Table of contents for March 15, 2021 in TIME Magazine

CHANGING TONES Crayola launched its Colors of the World crayon box set in May 2020, releasing new colors meant to reflect over 40 skin tones from around the world. The line has since expanded to pencils and markers. A DOLL FOR ALL Mattel, the maker of Barbie, launched its first line of gender-neutral dolls in 2019. A company spokesperson said that it was time for a “line free of labels” and that Mattel hoped the new toys would help kids freely express themselves. FIGHTING WORDS After a 6-year-old girl wrote to ask why none of its iconic green army soldiers were female, BMC Toys decided to launch its first line of Plastic Army Women, available in four military poses, in December 2020.…

TUCKED IN THE SHADOW OF THE TETONS, THE TOWN OF Jackson, Wyo., and surrounding Teton County is home to fewer than 25,000 full-time residents, but annually hosts more than 2.5 million visitors. The valley’s natural beauty attracts an influx of tourists, who in turn are responsible for roughly 30% of the region’s jobs and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. For the past year, visitors came with an unwelcome price tag for locals: “Every time in this pandemic that we’ve had an influx of visitation… it follows with an uptick in [COVID-19] cases and hospitalizations,” says Dr. Jeff Greenbaum, medical director at the emergency department for St. John’s hospital and the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (JHMR) ski patrol. With just one major hospital and eight emergency-room physicians serving…

A man in Yangon, Myanmar, is treated after police fired tear gas at protesters on Feb. 28, a day the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights says saw at least 18 people killed by security forces. The military has escalated its crackdown on protests since a Feb. 1 coup ousted the country’s democratically elected government; during demonstrations on March 3, more than 30 protesters were reported killed. Over 1,200 people—including officials, journalists and civilians—have been arrested, charged or sentenced, says the nonprofit Assistance Association for Political Prisoners (Burma). For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox…

Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel, Klara and the Sun, centers on artificial intelligence. The eponymous narrator is unlike any of Ishiguro’s previous narrators in that she is not human but an AF or “artificial friend,” a robotic being resembling a human child, designed to comfort lonely children. “The narrator is very different from me, but that’s really part of my technique,” he says. Ishiguro’s narrators typically look backward, over lives steeped in self-deception or regret. Klara, he says, is a “tabula rasa” at the novel’s beginning and mainly looks forward. “She really has a child’s perspective. She sees things that we don’t, and is learning how to become a human,” says the Nobel laureate, charming and self-effacing in a video chat. Through Klara’s eyes, we are shown a near-future world…

JUST DAYS AFTER PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN WAS SWORN IN TO OFFICE, HIS NATIONAL-SECURITY TEAM URGENTLY REACHED OUT TO THE ANTI-DEFAMATION LEAGUE FOR HELP. The new Commander in Chief was launching a government-wide effort to combat far-right extremism and wanted to hear from the nonprofit, which for 108 years has tracked anti-Semitism, hate speech and domestic radicalism. “We expected to be contacted,” says Ryan Greer, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who studies extremism at the ADL. “We just didn’t expect it that quickly. The change in tone and urgency could not be more stark from prior years.” In normal times, the top security aides in a new Administration would be focusing on dire foreign threats like transnational terrorism, Chinese cyberespionage or North Korean nuclear proliferation. This time, the…

XIOMARA WAS ALREADY HAVING LABOR PAINS WHEN SHE presented herself to U.S. Border Patrol officials to make a claim for asylum. She had fled gang violence in El Salvador six months earlier, working under the table in Mexico to afford bus tickets for her and her three young children to make it to the border. When she finally arrived, nine months pregnant and feeling contractions, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) offered to take her to a hospital. But she had heard about family separations and was worried about losing her kids if she were hospitalized, so instead she was sent back to the streets of Ciudad Juárez at night, alone with the children and with another on the way. “It was sad, and I started to cry,” Xiomara,…

