Table of contents for March 14, 2022 in TIME Magazine

IN MARCH 2020, JUST WEEKS BEFORE THE WORLD closed down with the arrival of COVID-19, TIME published a project highlighting 100 influential women, one per year starting in 1920. This was our way of correcting the record, addressing the legacy of a publication long known for its Man of the Year franchise, which only became Person of the Year in 1999. The response to that project was overwhelming, and it crystallized our desire to find more ways to highlight the impact that women have on the world. The pandemic underscored the ways in which broken systems hurt women, from rising domestic violence to disproportionate job losses. When we sat down last fall to conceive a version of this project that could become an ongoing tradition, we chose to spotlight leaders…

BEFORE HER GRADUATION from Miami Palmetto Senior High School in 1988, Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her yearbook that she wanted to be a judge. Thirty-four years later, Jackson walked into the White House, where President Joe Biden nominated her to be the first Black woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court in its 232-year history. “For too long, our government and our courts haven’t looked like America,” Biden said on Feb. 25 while introducing her. “I believe it’s time we have a court that reflects the full talents and greatness of our nation, with a nominee of extraordinary qualifications.” Jackson’s confirmation would bring the bench to near gender parity, with four women and five men. It would also mean a third of its Justices would be people of…

It was the fall of 1968. Earl Caldwell had just gotten back to the New York Times’ offices from a reporting trip. As he recalls, he was at his desk for no more than five minutes when a receptionist told him two men were at the office and wanted to speak with him. They were with the FBI. The agents wanted information about a story Caldwell had reported on the Black Panthers and their weaponry. “I knew this was the beginning of something real,” Caldwell tells TIME. A year and a half later, he received a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury and testify to his knowledge of the Panthers, including his confidential sources. Caldwell had no intention of giving up his sources—“It goes against everything you stand…

For more than a third of her life, Grace Kass called Ukraine home. She had left the Democratic Republic of Congo to study engineering in Kharkiv and stayed on, forging a career as a makeup artist. The 24-year-old learned some Russian and Ukrainian, and made close friends; she belonged. Until Feb. 27, when she was forced to flee Ukraine. Like many refugees of color, she feels betrayed by the country that once welcomed her. On her journey, she and other African women were forced to wait outside in the freezing cold while white women were allowed to board trains for Poland before them, and deprived of the food that others were offered. “It was a traumatic experience,” she says. Though a majority-white nation, Ukraine is home to small communities of…

DR. GINA SEQUEIRA FIRST SAW THE PROTESTERS ON A clear morning last September. A co-director of Seattle Children’s Gender Clinic who provides gender-affirming care to young people, Sequeira had confronted ignorance about her medical specialty in the past. But nothing had prepared her to see people outside her office, waving signs and handing out flyers warning of the “dangers” of the work she does. “That was really, really hard for us as a clinic,” she says. “And I think it was really hard for the hospital’s patients and families who witnessed it.” Just a month later, protesters showed up again. Hers wasn’t the only clinic having a hard time in 2021. The LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign has calculated that, last year, conservative lawmakers introduced more than 130 antitrans…

FOR AMANDA GORMAN, THE HARDEST PART OF writing poetry isn’t mastering rhythm or conjuring powerful images. Those things come naturally to the writer, who became the youngest Inaugural poet in U.S. history last year. No, the hardest part of poetry, Gorman says, is letting herself speak at all. “Girls have spent so much of their lives being told to be seen and not heard, and you can see how they might bring that fear to the page,” she says, speaking from her home in Los Angeles. “So the core aspect of any conversation I have with someone who wants to start writing is: How do you stare at the monster of fear, know that it’s there, but not let it take up so much space?” Gorman, 23, was lucky enough…

IN JANUARY 2019, FOUR BLACK AND LATINA girls were walking down the hallway of their middle school in Binghamton, N.Y., laughing, when their principal stopped them. He brought the 12-year-olds to the school’s health office where, one by one, they were given sobriety tests and searched, alleges a lawsuit filed on behalf of their parents by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF). The school denies the allegation of inappropriate searches, as well as the premise of the litigation: that racial and gender bias led school officials to read playful behavior as suspicious. The case, which is ongoing, is emblematic of LDF’s work under its president and director-counsel, Sherrilyn Ifill, who has strived to emphasize gender equity’s significance in the fight for racial justice and education access. For nine…

