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The artifacts many of us have accumulated in our homes right now will inform future generations about what it was like to live through this time. (2020)

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time

At 2:34 pm on Friday, March 13—a day after New York Governor Andrew Cuomo announced a ban on large gatherings, with the number of novel coronavirus cases in the state having tripled over the last four days—Rebecca Klassen, an associate curator of material culture at the New-York Historical Society, emailed museum director Margi Hofer. “I think we should collect an object or two to represent the pandemic,” she wrote. “What would you think if I asked around for an empty bottle of Purell, aka liquid gold?” Eleven minutes later, Hofer emailed back: “Sure. I have a pocket-sized one if you think that will do the trick.” And so, the museum’s COVID-19 collecting effort began. While the New-York Historical Society has not yet officially added Hofer’s pocket-size Purell to its collection, the museum has amassed more than 200 objects and multimedia files documenting the new normal, including bottles of hand sanitizer made by distilleries and New York inmates. In April, photographer Kay Hickman and journalist Kevin Powell interviewed and photographed New Yorkers at the peak of the pandemic, and now, visitors can see the pictures and listen to interview excerpts on their cell phones in the museum’s courtyard exhibit Hope Wanted: New York City Under Quarantine—and even submit their own pandemic stories to preserve. On Friday, six months after the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, the museum reopens its indoor galleries. The timing is apt; the N-YHS’s COVID-related collecting is the latest project within an ongoing program that began in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, to collect materials of cultural importance immediately after historic events. And the institution isn’t alone. In the last two decades, museums worldwide have carried out similar initiatives to document the aftermath of major events from natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina to social movements such as the climate strikes. Now, with COVID-19’s historic nature firmly established, even as the world still battles the virus, the question of how it will become part of historical memory is already being answered. The artifacts many of us have accumulated in our homes right now will inform future generations about what it was like to live through this time. Here, TIME highlights some examples of what you may find in future exhibits about life during the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. Hand sanitizer made by Kings County Distillery—which usually makes whiskey—in Brooklyn, N.Y. The New-York Historical Society has collected hand sanitizer made by distilleries that converted their operations. Courtesy Kings County Distillery Instead of collecting the usual art or materials belonging to influential people, museums in the pandemic era are seeking out everyday people’s experiences—via TikTok and YouTube videos, Zoom screenshots and recordings, workplace emails about safety protocols, text messages about keeping busy in lockdown, and pictures of drug-store shelves stripped bare of disinfecting products. “I want to know what’s in your emergency bag and on your shopping list,” says Anthea M. Hartig, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. What exactly that means varies widely. The New-York Historical Society had to act fast to acquire the cowbell that staff at the Samaritan’s Purse emergency field hospital in Central Park would ring every time they’d discharge a patient. Though life-saving equipment like ventilators can’t be collected while there’s still a critical need for them, many institutions are in touch with local hospitals about saving objects or stories from doctors, nurses and their teams. (In general, many museums are not physically collecting COVID-related artifacts while the pandemic is still ongoing, but rather asking people to email photos of objects for potential acquisition when it’s safer to collect them.) Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter For museums nationwide, documenting COVID-19 has been inseparable from documenting the ongoing Black Lives Matters protests. At the Museum of the City of New York, a social media open call for images of “a socially-distanced NYC” and scenes of activism drew nearly 20,000 images from professional and amateur photographers. Some are now on display in New York Responds, a new outdoor exhibit of photos and stories of pandemic life. One of the photos, taken by street photographer Clay Benskin, captures a protester doing a handstand in front of a line of NYPD officers outside City Hall on the evening of July 1. A protester stands on his head in front of a line of NYPD near City Hall during the first attempt to take over the so-called "Abolition Park," a makeshift camp in City Hall Park made up of people protesting police brutality. Clay Benskin The Anacostia Community Museum in Washington, D.C., issued an online call-out for stories from both the pandemic and this year’s social justice protests. It has garnered submissions from across the country, including from frontline workers like an Atlanta UPS driver who expressed her gratitude for customers who thanked the people who kept the delivery economy going. Melanie A. Adams, director of the museum, says the goal is “to tell the story of everyday people.” The Mercer Museum in Doylestown, Penn., received cell-phone video of a violinist playing in the parking lot of a senior housing complex and is saving copies of Neighbor to Neighbor COVID TIMES, a newsletter filled with information about the pandemic’s effects on local businesses and interviews with locals on how they are surviving. The Museo Diocesano Tridentino in the northern Italian city of Trento pivoted from its daily work preserving early Catholic history to preserving the objects that outfitted Italians’ new sanctuaries during lockdown. When Lorenza Liandru curated photographs for an outdoor exhibit that now lives online, she started with one of her own stove-top coffeemaker, which had become “a symbol of the lost ritual of the coffee break with friends, colleagues, family.” Other subjects ranged from a terrace that allowed a woman “to feel [like] part of the world again” to games that provided a distraction from the grim news cycle. Top left: Bialetti, Liandru's coffee maker. She says it "makes an unworthy substitute for bar espresso"; Top Right: Simone says "No video game can equal Subbuteo (a tabletop miniature football game). Isn't it wonderful?"; Bottom left: Luca's mother Francesca says "the dandelion is the symbol of the long time spent with my child"; Bottom Right: Daniela says focusing on the puzzle "helps the mind relax and push negative thoughts away." Courtesy Museo Diocesano Tridentino Some of the most powerful visuals are analog. Tanya Gibb, who teaches third grade in Los Angeles, has been keeping a bullet journal for three years, and realized midway through what she thinks was a case of COVID-19 that she was documenting history. In the boxes that had previously recorded commitments like parent-teacher conferences or her twin sister’s birthday tea, she wrote “STILL SICK.” She was briefly hospitalized in March and re-admitted a month later, and had to undergo emergency surgery to save her eyesight. Days after her release from the hospital, she noticed one of her favorite museums, the Autry Museum of the American West, had posted a Facebook callout for submissions, and she emailed a picture of her journal. She explained her rationale to TIME: “What would people want to see 100 years from now when they want to see what things were like? A diary of someone living.” Bullet journal created and submitted by Tanya Gibb to the Autry. "On March 5th, 2020, I came down with COVID-19 symptoms. When I went to the hospital, I could not get a test. After going back to the ER three times, I was eventually hospitalized. I was still not tested," she said. Courtesy The Autry Museum Masks, a signature of the new normal, will definitely be covered in future exhibits on the COVID-19 pandemic. Among the photos of homemade masks that people submitted to the Autry Museum is one made by a hair stylist for the clients she couldn’t see during the California stay-at-home order last spring; one with ruffles and a matching head-wrap sewn to represent the designer’s West African heritage; and masks that strangers sewed for strangers via Auntie Sewing Squad, an online community of hundreds of people nationwide who have sewn more than 80,000 masks for underserved populations, such as farm workers, incarcerated persons and victims of domestic violence. Screenshot of Auntie Sewing Squad "Stitch and Bitch Meeting" on April 4 Courtesy Auntie Sewing Squad But some places are collecting less tangible artifacts. To help future scientists track how we got here, archivists at the Library of Congress are collecting data from Johns Hopkins University’s Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE), which runs a COVID-19 dashboard; snapshots from GISAID, which aggregates genomic data from labs worldwide during pandemics; and capturing analyses from platforms like Nextstrain, which are mapping the mutations of the virus and its transmission. A Web Archiving team is also preserving websites that include information about the origins of the novel coronavirus, the spread of infection and containment efforts. The Library of Congress has also acquired photographs from Camilo José Vergara, who documents life in low-income neighborhoods, including scenes such as the “BE WELL” message on the marquee of the indefinitely-closed Apollo Theater in Harlem; pictures of residents who died of COVID-19 in the Corona neighborhood of Queens, N.Y.; and a barber giving a customer a haircut on a Newark, N.J., street. On Wednesday, the Library announced an additional effort to collect photos documenting a wide range of individuals’ experiences with the pandemic. A man guards the entrance to H. F. Dollar and Up grocery store in Queens, April 25 Camilo José Vergara Six months after COVID-19 lockdown orders closed down museums, these cultural institutions face a long recovery themselves, and the online outreach has helped them reinvent themselves. Curators hope these collecting efforts help the world see museums not only as buildings, but also as online communities in which citizens play a key role. “We just want to make sure people know we’re recording history now. We don’t have to wait until history is documented. And it’s actually better when more voices are involved,” says Tyree A. Boyd-Pates, an associate curator of Western History at the Autry Museum of the American West, who is spearheading its Collecting Community History Initiative. A history of the pandemic that includes those voices, and the objects they donate to museums, will play a key role is helping to establish a more inclusive future vision of American history. And, some museum professionals say, they can already help donors imagine a more inclusive present. Such documenting efforts take people out of their own experiences so they can “understand others in different situations,” says the Smithsonian’s Hartig. “My hope is it helps build empathy and compassion.” The cowbell that staffers at the Samaritan’s Purse emergency field hospital in Central Park would ring every time they’d discharge a patient Courtesy New-York Historical Society The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.

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Over the years, Louis Druehl, 84, has watched interest in seaweed come and go. But now, as climate change wreaks havoc on ecosystems across the planet, the world is turning to seaweed as a potential climate change solution.

https://ti.me/3CH5Cqs

time

In a cove in Bamfield, a coastal community in British Columbia, Canada, Louis Druehl steers his boat, The Kelp Express, a mile along the mountainous coastline. For 51 years, this boat has taken Druehl to the fortuitously named Kelp Bay where beneath the water’s surface ropes of seaweed that Druehl has been carefully harvesting for decades dangle in the cold Pacific water. Referred to by some as the “seaweed guru”—by others, as the “kelp grandfather”—Druehl, 84, was the first commercial seaweed operator in North America when he began growing kelp, a brown seaweed, in 1982. Seaweed is his life: he has studied it, farmed it, cooked it, and written an award winning, bestselling book about it. Over the years, Druehl has watched interest in seaweed come and go. But now, as climate change wreaks havoc on ecosystems across the planet, the world is turning to seaweed as a potential climate change solution. “All of a sudden, people have discovered seaweed,” Druehl tells me. “They’ve discovered us.” Seaweed can play a huge role in fighting climate change by absorbing carbon emissions, regenerating marine ecosystems, creating biofuel and renewable plastics as well as generating marine protein. Until recently, this centuries old industry has mainly farmed seaweed for food in Asia, with China as the world’s biggest producer of seaweed, accounting for 60% of global volume. But over the past decade, global seaweed production has doubled—with an estimated value of $59.61 billion in 2019—as interest in seaweed as a food source, carbon sink option and renewable product from consumers, farmers, researchers, and business leaders blossoms. The coast of British Columbia, where Druehl has spent his adult life, is a hotspot of seaweed biodiversity and yet the industry here is only just taking off. A seaweed industry could bring jobs to the area, amidst mass layoffs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Could this remote, seaweed-rich corner of the world turn seaweed into climate solutions for the future? Druehl is optimistic: “I think we’re going to pull it off.” Amy McConnell and Louis Druehl analyze a piece of kelp from Druehl's dock in Bamfield, on Vancouver Island. Melissa Renwick for TIME While forests have long been considered the best natural defense in the battle against climate change, researchers have found that seaweed is in fact the most effective natural way of absorbing carbon emissions from the atmosphere. Unlike tree planting, seaweed does not require fresh water or fertilizers and grows at a much faster rate than trees, expanding by up to two feet a day. But seaweed’s biggest comparative advantage is that it does not compete for demands on land. “When we’re planting trees, we need to make sure it does not take away that land from food production,” says Katie Lebling, a researcher with the World Resources Institute’s carbon removal team, which studies how best to sequester carbon from the atmosphere. “But that is not an issue with seaweed.” Seaweed can also help reduce greenhouse gas emissions in other ways: adding a small amount of Asparagopsis taxiformis—a red algal species—to cattle feed has the potential to reduce methane production from beef cattle by up to 99%. Given concerns about the environmental impact of eating meat, seaweed—which itself is a source of protein—could be an eco-friendly and nutrient packed food source in the coming years. Ronald Osinga of the Wageningen University in the Netherlands found that growing “sea-vegetable” farms totaling 180,000 square kilometers—roughly the size of Washington State—could provide enough protein for the entire world. “When you look at how we are going to feed the world population by 2050 in a way that doesn’t harm the environment, there is only one pathway,” says Carlos Duarte, a researcher and professor in biological oceanography and marine ecology. “To scale up seaweed farming.” ‘It’s not just about sustaining local economies — It’s about community.’ Expanding the farming of seaweed can also have beneficial social impacts. Along the coast of British Columbia, where Druehl is from, seaweed farming offers job opportunities for First Nations communities where unemployment rates have forced some people to leave the region to find work. A local company called Cascadia Seaweed, to which Druehl sits on the board, is working in collaboration with First Nations communities to become the largest provider of cultivated seaweed in North America for food. “We want people to have a job so that they can come home,” says Larry Johnson, President of the Nuu-chah-nulth Seafood Limited Partnership that provides aquaculture training for 15 First Nations communities living on Vancouver Island. “It’s not just about sustaining local economies—it’s about community.” For thousands of years, First Nations people living along these shores were agriculturalists, harvesting species on land and in the ocean. “Seaweed farming is unique for First Nations communities because it helps us create economies of our own that align with our traditions,” says Johnson. “Our role has always been to connect with the land and repair it.” Louis Druehl poses for a photo outside his home in Bamfield, on Vancouver Island. The 83-year-old botanist has been studying kelp since 1962 and was the first person to create a kelp farm outside of Asia. Melissa Renwick for TIME Although research into seaweed as a climate change solution has increased significantly over the past decade, the discoveries are not new to Druehl, who back in the 1970s, was one of the few people aware of seaweed’s potential. In the 1970s, Druehl was a marine biology professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver where he researched the reproductive biology of kelp, a large brown seaweed that can absorb twice the UK’s annual carbon emissions. But back then, he says, “the only interest in seaweed were people who went to health food stores and saw it as a good supplement to their diet.” This changed in the 1980s when the OPEC crisis struck, oil prices skyrocketed, and governments were suddenly desperately searching for alternative oil sources. Druehl, who was one of the few people that knew about seaweed’s oil potential, quickly went from being an unknown marine biologist on Canada’s west coast to someone that was of massive interest to the U.S. government. Druehl was invited to address the Senate—answering questions about seaweed-based biofuel—which led to him overseeing a promising kelp growing project in Bamfield in partnership with General Electric. But a year and a half into the project, the OPEC crisis ended, oil prices dropped, and the funding for seaweed biofuel dried up. “We were very disappointed,” Druehl says. “Even in the 1980s, we knew we needed alternative energy.” For the following decades, interest in kelp dissipated but Druehl kept growing seaweed, selling it in health food stores. “I never quit my day job,” Druehl says, noting at the time that only “a very small number of people” wanted seaweed. But slowly, interest in seaweed grew again. In 2014, the first peer-reviewed paper analyzing seaweed as a climate change solution for carbon offsetting was published. The same year, seaweed became trendy among some of the world’s most famous chefs, with english-language seaweed cookbooks appearing in book stores. Suddenly, seaweed—as well as Druehl—once again found themselves in high-demand. Druehl was supplying kelp to hotels across British Columbia including Fairmont, a luxury five-star resort. “My wife and I were flown to Denmark to give lectures to all these chefs,” he says. “It was a riot.” 'Macrocystis pyrifera', commonly known as giant kelp, floats in the Trevor Channel near Bamfield on the Canadian west coast, on Aug. 19, 2020. Melissa Renwick for TIME Dried kombu kelp is stored at the Canadian Kelp Resources Ltd., in Bamfield, Vancouver Island. Melissa Renwick for TIME ‘The climate economy is wind at our back’ Since 2014, seaweed has increasingly been in the spotlight as a solution for climate change due to its ability to offset carbon, be a sustainable food source, and its regenerative properties for ocean ecosystems. Over the past five years, several academic articles have been published about seaweed as a climate change solution and various seaweed cultivation projects have popped up around the world. From Saudi Arabia to New Hampshire, seaweed farmers and researchers are experimenting with seaweed cattle feed, biofuel, and bioplastics. While the industry for these products is still in its infancy, many are optimistic about its future. “The climate economy is wind at our back,” says Bren Smith, executive director of Green Wave, an ocean farming company. “The ocean is coming, the tide is rising, we can either run and hide and build sea walls, or we can turn around and embrace the sea as a climate change solution.” Yet there remain questions about whether seaweed can be scaled globally as a carbon offsetting strategy to combat climate change. The gains from seaweed sequestering CO2 can be reversed if it is not used correctly. If seaweed is just grown for the purpose of absorbing carbon without being harvested, it will rot and release the CO2 it has captured back into the atmosphere. Researchers say there are two possibilities—sinking the seaweed into the deep sea or using it for products ranging from food to biofuel. But these options are not straightforward. Technology to sink seaweed is unlikely to be cost effective and the process of transporting, drying and converting seaweed into food, biofuel and bioplastics itself emits CO2. “Seaweed has a range of applications beyond carbon storage that can be a part of the solution,” says Halley Froehlich, an assistant professor at the University of California Santa Barbara who researches the scalability of seaweed farming. “But it’s certainly not a silver bullet.” Growing seaweed on a global scale also has ecological risks; too much seaweed could impact the amount of light that goes down to other species affecting photosynthesis processes and could have dangerous effects on ecosystems by removing too many nutrients from wild ecosystems. Bull kelp floats within the Trevor Channel near Bamfield, off the west coast of Vancouver Island. Melissa Renwick for TIME Tory Pritchard hangs wild kombu kelp to dry at the Canadian Kelp Resources Ltd., in Bamfield on Aug. 19, 2020. It takes in between 36 to 40 hours to dry, depending on how much humidity is in the air. Melissa Renwick for TIME But for Druehl, who has watched interest in seaweed come and go—his prospective biofuel fortunes wax and wane—whether seaweed farming can be scaled is not a technological question. It is a question of whether governments, companies and consumers have the will to help this industry flourish. “We’re moving along very nicely technologically. We know that seaweed can improve many aspects of our life,” Druehl says. “But I don’t think things are working in a parallel fashion in the political and social world.” For the industry to scale, Druehl says, governing bodies—both national and international—as well as private companies have to make major investments to help the industry get its feet off the ground. But currently, many governments in the Western world have yet to sufficiently invest in the industry or create the necessary conditions for it to scale. In some countries like the United States and Australia, it is easier to receive a government concession for oil and gas than it is for cultivating seaweed for biofuel. In many Western countries, permits for growing seaweed are hard to come by. And internationally, all the global mechanisms that could regulate seaweed farming were developed before the industry was created, leaving gaps in regulation and permitting. “Seaweed is not an industry in most Western nations,” says Duarte. “It’s a thought.” The small town of Bamfield sits on the western edge of the Canadian coast on Vancouver Island. Melissa Renwick for TIME But this thought—somewhere between a pipedream and an inevitability—has captivated Druehl for half a century. “It’s always been kelp,” he tells me, noting that he has always been fascinated by kelp’s many uses. Even during the pandemic, Druehl thinks seaweed has a role to play. The industry, he says, could provide meaningful, green jobs to people who have recently become unemployed. Currently, Druehl is trying to convince his own daughter—whose job has been affected by the pandemic—to join him in Kelp Bay. “I keep telling her, we’ve got nice kelp business out here!” But even if Druehl’s daughter is not interested in joining the family business, there is a long line of prospective seaweed farmers waiting to learn from the kelp grandfather. At the end of our call, Druehl tells me that currently, he is looking out his window and watching people unload seaweed from his boat. “There is no question that seaweed farming can be done at a large scale and can improve our lives.” he says. “We just need the political will.” Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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After a hit BTS Meal that boosted sales, hip-hop star Saweetie is next in line for her own McDonald's meal.

