Table of contents for February 3, 2020 in TIME Magazine

MY 11-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER often asks me, tauntingly, what things were like “in the 20th century.” Things are moving her way. It’s a sign of just how quickly the globe’s generational shift is occurring that when Finland’s Prime Minister Sanna Marin, 34, became the world’s youngest head of government on Dec. 10, she lost that distinction almost immediately. A mere 28 days later, Sebastian Kurz, 33, became Austria’s Chancellor. Kurz, who had an earlier stint in the same job, regained the role via a coalition with the Green Party, whose support surged in the latest election—a result, many said, of the work of teen climate activist (and TIME 2019 Person of the Year) Greta Thunberg. “A specter is striding through Europe,” read an editorial in Austria’s right-leaning Die Presse. “Its name…

Africa’s richest woman in hot water Authorities in Angola are investigating Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s wealthiest woman and a daughter of a former Angolan President, after media outlets on Jan. 19 published 700,000 documents purporting to show that she misused state resources to get rich. She has denied the claims. U.S. court dismisses climate suit A lawsuit brought by a group of young people intending to force the U.S. government to address climate change, Juliana v. U.S., was dismissed on Jan. 17 by a panel of federal judges in the Ninth Circuit, on the grounds that the plaintiffs lacked legal standing. The litigants plan to ask the full court to review the decision. China targets single-use plastics China unveiled a plan on Jan. 20 to drastically reduce the amount…

DIED Terry Jones Monty Python’s eclectic mind WHEN THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY ADDED PYTHONESQUE to its pages, Terry Jones didn’t take it as a compliment. The mission of Monty Python, the influential comedy troupe of which Jones was a founding member, was to be “unpredictable” and “unquantifiable,” he said at a reunion in 2009. To be distilled into a mere adjective meant they had “failed utterly” in that quest. But Jones, who died on Jan. 21 at the age of 77, could not be defined. It was while studying at Oxford that Jones met Michael Palin; they eventually teamed up with John Cleese, Eric Idle, Graham Chapman and Terry Gilliam to form Monty Python. Their groundbreaking TV show, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, combined quietly uproarious sketches with rapid-fire wordplay,…

As the new decade begins, TIME asked young activists to write open letters to their elders expressing their vision of a world where young people can survive and thrive. From gun violence to refugee rights, gender equality to climate change, their letters are a snapshot of what matters not just to the authors but to everyone coming of age in an era of global turmoil. EMMA GONZÁLEZ Stop sacrificing our futures THE YOUTH OF THIS WORLD are watching you destroy our lives before they have begun. We are losing our futures, our sanity and our lives, all because you want more money and more power. Everyone I know has depression or anxiety or worse. Almost none of us can deal with these illnesses because we can’t afford the treatment, and…

CAPITALISM MAY BE at a tipping point. For too long, policymakers, governments and business leaders have done a poor job of helping those who have been left behind, and lost sight of how capitalism can create more opportunity for all. It’s not hard to see why some are losing faith in our system, particularly the younger generation. Health care costs are excessively high and unpredictable, often causing financial distress. Students are too often graduating without the skills to get good jobs and saddled with too much debt. Infrastructure is rapidly deteriorating. And maybe most importantly, wages, particularly at the low end, have not been growing enough. That might explain why some Americans and politicians are turning to the “hot” new trend of socialism as a cure-all for society’s ills.…

62% Share of people ages 20 to 37 who report feeling comfortable discussing their mental health at work 32% Share of people ages 54 to 72 who say they are comfortable discussing the same MADALYN PARKER HAD been at her first job only a few months when the depression and anxiety set in. She had beaten back both in college, where she became so depressed that she stopped eating and going to classes. It nearly prevented her from graduating. She kept her history to herself when she accepted a job as a web developer at the small software company Olark in 2014. But as the youngest (and only female) engineer, “I started getting panic attacks about work and being really, really stressed about not getting enough done,” says Parker, now…

Accessorize for health A growing wardrobe of wearable health sensors—from pulse-monitoring earrings to skin-sensing tattoos—will monitor our vital functions around the clock. In the future, they could work with communicating apps that store our genetic profiles, helping doctors and AI systems detect irregularities, predict disease risks and customize medicines. STEALING EXTRA SUNSHINE Orbiting power stations in space could capture solar energy 24 hours a day, convert it to electricity and beam it to earth via laser or microwave antenna. The technology may be cost-effective by the 2040s, according to the International Academy of Astronautics. Mushroom couture Fashionable leather-like garments of the future may be grown from mushrooms. Companies like San Francisco’s MycoWorks are pioneering eco-friendly alternatives to animal hides that can be easily dyed, textured and sewed. BIGGER THAN…

