Table of contents for January 22, 2024 in TIME Magazine

Taylor Swift—and her cat—made headlines worldwide with their Person of the Year cover shoot. Here are a few celebrity reactions to the choice: ‘Her tour came at a time when people were desperate to have meaningful in-person collective experiences. What I find most remarkable about her is her storytelling. In an era in which social media has distanced us from each other and even from connecting with our own authenticity, she’s managed not just to tell stories through her music, but to take control of her own story.’ —Arianna Huffington, media entrepreneur, on Instagram ‘Congratulations to my friend Taylor Swift, on being named the TIME magazine Person of the Year. So proud of you!’ —Carole King, singer-songwriter, on Instagram ‘Taylor, I knew looking in your eyes that first time…

Tom Richey, a teacher in Anderson, S.C., is hesitant to call the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol an insurrection when he’s in his classroom. “If a teacher were to come into a mostly Republican community talking about the January 6 insurrection, that’s a politically charged term,” Richey says, though the 2023 report by the bipartisan House Select Committee charged with investigating the violence refers to it as such. “I don’t approve of anything that happened on January 6, but I think for a teacher to use a term like insurrection in a classroom setting would be unnecessarily partisan and inappropriate.” When the anniversary of Jan. 6 rolled around this year, Richey was far from the only teacher wrestling with how to discuss the topic with students. Because…

Not long ago, I stopped referring to one of my most cherished Koshersoul recipes of black-eyed-pea dip as “hummus.” In Arab cultures, hummus is seen not just as a legume or chickpea dip—but also as a sacred offering from one of the world’s most ancient regions, the Fertile Crescent. In the shadow of the darkness that is “chocolate hummus,” listening to Arab and other Middle Eastern voices from the Levant forced me to confront my lazy acceptance of a generalized eponym useful for Western gloss. The thought swirled in my mind beside one of my other pet peeves: when people deem okra a nonspecifically “African” word. This not only reduces the diversity and richness of African languages and cultures, but also makes the deep connections between Africa and the subsequent…

Thirty years after tomatoes became the first genetically modified produce sold in the U.S., lots of people remain skeptical of science-ified foods. In a 2020 Pew Research Center survey, just 27% of Americans said they felt genetically modified foods are safe to eat, while 38% said they’re unsafe and 33% weren’t sure. That’s not only a U.S. phenomenon. In the Philippines, for example, activists have been protesting the production of Golden Rice, a type of genetically modified rice harvested at scale for the first time in 2022. Golden Rice is engineered to contain beta carotene, an addition meant to counter vitamin A deficiency and resulting vision loss. But opponents argue that the rice has not been through adequate testing and that there are safer and healthier ways for people…

Volodymyr Zelensky was already a celebrity when his first child was born in 2004. Back then, he and his wife Olena Zelenska often lived apart. He spent his days touring and promoting his comedy troupe in Kyiv, while she often stayed with her parents in their hometown of Kryvyi Rih, the city that Zelensky would later credit with forging his character. “My big soul, my big heart,” he once called it. “Everything I have I got from there.” The name of the town translates as “Crooked Horn,” and in conversation Zelensky and his wife tend to refer to it in Russian as Krivoy—“the crooked place,” where both of them were born in the winter of 1978, about two weeks apart. Few if any places in Ukraine had a worse reputation…

I believe in universal human worth, human rights of all people, natural rights, and international law—flawed, hypocritical, and ineffective as it can be, it’s still a beacon. My values have long driven my support for peace, an end to Israeli occupation, equality, self-determination for Palestinians. That’s still true, even though right-wingers in Israel assume that left-wingers will now admit that on Oct. 7, Hamas proved that Palestinians cannot be trusted, that there is truly no partner for peace. This is a strange argument, since no left-winger ever saw Hamas as a friend; Hamas was always an enemy of peace. Right-wingers also argue Oct. 7 proves that Hamas is embedded within Palestinian society—after all, once Hamas breached the barrier around Gaza, regular Palestinians joined in, and opinion polls among Palestinians…

Roberta Metsola has plenty of superlatives to her name. She is the youngest ever President of the European Parliament; the first from Malta, the bloc’s smallest country; and the first woman in two decades. But there’s one thing that landed her in the history books that she never expected. On Dec. 10, 2022, Metsola became the first President of the European Parliament to join a police raid against a fellow lawmaker. “It was sad,” Metsola, who turns 45 in January, tells TIME from her office in Brussels. It was like “a punch in the stomach.” Earlier that day, Belgian authorities had notified Metsola that to comply with local law, she had to join police by 9 p.m. for a raid against lawmaker Marc Tarabella as part of a corruption investigation.…

2024 will be a pivotal time—not least for U.S. leadership Last month, I had the chance to interview Sam Altman, the OpenAI leader whom we named the 2023 CEO of the Year, onstage at our “A Year in TIME” event in New York City. In part thanks to the drama surrounding his removal from—and speedy reappointment to—the top role at the artificial-intelligence company, Altman has emerged as one of the most-watched leaders of a technological revolution that promises (or threatens, depending on your view) to reshape the core features of our society, with the potential to provide long-sought transformations across industries and ways of life. “I think everybody involved in this, as we get closer and closer to super intelligence, gets more stressed and more anxious,” Altman told me.…

Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) sends up to 80,000 children under age 5 to the hospital each year in the U.S., but a study shows that a new drug approved last year for babies under 1 year old can significantly reduce the risk they face. THE STUDY More than 8,000 infants 1 year or younger and entering their first RSV season, which runs from fall to spring, received one injection of nirsevimab (brand name: Beyfortus) in the study, which was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and funded by the drug’s makers Sanofi and AstraZeneca. Nirsevimab is a monoclonal antibody that acts almost like a vaccine, training a child’s immune system to recognize RSV and defend against it. The drug was 83% effective in preventing hospitalization among babies…

It was 2:15 a.m. on Oct. 16, and Benjamin Netanyahu couldn’t figure out how to work the copy machine. Six floors underground, in the Tel Aviv bunker from which Israel’s war cabinet was directing its battle against Hamas, Secretary of State Antony Blinken waited to be handed a sheet of paper outlining the results of a nine-hour negotiating session with the Israeli Prime Minister. Even Blinken’s sleep-deprived advisers had no idea what the two men had agreed to behind closed doors. Less than 24 hours earlier, Blinken had been in Cairo, preparing to return to Washington after a six-country dash across the Middle East. The visit had started off with a show of U.S. support after the brutal Hamas attack on Oct. 7, followed by talks with Arab allies. But…

Your performance as Clarice Starling in Silence of the Lambs paved the way for a new generation of on-screen female detectives. How has that role evolved in pop culture? I didn’t realize I was doing anything special at the time. I just wanted to go on the hero’s journey. And the classic hero’s journey was reserved for men. Silence of the Lambs was revolutionary in that it posited that the hero’s journey could be a female journey. It’s been wonderful over the last 30 years to see different voices come into the picture—women protagonists and antiheroes that are complex and complicated and messy. True Detective: Night Country was shot in Iceland to double for Alaska. What was it like filming in those extreme winter weather conditions? There is an inherent…

A longing for authenticity. An urge to protect the planet and embrace nature. These are the modern sentiments shaping what will show up on our plates in 2024, according to experts who forecast food trends. You’ll soon get familiar with third-culture cuisine, or dishes that represent a chef’s diverse background. Think: wafu Italian restaurants, which bridge Japanese and Italian cultures, and Filipino-British bakeries. “It’s very much derived from social changes and globalization and the meaning of identity today,” says Claire Lancaster, head of food and drink at the trend-forecasting company WGSN. In the past, she notes, someone might have “slapped something random on a pizza” and called it fusion, but a new generation of chefs are ensuring that more care goes into it. Another big influence is our collective…

AFTER 10 LONG MONTHS of campaigning, it was a 30-second video that suggested Nikki Haley was finally getting somewhere. The December television ad, paid for by Donald Trump’s allies and aired in New Hampshire, accused the Republican presidential candidate of flip-flopping on the gas tax as South Carolina governor. But you could practically hear the champagne corks popping at Haley’s headquarters in Charleston. “Someone’s getting nervous,” she posted on social media. Haley’s emergence as perhaps the top threat to another Trump nomination isn’t what many Republicans expected when she launched her underdog campaign last February. But as the first votes in the 2024 GOP presidential primaries neared, she climbed to second place in many national and early-state surveys, eclipsing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Her slow-burn rise has been fueled by standout…

So often, articles and essays such as this begin with a gathering of unnerving statistics. Most of us don’t need those anymore: changes brought about by the climate crisis are becoming more tangible with the passing of each year. We smell it in the smoke-tinged air. We feel it in the seasons gone askew. We exist in a place where all the problems of the universe are present. And the problems we have today really can seem insurmountable. Too vast for any of us to do anything about. But that’s just it. We think only of the inadequacy of what we alone can do. This is partly because, over the past several generations, we’ve been taught to think of ourselves as individuals—pitted against one another to take what we…

Generative artificial intelligence became a focus for many businesses last year. Accenture CEO Julie Sweet believes that leaders must make their own version of “deep learning”—a phrase more often applied to how AI processes data—a priority in 2024. You’re constantly in dialogue with other CEOs about AI. What are those conversations centered on? There’s been a real shift from AI being something theoretical and down the line to “I urgently need to understand it.” When we were at Davos last year, our research showed less than 10% of companies thought of themselves as reinventors. Today, that dialogue has completely shifted, as generative AI [GenAI], in a very tangible way, started opening the eyes of CEOs that AI is critically important. How are you thinking about generative AI? We anchor…

David Chase is feeling thankful. Twenty-five years after the premiere of the series that cemented his legacy, the Sopranos creator is filled with gratitude that he got to work with actors like James Gandolfini, Edie Falco, and Lorraine Bracco and a writing staff that included future Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner and Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire). Gratitude for the freedom HBO granted him. And now that the show is a consensus classic, he says, “I have a great deal of gratitude that people still see it. That people wanna hear about it.” Yet when I ask Chase, during a wide-ranging video chat in December, whether he thinks it would be possible to make The Sopranos today, his reply is firm: “No, I don’t.” Chase is not known for his optimism.…