Table of contents for February 14, 2022 in TIME Magazine

Italy’s Coast Guard rescues some 280 migrants, mostly Bangladeshis and Egyptians, from a boat attempting to cross from Libya to the Italian island of Lampedusa on Jan. 25. Seven passengers died from hypothermia. While migrant crossings on the route typically peak in summer, more are attempting the treacherous winter journey to Europe this year, with 3,035 arriving in Italy in January—nearly triple the number for the same month in 2020 and 2021.…

BECOMING AN OLYMPIAN IS A LONG AND unpredictable journey rife with hurdles. But those in Beijing for the 2022 Winter Games face yet another daunting challenge: COVID-19. Hanging over every athlete is the specter of testing positive, beginning with a deep nasopharyngeal swab at the airport. All athletes are required to be vaccinated, or receive a medical exemption and comply with a 21-day quarantine if they are not. Still, with the Omicron variant so widespread and adept at sparking new infections, breakthrough infections are possible even among the vaccinated. Beijing officials have created a closed-loop system to adhere to the Chinese government’s dynamic zero-COVID policy, which relies on regular testing to detect infections and rigid isolation requirements to prevent spread of cases. But testing positive isn’t athletes’ only worry: they…

DIED ▷ Cheslie Kryst, the 2019 Miss USA, on Jan. 30, at 30. ▷ Olavo de Carvalho, a mentor of Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro’s, on Jan. 24, at 74. RENAMED The Washington Commanders on Feb. 2, 18 months after the NFL team retired its previous name because of its insensitivity to Native Americans. ADOPTED Willow, a 2-year-old tabby, by the Biden family, the White House announced Jan. 28. SWORN IN Xiomara Castro, as Honduras’ first female President, on Jan. 27. REPORTED Bomb threats at more than a dozen historically Black colleges and universities, which the FBI said on Feb. 2 it’s investigating as possible hate crimes. STEPPED DOWN Brian Houston, leader of Hillsong leader, on Jan. 30 amid allegations—which he denies—that he concealed his father’s child abuse. RESIGNED CNN president…

LEE HAYWOOD GOT THE COVID-19 VACCINE. HE’S SEEN friends lose their lives to the virus and watched others struggle to recover. A longtime smoker, he believes the medical evidence showing that the shot sharply reduces the chances of a severe infection. Yet on the frigid afternoon of Jan. 23, Haywood was near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, standing among signs that read VACCINES KILL and STOP THE VACCINE HOLOCAUST. “I’m against the forced vaccinations or forced wearing of these masks by these bureaucrats deep in the bowels of the government,” says Haywood, a 61-year-old Republican running for a North Carolina congressional seat. “These mandates just slap everybody in the face.” Haywood’s presence at the “Defeat the Mandates” rally illustrated how the antivaccine movement is uniting groups across…

A CONSENSUS IS BEGINNING TO FORM THAT A NEW WAR in Ukraine has become inevitable. In large measure, this is due to the escalation in both rhetoric and military preparedness coming from Moscow. Combined, they create a situation where the costs of retreating for Russia might now be too high. At present, it seems very unlikely that the Kremlin will get more than symbolic concessions from Washington, much fewer than it perhaps hopes to get after more concrete tokens of Russian determination. Vladimir Putin is less interested in substantive commitments than in the spectacle of Russian assertiveness and American retreat. The question, were Russia to make a move, is what kind. Kremlin insiders like longtime foreign policy adviser Sergey Karaganov have downplayed the prospect of an invasion followed by territorial…

EVERYTHING I HAVE LEARNED ABOUT my one known ancestor from Maryland comes from a pair of Census reports, and the clarity they fail to offer is a lesson in itself. Some years ago, I began to look at them every so often; one is from 1870, the other from 1880. I’m always hoping to discover something I missed—about myself, about my past. Every gaze is a moment of wonder and frustration. There she is, twice. In 1870, she is Easter Lowe. Born in Maryland in 1769, 101 years old, Black. In 1880, she is Esther Watkins, born in Georgia in 1789, 91 years old, widowed, Black. Both improbable and extraordinary. In rare, lighter moments, it makes me think of Mark Twain’s humorous story about George Washington’s mammy, Joice Heth, who…