DIED Lawrence Ferlinghetti Last of the Bohemians IN EVERYTHING LAWRENCE Ferlinghetti wrote, he wanted folks to wake up. A poet and publisher, Ferlinghetti, who died on Feb. 22 at 101, was a perceptive writer renowned for his progressive politics and a thoughtful observer of the human condition. In the mid-’70s we both lived in Big Sur, Calif. We were kindred souls, trying to straighten out a world gone mad through our art. We attended poetry readings, shared homemade meals and performed together on occasion. Sharing a stage with Lawrence was a magical, unscripted experience—going back and forth between my notes and his words as our audience went wild. Even in his 90s, Ferlinghetti continued writing. He was still eager—he never stopped striving for a better world. His legacy will live…

LIKE MANY OTHERS IN THE U.S., RON GUMUCIO AND HIS wife stopped going to the gym in 2020 as a precaution against COVID-19. To fill the void, Gumucio’s wife eventually purchased a stationary bike, joining the club of people who have splurged on pricey at-home exercise equipment. But Gumucio, 44, has gone in a different direction. Until he feels safe returning to the gym, he’s sticking to distinctly low-tech forms of fitness. He takes a daily walk around his New Jersey neighborhood. He jogs. He bought cheap resistance bands to sneak in a little strength training. Occasionally he uses the jungle gym in his local park to do pull-ups. His routine is nothing fancy, he says, but “it keeps my sanity.” During the pandemic, lots of people have rediscovered…

More than five years ago, before my daughter Evie Newman transitioned, she came to her parents one day upset. She had been experiencing anxiety and deep depression but was unable to identify the cause of her pain. Out of complete frustration and at just 14 years old, she thought there were only two solutions to put an end to it. “I can either kill myself or I can run away,” she told me. As a mother, my heart was broken. This was only an eighth-grader, barely a teenager, who felt so worthless in this world she would rather not live in it altogether. The next day, Evie enrolled in a local day program to help her cope and better understand what she was feeling. One night after her program,…

RUTH BADER GINSBURG WAS AN AMERICAN icon. The late Justice, who died on Sept. 18 at the age of 87, was only the second woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, a trailblazing feminist who, over a long career, enshrined equal protections for women into the law. During her 27 years on the nation’s highest court, Ginsburg also became a fashion pioneer, encoding style and meaning into the staid judges’ robes through an eclectic collection of collars often given to her by colleagues and admirers. “The standard robe is made for a man because it has a place for the shirt to show, and the tie,” Ginsburg told the Washington Post in 2009. She and Sandra Day O’Connor, the first female Supreme Court Justice, “thought it would be appropriate…

IT TAKES ABOUT EIGHT MINUTES TO try and save a life. Or at least that’s how long it takes a volunteer with a tablet, standing in the parking lot at the T.R. Hoover community development center in South Dallas on a bitterly cold February morning. During the pandemic, the small nonprofit situated in the neighborhood that developers in the 1920s dubbed “the Ideal community” has taken on an ever evolving list of roles. It’s a job-search center. It’s a drive-through food pantry. And, of late, T.R. Hoover is an in-person coronavirus vaccine registration site aimed at helping Ideal’s mainly Black residents, and anyone else who finds their way here, do what for several weeks the county’s online-only registration system has failed to do: put them in line for a shot…

SPECIAL REPORT WOMEN and the PANDEMIC Working moms fight back P.70 Migrant mothers commune P.78 Farmers lead a revolution P.84 Housing that works for all P.92 Feeding communities P.94 Curbing domestic violence P.100 WOMEN STEADILY ENTERED THE WORKFORCE BEFORE THE TURN OF THE CENTURY… …BUT THEIR PARTICIPATION SLID AFTER 2008, THEN PLUMMETED TO A 33-YEAR LOW DURING COVID-19 SEVERAL YEARS AGO, WHEN I WAS IN my mid-20s, after suffering from major depressive disorder and anxiety for most of my life, I found myself at the emergency room during an episode of substance-induced psychosis. My father and stepmother found me, at the very beginning of the episode, having paranoid delusions. Someone had tried to poison me and now they were coming, I told them. “Do not answer the door.” Somehow, I…

THE MESSAGE TO WOMEN WAS CLEAR: Go back home. Since November, hundreds of thousands of farmers had gathered at different sites on the outskirts of the Indian capital to demand the repeal of three agricultural laws that they say would destroy their livelihoods. In January, as the New Delhi winter set in, the Chief Justice of India asked lawyers to persuade elderly people and women to leave the protests. In response, women—mostly from the rural states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh—scrambled onto stages, took hold of microphones and roared back a unanimous “No!” “Something snapped within us when we heard the government tell the women to go back home,” says Jasbir Kaur, a sprightly 74-year-old farmer from Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, who has been camping at the Ghazipur protest…

