Table of contents for May 22, 2023 in TIME Magazine

At first, Abby Grossberg thought Fox News would be her big break. When she got a job as the main producer of Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo in 2019, she was responsible for booking guests, meeting newsmakers, and even sitting in on phone calls with President Donald Trump. In 2022, she moved to Tucker Carlson Tonight, where she became head of booking. But in recent weeks, Grossberg has filed two lawsuits against her former employer. In one suit, filed in Delaware, she alleges that Fox News lawyers bullied her into giving false and misleading testimony in Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation case against Fox, which the network settled in April for $787.5 million. According to Grossberg, the lawyers for the company coached her to “shade” her deposition in the Dominion…

If you think your life is too boring to be funny, joke’s on you: humor is all around us. Cultivating more humor in your everyday life is “one of the fastest and most powerful ways to increase overall health and well-being,” says Steven M. Sultanoff, a clinical psychologist and professor at Pepperdine University who studies how people can benefit from the healing powers of humor. “The experience of humor and distressing emotions can’t occupy the same psychological space,” he says. Adding humor to your daily life can lead to a wide array of benefits. Research suggests that it sparks energy, boosts brainpower, improves immunity, curbs stress, and improves mood. Some of those benefits stem from laughter, which is the physical response to humor, Sultanoff says. But not everyone laughs when…

For more than 20 years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has remade and dominated Turkey’s politics. First as Prime Minister, then as President, he built a political foundation with support from voters outside the country’s powerhouse cities—Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir—with appeals to traditional religious values and socially conservative policies. Over time, however, he has also polarized the country by amassing more and more executive power in his own hands, and by silencing, in some cases imprisoning, critics and journalists who tell stories he doesn’t like. He has sidelined judges who don’t rule his way. Following a failed military coup in 2016, he purged the upper ranks of the army. Now he faces his toughest test. The largest opposition parties have united behind the candidacy of a single challenger, a technocrat named…

The annual TV calendar looks quite different from what preceded it in the 20th century—and even the rhythms it was settling into a few years ago. Spring used to be the season of finales, as shows wrapped for summer hiatus. Now, as you might’ve noticed, the weeks between Easter and Memorial Day are packed with new releases. And these aren’t just any debuts. They’re some of the splashiest (Paramount+’s Fatal Attraction reboot) and most expensive (Amazon spy thriller Citadel) projects of the year. Marquee stars are everywhere, from Keri Russell as a green ambassador in Netflix’s The Diplomat to Woody Harrelson in HBO’s Watergate romp White House Plumbers. This glut is due, in large part, to a streaming landscape where Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are no longer the only major…

Not since Stella Dallas has a mother made so many selfless sacrifices for her daughter. Not since Taken has a protective parent fended off so many rotten baddies. Mush those two genres together—the classic women’s picture and the pulpy, rage-driven action adventure—and you get The Mother, in which J Lo plays the mother to end all mothers, a skilled assassin who slinks out of retirement to protect the daughter (Lucy Paez) she was forced to give up 12 years ago. If that sounds like fun, it is, but almost in spite of itself. Director Niki Caro (Whale Rider, Mulan) approaches the material reverently, as a parable about the strength of women. Lopez’s the Mother—her character, a womb with balls, has no name—thinks nothing of wasting the sexy bad guys…

In November 2020, Jack Teixeira wrote a letter to the local police chief asking him to reconsider allowing him to own guns. The Dighton, Mass., police had denied the 18-year-old’s two previous requests for a firearms license, citing an incident when Teixeira was suspended for alleged violent and racial threats, including comments about guns at school. This time, Teixeira’s pleas worked. As a newly minted member of the Massachusetts Air National Guard, he had recently received a top-secret security clearance. “The investigation process was extremely thorough,” he wrote to the police chief, arguing that the U.S. government had deemed him qualified to become “a person that now has the national trust to safeguard classified information.” That trust turned out to be misplaced. In April, Teixeira was arrested and charged with…

Researchers have long tracked the mental health of America’s teen girls. They’ve found that depression has become more common over the past decade, and in 2015, the suicide rate among teenage girls hit a 40-year high. More recently, data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown that nearly 60% of U.S. teenage girls feel sad or hopeless—and in 2021, 30% said they had considered suicide in the prior year, up from 24% two years earlier, a new report finds. In addition, about 24% had made a suicide plan, 13% had attempted suicide, and 4% required medical care related to an attempt. Among boys, those percentages were about 14%, 12%, 7%, and 2%, respectively. Suicidal thinking was more common among teens who did not identify…

Globally, influencing will be a $70 billion industry by 2029, according to Data Bridge Market Research. In France today, influencer marketing—which pays individuals to promote products to their followers—is worth an estimated hundreds of millions of euros. But the industry has never been formally recognized by the law. With the introduction of a new bill, the French government hopes to establish what it says is the first regulatory framework around influencing in Europe. SCANDALS A wave of high-profile scandals have hit France’s influencer sector recently. Reality television star Nabilla Benattia-Vergara (right), for example, was handed a €20,000 fine for promoting Bitcoin to millions of Snapchat followers without disclosing that she was being paid to do so. Over 100 alleged victims came forward with a class-action lawsuit earlier this year,…

Dianne Feinstein had already made history back in 1978, when she became the first woman elected to lead the San Francisco board of supervisors, effectively setting the agenda for the legislative arm of the country’s eighth largest economy at the time. She was, in practice, the Speaker of the S.F. House. But when a former colleague turned assassin returned to city hall with the intent to kill four political rivals, it was Feinstein who found her colleague Harvey Milk dead. Five bullets struck America’s first out gay politician, including two directly into Milk’s head at point-blank range, just down the corridor from Feinstein’s office. Before reaching Milk’s office, the gunman had killed Mayor George Moscone, leaving a vacuum that demanded Feinstein immediately rise to become the first woman to lead…

Deepika Padukone never set out to take India to the world. She wanted the world to come to India. As the most popular actress in the world’s most populous country, she’s often asked if she’s going to move to Hollywood. “My mission has always been to make a global impact while still being rooted in my country,” she says on her home turf in Mumbai one humid morning in April, while on a break from shooting India’s first aerial-action film, Fighter. It’s fitting that Padukone’s photo shoot for this story is happening inside Mehboob Studios, home to some of the most legendary movies made in Hindi-language cinema, from the seminal Oscar-nominated Mother India in 1957 to Padukone’s own Chennai Express in 2013. The 37-year-old is now a legend in…

The moment Rachel Cargle opens her Brooklyn apartment door, I see the signs of relaxed living. There is the time to greet me slowly on a Monday morning. There’s the letter board displaying not an overcrowded schedule but the affirming words “This Too Is the Living.” There is the sunshine streaming in from a balcony where salad greens hang from a pocket plant wall. And there’s the soft, brandy-colored leather couch where we sit and talk over steaming cups of dark-roast coffee, served Jamaican style with thick condensed milk. Jamaica ranks among her happiest places. Cargle, 34, is a Black woman leading a modern, multihyphenate life, improbably filled with “an abundance of ease”—another of her favorite phrases. Her career as an influencer, speaker, and writer began about six years ago…

People who only know your political career may not know that you’ve written four best sellers, some of them legal thrillers and romantic suspense novels. You have so much to do. Why write? I wrote my first attempt at a novel when I was 12. It was called The Diary of Angst. I was a very, very obnoxious 12-year-old who was just assailed by all the travails of the world. Novels have always been a part of how I think about writing. During law school, I wrote two things that got published: my first romantic suspense novel and an essay on the operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax exemption. Do you find novels a useful way to critique politics? For me, it’s a way to tackle complicated conversations,…