KID OF THE YEAR In the Feb. 28/March 7 issue, Angelina Jolie’s interview with TIME’s Kid of the Year, 11-year-old Orion Jean, who has arranged donations of hundreds of thousands of books and meals for kids and families in need, caught the attention of many. “If only we could all learn from Orion Jean—this world would be a kinder, better place,” tweeted the actor Mia Farrow. “We need MORE of his type of kindness in the world!” echoed the civil rights lawyer Ben Crump in a tweet. “I’m glad he’s being recognized for his outstanding contributions!” Other adults said that Orion’s story made them more hopeful about the future. “I just love seeing smart young people unfold their talent!” tweeted Marc Alain Boucicault. “Compassion should drive our actions as…

“IT IS UNEQUIVOCAL that climate change has already disrupted human and natural systems,” states the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in a Feb. 28 report warning that humans must accelerate efforts to adapt communities in preparation for the challenges of a warming world. “Any further delay in concerted anticipatory global action,” the report says, “will miss a brief and rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.” HOT TOPICS The next decade will prove a crucial test of whether the world can move fast enough to address an increasingly complex challenge. “There was concern among many in the climate community that highlighting the acute need for investment in adaptation would undermine the importance of reducing emissions,” says Nat Keohane, president of the Center for…

DIED Gary Brooker, front man for the rock band Procol Harum known for his vocals on “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” on Feb. 19, at 76. RESUMED Queen Elizabeth’s royal duties, on March 1—nine days after the 95-year-old British monarch tested positive for COVID-19. SETTLED A class-action lawsuit demanding equal pay brought against U.S. Soccer by the country’s women’s national soccer team, for $24 million, on Feb. 22. SANK A cargo ship carrying some 4,000 cars, including many luxury vehicles, on March 1, just over 250 miles off the Azores, after catching fire nearly two weeks earlier. ENDED The children’s TV show Arthur, on Feb. 21, after a 25-season run on PBS. HONORED The 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only all-female all-Black U.S. Army unit to serve in…

SARAH AL AMIRI was in VOVID-19 quarantine after arriving in Japan in July 2020 when she learned news beyond anything she had ever dreamed of: while scrolling through Twitter to pass the time, she read that the government of the United Arab Emirates was reshuffling some of its higher-ranking offices and officers and that Amiri, now 35, was being appointed chairwoman of the United Arab Emirates Space Agency (UAESA), the equivalent of NASA administrator. Amiri was already a member of the UAE Prime Minister’s office, serving as Minister of State for Advanced Sciences; she was in Japan for the launch of her country’s first Mars mission, aboard a Japanese Mitsubishi rocket. Yet she says the news still stunned her. “I was shocked. I think that is the right word,” she recalls.…

For years now, there’s been a constant stream of stories about a “crisis” at the border between the U.S. and Mexico as migrants travel north from Central America. On a recent trip to San Diego, I learned about another crisis at the southern border that’s threatening lives in local communities and, less directly, around the world: hours-long waits to enter the U.S. This may sound like a minor pain, but the time it takes vehicles to enter the country means thousands of idling cars and trucks. These vehicles generate considerable air pollution, leading to high levels of particulate matter, a pollutant made of tiny bits of dust, dirt, and smoke. This pollution harms the health of residents, who are overwhelmingly Latino, and contributes to climate change. Border delays result in…

NOT EVEN HOSPITALS ARE SAFE. AT NIGHT, surgeon Vitaly Demidov listens for the sirens signaling that shelling is about to begin near Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, Ukraine’s largest pediatric facility. Staff, parents, and patients “run five or six times a day to the basement and back,” he says. Corpses and abandoned cars surround the hospital buildings. Just four days into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, 16 children had already died and 45 others had been injured, according to official numbers on Feb. 28. Many of the wounded are brought to Okhmatdyt, where they join children who cannot be evacuated because they are on life support. Among the wounded are two siblings who were reportedly shot by Russian forces as they tried to flee Kyiv. Their parents and sister Polina, a…

