Table of contents for December 26, 2022 in TIME Magazine

FOR 2022, WE BROADENED THE FORMS OF INFLUENCE WE RECOGNIZE—SEEING LEADERSHIP FROM DIFFERENT VANTAGE POINTS On the cover of TIME, the year ended as it began. In January, our cover featured Alexei Navalny, the imprisoned Russian opposition leader and famous dissident, who warned, in a profile by TIME senior correspondent Simon Shuster, against appeasing Vladimir Putin: “Time and again the West falls into Putin’s elementary traps,” Navalny said. “It just takes my breath away.” This time there was no appeasement, as TIME’s 2022 Person of the Year Volodymyr Zelensky, who appears on the final cover of the year, persuaded the West that freedom was at stake not just in Ukraine but across the world. “If they devour us, the sun in your sky will get dimmer,” Zelensky told Simon…

Cast your eyes to the floor and you’ll notice: though there are dozens of people here, engaged in as many conversations over afternoon cocktails, virtually all the shoes in the room are angled toward Michelle Yeoh. It’s mid-November in Los Angeles, which means the city is gearing up for Oscars season, and Yeoh is holding court before an industry screening of her film Everything Everywhere All at Once. Everyone here wants to meet her, to shake her hand, to be remembered by her. Dressed in staggering platform sneakers and an embellished blazer, she’s posing for photos, cracking jokes, throwing her head back to laugh, sipping from a glass of wine—embodying the role of the star—until fellow actor Ke Huy Quan approaches, and she softens. She places a hand on…

‘If I need an inspiration or a way to articulate a feeling, I do one of three things—Watch a favorite Grey’s Anatomy episode, listen to a speech or a podcast with Shonda Rhimes or read a profile about her.’ JANIE OCTIA of New York CIty, on Judy Berman’s profile of TV showrunner Rhimes ‘A forceful and thorough assessment of President Biden’s challenged presidency to date.’ GEORGE KOEHLER of Grand Haven, Mich., on Molly Ball and Brian Bennett’s analysis of Joe Biden’s first year in office ‘A great overview of the challenges patients… and specialized clinics face.’ DR. JASON H. MALEY of Boston, on Jamie Ducharme’s report about Long COVID research ‘Kudos to TIME for featuring the accomplishments of kids and providing us all hope for a better future.’ PATRICIA…

‘I’M THE EFFING PRESIDENT; TAKE ME UP TO THE CAPITOL NOW.’ Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson, in June 28 testimony, relating what then President Donald Trump reportedly instructed his security detail to do during the Jan. 6 insurrection ‘I am human. And amid these dark times, I, too, miss joy, light, and fun.’ Sanna Marin, Finland’s Prime Minister, on Aug. 23, responding to criticism over images of her partying with friends ‘FLORIDA IS WHERE WOKE GOES TO DIE.’ Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, after winning re-election Nov. 8 ‘Please send the police now.’ A fourth-grade student in Uvalde, Texas, in a phone call to law enforcement during the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School ‘A monsoon on steroids.’ U.N. Secretary-General António Gutteres’ Aug. 30 description of historic floods in Pakistan…

The process of choosing the Person of the Year—who or what most influenced the events of the past 12 months, for good or for ill—can be agonizing. How could one person represent an entire year? Do we lean into the light, reach into the darkness, or land somewhere in between? This year’s choice was the most clear-cut in memory. Whether the battle for Ukraine fills one with hope or with fear, Volodymyr Zelensky galvanized the world in a way we haven’t seen in decades. In the weeks after Russian bombs began falling on Feb. 24, his decision not to flee Kyiv but to stay and rally support was fateful. From his first 40-second Instagram post on Feb. 25—showing that his Cabinet and civil society were intact and in place—to daily…

In the winter of 2017, a young woman called Vida Movahed stood on top of a utility box on Revolution Street, a busy artery of central Tehran, and dangled her white headscarf on a stick. As an act of dissent, it was strikingly peaceful, giving the appearance of a white flag of surrender. Still, by not wearing her hijab, Movahed was challenging the system’s dress codes. She stayed there for an hour, until she was arrested for breaking the law. Imagery of her silent, brave act raced around Instagram. A month later, a graduate student named Narges Hosseini performed the same defiant act on the same street. Soon, more women launched similar protests, and their movement took the name of where it all began: #TheGirlsofRevolutionStreet. When I lived in…

When Aaron Judge stood in the Yankee Stadium batter’s box in late September, he couldn’t quite shake the silence. Some 45,000 voices hushed, as if they were at a basilica, not a ball field. As fans anticipated a landmark moment in sports—the breaking of a revered home-run record—they refused to peep as the pitcher wound up. “I never noticed the crowd until they stopped cheering, which was one of the craziest things in my career,” says Judge, 30, sitting in the leafy courtyard of his luxury New York City apartment building, about a week after the end of a monumental campaign in which he set a new American League home-run mark, with 62. “That’s when I started to kind of realize, ‘Oh boy, there’s something special going on here.’”…

