Inhoudsopgave van January 26, 2026 - TIME Magazine

On Jan. 6, 2021, I was in the Chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives as violent insurrectionists attacked, bent on interrupting Congress in its constitutional responsibilities, and on doing harm to Vice President Mike Pence, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and members of Congress. Reflecting on that dark day, I keep returning to an underlying force fueling the violence: Second Amendment extremism. The movement I call Second Amendment extremism comes from what legal scholars describe as the “insurrectionist” interpretation of the Second Amendment. This seriously flawed reading holds that Americans have a right under the Constitution, and even an obligation, to take up arms against the government when they disagree with its direction. At the core of this extremism is the dangerous view that the founders viewed aggrieved citizens who…

Life once followed a familiar pattern. You’d go to school, get a job, build a family, and then, sometime in your 60s, retire, enjoying life for a few years until you grew too frail to live on your own. Then you might move in with family or check into a facility where you’d spend your “golden years.” A crucial part of that blueprint was an unsaid but universal assumption: that for the vast majority of people, life would not extend far beyond their 70s. That was based on the average lifespan when this still dominant picture of an American life arc was first formed, and it underpinned everything—from how people planned their careers to the way companies designed their pension plans. Yet now it looks like a relic. Today, life…

In Hampshire and Thames Valley in Southern England, a new kind of cop is on the beat—and it doesn’t wear a uniform. “Bobbi,” built on my company’s Agentforce platform, is an autonomous system that handles nonemergency calls to the police—the thousands of routine questions each day that can overwhelm response centers and slow response times. Bobbi now addresses many of these calls instantly, freeing human officers to focus on the critical emergencies that require, with lives hanging in the balance, the judgment, empathy, and on-the-ground experience that only humans can offer. Bobbi reflects an important shift in how AI is showing up in the world. What makes the platform work isn’t just a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Claude. It’s the way AI is woven into existing law-enforcement…

Four weeks before the beginning of his second term as President, Donald Trump abruptly floated the idea of taking back the Panama Canal. It had been a quarter-century since the U.S. formally ceded to Panama ownership of the channel connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. With one social media post, Trump threw a seemingly stable relationship off-kilter, accusing Panama of overcharging U.S. ships for passage and recklessly permitting China too much influence in the canal’s operations. Looking back, it was an early sign of how America’s relationship with the rest of the world was about to be shaken to its core. Trump’s maximalist threat sent his foreign policy advisers scrambling. Within days of his Inauguration, military planners started work on options for taking the canal by force, according to a…

In 1963, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “We’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check… a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.’” While many remember King’s dream for civil rights, he was also focused on addressing economic inequities, spotlighted by the name of the event that day: the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Just two weeks before he was assassinated, King sharpened that focus: “What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter,” he asked, “if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and a cup of coffee?” But despite progress in civil rights, the economic ledger has barely moved in the past six decades.…

In the early 1990s, young women raised on second-wave feminism but marginalized within the punk scene revolted. Dubbed riot grrrls, bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile aimed wrathful lyrics and gallows humor at a culture of misogyny as it manifested in their own lives, from condescending male musicians to abusive fathers. Now, those artists are in their 50s. And while sexism persists, it touches older women in different ways. Riot Women, a revelatory British series from Happy Valley creator Sally Wainwright that premiered in the U.S. via BritBox on Jan. 14, casts an empathetic eye on these under-acknowledged struggles: loneliness, invisibility, menopause stigma, caretaking fatigue. That might make it sound like a downer. In fact, this six-episode drama about women pushing 60 who form a band to compete in a…

TIME CEO Jessica Sibley and other company leaders opened the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 11, in honor of the announcement of TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year: the Architects of AI. Screens throughout the building showed a question mark inside a red border, which became the cover after the choice was revealed on the Today show. Read the article at time.com/person-of-the-year Getting wise The New Year isn’t the only time to focus on staying healthy—especially when you’re planning to stick around for a good long while. TIME’s new series on longevity, presented by TIAA, starts in this issue and continues online. Head to time.com/new-old-age to learn more, from the secrets of long-lived animals to how to think yourself younger. The Future of Living In this collection of interviews,…

