Table of contents for August 23, 2021 in TIME Magazine

EVEN BEFORE SIMONE BILES THREW THE Tokyo Olympics off their axis, Jessica Bartley knew mental-health issues were weighing heavily on athletes. Bartley, a psychologist and the director of mental-health services for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee, says her team received about 10 support requests daily during the Games. “The Games are really an incredible opportunity to start to have those conversations,” says Bartley, whose group was the first to travel with Team USA specifically to support athletes’ mental well-being. Taking place amid a pandemic that’s had a massive impact on global mental health, the Tokyo Olympics were always going to present additional challenges for competitors. But once Biles pulled out of the women’s gymnastics team event, the issue became a defining theme. Her decision, magnified by a global…

As wildfires consume the village of Limni on the Greek island of Evia on Aug. 6, residents board a ferry to evacuate. Dry conditions and one of the worst heat waves to strike the southern Mediterranean in decades have contributed to hundreds of blazes that have burned through pine forests and villages across the region in recent weeks, killing at least 10 people in Greece and Turkey, destroying thousands of homes and forcing the evacuation of popular beach resorts. Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has labeled the situation a “natural disaster of unprecedented dimensions.” ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

The July 21 front page of the Billings Gazette included the following stories: a local man used a bow and arrow to catch a world-record paddlefish (92 lb.) and searchers reported a possible sighting (which proved false) of a missing hiker. But the lead story was on the housing boom sweeping the nation and its impact on Montana’s biggest city. “Billings real estate market ranks hottest in the country,” the newspaper declared, citing a Wall Street Journal index, which ranked Billings as the No. 1 emerging housing market. Billings Mayor Bill Cole, a graduate of Dartmouth College, has a theory on why people are moving to town. “The 2020 election cycle was unusually brutal and divisive,” he said. “I think it’s possible, although I don’t have data, that some significant…

THE AUG. 9 WARNING FROM THE U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) couldn’t be more clear: the reality of climate change is unequivocal, its effects are already playing out in every region of the planet, and we need to act now before the outlook gets worse. In a 4,000-page report, the U.N.’s climate-science body laid out in methodical detail the ways in which human activity has set life on the planet on a collision course. Today, the effects of climate change are already pervasive; if we continue to emit greenhouse gases at current rates, the effects of climate change will be catastrophic and irreversible. “Recent changes in the climate are widespread, rapid and intensifying—unprecedented in thousands of years,” says Ko Barrett, a vice chair of the IPCC. It’s a…

WANDERING AROUND THE sprawling 6.2 million-sq.-ft. Lordstown Motors assembly plant in Ohio, it’s tempting to imagine a green future that is full of jobs. The company’s signature product is a high-performing electric pickup truck, and around the facility workers are buzzing about, getting ready to bring it into production. In one corner, according to company officials giving TIME a rare tour, the firm will build its cutting-edge motors, which will be located in each wheel. A short golf-cart ride away, engineers explain how the company will assemble the lithium-ion battery packs that will power the trucks instead of diesel fuel. And while an army of robots sit idle, ready to be put to use assembling the vehicle, company officials insist they will soon be hiring rapidly. At full capacity, the…

EVERY YEAR, MULTINATIONAL corporations divert some $1.38 trillion in profits away from the countries where they were made to places with much lower, or even zero, corporate tax rates. And while much of this is strictly legal, that doesn’t make it right. Lower tax rates can encourage innovation and investment. But the combination of complex laws and outdated global rules has meant that tax has become effectively optional for large multinationals and wealthy individuals with the money to invest in lawyers and accountants. This has come at immense cost, and not just to national budgets. Most dangerously, it creates a sense of injustice and resentment that has stoked the right-wing populism that is shaking the foundations of liberal democracy. Nothing fuels mistrust in government, or the belief that justice…

SUE BIRD & DIANA TAURASI The two Team USA veterans each scored their fifth gold in Tokyo—a record for any basketball player. Their victory extended the team’s Olympic winning streak to 55 games; its last loss was in 1992. NESTHY PETECIO The boxer’s silver medal makes her the first woman to win a medal in the sport for the Philippines. “This fight is also for the LGBTQ community,” Petecio told reporters after losing the gold-medal bout. TOM DALEY The openly gay British diver finally won gold in the men’s 10-m synchronized platform diving competition at his fourth Olympic Games—and knitted between events, crafting a pouch for his medal. QUINN Canada’s first gold medal in women’s soccer was also history-making for the team’s midfielder, who became the first transgender and nonbinary…

