Table of contents for December 23, 2019 in TIME Magazine

NOT SINCE SOMEBODY FIGURED OUT THAT YOU COULD ATTACH two black plastic disks to a skull cap and make everyone look like Mickey Mouse has a pair of ears sent such a buzz through a media executive. The new set were green, wing-shaped and attached to a baby space alien. The instant Disney CEO Bob Iger saw them, his heart leapt. “As soon as those ears popped up from under the blanket, and the eyes, I knew,” says Iger, recalling when he first saw footage of Disney’s newest bankable piece of intellectual property, known to the world as Baby Yoda. He likens the feeling to when he was running ABC’s prime-time TV division and 16-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio showed up on Growing Pains. The next moves were obvious: start production…

IN HIS THIRD YEAR AS PRESIDENT, DONALD J. TRUMP PHYSICALLY walked into North Korea. He declared a national emergency for the U.S. border with Mexico. He recognized the disputed Golan Heights as a sovereign part of Israel. For any previous residents of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, one of these developments—unprecedented and historic—might have defined their presidency. For the 45th, they amounted to bullet points. As America’s least orthodox Chief Executive rounds the corner into an election year, he is polishing his list of achievements. Trump has used the power of his office to roll back regulations, drive through a corporate tax cut and boost military spending. He takes credit for supercharging an economy that’s driven unemployment to record lows. He has also continued an uncharacteristically disciplined effort to reshape America’s…

THE GESTURE WAS SIMPLE, BUT THE EFFECT WAS PROFOUND. LESS than 24 hours after a far-right extremist massacred 50 worshippers in two Christchurch mosques in March, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern put on a black hijab to meet members of the Muslim community, hear their fears and share in their grief. In one photograph of the encounter, the young leader’s brow is lightly creased and her mouth turned down, an uncanny expression of empathy mixed with strength. The obscenity of the slaughters has been compounded by being livestreamed. But here was a still frame that, as it spread beyond the heartbroken island nation, would endure as an emblem of compassion, tolerance and resolve. When Ardern took power in October 2017 at the age of 37, it was as…

1. ‘If, instead of all the unsolicited advice, faux concern and nosy questions I fielded in my 30s, I could have read this @szacharek essay, it would have been a real gift.’ REBECCA KEEGAN, Hollywood Reporter editor, on Stephanie Zacharek’s Jan. 14 essay “Why I’m Glad I Didn’t Have Kids,” part of a series on fertility 2. ‘I have deleted my Facebook account. The benefit was hardly worth the burden of the loss of my privacy.’ TROY ANDERSON, Reno, Nev., on the Jan. 28 story about Facebook by one of its early investors, Roger McNamee 3. ‘I will pass this copy to my grandchildren. There are lessons to be learned.’ BARBARA COLLETT, Gainesville, Fla., on Haley Sweetland Edwards’ Feb. 4–11 special report on global migration 4. ‘So happy to…

FLYGSKAM noun 1: “Flight shame” (Swedish) 2: A movement encouraging people to stop traveling by plane in order to reduce carbon emissions hot girl adjective Confident and unapologetic, as expressed in rapper Megan Thee Stallion’s call for her fans to have a “hot girl summer” HINDUTVA noun 1: An ideology that seeks to define Indian culture through Hindu values 2: A concept underpinning the Hindu nationalist movement that helped Narendra Modi win a second term as Prime Minister of India QUANTUM SUPREMACY noun The development of a computer that uses the laws of quantum physics to complete tasks no conventional computer can do in a reasonable amount of time—i.e., solving in minutes a problem that would take another supercomputer 10,000 years, as Google says its quantum processor can streaming wars…

SURELY, IN THE YEAR OF OUR LORD 2019, YOU KNOW WHO LIZZO is. I mean, even if you don’t think you know, girl—you know. Her song is in that Walmart commercial with the dancing cart people, and another one is in an ad for GrubHub, and I swear I was watching a football pregame show and heard strains of the piano riff from her song “Good as Hell” twinkling in the background. She’s on the soundtrack at your Zumba class, her voice is blaring from the headphones of the guy across from you on the train, and your daughter is locked in her bedroom scream-singing, “I just took a DNA test/Turns out I’m 100% that bitch,” from Lizzo’s No. 1 hit, “Truth Hurts,” in her mirror right now. But…

