Table of contents for February 15, 2021 in TIME Magazine

After a section of California’s iconic Highway 1 was pushed into the Pacific Ocean on Jan. 28, the surf was still foaming brown three days later. The route along Big Sur’s coastline has “historically been a battle between the ocean and the hillside,” a California Department of Transportation spokesperson tells TIME. The 150-ft. chasm was caused when heavy rains carried down trees, rocks and mud from an area scarred by an August 2020 wildfire. For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

A WEIRD THING HAPPENED RIGHT AFTER THE NOV. 3 ELECTION: NOTHING. The nation was braced for chaos. Liberal groups had vowed to take to the streets, planning hundreds of protests across the country. Right-wing militias were girding for battle. In a poll before Election Day, 75% of Americans voiced concern about violence. Instead, an eerie quiet descended. As President Trump refused to concede, the response was not mass action but crickets. When media organizations called the race for Joe Biden on Nov. 7, jubilation broke out instead, as people thronged cities across the U.S. to celebrate the democratic process that resulted in Trump’s ouster. A second odd thing happened amid Trump’s attempts to reverse the result: corporate America turned on him. Hundreds of major business leaders, many of whom had…

A young woman came up to the microphone after another student had had his turn. I was book touring for Stamped From the Beginning at a historically Black university in Dover, Del. Looking freshman young, her darker skin curled around a nervous face. Or a curious one? “Have you ever thought about cutting your hair?” she asked matter-of-factly. My locs hung down my back as still and suspended as the room. I sensed the question had less to do with my hairstyle and more to do with my lifestyle choices. Locs after all—like cornrows and huge Afros—make some white people uncomfortable. Not considered professional. Considered rebellious. I didn’t think twice about my answer. “No,” I replied. Time paused in the silence. She smiled. An approving murmur shot through the room…

Twenty-seven years ago, two films depicting the Black Panther Party were released 10 months apart. The first, Forrest Gump, needed only two minutes to reduce the movement to nameless, arrogant militants in allegiance with a domestic abuser. The film won Best Picture at the Oscars, earned $680 million and became part of many high school history curriculums. The second film, Mario Van Peebles’ Panther, portrayed the group as a grassroots organization of idealists systematically stifled and imprisoned by an unjust legal system. The film drew vicious attacks from conservatives and skepticism from critics, with one Baltimore Sun story citing detractors who linked its antigovernment ideology to that behind the recent Oklahoma City bombing. Panther took in $6.8 million before fading from view; it’s currently unavailable on any streaming platform. Those…

ON FEB. 1, MYANMAR’S MILITARY ARRESTED LEADERS OF THE COUNTRY’S CIVILIAN-LED GOVERNMENT AND DECLARED A ONE-YEAR STATE OF EMERGENCY. After a decade-long experiment with limited direct democracy, the junta is firmly in charge, and a nation that once seemed to offer a road map for transition out of armed dictatorship is now once again under lockdown. This is an ugly story of fragile democracy and brute force, but it is not a simple morality play. Aung San Suu Kyi is a complicated figure. The sacrifice of her freedom and the force of her personality made the 2011 power-sharing deal possible. But when the army murdered members of the mostly Muslim Rohingya minority in 2017 and drove 750,000 more from the country, Aung San Suu Kyi publicly defended the country. Beijing…

It was –61°F in Yakutsk, about 300 miles south of the Arctic Circle, on Jan. 23, but the people still came. The scene was like something out of a postapocalyptic movie: a queue of dimly visible figures against the whited-out backdrop of a snow squall. They had come to show solidarity with Alexei Navalny. Navalny, the detained leader of the Russian opposition, was arrested upon his return from Germany, where he had been recovering from an attempt on his life by Russian intelligence agents. He had called on social media for nationwide protests. They were on rooftops in Vladivostok. Protesters thronged the city squares of Novosibirsk and Irkutsk, where they chanted, “We will not leave.” Authorities roughed them up, even the kids, in Moscow, where as many as 40,000 turned…

WHEN DOES A PANDEMIC END? IS IT WHEN LIFE REGAINS A SEMBLANCE OF NORMALITY? Is it when the world reaches herd immunity, the benchmark at which enough people are immune to an infectious disease to stop its widespread circulation? Or is it when the disease is defeated, the last patient cured and the pathogen retired to the history books? The last scenario, in the case of COVID-19, is likely a ways off, if it ever arrives. The virus has infected more than 100 million people worldwide and killed more than 2 million. New viral variants even more contagious than those that started the pandemic are spreading across the world. And though highly effective vaccines were developed and deployed in record time, it will be a mammoth undertaking to inoculate enough…

WHEN ALEX ALMEIDA SURVEYS HIS FAMILY FARM IN A RURAL CORNER OF LANDLOCKED PARAGUAY, he sees mainly fields, punctuated by small houses with sheet-metal roofs and, in the distance, native lapacho trees blooming with bright yellow flowers. But despite the isolation, there’s only one place in the world the 23-year-old feels truly cut off from. Paraguayan exports of cows and sheep, like the 130 or so Almeida raises, are locked out of the second largest economy in the world, a source of frustration for an ambitious young farmer and student of agriculture. “The cell phone I’m speaking to you on now is from China,” he tells TIME from Caaguazú, a town some 100 miles east of the capital, Asunción. “The shoes and clothes that I buy and wear, it all…