AS NASTYA WAITS FOR HER HUSBAND KIRILL TO COME HOME from work, thoughts run through her head. She smooths the creases from the tablecloth and lays the table in the dimly lit kitchen of their apartment in Moscow, careful to place the knife and fork perfectly straight next to Kirill’s plate. “Sometimes he loses his temper, but no one’s perfect,” she thinks. “I can’t do anything right.” When Kirill returns, he stares at the food his wife has prepared, then, when she asks what’s wrong, begins hurling insults. “You’re useless, even in the kitchen,” he says, becoming more aggressive as Nastya tries to reason with him, grabbing her and pushing her to the ground. She calls the police begging for help but knows they won’t come. When she calls…

ON A HOT SUMMER DAY LAST AUGUST, SVETLANA Tikhanovskaya was pacing up and down her empty apartment in Minsk, the capital of Belarus in Central Europe, her life—and her country—in turmoil. With her husband in jail, she had sent her two small children out of the country, to safety, and now faced a stark choice, bluntly handed to her by the nation’s security forces: flee into exile herself, or face arrest. “I had a couple of hours, but I could not pack anything, because I was so overstressed,” she recalls. “It was a shock. I was not prepared for this.” It is hard to imagine how Tikhanovskaya could have prepared for the jolting transformation of her life. Within the space of a few months, she emerged from obscurity to…

OVER THE PAST 18 years, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has consolidated more power than any other leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey. He has transformed Turkey’s politics, faced down a military coup and rewritten the constitution to give his presidency additional power. But his combative style and autocratic instincts have earned him critics at home and abroad. His biggest political problem at the moment is economic: unemployment stands near 14%, inflation remains in double digits, and the pandemic grinds on. History says Turkey’s strongman will become even more aggressive and erratic, at home and abroad The President and his Justice and Development Party (AKP) are paying a political price for all this. Erdogan has trailed rival Ekrem Imamoglu in head-to-head matchups in a number of recent…

FOR MOST TEXANS, THE LIGHTS ARE BACK ON AND THE water pressure has returned. But if the most acute effects of February’s weather crisis are fading into the rearview mirror, the battle to address the reality it revealed—America’s crumbling infrastructure and deficient electric grid—is just beginning. For years, engineers, policymakers and politicians have wrangled over how to fix deteriorating roads, bridges and buildings as well as an ailing U.S. electric grid. The most catastrophic winter storm to hit Texas in decades accelerated the conversation, helping make the case for a multitrillion-dollar federal infrastructure package and shutting down past political talking points. “Texas laid bare for everybody how fragile the system is,” says Jeff Navin, a former chief of staff at the U.S. Energy Department who is now a partner…

KIM NG TOOK HER SEAT ON THE CHARTERED jet. As assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, she was joining the team on a road trip in 2008. Soon the Dodgers players started filing onto the plane, and a flight attendant began taking drink orders from staffers. When she reached Ng—pronounced Ang, rhymes with hang—the flight attendant leaned in close. “So what did you do to get on this plane?” she asked. After nearly two decades in baseball front offices, Ng had become accustomed to the condescending glances, outright hostility and attempts at intimidation that come with being the only woman in the room. But this was, well, something else entirely. So Ng decided, as she had so many times in her professional life, to have some fun with…

IF YOU SUBSCRIBE TO NETFLIX OR ANY OTHER STREAMING service, you know—or you’re at least made to feel—that even if you’re not yet ready to return to theaters, you’ll never run out of things to watch. That should be exciting. So why isn’t it? The unending supply of that thing with the deeply unromantic name content is dispiriting: we’ve become a league of prisoners waiting for our rations to be dropped from the sky. Of course, thanks to streaming, we can watch just about anything we want, of any genre or from any era. But what if we’re eager to connect with others who have also just watched the same film we did? From our individual snow-globe worlds, how do we assert our individuality while still feeling part of…