As Russian troops closed in on their country, the Ukrainian government was already fighting on another front: disinformation. In Ukrainian, English, and Russian, top officials have provided regular social media updates, shot down rumors, and warned of what they say are false Russian narratives. These initiatives come as U.S. officials say that Russia is ramping up attempts to spread doubt among Ukrainian soldiers. “Our information indicates Russia is creating a disinformation campaign by publicizing false reports about the widespread surrender of Ukrainian troops,” a U.S. official told TIME. Russia, which has a history with this type of hybrid warfare, has used familiar tools to sow panic. In one case, text messages falsely alerted Ukrainians that ATMs had stopped working. Pro-Russia propaganda has especially been pushed out on Telegram channels, much…

AMAL CLOONEY DOESN’T LIKE TALKING ABOUT herself. Sit with the 44-year-old lawyer, and she’ll take you on a tour of some of the worst places in the world, where despots reign and standing up for your rights can get you killed. Yet, inevitably, she finds women in these places who want to challenge power, and she supercharges them with her own power: the law. I know that because I’m one of them. Just for doing my job as a journalist, the authorities in the Philippines filed 10 arrest warrants against me in less than two years. Amal has helped defend me since 2019, and I’m a rarity for her because she can actually talk to me. In the past, her journalist clients were in prison, and she worked to free…

IN 2016, AMANDA NGUYEN CELEBRATED A major victory when President Obama signed the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act into law. Helping to craft the legislation, which reforms the handling of sexual assault evidence-collection kits on the federal level, was her way of fighting back after learning in 2013 that her own rape kit was set to be destroyed. The CEO of the nonprofit civil rights organization Rise didn’t stop there; Nguyen, 30, has gone on to help establish similar laws in 40 states to date, and has taken her movement to the U.N., where she’s leading an effort to pass a resolution that would protect survivors around the world. CHANEL MILLER: You are one of the most hardworking and clearheaded people I know—a natural leader. I wanted to know if,…

ZAHRA JOYA WAS 5 YEARS OLD WHEN THE Taliban took power in Afghanistan and banned girls’ education. Undeterred, she dressed in boys’ clothing and walked two hours to and from school every day. After the U.S. invasion in 2001, she dropped her disguise, finished her schooling, and enrolled as a law student, before discovering her calling as a journalist. Afghanistan has long been an extremely dangerous place to be a female journalist. According to Reporters Without Borders, 80% of women journalists have lost their jobs since the collapse of the Afghan government in August. Joya, who founded Rukhshana Media in 2020 with a focus on stories by and about Afghan women, was among those forced to flee the country. She was airlifted to the United Kingdom. She spoke to me…

THREE YEARS AGO, WHEN TRACY CHOU WAS between meetings or even while brushing her teeth, she would frequently open her phone and gravitate to Twitter. “I was a little bit addicted,” admits the 35-year-old founder, software engineer, and advocate for diversity in the tech industry. As an Asian American woman, Chou often found herself in environments that felt alienating. On Twitter, though, she could connect with a broad community of allies, engage with the world around her, and occasionally air her frustrations at racism and sexism in Silicon Valley and beyond. But as her Twitter following grew, so did the abuse. It ranged from what she calls “drive-by trolling,” including sexist or racist slurs, to a couple of persistent stalkers who supplemented online abuse with real-world harassment, with one even…

EARLY IN THE BATMAN, OUR HERO strides into a train station where a group of face-painted hooligans are harassing a citizen of Gotham. He starts punching their ringleader. Maybe too many times. And a little too hard. Is he enjoying it? The man Batman has saved doesn’t say thank you. Instead, he crawls backward, begging for his life. Batman strikes fear in the hearts of villains, but he strikes fear in the hearts of victims too. “I wanted to play on this idea that Batman is going to unleash on these guys, and there’s a part of you that can’t wait to see it,” says director Matt Reeves, whose superhero reboot hits theaters March 4. “You go to a Batman movie to see that moment. And then you see it’s…

