Table of contents for September 12, 2022 in TIME Magazine

People gather in front of a road washed out by unprecedented flooding in Pakistan’s northern Swat Valley on Aug. 27. The country’s climate minister described the devastation, which has killed more than 1,130 people since mid-June, as a “climate-induced humanitarian disaster” of “epic proportions.” The floods have pushed almost 500,000 people into relief camps. Scientists point out that Pakistan, a poorer country that has contributed comparatively little in carbon emissions, is feeling disproportionate effects of the climate crisis.…

THERE’S SOMETHING FAMILIAR ABOUT the high-stakes water-use drama playing out in the parched U.S. Southwest. The mighty Colorado River serves as an economic artery of the region, powering massive hydroelectric dams and supplying water to farmers and rapidly growing cities. But continued overuse during a massive yearslong megadrought—the driest stretch the area has experienced in more than a millennium—has caused reservoir levels to fall to unprecedented lows, imperiling water supplies and the operation of crucial power plants. Leaders are holding out on hard decisions Seven states rely on water from the Colorado River: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, California, and Nevada. In June, the federal government told them they had 60 days to come up with a plan to massively scale back their consumption. That deadline came and…

TIPTON ADAPTIVE DAYCARE IS STILL FILLED WITH COLORFUL plastic chairs, butterfly-adorned cubbies, and star mobiles dangling above cribs. But the classrooms were mostly empty in mid-August as the owner of the Tipton, Iowa, childcare center prepared to close her business permanently after more than seven years. “I gave up,” says Deborah VanderGaast, the director and founder. At the heart of VanderGaast’s struggle is a problem of basic economics. Even before the pandemic, Tipton Adaptive was only just breaking even. Before she closed, she was charging $175 per week for full-time infant and toddler care—a rate that was barely affordable for many families she serves. But it was also barely enough to pay her employees, for whom the starting wage was $9 to $11 per hour. The closure illustrates the ways in…

I RECENTLY MET A YOUNG AFGHAN REFUGEE IN ROME who had been months from qualifying as a doctor when the Taliban overthrew the Afghan government in August 2021. Her older sister was studying dentistry at university. Her two younger sisters were doing brilliantly in school. Overnight, they and 19 million other Afghan women and girls lost their right to go to high school or university, their right to work, and their freedom of movement. As we spoke, she hugged her father, who’d worked for decades as an expert in rural development in Afghanistan. He left everything behind when he fled with his family. With tears streaming down her face, she told me she was sad not for herself but for all the women of her country. Long before 9/11,…

There’s a devilish, damnation-worthy idea at the heart of Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, writer-director Adamma Ebo’s satire about the pastor and first lady of a Southern Baptist mega-church who scramble to reclaim their past glory after a scandal sends their congregation scattering. That staggeringly charismatic pastor, Lee-Curtis Childs (Sterling K. Brown), is the source of all the trouble, having instigated more than one illicit affair. His dutiful wife Trinitie (Regina Hall) is left to clean up most of the mess, standing by her husband’s side even as he peacocks around in his costly suits, readying himself for his public redemption. Ebo mines a lot of territory here, especially the hypocrisy of Black churches that preach love for all human beings—as long as they’re not gay. She’s also…

September 9/2 MOVIE Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul. Regina Hall is the wife of a disgraced Southern Baptist pastor (Sterling K. Brown) whose attempted comeback forces her to re-evaluate her faith and marriage. 9/2 TV The Rings of Power Amazon’s long-awaited fantasy prequel series based on The Lord of the Rings takes place thousands of years earlier, in the Second Age of Middle-earth. 9/6 BOOK The Marriage Portrait Maggie O’Farrell breathes new life into the story of Lucrezia de’ Medici, the noblewoman whose death in 1561 at 16 was rumored to be caused by poisoning at the hand of her husband. 9/6 TV Queen Sugar This epic saga from Ava DuVernay closes out on OWN with a seventh and final season following the Bordelon family on their rural Louisiana…

