family to believe he was a serious boyfriend, he’s summoned to West Texas for her funeral. There he learns from Abilene’s brother, Ty (Boyd Holbrook), that she might have been murdered. Ben doesn’t want to get involved—until he smells a podcast idea. He connects with a hotshot producer back…

$79 billion Value of the Colosseum in Rome, according to a July 25 report by Deloitte Auroralumina attenboroughii Name of the oldest known animal predator, announced July 25 in honor of British naturalist and broadcaster David Attenborough ‘WE PUT OUR LOVE FOR CHADWICK INTO THIS FILM.’ Ryan Coogler, director, on July 23, on Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman, who died in 2020, ahead of the release of a teaser for sequel Wakanda Forever ‘If he’s not fired by noon tomorrow then I want your resignation.’ Brett Cross, uncle of fourth-grader Uziyah Garcia, who was killed in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, discussing school police chief Pete Arredondo—whom some have blamed for law-enforcement failures that day—at a school-board meeting on July 18. Arredondo remains on unpaid leave ‘We know this may…

FOR AS LONG AS SHE COULD REMEMBER, TONJA MYLES had thoughts of suicide. After a childhood of sexual abuse, Myles turned to drugs and prostitution to “mask the pain,” she says, and twice she overdosed on prescription pills. After recovery, she worked as an advocate for improving mental-health care in her home city of Baton Rouge, La., by sharing her story and working with others who had suffered trauma and struggled with mental illness. Still, in 2016, she had her own mental-health crisis. She wrote a note to her family, collected some pills, and drove to a secluded place, where she planned to end her life. After her family discovered her note, persuaded her to come home, and called 911, one of the officers who showed up recognized Myles from…

ON THE MORNING THE SUPREME COURT announced it had overturned Roe v. Wade, we had 21 patients in our lobby waiting to have an abortion. We cried as we were forced to turn them all away. They cried as they realized the very same medical procedure that was legal only a few minutes earlier was no longer available to them. But the reality was that each of those people represented a potential felony for my staff—and up to 99 years in prison. Within hours of the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the injunction on a 2019 law was lifted and abortion became illegal in almost all instances in the state of Alabama. Before the ruling, 95% of the patients we saw at West Alabama Women’s Center…

SAMERSON ORIAS WAS WORKING AS A line cook last year in the rural Philippines when his friend told him he could make way more money playing a new video game. Orias was earning about 4,000 pesos a month (about $80, a little less than half the national minimum wage) making takoyaki—Japanese octopus balls. His friend told him he and others were pocketing up to $600 a month playing Axie Infinity, a game fueled by cryptocurrency and NFTs. Orias, now 26, desperately needed an escape hatch from his financial woes: his mother had had a stroke and required medication, and electricity and grocery bills were stacking up. So he plunged into Axie, doing battle with cartoon monsters for hours deep into the night. He soon began earning cryptocurrency, which he converted…

ON NORTHERN VIETNAM’S RED RIVER Delta, the world’s most ambitious electric-vehicle (EV) upstart occupies a factory complex fringed with mango trees and palms. Outside VinFast’s plant by the port city of Haiphong, fishermen in conical hats still plumb mudflats for grass carp and tilapia; inside, each car negotiates an overhead ergonomic conveyor assembly line measuring 2.5 miles. A gauntlet of 1,250 robot arms, twirling like pneumatic ballerinas, adds some 3,000 components and welds rivet after rivet in a flurry of sparks. Everything here is top of the line: machinery sourced from Germany, Japan, Sweden. Welding is 98% automated. Capacity is 250,000 cars a year. Impressively, instead of individual assembly lines tailored for each vehicle, the facility can simultaneously assemble multiple models on the same line. Even more impressively, Google Maps…

EVEN THOUGH WE KNOW THE WORLD ISN’T SUDDENLY spinning faster, it’s hard to shake the feeling that time is speeding up on us. In early summer 2018, 12 boys and their assistant soccer coach were trapped for more than two weeks in the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave in northern Thailand, their situation becoming increasingly dire as heavy rainfall threatened to engulf the cave’s chambers completely. Volunteers from around the globe rushed to help, but as the world watched and waited, it seemed increasingly doubtful that the boys and their coach could be brought out alive. Astonishingly, rescuers pulled it off. Yet as joyful as that news event was, the world moved on quickly, as it always does. That’s the wonder of Ron Howard’s vivid true-life drama Thirteen…

The fast-moving Oak Fire—pictured engulfing the dining room of a home in Mariposa County, California, on July 23—charred more than 18,000 acres near Yosemite National Park in just three days. Cal Fire officials warned that the unpredictable behavior of the blaze, which fed on extremely dry vegetation—a problem aggravated by climate change—is “really unprecedented.” As of July 27 the fire had burned dozens of homes, threatened some 1,400 structures, and forced more than 3,000 people to flee. ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

PEOPLE HAVE MANY ISSUES WITH JOY BEHAR, BUT here is one that has gotten scandalously slight attention. Joy Behar is a bad driver. A person sitting in the back of her SUV to, say, drive a short distance on flat roads, will get nauseated, which will significantly impede that person’s ability to carry out such journalistic duties as noticing whether Behar stops and starts so much because in two months she’ll be 80 and her reaction time has slowed, or because she doesn’t care how she makes people feel. The View co-host has agreed to go yard-sale shopping near her home in the wealth-soaked Hamptons area of Long Island. Behar, the publicist says, loves yard-sale shopping. But she doesn’t seem that thrilled. We are among the first to arrive…

ONE OF THE OLDEST CRITICISMS OF the Sex and the City franchise is that it isn’t really about women. According to this theory, the four main characters are secretly avatars for gay men like creator Darren Star and executive producer Michael Patrick King. Embedded in this otherwise reductive assumption is the understanding that when SATC debuted, in 1998, it would’ve been impossible, even on HBO, to make an equally blunt show about queer sexuality. Now, after two American iterations of Queer as Folk and with King overseeing Carrie Bradshaw’s future in And Just Like That, Star has made a TV-MA rom-com whose central characters really are gay men. Co-created with Jeffrey Richman and starring Neil Patrick Harris, Uncoupled chronicles the misadventures of middle-aged men seeking men in Manhattan. It’s…

There was a time when we all seemed to know way too much about Lena Dunham. But even a big-time look-at-me personality can surprise you, and the writer-director’s second full-length feature, Sharp Stick, counts as a surprise. This is a tender picture about the search for openness in a closed-off world—one where the internet is better at providing the illusion of interconnectedness than it is at truly connecting us. Sarah Jo (Kristine Froseth) is a sheltered 26-year-old living with her deadpan, oft-divorced mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and aspiring Instagram-influencer sister (Taylour Paige) in an unglamorous Los Angeles apartment. Sarah Jo dresses like a sister-wife and behaves just as demurely, though there’s a reason for her sexual reticence: painful health problems forced her to undergo a radical hysterectomy at 15,…

PODCASTS Buffy In this five-part CBC podcast, host Falen Johnson makes the case that the story of musician Buffy Sainte-Marie goes hand in hand with the story of the last 60 years of Indigenous resistance. Best of all, Johnson invites the charismatic and candid singer-songwriter, now 81, to tell much of the story herself. BOOKS Babel In R.F. Kuang’s work of dark academia, the author of The Poppy War chronicles a Chinese orphan studying at Oxford’s Royal Institute of Translation, known as Babel. But as he digs deeper, he realizes that serving Babel may mean forsaking his motherland. TELEVISION The Last Movie Stars Ethan Hawke’s HBO Max docuseries about Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward recounts one of Hollywood’s most distinctive partnerships and reminds us why Woodward, who never fully got…