Table of contents for February 27, 2023 in TIME Magazine

At TIME’s second annual TIME100 Impact Awards in Dubai, the honorees were actor Idris Elba and model Sabrina Dhowre Elba, philanthropist Jeffrey Katzenberg, rain-forest-preservation activist Farwiza Farhan, and Mozambique’s first female cabinet minister, Graça Machel. TIME CEO Jessica Sibley spoke during the ceremony about the power of influence, and the host, journalist Raya Abirached, led a moment of silence for victims of the Syria and Turkey earthquakes. Read more at time.com/impact 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 full name, address and home telephone, and may be edited for purposes of clarity and space Back Issues Contact us at customerservice@time.com, or call 800-843-8463. Reprints and Permissions Information is available at time.com/reprints. To…

A particularly nasty strain of the H5N1 virus is currently causing the worst outbreak of the disease among birds since it was first identified in China in 1996. Across the U.S., some 58 million birds have died or had to be killed because of infection, with similar die-offs in poultry farms in Europe and Japan—one of the main reasons that eggs have been so expensive lately. The good news: there is no record of any human getting infected with bird flu from eating eggs or poultry products. WILD BIRDS Experts aren’t sure why the current bird flu has spread so far, so fast, but do have one theory: while avian flus infect mainly domestic poultry, the recent outbreaks have spread to wild species—there’s been a record number of deaths…

Thanks to a mom who archived my childhood, I still have my “artwork” from Mrs. Matousek’s kindergarten class 50 years ago. It’s where I learned to color inside the lines. Clearly, the instruction made an impression. As creative director of TIME, I’ve spent almost half of my life “coloring” inside the blank canvas of the magazine’s cover. Every issue, I aim to create a poster for our times within its border. That frame came into being another half-century before my childhood artistic endeavors, when, in TIME co-founder Briton Hadden’s New York City office, a friend of his named Philip Kobbe took out a red crayon and drew a thick line around the cover of a 1926 copy of the magazine. These days, we’re often told that to be creative we…

Nigeria—Africa’s most populous country, largest economy, and top oil producer—will hold a presidential election on Feb. 25. Incumbent President Muhammadu Buhari, now finishing his second four-year term, is ineligible to run for re-election. Even if he could run, he probably wouldn’t win. The economy, still recovering from a COVID-19 shock that triggered the country’s second recession in just five years, continues to struggle. Inflation reached 21.5% at the end of 2022. The unemployment rate stands at 33% for all adults and 42.5% for young adults. Some 40% of the country’s 221 million people live below the poverty line, wrote the World Bank in March 2022, and “many Nigerians—especially in the country’s north—also lack education and access to basic infrastructure, such as electricity, safe drinking water, and improved sanitation.” The…

James Cameron wanted a vegan set on Avatar: The Way of Water. Anything less would be hypocritical. The sci-fi epic, which reportedly cost more than $350 million, centers on aliens fending off invading humans who have depleted earth’s resources. “We couldn’t lecture oil companies and turn around and eat hamburgers,” he says. Cameron may have also intended to make a larger point to Hollywood. When the director brought the idea for the first Avatar to 20th Century Fox, he says executives asked him to strip the script of “tree hugging” because they thought it wouldn’t sell tickets. He refused. Avatar went on to achieve massive success, grossing nearly $3 billion globally. Since then, other movies like Avengers: Infinity War have tackled climate change. Still, that Marvel blockbuster doesn’t exactly endorse…

In Turkey—located between several plate boundaries and directly on two main fault zones—earthquakes are a fact of life. But the two that hit the country’s southern reaches on Feb. 6 brought a level of destruction that numbers can only suggest—a 7.8-magnitude quake, followed nine hours later by a temblor registering 7.5. The death toll nine days later stood at 41,000, including thousands killed across the nearby border in northern Syria. “These are the kinds of quakes we’d expect to see 10 or 20 years apart,” says Cuneyt Tuzun, an earthquake engineer based in Izmir, Turkey. “They happened within a few hours of each other.” They also happened in a country that, despite every warning, had not prepared. Ten years after a 1999 earthquake in the northern city of Izmit killed…

There’s a certain disconnect that plagues almost everyone nowadays: your body is doing one thing—sitting in a meeting, eating dinner with the family—while your brain is miles away. Call it being in two places at once, but mental-health experts say it’s more problematic. Not being grounded in the moment is an open invitation to stress and unpleasant emotions. “Our minds tend to focus on worries about the future, or upsets from the past, even when our body may be in a neutral or pleasant place,” says Corrie Goldberg, a clinical psychologist and founder of Shore Therapy Center for Wellness in the Chicago area. Enter mindfulness. The now ubiquitous concept, which is rooted in Buddhism, is generally defined as turning your attention inward and maintaining an awareness of your thoughts,…

