Table of contents for September 4, 2023 in TIME Magazine

From Aug. 7–9 in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, TIME Impact House was a new place for influential conversations. Sponsored by UBS, programming focused on equity in philanthropy and featured speakers like former Attorney General Eric Holder (bottom right). “The right thing to do is also the smart thing to do,” entrepreneur Tulaine Montgomery (near right) told TIME’s Janell Ross. For more, visit time.com Equality’s march In honor of this August’s 60th anniversary of the March on Washington, TIME hosted an Aug. 10 dinner in Atlanta for more than 100 leaders. Held at the National Center for Civil and Human Rights, in partnership with American Family Insurance, the event featured speakers including Stacey Abrams, former Georgia house minority leader, who talked about honoring Martin Luther King Jr. “We must live his…

Peter Paccone, a social-studies teacher in San Marino, Calif., has a new teacher’s aid helping him in the classroom this year. He plans to defer to his helper to explain some simpler topics to his class of high schoolers, like the technical aspects of how a cotton gin worked, in order to free up time for him to discuss more analytical concepts, like the effects of the first Industrial Revolution. His new assistant? ChatGPT. “What I feel that I don’t have to do any longer is cover all the content,” Paccone told a group of more than 40 educators in a May Zoom workshop, which he organized. If artificial intelligence is on the cusp of reshaping entire aspects of society—from health care to warfare—the realm that leaps first to many…

American teens are having a hard time. High school students reporting chronic feelings of sadness and hopelessness rose from 1 in 5 to 1 in 3 from 2008 to 2019, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). By the pandemic fall of 2021, the feelings were reported by 42% of high school students and almost 60% of girls. The thing is, a lot of parents are in really bad shape too. The attention to the kids makes sense. The CDC’s 2021 data showed a quarter of teen girls had made a suicide plan. Social media has been blamed for the rise in mood disorders, as have sleep deprivation, spikes in loneliness, and academic pressure. One of the key ways we can bolster teens’ mental health and buffer…

Enric Sala—marine ecologist, conservationist, and ocean advocate—is standing under a life-size replica of a Northern Atlantic Right Whale at the natural history museum in Washington, D.C., and the air outside is smudged with wildfire smoke drifting down from Canada. It’s not surprising that Sala wants to talk about the smoke, or about whales. Their poop, however, is an unexpected twist. According to Sala, whale excrement, or, more precisely, the lack of it, has a role to play in the choking miasma that has forced my interview with one of the world’s foremost ocean explorers indoors instead of out on a boat. It may seem like a stretch, the kind that relegates environmentalists deep into woo-woo territory, but as our conversation unfolds, it starts making sense. Whale poop fertilizes ocean plankton.…

There’s always some way to reinvigorate an old genre, and anybody with the energy and imagination to do so should try. In Emma Seligman’s Bottoms, gay misfits and best friends PJ (Rachel Sennott) and Josie (Ayo Edebiri) face their last year of high school with a typical teenage longing: they desperately want to lose their virginity before graduation. They’re gawky, socially inept. The objects of their affections, unfortunately, are cheerleaders who want nothing to do with them, lanky, blasé Brittany (Kaia Gerber) and sweet, adorable Isabel (Havana Rose Liu), who’s under the thumb of the school’s bullying, numbnuts football star Jeff (Nicholas Galitzine). How many times have we seen some version of that scenario, only with gawky teenage boys as the protagonists? Bottoms reverses that equation at the start,…

Italy noticed first. It was the first country to lock down during the COVID-19 pandemic, and later in 2020, researchers at Florence’s Anna Meyer Children’s University Hospital were the first to point out a puzzling trend: more young girls than ever before had been showing up at the hospital with clear signs of early-onset puberty. The cases weren’t unique, but their frequency was. Since early-onset—or “precocious”—puberty first gained widespread clinical attention in the 1990s, it’s become steadily more common worldwide. Defined as the appearance of secondary sex characteristics such as breasts, pubic hair, and vocal changes in girls 8 or younger and boys 9 or younger, precocious puberty has been difficult for researchers to attribute to a single cause. But a mysterious, pandemic-generated spike in cases has provided experts with…

