Table of contents for January 16, 2023 in TIME Magazine

TIME marked the selection of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as the 2022 Person of the Year with a reception on Dec. 8 at the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Zelensky was not able to attend in person, but he said in a video message that “it is an honor for me to represent the struggle of Ukrainians.” Icon of the Year Michelle Yeoh took the stage, and Mayor Eric Adams mingled. Find more on the biggest moments at time.com/poy-2022 OUR 100th YEAR On this issue’s cover, readers may notice something new—or, rather, old. We’re marking a century since TIME’s 1923 debut with a callback to the magazine’s original look. Stay tuned for more celebration all year long. SUBSCRIBE Climate Is Everything newsletter Subscribe to TIME’s climate newsletter to…

A few years ago, it might have been daunting to try to start a union at an arts organization during times of economic uncertainty. But that’s exactly what Jorie Moss, 34, and a group of professional singers did in early December when they asked the Philadelphia Orchestra Association to recognize them as a union so they could negotiate a contract. A recession may be coming, says Moss, but the pandemic changed what workers are willing to tolerate. “The time that we all had to sit in our rooms and think about what we’ve done—I’m talking about the pandemic—gave us a chance to reflect on the fact that these are conditions that we don’t have to stand for, we should be treated better, and we deserve to ask for it,” she…

On a drizzly December evening in Washington, D.C., Kimberly Mata-Rubio marched from Union Station to Capitol Hill with dozens of other families from Uvalde, Texas. Her 10-year-old daughter Lexi Rubio was murdered in the shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24. Mata-Rubio had never been on a plane before the shooting, but this was now her seventh trip to Washington in as many months to pressure lawmakers to pass restrictions on assault weapons. When the march ended, Mata-Rubio, 33, was weeping. This is not the vocation that Mata-Rubio envisioned for herself, but it is now her future. While she’s taking on the legislative battles, she is also navigating her complicated and painful grief. She is mourning the loss of her daughter—but also the loss of the life she…

As Putin threatens to strike Ukraine with tactical nuclear weapons and Biden warns that this risks escalation to nuclear Armageddon, many observers have wondered aloud whether the septuagenarian or the octogenarian or both have lost touch with reality. Pundits declare Putin’s threats “irrational,” since according to them no rational leader could order a nuclear strike on another state. Critics of Biden have seized on his references to Armageddon—for example, when he recently said that “for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, we have a direct threat to use nuclear weapons” which “could end in Armageddon”—as evidence of “senility.” Even observers less judgmental about Biden and Putin have dismissed these two leaders’ talk about nuclear weapons and war as a throwback to the last century. Having come of…

In a field of bare red dirt in São Paulo state, Paula Costa is trying to turn back the clock. Five hundred years ago, this land was part of the Mata Atlantica, a dense, diverse rain forest that covered 15% of Brazil. Its trees stretched more than 2,000 miles along the eastern Atlantic coast, and far inland. But today 93% of the forest has been stripped of trees, with much of it turned over to monoculture farming. Costa, a 36-year-old biologist, bangs the ground with her fist: it’s hard, the dry soil degraded by the tropical sun. Yet on this sweltering morning in March 2022, a few green shoots have forced their way through the surface. The rain forest is making a comeback. “These will be jack beans. These are…

If anyone knows the secret to happiness, it’s surely the people who have dedicated their careers to studying it. The first thing they’ll tell you? Being happy all the time isn’t a feasible—or even desirable—goal. “It’s not a yellow smiley face,” says positive-psychology expert Stella Grizont, founder and CEO of Woopaah, which focuses on workplace well-being. “It’s being true to yourself and all the emotions that come up.” Grizont was among 18 leading happiness experts surveyed by TIME about their daily habits, and the professional insights they’re most likely to apply to their personal lives. The results are illuminating—and could help all of us boost our mood and well-being. The meaning of happiness is, to an extent, subjective. But nearly every expert we surveyed emphasized the same cocktail of…

Looking at the world around us, happiness may seem an unattainable goal. As we move into the fourth year of a pandemic that has killed millions and continues to threaten health and well-being worldwide, compounded by devastating consequences of climate change, spikes in hate crimes, and continued fallout from systemic oppression and inequality, there seems little reason to be happy. Indeed, results from the 2022 annual Stress in America survey indicate one-third of the respondents report that their stress in the face of these challenges is “overwhelming.” Simply ignoring or denying stress, or suppressing your negative emotions and pretending everything is just fine, will not lead to enduring happiness. In most cases, negative emotions are, surprisingly, useful—they provide important signals about our environment and can guide us to an…

The collapse of the crypto exchange FTX seemed to materialize out of nowhere. In the space of one week in November, FTX went from one of the most trusted parts of crypto to a bankrupt disgrace that lost more than $8 billion of its customers’ money, according to authorities. FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried faces criminal charges, including fraud and money laundering. He is free on $250 million bail and entered an initial plea of not guilty on Jan. 3 in federal court in New York City. While much of the press coverage has focused on Bankman-Fried allegedly spending customer money on political donations and a Bahamian real estate empire, it appears that a far greater amount of FTX money disappeared in the wake of an earlier and lesser-known crypto…

The Declaration of Independence promises “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” But if you’re lucky enough to live in states like Virginia, New Hampshire, Vermont, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and a number of others, your rights get even better: the 18th century constitutions of all these states spell out not only a right to seek happiness, but also to obtain it. Of course, blandishments about happiness meant little to enslaved persons or the Indigenous. And there were others—from people struggling at the margins to women trapped in abusive marriages—for whom happiness was inconceivable at the time. We are quick to identify those shortcomings today, pointing out where the founders, for all their farsightedness, were blind. Yet, even as many have worked hard to extend rights more broadly and raise…