THE TEMPERATURE IN WASHINGTON CHANGED ON JAN. 3 WHEN Nancy Pelosi picked up the gavel and became Speaker of the House for a second time. President Donald Trump has yet to recover. For two years, Trump had benefited from a subservient Republican Congress. Pelosi quickly made clear that divided government would be a different story. Taking the reins in the midst of the longest government shutdown in history, she refused to cave to Trump’s demand for a border wall, waiting him out—and canceling the State of the Union address—until he surrendered. Over the ensuing months, she served as the unorthodox President’s foil, using her mastery of the powers of the Legislative Branch to hold Trump in check. For much of the year, Pelosi battled the left nearly as much…

WHEN EMMANUEL MACRON WAS ELECTED IN MAY 2017, HE strode into his victory celebration not to the sounds of “La Marseillaise” but to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” the anthem of the European Union. Now, halfway through his five-year term, the French President has finally emerged as the de facto leader of the Continent. With German Chancellor Angela Merkel drifting toward retirement, and Britain searching desperately for Brexit, the French leader has seized on seemingly every simmering transnational issue as though he were an indispensable part of its solution: climate, global trade, Iran sanctions, Russian aggression and China’s superpower rivalry. A theater actor in his high school days, this year Macron has cast himself as a global decisionmaker. In November, he bluntly pronounced NATO dysfunctionally “brain dead,” again suggesting that…

IT HAS BEEN MORE THAN FIVE MONTHS SINCE THE U.S. WOMEN’S soccer team won the World Cup, and yet barely a day goes by that Megan Rapinoe doesn’t hear about it from strangers. A young girl at a soccer clinic. A middle-aged man at an airport. Parents the world over via social media. No matter who or where, the topic is always the same: how the team changed a life. A trophy—even for the world’s most prestigious soccer tournament—rarely alters the life of someone who didn’t win it. Nor does a game played in summer tend to generate dinner-table discussions as fall gives way to winter, least of all about gender equity in the workplace. But if there was any question before the World Cup that the U.S. had…

Six leaders who shaped the world in 2019 ON OCT. 1, A PARADE OF TANKS, TROOPS AND NUCLEAR MISSILES rolled through Beijing to mark 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic. Standing before the Forbidden City, abode of emperors, China’s Xi Jinping vowed, “No force can stop the Chinese people and the Chinese nation forging ahead.” Quite a few have tried this year. Nearly 2 million took to the streets to demand democratic reform in semiautonomous Hong Kong, where anti-Beijing candidates won a landslide in district elections. The trade war with the U.S. squeezed China’s growth to a three-decade low. The detention of over a million Muslims in the province of Xinjiang prompted condemnation by the U.N. None have dented Xi’s resolve. Through propaganda and censorship, the…

FOR DECADES AFTER THE BRITISH DEPARTED THE INDIAN subcontinent, its history was one of painful cleavings. The 1947 Partition is a bland label for a division that produced two countries, 15 million refugees and at least a million deaths. When Pakistan, founded as a Muslim homeland opposite a secular India, itself split in two, the war that created Bangladesh in 1971 undid the assumption that a common faith alone could bind a nation. But in 2019, Narendra Modi began his second term in office having revived the premise in India. In May, Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won a months-long election in a landslide that established Modi as the most powerful Prime Minister in more than a generation. But as Modi has consolidated power, India’s Muslims—who make up 14%…

ACROSS 1. First 24-hour news channel, launched by Ted Turner 4. Like much of the heartland inhabited by The Middle Americans 6. Do what Owen D. Young did to some of Germany’s Great War reparations debt 7. Law, like the one establishing Social Security that Franklin D. Roosevelt signed 8. 81, for the oldest individual Person of the Year, Deng Xiaoping 9. A form of aid George Marshall offered to Western Europe after World War II 12. Groups like the Apollo 8 crew 14. Genetic molecule analyzed by some U.S. Scientists 15. French honorific for Chiang Kai-shek’s wife Soong Mei-ling, briefly 16. Market event during Ben Bernanke’s Fed tenure 18. Political affiliation of POTUS Ronald Reagan 19. Rudy Giuliani’s title on 9/11 20. Come before, as Gerald Ford’s time…