Table of contents for April 10, 2023 in TIME Magazine

Jonas Salk was home with his wife, but she could tell his mind was elsewhere—back in his lab, where work was proceeding apace on what would become the first vaccine against polio. “Why Jonas,” said Donna Salk, according to TIME’s March 29, 1954, cover story, “you’re not listening to me at all.” “My dear,” he was said to have joked, “I’m giving you my undevoted attention.” That Jonas Salk’s devotions lay elsewhere was well known to his intimates. They lay in the battle against polio—a disease that had killed or paralyzed more than 52,000 American boys and girls in a single summer just two years earlier. They lay in his yearslong effort to develop a vaccine against the disease. And they lay too in the great field trial that…

Apologizing is how we coexist as imperfect beings. Yet few of us know how to do it well—and not defensively. “We immediately turn to excuses, justifications, reasons why the victim provoked us,” says Karina Schumann, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Pittsburgh who has researched the barriers to apologizing. Just as often, apologies don’t happen at all out of fear that they’ll be uncomfortable or ineffective. But sincere apologies bring a host of benefits to the person delivering the message and the one receiving it. They help solidify relationships and mend trust, both of which can lower stress and improve mental health. Research has found that those receiving apologies can experience improvements in blood pressure and heart rate, as well as increased activation of empathy-related brain…

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul when a devastating earthquake hit Izmit in 1999, killing more than 17,000 people and devastating the country’s economy. The government’s shambolic response to the natural disaster allowed Erdogan to burnish his credentials as a capable and compassionate leader, setting the stage for his election as Premier in 2003. Erdogan has maintained an iron rule ever since, outliving economic downturns, refugee crises, corruption scandals, protest movements, and even a coup attempt. But with the May 14 presidential and parliamentary elections coming up, two seismic shifts threaten Erdogan’s grip on power. Two seismic shifts threaten Erdogan’s grip on power The most obvious challenge to Erdogan’s re-election is his botched response to the earthquakes that rocked Turkey and Syria in February, which claimed…

There is one word in Joe Biden’s vocabulary that he surely wishes he could purge: again. It’s been a constant during his two-plus years as President and his eight as the understudy. Over that time, Biden has repeatedly had to shoehorn again into his planned remarks on other subjects, to pepper it into hastily called statements from a White House podium or en route to another event. “You know, the shooter in this situation reportedly had two assault weapons and a pistol—two AK-47,” Biden said on March 27 in the White House’s East Room, where he was forced to preface his speech to the Small Business Administration’s summit for women with an update on the school shooting earlier that day in Nashville. “So, I call on Congress, again,” he said,…

EXPELLED Rahul Gandhi Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, the de facto leader of India’s main opposition party, was expelled from Parliament after being criminally convicted of defamation on March 23. Gandhi’s question in a 2019 speech—“Why do all thieves have Modi as their surname?”—brought a two-year prison sentence from a judge in Gujarat, and more questions about the trend toward authoritarianism in the world’s largest democracy under Narendra Modi, India’s Prime Minister. “These are flimsy and cooked-up charges,” Praveen Chakravarty, a spokesperson for the Indian National Congress, told TIME in a statement. The party ruled India for 54 of its 75 years of independence, and Gandhi’s father, grandmother, and great-grandfather served as Prime Ministers. Gandhi can file an appeal. If he loses, he will not be able to contest any…

Climate experts have long warned about the many ways a warming planet can negatively affect human health. Now that global temperatures are predicted to increase by 1.5°C by the 2030s, that risk is becoming increasingly real. One long-held prediction that appears to be coming true—according to the results of a study recently published in Nature Scientific Reports—is how climate change might expand concentrations of bacteria that thrive and spread through warm sea waters and cause an infection with a particularly high fatality rate. Vibrio vulnificus flourishes in salty or brackish waters above 68°F. Infections are currently rare in the U.S., but that’s likely to change. Using 30 years of data on infections from the bacterium reported to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, scientists at the University of…

