Table of contents for January 30, 2023 in TIME Magazine

Last month, I was in Boston for the presentation of the Earthshot Prize, the annual awards started by Prince William designed to help accelerate creative solutions to the climate crisis. The roughly $6 million in grants—supported by donors including TIME’s owners Marc and Lynne Benioff—went to five remarkable projects, from a technology that turns carbon into rock to biodegradable seaweed-based packaging for consumer goods (called Notpla for “not plastics”). At a gathering after the ceremony, I was struck by the remarks of Earthshot board chair Christiana Figueres, the former U.N. climate chief, who framed this moment in the planet’s 4.5 billion years (no small task!) as one in which “the pen of history has been passed from nature to humanity.” I asked Figueres if she would adapt those comments…

Harry Li wants to spend the Lunar New Year holiday in his home village in northern China’s Hebei province, but he is afraid of spending more than 12 hours on crowded trains and buses lest he bring COVID-19 to his elderly parents, who have not been vaccinated. “It’s been three years since I’ve been home [for Lunar New Year],” says Li, a 20-year-old law student in Shanghai. “I was vaccinated nine months ago, but everyone around me is still getting sick.” Many Chinese face a similar conundrum. For decades, the Lunar New Year holiday was renowned as humanity’s largest annual migration, when hundreds of millions travel from China’s freewheeling coast back to ancestral villages to feast and toast with elderly kin. During the pandemic, strict controls and state-led incentive schemes…

A pair of muddied protesters huddle in the rain on Jan. 14 near Luetzerath in western Germany, where they joined thousands demonstrating against the demolition of the village as part of utility company RWE’s expansion of a coal mine. Climate activist Greta Thunberg was among those detained on Jan. 17, when protesters broke through a barrier around the site. Activists and police both said scores on their side sustained injuries. For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox Photograph by Thilo Schmuelgen—Reuters…

A year ago, Ukraine’s economy was on a strong footing, with a debt-to-GDP of less than 50% and a budget deficit of 3.5%. Then came Feb. 24, and with it a full-scale war. We were in a new reality, with very different financial needs. Funds that should have been directed toward environmental, social, and corporate-governance goals, sustainable development, and strengthening the country’s competitiveness were redirected to defense, humanitarian purposes, and support for people affected by the war. And in 2023, about 50% of the state budget is allocated to national security and defense. Months of war have transformed Ukraine from a country with stable and promising financial indicators to one that is directing all resources to the struggle while battling severe economic consequences: 30% economic decline, inflation around 28%,…

The World Economic Forum may be returning to its long-standing ritual of meeting in Davos, Switzerland, in January, but—even as the pandemic ebbs—this is still a time of remarkable upheaval. WEF founder Klaus Schwab sat down in New York City with TIME’s editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal to discuss what’s ahead for Davos and the global economy. A couple of times when we’ve had these conversations, I’ve asked you about what the impact of a real economic downturn might be on the tension between stakeholders and shareholders. And here we are, with the economy facing some real headwinds. Do you see any retreat from the movement toward stakeholder capitalism? I think it’s the wrong approach, from the beginning on, to create a choice between shareholder capitalism vs. stakeholder capitalism. The company is not just an economic…

It’s hard to make a good movie about the act of writing; it’s even harder to make a movie about the work of editors, whose main job is to read—and read—with empathy and acumen. Yet Lizzie Gottlieb has made a splendid documentary that captures the quicksilver essence of these conjoined pursuits. Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb is an adventure story, albeit one in which the heroes spend most of their time sitting down. Gottlieb, the director’s father, is one of the most acclaimed editors of his generation, having helped bring books like Catch-22, Beloved, and True Grit into being. He was also the editor of the first book by former newspaperman Robert Caro, a meticulously researched biography of the mighty urban planner Robert…