CHRIS ADAMO CONSIDERS HIMSELF LATE TO THE game when it comes to investing in NFTs, or nonfungible tokens. He collected his first one in summer 2021. But when it comes to buying up property in the metaverse, Adamo is early. Eight months ago, the Miami-based venture capitalist and a group of associates calling themselves the MetaCollective DAO (a decentralized autonomous organization, the blockchain version of a venture capital fund) used a virtual real estate broker to buy 23 parcels in the Sandbox, a user-generated, blockchain-based virtual world, for prices starting at 1 ETH (about $3,000). A nearby property sold for about 42 ETH, or $130,000. The land—pixels, really—borders the compound of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, a buzzy NFT community, and a plot owned by Adidas. They’re calling it Sandbox…

The dusty white cargo plane stood out among the gleaming corporate jets, as did its passengers: 48 barking dogs, newly arrived at the private air terminal at Hanscom Field, outside of Boston. They had left Mississippi that morning with their health certificates taped to their kennels. All week, the staff at Oktibbeha County Humane Society (OCHS), in Starkville, Miss., had been getting them ready, giving them their shots, testing their temperaments, and color-coding each crate for its destination: red for Second Chance Animal Services in North Brookfield, Mass.; gray for the Animal Rescue League of Boston; and blue for the MSPCA, an independent animal-welfare organization. On the tarmac, representatives from each jostled around the animals like vacationers at baggage claim. Danielle Bowes, a staff member at Second Chance, checked her…

477 MILES Length of a single lightning bolt—the longest ever recorded—during an April 2020 storm, stretching across three U.S. states, the World Meteorological Organization confirmed on Feb. 1 ‘IT FELT LIKE A BULLET-HIT TO LEARN THAT ONE MORE PRECIOUS LIFE DIED WITH COVID-19.’ LOTAY TSHERING, Prime Minister of Bhutan, in a Jan. 29 Facebook statement responding to the country’s fourth recorded coronavirus death 2 WEEKS Length of suspension handed to The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg on Feb. 1, the day after she made widely condemned comments about the Holocaust during a conversation on the daytime talk show ‘I have been completely betrayed by the DOJ lawyers.’ WANDA COOPER-JONES, the mother of Ahmaud Arbery, responding to a plea deal announced on Jan. 30 to allow two men convicted of her son’s…

AHMAD NAEEM WAKILI ESCAPED Afghanistan in mid-August, after the government collapsed and the Taliban took Kabul. A former judge who had earned the Taliban’s ire, Wakili was granted refuge in the U.S. by the American government under an ad hoc program called humanitarian parole. Wakili now lives in Tucson, Ariz., where he dreams of reuniting with his family, who remain in Turkey. But over the past few months, U.S. immigration officials have twice rejected his wife and 2-year-old daughter’s humanitarian-parole applications. Although the rejection letters cite a problem with the fees that Wakili attempted to pay—a total of $1,150—U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) provided him with no further explanation. Wakili’s story is not unique. His family are among tens of thousands of Afghan nationals marooned in immigration bureaucracy amid…

THIERRY MUGLER HAD THAT fire. He had the passion, not only the big vision but also the meticulousness needed to design clothes well—down to what exactly a curve should look like, and how it should be executed. I first met Mugler, who died at 73 on Jan. 23, in 1989 when he discovered my off-Broadway show—I performed as my über-glam female character, Lypsinka. He hired me to jump out of a cake at his birthday party; he later said he wanted me to be a part of his spring/summer 1992 runway show at Paris Fashion Week. This was something that I had long dreamed of: to be in a Parisian fashion show wearing women’s clothes. We realize that your body type is not the same as one of our fitting…

Spanish tennis star Rafael Nadal reacts after smashing records on Jan. 30 as he beat Russia’s Daniil Medvedev in the final of the Australian Open, his 21st Grand Slam singles title. The 35-year-old rallied from two sets down to defeat Medvedev, who had been seeded above him, in the second longest Grand Slam final ever. In the absence of archrival Novak Djokovic, who was deported from Australia on Jan. 16 in a row over his COVID-19 vaccination status, Nadal’s victory marks a new record in men’s tennis history. ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

I RECENTLY HAD DINNER WITH A WHITE FRIEND. He mentioned completing the Me and White Supremacy workbook—Layla F. Saad’s extraordinary tool for people who hold white privilege and want to interrogate it. “How was it?” I asked, sipping my wine. “Exhausting,” he proclaimed. And it is exhausting, the slow, painstaking, write-it-down process of examining how racial hierarchy shows up in one’s beliefs, desires, fears, friendships, and communities. He was doing “the work.” I was happy and, being a person of color, relieved. I also immediately wondered whether he’d insisted that white members of his social circle—friends, spouse, parents, siblings—do the work too. But I didn’t ask. I was afraid to learn that he hadn’t. I know a lot of white people. Private elementary and high school, an elite law school,…