https://ti.me/2WAgmqa

time

Ten crispy chicken nuggets, medium fries and a Coke: a classic McDonald’s order. But add sides of cajun and sweet chili sauces and a collectible purple box and you’ve just placed an order for the BTS Meal, this summer’s collaboration between the seven-member Korean pop sensation and the fast food giant. It was a small addition, yet on a quarterly earnings call this week, McDonald’s partially credited a 25% sales increase in the U.S. to the collaboration. Launched in late May and officially concluded on June 20, the BTS Meal followed a history of big-ticket star collaborations between McDonald’s and buzzy parts of pop culture. And on July 29, McDonald’s announced the next celebrity to receive a meal treatment: 28-year-old Californian rapper Saweetie, whose song “Best Friend” with Doja Cat went platinum this year. Her meal: a Big Mac, 4-piece chicken nuggets, fries, Sprite and sides of bbq and “Saweetie-N-Sour” sauce. In the 90s and 2000s—and continuing to this day—Happy Meals partnered with movie releases, intended to drive audiences to the box office and provide kids with collectible pieces of kitsch. Cartoon characters and superheroes are prevalent. (Most recently, you can find Disney Pixar’s new animated movie Luca featured in a box.) But lately, McDonald’s has turned to real-life stars—specifically, globally hitmaking musicians—to drive sales, with food and collectible merch as the main appeal, instead of free plastic souvenirs. In September 2020, their Travis Scott meal (Quarter Pounder with bacon, fries with BBQ sauce, Sprite) netted the rap star about $20 million, according to a Forbes profile, and some franchises even ran out of ingredients. It was the first McDonald’s meal named after a celebrity since 1992’s Michael Jordan meal. October’s J Balvin meal (Big Mac without pickles, fries and ketchup, Oreo McFlurry) was similarly popular. Now known as the biggest band in the world, BTS has a powerful fan base that turns performances and video clips viral in a matter of minutes. They have rallied to support philanthropic efforts and to ensure that streaming numbers regularly break records. And their other commercial partnerships—with brands like Hyundai, Samsung and Fila—have proved fruitful, as fans happily shell out for BTS-branded items. (The McDonald’s meal collaboration was followed by two merch collections as well.) According to McDonald’s president and CEO Chris Kempczinski, that was borne out in the BTS Meal reaction. “It has been, to borrow a BTS lyric, Dynamite,” he said during the July 28 earnings call, referring to the group’s 2020 hit song. “We saw significant lifts in McNuggets sales and record breaking levels of social engagement.” For BTS, the launch coincided with the release of their summer single “Butter,” which was incorporated into a commercial starring the septet. For McDonald’s, it came on the heels of a challenging year for the restaurant business, especially quick-serve establishments. The company’s 2020 earnings took a hit due to pandemic-related downturns, with increased U.S. revenue at the end of 2020 not quite offsetting the slowdown in global sales, missing Wall Street projections by 2%. This summer’s BTS meal helped them get back on track, plus some: sales for existing U.S. locations beat analysts’ projections for the past quarter, showing numbers up nearly 15% compared to the same period in 2019. “We saw our customers framing and even selling their receipts from the Travis Scott and J Balvin meals,” says Jennifer Healan, Vice President of U.S. Marketing, Brand Content and Engagement for McDonald’s, “so we wanted to build on that fan passion for memorabilia.” And, given BTS’s well-known dominance on social media, she says McDonald’s took inspiration from K-pop marketing tactics, sharing a release schedule, concept photos and teasers in advance so fans could plan their purchases, just like with an album release cycle. The result: they broke their own records of social engagement across channels, trending number two on Twitter globally and number one in the U.S. Their TV commercial also trended on YouTube and remains easily their most-liked piece of content there, with over 4 million views. Ultimately, that translated into sales. Sales jumped 25.9% in the U.S. for the quarter, attributed in part to the BTS Meal (and a revamped chicken sandwich offering). Internationally, the meals proved particularly popular: in Indonesia, franchises had to shut down due to too much demand to cope with COVID precautions. In Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, Kempczinski said on the earnings call that “the BTS ARMY went out of their way to prepare snacks for our crew and managers to support them on launch day.” Tapping into pop star power is not new for McDonald’s. In the 2000s, celebrities like Britney Spears and *NSYNC featured heavily in marketing, with CDs available in-store. Those partnerships never included specific meal, however, and they faded out of fashion over the past few decades. But celebrity collaboration has made its comeback this year—not only for McDonald’s, but also for fellow fast food brands: there was “The Charli” coffee order at Dunkin’ Donuts, the “Shawn Mendes Bowl” with cauliflower rice at Chipotle, Miley Cyrus’s “Guac is extra but so is Miley burrito” also at Chipotle, and a special menu at Wendy’s with custom orders matched to (and promoted by) a selection of Twitch’s top gaming streamers. Oreo also struck gold with their cult-status Chromatica cookies, designed after Lady Gaga’s last album. That these brands are opting for high-wattage endorsements and partnerships to add shine to their offerings should come as little surprise: not only are the 2020s shaping up to be an era of extreme nostalgia for the glossy pop heyday of the 90s and 2000s, but also savvy consumers—particularly younger customers—want and expect more from the products they shell out for. French fries served up in a novel purple box may be just the extra push someone needs to make a purchase, especially if there’s a connection to a beloved star. And a name like Saweetie, who is currently a rising star with songs that are known for viral popularity on apps like TikTok, could add a tastemaking edge to the seminal brand. “A critical goal of ours with these collaborations is to create a cultural moment for the brand that resonates with a new generation. And we want to make sure we’re staying relevant with our younger customers and crew members,” Healan says. Fast food in the U.S. is a $279 billion market; growth is projected for 2021 as the economy, and life, comes back online. McDonald’s is taking a gamble on Saweetie, who does not have the same level of name recognition and superstardom as J Balvin, Travis Scott or BTS. But she does have over 12 million Instagram followers. And when a burger is only $2, any boost—from BTS, Saweetie or otherwise—can make a big difference. The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@time.com.

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"The clear message from all this is that the U.S.-China rivalry is escalating, and no one has yet figured out a way to slow the momentum," writes Ian Bremmer.

https://ti.me/3BwSJyL

time

On July 19, the White House accused the Chinese government of supporting a hacking operation, revealed in March, targeting Microsoft Exchange Server software. The view from the U.S. intelligence community is that Chinese state security played a role in illegally accessing email services on a server used by governments and some of the world’s biggest companies, including military contractors. The Biden Administration also accuses China of hiring “criminal contract hackers who carry out both state-sponsored activities and cybercrime.” Though the Administration’s response doesn’t appear to include the sorts of sanctions that have been imposed on Russia, a far less important commercial rival than China, its statement featured considerably stronger language about China’s pattern of “irresponsible and destabilizing” behavior in cyberspace, behavior unworthy of a country with pretensions to global leadership. The White House knows that comment will draw a prickly response from Chinese officials. Unlike Donald Trump, President Biden showed up for this fight with China backed by lots of friends. In fact, Washington has the backing of every member of the G-7 and NATO, a group that includes nations traditionally reluctant to criticize the Chinese government too aggressively. These allies are mostly unwilling to contemplate sanctions against China, at least at this point, and the E.U. says only that the latest attacks came from Chinese territory rather than explicitly calling them state-backed. But the White House statement made the point that the Biden Administration is working actively toward a common cyberapproach. There’s no question that the joint statements from the E.U., U.K., Japan, Canada, Australia and New Zealand will confirm Chinese suspicions that Biden means to divide Europe and allies from China where possible and to build broad technology alliances with an eye to confronting China’s bid to set new rules in cyberspace. Cyberespionage is a fast-growing threat. Among the world’s most powerful countries, each government knows that an attack on the critical infrastructure of another invites retaliation. China can attack the U.S., but its leaders know the U.S. can hit back. That’s why most of the action in cyberspace among cybersophisticated nations is focused on stealing secrets and intellectual property. The bad news is that there are no enforceable rules that limit a government’s ability to share its cybertools with outside actors like hackers. The ransomware charge that the Biden Administration has leveled at China is serious. In 2020 alone, the total known cost of cybercrime was over $1 trillion in global losses, more than double the costs in 2018. Hospitals have also faced a surge in ransomware attacks. For now, no warning from Washington, coordinated with allies or not, will halt Chinese hacking operations. The scale of cyberthreats is growing, and Biden hasn’t found the right combination of carrots and sticks to make much difference. The Administration promises “further actions to hold [China] accountable.” That leaves future sanctions on the table. For now, the Chinese have lost significant face. They’ll respond with statements that remind Washington and the world that the U.S. doesn’t always behave “responsibly” in cyberspace either. Beijing will also threaten some of the other countries that joined the U.S. condemnation, including by warning of less access to the Chinese marketplace for their companies. The clear message from all this is that the U.S.-China rivalry is escalating, and no one has yet figured out a way to slow the momentum. This appears in the August 02, 2021 issue of TIME. Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Ashimmy up the Atlantic coastline from Montevideo, José Ignacio is uncrowded and unbuttoned. In time for the 2021 summer season, Posada LUZ, a country retreat with olive groves, a miniforest, a vineyard and an infinity pool, is set for a November opening.

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A shimmy up the Atlantic coastline from Montevideo, José Ignacio is uncrowded and unbuttoned. In time for the 2021 summer season, Posada LUZ, a country retreat with olive groves, a miniforest, a vineyard and an infinity pool, is set for a November opening. One of James Turrell’s Skyspace installations—large, enclosed chambers with apertures in the ceilings that open up to the sky—is coming in November to nearby Posada Ayana, his first freestanding work in South America. There are new beachside bungalows at Bahia Vik with individual suites featuring oversize art and a pool set among sand dunes, plus the wood-clad bookstore-gallery-hotel Rizoma. The area’s restaurant of choice is La Huella, which sits in the dunes, serving freshly grilled seafood. The nearby bar Solera offers a choice of no fewer than 350 wines, many local. —Julia Buckley Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"The 'Overview Effect' forever changes some astronauts’ attitudes towards Earth—but you don’t need to go to space to experience it."

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The best way to appreciate the planet fully is to leave the planet entirely. To inhabit a world is to get awfully used to it. The sky is up there—big as ever. The ground is down there—solid as ever. The ocean is over that way. Canada is up the other way. There are happy places—Paris, Bora Bora. There are parts of the world—North Korea, Afghanistan—where people suffer tremendously. Our own place in all of that determines who we become. We’re like wine grapes; we have a terroir, a home soil that flavors us and changes us, and once we’ve become one thing it’s hard to become—or even understand—something else. But for a tiny handful of us—fewer than 600 in all of human history—there’s been a way outside of all of that, and it’s by flying above all of that. Ever since Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space, 60 years ago this April, astronauts have come home to describe what they call the Overview Effect: the change that occurs when they see the world from above, as a place where borders are invisible, where racial, religious and economic strife are nowhere to be seen. The blue and green Earth appears alive, and yet denuded of people. The atmosphere reveals itself to be what it is: an impossibly thin onion skin that protects us from the killing void of space and yet appears penetrable, destructible. The further you get from the Earth, the more the Overview Effect asserts itself. In 1968, the crew of Apollo 8 became the first humans to orbit the moon and the first to move far enough away from Earth to be able to see it in full—a fragile, glassy sphere, hanging alone in black space. When Frank Borman, the commander of the mission, first saw that sight, the cockpit voice recorder captured him exclaiming, “What a view!” When he spoke of the experience afterwards, he recalled that what he was really thinking was, “This must be what God sees.” In his book Floating in Darkness, retired astronaut Ron Garan reports a touch of the Overview Effect when he was on the nighttime side of the Earth, where the blazingly bright cities attest to the high—if flawed—intelligence that dominates the planet. Gazing down on Shanghai after dark, he observes, “The whole scene looks somehow biological. The city has glowing tentacles reaching out in all directions to other radiant cities. The scene looks like a microscopic photograph of a nerve cell. Every city is like a giant nerve cell in the brain of the superorganism called humanity.” If as tough and mercantile a place as Shanghai can make an astronaut go dreamy, any spot on the planet—when seen from high enough—can too. But those extreme feelings can swing the other way, when the Overview Effect reveals the depredations of the world. In my new novel, Holdout, the lead character, Walli Beckwith, is driven to an extreme act by the power of the Overview Effect. When an emergency forces the evacuation of the space station, she refuses to leave, staying aboard alone, explaining opaquely that she will not come home because she “would prefer not to.” Only later do we learn her reason: She is remaining aloft to protest widespread burning of the Amazon and the dispersal and killing of the Indigenous tribes. She chooses to stay where she is and lead a global movement demanding international intervention to stop the devastation. “I will come home,” she tells the world, “when we have put an end to the project that is causing damage so great it’s visible from space.” Of course, Walli Beckwith is not real. But Ron Garan is real. Yuri Gagarin was real. The near-600 people who have flown into space as well are all real. And so too are uncounted others who will follow them as the commercial space industry continues to develop. Still, not everyone will go. But that doesn’t mean some measure of the Overview Effect is not available to us as well. Spend a little time gazing out at the ocean and try not to be moved by the grandeur of what you see. Spend a little time at the rim of the Grand Canyon and try not to fall in love with the planet. In a 2013 study, researchers administered to two different groups of people a survey designed to measure an individual’s level of spirituality: One group first looked at pictures intended to inspire awe: a sunset, a galaxy, mountains, canyons; the other group was shown no such pictures. Repeatedly, those who had seen something of the magnificence of the universe first scored spiritually higher than those who had not. Spirituality need not mean religion—though it can. It may simply mean something transcendent, something beyond the quotidian—something like, well, the feeling the Overview Effect elicits. Going to space may provide a full dose of awe mainlined straight to our emotional center. But it’s available in smaller doses too—ones available without ever leaving the ground. It’s an unalloyed good that spacemen and spacewomen can travel from the Earth and come home with pictures and experiences that remind us of the fragile, breakable, beautiful whole that is our world and only home. But it’s an unalloyed good too that if we make the effort, we can find some of that feeling for ourselves. The overwhelming majority of us will never leave the planet; but that doesn’t mean we can’t find powerful ways to love the planet. Holdout, by Jeffrey Kluger, is now available at Penguin Random House books. Get our Space Newsletter. Sign up to receive the week's news in space. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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With its price tag adding $550 billion in new spending, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would upgrade the nation’s power grid, further efforts to fight climate change and start the removal of lead pipes that contaminate water supplies.

https://time.com/6088718/senate-infrastructure-bill-breakdown/

time

The Senate approved a sweeping $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill on Tuesday that includes a substantial increase in funding for roads, broadband and energy usage, marking a major step forward in President Joe Biden’s economic agenda as the nation continues to recover from the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The vote was 69-30, with 19 GOP senators joining Democrats following months of negotiations. “Today, the Senate takes a decades-overdue step to revitalize America’s infrastructure and give our workers, our businesses, our economy, the tools to succeed in the 21st century,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said. “The bill will make large and significant differences in both productivity and job creation in America for decades to come.” With its massive price tag adding $550 billion in new spending, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would upgrade the nation’s power grid, further efforts to fight climate change and start the removal of lead pipes that contaminate water supplies. Although the Biden Administration has lobbied for the bill—which would add more than $250 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office—it contains only a fraction of the money the President requested for major environmental and community-based initiatives, and does not include clean energy tax credits and investments in in-home care. Democrats will have a second chance at those proposals when they take up a larger but more partisan $3.5 trillion bill in the coming months that is expected to draw zero Republican votes and clear the Senate through a procedural loophole that removes the typical requirement for legislation to draw support from 60 of the 100 Senators. The bipartisan bill now heads for a vote in the House, where it faces an uncertain future. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said she won’t bring this bill up for a vote without the larger Democratic bill alongside it. Progressives are signaling they aren’t going to settle for compromise, and Democrats have little room for error. But if the bipartisan bill passes there, it is expected to be signed into law by Biden, whose top advisers have been involved in the marathon negotiations. Here’s a look at six major elements of the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Physical infrastructure repairs The biggest sum of money is directed towards repairing the nation’s roads and bridges, which face a $786 billion backlog of investment needs, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. Under the plan, $110 billion in new federal funding is set aside for physical infrastructure, with a focus on climate change mitigation and safety measures, including cyclist and pedestrian protections. After a year of extreme heat, drought and wildfires, lawmakers pushed for measures to ensure the nation’s roads and bridges are able to withstand severe climate conditions, having seen roads in the Pacific Northwest buckle and crack during last month’s historic heat wave. The White House estimates that around 20%, or 173,000 miles, of the country’s highways and major roads are in poor condition, as are more than 45,000 bridges. The bill also establishes a federal program designed to reconnect communities divided by transportation infrastructure, such as the Claiborne Expressway in New Orleans, which runs through a predominantly Black neighborhood. Although Biden sought $20 billion for this program, the approved legislation only includes $1 billion over five years. Another $2 billion grant program will expand roads, bridges and other surface transportation projects in rural areas. Clean energy makeover The bill provides $73 billion to expand clean energy sources and modernize the nation’s aging electricity grid with new transmission lines—the single largest investment in clean energy transmission in American history. Following the deadly Texas power outages earlier this year, the bill creates a new Grid Deployment Authority within the Department of Energy to finance and encourage the development of high-voltage transmission lines that can better handle disruptions to local power-generating abilities. New transmission lines will also be used to transport renewable energy like wind, solar and geothermal to rural communities, expediting the adoption of clean energy sources. As part of the bipartisan compromise, the bill only includes $7.5 billion to develop electric vehicle charging stations across the country—which is half of what Biden requested, and will likely not be enough to deliver on his campaign pledge of building 500,000 stations. An additional $7.5 billion goes toward upgrading school buses and ferries to use electric power. Closing the ‘digital divide’ For years, policy experts have insisted on fixing the gaps in broadband Internet access. The pandemic has only amplified these equity concerns, as much of the nation continues to work from home, receive healthcare remotely and learn online. In an attempt to close the digital divide, the package includes $65 billion to connect rural areas and low-income communities to high-speed internet. The agreement also passes the Digital Equity Act, legislation drafted by Sen. Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington, to authorize funding for digital inclusion programs, such as Internet education and skills training for low-income populations. The White House estimates that more than 30 million Americans live in areas that lack broadband infrastructure to provide minimally acceptable speeds. Lead pipe replacement The legislation allots $15 billion for lead pipe replacement, though water sector leaders argue it will cost an additional $45 billion to replace all lead pipes and service lines across the country. Democrats and Republicans have touted efforts to clean up water sources for years, sparked by the lead crisis in Flint, Mich. that started in 2014 and drew international attention on the long-term effects of lead exposure. In some Baltimore public schools, water fountains are still banned due to high levels of lead in the pipes. Up to 10 million American households and 400,000 schools and child care centers lack safe drinking water, according to the White House. Public transit Under transportation spending, the bill authorizes the largest investment in passenger rail since the creation of Amtrak 50 years ago. Some $66 billion will eliminate the Amtrak maintenance backlog, modernize the Northeast Corridor and expand rail service in high-potential areas outside the northeast and mid-Atlantic. Amtrak, which is a state-owned, for-profit enterprise, reported a net loss of $875 million in 2019, and has lost money every year in its history, but federal subsidies and payments from states have allowed the agency to remain in service. Public buses, subways and trains will also receive $39 billion, which will be used to repair and replace aging infrastructure and expand transit service to underserved areas. It is the largest federal investment in public transit in history. Elsewhere in the package, lawmakers included some novel efforts to improve safety. The bill orders the Transportation Department to figure out what technologies can be deployed to prevent drunk driving, such as passive in-car breathalyzers, eye scans and motion sensors. Public-safety advocates also secured a review of whether crash-test dummies prioritize middle-aged men’s safety over those of women, the young and the old. Republican amendments Republicans recognized early that they would pay a political price for standing lockstep against the plan. Seventeen of them agreed to allow debate to begin on the process with the understanding they could add amendments to the package for their own pet projects. Tacking on amendments gave lawmakers like Texas Sen. Ted Cruz the ability to defend the plan at home by noting he won specific highway spending for his state. Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer secured a requirement that the government make a map showing where new broadband spending was going. Wyoming Sen. Cynthia Lummis won a mandate for the Transportation Department to study who is using highways and at what cost. Democrats saw the tweaks as a way to ensure Biden wouldn’t be called out for blocking Republican input. After all, it wasn’t politically painful for Democrats to give South Dakota Sen. John Thune a win on safety improvements for telecom workers to perhaps combat a labor shortage. Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Nik Popli at nik.popli@time.com and Philip Elliott at philip.elliott@time.com.

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There's no simple formula, but these reflections can help create some clarity.

https://ti.me/36TDstE

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At the age of 16, perched on a ridge in western North Carolina, I scrawled these words into a handbound journal: Want to help the world. Be connected with the Earth. Change the way I live. My mother has always called the Appalachians “wise old mountains,” not as tall or dramatic as their younger brethren out west but sage and powerful. In the presence of these remnants of geologic uplift, now carved up by cold water and swathed with moss, one feels called to deeper truths. I recall a steadiness of hand as I recorded my clarity and commitment in that moment. It has stayed with me for longer than two decades, but like many moments of inward truth telling, it prompted more searching than it supplied answers. But, what can I do? How, where, and with whom? Anyone who spends their days working to address the climate crisis, as I do, hears this question again and again: What can I do? On the one hand, the question brings me joy: so many people want to help, to be part of fixing the mess we’re in. On the other hand, I find myself feeling twitchy. That’s because I hear in the question a craving for simple answers to an enormously complex challenge—but even more so because I feel responsible for providing a good answer. Science tells us that wholesale transformation of society is urgent. I want all minds, hearts, and hands to be able to make their best contributions, and I understand the agony that not knowing how can brew. Read More: The Pandemic Remade Every Corner of Society. Now It’s the Climate’s Turn There is no simple formula, no fact sheet or checklist, for figuring out our roles in the vital work to forge a just, livable future. But I have found a series of reflections can help us arrive at some clarity and uncover ways to be of use. Rather than stipulating actions that are one-and-done or one-size-fits-all, I’ve found that these five steps are a way to hold the question and work our way into answers. Feel Your Feelings There’s no getting around it: the climate crisis brings with it big feelings. If we’re awake to what’s unfolding on this planet, we experience some cocktail of compassion, grief, anger, anxiety, and even depression. Entwined as we are with Earth’s living systems, this makes sense. At the same time, the movements, true leadership, and solutions rising may kindle hope, courage, yearning, zeal. I find that ferocious love—some blend of tenderness and fire—is often the throughline. What emotions does the climate crisis stir up in you? What do you feel is at stake? Why do you feel drawn to be part of Earth’s healing? Journal about it. Meditate on it. Discuss with a trusted friend or counselor. Let the tears come if they need to. Our feelings can keep us frozen, or they can be fuel. Here’s a resource that might help: Britt Wray’s Gen Dread newsletter is a clearing house for ideas and tools at the nexus of climate and psychology. Scout Your Superpowers Humanity has a massive task at hand to stem climate pollution and come back into balance with our planet’s living systems, and the heaviest lifting must happen this decade. There’s no tweaking our way out of this mess; we must do transformative work, and need to bring the very best of ourselves to the effort. What knowledge, skills, or resources could you contribute? Does using particular talents fill you with a sense of power or joy? What are they? Don’t worry yet about exactly how to deploy your superpowers—just spend some time reflecting on these questions. We need a vast array of talents. We need whatever you’ve got to give. Here’s a resource that might help: The anthology All We Can Save contains a mighty chorus of women leading on climate, each essay illuminating different knowledge and skills that can be brought to bear. Survey Solutions The work of climate justice is vast and varied. We have a robust toolbox of solutions—in hand, today—that can help us stop burning fossil fuels, regenerate the land, and improve lives and communities. We can accelerate change by telling different stories, reshaping culture, building collective power, elevating good leaders, adopting different policies, investing money in solutions, innovating where we need to, and shifting our habits. Are there particular climate solutions that capture your imagination? Are any of the ways we can “grease the skids” of change especially compelling to you? Now that you’ve looked inward, let these questions direct your gaze outward. Do some reading and research. See what lights you up. Here’s a resource that might help: The Drawdown Review catalogues the world’s proven climate solutions and explores critical ways to accelerate them. Consider Your Context We’re all nested into different contexts—different spaces in which we have influence and make decisions. To simplify things a bit, consider these three realms: your personal life, your professional life, and public life. What opportunities for action lie right at hand in your home, family, or friend group? In your workplace or profession? In the civic life of your community, city, state, or country? Are there efforts already underway you could join? Again, take a look outward and around. Sometimes the answers are literally right in front of us. Sometimes an invitation is already in hand. Here’s a resource that might help: The podcast How to Save a Planet spotlights people taking action in many different spheres, from farms and coastal communities to startups and halls of power. Cultivate a Climate Squad When facing a planetary crisis, it’s best not to go it alone. We need each other in this moment and to succeed in the work of building a better future. Are there people you want to link arms with? Is there a climate-focused group, campaign, or organization that feels kindred? Could you join, volunteer, or apply for a job? We’re up against powerful interests that want to maintain the status quo, and others who are content to stand by and see how things play out. That means we need to be the biggest, strongest “we” possible—numerous and connected, nurturing the threads between us and leveraging our collective power. Collaboration and community get us to better answers and can keep us going when the work is hard. Here’s a resource that might help: All We Can Save Circles are a one way to have deeper dialogue about the climate crisis and to build community around solutions and action—like a book club, but a cooler extended remix version. So, what can I do? I wish I could counsel my 16-year-old self that the only simple answer is to form a relationship with the question, let it work on and with you, and begin to live life as a response. One answer and then another and another. In my experience, that’s a winding path—more tangle of rhododendron than straight-shot white pine. We keep evolving, the challenges shift shape or become clearer, the solutions expand, the work unfolds in new ways. Given the enormity of the task at hand, we need to function like an ecosystem, finding strength in our diversity. With more and more people stepping off the sidelines, called to take their place in climate, let’s ask this question in community and work on figuring out what we can do together. The paperback version of All We Can Save is published July 20. Get our climate newsletter. Learn how the week’s major news story connects back to the climate crisis. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Everyday items rely on microchips—and the U.S. is running short on them.