$850,000 Sale price of a Ford Escort that had been customized for Princess Diana to drive on errands around London, at auction on Aug. 27 ‘She truly is an icon.’ Elton John, about Britney Spears, following their collaboration on the single “Hold Me Closer,” released Aug. 26 ‘I AM HUMAN. AND AMID THESE DARK TIMES, I TOO MISS JOY, LIGHT, AND FUN.’ Sanna Marin, Finland’s Prime Minister, responding to criticism over images of her partying with friends ‘There literally will be riots in the streets.’ Lindsey Graham, Republican Senator, predicting what would happen if former President Donald Trump is indicted for mishandling classified documents, on Aug. 28 on Fox News ‘Why doesn’t the rest of the world need this extra minute?’ DU SIR, a Chinese film blog, on a…

This photo of files seized from former President Donald Trump’s residence at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, released Aug. 30 by the Justice Department (DOJ), shows at least five yellow cover sheets marked “Top Secret” and a red cover page marked “Secret.” The picture was part of a 36-page court filing alleging the DOJ had received information that classified documents were being concealed from investigators. The Aug. 8 FBI search recovered more than 100 classified documents taken from the White House. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that he declassified the files before leaving office. TRUMP: DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE/AP; GORBACHEV: BONO…

Forget Korean soaps. The hottest shows in many parts of the world are queer romances known as Boys’ Love (BL). BL began as graphic novels in Japan before making it to the small screen in Thailand. The genre took off during the COVID-19 pandemic, when millions in Asia and Latin America, bored at home, embraced what Thomas Baudinette, of Sydney’s Macquarie University, calls the “emancipatory, very positively framed” depictions of male-male love. Insiders hope the genre can do for Thailand what K-pop did for South Korea. Actor Jitaraphol Potiwihok says BL story lines rival series from other countries. But the road ahead isn’t smooth. The Thai government helped secure $10.7 million in foreign investment for BL productions in 2021—but the sum is paltry in Hollywood terms, and many in…

SINCE AUG. 17, NASA’S MASSIVE SPACE LAUNCH SYSTEM (SLS) moon rocket has stood silent on pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center, towering over the Florida swamps. But as soon as Saturday, Sept. 3, that silence is expected to be broken in the most dramatic way possible, when the giant machine’s six engines light, generating a record 8.8 million lb. (4 million kg) of thrust, muscling the rocket off the pad and hurling an uncrewed Orion capsule on a mission to orbit the moon. The launch will kick off NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to have astronauts back on the lunar surface by 2026. (An initial launch attempt on Aug. 29 was scrubbed because of a technical glitch in one of the engines.) There is no overstating the scale and…

THE GREATEST FEMALE ATHLETE OF ALL TIME—CHECK that: perhaps the greatest athlete of all time—has been thinking a lot about the reason she’s vowed to hang up her racket for good. “Olympia doesn’t like when I play tennis,” Serena Williams says plainly about her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. When Williams told Olympia, who turned 5 on Sept. 1, that she was soon to be done with the life that made her an inspiration to millions, Olympia’s reply was as joyful as her mother’s celebrations after so many Grand Slam wins: a fist-pumping “Yes!” “That kind of makes me sad,” says Williams, leaning forward in her chair in the library of a New York City hotel. “And brings anxiety to my heart.” No kid understands their parent’s absence. But Williams…

After the harsh morning sunlight, the research center was dark and cool inside. There, in front of a large monitor, an engineer clicked on a slide to begin the day’s presentation for his visitor: “Towards carbon emissions net zero,” it read. This was not, as the slide suggested, an environmental organization or a climate conference. TIME had been allowed inside the normally secretive R&D hub of Saudi Aramco, a fossil-fuel behemoth that dwarfs giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron. Even as the world’s largest oil exporter busily pumps crude and pours it into the hulls of seafaring tankers, it is loudly proclaiming its ambitions to reach net-zero carbon emissions within its borders by 2060. For Saudis—two-thirds of whom are younger than 35—climate change is not a far-off issue. Summer heat regularly…