WHEN JEREMY LUBAN FIRST SAW THE GENETIC SEQUENCE OF THE OMICRON VARIANT LAST NOVEMBER, HE KNEW RIGHT AWAY IT WOULD BE A SERIOUS PROBLEM. There was the sheer number of new mutations—as many as 50, with 30 or so in the critical places that vaccines and drug treatments target—and the fact that this version of the SARS-CoV-2 virus seemed to have appeared out of nowhere. “It’s like when you look at the first page of a comic book and all of the Marvel villains have gotten together,” says the University of Massachusetts virus expert. “How are we going to survive this?” he recalls thinking. “We can deal with one [mutation], but 10 or more of them all at once?” Yet Omicron, like all villains, has an Achilles’ heel. While it…

If you could levitate, dronelike, above the dilapidated, 1940s-era public-housing projects in California’s Sunnydale neighborhood, you would be able to make out San Francisco’s gleaming silver skyline, just seven miles away. Here, iron-barred windows are framed by exposed electrical wires and water-stained exteriors. There, the median price of a midtier home exceeds $1.5 million; a one-bedroom apartment rents for an average of $3,330 a month. On a crisp October morning, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Marcia Fudge, an austere figure dressed head to toe in black, stood in the gulf between these disparate realities and connected them. She was in Sunnydale to champion the city’s plan to erect 1,770 new mixed-income residential units to replace 775 old ones, but her message was about the larger challenge facing America.…

ON A DRIZZLY DECEMBER MORNING THAT turned Helsinki’s ice-slicked streets even more treacherous, 11-year-old Minh Anh Ho sat safely indoors, hunched over a microscope. The rest of her classmates were occupied with different tasks: interviewing the mayor for the local news station, overseeing the electric company, stocking the shelves of the local grocery store. But as a researcher for a company called Borealis that repurposes plastic, she was busy analyzing the sheet of cling film that lay beneath her lens. “I think it’s a really important job,” she said. “Plastic takes a really long time to disappear, so it would be good to come up with something else to do with it and not just throw it away.” Yrityskyla, the learning center where Ho and her class were spending the…

HANDSOME, FUNNY, AND OOZING charisma, Will Smith would have excelled at anything he attempted as a 21-year-old rapper. Luckily for kids growing up in the ’90s, he turned to the small screen in the classic NBC sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Viewers drawn in by Smith’s energetic presence found more to love than one famous face. Each member of the stuffy yet loving Banks clan became a foil for Will’s street-smart extroversion, and every actor in the ensemble shined. As Tatyana Ali, who played Will’s cousin Ashley, observed in a 2020 reunion special, “Our show meant Black excellence to people.” To its credit, Peacock’s passable reboot doesn’t try to re-create that comedic chemistry. Inspired by a viral spoof trailer for a dark Fresh Prince adaptation, Bel-Air (which includes the…

BUDDHIST MONK THICH NHAT HANH, who died on Jan. 22 at 95, exemplified simplicity and humility. He was one of the first people who helped me grapple with what mindfulness really meant. Many teachers try to focus on letting go of the mind. That’s such a daunting concept. But he emphasized mind-full-ness. These teachings had so many simple yet profound implications. They weren’t highly philosophical or abstract—rather, grounded in reality. One of Thich Nhat Hanh’s most memorable sayings was his prediction that the next Buddha might not be an individual, but a community. I agree with him. We’re not looking for individual messiahs anymore. We need concrete gatherings of people who can sustain loving, nonviolent relationships over time. That combination of individual as well as community-oriented enlightenment is his greatest…

When an NFL player decides to retire at 44, it rarely comes as a surprise. But Tom Brady thought he could throw touchdown passes forever. “I really think I can play as long as I want,” Brady told reporters last October. Fans had plenty of reasons to believe him. Brady played in three Super Bowls past the age of 40, and 10 in total—seven of which his team won. And although his Tampa Bay Buccaneers, the defending Super Bowl champions, lost to the Los Angeles Rams in the playoffs, he was also coming off a career year. But after days of speculation, Brady confirmed his plan to step back from his “competitive commitment” to football, in a Feb. 1 statement. The all-time bar for NFL greatness that Brady has set…

Spotify has a much bigger problem than Joe Rogan. The streaming service has been in damage-control mode, trying to quell the outcry over COVID-19 misinformation spread by Rogan, the popular podcast host. Spotify released its internal rules prohibiting “dangerous content,” and said it will attach an advisory to any podcast that discusses the pandemic, directing listeners to a new informational hub. But despite these moves, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek also suggested this issue is about free speech. He stressed that Spotify doesn’t want to become a “content censor” and that he is committed to “supporting creator expression.” That’s where his trouble starts. He is hiding behind the same argument that platforms like Facebook and Google make—that Spotify is a platform that distributes content created by others, but isn’t really responsible…