https://ti.me/3y4KaZN

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“The only operators are the ones in the ceiling,” says Chris Belfi, wrapped up in a Tyvek bunny suit, tinted yellow under the photo-safe lights. The robots rush by on overhead tracks, blinking and whirring. Every few seconds, one pauses above a giant machine. Out of its laundry-basket-size belly, a plastic box drops on thin wires, like Tom Cruise in a catsuit. It holds precious cargo: up to 25 shiny silicon wafers, each the size of a 12-in. pizza. The process of transforming them into tiny computer brains—call them microchips, semiconductors or just chips—takes nearly three months. “I use an analogy like baking a cake,” says Belfi, an automation engineer at chipmaker GlobalFoundries. “The only difference is our cake is about 66 layers.” This $15 billion complex tucked away behind trees north of Albany, N.Y., is one of only a handful of advanced semiconductor factories, or “fabs,” in the U.S. Its receiving docks pull in 256 specialty chemicals, like argon and sulfuric acid. Its shipping docks send out finished wafers, ready to be cut up, encased in metal and ceramic shells, and assembled into everything from airbags to blenders, headphones to fighter jets. Since it opened in 2011, Fab 8, as it’s known, has kept a low profile. But as with toilet paper and chicken wings, the pandemic shocked the global semiconductor supply chain, leading to shortages in surprising places—and pulling the U.S. semiconductor industry to center stage. The car industry has been hardest hit of all. When the initial lockdowns caused car sales to collapse, automakers cut their orders for parts, including semiconductors. (A typical new car can contain more than a thousand chips.) Chip manufacturers saw the slack and shifted their output to serve the surging demand for consumer electronics, like webcams and laptops. But when car sales snapped back last fall, a dramatic misstep became apparent: the automakers couldn’t get enough chips. They still can’t. Missing chips are now expected to lower global output by 3.9 million vehicles in 2021, or 4.6%. Ford alone expects to produce 1.1 million fewer vehicles, leading to a $2.5 billion earnings hit. (Even before it gets to its silicon-heavy electric F-150.) The Fabrication Clean room, containing all process tools for the Fab 8 at GlobalFoundries Thomas Prior for TIME As automakers and chipmakers scrambled for equilibrium, the White House stepped in to help, urging industry leaders to untangle the supply chain and increase production. The problem wasn’t only that there weren’t enough chips being made in America. The problem was that no one was paying attention to where chips were being made at all—and, more important, how long it took to make them. In June, the Senate passed a bipartisan bill with $52 billion in funding aimed at increasing chip production and cutting-edge research—competing directly with China’s ambitions of becoming the global semiconductor champion. But new chip fabs take years. Analysts now worry that the auto chip shortage will slosh back to consumer electronics, affecting manufacturing all the way to Christmas. “Never seen anything like it,” tweeted Tesla CEO Elon Musk. Microchips, long revered as the brains of modern society, have become its biggest headache. The stakes extend beyond pandemic-era shortages. Because chips are a crucial component of so many strategic technologies—from renewable energy and artificial intelligence to robots and cybersecurity—their manufacturing has become a geopolitical thorn. In the 20th century, oil was the supreme global resource. But this year’s shortages have prompted a 21st century catchphrase among policymakers and diplomats: Chips are the new oil. As the U.S. resets to post-pandemic life, a steady supply of semiconductors has become a high-priority benchmark of preparedness and resilience. Except there’s a bigger problem: semiconductors were invented in the U.S., but fabs like GlobalFoundries have become a dying breed. In 1990, 37% of chips were made in American factories, but by 2020 that number had declined to just 12%. All the new pieces of the growing pie had gone to Asia: Taiwan, South Korea and China. Chip fabs aren’t just factories, but linchpins of American self-reliance. Jordon Cheung for TIME Semiconductors are astonishing, with billions of transistors packed into a space the size of a dime, and they are astonishingly hard to make. If Henry Ford imagined an assembly line, a silicon wafer’s path through a factory is more like a labyrinth. At GlobalFoundries, the journey from raw material to finished chip—what engineers like Belfi call the “process flow”—is typically 85 days and encompasses more than a thousand steps. The whole time, the chips travel in sealed pods called FOUPs, entirely untouched by human hands. The robots do the driving, careening on their suspended tracks above machines the size of small RVs. One polishes wafers with a slurry that acts like liquid sandpaper. Another uses lasers to imprint circuits just 12 nanometers wide—about the length your fingernail grows in 12 seconds. Electron microscopes inspect the wafers for imperfections, and a robotic arm immerses them 25 at a time into a chemical bath like a carnival dunk tank. “We basically are bouncing wafers to and from each section of the fab, all day every day,” Belfi says. “It’s a lot of putting things on, taking it off, printing, putting more on, taking more off.” Humans intrude only when something goes wrong. The showstopper is a problem with one of the lithography machines, which set the pace of the whole operation. Each costs more than $100 million. “When one of those go down, it is all hands on deck,” says Belfi.Yet when COVID-19 hit, the fab never stopped. “We never shut down a single factory—not for an hour,” recalls Tom Caulfield, CEO of GlobalFoundries, in his office two levels above the fab floor. Long accustomed to wearing masks and full PPE, the engineers kept their usual watch on the robots. The business shocks proved harder to handle. As in so many industries, Caulfield’s initial financial models left him bracing for the worst. “We told our team, ‘We entered this pandemic together; we’re going to exit together. The world needs us to continue to make semiconductors.'” It was not an understatement. Chips powered the pandemic response—webcams, laptops, COVID-19 testing machines. In New York City alone, the department of education purchased 350,000 iPads. The only thing it seemed no one needed was a new car, at least at first. Sales were off by a third in April, May and June 2020. Auto-component makers—not the brand-name car companies but their suppliers, and their suppliers’ suppliers—canceled orders. But a semiconductor fab can’t turn on a dime. Foundry is the chip-industry term for a contract manufacturer, like a $15 billion Kinko’s. GlobalFoundries alone prints chips for more than 250 customers, which in turn supply components to device manufacturers—big, familiar names like Apple or Samsung, as well as industrial brands like Continental or Bosch. The supply chains are long. It takes three months to bake a chip, but it won’t end up in a car engine or smart speaker for months beyond that—and in consumers’ hands for more months still. On any given day at GlobalFoundries, there might be only 10 different kinds of chips in some phase of production. Each unique new chip design arrives on a 6-sq.-in. piece of quartz glass called a reticle. Like an old photographic slide, it contains a map of the chip, ready to be projected onto the silicon wafer with lasers. A reticle is its own trade secret, a protected piece of intellectual property belonging to the company that designed it, and adjusted to the unique specifications of GlobalFoundries’ proprietary process. Switching fabs isn’t easy, and definitely isn’t quick. Around Thanksgiving, eight months into the pandemic, Caulfield’s phone started ringing. Auto executives who had never heard of GlobalFoundries were realizing they couldn’t make cars without them. “There is no way if you’re a supply-chain owner of an auto-manufacturing company, and you didn’t ship a car because you didn’t have a $5 or $10 chip, that you’re ever going to let this happen again,” Caulfield says. By New Year’s, the implications were alarming. In 2019, the auto industry spent $43 billion on chips—but they made up just 10% of the total chip market. The world’s largest foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), supplies more chips than anyone else to the automotive industry—but the automotive industry makes up just 3% of its revenue. (Apple makes up more than 20%.) At GlobalFoundries, chips destined for cars accounted for less than 10% of its business—enough to matter, but not enough to set the clocks. That changed this year, when the political stakes for chipmakers rose dramatically. Caulfield called on his engineers to “remix their output,” sidelining some orders and prioritizing car chips. “We made very difficult decisions,” Caulfield says. “Wherever we could create more capacity, we gave it to automotive to make sure we were no longer the gate to manufacture.” The implications were obvious to him. “I didn’t need a letter from the White House to do the right thing.” The AMHS (Automated Material Handling System), which is responsible for moving the containers of wafers to and from the process tools at the foundry Thomas Prior for TIME But the White House was paying attention. Before this year, lawmakers saw chipmaking as a local economic issue. Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer championed the construction of GlobalFoundries’ fab in his home state of New York, and lobbied for more. But the pandemic revealed how the decline in chipmaking wasn’t only about jobs and regional economic impacts, but also had strategic implications at a global scale. In February, President Biden signed an Executive Order launching a review of critical supply chains. If a pandemic could cause chip-induced shocks across industries, what else might happen? “We explicitly saw geopolitics as one of the risks to our supply chains,” says a senior Administration official. In the earliest days of semiconductor manufacturing, in the 1960s, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore observed that he and his colleagues were able to double the number of transistors they could squeeze onto a chip every year. A decade later, that pace of innovation slowed (a little) to a doubling merely every two years. But then, it held. Chips got faster, cheaper and more efficient, eventually achieving a kind of social liftoff—powering computers that fit in a pocket. But Moore’s law, as it became known, isn’t a fact of nature but the hard-earned result of enormous expenditures on research and development to conceive of new chip designs, and to find ways to manufacture them. Each new generation of semiconductor requires, in effect, a new factory to make it. Each new “process,” as it’s known, is named for the size of the chip’s smallest feature, like a jeweler whose fingertips keep getting finer. In the 1970s, chips were measured in micrometers, or one millionth of a meter. Since the 1980s, “leading edge” fabs have measured their handiwork in nanometers, or one billionth of a meter. Today, the benchmark is set by TSMC, which runs the 5-nanometer fab that makes Apple’s new M1 chips, for its latest computers and tablets. Each step down in process size—and increase in performance—requires the fab to be retooled with the latest generation of lithography machines to “print” the chips, along with the fleet of equipment that rings them. The newest fabs cost at least $12 billion. Today, the semiconductor industry has predominantly split between the “fabless” companies that design chips and the foundries that make them. “There’s really two giant pieces of fixed costs,” says Chad Bown, an economist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. “One set of fixed cost is all of the R&D—you need to come up with the chip’s ideas. The other fixed cost is all of the capital equipment—you need to build one of these fabs.” For decades, the leading companies—like Intel—did both. “Real men have fabs,” Jerry Sanders, former CEO of Advanced Micro Devices, famously insisted in the 1990s, in a comment as sexist as it is now outdated. AMD went fabless in 2009—selling its chip factories to GlobalFoundries. Jordon Cheung for TIME But it was TSMC in Taiwan that pioneered the division between fab and fabless, and that dominates the industry today. Its founder, Morris Chang, was born in China and educated in the U.S. When he worked at Texas Instruments in the 1960s and 1970s, his engineering creativity and management acumen were legendary. He helped improve a chip fab’s “yield”—the number of chips good enough to be sold—and drive down prices. But after managing TI’s entire semiconductor division, Chang came to the conclusion that he would never be an American CEO. “I felt that essentially I had been put out in the pasture,” Chang recalled in a published oral history. “My hope of further advancement was gone.” While at Texas Instruments, Chang had seen the rising cost of chip factories, and the way in which it can hold back innovation. His colleagues were eager to strike out on their own with new innovations, but never could. The barriers to entry were too high, if you had to run your own fab. He seized on the idea of a “pure-play foundry,” as he called it—a merchant semiconductor company focused on making chips for others—and, with support from Taiwan’s government, founded TSMC in 1987. It was an auspicious moment in global trade policy. The Reagan Administration had enacted policies to counter rising Japanese production of semiconductors—but the first Bush Administration took a more hands-off approach. “Potato chips, computer chips, what’s the difference?” Michael Boskin, an economic adviser to George H.W. Bush, famously said. Along with TSMC in Taiwan, South Korean and Chinese companies began ramping up chip manufacturing, constructing high-tech fabs, often with the help of government subsidies. By the 1990s, even Intel began shifting some production overseas. “And while that’s all happening, we are adhering to our market-economics principles strongly—obsessively,” says John Neuffer, CEO of the Semiconductor Industry Association, a leading trade group. The prevailing attitude was to leave companies alone—to keep government out of business. When in 2010 Apple announced its first custom-designed chip, the A4, it was self-evident in the semiconductor industry that it would be made by a foundry in Asia. This particularly stung Intel, which until then had both designed and manufactured the chips Apple used in its devices. But that division in the industry had become the norm, and it continues today: the most sophisticated chips are likely to still be designed in America but manufactured overseas. Silicon Valley still deserves its name—but only thanks to the dozens of fabless chip-design startups, not the foundries that once replaced its fruit orchards. Without the government incentives offered by Asian nations, that’s unlikely to change. “The U.S. policy was ‘We don’t create winners; we let capitalism work,'” says GlobalFoundries’ Caulfield. “That’s a great philosophy if everybody around the world plays that way.” Now U.S. lawmakers are changing course. June’s Senate bill, officially the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, is squarely aimed at competing with China, in part by subsidizing semiconductor manufacturing. “There’s been a growing bipartisan consensus over several years now that the U.S. needs to make more domestic investments to keep our competitive edge, particularly in an era of sort of strategic competition with China,” says a senior Administration official. “It was an easy political oversight,” says Neuffer, of the Semiconductor Industry Association. “It’s not an oversight anymore.” The aggressive trade policy of the Trump Administration opened the door for Republicans to support greater economic intervention. Now they are clamoring for more. “There really has been a mistake here,” says Oren Cass, executive director of American Compass, a conservative think tank, who sees semiconductors as the “ultimate case study” for this necessary shift in American economic policy. “They are so obviously high-tech, they were an American area of dominance for so long, they so obviously have national-security implications, and you can so nicely quantify who is ahead or behind,” Cass says. “It crystallizes the issue in a way few other things could.” For President Biden, semiconductors are an opportunity to stimulate high-tech American industry. “This is infrastructure,” the President said in April, holding up a glinting silicon wafer at the White House. But bringing leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing to the U.S. will take years. In March, Intel announced plans for a $20 billion expansion of its factory in Arizona designed specifically to manufacture chips for others, as part of a newly launched division, Intel Foundry Services. But unlike TSMC—itself building a new factory estimated to cost $10 billion to $12 billion in Arizona, and possibly more–it will not be able to manufacture the cutting-edge chips. Smaller means faster, because you can squeeze more transistors into less space. But Intel has struggled to bring even its 7-nanometer node online, while TSMC is moving beyond its 5-nanometer node and preparing a 3-nanometer node for production. (Apple will reportedly again be its major customer.) It’s about “capacity and capability,” says Intel’s Al Thompson, vice president of U.S. government relations. “We’re going to spend a great deal of money in the U.S., creating a lot of jobs, to put us on a path to ensure that we’re doing our part to protect our nation’s economic and national security.” But there is a long way to catch up. In April, a Silicon Valley startup called Cerebras announced a new computer called the CS-2. It’s meant not for Zoom calls or Netflix parties, but for the most sophisticated research in artificial intelligence—like discovering cancer drugs or simulating fusion reactions. At its heart is a custom-designed chip with a remarkable new design. Chemical lines in the Globalfoundries fab in Malta, N.Y. Thomas Prior for TIME Rather than chop up a 12-in. silicon wafer into hundreds of tiny chips—punching each one out like a gingerbread cookie—Cerebras has found a way to make a single giant chip, like a cookie cake. Today’s smartphone chips contain billions of tiny transistors, etched into silicon like a miniature city. Cerebras’ custom chip contains trillions of transistors. To make it work, Cerebras engineers found a way to work around a basic flaw of silicon wafers. Typically, they are sliced from an ingot, like deli salami. But even the most sophisticated of these crystalline disks have imperfections, which ruin a chip. Semiconductor designers and manufacturers get around this by keeping each chip small, and throwing out the bad ones. (The yield is what’s left.) The engineers at Cerebras created a design with 850,000 identical blocks, like wallpaper, and a system to turn off any flawed sections without ruining the entire chip. Most supercomputers chain thousands of individual chips together. But moving information between those chips slows things down. Cerebras keeps it all on a single giant chip. “We found a way to use the fact that silicon moves information at nearly the speed of light, and at tiny fractions of the power taken to move bits elsewhere,” says Cerebras CEO Andrew Feldman. For customers like the drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and the Argonne National Laboratory, it provides the horsepower needed for breakthroughs in artificial intelligence—a key ambition of U.S. technology policy. It’s the kind of bold idea that defined the early days of Silicon Valley innovation, and the ongoing creativity of American chip designers. But if in the 1960s and 1970s, chip fabs were all over the valley, when it was time for Cerebras to find a fab for its chip, there were no local options. “There are only two choices if you want to build chips at the cutting edge,” Feldman says portentously. “You can swim to China from one, and you can throw a stone to the DMZ at the other”—meaning Taiwan’s TSMC and South Korea’s Samsung. Like Apple—whose headquarters are just a 10-minute drive away—Cerebras uses TSMC for its manufacturing, using its 7-nanometer fab. If the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act survives its journey through the House and becomes a law, billions of federal dollars will flow into the semiconductor industry—already one of the most profitable. But it will take years to turn that investment into new chip factories, new chip designs and a new pipeline of engineering talent. The challenge for the industry isn’t merely to catch up to where Taiwan is today, and China plans to be by 2025, but to meet them where they’ll be in the future—or go further. Except chips improve nonlinearly. A 3-nanometer node is more expensive than a 5-nanometer. “The amount of money it takes to stay ahead of that curve keeps going up,” says Alisa Scherer, an independent chip-manufacturing expert. And the time span does too. It is almost impossible to skip a generation. The environmental permitting alone can take years. “These aren’t Taco Bells,” says Feldman. “You don’t knock them out. They don’t arrive in a box.” For his giant AI chips, TSMC and Samsung are the only two choices, “as far as the eye can see.” Until then, chip manufacturing—and all of the geopolitical and economic reverberations it causes—will continue to depend on a global web, stretched delicately across the oceans. —With reporting by Barbara Maddux and Simmone Shah Blum is the author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet and The Weather Machine: A Journey Inside the Forecast This appears in the July 05, 2021 issue of TIME. The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. 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Anti-Asian hate crimes fueled by false claims Asians brought the COVID-19 pandemic to the U.S. are spurring people who once shunned guns to become gun-owners.