When a fur-bedecked Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene yelled “Liar” on Feb. 7, she was among the loudest in an abrupt chorus of boos hurled at the oldest President to ever deliver a State of the Union address. Joe Biden didn’t miss a beat; he smiled and went off script as GOP lawmakers tried to rebuff his claim that they were ready to gut social-entitlement programs. “Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right? We’ve got unanimity?” he asked. The striking exchange, and Biden’s ease in handling it in front of an audience of millions, illustrated why the Democratic establishment isn’t ready to toss their 80-year-old standard bearer overboard just yet. Despite a halting start to his speech, Biden held his own when Republican hecklers started to stalk him.…

To create is human. For the past 300,000 years we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine, manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something new where there was nothing before. Now we have company. While you’re reading this sentence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax returns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blueprints, and providing health advice. Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive impact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on social media. But generative AI, a category of system that can be prompted to create wholly novel content, is much newer. This shift marks the most important technological breakthrough since…

The third season of the Netflix thriller You ended with a red herring. Fresh off murdering his deranged wife, torching their suburban California home, and faking his own death, serial killer and hopeless romantic Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) resurfaced steps away from the Eiffel Tower. Fans joked that Emily “In Paris” Cooper would be his next victim. Alas, it was a fake-out. The real action of Season 4 unfolds in London, where the bookish Joe, posing as a university literature instructor, falls in with a clique of posh lowlifes and wakes up with a corpse in his apartment. Upon receiving an invitation to “a night to die for,” it dawns on him: “A circle of privileged suspects, a frame job, and now a cryptic invite evoking a British murder…

What drew you to a project about a bear overdosing on cocaine during a botched 1985 drug-smuggling operation? I read this script in April 2020, when chaos was all around, and I just thought, There’s no greater emblem of chaos than a bear high on cocaine. More importantly, this is the movie I want to see. I knew there was this high concept hook in the rampaging bear, but I knew if I did it right, it would become this very entertaining, heartfelt, fun movie. It’s a star-studded cast. Who were you most excited to see tangle with a CGI bear? There is absolutely no question: Margo Martindale. The audience is not expecting her to be as bold as she is. I had to convince her. She was like, “I…

The devastating earthquakes that hit Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6 struck the heart of the displaced Syrian community on both sides of the border—dramatically affecting one of the most vulnerable populations in the world. Some 4 million Syrians who rely on immediate humanitarian aid live in the region, according to the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. More than 41,000 people had died as of Feb. 15, and the affected area of Syria was already confronting a cholera outbreak. Harsh weather makes the situation worse: many buildings that were left standing are damaged and in danger of collapse, meaning people can’t go home even if they have one to return to. Turkey is the world’s biggest refugee host country, with about 3.6 million Syrian refugees living within…

Not long after How to Be an Antiracist was published in August 2019, the book’s author, the historian and National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi, found his work an unexpected touch point in the conversation about the persistence of racism in American society. Initially I was wary: The title had the ring of self-help, the ideology that personal effort can fix anything. It sounded like one of those books that make the bold and arguably illogical claim that just about everything is within the individual’s control. They do not demand system change, but personal effort. But its new companion volume, How to Be a (Young) Antiracist, co-authored by young-adult novelist Nic Stone and published on Jan. 31, illuminates just how much that’s not the case. In a format accessible…

It was a sunday morning in early February in Madrid, and Spain’s Minister of Equality was on a war footing. Having eschewed business attire for the occasion, Irene Montero rose on sneaker-clad feet from her seat onstage at a local cultural center and addressed her supporters. A key reform on sexual violence that her ministry had spearheaded was under attack, and the meeting was intended to rally the troops from Unidas Podemos, the progressive political party that she helps lead and which, along with the Socialist Party, has formed Spain’s coalition government since January 2020. “This law is more than just a law,” she said. “It’s a process of democratizing society. It is not the ministry’s law, or the government’s, or the parliament’s. It is the law of the women…

If your present self could reckon with the past, what would you try to resolve? That’s the question that haunts Bodie Kane, the protagonist of I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca Makkai’s slow-burning crime novel, to be published Feb. 21. Bodie, a 40-something film professor and popular podcaster, has moved on from everything that happened at Granby, the tony New Hampshire boarding school where her roommate Thalia was murdered during their senior year. But when Bodie is invited back to campus to teach a podcasting course, she’s forced to revisit long-buried dark truths. For Makkai, engaging with the past is a daily reality. For the past 21 years, the author, 44, has lived on the campus of the Illinois boarding school that she attended as a day student…