Table of contents for October 24, 2022 in TIME Magazine

In 2021, Americans were killed by guns at the highest rate in 30 years, with a big increase following the pandemic. The homicide rate involving guns rose from 4.6 deaths per 100,000 Americans in 2019 to 6.63 per 100,000 two years later, according to U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention analyses. Suicides by firearm rose from 7.9 per 100,000 people in 2019 to 8.75. Experts say it’s difficult to link the surge to any single explanation, but the increasing prevalence of guns may have been a major factor. PANDEMIC EFFECT The social upheaval of the past 2½ years likely added to both violence and personal suffering, experts say. The COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread “fear, uncertainty, and isolation,” says Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research…

Shaye Brown is uniquely familiar with the nation’s teacher shortage. About a week into the school year, she learned that her 9-year-old son, who is in a specialized class for students with autism, would not have a full-time teacher because there were not enough of them at Paterson Public Schools in New Jersey. Instead, a substitute teacher is filling in. And on Sept. 12, she resigned from her job as a special-education teacher in the same district to take a better-paying job at a neighboring school. She knows her decision will make Paterson’s situation worse. “I take being a special educator very seriously, but I have to care for my children,” says Brown, who makes $59,000 per year in Paterson. Her new district, which is about two miles away in…

Russia launched the biggest wave of missile strikes on Ukraine since the invasion, two days after an explosion on a bridge to Crimea severed a crucial supply line between that Russian-occupied territory and Russia. The vehicles burning in central Kyiv on Oct. 10 were from at least 84 strikes the Ukraine military counted in 24 hours, leaving at least 14 people dead and knocking out power in five regions. ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox Photograph by Gleb Garanich—Reuters…

Back in March 2018, I found my mind wandering inside Beijing’s Great Hall of the People as China’s rubber-stamp parliament voted to remove the two-term presidential limit. Ensconced in the building’s top tier with other journalists and dignitaries straining to hear the proceedings, I stared up at the huge red star ceiling motif that loomed over Chinese Communist Party (CCP) delegates. Nearby, two bored European diplomats gossiped noisily. If we perhaps failed to grasp the magnitude of what was transpiring in that auditorium 4½ years ago, it’s only too clear today. The world has since endured a pandemic that sprouted amid official obfuscation in China’s central city of Wuhan and spilled across every continent to claim an estimated 15 million lives. Beijing has led a campaign of incarceration and indoctrination…

British-Irish playwright and filmmaker Martin McDonagh specializes in bitter-bleak semicomedies (In Bruges; Seven Psychopaths; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) about the tendency of human beings to be angry, defensive grudgeholders—yet gloriously, messily human nonetheless. That pattern repeats in McDonagh’s latest, The Banshees of Inisherin, as well. Yet this picture feels fresher and less forced than most of the writer-director’s work, and the key to its pleasures and heartbreak can be summed up thus: Colin Farrell and a miniature donkey. Banshees is set in the waning days of the Irish Civil War, on a somber island off the coast of Ireland, a place where there’s not much to do but scowl at your neighbors and drink at the pub. Farrell’s Padraic Suilleabhain is in the mind to do the latter, so…

Not long after North Korea launched its fifth weapons test in 10 days on Oct. 4, firing a ballistic missile high above northern Japan—and prompting the government to warn citizens to take cover—a familiar routine began to unfold. Leaders from the U.S., South Korea, and Japan issued strongly worded statements condemning the “dangerous” and “destabilizing” provocation. The American and South Korean militaries conducted “show of force” exercises, including sending fighter jets to bomb a deserted island. For more than 30 years, the U.S. and its Asian allies have responded to North Korean demonstrations of ever advancing weapons technology with their own shows of force. But with signs that the North may soon perform its seventh underground nuclear test, the now routine countermoves—embraced by Republican and Democratic Presidents alike for…

In a country where a man’s voice has historically been louder, the women of Iran now lead the fight for change. In the weeks since the innocent death of 22-year-old Mahsa (Jina) Amini by the Iranian regime’s morality police, the nation’s ever present cry for change has been supercharged by the country’s fearless women and girls calling for individual, social, civil, and economic reforms. These unprecedented protests—the largest since the 2009 Green Movement—continue to be met by a systematic crackdown, including the killing and arrest of hundreds of civilians, journalists, and activists. Among those detained are two young female journalists, Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi, without whom the world would have never known about Amini’s horrific plight. “With every bullet fired and every arrest, the regime is shooting itself in…

Children today, unlike their parents and grandparents, are growing up in a world that is both experiencing the impacts of climate change and actively adapting to it. They are being introduced to climate-change concepts through school, their peers, and kid-friendly TV shows much earlier than their older family members. Fortunately for them and their caretakers who may feel intimidated by the complex—and often frightening—topic, there’s no shortage of literature to help with the tough job of explaining why the world is changing, what’s at stake, and what we can do about it. The best books are those that meet children where they are, both academically and emotionally, in order to give them a space to discuss it and ask questions. Here is an abridged list of books curated by TIME…