In the Starz horror comedy Shining Vale, a desperate dad moves his unfaithful wife and their two teen children out of Brooklyn and into a huge old dimly lit house in small-town Connecticut. Terry (Greg Kinnear) hopes the change will bring Pat (Courteney Cox) back to him; Pat, the author of a steamy best seller, hopes it will provide inspiration for her long-awaited sequel. Too bad no one anticipated the haunting. Haunted-house shows have become rather popular in recent years, from Mike Flanagan’s Netflix duology Haunting to the British sitcom Ghosts and its hit CBS remake. More often than not, the spectral infestation symbolizes the anxieties of the human occupants. Into that dusty attic of imagery, Shining Vale throws in the archetypal blocked writer and housewife horror à la…

SARAH MARSHALL FELL HARD FOR TONYA HARDING. “Why do you fall in love with the people you fall in love with?” Marshall asks. “If you research people for a living, you can ask the same question about why you dedicate months or years of your life to a particular human being and trying to understand them.” These days, Marshall is best known as the host of the podcast You’re Wrong About, which aims to debunk misremembered history. But from 2010 to 2014, Marshall was obsessively reading tabloid coverage of the disgraced figure skater who was accused of conspiring with her ex-husband to attack Nancy Kerrigan, her rival in the 1994 Olympics. (Harding pleaded guilty to hindering the prosecution but denied being involved in the planning.) In 2014, Marshall collected her…

How do you know when you’re ready to write a memoir? It’s very simple: You arrange for a global pandemic. You clean your desk of all other garbage; you look around the house for other things to do. I made five quilts. I walked the dog. And then the next thing—the only thing—I could possibly come up with, besides cleaning the refrigerator, which is nothing anybody ever wants to do, was to write my memoir. You write about rehearsals for your Torch Song Trilogy, and a scene specifically where Estelle Getty took issue with a line when her character tells her son, “It gets better.” She’s talking specifically about grief, but that phrase has become such a rallying cry for the LGBTQ community more broadly. Do you think that’s been…

10 The new maximum length, in minutes, for TikTok videos, the social media platform announced on Feb. 28—a marked increase from the previous three-minute limit ‘TODAY’S RULING IS FRUSTRATING FOR THOSE WHO WERE HOPING FOR SOME REAL CHANGE.’ Clement Tan, spokesperson for the Singaporean LGBTQ-rights group Pink Dot SG, in a Feb. 28 statement shortly after the country’s top court declined to overturn a law criminalizing gay sex €2,000 The “bonus” offered by the Italian region of Lazio as part of a campaign to boost wedding tourism; from Feb. 28, couples who wed in Lazio this year can submit receipts to receive up to that limit (roughly $2,200) in refunds ‘I very much desire to be divorced.’ Kim Kardashian, in Feb. 23 legal documents seeking to end her marriage to…

CDC lifts mask rules for most of U.S. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced on Feb. 25 that it no longer advises mask wearing in public indoor spaces for most Americans, citing its new methodologies for determining community risk. Masks are still required on airplanes and trains and in transit centers, however, through March 18. Guilty verdicts in Floyd officers’ trial Three former Minneapolis police department officers—Tou Thao, J. Alexander Kueng, and Thomas Lane—who were with Derek Chauvin when he killed George Floyd were found guilty on Feb. 24 of federal charges of violating Floyd’s civil rights, and could face decades in prison. The officers also still face charges in state court. N.Z. police break up anti-vax protest On March 2, police removed protesters from grounds…

I’M TRIPLE-VACCINATED AND HAD COVID-19. CAN I GO BACK TO NORMAL? Your body gets better at fighting COVID-19 after each vaccine dose or exposure to the virus—but there doesn’t seem to be a point at which the risk of infection completely disappears. That’s especially true if you are elderly, have underlying medical conditions, or are immunocompromised. Still, there’s good news for triple-vaccinated people who have recovered from a recent COVID-19 case: especially if you’re generally healthy, experts say you’re unlikely to get sick again for at least three to six months. You should never try to catch COVID-19, but there is a silver lining to getting it. The body mounts a wider-ranging immune response when it encounters the actual virus as opposed to a vaccine, says Dr. Rachel Presti, an…