At the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland—the first winter meeting since 2020—TIME and Sompo Holdings hosted a dinner and conversation on how to foster greater cooperation to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Onstage, TIME editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal interviewed World Trade Organization director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (above). Read more about Davos at time.com/davos-2023 On the covers Illustration by Ben Wiseman for TIME Photograph by Sarker Protick for TIME Is your company shaping the future? In 2023, TIME will again recognize 100 businesses making an extraordinary impact around the world in the TIME100 Most Influential Companies issue. Apply now through March 1 at time100cos.com TALK TO US SEND AN EMAIL: letters@time.com Please do not send attachments FOLLOW US: facebook.com/time @time (Twitter and Instagram) Letters should include the writer’s…

Federal Regulators are considering a ban on gas stoves—present in roughly one-third of U.S. homes—amid rising concern about increased risk of asthma in children and other respiratory-health risks linked to indoor air pollution from the appliances. The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), which can issue mandatory standards or ban products if no feasible change would adequately protect the public, says it is still figuring out the best way to tackle this issue. Richard Trumka Jr., a CPSC commissioner, tweeted on Jan. 9 that “gas stoves can emit dangerous [levels] of toxic chemicals—even when not in use” and that his agency will consider “all approaches to regulation.” The news has generated its own heat, but CPSC says any action would involve a lengthy process, meaning there are no imminent policy…

The Media Blitz following the Jan. 10 publication of Prince Harry’s memoir Spare has one major theme: he has grown apart from his father King Charles III and his brother William, the Prince of Wales. Family tensions boiled over in public when, in January 2020, Harry announced that he was taking a step back from his royal duties because of what he saw as a lack of support from the palace staff over negative tabloid coverage of his wife Meghan Markle. But passages from Spare suggest tensions go back to birth—an underlying resentment of being “the spare,” while his older brother is “the heir” to the throne. (The book is jam-packed with revelations, such as Harry’s claim that he killed 25 Taliban fighters from a helicopter in Afghanistan—which experts…

Wherever you look, animals are in trouble. Our world is dominated by humans everywhere: on land, in the seas, and in the air. No nonhuman animal escapes our domination, which inflicts wrongful injury on animals through the barbarous cruelties of the factory meat industry, pollution of the air and the seas, or neglect of the companion animals that people purport to love. In a way, this problem is age-old. Both Western and non-Western philosophical traditions have deplored human cruelty to animals for around two millennia. The Hindu emperor Ashoka, a convert to Buddhism, wrote about his efforts to give up meat and to forgo all practices that harmed animals. In ancient Greece, the Platonist philosophers Plutarch and Porphyry wrote detailed treatises deploring human cruelty to animals, describing other creatures’ keen…

Nobody uses the term Generation gap anymore, but the problems it refers to are eternal—and they’re the core of When You Finish Saving the World, Jesse Eisenberg’s debut as a writer-director. Finn Wolfhard is Ziggy Katz, a teenage singer-songwriter who’s a minisensation in his corner of the internet, cultivating an audience of loyal followers with his folky songs about youthful love and angst. But his mother Evelyn (Julianne Moore), the harried founder and manager of a women’s shelter, downgrades both his enterprise and his talents, and his father Roger (Jay O. Sanders) is a checked-out academic type whose nose is always buried in a book or a magazine. The clash between mother and son is particularly acute: Evelyn just wishes her son were somehow different, in ways she can’t…

That ’70s Show, the teen comedy that launched Ashton Kutcher and Mila Kunis, ran for a now inconceivable eight seasons thanks to its charismatic cast, stoner humor, and disco-decade nostalgia. It wasn’t great, but it made for benign background noise and thus became ubiquitous in syndication. Netflix’s unasked-for sequel That ’90s Show revisits suburban Wisconsin in 1995, as a grownup Eric (Topher Grace) and Donna (Laura Prepon) drop off their teenage daughter Leia (Callie Haverda) for a summer with his parents Red (Kurtwood Smith) and Kitty (Debra Jo Rupp). Playing a sweet misfit who finds a crew of her own in her grandparents’ neighborhood, Haverda puts a winsome spin on Grace’s endearing awkwardness. But most of the cast reads as a bit Disney for story lines about sex and…