An Afghan man I’ll call “Mohammed” saved my life. It was 2001, just over two months since the Sept. 11 attacks, when Mohammed drove me into Afghanistan as Kabul was falling. He spirited me through a Taliban checkpoint between Jalalabad and the capital, where, an hour or so later, a car full of journalists were brutally killed. Mohammed found me, then a CBS News reporter, a safe place to stay in chaotic post-Taliban Kabul. That’s what a “fixer” is for a foreign correspondent: part translator, part driver, part MacGyver. Every time I returned to the country, I would check on him and his family. And if I asked, he would drive me to hell, and back. In 2015, three men beat and stabbed Mohammed’s 18-year-old son, saying he was being…

ALEXANDRA COOPER HAS THE POWER TO FELL DOZENS OF relationships. Just 26 years old, Cooper is arguably the most successful woman in podcasting, drawing on her own experiences to dole out sex advice to millions of listeners on her weekly podcast, Call Her Daddy. “In one episode, I was jokingly like, ‘If he does this, break up with him,’” she says. “Then I got hundreds of girls DMing me being like, ‘O.K., I did it,’ and I’m like, ‘Wait, hold on, let’s make sure that’s the right choice for you specifically.’” Cooper and I are sitting in the lounge of the Greenwich Hotel in New York City, and she leans in conspiratorially while keeping one wary but eager eye on a group of girls in the lobby who have either…

FOR MANY YEARS NOW, CHINA has been the world’s factory. Even in 2020, as other economies struggled with the effects of the pandemic, China’s manufacturing output was $3.854 trillion, up from the previous year, accounting for nearly a third of the global market. But if you are still thinking of China’s factories as sweatshops, it’s probably time to change your perception. The Chinese economic recovery from its short-lived pandemic blip has been boosted by its world-beating adoption of artificial intelligence (AI). After overtaking the U.S. in 2014, China now has a significant lead over the rest of the world in AI patent applications. In academia, China recently surpassed the U.S. in the number of both AI research publications and journal citations. Commercial applications are flourishing: a new wave of…

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS now one of the most concentrated industries in the world. Dominated by a handful of tech giants and deployed at a planetary scale, AI already influences high-stakes social institutions in education, criminal justice, hiring and welfare. AI is remapping and intervening in the world, expanding wealth inequality and power asymmetries. But so far the sector has primarily escaped regulation, despite affecting the lives of billions of people, even when its products are unproven or potentially harmful. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated this. Many AI companies are now pitching emotion recognition tools (ERTs) for monitoring remote workers and even schoolchildren. These systems map the “microexpressions” in people’s faces from their video cameras. Then they predict internal emotional states drawn from a short list of supposedly universal categories:…

‘He always protected others. He just didn’t protect himself.’BAZHENA ZHOLUDZH, partner of Belarusian dissident Vitaly Shishov, in an Aug. 5 interview; Shishov was found dead on Aug. 3 in Ukraine, in what European Parliament members have since said “looks like a political killing” ‘I didn’t want to leave, but I have to. And I want to keep winning. That’s my mentality.’LIONEL MESSI, in a tearful Aug. 8 press conference confirming his exit from the Spanish soccer team FC Barcelona after 21 years with the club; on Aug. 11, Messi signed with French team Paris Saint–Germain ‘IT WAS AN ERROR TO SIGN THAT LAW. I ADMIT THAT.’ASA HUTCHINSON, Republican governor of Arkansas, in an Aug. 8 interview acknowledging regret over his approval of a law banning mask mandates in the state…

RESIGNED Andrew Cuomo New York governor felled by harassment report NEW YORK GOVERNOR ANDREW CUOMO ANNOUNCED HIS intent to resign from office on Aug. 10, one week after the release of a damning investigation by the state’s attorney general left him teetering on the edge of impeachment. The long-awaited report into a slew of sexual-misconduct allegations found that Cuomo, 63, had harassed 11 women by kissing, groping or making suggestive comments, creating a “toxic culture” of fear and intimidation in his office. “What he did to me was a crime. He broke the law,” said Brittany Commisso, one of the women accusing Cuomo of groping her, in an interview with CBS News that aired on Aug. 9. “The governor needs to be held accountable.” It was a stunningly rapid…

IT HASN’T ALWAYS BEEN EASY TO discern from a Western vantage point, but the rise of China and Asia has been the most important economic development of the past four decades. In 1979, many Chinese people had an average income of less than a dollar a day. Today, Shenzhen, China’s tech capital, has a per capita GDP of almost $30,000. The city is home to tech giants such as Huawei, Tencent and ZTE, and a “maker movement” of tech startups. And many other Chinese cities, including Hangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing’s Zhongguancun (home to TikTok creator ByteDance), made equally impressive progress. When I visited the country for the first time in April 1979, it was still reeling from two centuries of turmoil. But China’s new leader, Deng Xiaoping, had already…