At noon on Monday, March 4, 1861—a day that observers noted had dawned “cloudy and raw” but turned bright and warm—Abraham Lincoln emerged from the 14th Street NW door of Willard’s Hotel, accompanied by President James Buchanan. The two men rode together in an open carriage up Pennsylvania Avenue, bound for the covered platform that had been erected on the East Front for the presidential Inauguration. Double files of cavalrymen escorted the procession to the Capitol. Cross streets had been closed to secure the route in the event of attack. Sharpshooters were stationed on rooftops along the avenue, “with orders,” an officer recalled, “to watch the windows on the opposite side, and to fire upon them in case any attempt should be made to fire from those windows on the…

We have lots of stories about the ways boys relate—or don’t—to their mothers. But in the movies, reflections on how girls feel about their fathers, told from a woman’s point of view, are still relatively rare. That’s the territory of Scottish director Charlotte Wells’ gorgeous, resonant debut Aftersun. The movie begins with an interrogation: it’s sometime in the mid-1990s, and 11-year-old Sophie (Frankie Corio) has turned a video camera on her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), who has taken her to Turkey for a rare holiday break. “When you were 11, what did you think you’d be doing by now?” she asks, her innocence the demanding kind, so common in the very young. Calum—whose life we know little about, beyond the fact that he’s separated from Sophie’s mother—doesn’t want to…

2,560 Weight, in pounds, recorded Oct. 10, of Minnesota horticulture teacher Travis Gienger’s pumpkin—a North American record ‘A dark day for all involved in football, and a tragedy beyond comprehension.’ Gianni Infantino, president of FIFA, after a stampede at a soccer match in Indonesia on Oct. 1 led to more than 120 deaths ‘IF BLACK PEOPLE DON’T SPEAK UP FOR EACH OTHER, WHO WILL?’ Clayton English, comedian, on a lawsuit he and fellow entertainer Eric André filed Oct. 11 alleging that Black flyers are racially profiled by police at the Atlanta airport 66 Number of clinics that have stopped providing abortions since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, according to an analysis released Oct. 6 by the Guttmacher Institute ‘I DID NOT SEE THIS COMING AT ALL.’…

I needed a car there were no cars. Having just moved across the country, from a city to the suburbs, I started my search for a new car with the self-assurance of most U.S. shoppers, who have grown to expect that they can get everything they need with two-day delivery from Amazon or a quick drive to Walmart. Months after we began the hunt for a new compact SUV to combat the isolation of the suburbs, my husband and I paid $34,447 for a 2022 Subaru Forester Base model with some added features. That’s $3,002 over the manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), the sticker price that, for years, buyers were counseled never to exceed. We also paid $800 in fees that the dealership sprang on us at the last minute—$199…

On the day of his mother's funeral in 1996, the playwright Tom Stoppard had a spat with his stepfather Kenneth, the man who had married his widowed mother in India and taken her and her two young sons back with him to the U.K. “It was, like, the hour my mother died, and we came home from the hospital and he was very upset, and he didn’t entirely approve of things I was involved in—Jewish questions—and he just blurted out that I should stop using his name. But it was just an expression of grief,” says Stoppard. He regrets having ever mentioned it. “I shouldn’t have told people about it. It was true for about 10 minutes.” At least, that’s how Stoppard tells the story now. But he’s told it…

Inflation is back, and it is rising sharply, especially over the past year, owing to a mix of both demand and supply factors. This rise in inflation may not be a short-term phenomenon: the Great Moderation of the past three decades may be over, and we may be entering a new era of Great Stagflationary Instability. Unless you are middle-aged and gray-haired, you probably hadn’t heard about the term stagflation until very recently. You may have barely heard about inflation. For a long time, until 2021, inflation—the increase in prices year to year—was below the advanced economies’ central banks’ target of 2%. Usually inflation is associated with high economic growth. When aggregate demand for goods, services, and labor is strong, coupled with positive animal spirits, optimism about the future, and…

The story of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Chicago youth who was tortured and lynched in 1955 Mississippi for allegedly whistling at a white woman, is one of the most shameful episodes in American history, an event that’s still painful to face. Chinonye Chukwu’s Till is partly a dramatization of that tragedy, though its chief focus is Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till-Mobley—played, superbly, by Danielle Deadwyler—who channeled her intense grief into activism that has profound repercussions to this day. The opening scenes are perhaps the most agonizing to watch: Young Emmett (the incandescent Jalyn Hall) radiates optimism as he prepares for a summer trip to visit relatives in Money, Miss. His traveling clothes are neat and natty, complete with cuff links, a patterned necktie, a pressed pocket square. It’s Mamie who’s nervous:…