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Six months ago, Svetlana Kim was so scared of guns, she couldn’t even look at an image of one without feeling anxious. If she was home watching a movie that suddenly depicted gun violence, the 47-year-old accountant would scramble to hit the fast-forward button on the remote. If she couldn’t skip the scene, she would shut her eyes, and her husband would gently put his hand over hers until the scene was over. Kim knew it was just a movie, but in those moments, she couldn’t help but feel like she was in the victim’s shoes, staring the shooter in the eye. “My brain was always signaling danger. I just felt like, it’s here, it’s present,” says Kim, who blames empathy and imagination for her visceral reaction, since she has never personally experienced gun violence. “It was bad like that, and I couldn’t control it.” That all changed when something scarier came along. Months into the pandemic, people who looked like Kim were being shoved and kicked to the ground, punched, stabbed and slashed, while doing everyday activities like walking around the neighborhood, shopping and riding buses and trains. One after another, unprovoked, racist attacks against Asian Americans being unfairly blamed for the COVID-19 virus started to increase in major U.S. cities. Kim wondered if she could be the next victim. “It was a turning point when I saw that people just randomly got attacked based on their race,” says Kim, a Korean American, who lives in Downey, Calif. On March 3, Kim went from being a “really anti-gun person” to the new owner of a Springfield Armory handgun. Tom Nguyen and Robbie Tarnove of L.A. Progressive Shooters, a group that works to empower BIPOC gun owners, remove targets after a beginner’s class at Burro Canyon Shooting Park in Azusa, CA. Isadora Kosofsky for TIME After months of rising anti-Asian hatred, many others like Kim are having a change of heart about firearms. Tired of relying on bystanders for aid that sometimes never comes, more Asian Americans are bucking entrenched cultural perceptions of guns and overcoming language barriers to help fuel a spike in U.S. gun ownership. While there is no official data on firearm purchases by Asian Americans, a survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) indicated that Asian Americans bought 42% more firearms and ammunition in the first six months of 2020 than they did in the same timeframe the year before. At Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., where guns and pepper spray have been flying off the shelves since the pandemic, gun purchases by Asian buyers have surged 100% due to recent fears of attacks, according to Jimmy Gong and Jay Zeng, the shop’s Chinese-American owners. "It was a turning point when I saw that people just randomly got attacked based on their race." “Everybody got paranoid,” says Gong, 47, adding that some might have good reason to feel that way. Several customers have walked into the business, saying they were targeted in robberies, home invasions and assaults. “Some guys come in with black eyes,” Gong says. From March 2020 to March 2021, reported hate incidents against Asian Americans nationwide jumped 74% to more than 6,600, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic. Anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities increased 149% in 2020, according to an analysis of official preliminary police data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The sustained violence has shaken Asian-American communities, particularly in New York and California, where the majority of the hate incidents have unfolded and where assaults on the elderly have sent shockwaves across the world. Terror grew on March 16 after a white gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women, at Atlanta-area spas. “I’ve never seen this level of fear,” says Chris Cheng, 41, a professional sport shooter in San Francisco, who has been fielding numerous questions from relatives, friends and strangers about buying guns. Jimmy Gong, co-owner of Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., shows a revolver to customers on July 10, 2021. An Rong Xu for TIME A Pew Research Center survey conducted after the Atlanta massacre found that one in five Asians blame former President Donald Trump for the uptick in violence against them. Ericson Reduta, a 49-year-old Californian who had been on the fence about buying a gun for years, armed himself for the first time in 2020, largely due to Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric. Before then, Reduta had done his homework on firearms but had not purchased one, mostly because he thought his Filipino-American family wouldn’t approve and that he wouldn’t feel comfortable in any gun membership groups. “Most gun owners you see on TV or on the internet are white, conservative, Republican, outspoken, former military or hunters in the Midwest,” says Reduta, a Democrat. “That’s just what I saw.” Read more: Racist Slurs, Broken Glass, Then a Return to Business for an Asian-Owned Store But as Trump doubled down on his divisive nicknames for COVID-19, including “the China virus” and “Kung Flu,” Reduta gave in. He says growing up as a person of color in the U.S. gave him the foresight to know that bigotry already existed and would only get worse if a sitting president was singling out an entire race. “Unfortunately, we are the scapegoat,” he says. In the spring of 2020, Reduta participated in a firearm safety class over Zoom, joined a national gun club for liberals, and then purchased three pistols and an AR-15 rifle. Gun ownership is most common among white men, particularly those who live in rural areas and those who describe themselves as conservative, according to the Pew Research Center and other surveys. During the first six months of 2020, gun buyers were nearly 56% white males, the NSSF said, citing an industry survey of 104 retailers, which tracks with other national demographic surveys on gun ownership trends. Only about 3% of gun buyers were Asian males and less than 1% were Asian females, the survey found, so Reduta’s initial concerns about fitting in might have been warranted. Asians have been historically underrepresented among gun owners, so much so that major national demographic surveys conducted on gun ownership trends in the past have left out Asians as a category entirely. A 2013 NSSF report on diversity found some reasons why. About 35% said gun ownership negatively impacts their ethnic community, while 38% said owning a firearm is not desirable in their culture, according to the report, which was based on a national survey of 6,000 white, Black, Hispanic and Asian adults. That was true for Reduta, who waited a year to tell his family that he had bought a gun. Kim still has not shared the news with her two sisters. "If more guns made people safer, this would be the safest country on Earth." “Asians never like guns,” says David Liu, another gun shop owner who has seen a spike in his Arcadia, Calif. business. “They only buy guns after they’ve become a victim.” There’s a lot more to it, says Cheng, who testified before the Senate’s Judiciary Committee on March 23 about the “real and imminent threat” convincing Asian Americans that they need to arm themselves. Besides having to overcome negative cultural perceptions about firearms, language poses a challenge. The vast majority of gun shops and gun ranges in the U.S. have English signage and instruction, Cheng says, and a good understanding of the English language is necessary to fill out federal background check forms. “You have literal language barriers,” he says. Read more: The Long Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence in America On a Monday afternoon in June, the handful of masked customers who trickled into Jimmy’s Sportshop, on a business strip in a suburb about a dozen miles outside of New York City, did not speak English. That’s common, says Gong, who often accompanies those customers to police precincts when their applications are wrongly denied and when they’re unable to fight their case on their own. “It would be a problem for them to buy from a non-bilingual speaking gun shop,” he says. At least one gun group plans to tackle that issue. In the aftermath of the Atlanta shooting in March, Patrick Lopez, 46, created the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association (APAGOA), a California-based nonprofit educational resource group, which features on its website downloadable posters of basic gun-safety rules available in multiple languages. More than 500 people have subscribed in just four months—and Lopez says interest grows each week, largely by word-of-mouth. Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., promotes itself and caters to Chinese-speaking clients. An Rong Xu for TIME Racial tensions have been spurring gun sales among people of color since 2020. Not everyone sees that as a good thing, including Alex De Ocampo, a Filipino-American who knows firsthand the trauma a firearm can bring. When he was 9, he says three teens burst through the door of his family’s one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles and demanded money. One of them held a gun to his forehead, while his father, in the final stages of spinal cancer, cried and begged them to leave. “I remember vividly thinking of my mom and my dad, when that gun was pointed at my head,” says De Ocampo, who was convinced he would die that day. After his older sister offered the intruders the $4 in her wallet, the robbers fled, leaving De Ocampo and his family unharmed. But the incident changed him. Read more: For Asians Living in the Shadow of the Atlanta Shootings, Anger and ‘Just This Constant Fear’ Now a 41-year-old community activist, De Ocampo tells as many people as he can that more guns are not the answer. His warnings have fallen on deaf ears for at least one of his relatives, who bought a gun because of the increase in anti-Asian hate. The other day, his teenage nephew suggested that the family get his grandmother a gun, too. “That we have to resort to that is terrifying and it’s just sad,” he says. De Ocampo thinks about his father, who died in 1991 after immigrating to the U.S. for a better life, and how this is not the world his father wanted for his loved ones. “If more guns made people safer, this would be the safest country on Earth,” De Ocampo says. “But that’s not the reality.” "Unfortunately, we're the scapegoat." Gun-control advocates agree, saying firearms largely cause more harm than good, despite so many people purchasing them for self-protection. There were more than 43,500 gun deaths and 39,000 gun injuries in the U.S., last year, compared to about 39,500 deaths and roughly 30,000 injuries in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which uses police and news reports and varioius government sources to tally daily gun-violence incidents. Svetlana Kim sees things differently. Since she became a gun owner, her confidence has skyrocketed, and she no longer feels she has to shrink away from confrontation. “It just opened for me a whole different world,” Kim says. She’s become a regular at the shooting range, where she boasts of hitting targets 75-yards away. Now, she and her husband are going back to finish old movies she fast-forwarded. “The happiest person in the world is my husband,” she says. “We don’t have to skip anymore.” The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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From a St. Jude's physician assistant to a Lockheed Martin engineer.

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TIME Studios is producing the Netflix documentary series Countdown: Inspiration 4 Mission to Space, starting Sept. 6. Astronauts are accustomed to celebrity status, and Jared Isaacman, 38, is learning that truth first-hand. Isaacman is the billionaire CEO of Shift4 Payments, an online payment company, who bought all four seats aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft and, come September, will command Inspiration4, the first orbital space mission crewed entirely by non-professional astronauts. But if Isaacman’s name is becoming increasingly well-known in space circles, those of the other crew members are less so. Here’s a look at who they are, how they were selected to make their improbable journey, and what they hope to accomplish while aloft. Sian Proctor Dr. Sian Proctor of the Inspiration4 crew, the world's first all-civilian mission to orbit. Philip Montgomery for TIME Two of the most memorable moments in Sian Proctor’s life involved a phone call—though the first she’d just as soon forget. That one came in 2009, when she was in contention for selection as a NASA astronaut. It was her first of two attempts, and while she wouldn’t get very deep into the selection process the second time around, the first time she was one of 47 candidates remaining out of 3,500 who had applied. Then came the call from NASA’s astronaut office. “It was the yes-or-no call,” Proctor says. “And for me it was a no.” Twelve years later, things were decidedly different. Proctor, 51, learned about Inspiration4 when friends emailed her about the TV ad that ran during the 2021 Super Bowl announcing both the mission and that Issacman was seeking three crewmates to fly along with him. One of the seats was reserved for a worker at St. Jude Children’s Hospital in Memphis, Tenn. (the mission is in part raising funds for the hospital). One of the other two crewmates would be chosen via a simple lottery. The last was determined by a contest in which contenders designed an online store using Shift4 Payments’ software and shared their entrepreneurial and space aspirations via social media. That was the route Proctor chose, and within two weeks of submitting her proposal, she got an email inviting her to a Zoom call. When she logged on, she found Isaacman at the other end. “Jared was very direct,” Proctor recalls. “He just said, ‘We’ve selected a winner. It’s you.'” The choice was apt in all manner of ways. Proctor was born on Guam, the daughter of an engineer who worked at the NASA tracking station there during the Apollo 11 mission—the first lunar landing. She grew up admiring the framed, autographed note Neil Armstrong wrote her father. It said simply: “To Ed—Thanks for the help.” That was enough to light the science fires in Proctor, who went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in environmental sciences, a masters in geology, and a PhD in science education. She now teaches geoscience at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix. But space was always tugging at her. In 2020, she participated in a four-month simulated Mars mission at a habitat run by NASA and the University of Hawaii on the flank of the Mauna Loa volcano meant to study crew cohesion. But Proctor still longed for the real space deal—and now she has her shot. “I thought a commercial mission like this was a decade away,” she says. “But as it turns out, the moment is now.” That moment will go quickly for Proctor, if only because she will be kept very busy during the three days she’ll be in space. Though Isaaacman is the commander, Proctor has been designated the mission pilot and will take the lead in calling up checklists and monitoring systems. Any command Isaacman issues, she’ll verify and execute. If Isaacman is away from the controls at any moment, she will step in, oversee the spacecraft and communicate with Mission Control. Even as she trains, she continues to work for her community college, curating art and poems she will take to space with her. Proctor will have academic responsibilities in space as well. In one of her rare free periods, she hopes to teach a science lesson from space, parlaying her professorial skills to help promote both the mission itself and the larger goal of advocating for civilian space flight. And then, too, there will be one personal goal she plans to achieve: in a symbolic thank you to her father, who died in 1989, and a sort of closing of a life circle, the letter from Armstrong will accompany her to space. Chris Sembroski Chris Sembroski of the Inspiration4 crew, the world's first all-civilian mission to orbit. Philip Montgomery for TIME Here’s how you tell your spouse you’re going to go to space—or at least here’s how you tell your spouse if you’re Chris Sembroski, 41, a man of admirable directness. “Sweetheart,” he said, after he got the call from Isaacman that he’d been tapped for Inspiration4. “I think we’re gonna go ride a rocket.” His wife responded with a shocked, “What?” recalls Sembroski, who adds: “Then she got really quiet, and I knew we had more to discuss.” Sembroski and his wife almost never had to have that discussion. He won his seat aboard Inspiration4 by making a donation to St. Jude and entering the mission lottery. Good fortune first passed him by, however, when someone else’s name was pulled from the hat. But good fortune wasn’t done with Sembroski. The person who won the contest was Sembroski’s closest friend and the best man at his wedding. For personal reasons, they decided not to go and, almost as an afterthought, suggested to Isaacman that maybe Sembroski could fly in his place. Isaacman agreed. The commander of the mission made the right choice, because Sembroski is decidedly well-suited to make the trip. A one-time space camp counselor who built high-power model rockets as a child, Sembroski attended Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in professional aeronautics. He served in the U.S. Air Force, both in the Iraq War and later in a domestic posting attending to the white knuckle business of maintaining a fleet of nuclear Minuteman missiles. He also volunteered his time with ProSpace, a nonprofit lobbying group advocating for the very legislation that opened up the private spaceflight market to companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. He now works as an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin in Everett, Wash. Like the rest of the Inspiration4 crew, Sembroski has been devoting much of his time lately to training to be a citizen astronaut. Along with his crewmates, he’s working 60-hour weeks in the simulator and the classroom at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., and spending his ostensible off-hours deep in briefing books and conference calls. The homework involves matters as grave as how to handle emergencies like an on-board fire and as mundane but essential as the crew’s sleep and meal schedules. Once in space, Sembroski will serve as the payload specialist, seeing to cargo, making repairs and serving as technical expert on some of the systems. “I am still learning culture and processes,” Sembroski says. “Finding where I am going to apply my stamp of expertise is my biggest focus right now.” At the same time, he’s also trying to make time for family. The father of two girls, ages nine and three, Sembroski is determined not to tumble so deeply into his work that he loses track of them and his wife—a goal made all the harder to achieve as he is not on leave from his day job, though his employer has made some accommodations for his training schedule. “If I am constantly on my phone or checking email, am I really there and in the moment spending time with them?” he says. “It is important that I am with my family when I am with my family.” And as for the mortal fear every person who goes to space must find a way to face—the risk that the outbound journey may not end with a safe inbound journey, that that well-loved family will be left bereft? Sembroski, like every person who has ever gone to space before him, has found a way to make peace with that risk, though he’s concerned with another worry. “The biggest fear I have is not related at all to the rocket itself,” he says. “The biggest fear I have is that this sacrifice and time spent away from my family results in very little change in me. If the narrative behind this becomes nothing more than, ‘Oh, yeah, there was this one time when I flew into space,’ then I will have felt as though I wasted this opportunity.” Hayley Arceneaux Hayley Arceneaux of the Inspiration4 crew, the world's first all-civilian mission to orbit. Philip Montgomery for TIME The pain in Hayley Arceneaux’s left knee began when she was 10, and at first she tried to shake it off. She was a child, children get banged up, and something or other is always hurting. But she wasn’t banged up and the knee didn’t stop hurting and her parents eventually took her to the doctor—who was blunt in his diagnosis. “This is bone cancer,” he said. “I don’t want to die,” Arceneaux answered. Twelve rounds of chemotherapy at St. Jude followed—the last of which was celebrated with confetti—and Arceneaux emerged from her illness with an artificial knee and a prosthetic bone in place of her left femur, as well as with a commitment not to be slowed down by her circumstances. Even while a patient at St. Jude, she volunteered as an assistant receptionist in the blood donor department. “Thank you,” she would say to donors. “If I didn’t get blood platelets I would shrivel up.” After her treatment was done, Arceneaux returned to school, earned her undergraduate degree in Spanish and, in 2016, got her physician assistant degree and began working at the very hospital that saved her life. Only one goal eluded her: she promised herself she would visit every continent by the time she was 30—the age she turned this year—and while she made it to five, the last two, Antarctica and Asia, will have to wait, because she is going to space instead. Isaacman knew from the start that he wanted a St. Jude employee along on his mission. When he approached the administrators there, they enthusiastically recommended Arceneaux. Unlike Proctor and Sembroski, she did not get the news from Isaacman himself, but from St. Jude staffers who told her they had what they called “a unique opportunity” for her. She suspected it was a TV commercial or perhaps a speech they wanted her to deliver. When they told her what they actually had in mind, Arceneaux demurred. “I should check with my Mom,” she said. Her mom said yes and Arceneaux became part of the Inspiration4 team, tapped to serve as the mission’s chief medical officer and also to conduct many of the on-board experiments. During her training, she is also using her newfound celebrity to continue publicizing and fundraising for St. Jude. Flying to space won’t be easy—and flying to space with a prosthesis, something no one has done before, will make things more challenging still. Arceneaux earned a black belt in taekwondo before she got sick, but since then, she has been forbidden to play contact sports for fear of damaging her prosthesis. She worries about the effect the g-forces during lift and reentry will have on the artificial femur—though she has already made it through centrifuge training with no ill effect. If she fares as well in the mission itself, she thinks she may be able to change the very standards used to judge future astronauts. “People who went to space in the past had to be perfect physical specimens,” she says, “and that’s not the case anymore. I’m going to be the first pediatric cancer patient to go, but I won’t be the last.” Indeed, she is already doing what she can to make that prediction a reality. “A girl at the hospital told me that she can’t run or jump,” she says. “I told her, ‘I can’t run or jump either, but that’s not stopping me from going to space.'” Corrections: The original version of this story misstated Jared Isaacman’s age; he is 38, not 41. Additionally, 2009 was the first time Sian Proctor applied to NASA, not the second. And Proctor learned about Inspiration4 via emails from friends, not via the mission’s Super Bowl ad. TIME Studios is producing the Netflix documentary series Countdown: Inspiration 4 Mission to Space, starting Sept. 6. Read More About the Inspiration4 Mission: Get our Space Newsletter. Sign up to receive the week's news in space. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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How do you cultivate a healthy workplace culture when it’s rooted in poisoned soil?