The two years that Miguel Cardona has been in the nation’s top education job haven’t exactly been serene: In June, the Supreme Court rejected President Joe Biden’s student-loan-forgiveness plan and, in another ruling, essentially overturned affirmative action. The nation is in the midst of both a teacher shortage and a wave of book-banning attempts. At the same time, students are still working to recover from pandemic-era learning loss. The Secretary of Education covered all that, plus ChatGPT, in a July conversation with TIME. When the student-loan-payment pause ends this fall, what do you say to borrowers who won’t be able to make ends meet? We announced the best income-driven repayment program in our country’s history, which will change the experience for so many borrowers. It cut in half the college…

The Iowa voter had a question for Ron DeSantis—a plea, of sorts, on behalf of “all the small-town people.” Outsiders “suggest we’re the flyover country, the racists, the deplorables, the Walmart shoppers,” Jason Summers, a 53-year-old Republican activist who owns a small insurance business, tells the governor of Florida. Presidential candidates, he adds, “come around every four years, they kiss our babies, pat us on the head and send us on our way, and then they forget about us.” How could the residents of Albia, Iowa—pop. 3,712—be sure that DeSantis wouldn’t abandon them too? Less than an hour earlier, DeSantis had roared into town juggernaut-style, disembarking from a bus emblazoned with his name and that of Never Back Down, his $100 million super PAC, trailed by a dozen advisers and…

It’s easy to spot the small, family-owned fishing boats that ply the waters around Baja California—a peninsula 1,223 km (760 miles) long that represents the westernmost part of Mexico. There are 24,000 of the vessels, after all, and they spend much of their time at sea—as well they might if the so-called artisanal fishermen are going to compete with the vastly larger industrial vessels that fish the same waters. The average artisanal boat measures 24 m (79 ft.) from bow to stern, compared with the industrial vessels, which can easily exceed the length of a football field, at 130 m (427 ft.). And the industrial vessels are equipped accordingly—with nets that measure 600 m (1,968 ft.) across, and baited lines that may stretch 45 km (28 miles) long. “There’s…

In a nation torn apart by, of all things, the perception that drag performers will corrupt our children, the time is right for a documentary about the glitter king himself, Little Richard, a performer who broke all kinds of boundaries at a time when doing so could be life-threatening. Lisa Cortés’ Little Richard: I Am Everything—which premiered at Sundance and will make its television premiere on CNN on Sept. 4—tells the life story of the man who was born Richard Wayne Penniman in 1932 Macon, Ga., the son of a minister and nightclub owner who disapproved of his son’s flamboyance. But Cortés, using clips from Penniman’s performances and appearances on TV talk shows, gives us something much more than your standard biographical documentary. She uses Penniman’s story to map…

The signs in Georgia were there for months. Back in February, the forewoman of a special grand jury hinted that her advisory panel had recommended criminal charges against “not a short list” of familiar names in connection to an effort to overturn the results of Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. The prosecutor asked a county judge in May to keep the courthouse clear and prepared for any potential violence, just in case she moved ahead with a second grand jury seeking an indictment of ex-President Donald Trump. On July 27, orange barricades encircled the Fulton County courthouse compound, telegraphing as clearly as possible that the former Leader of the Free World was about to face a judicial summons, even as he leads the pack of rivals for the Republican Party’s…

It might sound obvious, in the midst of a loneliness crisis, that having friends matters. But many of us “underestimate the very real impact our friendships can have on our life,” says Marisa Franco, a psychologist and author of Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make—and Keep—Friends. “Connection is the most important factor predicting our health, both physical and mental.” A growing body of research supports that point: Healthy, stable friendships can protect against depression and anxiety, increase life satisfaction, extend longevity, and improve health metrics like blood pressure and body mass index. Those who don’t have strong social connections, meanwhile, have an elevated risk of heart disease and stroke, Type 2 diabetes, addiction, and dementia. While many people assume it’s the number of friends that…

Ever since I retired from television writing at the ripe age of 38, people have asked me, “Why would you quit such a cool career?” It’s impossible to answer this question over cocktail-party conversation. Where would I even begin? There were the grueling hours, the egotistical bosses, the dysfunction—there’s everything the Writers Guild of America is currently fighting against with their ongoing strike, and the issues have only gotten more complex since I left in 2008. My disillusionment had begun at my very first writing job but was momentarily staved off by a positive experience at Freaks and Geeks. Then came Friends. When my agent told me the Friends team wanted to meet with me, I was stunned. It was America’s most popular sitcom—and I had been writing for only…