When something really bad happens to you, how do you think about your future? Catastrophizers think, Everything will now unravel, and my life will be ruined. This mindset turns out to be an enormous impediment to happiness and, even worse, it is a major risk factor for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We found this out by tracking every single one of the 79,438 U.S. Army soldiers who deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan from 2009 to 2013. On their very first day in the Army, they took a psychological questionnaire asking them to rate how they felt about several statements related to pessimism and its most extreme form, catastrophization. For example: • “When bad things happen to me, I expect more bad things to happen.” • “I have no control…

Sometimes, in the winter, you just want a little hygge, that sense of cozy well-being signified by balsam-scented candles, puffy coverlets, and lumpy sock knitting. For your other, darker moods, there’s Scott Cooper’s The Pale Blue Eye, a chilly murder mystery set at West Point in 1830 in which a taciturn local detective, Christian Bale’s Augustus Landor, enlists the help of a young cadet in solving a rash of homicides at the school. The cadet, played by English actor Harry Melling, is a hunched, pale lad whose sentences unspool in loquacious curlicues. He seems out of place at a military academy, and pretty much out of place anywhere practicality and speed might be valued. But he already knows he’s a poet, and though he hasn’t yet made a name…

In 2022, social media inspired many of the ways we tried to get and stay healthy—but not always for the better. Talk about weight-loss drugs spread like wildfire online, as did our collective agreement to stop going the extra mile at work. We turned to Dr. TikTok again and again, and focused perhaps too much on body image—even when we tried to keep things positive. The new year is the perfect time to re-evaluate these habits, experts say. Here are five wellness trends you’d be better off ditching in 2023—plus healthier alternatives. 1. Weight-loss shots Ozempic and Wegovy, two injections that are used to treat Type 2 diabetes and obesity, are hot commodities—even among people without those conditions. “There are people on Reddit and TikTok and other platforms hearing…

Dr. Jennifer Lincoln has amassed nearly 3 million followers on TikTok through her frank videos about sex, abortion, and reproductive care. Now the Oregon-based ob-gyn is taking on a new role as executive director of Mayday Health, a health-education nonprofit designed to help patients in states that have banned abortion figure out how to get abortions anyway. Lincoln and Mayday are on the front lines of the next battle over abortion rights: the information war. Mayday launched on the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the goal of spreading the word about abortion pills—two medications prescribed by a doctor that, when taken within 48 hours of one another during the first trimester, can safely terminate a pregnancy. For patients living in states where abortion is banned,…

During my years in the Marine Corps, I participated in military operations as diverse as night ambushes, amphibious raids, and helicopter assaults. All required intricate planning. Gathered around maps and satellite imagery, my colleagues and I had to consider all three of the dimensions in which war is typically waged: land, sea, and air. Once our plans were laid, there was always one last step before our mission: we would synchronize our watches. This ritual acknowledged the final dimension in which war is waged: time. Too often our analysis of a conflict neglects time as a space through which armies maneuver. But in Ukraine, as winter sets in and the war enters its second year, time will prove decisive. Time is not on Ukraine’s side. A strategy of maximum…

In the predawn darkness of the western Mojave Desert, workers make their way across a parking lot toward a sprawling complex of factories, hangars, and runways. Teams of armed military and civilian guards patrol the grounds leading to the 5,800-acre facility, which is ringed by an elaborate security system and monitored from space by orbiting reconnaissance satellites. At a fence bristling with razor wire, the men and women pull key cards from their belt-loop lanyards, flash them on a contact sensor, punch in their numerical codes, and push through high-gate turnstiles. Inside, they stow signal-emitting electronics like iPhones and earbuds at a bank of storage shelves, then swipe in at computer monitors to confirm their identities and security clearance. At last, they step onto a gleaming production floor the size…

I was a graduate student in Manhattan having breakfast on my rooftop on Sept. 11, 2001, when I witnessed planes demolish the Twin Towers. For months afterward, I shook with anxiety every morning. Unwilling to medicate, I tried everything else. Mindfulness meditation induced panic attacks. Hot yoga built muscle but did nothing for my anxiety. I went to talks by Buddhist monks and meditation teachers hoping to attain inner peace, to no avail. Finally, I attended a SKY Breath Meditation class, which involves a 20-minute breathing regimen in different postures and rhythms. Though I went in skeptical, I came out calm. Two decades later, I haven’t missed a day of my breathing practice, not even when I gave birth. I’ve also devoted part of my research career to studying…

The Golden Globes will return to TV on Jan. 10, for the first time since 2021, and this year’s 80th-anniversary edition has a lot going for it. Among the most-nominated titles are many wonderful movies (The Banshees of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Tár) and shows (Abbott Elementary, Severance, The White Lotus). The relatively diverse list of individual nominees includes such deserving performers as Angela Bassett, Diego Luna, Michelle Yeoh, Quinta Brunson, and The Inspection star Jeremy Pope. Most promising, this year’s shindig will be hosted by Jerrod Carmichael, the thoughtful and hilarious comedian whose confessional HBO special Rothaniel was 2022’s most acclaimed hour of stand-up. It’s all exciting enough to make the casual awards-show viewer forget why NBC took a year off from airing the Globes, so…