https://ti.me/3BCqbUG

time

“Empathy is one of the values we’ve had from our founding.” That’s what Chelsea MacDonald, SVP of people and operations at Ada, a tech startup that builds customer-service platforms, told me when we first got on the phone for this story in June. When the company was in its early stages, with about 50 people, empathy was “a bit more ad hoc,” because you could bump into colleagues at lunch. But that was pre-pandemic, and before a hiring surge. Now, MacDonald says, empathy is built on communication (as many as five times a week, she communicates in some way to the entire company about empathy), through tools (specifically, one that tracks whom people communicate with most and who gets left out), through intimacy (cultivated through special-interest groups) and through transparency (senior leaders share notes after every meeting). At various points in our discussion, MacDonald describes empathy as “more than just, ‘Hey, care about other people’” and “making space for other people to make mistakes.” More from TIME She was one of a dozen executives whose communications directors reached out when I tweeted about the office trend of “empathy.” Adriana Bokel Herde, the chief people officer at the software company Pegasystems, told me about the three-hour virtual empathy-training session the company had created for managers—and how nearly 90% had joined voluntarily. Kieran Snyder, the CEO of Textio, a predictive-writing company, said the biggest surprise about empathy in the workplace is that it and accountability are “flip sides of the same coin.” “We had an engineer give some feedback that was really striking,” she told me. “She said that the most empathetic thing her manager could do for her was be really clear about expectations. Let me be an adult and handle my deliverables so that I know what to do.” All of these leaders see empathy as a path forward after 17 months of societal and professional tumult. And employees do feel that it’s missing from the workplace: according to the 2021 State of Workplace Empathy Study, administered by software company Businessolver, only 1 in 4 employees believed empathy in their organizations was “sufficient.” Companies know they must start thinking seriously about addressing their empathy deficit or risk losing workers to companies that are. Still, I’ve also heard from workers who think it’s all nonsense: the latest in a long string of corporate attempts to distract from toxic or exploitative company culture, yet another scenario in which employers implore workers to be honest and vulnerable about their needs, then implicitly or explicitly punish them for it. If you’ve read all this and are still confused about what workplace empathy actually is, you’re not alone. Outside the office, developing empathy means trying to understand and share the feelings or experiences of someone else. Empathy is different from sympathy, which is more one-directional: you feel sad for what someone else is going through, but you have little understanding of what it feels like. Because empathy is predicated on experience, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate. At best, it’s expanded sympathy; at worst, it’s trying to force connections between wildly different lived experiences (see especially: white people attempting to empathize with the experience of systemic racism). Illustration by Sol Cotti for TIME Applied in a corporate setting, the very idea of empathy begins to fall apart. Is it bringing their whole selves, to use an HR buzzword, to work? Is it cultivating niceness? Is it making space for sympathy and allowing people to air grievances, or is it leadership modeling vulnerability? Over the course of reporting this story, I talked to more than a dozen people from the C-suites of midsize and large companies that had decided to make empathy central to their corporate messaging or strategy. Some plans were more fleshed out and self-interrogating. Some thought an empathy training available to three time zones was enough. Others understood empathy as small gestures, like looking at a co-worker’s calendar, seeing they’ve been in meetings all day, and giving them a 10-minute pause to get water before you meet with them. But where did this current push for workplace empathy begin? According to Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and author of the upcoming book Reset: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval, it sort of started with, well, him. In the fall of 2020, he’d been hearing a similar refrain from businesses: everyone was tired. Tired of the pandemic; of stalled diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) efforts; of their bosses and their employees. When he looked at the 2020 State of Workplace Empathy Study, then in its fourth year, the reasons for that exhaustion became clear. People were tired because they were working all the time, and trying to sort out caregiving responsibilities, and dealing with oscillating threat levels from COVID-19. But they were also tired, he believed, because there was a generalized empathy deficit. Read More: Hourly Workers Are Demanding Better Pay and Benefits—and Getting Them That “empathy deficit” became the cornerstone of Taylor’s State of Society address in November 2020. “Much of the resurgence of DE&I programming in the wake of the George Floyd killing was supposed to encourage open conversation and mutual understanding,” he said. “But it often bypassed empathy. Well-meaning programs devolve into grievance sessions … rather than listening and trying to relate.” SHRM is an incredibly influential organization, with more than 300,000 members in 165 countries. So while it’s not as if empathy efforts were nonexistent before, Taylor’s speech encouraged them. Even if members weren’t there to listen to his words, his message—and the data from the study—began to filter into HR departments, leaving a trail of optional learning modules and Zoom trainings in its wake. The backlash started shortly thereafter. Taylor acknowledges as much. “I see these companies jumping on it,” he told me. “But it’s not an initiative. It’s not a buzzword. It’s a cultural principle. If you make this promise, as a company, if you put this word out there, your employees are going to hold you to it.” He adds that empathy should go both ways: “There’s an expectation that employees can mess up; employers should be able to mess up too.” In the case of employees, many are frustrated by perceived hypocrisy. (All employees who spoke critically about their employers for this story requested anonymity out of concern for their jobs.) One woman told me her company, Viacom, has been doing a lot of messaging about empathy, particularly when it comes to mental health. At the same time, it has switched to a health plan that’s more restrictive when it comes to accessing mental-health professionals and care. (Viacom attributes the change to a shift in policy on the part of their insurance provider and says it has worked to remedy it.) Other employees report repeated invocations of empathy from upper management in staff meetings, but little training on how to implement it with those they supervise. As one female employee at a performing-arts nonprofit told me, “In a one-on-one meeting with my boss where I was openly struggling and tried to discuss it, I was told that mental health is important, but improving my job performance was more important.” A customer-service representative for a fintech company said empathy had been centered as a “core value” of the organization: something they were meant to practice with one another but also with customers. To quantify worker empathy, the company sends out customer-satisfaction surveys (CSATs) after each interaction. It found that dips in CSAT scores, which were measured by an automated system, reliably happened when a customer had a long hold time, which had little to do with whether the representative modeled empathy. Yet employees were still promoted based on these scores. The central tension emerges again and again: “There’s an irony, because there’s the equity that you want to present to employees—while also giving special consideration and solutions for specific situations,” Joyce Kim, the chief marketing officer of Genesys, which provides customer service and call-center tech for businesses, told me. “Those two are often incongruent.” Put another way, it’s hard, at least from a leadership perspective, to cultivate equal treatment for everyone while also making exceptions for everyone. If you allow an employee to work different hours, have different expectations of accessibility or have more leeway because of an illness, how is that fair to those who don’t need those things? How, in other words, do you accommodate difference while still maximizing profits? Illustration by Sol Cotti for TIME What companies are trying to do, at heart, is train employees to treat one another not like productivity robots, but like people: people with kids, people with responsibilities, people shouldering the weight of systemic discrimination. But that runs counter to the main goal of most companies, which is to create and distribute a product—whether that’s a service, an object or a design—as efficiently as possible. They might dress up that goal in less capitalistic language, but the end point remains the same: profits, the more the better, with as little friction as possible. Within this framework, the frictionless employee is the ideal employee. But a lack of friction is a privilege. It means looking and acting and behaving like people in power, which, at least in American society, means being white, male and cisgender; with few or no caregiving responsibilities; no physical or mental disabilities; no strong accent or awkward social tics or physical reminders, like “bad teeth,” of growing up poor; and no needs for accommodations—religious, dietary or otherwise. For decades, offices were filled with people who fit this bill, or who were able to hide or groom away the parts of themselves that did not. The women and people of color who were admitted into these spaces did so with an unspoken caveat that they would make themselves amenable to the status quo. They didn’t bring their “whole selves” to work. Not even close. They brought only the parts that would blend in with the rest of the workforce. If you were sexually harassed, you didn’t make a fuss about it. If someone used a racial slur, same deal. If there were Christmas celebrations that made the one Jewish employee feel weird, that person was expected not to make waves. Bad behavior wasn’t friction, per se. But a worker whose identity already created a form of friction complaining about it? That sure was. Historians of labor have pointed out that this posture was particularly prevalent in office settings, where salaried workers were often saturated in narratives of a great, unified purpose. If employees took care of the company, and flattened themselves into as close to the image of the ideal worker as possible, the company would take care of them, in compensation and eventual pension. Which is one of many reasons that white collar office workers have been resistant to unionization efforts, which felt, as sociologist C. Wright Mills has noted, like a crass, almost hysterical form of office friction. Machinists and longshoremen were laborers and had no recourse other than the big stick of the union to advocate for themselves. Office workers could solve conflict man to man, boss to employee, like, well, the white gentlemen that they were—or at the very least pretended to be. This mindset began to erode over the course of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s—first, when massive waves of layoffs and benefit cuts destabilized the myth of the benevolent parent company. But the white maleness of the culture also began to (very gradually) shift in the wake of legal protections against discrimination related to gender, age, disability and, only recently, sexual orientation. White male workers remained dominant in most industries, particularly in leadership roles. But they began to lose their unquestioned monopoly on the norms of the workplace. Some changes were embraced; others, especially around sexual harassment and racial discrimination, were changed via legal force. Read More: The Pandemic Reset the Balance Between Workers and Employers. How Bosses Respond Will Shape the Future of Work The overarching goal of HR departments in the past, going back to the field’s origins in “scientific management” of factory assembly lines, was keeping employees healthy enough to work efficiently. After 1964, their task expanded to include compliance with legal protections, in addition to the continued work of keeping employees healthy and “happy” enough to do their work well. “Unhappiness,” after all, is expensive—according to a Gallup estimate from 2013, dissatisfaction costs U.S. companies $450 million to $550 million a year in lost productivity. Unhappiness, in other words, is friction. But as the workplace continues to diversify, how do you maintain the worker “happiness” of a bunch of different sorts of people, from different backgrounds, with different cultural contexts? There are some obvious fixes: continuing to erode the power of monoculture (in which one, limited way of being/working becomes the way of being/working to which all other employees must aspire); recruiting and retaining managers who actually know how to manage; creating a culture that encourages taking time off. But usually, the proposed solution takes the form of the HR initiative. Take the 2010s push for “wellness,” which manifested in the form of mental-health seminars, gym memberships and free Fitbits. You can view these initiatives as part of a desire to reduce health-insurance premiums. But you can also see them as a means of confronting the reality of a workforce that, in the wake of the Great Recession, was anxious about their finances and careers, particularly as more and more workers were replaced by subcontractors, who enjoyed even fewer protections and privileges. Or consider the push for DE&I programs in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2015. These initiatives aim to acknowledge a perceived source of friction—the fact that a company is very white, its leadership remains “snowcapped,” or the workplace is quietly or aggressively hostile to Black and brown employees—while also providing a proposed solution. The corporate DE&I initiative communicates that we see this problem, we’re working to solve it, so you can talk less about it. Illustration by Peter Arkle for TIME Get a print of TIME’s “Rethinking Work” cover here Wellness and DE&I initiatives are frequently unsatisfying and demoralizing, particularly for those workers they are ostensibly designed to benefit. They often lean heavily on the labor of those with the least power within an organization. And they approach systemic problems with solutions designed to disrupt people’s lives as little as possible. (A three-hour webinar will not create a culture of inclusion.) But the superficiality is part of the point. Contain the friction, but do so by creating as little additional friction as possible, because a series of eruptions is easier to contain than a truly paradigm-shifting one that threatens the status quo and, by extension, the company’s public profile and profitability. According to a 2021 SHRM report, in the five years since DE&I initiatives swept the corporate world, 42% of Black employees, 26% of Asian employees and 21% of Hispanic employees reported experiencing unfair treatment based on their race or ethnicity. The ramifications of racial inequity (lost productivity, turnover and absenteeism) over the past five years may have cost the U.S. up to $172 billion. But instead of acknowledging what it is about the company culture that makes it difficult to retain diverse hires, or what might have to change to recoup those losses, companies blame individual workers who were a “bad fit.” DE&I initiatives don’t fail because there’s a “diversity pipeline problem.” It’s because those in power aren’t willing to relinquish any of it. A similar contradiction applies to the rise of “corporate empathy.” At its heart, it’s a set of policies, initiatives and messaging developed to respond to the “friction” of a workforce unsettled by the pandemic, a continuing racial reckoning and sustained political anxiety, capped off by an uprising, on a workday, days after most of the workforce had returned from winter breaks. Many empathy initiatives are well-intentioned. But coming from an employer, they still, ultimately, say: We see you are breaking in two, we are too, but how can we collectively still work as if we’re not? Therein lies the empathy trap. So long as organizations view employees with different needs as sources of friction, and solutions to those needs as examples of unfairness, they will continue to promote and retain employees with the capacity to make their personalities, needs and identities as frictionless as possible. They will encourage “bringing the whole self to work,” but only on a good day. They will fetishize “sharing personal stories,” but only when the ramifications don’t interfere with the product or create interpersonal conflict. This is what happens when you conceive of empathy as allowances: Those who would benefit from it become less desirable workers. Their friction is centered, and their value decreases. Our society is built around the goals of capitalism—and capitalism, and the ethos of individualism that thrives alongside it, is inherently in conflict with empathy. The qualities that make our bodies, selves and minds most amenable to those goals are prized above all else, and it is HR’s primary task to further cultivate those qualities, whether through “enrichment” or “wellness,” even when the most significant obstacle to either is the workplace itself. Why do the declarations of empathy feel so hollow? Because growth and profit do not reward it. Companies, HR professionals, managers, even the best trained can do only so much. A large portion of the dissatisfaction that employees feel is the result of actively toxic company policy, thoughtless management and executives clinging to the status quo. But a lot of it, too, is anger at systems that extend beyond the office: the fraying social safety nets, the decaying social bonds, the frameworks set up to devalue women’s work, the stubborn endurance of racism, the lack of protections or fair pay for the workers whose labor we ostensibly value most. We don’t know how to make people care about other people. No wonder workplace initiatives can feel so laughably incomplete. How do you cultivate a healthy workplace culture when it’s rooted in poisoned soil? “It’s not just a workplace empathy deficit,” Taylor told me. “It’s an American cultural deficit.” Petersen is co-author of the upcoming book Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"In talking with other parents with kids around my son’s age, it’s become clear that to become a first-time parent in the pandemic is a unique experience, and one that warps how you think about parenting and risk tolerance, possibly forever."

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time

I’ll say this for the pre-vaccine days: it was far easier to think about risk when the only sensible option—for those lucky enough for it to even be an option—was to hunker down, avoid as much contact with other people as possible, and wait out the storm. But a year of self-imposed isolation, fueled partially by fear and partially by a moral imperative to not infect others, has a way of scrambling your brain in a way that makes it hard to figure out what’s “safe” now that we’ve entered this strange, half-vaccinated liminal phase. After getting my shots this past spring, it took me weeks to feel anything resembling normal while spending time with family and friends indoors again. Now, with the Delta variant fueling a potential fourth wave while only half the country is vaccinated and many people are acting as if the pandemic is over, it’s harder than ever to gauge the risk to myself and, more importantly, my nearly two-year-old son. It would help if you and I could think this through together. I, a 32-year-old vaccinated man with no relevant pre-existing conditions, am very safe from developing severe COVID-19. Yes, breakthrough cases happen—they were always going to happen; the vaccines were judged on their ability to prevent serious disease, not infection—but they are rare, and serious cases among the inoculated are rarer still. The result: this has become, as U.S. President Joe Biden recently put it, a “pandemic of the unvaccinated;” nearly all the latest deaths are among those who didn’t get their shots. The logical side of my brain knows all this, but the anxiety-driven corners of it also know that breakthrough cases still happen, and there’s a non-zero chance I could be one of those cases, and wind up very sick, or die, or end up with inexplicable Long COVID symptoms that plague me for months, years, or the rest of my life, making it harder to be the father I want to be. My answer to all this is to keep avoiding large indoor crowds, to steer clear of anyone I know to be unvaccinated, and to start wearing my mask at the grocery store again, CDC guidance otherwise be damned. I’ve gotten used to the hermit life—a little too used to it, probably—and another few months of laying low won’t kill me. Judging the risk to my son, unfortunately, is far harder. Like all Americans under 12, he remains unvaccinated, though I would bring him in for the shot in a heartbeat given the chance. Children mostly do not get seriously sick from COVID-19; only about 350 have died of the virus in the U.S. so far, per the American Academy of Pediatrics, a vanishingly small case fatality rate of 0.01%. But, again, it does happen, and every headline I see about an eight-, six-, or three-year-old who died from a serious case makes me want to take my son, climb into a doomsday bunker and return only when it’s time for his bar mitzvah. That childhood COVID-19 fatalities are skyrocketing in Indonesia is a particularly harrowing data point, though many children there, and in other low-income parts of the world, are likely at higher risk because, tragically, they suffer from poor access to health care, malnutrition, and other factors that make them more vulnerable to disease in general. In talking with other parents with kids around my son’s age, it’s become clear that to become a first-time parent in the pandemic is a unique experience, and one that warps how you think about parenting and risk tolerance, possibly forever. My purely anecdotal findings suggest that parents of slightly older kids—kids who became actualized human beings with likes, dislikes and aptitudes well before COVID-19 sent everything sideways—are generally a little more willing to accept the (again, very low) risk the virus poses to their children; they have already learned the inevitable lesson that you can’t protect your kids from everything scary forever. My fellow pandemic first-time parents, meanwhile, are—again, speaking generally—freaked right the hell out. I suspect that becoming a parent always changes how you think about risk, both regarding yourself and the tiny blob you’ve suddenly been tasked with caring for—regardless of the historical and geographical context. But there is probably something unique about entering parenthood at a moment when “risk tolerance” became the defining question of human existence. My wife and I have, for now, only slightly recalibrated how we think about the risk our son now faces. Earlier this summer, when cases were low and Delta wasn’t a concern in the U.S., we took him to the zoo; we probably wouldn’t do that now. He’s still in day care, something I wrestle with every day. He clearly loves “school,” as we call it, and he’s bringing home new skills (he recently started, out of nowhere, walking backwards) and words almost every day, marking significant milestones in his physical and mental development. But exposure to COVID-19 in that environment seems inevitable, despite the efforts his day care center is making to keep the kids safe, and it tears me up inside that there’s a potential future in which he gets very sick because mom and dad needed to work in order to feed, clothe, and shelter him—and, ironically enough, pay for daycare. I have more or less accepted that the draw-dropping transmissibility of the Delta variant means that I, my son and my wife will all probably be exposed at some point or another, no matter the effort we make to avoid it. When and if that happens, I have to trust that the vaccines will protect my wife and I, while my son will fend it off by virtue of his age. I’m not throwing caution totally to the wind—we’re not taking him to crowded indoor spaces like museums, and I’m avoiding such spaces myself. But small visits with vaccinated family members are very much on the table—indeed, I’m currently writing this from my in-laws’ basement; my son is upstairs with Nana and Opa. Our thinking may change if the situation gets dramatically worse, or if new data suggest a greater risk to kids (hopefully, the CDC’s revised masking guidance will make life safer for unvaccinated children). But this virus has already taken too much from him, and it wouldn’t be fair to once again totally isolate him from his loved ones, no matter how badly I just want to protect him at all costs. We are, after all, doing other ostensibly dangerous stuff with him, like driving, an activity that in 2018 resulted in the deaths of 636 children in the U.S., per the CDC, about double the number known to have died of COVID-19 so far. I just hope that’s the right decision. The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. 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The Chicago-based airline estimates that up to 90% of its pilots and close to 80% of its flight attendants are already vaccinated.

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United Airlines will require employees in the U.S. to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by late October, perhaps sooner, joining a growing number of big corporations that are responding to a surge in virus cases. Company leaders called it a matter of safety and cited “incredibly compelling” evidence of the effectiveness of the vaccines. “We know some of you will disagree with this decision to require the vaccine for all United employees,” CEO Scott Kirby and President Brett Hart told employees Friday. But, they added, “the facts are crystal clear: everyone is safer when everyone is vaccinated.” United, which has 67,000 employees in the United States, is the first major U.S. airline to announce it will require vaccination for workers. The airline has been requiring vaccination of new hires since mid-June. Unvaccinated workers are required to wear face masks at company offices. The Chicago-based airline estimates that up to 90% of its pilots and close to 80% of its flight attendants are already vaccinated. They get incentives to do so. The airline told U.S. employees Friday that they will need to be fully vaccinated by Oct. 25 or five weeks after the Food and Drug Administration grants full approval to any one vaccine — whichever date comes first. So far, the FDA has only granted emergency-use approval of the Pfizer, Moderna or Johnson & Johnson vaccines. Full approval is expected soon. Each employee will have to send an image of their vaccine card to the company. Those who don’t will be terminated, with exemptions granted only for religious or health reasons, officials said. Employees who are already vaccinated or do so by Sept. 20 will get an extra day of pay, according to the memo from Kirby and Hart. Like United, Delta Air Lines has operated vaccination center for employees and recently began requiring the shots for new hires. Delta CEO Ed Bastian said this week that 73% of the airline’s workforce is vaccinated. Executives at other airlines have similarly encouraged their workers to get vaccinated, even offering bonuses and paid time off to get the shots, but haven’t made them mandatory. Airlines and other companies in the travel business have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, which led to sharp travel restrictions. The United States requires people entering the country, including U.S. citizens, to show proof of a negative COVID-19 test, and the Biden administration plans to require non-U.S. citizens to be vaccinated before entering the country. A United executive said the airline has no plans to require that passengers be vaccinated, calling that a government decision. The CEOs of Delta and American have similarly ruled out a mandate for passengers. Microsoft, Google and Facebook have said they will require proof of vaccination for employees and visitors to their U.S. offices starting this fall. This week, Tyson Foods announced it will require all U.S. employees to get vaccinated by November — notable because unlike the tech companies, Tyson relies on many lower-paid workers who cannot do their jobs remotely. The president of the United Food and Commercial Workers criticized Tyson for imposing the requirement while the vaccines still have only emergency FDA approval. A few governments are getting involved. California and New York City will require employees to be vaccinated or face weekly testing, and the California mandate extends to workers in public and private hospitals and nursing homes. The new rules come as the U.S. struggles with a surge in infections driven by the highly contagious delta variant of COVID-19. The 7-day average of new reported coronavirus cases has jumped to more than 90,000 a day from around 12,000 a month ago, although hospitalizations and deaths have risen more slowly. The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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In her final individual race in her final Olympics Games, American track star Allyson Felix won her 10th Olympic medal—a bronze in the 400-m—to pass Merlene Ottey of Jamaica as the most decorated female track and field athlete of all-time.

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They were watching the race from the family room at Allyson Felix’s parents’ home in Los Angeles: Felix’s husband Kenny Ferguson, 2-year-old daughter Camryn, brother Wes, mother Marlean, dad Paul, and two cousins, Lee Williams and Brandi Wilson. This 400-m sprint in Tokyo would be the final individual Olympic event of her storied career: another Olympic medal would give Felix 10, the most ever for a female track-and-field athlete. It was 5:30 a.m. Friday morning in Southern California, still dark out. Right before the race, Kenny had woken up Camryn. From dad’s lap, she watched mom push herself to a bronze medal with some grogginess in her eyes. “I was surprised she was awake,” Felix said afterward. “She should have been asleep. We’ll deal with that later.” As the family started celebrating, however, Camryn began to snap out of her slumber. She said she wanted to go see her mother at the track. As Felix stood on the medals podium, smiling through her white mask, Camryn said she wanted to wear a mask too. Overwhelming pride filled that family room as Felix finished third, winning bronze. So many Americans felt it too, as Felix was running for so much more than a medal. Besides her sustained excellence on the track, though her experiences off it Felix has emerged as an inspiration and advocate, fighting for the rights of working mothers in sports, and for better maternal health care protections from women of color. Over the past few years, she’s also fought self-doubt to return to the Olympic podium after Camryn’s difficult premature birth threatened Felix’s life. READ MORE: Motherhood Could Have Cost Olympian Allyson Felix. She Wouldn’t Let It “She’s more than we ever could have imagined,” six-time Olympic medalist Jackie Joyner-Kersee—whose husband Bobby Kersee coaches Felix—tells TIME from her St. Louis home at 4:50 a.m. on Friday; she was up early to watch the final. “From the very first day she stepped on the track, and now as she steps off the track, her journey will continue to inspire young girls and young women alike to be the very best of themselves.” Allyson Felix’s Olympics journey At the Olympics, individual races have caused Felix heartbreak. In Athens in 2004, at age 18, she sobbed after finishing second in the 200-m. Another silver in Beijing felt devastating. She finally won 200-m gold in London, but in the 400-m in Rio, Felix was again the runner up; Shauae Miller-Uido of the Bahamas dove across the finish line to eke out the win. (Miller-Uido of the Bahamas defended her Olympic title here in Tokyo, winning the race in 48.36 seconds. Marileidy Paulino of the Dominican Republic took silver with a time of 49.20 seconds and Felix finished with a time of 49.46 seconds; Stephenie Ann McPherson of Jamaica finished fourth, in 49.61 seconds.) This time, given her comeback story, the hardware in Tokyo felt almost golden. “It’s really hard for me, when I don’t win, to still have joy,” says Felix. “Tonight I have joy.” With her finish, Felix passed Merlene Ottey of Jamaica as the most decorated female track and field athlete of all time. Felix is also now tied with Carl Lewis for the most medals ever won by an American track and field athlete. (Felix now has six golds, three silver, one bronze medal; Lewis owns nine golds and a silver). Felix waved her hands when she was introduced before the race at the Olympic Stadium: she slapped her thighs before taking her starting spot in the outside lane. She kicked her left leg up, then her right leg. Her start was quick, but at one point, she sat in fourth place near the turn. But she caught McPherson and held her off down the straightaway; Felix seemed to almost smile as she crossed the finish. She lay on the track, looking upwards, hand covering her face, as if she didn’t want to leave the track after her fifth Olympics. She said a combination of emotion and fatigue caused her to lay out. “The 400,” says Felix, “It just does it to you.” Allyson Felix of Team USA reacts after winning the bronze medal in the Women's 400m Final on day fourteen of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at Olympic Stadium on Aug. 06, 2021 in Tokyo, Japan. Richard Heathcote—Getty Images Felix should have another opportunity to medal here at the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games and break Lewis’ American record; she’s set to participate in the 4×400-m relay final on Saturday, a race the U.S. has won at every Olympics since the 1996 Atlanta Games. Running for more than medals Felix’s record is even more remarkable given all the unexpected adversity she’s faced since the 2016 Rio Games, when she lost on Miller-Uido’s dive. (“I wouldn’t want to win that way,” Felix told TIME in a May interview. “In my opinion, it’s not respectable.”) In late November 2018, Felix gave birth to her daughter, Camryn, seven weeks premature: she was diagnosed with severe preeclampsia—a potentially life-threatening, pregnancy-related condition more prevalent in African-American women, and required emergency C-section surgery. Both mother and daughter, however, recovered, and Felix has turned her attention towards raising awareness for African-American maternal care. “We need to provide women of color with more support during their pregnancies,” Felix told the House Ways and Means Committee in 2019. “Research shows that racial bias in our maternal health care system includes things like providers spending less time with Black mothers, underestimating the pain of their Black patients, ignoring symptoms and dismissing complaints.” When she returned to the track for training, some 10 weeks after giving birth, simple exercises caused her pain, due to the surgery. At the same time, Felix was embroiled in a contract dispute with Nike, her primary sponsor for over a decade, over a clause that would tie performance protections for athletes to pregnancy. In May of 2019, she went public with her story. Felix left Nike and signed with Athleta in July of 2019, becoming the female-focused brand’s first sponsored athlete. That August, Nike announced that the company would guarantee athlete pay and bonuses for 18 months around pregnancy. “I’ve heard from what seems like thousands of [mothers],” said Felix following her semifinal heat in Tokyo. “All the different situations and scenarios. All that they’ve been through. There are a lot of similarities. I just want to be that representation.” In June, Felix launched her own footwear and apparel company, called Saysh, becoming the rare athlete to take a bet on herself when it comes to sponsorship. She won her 400-m Olympic bronze while wearing Saysh spikes. Read more: Allyson Felix Launches Her Own Show Company Two Years After Breaking Up With Nike Families were not permitted to travel with athletes to Tokyo; these restrictions were particularly difficult for mothers of young children. “Already getting my mind right for being away from Cammy for 16 days,” Felix wrote in a July 9 text message, two weeks before the Tokyo Opening Ceremonies. “But I’ll make it through.” Once she arrived in Tokyo, Felix found the separation difficult. “It’s been a lonely Olympics,” Felix told TIME earlier this week. “The biggest down for me, and it’s probably the most expected one, is being apart from Cammy. I’ve had a few moments just talking about that with other moms. There are just moments of sadness.” Here in Tokyo, she’s been FaceTiming often with her daughter back in Los Angeles. “That’s been the high point of my day, catching up with Cammy,” Felix tells TIME. “I think this is the first time that she does understand that I’m gone. She sometimes becomes frustrated in the FaceTime that she can’t get to me.” One high point in Tokyo, Felix says: after she was having trouble sleeping when she first arrived and being bothered by neck pain and back pain on the cardboard beds in the Olympics village, she ordered an extra mattress from Amazon in Japan. She found some extra cardboard to build herself a full-size bed: sleep got better, and the pain dissipated. Felix solidifies her place in history Still, Felix fought through isolation and homesickness, at 35, in her final Games, to break the track-and-field medals record. “We all now know the complications I’ve faced the last couple of years,” says Felix. “The physical complications, along with all the hardships. I think that’s what gave me the most doubt. Could I ever get back to myself? To me, tonight was really special because I do feel like myself again.” Even before breaking the track-and-field medals record for women, Felix was one of the most influential Olympians here in Tokyo. Capping her career with an individual bronze medal, after many track prognosticators wondered if she’d even make the U.S. team, will offer her an even bigger platform. “I think her legacy is kind of showing everyone you can do what you want to do,” says U.S. sprinter Gabby Thomas, who won silver in the 4×100-m relay, and bronze in the 200 m, in Tokyo. Thomas’ mother steered her into sprinting after watching Felix race in Beijing. “She’s had such a long career. She hasn’t let anything stop her, whether it’d be her age, the number of races she’s running, who’s running next to her, who may be testing positive. She never let any of that get to her. Even now being a mother… so just her grace, her poise, her commitment to excellence has been such an inspiration.” And now, with more track-and-field medals than any woman in history, Felix stands alone. Read more about the Tokyo Olympics: Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Sean Gregory at sean.gregory@time.com.