DIED Lisa Marie Presley Daughter of the King Four days before her death at age 54, Lisa Marie Presley gave a speech at Graceland. Jan. 8 was her father’s birthday. “Today, he would’ve been 88 years old,” she told fans gathered at the Memphis estate. “It’s hard to believe. And I think that he would be proud. I think this year has been an incredible year. And I think the movie was incredible.” Presley was referring to Elvis, the biographical drama directed by Baz Luhrmann that includes the courtship of her parents on a U.S. military base in Germany. Her last public appearance would be at the Golden Globes, where Austin Butler won Best Actor for playing her dad. Presley was at her own home in Calabasas, Calif., on…

I have always had the urge to lie. As a child, I told classmates that I had a new puppy at home. I was afraid of dogs and had never even asked my parents for one, but I understood that pets were attractive to other 6-year-olds. When Julie, a French girl with a blunt haircut, came over for a playdate, she looked skeptical when I told her my dog was in the other room. “He’s sleeping,” I explained. When she accused me of lying, I finally introduced her to Lucky, my plush stuffed dalmatian, holding him the way I had seen my mom cradle my baby brother. “Shh,” I whispered to Julie. She never came over again. I told white lies, mostly. “I’m majoring in biology,” I once rattled…

More than at any other time in the history of human presence on this planet, we are now deciding what our own future will be. Since the last ice age, some 12,000 years ago, humans have been able to develop civilization as we know it thanks to the stability of the earth’s interconnected ecosystems, which cradled life and supported our expansion. During this era, the Holocene, humans flourished but nature reigned. We were the thriving recipients of a favorable environment unique in the history of the planet. But around 1950, the situation changed. We moved from being the passive recipients to being the direct driving force behind transformation in our natural environment, and not for the better. We now exercise such control over the planet that we have catapulted…

Cooperation, the thing we need most to solve big problems in the world, is being collapsed by the thing that promised to connect us and bring us closer together: social media. The problem is that social connection isn’t actually the business model—“engagement” is. Social media platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and more) make choices to show us—the users—content that is most “engaging.” Unfortunately, what is most engaging isn’t always aligned with what we value. What gets the most engagement—follows, shares, and comments—are the fights, takedowns, and proverbial car crashes we can’t take our eyes from. Seeing more divisive content pushes us further into polarized ways of thinking on every topic—which spills over into our offline lives and makes cooperation a taller and taller task. Yet today’s world requires unprecedented…

Soon enough, most adults must reckon with their parents’ physical and mental vulnerabilities, and it’s always a blow. Writer-director Mia Hansen-Løve’s delicately shaded One Fine Morning deals with the wrenchingly mundane nature of caring for those who used to take care of us. But it’s also about the difficulty—and the necessity—of tending to our own emotional lives even as we’re looking after others. That sounds so simple, you might not think it’s enough to fill a whole movie. Yet the end of One Fine Morning imparts a sense of life spilling over, the way its strange, radiant richness is often too much to analyze in the moment. This is a big movie served up in a surprisingly small, intimate package. Léa Seydoux is Sandra, a translator living in Paris…

The aim of the 1619 Project is to re-center American historical discourse around “the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans.” In some senses, it’s been a victim of its success. Launched in a 2019 issue of the New York Times Magazine that coincided with the 400th anniversary of slavery in the colonies, the acclaimed initiative stoked right-wing outrage. A curriculum released with it became a target of reactionary red-state legislation. Stories transcend polemic when viewers see faces The project’s leader, Nikole Hannah-Jones, has defended it, in part, by keeping it in the public eye, with the publication of a book and now in a Hulu docuseries of the same name. Given that the six episodes draw heavily on essays that have fueled a book, a curriculum,…