AMERICA WAS IN PERIL IN 2016: unarmed Black people were being killed by police at an alarming clip, and Donald J. Trump’s presidential campaign revealed stark ideological divides. None of this was new; law-enforcement officers have always harassed minorities, and U.S. citizens have long been split along racial and political lines. But not since the late 1960s had the tension been so palpable. Between social media and the 24-hour TV news cycle, viewers could see bullets penetrate Black skin on a continuous loop, or watch antipolice protests unfold in cities like Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York. The music responded in kind; from Solange and Beyoncé to Frank Ocean, Black artists were using their work to address the cultural landscape. And as the world grew louder, the music took on…

‘Children need to have a say in the big topics of our day, like climate change or economic policy.’FRANCISCO VERA, 11-year-old Colombian activist, in an interview with the BBC published Jan. 27. Vera received death threats after he called on the government to provide better access to education ‘As much as I still tap dance into the office, I’m excited about this transition.’JEFF BEZOS, announcing his intent to step down as Amazon’s CEO later this year, in a Feb. 2 statement. He plans to become executive chair ‘LIFE IS A GIFT—EVEN WITH ALZHEIMER’S.’TONY BENNETT, in a Feb. 1 tweet after revealing he was diagnosed with the disease in 2016 ‘I’M THE HAPPIEST THAT I’VE EVER BEEN AND THAT’S WHAT MATTERS.’JOJO SIWA, speaking on Instagram on Jan. 23 after coming out…

PULMONOLOGISTS, EMERGENCY RESPONDERS AND INTENSIVE-CARE TEAMS HAVE BEEN THE POINT OF THE MEDICAL SPEAR IN BATTLING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC IN THE U.S. OVER THE PAST 12 MONTHS, but before long, expect another group of specialists to be more engaged than ever: cardiologists. Take a nation that already eats too much, drinks too much, exercises too little and fails too often to show up for regular checkups, put them in lockdown for a year or more, and those behaviors—all of which are drivers of cardiovascular disease—will only get worse. In a recent survey in the journal Circulation, the American Heart Association (AHA) predicted a surge of cardiovascular death and disease in the months and years to come as a lagging indicator of the lifestyle changes forced upon the world by the…

LUNAR NEW YEAR MIGHT BRING TO MIND FESTIVALS AND FIREWORKS, BUT I’VE ALWAYS ASSOCIATED IT WITH A KIND OF ISOLATION. Long before the pandemic, long before the rest of America learned about sriracha and pho, I grew up in a Vietnamese refugee family in a mostly white town in Michigan. We knew what it meant to be at once invisible and too visible. But at least once a year, on Tet, that racial isolation felt self-chosen; this holiday, the most important day of the year, seemed to be just for us. I could stay home from school, forget about homework and chores. Collect red envelopes filled with money. Eat fried spring rolls, sticky rice cakes, pickled leeks, dried coconut and persimmons, all kinds of treats. My grandmother would cook and…

CERUE COTTON NEVER EXPECTED TO FIND HERSELF ON A PICKET LINE. As a forklift operator for Cash-Wa, a regional food distributor in Fargo, N.D., she enjoyed the physical challenges and responsibility of her job, and was used to working overnight hours. Then COVID-19 arrived. The coronavirus, which had seemed like a faraway problem last spring and summer, began spiking in her community in September. Cotton had a newborn baby and two older children at home, both of whom have asthma. She no longer felt safe going to work. For months, Cash-Wa had failed to require masks in its warehouses, enforce social-distancing rules or screen employees. The company’s only precautions, she says, were handing out cloth masks and placing two bottles of hand sanitizer in the break room. By late November,…

“I’M ROOTING FOR EVERYBODY BLACK.” So said Issa Rae on the red carpet at the 2017 Emmy Awards, capturing the electricity of a moment when “everybody Black” referred to quite a large group of ascendant voices—not only those up for awards that night, and not only those in Hollywood, but artists across the cultural landscape. While there has never been a shortage of Black artists making great work, the past six or so years have seen these creators claiming the spotlight as never before. In fact, the hardest part of compiling this list of 25 works that have defined the current Black Renaissance was coming to terms with what had to be left out: vital films, series, albums, books, plays and more. For guidance, TIME assembled some of the era’s…

FORGET THE UNDOING. TV’S BEST MARITAL THRILLER IN YEARS IS LOSING ALICE, a psychologically rich drama about a filmmaker, her actor husband and the young writer who wants them to bring her first screenplay to life. It premiered on Apple TV+ in January, to little fanfare, and I’ve been talking it up ever since. It’s a shame the show hasn’t gotten more buzz, but the fact that Americans have a chance to see it at all is worth celebrating. In Hebrew with English subtitles, Alice comes to us from Israel—it’s the kind of title that once struggled to find a home in the States. While generations of Americans have had access to British period dramas on PBS, Canadian teen soaps on cable and other Anglophone imports, traditional TV shied away…