THE GOOD PLACE ALWAYS SOUNDED like a match made in TV heaven: Beloved star Kristen Bell. Comedy veteran Ted Danson. And creator Mike Schur, a prolific writer and producer who’d made his name as a driving force behind acclaimed sitcoms The Office, Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine. As we approach the end of its four-season run, however, it’s clear the show was a gamble for all involved—including NBC, which believed in Schur enough to let him run with a wild idea. Though trailers suggested a fantastical take on his typical bighearted ensemble comedies, The Good Place quickly revealed itself to be a very funny but also quite earnest disquisition on moral philosophy. The saga begins with Bell’s Eleanor Shellstrop opening her eyes outside the office of the avuncular…

BENEATH THE HEATED PARTISAN LANGUAGE surrounding President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial lies a constitutional question: Can a President be removed from office even if he hasn’t committed a crime? That’s the key question facing the Senate now that its formal trial began in earnest on Jan. 21. The fate of Trump’s presidency and the carefully calibrated balance of power between the White House and Congress hang on the answer. House Democrats say Trump twisted U.S. foreign policy to try to stay in office, withholding defense and diplomatic aid to Ukraine to get the country to announce investigations into his political rival Joe Biden. Trump’s lawyers dispute that framing of what happened—but regardless of the President’s motivations, they say, there is no law saying anything he did was illegal. “House…

Nearly 1 in 5 American children is officially poor. That’s roughly 15 million kids. But the number living with a significant deprivation—insufficient food, seriously overcrowded housing or a lack of access to medical care due to cost—is actually much higher. According to the latest studies, it’s more like 1 in 3. Why do we tolerate this? America has long been resistant to adequate poverty policies because of its strong strain of thinking that the poor are responsible for their own situations, no matter their suffering, but child poverty is too harmful and punishing to ignore. I, and a growing number of academics, believe there is a solution: the government should give monthly cash allowances, without conditions, to every family with kids. (Higher-income families would have much of that money taxed…

“Only when there is chaos in society does the government pay some attention to our demands. I think that all police are the same. Maybe I hate them too much, but I think that whatever protesters do, whether they slash their necks or whatever, I think there’s no problem.”—JANE, 21 AT 15 YEARS OLD, YANNUS IS TOO YOUNG TO DRIVE a car, buy a beer or donate blood. But he says he is willing to give his life in the “final battle” for Hong Kong. “Maybe I will die for this movement,” he says, at the edge of one of the pitched battles that demonstrations have frequently become over the past eight months. As protesters beside him pour Molotov cocktails, the teenager straps on a motorcycle helmet to hide his…

Hindsight, as the saying goes, is 20/20. So, as well as soliciting letters from young people to their elders, TIME asked six global leaders to write to a young person or people of their own choosing. The authors have decades of experience in the fields of statecraft, human-rights work and innovation—and together their open letters reflect a feeling of hope that despite the challenges young people face, they also hold the power to improve the planet. WINNIE BYANYIMA A letter to Lucy Lucy is a young HIV-positive domestic worker in Kenya I WAS THINKING about you today, Lucy, and wondering how you were doing. You still don’t have a contract or earn the minimum wage, even though a landmark 2012 ruling granted Kenyan domestic workers the same basic labor rights…

THERE CAN BE irony in even the happiest of sentiments—a fact that is surely not lost on Eddie Ndopu. The son of a South African mother and a Namibian father, Ndopu was born in 1990, the year Namibia attained its independence from South Africa, and just four years before Nelson Mandela became South Africa’s first black President. Ndopu and his demographic cohort in the southern part of Africa became known as the “born free” generation—a sentiment suited to a time and a place when apartheid and other old oppressions were being cast aside. But for Ndopu, freedom lasted only until he turned 2. It was then that he was diagnosed with spinal muscular atrophy (SMA), a degenerative condition that would weaken him, require the use of a wheelchair and kill…