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Ilona Maher’s videos are a wry, witty, and engaging peek at the action in Tokyo, where spectators have been banned due to the COVID-19 state of emergency there.

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When Ilona Maher isn’t dominating on the rugby field while representing Team USA at the Tokyo Olympics, she’s going viral on TikTok. The 24-year-old has become a star on the social media platform by giving fans a front-row seat to the fun in Tokyo as the U.S. women’s rugby squad chases its first Olympic medal. (Team USA recently beat Japan and China to advance out of the group stage to the quarterfinals on Friday). Maher’s videos are a wry, witty, and engaging peek at the action in Tokyo, where spectators have been banned due to the COVID-19 state of emergency there, that have garnered tens of millions of views. Her notable clips include trying to talk to her “kiwi coach” while social distancing, modeling Ralph Lauren’s Olympic uniforms (especially that bucket hat), or trying to work up the courage to go talk to Romanian volleyball players. (“It is not easy to go up to a pack of six, seven Romanian volleyball players and shoot my shot,” she said in one video. “I mean, I’ll work on it. But I don’t know if that’s in the cards for me.”) Maher’s U.S. rugby teammates make frequent appearances; they racked up over 6.8 million views (so far) when she and some teammates tested the Olympic Village’s infamous cardboard beds. Maher highlights their on-field success in post-game interviews breaking down Jordan Maytas’ tackles and Kristi Kershe’s two tries against China on Thursday. Maher also spotlights her teammates’ skills off the pitch. Joanne “Nana” Fa’avesi, who not only plays hooker and prop on the field, but apparently doubles as the team’s hair stylist. “We would be lost without Nana Faavesi,” Maher wrote over a video of Fa’avesi diligently braiding the hair of multiple teammates. Maher, a Vermont native, played Rugby in college at Quinnipiac University, has struck a chord with fans who appreciate her honesty and openness. “I started playing rugby my senior year of high school. I don’t love my body all the time but I’ve grown to really appreciate it. I get very mad at myself when I make mistakes,” she shared. “I’m self conscious that my personality may be too much for some people.” While the Olympian is clearly match fit and ready to rumble on the rugby field, she did admit to spending six hours per day on the app. Maher said that much time online can be a challenge in a video she shared of herself creating TikTok content “so the world can get an inside look” at the Olympic Games. To soundtrack the clip, she chose Reba McEntire’s “I’m a Survivor” to highlight the fact that she is working two jobs at the moment—Olympic athlete and TikTok influencer. Read more about the Tokyo Olympics: Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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“With the book, I’m also trying to address what it was like to even consider these experiences and how I can label them now,” Mena Suvari says of her new memoir “The Great Peace.” “It’s about feeling like I am allowed to consider that I was abused.”

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Many of us know Mena Suvari as the wholesome choir girl from the 1999 comedy American Pie or the teen who becomes the object of Kevin Spacey’s infatuation in the 1999 drama American Beauty. Yet after decades of portraying fictional women, Suvari, 42, is ready to open up about her own life. In her new memoir, The Great Peace, Suvari details the breakdown of her family following a childhood of material abundance, reveals that she was repeatedly sexually abused beginning at the age of 12 and shares the experience of going through multiple toxic relationships as she tried to find stability in adulthood. The opportunity to act and find connections through roles in film and TV, Suvari writes, helped to pull her through some of the darker moments. But her continued silence, especially around the abuse she suffered as a young woman working in Hollywood, took its toll. She recounts in the book that for years, she used drugs to numb her feelings, coping with marijuana and, for a time, meth. In 2018, Suvari writes, she found an old journal and works of art she’d made as a young woman in a long-ignored storage unit. The notes, poems and drawings prompted memories of experiences that Suvari realized she needed to share in order to heal. Here, Suvari talks with TIME about releasing her first book and finally opening up. “I’ve been joking it’s like therapy with the world,” she says. The Great Peace includes several sections where you share poetry and diary entries you wrote as a teenager. What was it like to revisit your old self? I found this bin, which had everything, even VHS tapes and old press clippings from my whole career. When I opened my diary, I was surprised to see there was just one entry in the middle of it. Then, there was a folded yellow piece of construction paper I’d made into a card and decorated with angels on top. It was my adieu, my farewell—I’d written my suicide note. I had forgotten about that. But when I found it, I remembered that exact moment, the space I’d been in. I was saddened and shocked, and yet it was kind of funny to me because I realized my life only got worse after I wrote that. That was the beginning of the process for me. You write about all kinds of difficult experiences—from being sexually coerced to overcoming drug addiction to feeling abandoned—that you are discussing in public for the first time. Why was right now the time to come forward with the truth? It’s just something I felt like I needed to do. This book has been a couple years in the making. When I started, I’d gotten to that place in my life—I’d met my husband, I was ready to make personal changes. I was definitely inspired by #MeToo and this environment of sharing that felt new at the time. I realized simple things, like, we’re not alone. We have the right to talk about our experiences. With the book, I’m also trying to address what it was like to even consider these experiences and how I can label them now. It’s about feeling like I am allowed to consider that I was abused. I was always comparing the abuse to something else I thought was worse, telling myself it wasn’t that bad and that I really had nothing to say. Hachette Books From your roles in American Pie to American Beauty, you talk often about how working as an actor became a lifeline amid the chaos of your life. Was there a project in particular that inspired you as you wrote? Art saved my life. Work has always given me the opportunity to learn more about myself and grow. The types of projects I worked on really challenged me and put me in a space of being ready to share. One is Grace and Grit, based on Treya Wilber and her battle for her life and for love. That put me in a very different space, spiritually, in touch with the magic that’s all around us. Read More: How Celebrity Memoirs Got So Good Something that stuck with me was how adults in your life didn’t really seem to know how to talk to you, how to ask if you were doing okay. I know you recently had a child, and am curious about how you plan to address difficult conversations with him. It’s about trying to stay as open and as aware as possible and asking questions: How are you doing? How are you feeling? What’s going on right now? That’s what most important. That’s why I’m fine with sharing all of this—I’d like to use my life experiences to hopefully be aware and be present and maybe notice signs. But it’s not a black-and-white thing. I’m not trying to make this a blame game or live in regret. I’m just offering my perspective on what it was like to be someone at that age who needed more guidance in that moment. Everyone deserves to be noticed. Communication is the most important thing. That’s why we’re here: to share and learn and grow with one another. Maybe someone hears this story and they see how I became detached. No one asked me about my drug use or if I got a bladder infection at age 12 because I had sex. No one noticed, and it became harder for me to be rescued. We think we’re alone. I just felt, “I’ll suffer silently.” You write about shaving your head for a role around the same time paparazzi hounded Britney Spears for shaving hers, and feeling like you understood her despite living in very different circumstances. What are your thoughts on how women in the spotlight are treated these days versus a couple decades ago? It’s great we’re noticing these moments now and that we’re having these conversations. But we still have a lot of work to do. I used that example because I happened to be working on a film where a character shaves her head, and I cut my hair in real life. To everyone else, it seemed like I’d lost my mind. I’m a woman, so I must have just lost it. That was shocking to me, and I was trying to figure out what my value was in conjunction with what everyone else thought it was. In the broader conversation, we’ve got a long way to go. Let’s move forward and not forget about what we’ve learned about awareness and other people’s rights. If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911 or seek care from a local hospital or mental-health provider. Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Mahita Gajanan at mahita.gajanan@time.com.

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"When it emerges from our pores, sweat is relatively odorless. Potent aroma arises when bacteria living in our armpits devour sweat as food, and release heady odors as a by-product.These odors provide clues about our identity and our health to those in our communities, even though many of us might prefer to rely on language and optics."

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When Annlyse Retiveau leaned in to sniff my armpits, I held my own breath as she inhaled. I’ve spent a vast majority of my life using products to avoid this precise critique—another human intentionally evaluating my armpit aroma. Yet, whether we like it or not, humans do smell each other, and we can glean useful social cues and health information from the body odor of others, albeit sometimes unconsciously. There’s nothing unconscious about Retiveau’s sniffing. As a professional nose at the New Jersey-based company Sensory Spectrum, she smells things for a living, to help companies assess the aromas in a new coffee brew, or to evaluate whether a deodorant successfully blocks body odor. She’s neither chagrined nor embarrassed, just professional, as she demonstrates exactly how far her nose must be from my armpit—6 inches—to properly assess my aroma, as well as the correct inhaling technique: short bunny sniffs to avoid sensory overload. And yes, “bunny sniffs” is the technical term. Most of our potent body odour arises from a kind of sweat that emerges from apocrine glands in our armpits. Apocrine glands become active at puberty and are primarily responsible for turning armpits into stink zones from adolescence onward. Meanwhile the salty stuff that flows when we exercise or are overheated emerges from a different, more abundant, kind of sweat gland—the eccrine gland. Most of us have between 2 and 5 million of eccrine sweat glands sprinkled across our whole body, including the armpit. Evaporation of water in this salty sweat whisks away heat from skin to cool us down; it’s our major defense against potentially deadly heatstroke. More from TIME When it emerges from our pores, sweat is relatively odorless. Potent aroma arises when bacteria living in our armpits devour sweat as food, and release heady odors as a by-product. These odors provide clues about our identity and our health to those in our communities, even though many of us might prefer to rely on language and optics. The first thing our noses tell us about those around us is their odor print, the unique collection of aromas that distinguish one person from another, and that allows dogs, for example, to track specific individuals. Parents learn the odor of our newborns just hours after birth (and newborns scootch preferentially towards the odor of breast pads worn by their birth mothers rather than those of other women). Siblings can identify each other even if they haven’t seen one another in years. And for many of us there is a quintessential comfort in the familiar odor of a grandmother or of a romantic partner. In one study about smell and romance, straight women preferred the body odor of straight men whose immune systems were different enough that any offspring would have healthy immune systems. For most of human history, infectious disease has been our greatest threat. In modern times we may seek life-partners that satisfy a multitude of needs, but more fundamentally, if you could produce babies with immune systems able to fight a potpourri of pathogens, then your progeny—and your genes—stand a better chance at survival. There are also tantalizing hints that body odor doesn’t just influence romantic relationships, but platonic ones, too. Earlier this summer, a study by Noam Sobel at the Weizmann Institute in Israel reported that people who became fast friends with each other have similar body odor prints, as determined by odor panelists as well as electronic noses. This begs the awkward question: How do two individuals, meeting one another for the first time, get close enough for a whiff? Most human cultures—at least before COVID-19—have social greetings that involve proximity, whether it’s a cheek kiss, a bow or a handshake. In a fascinating study where people meeting for the first time were recorded on video, Sobel discovered that individuals unconsciously sniff their own hands after a handshake—presumably to take in the aroma of the person they’ve just met. (Although this information has the propensity to ruin handshakes, it may make people-watching at parties and conferences all the more fascinating.) We don’t just sniff out the identity of those around us, we can sometimes assess their anxiety levels. Law enforcement officers have long noticed that individuals arriving for an interrogation smell like their own unique selves—yet they leave smelling potently similar, after the stressful questioning. This observation suggests that there’s a signature anxiety odor humans produce when afraid that overwhelms their normal aroma. Scientists put this observation to the test and found it had merit. When a panel of people sniffed odor pads from individuals who sweat from fear (by watching a scary film) and those that sweat normally (when watching a nature documentary), the panelists could distinguish which sweat samples were produced in fear. Militaries worldwide have an interest in capturing and sequestering anxiety odors: The concern is that if one soldier in close quarters, say in a tank, becomes afraid, the odor might spread that fear to other soldiers To date, chemists haven’t been able to pluck the fear molecule out of the collection of body odors, but they’re working on it. Health status is another fascinating piece of information we may glean from the body odor of others, namely whether their bodies are fighting off a microbial pathogen. A team of researchers, led by Mats Olsson at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, injected a tiny component of the diarrhea-causing E. coli pathogen into some study subjects (with their consent). This piece of the pathogen was a protein, called endotoxin, that normally sits on the surface of the bacteria. Endotoxin alone can’t cause an infection (or it’s terrible consequences) but it does trigger our immune systems to rally the troops because they detect that something foreign is afoot. Study subjects injected with the endotoxin were given T-shirts to wear over a few hours to capture their body odor. The subjects didn’t show any signs of being ill, nor did they feel ill, even though the researchers could measure in blood samples that their immune systems had activated Code Red. Because the endotoxin wasn’t actually attached to a pathogen, the study subjects’ immune systems eventually settled down. They were sent home, while their T-shirts were put in a freezer. The researchers repeated the same experiment some time later, except the study subjects were only injected with saline solution, and no endotoxin, so that normal body odor was collected on a different set of T-shirts. When a panel of people smelled the collection T-shirts, panelists found the body odor of people whose immune systems had been activated by the endotoxin to be more aversive than normal body odor. It wasn’t a conscious thing; the panelists didn’t say, “oh that person smells sick.” It was an unconscious, negative response to the odor of people whose immune systems were on high alert. The take-home message is that if someone smells aversive, others may avoid being in close proximity, which is a pretty reasonable strategy for avoiding potential infections. Given that microbial pathogens are a major human foe, it would behoove us to evolve some way to sniff out when others are sick. But since there are many pathogens, it would be inefficient—frankly impossible—to learn the smell of each and every one, especially given that new microbial threats can evolve quickly. Instead, smelling when someone’s immune system is activated could be a universal way of alerting each other that a microscopic war is afoot. Which brings us to deodorant and antiperspirants, a $75 billion dollar industry that helps keep all our aromatic secrets to ourselves. Antisweat products work to subdue the medley of odors wafting off our bodies: deodorants kill bacteria that turn sweat into stinky odors while antiperspirants literally block our sweat pores, cutting off the sweaty buffet to bacteria responsible for turning odorless sweat into a strong pong. When we put on products that block body odor, are we inadvertently putting on an aromatic filter—like one might do to a selfie on Instagram, to improve our image? That filter could be hiding our aromatic messages, or dialing down the volume of these dispatches, interfering with lines of communication that might tell others we are anxious, sick, destined to be a bestie, or a good choice as a procreation partner. Then again, some might argue that this odorous communication is a vestige of our evolutionary past, that it should die out as language—and/or biomedical testing—nixes the need for such aromatic cues. I often wonder, as I put on anti-sweat products whether I am whether we are as a society, one armpit at a time, helping to facilitate the end of human odor communication. Then again, I also value discretion. In this era of rampant oversharing, deodorants and antiperspirants may be delivering a needed dose of privacy from the smelly secrets we would otherwise release into the wild. Adapted from Sarah Everts’ new book The Joy of Sweat Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"Studies find little to no difference between tutored and untutored children in their academic achievement under standard learning conditions. Even when students show short-term improvement, they do not maintain long-term gains," writes Pawan Dhingra.

https://ti.me/3zMS22I

time

Summer tutoring has become the rallying cry by politicians and pundits as a way to address the learning loss from months of remote and hybrid learning. A frightening number of students did not show up to class last school year, including up to 15% of kindergarteners in some school districts. But tutoring is the not the easy solution many think it is. Before parents sign up their children, they need to do their own homework and, except under specific conditions, they should not pursue tutoring. Simply put, most children do not benefit long term from standard tutoring. Moreover, current trends in supplemental education can end up hurting children. Tutoring can work well under certain conditions for children. Unfortunately, those conditions are quite strict. First, tutors should have a strong command of the content and must find ways to connect it to the student’s interests. Second, tutoring is more effective when it is intensive, with multiple hours per week and small teacher-to-student ratios and when run by trained professionals (e.g. teachers) during the school year rather than over the summer. The costs for effective tutoring are high (e.g. $3,800 per child in a Chicago program). Without such expensive and intensive conditions, tutoring proves to be mostly ineffective. Studies find little to no difference between tutored and untutored children in their academic achievement under standard learning conditions. Even when students show short-term improvement, they do not maintain long-term gains. Still, all kinds of tutoring are gaining steam among parents, increasingly for those who need it the least. Affluent students in well-resourced schools increasingly take part. The national chain Mathnasium, for instance, advertises as serving students already succeeding in math. A founder of another company told me their growth model is to open franchises in well-ranked districts. Companies are cashing in on anxious parents with marketing directed at overcoming the “Covid slide.” This is despite the fact that their learning loss over the past 12 months is less of a concern than often assumed. Kumon, Mathnasium, and other tutoring companies rank among the fastest-growing franchises of 2021. This popularity for tutoring continues a trend that has been going on for years. In fact, No Child Left Behind gave billions of taxpayer dollars to the tutoring industry, jumpstarting their rapid growth. Parents have strong motivations behind their enrollment. Based on my research with over 100 parents for my book, Hyper Education: Why Good Schools, Good Grades, and Good Behavior Are Not Enough, I learned that such parents worry that their child otherwise will not be adequately challenged in schools, even before the onset of remote learning. They also fear that their child would fall behind peers who are being tutored. Learning is sold at younger and younger ages as parents seek an academic edge. Junior Kumon starts at age three; I even saw a child in a diaper at a center. Parents even believe that after-school academics instills values of hard work, sacrifice, and more. The fact that the child does not like this after-school activity is not necessarily a reason to stop. Yet what parents see as essential to their child’s development can be detrimental. Teachers bemoan this trend. They struggle to appropriately reach elementary and middle school children with increasingly wide ranges of abilities, which is prone to grow by the fall. What’s more, as children in well-ranked schools seek private, corporate-sponsored education, it appears as if even the best schools are failing to properly serve our youth. This becomes one more rebuke of our public-school system. While teachers lament their own struggles, they dwell on their worries for the children. Teachers see stressed-out youth prone to either crying or silence due to increased academic pressure, much more than parents realize. Nor is it only those tutored who are stressed. One student I interviewed who performed at grade level in her well-ranked school confessed that she felt “stupid” relative to peers who “were three years ahead because of [their tutoring].” Tutored students are not necessarily better off in the long run either and, in fact, could encounter obstacles to in-depth learning. According to a middle school math teacher, students with supplemental education “do more posturing in class” because they feel they know the subject already. They also can be “bored” in class if they have covered the material already. What’s more, they lose a love of learning, another educator said. If youth are not invested in their after-school education, they come to see all education as a chore to get through. Such monetary and emotional costs are all the more unnecessary given that well-resourced schools, such as the ones many of these families attend, often have a good record of educating children. Fears over children’s learning are understandable now more than ever. But the costs of tutoring go beyond the financial. Unless their children are well behind grade level and can enter effective programs, parents should avoid the treadmill of extra academics for the sake of their children and others. Especially after the school year so many have had, youth deserve a summer of childhood. The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"The modern office was created after World War II, on a military model—strict hierarchies, created by men for men, with an assumption that there is a wife to handle duties at home," writes Joanne Lipman."But after years of gradual change in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, there’s a growing realization that the model is broken."