WHAT WOULD IT take to persuade the E.U. to ship weapons into a war zone for the first time in its history? To get Germany to sharply increase its military spending? To inspire famously neutral Switzerland to announce sanctions against the home of some of its biggest banking customers? To push Finland and Sweden to entertain NATO membership? To have Turkey block warships from passing from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean? To move Europeans to sanction the country that supplies 40% of their natural gas? To support severing the access of a military superpower’s banks to the global financial system? Before Vladimir Putin ordered a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, none of these developments was plausible. But as Russian soldiers continue their onslaught on Ukraine’s largest cities, all these…

IF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY has an id, it might look like Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds. Mask requirements? Scrap ’em. Vaccine mandates? In the trash. Distance learning? Nah, thanks. Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Reynolds was among the loudest critics of any efforts to modify personal behavior to curb the spread of the virus. It made her something of a celebrity among conservatives who saw government overreach in every effort to slow the spread of coronavirus. The posture fit perfectly with her political identity honed over decades in Iowa, climbing from county treasurer to become the first woman elected governor of the state despite a good-ol’-boys ethos in Des Moines. And that was why, on March 1, she delivered the Republicans’ official response to President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union…

When Allyson Felix’s daughter Camryn was born premature at 32 weeks in 2018, it was a lonely time for the runner. Just a few years ago, vulnerability was something that female athletes didn’t publicly discuss. But now, things are different. A growing community of Black women athletes—like Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, and Simone Biles—are speaking openly about urgent issues like mental health, maternal health, athlete safety, and equal pay. “When you speak your truth, things happen,” says Felix, who takes inspiration from her peers. “You draw power from one another.” The athlete, 36, had a big year in 2021. Her two medals at the Tokyo Olympics made her the all-time most decorated woman in track, and she earned that distinction wearing shoes made by Saysh, the women’s lifestyle brand she…

In January, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez made history as the first trans actor to win a Golden Globe. The 31-year-old won best actress in a TV drama for her role as house mother Blanca Evangelista on Pose, the FX series about New York City’s ’80s and ’90s ball scene. Just six months earlier, Rodriguez had also broken barriers by becoming the first trans woman to earn an Emmy nomination in a lead acting category. This recognition means more to the actor than adding trophies to her shelf. Rodriguez, who proudly identifies as an Afro-Latina trans woman, has long felt the scarcity of role models who look like her in Hollywood. Rising to the top of her field is validation of the change she’s striving to make. “When I was younger, I…

KERRY WASHINGTON WAS WORKING AS AN activist long before she became a star. She’s best known for her roles onscreen—particularly D.C. fixer Olivia Pope on Shonda Rhimes’ Scandal, which ran from 2012 to 2018—but after the 2016 election, Washington threw herself into political activism. She spoke at the Los Angeles Women’s March in 2017, stumped for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in 2020, and worked with local activists and Stacey Abrams to get out the vote in the 2021 Georgia runoff. These days, Washington prefers to use her star power to lend the spotlight to others, offering up funding, her Hollywood connections, and her storytelling expertise to 10 local organizations that are part of the Vision Into Power Cohort, a program she set up in partnership with the Movement Voter…

Adena Friedman grew up hanging out at the trading desk at investment firm T. Rowe Price—her father’s workplace—and calls herself a “big believer” in the power of capitalism. But it’s become evident, she says, that capitalism isn’t easily accessible to all. Less than 3% of venture capital in the U.S. goes to women-led companies and only 1% to Black and Latinx founders. Friedman believes Nasdaq, the exchange founded in 1971 to expand access to financial markets, has a role to play in ensuring “capitalism works for everyone.” In December 2020, Nasdaq proposed that its listed companies be required to disclose diversity data about their boards of directors. Those companies without at least two “diverse” directors—one who self-identifies as a woman and one who self-identifies as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+—would…