Every time you cram into a tightly packed plane, you might find yourself wondering if you’re about to catch something from the person sitting next to you—or a few rows away. You’re not alone: researchers are also curious about what’s lurking in airplane air. Erica Hartmann, associate professor in the department of civil and environmental engineering at Northwestern University, and her colleagues tried to find out by testing face masks worn by passengers on flights to document what kinds of bugs they trapped. The team was also interested in the air circulating in hospitals, another public place where germs commonly spread, and tested face masks worn by hospital personnel. The researchers collected 53 masks in sterile bags and cut out the outer layers to analyze just the microbes circulating in…

U.S. Special Forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores in Caracas on Jan. 3. The raid involved more than 150 U.S. aircraft and followed months of strikes on alleged drug boats, and a blockade of Venezuelan oil shipments. Two days later, Maduro pleaded not guilty to drug-trafficking charges in a Manhattan courtroom. ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox PHOTOGRAPH BY JESUS VARGAS—GETTY IMAGES PHOTOGRAPH BY CRISTOBAL OLIVARES—BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES PHOTOGRAPH BY JESUS VARGAS—GETTY IMAGES PHOTOGRAPH BY XNY/STAR MAX/GC IMAGES…

Back in the 1980s, around when I first moved to the U.S. from Mexico, Republican Congressman Jack Kemp, then one of conservatism’s brightest stars, who’d quarterbacked the Buffalo Bills before going into politics, declared America’s brand of football stood for democracy and capitalism, unlike that dodgy foreign football, which was a European socialist plot to undermine our ways. The message was that like socialism and the metric system, soccer should be resisted to preserve America. And Americans were doing an excellent job resisting. To move to the U.S. as a teenager in those years was like moving behind some sporting Iron Curtain. I found myself suddenly cut off from the shared global culture of the world’s default sport, in a country that insisted on playing its own games to reinforce…

In too many corners of the world, the Summer skies now arrive with a sepia haze, telltale smoke that signals both burning forests and systems under strain. First responders rush into wildfires knowing they may not return home. Families evacuate. Homes and businesses are destroyed. Air and water are contaminated. In the U.S. alone, wildfires now drive hundreds of billions of dollars in annual losses, while the destruction of biodiversity and forest health locks in a feedback loop that makes each fire more likely, and often more destructive than the last. And yet perhaps the most surprising fact about wildfires is not how grave a crisis they’ve become—but how preventable so many of them are. We know where the risks are highest. We know a great deal about what works.…

In 2025, Donald Trump returned to global center stage with big plans. In year one of his second term, he expanded the formal and informal powers of the presidency in ways that challenge the American political system itself. In 2026, he looks set to up the ante at home. But the disruption he has created abroad is set for a sharp turn this year, as Trump discovers the limits of his (and American) power. No one should ever use the word revolution lightly. It implies a fundamental change in the way a nation is governed—an effort to overthrow what exists and replace it with something new. The motives driving a revolution might be ideological, clashing ethnic or tribal identities, competition for wealth, or a combination of all these. But whatever…

The journey from Tawny Earth to copper wire begins with an explosion. Or 2,697 explosions, to be precise. At the 1,100-acre main pit of Kansanshi copper mine in northern Zambia, a lattice of six-inch blast holes punctuates the ribboned moonscape. At 3 p.m., the ground erupts in an echelon pattern, sending plumes of dust skyward. Cue the arrival of the world’s largest electric dump trucks, which haul away the rubble to be ground to a fine powder. The ore is then concentrated via chemical flotation and finally transformed into 99.5% pure copper anode on site in Africa’s biggest smelter, where the liquid metal emerges amid an emerald glow. “The green color shows it’s pure copper,” says Edmund Mokolo, a smelter engineer for First Quantum Minerals (FQM), which runs Kansanshi. Zambia…

There’s no better time for an adaptation of Donald E. Westlake’s unsparing 1997 novel The Ax, which treats downsizing as a form of dehumanization. The bad news is that No Other Choice, the Ax adaptation Korean master Park Chan-wook has long wanted to make, isn’t the picture Westlake’s cold shiv of a novel deserves. As fine a filmmaker as Park is—his 2003 Oldboy is a chilly, operatic masterpiece—No Other Choice is too dully observed and too slapsticky to hit its mark. It’s a missed opportunity dressed up with proficient filmmaking. Park takes Westlake’s premise—a laid-off paper-mill executive methodically and with increasing detachment kills off rival candidates for a job he feels he deserves—and twists and tweaks it so the focus is more on the symphony of mishaps that allow the…