IN A WOOD-PANELED OFFICE, MONGOLIA’S PRIME MINISTER Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene sits in front of a gilt framed painting of a warrior and fawn called Hero Going to War. But the last thing Mongolia needs, sandwiched between Russia and China, is war, or heroics of any kind. “We are located geopolitically between two superpowers,” says Oyun-Erdene, who became Prime Minister in January 2021 after serving two years as Chief Cabinet Secretary. His nation—twice the size of Turkey—has just 3.3 million people. “We are very sensitive to global economic fluctuations,” he says, “which is a blessing and a curse.” The blessings are straightforward: Mongolia has the world’s biggest coal reserves, second largest reserves of uranium, and one of the largest of silver. Throw in significant deposits of gold, copper, iron ore, phosphorus, and…

After 30 years of failed attempts to enact bold climate legislation, the U.S. entered a new era when President Joe Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act on Aug. 16, for the first time giving the country a pathway to cut emissions in line with the Paris Agreement. “This bill is the biggest step forward on climate, ever,” Biden said. Now the fight begins to fill in the gaps. The new law includes a mix of policies that activists have been pushing for years. At its core are a slew of incentives for technologies that provide zero-carbon energy. The law provides tens of billions of dollars for historically disadvantaged communities. And it includes rebates for consumers who make their homes more efficient. But questions remain: Which zero-emissions technologies will thrive? Which…

At first he thought it was an umbrella. But when the gun pointed at John Seymour went off, hitting him in the back and the wrist, he thought he was going to die in his own barbershop. He fell to the floor and played dead as the gunman shot three of his customers, killing two of them. Then the shooter, a former customer, killed two men in a nearby oil-change shop, and holed up in an abandoned restaurant, where he later died in a shoot-out with police. Nearly 10 years later, Seymour thinks constantly about the shooting. “To this day, anything goes, Bang bang! and I jump. What do you expect? I had a guy die on top of me at my barbershop,” says Seymour, 76, who is known locally…

GABRIEL BORIC CLIMBS INTO THE back of the gigantic black SUV waiting outside his house. It’s a cold morning in mid-August—winter in Santiago—and the Chilean President is enveloped in a slightly-too-long gray coat, making him look even younger than his 36 years. As the car rolls through city streets, windows down, pedestrians spot him on his way to work and let out whoops or an affectionate “Presi!” Boric laughs and waves, but then bows his head to nervously scan the front pages of Chile’s newspapers. There’s plenty to be nervous about. Since taking office in March, Chile’s youngest-ever leader has been shepherding his country through a moment of historic uncertainty. For decades, Chile was touted as Latin America’s economic success story, with a business-friendly, small-government model creating relative wealth, and…

AMERICAN GIGOLO, THE 1980 EROTIC THRILLER FROM writer-director Paul Schrader that made Richard Gere a superstar, opens with an indelible sequence. Gere, as high-end sex worker Julian Kaye, cruises the Pacific Coast Highway in a Mercedes convertible with the wind blowing through his lustrous hair as Blondie’s “Call Me” blares. American Gigolo, the 2022 Showtime drama series from executive producer and showrunner Nikki Toscano (The Offer) that casts Jon Bernthal in the Gere role, faithfully updates the montage, preserving its undeniable theme song. Derivative but fun, the sequence is just about as good as the show gets. While the original film captured the zeitgeist of its era, all the series has going for it—besides a charismatic performance from its reliably great lead—is nostalgia. A sequel that revises aspects of…

IN THE WORLD OF ROMANTIC DESIRE, there’s no such thing as close enough for jazz; you either hit the note or you don’t. George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing—adapted from an A.S. Byatt short story—strives for something romantic and magical and almost reaches those heights. But a movie starring Tilda Swinton and Idris Elba—as, respectively, a gloriously mousy academic who tells “stories about stories” and a seductive, wish-granting djinn—should provide at least a smidgen of unintellectualized eroticism. Yet the arrow Three Thousand Years of Longing shoots from its mighty bow just doesn’t pierce as it should. What it does offer is plenty of talking. Swinton’s Alithea Binnie is a self-described loner, happy with her own company—but perhaps she secretly longs for something more. On a business trip to…