In 40 minutes, the former grocery bagger from Puerto Rico will try on outfits worth thousands for the cover of this magazine. In 12 hours, he will be photographed embracing the world’s highest-paid supermodel. In one month, he will be staring out onto a sea of 125,000 superfans from the heights of Coachella’s main stage. But right now, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who also goes by Bad Bunny, is slouched almost completely horizontally on a green-room couch in downtown Los Angeles, thinking about being with his parents back home in Puerto Rico. “Outside of that house, perhaps the world is listening and talking about me,” he murmurs in Spanish. “But in that house, everything is the same. Nothing has changed. It’s beautiful for me to go there and they…

Frank Gehry wants to build a park in Los Angeles. Not just a normal park on empty land; that’s for lightweights. Gehry wants to take chunks of the legendarily unlovely Los Angeles River, a 51-mile engineered waterway mostly lined with concrete, and suspend parks over them. It sounds like a pipe dream, or in this case more of a channel dream; it’s expensive, unprecedented, structurally complex, and anathema to many of the locals. But Gehry, 94, has made a career of overcoming such obstacles and, in the process, transforming cities. Skepticism was also the initial response of officials in charge of selecting the architect for the Guggenheim Museum in the northern Spanish town of Bilbao, upon seeing the extremely rough models Gehry presented in 1991, in one version of which…

The rise of Bad Bunny has been all the more impressive for how he’s come to dominate pop culture while singing in his native Spanish. Find the full interview that formed the basis of this story, as well as an English translation, at time.com/badbunny Actualmente, estamos en el centro de L.A. ¿Te gusta la ciudad? Realmente, sí me gusta. Siempre me ha gustado desde que he estado viniendo unos años. Es un lugar al que desde que era chamaquito, antes de todo esto, siempre soñé con ir. Siempre soñé con ir algún día a Los Ángeles porque era fanático de los Lakers y Kobe. ¿Dónde están las mejores playas? ¿Los Ángeles o Puerto Rico? Ya sabes la respuesta a eso. Puerto Rico, definitivamente mil veces. Todavía no me he…

TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew (right) was grilled by U.S. lawmakers at a congressional hearing on March 23, amid fresh concerns about the app’s ties to China and its data security. The Biden Administration, the intelligence community, and lawmakers say they worry Americans’ app-usage data may be weaponized by the Chinese state. The hearing came after the White House indicated it may ban the app in the U.S. if TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Bytedance, refuses to sell its stake. Setting up a confrontation, Beijing said it would oppose any forced sale. WASHINGTON’S CONCERNS TikTok, which has 150 million users in the U.S., has emerged as one of the most contentious elements in the nation’s deepening rivalry with China. The Biden Administration is reportedly concerned about China’s harnessing user data…

The comet known as Oumuamua (Hawaiian for “visitor from afar”) sailed through our solar system in 2017, and right away made news. Its small size—barely a quarter-mile long—and strange, elongated shape made it an odd cosmic spectacle. What’s more, its trajectory indicated that it came from outside our solar system, making it the first known interstellar object to visit our corner of space. And there was one other thing about Oumuamua that caught astronomers’ eyes: it sped up when it was leaving the solar system, far more than ordinary comets do when they’re flung away by the sun’s gravity. That led to some wild speculation that Oumuamua might be an alien vehicle buzzing our solar system. Now, a new paper in Nature explains the acceleration, and alas, no aliens…

On the edge of Wallace Park in Portland, Ore., there is an unremarkable house with a camellia shrub out front. The house is painted a bluish gray now, but it might have been another color before. Cheryl Strayed is standing on the sidewalk in the rain with a smile on her face, conjuring a memory. This is where she took part in a yard sale in 1995, immediately after she—now quite famously—completed a 1,100-mile solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail. At the time, she was a 27-year-old aspiring writer with 20¢ to her name. She sold whatever she could, including a pencil sharpener to a man who rode in on a bicycle. The man invited her to dinner with some friends, and later that night, Strayed met the person…