Table of contents for December 5, 2022 in TIME Magazine

As our 100th birthday approaches, a moment to say thanks to our readers and partners Leadership is one of the pillars of TIME’s coverage, and a frequent topic of this column. With this issue, we have some leadership news of our own. Jessica Sibley, who has spent her career growing media businesses, most recently at Forbes, is joining TIME as chief executive officer. We’re excited to welcome Jessica, who brings a sterling reputation as a leader and innovator, into the TIME family. For us, especially as we approach TIME’s 100th birthday in March, it’s also a moment to take stock of where we are, and to express our gratitude to all of you—our readers, viewers, and partners around the world. This month also marks four years since TIME became…

Xi Jinping was the man to see at the G-20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on Nov. 15 and 16. Joe Biden had his first face-to-face meeting as U.S. President with the Chinese leader. Xi had a rare testy public exchange with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. But it was his meeting with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese that may have the biggest impact on China’s backyard. DEEP FREEZE Australia may have set the standard for how bad a relationship with China could become. No Australian leader had held formal talks with the Chinese President since 2016. Goodwill plummeted under the leadership of former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who called for an investigation into the origins of COVID-19. Beijing responded with costly tariffs on Australian goods, warnings to Chinese students that…

On Nov. 13, an explosion on Istiklal Avenue, Istanbul’s busiest pedestrian street, killed six people and injured more than 80. Turkish authorities immediately accused Kurdish groups of a terrorist attack, the first in Turkey’s capital in nearly six years. The blast was condemned in Europe, the U.S., Russia, and elsewhere, but this latest attack will only complicate the already complex foreign policy that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan hopes will help him and his party win re-election in Turkey’s elections next June. After 20 years at center stage in Turkish politics, Erdogan knows he faces a rough road ahead. His country’s economy is in bad shape. Inflation is surging, the currency is sinking, and voters feel the pain. Tourism is crucial to any economic revival, and an attack in the…

Of all the questions I get asked, there’s one that comes up more often and more predictably than any other. Nearly every time I talk to an interviewer or sit down with a new group of people, I can basically count on someone raising it, while others lean in to listen. What does it really mean to go high? It seems possible that I might spend years answering this question. So let me try here. I first publicly uttered the words When they go low, we go high while speaking at the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Hillary Clinton was running for President, as was Donald Trump. My job was to rally Democratic voters, reminding everyone to stay involved and do the work it would take to get…

Why make the trip here to Egypt to attend COP27, this year’s U.N. climate conference? No. 1 is to give the world confidence that America as a whole is moving. And that was an important job, particularly during the darkness of the Trump Administration. We wanted to wave the flag and show the rest of the world there’s hope. How has the reception to an American presence at a conference like this changed since the Trump Administration years? Darkness to light. Now there’s light. It’s a 180-degree change, and people are very appreciative of it. They understand the change that both the Administration has brought and the states have brought. How has the Inflation Reduction Act, the landmark climate bill passed in August, affected policy efforts in Washington State? First…

Steven Spielberg This week’s TIME cover featuring the Academy Award–winning director is his fifth—following covers in 1985, 1995, 1997, and 2005. He was 37 when he made his first red-border appearance in ’85, and had already made Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. TIME dubbed him “the Prince of Hollywood.” He talked about what it’s like to be overflowing with creativity. “I dream for a living,” Spielberg explained. “Once a month the sky falls on my head, I come to, and I see another movie I want to make. Sometimes I think I’ve got ball bearings for brains; these ideas are slipping and sliding across each other all the time. My problem is that my imagination won’t turn off. I wake…

Mark Cuban, the tech titan, Dallas Mavericks owner, and star of ABC’s Shark Tank, moves through the world like a friendly great white, all teeth and eyes and relentless motion. When we meet on an October morning at his office in the Mavericks’ headquarters, the serial entrepreneur, 64, is wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt advertising his last investment: Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Co. I was there to find out why a guy who’s made billions in tech, won an NBA championship, and become perhaps the most popular businessman on reality TV was spending his time and fortune hawking generic anti-fungal medications online for $7.34. “To f-ck things up,” Cuban explains. “That’s what capitalism is all about. Capitalism isn’t just, ‘Everybody should make as much money as they can.’ Capitalism is…

As Mike Pence’s armored SUV arrived at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the Vice President turned to his daughter with a mix of frustration and compassion for the thousands already gathered on the east front. “God bless those people,” he said. “They’re gonna be so disappointed.” ‘I think we’ll have better choices in the future.’—Mike Pence, to ABC News Thus begins a harrowing climax to the former Vice President’s memoirs, released Nov. 15 just hours before former President Donald Trump officially launched a 2024 comeback effort. Pence’s book, So Help Me God, chronicles plenty of contradictions in his rise to power. The book is the most credible defense to date of the Trump Administration’s four years in power from one of its senior members. That doesn’t mean it’s all…