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Until March 2020, Kari and Britt Altizer of Richmond, Va., put in long hours at work, she in life-insurance sales and he as a restaurant manager, to support their young family. Their lives were frenetic, their schedules controlled by their jobs. Then the pandemic shutdown hit, and they, like millions of others, found their world upended. Britt was briefly furloughed. Kari, 31, had to quit to care for their infant son. A native of Peru, she hoped to find remote work as a Spanish translator. When that didn’t pan out, she took a part-time sales job with a cleaning service that allowed her to take her son to the office. But as the baby grew into a toddler, that wasn’t feasible either. Meanwhile, the furlough prompted her husband, 30, to reassess his own career. “I did some soul searching. During the time I was home, I was gardening and really loving life,” says Britt, who grew up on a farm and studied environmental science in college. “I realized working outdoors was something I had to get back to doing.” Today, both have quit their old jobs and made a sharp pivot: they opened a landscaping business together. “We are taking a leap of faith,” Kari says, after realizing the prepandemic way of working simply doesn’t make sense anymore. Now they have control over their schedules, and her mom has moved nearby to care for their son. “I love what I’m doing. I’m closer to my goal of: I get to go to work, I don’t have to go to work,” Kari says. “We aren’t supposed to live to work. We’re supposed to work to live.” As the postpandemic great reopening unfolds, millions of others are also reassessing their relationship to their jobs. The modern office was created after World War II, on a military model—strict hierarchies, created by men for men, with an assumption that there is a wife to handle duties at home. But after years of gradual change in Silicon Valley and elsewhere, there’s a growing realization that the model is broken. Millions of people have spent the past year re-evaluating their priorities. How much time do they want to spend in an office? Where do they want to live if they can work remotely? Do they want to switch careers? For many, this has become a moment to literally redefine what is work. More fundamentally, the pandemic has masked a deep unhappiness that a startling number of Americans have with the -workplace. During the first stressful months of quarantine, job turnover plunged; people were just hoping to hang on to what they had, even if they hated their jobs. For many more millions of essential workers, there was never a choice but to keep showing up at stores, on deliveries and in factories, often at great risk to themselves, with food and agricultural workers facing a higher chance of death on the job. But now millions of white collar professionals and office workers appear poised to jump. Anthony Klotz, an associate professor of management at Texas A&M University, set off a Twitter-storm by predicting, “The great resignation is coming.” But those conversations miss a much more consequential point. The true significance isn’t what we are leaving; it’s what we are going toward. In a surprising phenomenon, people are not just abandoning jobs but switching professions. This is a radical re-assessment of our careers, a great reset in how we think about work. A Pew survey in January found that 66% of unemployed people have seriously considered changing occupations—and significantly, that phenomenon is common to those at every income level, not just the privileged high earners. A third of those surveyed have started taking courses or job retraining. Pew doesn’t have comparable earlier data, but in a 2016 survey, about 80% of people reported being somewhat or very satisfied with their jobs. Early on in the pandemic, Lucy Chang Evans, a 48-year-old Naperville, Ill., civil engineer, quit her job to help her three kids with remote learning while pursuing an online MBA. Becoming “a lot more introspective,” she realized she’s done with toxic workplaces: “I feel like I’m not willing to put up with abusive behavior at work anymore.” She also plans to pivot into a more meaningful career, focused on tackling climate change. The deep unhappiness with jobs points to a larger problem in how workplaces are structured. The line between work and home has been blurring for decades—and with the pandemic, obliterated completely for many of us, as we have been literally living at work. Meanwhile, the stark divide between white collar workers and those with hourly on-site jobs—grocery clerks, bus drivers, delivery people—became painfully visible. During the pandemic, nearly half of all employees with advanced degrees were working remotely, while more than 90% of those with a high school diploma or less had to show up in person, CoStar found. Business leaders are as confused as the rest of us—perhaps more so—when it comes to navigating the multiple demands and expectations of the new workplace. Consider their conflicting approaches to remote work. Tech firms including Twitter, Dropbox, Shopify and Reddit are all allowing employees the option to work at home permanently, while oil company Phillips 66 brought back most staff to its Houston headquarters almost a year ago. Target and Walmart have both allowed corporate staff to work remotely, while low-paid workers faced potential COVID-19 exposure on store floors. In the financial industry, titans like Blackstone, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs expect employees to be back on site this summer. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon recently declared that remote work “doesn’t work for those who want to hustle-. It doesn’t work in terms of spontaneous idea generation,” and “you know, people don’t like commuting, but so what.” Illustration by Bratislav Milenkovic for TIME There’s a real risk that office culture could devolve into a class system, with on-site employees favored over remote workers. WeWork CEO Sandeep Mathrani recently insisted that the “least engaged are very comfortable working from home,” a stunning indictment that discounts working parents everywhere and suggests that those who might need flexibility—like those caring for relatives—couldn’t possibly be ambitious. Mathrani’s comments are yet another reminder that the pandemic shutdown has been devastating for women, throwing into high relief just how inhospitable and precarious the workplace can be for caretakers. Faced with the impossible task of handling the majority of childcare and homeschooling, 4.2 million women dropped out of the labor force from February 2020 to April 2020—and nearly 2 million still haven’t returned. Oxfam calculates that women globally lost a breathtaking $800 billion in income in 2020. Women’s progress in terms of U.S. workforce participation has been set back by more than three decades. Despite Mathrani’s assertion, there’s little evidence that remote employees are less engaged. There is, however, plenty of evidence that we’re actually working more. A study by Harvard Business School found that people were working on average 48 minutes more per day after the lockdown started. A new research paper from the University of Chicago and University of Essex found remote workers upped their hours by 30%, yet didn’t increase productivity. All this comes at a moment when business and culture have never been more intertwined. As work has taken over people’s lives and Americans are doing less together outside the office, more and more of people’s political beliefs and social life are defining the office. In thousands of Zoom meetings over the past year, employees have demanded that their leaders take on systemic racism, sexism, transgender rights, gun control and more. People have increasingly outsize expectations of their employers. This year, business surpassed nonprofits to become the most trusted institution globally, according to the Edelman Trust Barometer, and people are looking to business to take an active role tackling racism, climate change and misinformation. “Employees, customers, shareholders—all of these stakeholder groups—are saying, You’ve got to deal with some of these issues,” says Ken Chenault, a former chief executive of American Express and currently chairman and managing partner of General Catalyst. “If people are going to spend so much time at a company, they really want to believe that the mission and behavior of the company is consistent with, and aligned with, their values.” Hundreds of top executives signed on to a statement that he and Ken Frazier, the CEO of Merck, organized this year opposing “any discriminatory legislation” in the wake of Georgia’s new voting law. Yet those same moves have landed some executives in the crosshairs of conservative politicians. That points to the central dilemma facing us all as we rethink how we work. Multiple surveys suggest Americans are eager to work remotely at least part of the time—the ideal consensus seems to be coalescing around three days in the office and two days remote. Yet the hybrid model comes with its own complexities. If managers with families and commutes choose to work remotely, but younger employees are on site, the latter could lack opportunities for absorbing corporate culture or for being mentored. Hybrid work could also limit those serendipitous office interactions that lead to promotions and breakthrough ideas. Yet if it’s done correctly, there’s a chance to bring balance back into our lives, to a degree that we haven’t seen at least since the widespread adoption of email and cell phones. Not just parents but all employees would be better off with more flexible time to recharge, exercise and, oh yeah, sleep. There’s also a hidden benefit in a year of sweatpants wearing and Zoom meetings: a more casual, more authentic version of our colleagues, with unwashed hair, pets, kids and laundry all on display. That too would help level the playing field, especially for professional women who, over the course of their careers, spend thousands of hours more than men just getting ready for work. There are glimmers of progress. During the pandemic, as rates of depression and anxiety soared—to 40% of all U.S. adults, quadruple previous levels—a number of companies began offering enhanced mental-health services and paid “recharge” days, among them LinkedIn, Citigroup, Red Hat and SAP. Some companies are offering subsidized childcare, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Home Depot. More than 200 businesses, along with the advocacy group Time’s Up, recently created a coalition to push for child and eldercare solutions. It’s essential that these measures stay in place. We have an unprecedented opportunity right now to reinvent, to create workplace culture almost from scratch. Over the past decades, various types of businesses have rotated in and out of favor—conglomerates in the ’60s, junk bonds in the ’80s, tech in the ’00s—but the basic workplace structure, of office cubicles and face time, has remained the same. It’s time to allow the creative ideas to flow. For example, companies are stuck with millions of square feet of now unused office space—sublet space soared by 40% from late 2019 to this year, CoStar found. Why not use that extra space for day care? Working parents of small children would jump at the opportunity to have a safe, affordable option, while having their kids close by. Now would also be a good time to finally dump the 9-to-5, five-day workweek. For plenty of job categories, that cadence no longer makes sense. Multiple companies are already experimenting with four-day workweeks, including Unilever New Zealand, and Spain is rolling out a trial nationwide. Companies that have already tested the concept have reported significant productivity increases, from 20% (New Zealand’s Perpetual Guardian, which has since made the practice permanent) to 40% (Microsoft Japan, in a limited trial). That schedule too would be more equitable for working moms, many of whom work supposedly part-time jobs with reduced pay yet are just as productive as their fully paid colleagues. Meanwhile, the 9-to-5 office-hours standard becomes irrelevant, especially when people don’t have meetings and are working remotely or in different time zones. While we’re at it, let’s kill the commute. Some companies are already creating neighborhood co-working hubs for those who live far from the home office. Outdoor retailer REI is going a step further: it sold its new Bellevue, Wash., headquarters in a cost-cutting move and is now setting up satellite offices in the surrounding Puget Sound area. Restaurants might get in on the act too; they could convert dining areas into co-working spaces during off hours, or rent out private rooms by the day for meetings and brainstorming sessions. Some of the shortcomings of remote work—the lack of camaraderie and mentoring, the fear of being forgotten—may ultimately be bridged by new technology. Google and Microsoft are already starting to integrate prominent remote-videoconferencing capabilities more fully into meeting spaces, so that remote workers don’t seem like an afterthought. Augmented reality, which so far has been used most notably for games like Pokémon Go, could end up transforming into a useful work tool, allowing remote workers to “seem” to be in the room with on-site workers. There are plenty of other ideas out there, and a popular groundswell of support for flexibility and life balance that makes sense for all of us. Will we get there, or will we slide back into our old ways? That’s on us. Companies that don’t reinvent may well pay the price, losing top talent to businesses that do. “We aren’t robots,” Kari Altizer says. “Before, we thought it was impossible to work with our children next to us. Now, we know it is possible—but we have to change the ways in which we work.” Lipman is the author of That’s What She Said and a former editor in chief of USA Today; her next book is on the art and science of reinvention Buy a print of TIME’s The Great Reopening cover This appears in the June 07, 2021 issue of TIME. This appears in the June 07, 2021 issue of TIME. The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"Water is already shaping our politics, our economy and our national security too. Whether it’s floods or droughts, storms or wildfires—too much water, or too little—water shapes lives in the United States and around the world."

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One of the greatest lessons of the pandemic is that we can meet the challenges of existential threats when we combine the collective power of our creativity, innovation and industry. As the climate crisis worsens, we need to address protecting and preserving water with the same urgency that we put into creating vaccines. We need to act like lives are hanging in the balance—because they are. Water is already shaping our politics, our economy and our national security too. Whether it’s floods or droughts, storms or wildfires—too much water, or too little—water shapes lives in the United States and around the world. We are currently seeing this play out in real time in the West, which in many ways is ground zero for climate change, as we see the intersection between mega-drought and fire season colliding with one another. Back in 2012, the intelligence community prepared a report on global water security, forecasting that within a decade water shortages and floods in many countries would “risk instability and state failure, increase regional tensions, and distract them from working with the United States.” The same report predicted that before 2040, the world’s demand for fresh water would not keep up with the supply, unless we managed our water far better than we do today. More from TIME Just this year, World Central Kitchen worked closely with the World Food Programme to deliver 27,000 food kits to Guatemalan families in the months after intense hurricanes ripped the country apart. The crops that sustained them were destroyed, and in some places it’s taken months for the waters to subside. It’s clear from this example and too many others that water shortages and mega storms fueled by climate change are already endangering peace and prosperity in different parts of the world. If we’re being honest, we can see that potential here at home too. But the truth is, it doesn’t have to be this way. Water can and should be a source of cooperation, innovation, and generosity. From the source to the sink, we need to be much smarter about how we manage water—and share our knowhow, technology and investment—so that nature and people can thrive together. Let’s start with the biggest use of water: our food. Agriculture accounts for roughly 70 percent of water use worldwide. Our planet is groaning under the weight of our demands for more, as the population of the world grows while rising temperatures make fresh water harder to find. We need to ask critical questions about how we can do more with less. Where can we farm smarter, using cover crops or more efficient irrigation to protect soil and water? What is the balance of having enough fish in the oceans to keep a thriving food chain, while also providing enough seafood to sustainably feed people and support fishing jobs? The good news is that if we take the time to think and act collectively, there are solutions that will allow us to feed more people while also protecting our water. We can apply innovations in technology like electronic monitors that help farmers and ranchers precisely manage the nutrients they put in the soil, so they don’t become pollutants in our water; or satellite navigation that help lower the costs of sustainable fishing for businesses around the world, so that the seafood industry is both environmentally and economically sustainable. We also need to ask big questions about how we can best work with nature to mitigate some of the worst water impacts of climate change? Where can we support natural infrastructure to protect communities from water shortages, or floods, or storm surge? We need to stop damaging the resources that we have, conserve what is left, and find ways to live differently. We need to farm on land and harvest from the sea with new methods that build a better future. Most importantly, we need to invest in one another—in communities that care for each other before disaster strikes, not just after the storm or the fire. It is all too easy to take water for granted. But water is ever-present in the disasters we are enduring at home and around the world. It needs to be present in our thinking, our planning, and in our policies, so that we can plan for our future, too. Get our climate newsletter. Learn how the week’s major news story connects back to the climate crisis. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Quito is a great jumping-off point to explore all manner of natural wonders, including volcanoes, hot springs and national parks—all of which have been made more accessible with the launch of two convenient tourist-bus services: Wanderbus Ecuador supplies guided set itineraries, and Ecuador Hop offers open-ended hop-on-hop-off options.

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Ecuador’s stunning capital city is also a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its Colonial Center bursting with examples of 16th to 18th century architecture and design. But there are plenty of new reasons to visit Quito: Zingaro, a restaurant and gastronomic hub where rotating chefs provide casual takes on both regional dishes and world food, cocktails and beer, recently opened in the La Vicentina neighborhood. The Casa Anabela Hotel Boutique offers 11 rooms in a renovated, and strikingly pink, late 19th century building. And the elegant Casa Gangotena, a Relais & Châteaux hotel in the historic center of Quito, just opened its first spa. (Go for the signature Chuspa Andina massage, which utilizes pouches full of warm Andean herbs.) Quito is also a great jumping-off point to explore all manner of natural wonders, including volcanoes, hot springs and national parks—all of which have been made more accessible with the launch of two convenient tourist-bus services: Wanderbus Ecuador supplies guided set itineraries, and Ecuador Hop offers open-ended hop-on-hop-off options. —Karen Catchpole Contact us at letters@time.com.

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A series of studies looked into relationships in the age of COVID-19. Here's what researchers learned so far.

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The pseudo-scientific formula that explains most human bonding is basically time + affection + togetherness = relationship. So what happens to humans and their interconnectedness when two of the key elements—time and togetherness—are removed or increased? Can digital communication replace human to human contact? How do couples cope with stressful events they have never before encountered? This is the focus of a series of studies published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, which has dedicated several special issues to relationships in the time of COVID-19. “When COVID hit it became clear to me that… it would be really important for us to provide a space for relationship science to showcase their work,” says Pamela Lannutti, the director of the Center for Human Sexuality Studies at Widener University in Chester, Penn., and one of the editors of the series of issues. So the journal put out a call for researchers who had begun research on what relationships were like in this unique set of circumstances and the studies flooded in. Some of the results were obvious: health workers needed supportive spouses during this time, digital communication with friends helped with loneliness and college couples who were dating grew apart when they couldn’t see each other. Others were a little more surprising. Here’s what we’ve learned so far. Gender roles in the home got more, not less, defined. A study out of New Zealand found that during the stay-at-home measures, with people working from home and schools closed, each partner in heterosexual relationships had to take on more responsibilities around the house. But women took on many more. While both men and women recognized the situation was imbalanced, it only led to relationship dissatisfaction among the women, unless the men were doing a lot of childcare. That is, the men could see the burden was being unevenly carried, but it didn’t bother them. “There’s definitely a shift back towards traditional gender roles in ways that perhaps weren’t there before COVID,” says Lannutti. “Here’s something that came along and just shook up society in this really unexpected and really quick way. And still those gender roles were so powerful.” Contrary to expectations, lonely single people didn’t settle. Using a multinational survey of almost 700 single people, most of them female, a group of researchers from across the globe found that single people were more interested in finding a partner if they were more concerned about COVID-19. The researchers expected single people to lower their standards given the exigent circumstances. They did not. Not even about looks. “They still cared about physical attractiveness,” says the journal’s co-editor, Jennifer Bevan, a professor of communication at Chapman University in Orange, California, “which I thought was such an interesting element.” Read More:The Forever Boyfriends of the Pandemic. People who don’t like video chat just kept meeting in person. Getting together via video took off during the early days of lockdown, with workplaces and families having to quickly adjust to meeting over Zoom, Google meetings, Bluejeans or other digital platforms. A Utah State university study found that those who had difficulty adjusting to this form of communication were more likely to violate social distancing protocols and pleas to avoid gatherings, in order to see other humans. “The need for connection overrides what’s happening at that moment, which is a scary thought,” says Bevan. “How do we kind of override the need for connection? I know it’s really difficult to do.” Same sex couples who avoided fighting were less happy than those who voiced their complaints. In a study of LGBTQ couples, those who refrained from complaining about their relationships when something was wrong had less satisfying relationships, suffered more anxiety and depression, and leaned more heavily on substance use during COVID-19. Their dissatisfaction with their relationships was also worse if they were people of color or had higher internalized homophobia. The researchers noted that one fifth of the participants in the study had decided to move in together because of the pandemic—which paradoxically had made them less anxious while also making the relationship less stable. “We recommend same-sex couples to actively discuss their moving in decisions,” the researchers suggested, “rather than rushing to cohabit without adequate considerations.” When people can’t meet in person, even fictional characters and celebrities feel like friends. The lockdown proved to be a bumper time for what researchers call “parasocial relationships,” that is, relationships with folks who don’t know you, but with whom you form an attachment. Because of the isolation and the direct access people had to celebrities via social media as well as via streaming platforms, many people became much more attentive to their favored celebrities. The study found that people maintained stable relationships with friends as the social distancing measures went on, but felt much closer to the celebrities they followed. The editors theorized this closeness might partly be the result of people consuming a lot more content in their homes, through their personal devices. “It‘s not the same as going to an arena and seeing the concert. They’re sitting at their house,” says Bevan, who acknowledged that Taylor Swift helped get her through some hard days. “It makes that experience a lot different.” These can be famous people, or even fictional characters. Read More: Bennifer 2.0 Got You Pining for Your Ex? Therapists Say Forget It These 5 resilience-building habits seemed to help couples soldier on. “A problem a lot of couples can face during times of hardship or crisis is relational uncertainty—meaning they aren’t sure how committed they or their partners are or where the relationship is going,” says Helen Lillie, a post-doctoral Fellow at the University of Utah. According to the school of relationship science known as Communication Theory of Resilience, couples who focus on five habits can weather hard times more easily. The five techniques are: maintaining some semblance of normalcy with their routines, talking to their spouse as well as sympathetic others about their concerns, reminding themselves of who they are and what they believe, reframing their situation in a more positive or different way and focusing on how good things will be when the crisis is over. Lillie’s study surveyed 561 people to ascertain whether couples who used those strategies were getting on with their partners better during the pandemic, and found that they did. The study also found humor helped couples cope with the lockdown, although it didn’t always improve couple communication. The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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How do you cultivate a healthy workplace culture when it’s rooted in poisoned soil?