1. THE FABELMANS Steven Spielberg has been making movies for more than 50 years, and there are autobiographical touches in many of them. But The Fabelmans is his most personal film to date, one that reckons with the bittersweet truth of how families endure even in the midst of stress and crisis. Michelle Williams and Paul Dano star as Mitzi and Burt Fabelman, stand-ins for Spielberg’s real-life parents. Their performances are among the year’s best, delicately textured and deeply moving. 2. AFTERSUN As kids, we have no idea how our feelings about our parents will take shape when we ourselves are grown up. That’s the territory Scottish writer-director Charlotte Wells explores in her stunning debut. Eleven-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) goes on a rare holiday break with her father Calum (the extraordinary…

• Fiction • 1. TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW Gabrielle Zevin’s sweeping novel follows the decades-long friendship between two video-game designers who become household names before they turn 25. As the duo wrestle with their growing ambitions, Zevin unveils a devastating narrative about identity and art, and depicts a creative partnership that is much more meaningful than any romance. 2. THE HERO OF THIS BOOK Elizabeth McCracken delivers a potent meditation on processing loss through the fictional (or is it?) story of an unnamed writer coping with her mother’s recent death. McCracken, who shares many life experiences with her narrator, makes startling revelations about how fiction can reveal the biggest truths about life, and what it really means to write. 3. THE BOOK OF GOOSE In Yiyun Li’s taut novel, Agnès…

JAN. 23 Tom Brady plays his final NFL game before announcing his retirement JAN. 31 Last game of Wordle before New York Times acquisition FEB. 4 Beijing becomes the first city to have hosted both the Summer and Winter Olympics when the 2022 Games begin APRIL 2 Men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski coaches the last game of his 42-year career at Duke University APRIL 7 Ketanji Brown Jackson becomes the first Black woman confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court APRIL 28 After 19 seasons, the last episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show tapes MAY 7 An outbreak of monkeypox begins when a case of the virus is reported in London MAY 23 Crews remove the last functioning public pay phone in Manhattan JULY 13 The euro falls below the U.S.…

The call from the President’s office came on a Saturday evening: Be ready to go the next day, an aide said, and pack a toothbrush. There were no details about the destination or how we would get there, but it wasn’t difficult to guess. Only two days earlier, on the 260th day of the invasion of Ukraine, the Russians had retreated from the city of Kherson. It was the only regional capital they had managed to seize since the start of the all-out war in February, and the Kremlin had promised it would forever be a part of Russia. Now Kherson was free, and Volodymyr Zelensky wanted to get there as soon as possible. His bodyguards were urging him to wait. The Russians had destroyed the city’s infrastructure, leaving…

Four years ago, Gregory Robinson wanted nothing to do with what might be the greatest spacecraft ever built. It didn’t, at the time, seem like it would ever actually become what it was promised to be: a machine that would take images from space, return them to Earth, and gobsmack the public with their clarity and depth and sheer celestial beauty—the kind of beauty that could, even briefly, stop a fraught and fractious species like ours from the daily messes we make of our world and leave us thinking, just once, You know what? When we try, we can do something truly grand. What the spacecraft did seem like at the time was a massive white elephant, one that a man in Robinson’s position would not want to go…

The warehouse in Los Angeles is cold and drafty, transformed this November day into a photo-shoot dreamland for Jennie, Jisoo, Lisa, and Rosé, the four members of Blackpink. Cement floors sprout into a fairy-tale garden, and a glossy vintage station wagon is parked next to a man-made hill. For nearly 12 hours, the performers—some of the most popular women in the world—gamely hit their poses. In the evening, huddled up with fuzzy blankets over bare legs in front of a makeshift plywood backdrop, they seem less like superstars than best friends unwinding. “We put in a lot of work so we could look like superwomen,” says Jennie. “We’re very normal girls, at the end of the day.” Normal as they may be, their 2022 has been anything but. They…

1. BETTER CALL SAUL One of TV’s most visually gorgeous, carefully plotted, emotionally involving sagas ended this year, with the finale of Breaking Bad prequel Better Call Saul. Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s lawyer show about the inevitable perversion of justice surpassed even its predecessor, thanks largely to superb lead performances by Bob Odenkirk and Rhea Seehorn as two characters trying to be good people who can’t find a way to be good together. For all its blood and death, Saul was the most fundamentally humanistic drama of its time. (AMC) 2. THE REHEARSAL In the year’s best nonfiction show, Nathan for You creator and star Nathan Fielder helped regular people “rehearse” for tough encounters. Well, that was the premise. Then things got messy, calling into question the extent of…

This year, the country singer Mickey Guyton represented America on its biggest stages, belting out the national anthem at the Super Bowl and hosting PBS’s July 4 celebration from the Capitol Lawn. She also became the first Black nominee for Best Country Album at the Grammys in the award’s history. But Guyton faced plenty of resistance: to her music being played on country radio; to conversations she tried to hold about race with industry leaders; to the representational gains that seemed to vanish two years after the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020. “I am seeing it very much going back to your regularly scheduled programming, and that’s something I’m scared about,” she says. Guyton opened up to TIME about her year of growth and frustration. When you…