ICAN’T TELL you the exact moment I realized how many powerful people belonging to the previous generation were failing ours, but I will never forget the feeling. It animates me still today. It was the feeling of coming home from a war knowing politicians were mouthing words about a conflict that looked completely different from the one they’d sent us to fight, only to read the leaked Pentagon Papers and learn so many were saying one thing publicly while privately knowing another. It made me angry. But more importantly, it made me an activist. Five decades ago, I spent two years of my life working with other young veterans to end a war that had gone wrong. We were attacked. We were criticized. We were spied on. We were…

WHILE 2019 MAY NOT HAVE BEEN AN EXPLOSIVE year in pop music, it teed up the personalities and story lines that could define the next decade in listening. A new generational gap opened up, one separating the veteran stars of the ’10s—think Beyoncé, Drake, Rihanna and Taylor Swift—from a new crop of ascendant artists like Billie Eilish, Lizzo and Post Malone. A quiet year for the former group included live albums, B-side compilations and a focus on nonmusical pursuits. Among the few to release a collection of new work was Swift, whose Lover sought to recapture the polished, joyous sound of older albums like Red and 1989. The pause left space for Eilish and her colleagues to storm the charts with work that shared a key set of qualities:…

LUNAR NEW YEAR IS A TIME FOR TRAVEL across China, as people make up to 450 million trips abroad for vacation or back to their hometowns for meals with family. But a deadly virus is also on the move, putting a damper on the celebrations, which fall around Jan. 25 this year. The outbreak of a viral pneumonia-like illness was first reported in December in Wuhan, a major city in central China. Health officials quickly identified the pathogen as a coronavirus related to the virus that caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak, which began in southern China in 2002, killing nearly 800 people and turning bustling cities across Asia into ghost towns. The new virus sickened more than 500 people in China and led to 17 deaths as…

DOMI-NOOOOOOO In the town of Nidda, Germany, a 2018 attempt to break the record for the most minidominoes to fall in one go failed when a fly landed on one of the tiny pieces, triggering a premature chain reaction. MISSTEP British endurance runner Amy Hughes, who ran 520 miles on a treadmill in one week in 2017, lost out on a world record after officials said her boyfriend, who monitored the bid, wasn’t an independent witness. EATING CROW Cooks used 2,200 lb. of ostrich meat in a bid to make the world’s largest ostrich sandwich at a food festival in Tehran in 2008. But a crowd began eating the evidence before Guinness officials could measure it.…

AN INTERGENERATIONAL crisis is—increasingly—under way. We have created a system that disproportionately rewards the happy few, underfunds social security and infrastructure, and puts at risk the health of the planet as a whole. Young people are right to be deeply concerned and angry about this, seeing it as a betrayal of their future. But we can’t let that realization stifle us. 2020 should be the year in which we start thinking and acting long-term again and make intergenerational parity the norm. But how? Many young people will look back at the 2010s with mixed feelings at best. At the beginning of the decade, the youth-driven Arab Spring ended in disappointment. In the West, at the same time, demands for a fairer system from the Occupy and Indignados movements similarly…

THE PHOTOGRAPHER IS trying to coax the Prime Minister of Finland into a three-quarter pose, with knees turned slightly to the side, hands demurely joined in her lap. But Sanna Marin isn’t having it. Just 11 days after taking office, she faces the camera squarely, legs slightly apart, and rests her hands firmly on her thighs. “This is how you would do it if I were a man,” she says. Finland’s new leader has good reason to think about how she is portrayed. After her predecessor resigned on Dec. 3, the 34-year-old became the youngest Prime Minister in Finnish history and the world’s youngest female state leader as well. That status earned her and her coalition government (all five party leaders are women, and four are below the age of…

In the same way Hunter S. Thompson and Pablo Picasso gave us gonzo journalism and Cubism, you’ve been credited with creating cyber punk and inventing the term cyberspace. How do you plead? I remember early in my career looking at a yellow legal on which I wrote down infospace and dataspace, and they just looked woefully unsexy. Then I wrote cyberspace and it just rolled off the tongue. Since then I’ve discovered that a Scandinavian artist previously used it in an abstract painting. Cyberpunk is not my coinage. I was with a group of sci-fi writers and someone called us that, and I said, “Don’t buy this.” We were already marginalized as sci-fi writers. Cyberpunk would marginalize us further. Much of your work takes place in the near future,…