In 2018, hoping that the moodiness of the trees and mountains might help me discover something about myself, I left Columbus, Ohio, for Portland, Ore. Sometimes I biked to work, and on the first warm day of the year noticed a warehouse by the bike path had its doors open. There was an oval-shaped track inside, where a handful of people on roller skates were running into each other. I slowed my bike and stopped, putting one foot down to watch them. I figured it was roller derby (I had of course watched Whip It shortly after realizing I was gay), but I’d never seen the real thing. The people in the warehouse were of all sizes, all ability levels, and they were hitting each other hard. I signed up.…

Deena Emera was mesmerized by the images on the screen. “They were beautiful,” she says of the slides she saw in December—each a microscopic closeup of a bowhead whale’s ovary. The images were marvelously crisp and showed the mottled outer layer of the organs. Bowhead whales are considered the longest-living mammals on earth. They can live for more than 200 years, and females can reproduce well after their 100th birthdays. Emera, an evolutionary biologist, has long wondered: “What is different about their ovaries that allows them to continue ovulating for so long?” Could we harness those qualities to benefit human health? She had to find out. But obtaining samples of any kind from a bowhead whale is a Sisyphean challenge. The whales—giants of the ocean that can span 60 ft.…

Our 19th century economic model is running on borrowed time. Finite resources are used to make things that we soon discard. Even if some are recycled, it’s a wasteful, polluting system that’s too fragile for today’s world. Resale sites and companies building circular business models into their operations are making strides. And there are steps toward a global plastics treaty to address how plastic is made and used, not just how it’s recycled. The circular economy is a strategic counterattack against cascading global threats. Some 55% of large businesses have circular-economy commitments or strategies, and more than 75 countries are actively developing circular economy road maps. Yet global challenges are still outpacing the solutions, and we face the question of how to achieve economic change to address the issue. We…

In Malawi, 1 in 3 women is a victim of violence. Almost 1 in 10 girls is forced into marriage before turning 15. But fewer than 800 lawyers serve the population of 22 million. What chance does a girl in a rural village have of finding legal help—let alone affording it? This is the justice gap: the chasm between those who need the law’s protection and those who can actually access it. According to the World Justice Project, only about 10% of people reach a lawyer when they need one. Yet across the world, grave offenses are going unpunished. Cybercriminals attack hospitals, elections, and infrastructure with impunity. Journalists are imprisoned at record rates under defamation, “fake news,” and terrorism laws. In much of the world, women’s rights exist only on…

Last year, AI companies struck multibillion-dollar deals to build out AI infrastructure. In 2026, as this new computing power starts coming online, experts say we’ll begin to see whether that investment pays off. 1. ADVANCING SCIENCE In November, California startup Edison Scientific said its system, Kosmos, which combs existing scientific literature for new insights, has not only replicated human discoveries but also turned up new ones—like evidence that aging brain cells in Alzheimer’s may tag themselves with signals telling the brain’s cleanup system to dispose of them. The Trump Ad-ministration’s Genesis Mission, a Manhattan Project–style initiative, also aims to use AI to advance science. But what counts as an autonomous discovery may be contested. We may be far from a discovery that “we can very confidently say a human would…

A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is not like other Game of Thrones shows. Or, at least, it’s not so much like them that you have to take it seriously. Less than five minutes into the premiere, the HBO series conspicuously adjusts the expectations of anyone who might be confused. Sword in hand, our strapping hero, Ser Duncan the Tall (Irish actor Peter Claffey, lately seen in Bad Sisters), decides to enter a tournament. As he lifts his face heavenward, we hear Thrones’ solemn, churning theme song, the same one that now plays at the top of House of the Dragon episodes. Suddenly, the music stops. Cut to a closeup of the knight’s face as he audibly defecates. In case we still haven’t gotten the message that earthy hilarity awaits, the…