Visitors to the bustling Lego store in midtown Manhattan this holiday season may be surprised by what greets them upon their entrance. After waiting in a line so long that it requires a bouncer, they will find not only sections dedicated to Star Wars and Harry Potter, but also an area labeled ADULTS WELCOME. Occupying about a third of the store’s floor space, it invites those who are young at heart, if not in body, to build. In neat stacks sit a Lego typewriter, a Lego grand piano, a Lego Colosseum, and a Lego version of the set of Friends. Some of the construction kits are eerily specific, like a Lego Real Madrid soccer stadium, a Lego Bugatti Chiron 42083, and a Lego version of the ’80s-era Nintendo NES gaming…

Say what you will about Donald Trump: the man is not a quitter, even when nearly everyone else might wish him to be. His advisers counseled him not to give the Nov. 15 speech at Mar-a-Lago declaring he would seek the presidency for the third time—not while his party was still licking its wounds from the disappointing midterm election, not while the GOP was still trying to win one last Senate runoff in Georgia. The sun had long since set by the time Trump took the stage, palm fronds waving invisibly in the humid dark outside the Florida-rococo auditorium, to make his anticlimactic announcement. He did so with an air of joyless near-resignation, jaw clenched, glaring at the teleprompters as if they’d done him some unforgivable wrong. He did so…

Student-loan forgiveness for 40 million Americans is on hold indefinitely after another legal setback—and experts say it’s possible the measure will be killed by the courts before anyone sees debt relief. A federal appeals court in St. Louis issued a preliminary injunction on Nov. 14—days after the Education Department stopped accepting new applications for loan forgiveness because of a ruling by a federal judge in Texas in a separate challenge. That judge blocked the program, calling it “an unconstitutional exercise of Congress’s legislative power.” The appeals-court ruling is the result of a lawsuit by six Republican-led states that say they will be harmed by lost tax revenue as a result of debt cancellation. The appeals court has not yet ruled on the legal merits in the case, but concluded…

All of a sudden, everyone seems to know the term quiet quitting. It’s alliterative and descriptive, and its deep resonance demonstrates just how fried we all feel. Defined as no longer going above and beyond at work, but simply completing necessary tasks, quiet quitting can feel like the last form of agency for the exhausted and unappreciated workers, burned out from trying to meet employers’ unrealistic expectations. As a researcher of gender dynamics and household work, I can’t help but see similarities between our homes and our current workplace conditions. Data shows household dynamics have not progressed much since 1985 We may like to think we have achieved gender equality at home, but we have not. Research involving household-chore journals—where participants log time spent on domestic tasks each day—tell…

When Steven Spielberg was a kid growing up in 1950s Arizona, watching westerns on his family’s 20-inch black-and-white Philco, he would creep right up to the screen, as if to surround himself with the image. He also wished he could see these moving pictures in color. So he’d riffle through his family’s collection of slides, having learned that by holding one transparency or another up to the television screen he could turn grayed-out western skies blue, or the ground to a realistic-looking green. Recalling this story from a conference room at his production company Amblin Entertainment, he winds toward the classic punch line: “So my mom would walk in, and she’d see me holding these slides up to both of my eyes, right next to the TV set. And she’d…

The New Orleans set of Queen Sugar is buzzing with energy. It’s a relentlessly humid July day, and creator Ava DuVernay has returned to direct the series finale, her first time helming an episode since its debut season, in 2016. DuVernay yells “Cut!” and rises from her chair, moving nimbly through the immaculately decorated living room of the show’s central character, Nova Bordelon (Rutina Wesley). DuVernay converses with camera operators and grips. She positions props to her liking. Her light but authoritative touch is on everything from scripts to wardrobe. She finally stops in front of the couch where Wesley lies under a thick blanket, adjusting it to ensure that the actor’s striking face isn’t obscured. They talk briefly about the scene. “We have an unspoken language,” Wesley tells me…

In the new movie The Inspection, your character is inspired by writer-director Elegance Bratton’s life as a young gay Black man who joins the Marines. What was that like? I was a sort of vessel for him. In a film that’s centering a Black queer man, I could use this experience to bring up some of my own pain and abandonment and then bring it to the surface of healing and love and self-discovery. It was the most emotionally and physically demanding role, but very fulfilling. There are some harrowing scenes. Did you and Bratton have conversations about the merits and possible drawbacks of portraying such violence onscreen? There were a lot of conversations. I don’t want [my character] to get beat up. But I understood what it meant…