GREAT WARS SOMETIMES START OVER SMALL OFFENSES. A murdered duke. An angered pope. The belief of a lonely king that his rivals aren’t playing fair. When historians study why armies began gathering in Europe during the plague of 2021, their interest might turn to a teenage girl, the goddaughter of Moscow’s isolated sovereign. Her name is Daria, a young Ukrainian with a shy smile and big brown eyes. When she was born in 2004, her parents asked their friend Vladimir Putin, then a few years into his reign in Russia, to christen her in the Orthodox tradition they all share. The girl’s father, Viktor Medvedchuk, has been close to Putin for decades. They holiday together on the Black Sea. They conduct business. They obsess over the bonds between their…

IN MARCH 2020, LAURA FITTON, A 50-YEAR-OLD ENTREPRENEUR in Massachusetts, had a high fever, sore throat, gastrointestinal issues, and loss of taste. But at the time, few of those symptoms were linked to COVID-19, so Fitton wasn’t eligible for a test. It took seven more months of persistent symptoms—including brain fog, swollen joints, fast heart rate, chills, and fatigue—for a doctor to order an antibody test. Although the test came back negative—perhaps because of how much time had passed since she had gotten sick—Fitton was relieved that a doctor was finally exploring the possibility of Long COVID, a little-understood condition in which people suffer symptoms long after their acute infection passes. Two years after her initial illness, getting care is still a battle. She must wait until July for a…

A gallon of unleaded gas costs $1.11 more than it did last year, and a pound of ground beef now goes for an extra 65¢. But there are few places where Americans are feeling inflation rates as acutely as the U.S. housing market: from December 2020 to December 2021, the median price of a home shot up by nearly $50,000. There are lots of reasons for this uptick, but one major factor is the nationwide shortage of affordable housing—a problem borne of exclusionary local land-use rules, a slump in new construction because of supply-chain issues and labor shortages, and COVID-19, which drove a surge in demand among newly remote workers. It’s more than just a housing problem. Since homeownership is the best way to accrue wealth over a lifetime,…

WHEN THE NEWS BROKE, IN 2020, that Disney-owned Hulu was making a miniseries about Pamela Anderson, Tommy Lee, and the purloined sex tape that shook the world, it came as a surprise. The platform had always been the streaming home for the company’s R-rated fare, but it seemed doubtful that Disney would be bold enough to do justice to a triple-X premise. Well, as all the prerelease headlines trumpeting the fictionalized Lee’s animatronic talking penis confirmed, that particular worry was misplaced. It turns out that the problems with Pam & Tommy go far beyond a shortage (or surplus) of raunch. The best thing this frustrating ’90s-set crime caper has going for it is its cast. Sebastian “Winter Soldier” Stan captures the manic machismo of Mötley Crüe drummer Lee in full,…

IN A WORLD STARVED FOR GLAMOUR, THANK GOODNESS for Jennifer Lopez. There’s a moment in her new romantic comedy, Marry Me, where, as a worldwide pop star who impetuously marries a regular-guy math teacher (Owen Wilson), she makes a showbiz entrance almost too outsize for even the big screen. Rising from the depths of an arena stage in a cloud of sea-foam white smoke, her pulled-back hair capped with a spiny jeweled crown, she’s the spirit of midcentury movie and swimming star Esther Williams incarnate. Her skin is luminescent, like the inside of a shell. Her bearing is both regal and athletic, a reminder that she’s not really a deity, but a middle-aged woman who works hard to keep every muscle sculpted. Real yet unreal, she’s the kind of extravagant…

KATHY JOHNSTON IS SO IN LOVE WITH CHOCOLATE, she lies awake at night thinking about it. “For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed,” she says. But as chief chocolate officer of Dubai-based chocolatier Mirzam, that’s a healthy fixation to have. Like many other goods on Dubai’s store shelves, most of the city’s chocolate has traditionally been imported. But Mirzam is one of several ambitious startups developing homegrown alternatives—in its case, it’s making high-quality, bean-to-bar chocolate featuring ingredients sourced from along a historic spice route that ran from the west coast of Japan across the Middle East to Europe. Johnston joined Mirzam in early 2016 after meeting the company’s founders, who persuaded her to work for them, rather than chasing her original dream of moving to Switzerland,…