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time

“Empathy is one of the values we’ve had from our founding.” That’s what Chelsea MacDonald, SVP of people and operations at Ada, a tech startup that builds customer-service platforms, told me when we first got on the phone for this story in June. When the company was in its early stages, with about 50 people, empathy was “a bit more ad hoc,” because you could bump into colleagues at lunch. But that was pre-pandemic, and before a hiring surge. Now, MacDonald says, empathy is built on communication (as many as five times a week, she communicates in some way to the entire company about empathy), through tools (specifically, one that tracks whom people communicate with most and who gets left out), through intimacy (cultivated through special-interest groups) and through transparency (senior leaders share notes after every meeting). At various points in our discussion, MacDonald describes empathy as “more than just, ‘Hey, care about other people’” and “making space for other people to make mistakes.” More from TIME She was one of a dozen executives whose communications directors reached out when I tweeted about the office trend of “empathy.” Adriana Bokel Herde, the chief people officer at the software company Pegasystems, told me about the three-hour virtual empathy-training session the company had created for managers—and how nearly 90% had joined voluntarily. Kieran Snyder, the CEO of Textio, a predictive-writing company, said the biggest surprise about empathy in the workplace is that it and accountability are “flip sides of the same coin.” “We had an engineer give some feedback that was really striking,” she told me. “She said that the most empathetic thing her manager could do for her was be really clear about expectations. Let me be an adult and handle my deliverables so that I know what to do.” All of these leaders see empathy as a path forward after 17 months of societal and professional tumult. And employees do feel that it’s missing from the workplace: according to the 2021 State of Workplace Empathy Study, administered by software company Businessolver, only 1 in 4 employees believed empathy in their organizations was “sufficient.” Companies know they must start thinking seriously about addressing their empathy deficit or risk losing workers to companies that are. Still, I’ve also heard from workers who think it’s all nonsense: the latest in a long string of corporate attempts to distract from toxic or exploitative company culture, yet another scenario in which employers implore workers to be honest and vulnerable about their needs, then implicitly or explicitly punish them for it. If you’ve read all this and are still confused about what workplace empathy actually is, you’re not alone. Outside the office, developing empathy means trying to understand and share the feelings or experiences of someone else. Empathy is different from sympathy, which is more one-directional: you feel sad for what someone else is going through, but you have little understanding of what it feels like. Because empathy is predicated on experience, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to cultivate. At best, it’s expanded sympathy; at worst, it’s trying to force connections between wildly different lived experiences (see especially: white people attempting to empathize with the experience of systemic racism). Illustration by Sol Cotti for TIME Applied in a corporate setting, the very idea of empathy begins to fall apart. Is it bringing their whole selves, to use an HR buzzword, to work? Is it cultivating niceness? Is it making space for sympathy and allowing people to air grievances, or is it leadership modeling vulnerability? Over the course of reporting this story, I talked to more than a dozen people from the C-suites of midsize and large companies that had decided to make empathy central to their corporate messaging or strategy. Some plans were more fleshed out and self-interrogating. Some thought an empathy training available to three time zones was enough. Others understood empathy as small gestures, like looking at a co-worker’s calendar, seeing they’ve been in meetings all day, and giving them a 10-minute pause to get water before you meet with them. But where did this current push for workplace empathy begin? According to Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president and chief executive officer of the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM) and author of the upcoming book Reset: A Leader’s Guide to Work in an Age of Upheaval, it sort of started with, well, him. In the fall of 2020, he’d been hearing a similar refrain from businesses: everyone was tired. Tired of the pandemic; of stalled diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) efforts; of their bosses and their employees. When he looked at the 2020 State of Workplace Empathy Study, then in its fourth year, the reasons for that exhaustion became clear. People were tired because they were working all the time, and trying to sort out caregiving responsibilities, and dealing with oscillating threat levels from COVID-19. But they were also tired, he believed, because there was a generalized empathy deficit. Read More: Hourly Workers Are Demanding Better Pay and Benefits—and Getting Them That “empathy deficit” became the cornerstone of Taylor’s State of Society address in November 2020. “Much of the resurgence of DE&I programming in the wake of the George Floyd killing was supposed to encourage open conversation and mutual understanding,” he said. “But it often bypassed empathy. Well-meaning programs devolve into grievance sessions … rather than listening and trying to relate.” SHRM is an incredibly influential organization, with more than 300,000 members in 165 countries. So while it’s not as if empathy efforts were nonexistent before, Taylor’s speech encouraged them. Even if members weren’t there to listen to his words, his message—and the data from the study—began to filter into HR departments, leaving a trail of optional learning modules and Zoom trainings in its wake. The backlash started shortly thereafter. Taylor acknowledges as much. “I see these companies jumping on it,” he told me. “But it’s not an initiative. It’s not a buzzword. It’s a cultural principle. If you make this promise, as a company, if you put this word out there, your employees are going to hold you to it.” He adds that empathy should go both ways: “There’s an expectation that employees can mess up; employers should be able to mess up too.” In the case of employees, many are frustrated by perceived hypocrisy. (All employees who spoke critically about their employers for this story requested anonymity out of concern for their jobs.) One woman told me her company, Viacom, has been doing a lot of messaging about empathy, particularly when it comes to mental health. At the same time, it has switched to a health plan that’s more restrictive when it comes to accessing mental-health professionals and care. (Viacom attributes the change to a shift in policy on the part of their insurance provider and says it has worked to remedy it.) Other employees report repeated invocations of empathy from upper management in staff meetings, but little training on how to implement it with those they supervise. As one female employee at a performing-arts nonprofit told me, “In a one-on-one meeting with my boss where I was openly struggling and tried to discuss it, I was told that mental health is important, but improving my job performance was more important.” A customer-service representative for a fintech company said empathy had been centered as a “core value” of the organization: something they were meant to practice with one another but also with customers. To quantify worker empathy, the company sends out customer-satisfaction surveys (CSATs) after each interaction. It found that dips in CSAT scores, which were measured by an automated system, reliably happened when a customer had a long hold time, which had little to do with whether the representative modeled empathy. Yet employees were still promoted based on these scores. The central tension emerges again and again: “There’s an irony, because there’s the equity that you want to present to employees—while also giving special consideration and solutions for specific situations,” Joyce Kim, the chief marketing officer of Genesys, which provides customer service and call-center tech for businesses, told me. “Those two are often incongruent.” Put another way, it’s hard, at least from a leadership perspective, to cultivate equal treatment for everyone while also making exceptions for everyone. If you allow an employee to work different hours, have different expectations of accessibility or have more leeway because of an illness, how is that fair to those who don’t need those things? How, in other words, do you accommodate difference while still maximizing profits? Illustration by Sol Cotti for TIME What companies are trying to do, at heart, is train employees to treat one another not like productivity robots, but like people: people with kids, people with responsibilities, people shouldering the weight of systemic discrimination. But that runs counter to the main goal of most companies, which is to create and distribute a product—whether that’s a service, an object or a design—as efficiently as possible. They might dress up that goal in less capitalistic language, but the end point remains the same: profits, the more the better, with as little friction as possible. Within this framework, the frictionless employee is the ideal employee. But a lack of friction is a privilege. It means looking and acting and behaving like people in power, which, at least in American society, means being white, male and cisgender; with few or no caregiving responsibilities; no physical or mental disabilities; no strong accent or awkward social tics or physical reminders, like “bad teeth,” of growing up poor; and no needs for accommodations—religious, dietary or otherwise. For decades, offices were filled with people who fit this bill, or who were able to hide or groom away the parts of themselves that did not. The women and people of color who were admitted into these spaces did so with an unspoken caveat that they would make themselves amenable to the status quo. They didn’t bring their “whole selves” to work. Not even close. They brought only the parts that would blend in with the rest of the workforce. If you were sexually harassed, you didn’t make a fuss about it. If someone used a racial slur, same deal. If there were Christmas celebrations that made the one Jewish employee feel weird, that person was expected not to make waves. Bad behavior wasn’t friction, per se. But a worker whose identity already created a form of friction complaining about it? That sure was. Historians of labor have pointed out that this posture was particularly prevalent in office settings, where salaried workers were often saturated in narratives of a great, unified purpose. If employees took care of the company, and flattened themselves into as close to the image of the ideal worker as possible, the company would take care of them, in compensation and eventual pension. Which is one of many reasons that white collar office workers have been resistant to unionization efforts, which felt, as sociologist C. Wright Mills has noted, like a crass, almost hysterical form of office friction. Machinists and longshoremen were laborers and had no recourse other than the big stick of the union to advocate for themselves. Office workers could solve conflict man to man, boss to employee, like, well, the white gentlemen that they were—or at the very least pretended to be. This mindset began to erode over the course of the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s—first, when massive waves of layoffs and benefit cuts destabilized the myth of the benevolent parent company. But the white maleness of the culture also began to (very gradually) shift in the wake of legal protections against discrimination related to gender, age, disability and, only recently, sexual orientation. White male workers remained dominant in most industries, particularly in leadership roles. But they began to lose their unquestioned monopoly on the norms of the workplace. Some changes were embraced; others, especially around sexual harassment and racial discrimination, were changed via legal force. Read More: The Pandemic Reset the Balance Between Workers and Employers. How Bosses Respond Will Shape the Future of Work The overarching goal of HR departments in the past, going back to the field’s origins in “scientific management” of factory assembly lines, was keeping employees healthy enough to work efficiently. After 1964, their task expanded to include compliance with legal protections, in addition to the continued work of keeping employees healthy and “happy” enough to do their work well. “Unhappiness,” after all, is expensive—according to a Gallup estimate from 2013, dissatisfaction costs U.S. companies $450 million to $550 million a year in lost productivity. Unhappiness, in other words, is friction. But as the workplace continues to diversify, how do you maintain the worker “happiness” of a bunch of different sorts of people, from different backgrounds, with different cultural contexts? There are some obvious fixes: continuing to erode the power of monoculture (in which one, limited way of being/working becomes the way of being/working to which all other employees must aspire); recruiting and retaining managers who actually know how to manage; creating a culture that encourages taking time off. But usually, the proposed solution takes the form of the HR initiative. Take the 2010s push for “wellness,” which manifested in the form of mental-health seminars, gym memberships and free Fitbits. You can view these initiatives as part of a desire to reduce health-insurance premiums. But you can also see them as a means of confronting the reality of a workforce that, in the wake of the Great Recession, was anxious about their finances and careers, particularly as more and more workers were replaced by subcontractors, who enjoyed even fewer protections and privileges. Or consider the push for DE&I programs in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2015. These initiatives aim to acknowledge a perceived source of friction—the fact that a company is very white, its leadership remains “snowcapped,” or the workplace is quietly or aggressively hostile to Black and brown employees—while also providing a proposed solution. The corporate DE&I initiative communicates that we see this problem, we’re working to solve it, so you can talk less about it. Illustration by Peter Arkle for TIME Get a print of TIME’s “Rethinking Work” cover here Wellness and DE&I initiatives are frequently unsatisfying and demoralizing, particularly for those workers they are ostensibly designed to benefit. They often lean heavily on the labor of those with the least power within an organization. And they approach systemic problems with solutions designed to disrupt people’s lives as little as possible. (A three-hour webinar will not create a culture of inclusion.) But the superficiality is part of the point. Contain the friction, but do so by creating as little additional friction as possible, because a series of eruptions is easier to contain than a truly paradigm-shifting one that threatens the status quo and, by extension, the company’s public profile and profitability. According to a 2021 SHRM report, in the five years since DE&I initiatives swept the corporate world, 42% of Black employees, 26% of Asian employees and 21% of Hispanic employees reported experiencing unfair treatment based on their race or ethnicity. The ramifications of racial inequity (lost productivity, turnover and absenteeism) over the past five years may have cost the U.S. up to $172 billion. But instead of acknowledging what it is about the company culture that makes it difficult to retain diverse hires, or what might have to change to recoup those losses, companies blame individual workers who were a “bad fit.” DE&I initiatives don’t fail because there’s a “diversity pipeline problem.” It’s because those in power aren’t willing to relinquish any of it. A similar contradiction applies to the rise of “corporate empathy.” At its heart, it’s a set of policies, initiatives and messaging developed to respond to the “friction” of a workforce unsettled by the pandemic, a continuing racial reckoning and sustained political anxiety, capped off by an uprising, on a workday, days after most of the workforce had returned from winter breaks. Many empathy initiatives are well-intentioned. But coming from an employer, they still, ultimately, say: We see you are breaking in two, we are too, but how can we collectively still work as if we’re not? Therein lies the empathy trap. So long as organizations view employees with different needs as sources of friction, and solutions to those needs as examples of unfairness, they will continue to promote and retain employees with the capacity to make their personalities, needs and identities as frictionless as possible. They will encourage “bringing the whole self to work,” but only on a good day. They will fetishize “sharing personal stories,” but only when the ramifications don’t interfere with the product or create interpersonal conflict. This is what happens when you conceive of empathy as allowances: Those who would benefit from it become less desirable workers. Their friction is centered, and their value decreases. Our society is built around the goals of capitalism—and capitalism, and the ethos of individualism that thrives alongside it, is inherently in conflict with empathy. The qualities that make our bodies, selves and minds most amenable to those goals are prized above all else, and it is HR’s primary task to further cultivate those qualities, whether through “enrichment” or “wellness,” even when the most significant obstacle to either is the workplace itself. Why do the declarations of empathy feel so hollow? Because growth and profit do not reward it. Companies, HR professionals, managers, even the best trained can do only so much. A large portion of the dissatisfaction that employees feel is the result of actively toxic company policy, thoughtless management and executives clinging to the status quo. But a lot of it, too, is anger at systems that extend beyond the office: the fraying social safety nets, the decaying social bonds, the frameworks set up to devalue women’s work, the stubborn endurance of racism, the lack of protections or fair pay for the workers whose labor we ostensibly value most. We don’t know how to make people care about other people. No wonder workplace initiatives can feel so laughably incomplete. How do you cultivate a healthy workplace culture when it’s rooted in poisoned soil? “It’s not just a workplace empathy deficit,” Taylor told me. “It’s an American cultural deficit.” Petersen is co-author of the upcoming book Out of Office: The Big Problem and Bigger Promise of Working From Home The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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The internal obstacles are surmountable. Here's how to actually achieve your post-pandemic goals.

https://ti.me/2VSVZUB

time

With gyms, restaurants, and workplaces reopening, people from every part of my life are asking for expert advice on how to ingrain new and healthier habits as we re-emerge from our pandemic cocoons. Their instinct that now is the right time to make a change is spot on—my research shows that having a “fresh start” is a powerful motive to initiate positive change at home and at work. But what are the chances that a new, post-COVID fitness routine or commitment to meeting-free mornings will outlast our initial fervor? Unfortunately, even with the motivation of a fresh start, most self-improvement goals don’t pan out. One reason is that change is hard. But a more helpful explanation is that change requires the right strategy. I’ve devoted my academic career to the study of behavior change, and I’ve been startled by how often people fail to size up the obstacles they’ll need to surmount to achieve their objectives before charging forward with a strategy that’s poorly-suited to their circumstances. Setting audacious goals and visualizing success are all well and good, but most people would get farther faster if they customized their approach to counter the blockades that stand in their way. The internal obstacles that commonly prevent change—the tendency to give into temptation, to be lazy, to be forgetful, to experience self-doubt, and so on—are surmountable. But just as different maladies respond to different treatments, so too do different barriers to change. We can’t just throw any solution at them and expect great results. We need the right one. Tackling Temptation Take, for example, temptation. Falling prey to temptation is one of the most common reasons people fail to reach their goals. We mean to go to the gym, but Netflix beckons. We know we should prepare for an upcoming presentation, but scrolling through Facebook is more enticing. Psychologists Ayelet Fishbach and Kaitlin Woolley have shown that when pursuing goals that require resisting temptation, most people make a crucial mistake: they approach them in the way they believe will yield the greatest long-term payoff. But a more successful strategy is to try to make this kind of goal pursuit fun. Across multiple research studies, Fishbach and Woolley encouraged some participants (chosen at random) to choose healthy foods or exercises they expected to enjoy most while others were encouraged to choose foods and exercises they’d benefit from most. These studies demonstrated that people encouraged to approach healthy activities with a focus on short-term enjoyment persisted longer on their workouts and ate more healthy food. This research reveals that we’re better off when we harness temptation, rather than when we ignore it to focus on our long-term goals. One way of engineering success with this insight is through what I call “temptation bundling.” This technique involves pairing something tempting (like watching lowbrow tv) with a goal-oriented activity that isn’t inherently fun (like exercising or preparing a home-cooked meal). The “indulgence” is only permitted while working towards the goal. I’ve proven that temptation bundling can help gymgoers exercise more, but I’ve also heard stories of people using this technique to get ahead in school (by bundling trips to the library with indulgent snacks), master housework (by bundling it with a favorite podcast), and even improve relationships (by bundling get-togethers with trips to a favorite restaurant). Foiling Flake Out Of course, many goals—like strengthening bonds with loved ones through frequent calls, staying on track with medical check-ups, and even reducing waste by cancelling unnecessary subscriptions—aren’t inherently unpleasant to pursue. We just don’t get around to them because we’re forgetful. Estimates suggest, in fact, that we flake out on anywhere from a third to two thirds of our stated intentions, and forgetfulness plays a key role. The solution here has nothing to do with fun. Psychologist Peter Gollwitzer has shown that when most people make plans to attack their goals, they do it incorrectly, focusing on what they intend to do (say, saving more money) rather than what will trigger them to act. To avoid flaking out, it’s vital to link intentions with a trigger cue, like a specific time, place, or action. Making the right kind of plan is as simple as filling in the blanks in the sentence “when ___ happens, I’ll do ___.” So “I’ll increase my monthly retirement savings” has a missing ingredient, but “whenever I get a raise, I’ll increase my monthly retirement savings” is a more useful plan because it includes a trigger. Research done by myself and others shows that prompting people to think through the date and time cue that will spur them to act can increase follow-through on everything from voting to getting a flu shot or colonoscopy. Managing Missteps As a final example, many people fail to achieve their goals because they get discouraged by small setbacks. For over a decade, my Wharton colleague Marissa Sharif has had the ambitious goal of running every day. But, as a behavioral scientist, Marissa realized that a missed jog could easily spiral into a series of skipped workouts thanks to the aptly-named “what the hell effect.” Research on this psychological phenomenon shows that even small failures, like missing a daily diet goal by a few calories, can lead to downward spirals in behavior—like eating a whole apple pie. Marissa came up with a clever strategy to counter this risk. She allowed herself two emergency skip days each week. If she couldn’t squeeze in a workout, she’d let herself declare an emergency, and this kept her on track. Marissa has proven that this strategy works for other people at risk of abandoning their goals after a small failure, too. In one study, Marissa and a collaborator asked hundreds of people to do thirty-five annoying tasks every day for a week in exchange for $1 a batch. These workers were randomly assigned to three groups. Some got the tough goal of completing their work every day of the week. Others were given the easier objective of completing their work just five days out of seven. Finally, a third group was told to complete the assignment every day but got two “emergencies” to excuse missed work. Everyone knew they would get a $5 bonus if they managed to achieve their goal. The chance to declare an emergency proved invaluable. A whopping fifty-three percent of those allowed to take “emergencies” hit their goal, compared with just twenty-six percent of people in the (objectively identical) easy group and twenty-one percent of participants with the seven days-per-week goal. The beauty of the system was that people were reluctant to use emergencies willy nilly (wisely hoarding their chits for real disasters). But having a tough goal with wiggle room kept people highly motivated even when they stumbled – blips no longer spiraled out of control because they could be written off. These findings demonstrate that allowing for a limited number of emergencies is one way to ensure small mistakes won’t derail goal pursuit. Temptation, flake out, and the what the hell effect are just a few of the many internal barriers to goal achievement that behavioral scientists have identified, ranging from self-doubt to bad habits. As people the world over seize upon a spike in motivation to change their lives for the better at the end of this pandemic era, I’m confident that successful change will come easiest to those who diagnose the barriers they’ll face and counter them strategically. Adapted from Milkman’s new book, How to Change: The Science of Getting From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"The crisis in male identity that has been escalating for the past half-century has had a profound effect on depictions of men in pop culture," writes Judy Berman.

https://ti.me/3rnlFEH

time

Ted Lasso was either TV’s most or least surprising breakout hit of 2020. On one hand, it was a sitcom adapted from a series of commercials and debuting on the relatively overlooked Apple TV+ platform. But it was also a sweet soccer comedy with a recognizable star, co-creator Jason Sudeikis, that arrived at a mid-lockdown moment when the demand for comfort viewing and sports content was surging. The combination proved irresistible. Instead of disappearing on Apple TV+, it built word-of-mouth momentum to become the service’s first big hit. Sudeikis won a Golden Globe for his performance as an American-football coach imported to helm an English Premier League team, and the show recently scored 20 Emmy nominations. Fans, critics and awards voters all seemed to be responding to the show’s fundamental decency. Here was a comedy about a straight, white man’s man—immersed in the heterosexual, homosocial world of pro sports—who’s also thoughtful, nurturing, kind. The crisis in male identity that has been escalating for the past half-century has had a profound effect on depictions of men in pop culture. For socially conscious creators, the increasingly common association of masculinity with misogyny and sexual misconduct presents a problem. How do you write a male character—especially one who’s straight, white and cisgender—who is likable, relatable and maybe even aspirational for the typical viewer who shares his identity, without making that guy odious to everyone who doesn’t? Ted Lasso, which returns for a second season July 23, solves this by making its protagonist a sort of happy-go-lucky fantasy creature, the kind of magical role model usually confined to children’s stories. Ted is hardly the only idealized male specimen in entertainment made for grown-ups, of course, but I’ve never seen another fictional character who seemed so deliberately constructed to teach other adult men how to behave in the world. Brendan Hunt, Cristo Fernández and Jason Sudeikis in “Ted Lasso” Apple TV+ In the NBC Sports promo that introduced him in 2013, Ted Lasso has been inexplicably summoned across the Atlantic to coach Tottenham Hotspur—despite his ignorance of the basics of soccer. After three days of cleat-in-mouth moments, he’s fired. Yet his goofy, quixotic, quintessentially American optimism earned the character a following. A slightly different, even more endearing, version of Ted appears in the show’s pilot. This one isn’t stupid. He knows he’s likely to become the laughingstock of the sports world. He’s just positive enough to believe he can learn and secure enough to shrug off the ridicule. “Ted knows that he’s being insulted; he just knows that, ‘Well, they don’t know me well enough to really be talking about me,’” Sudeikis explained on Seth Meyers. “It doesn’t rattle him in the least.” Besides, Ted’s marriage is in trouble. Moving thousands of miles to coach the fictional team AFC Richmond is a way of honoring his wife’s request for space. As the first season unfolds, his good qualities keep multiplying. A paternal figure to his players, he cares more about teamwork and good sportsmanship than winning. He’s jovial, culturally literate and enlightened on issues of social justice. A typical Lasso-ism: “You beatin’ yourself up is like Woody Allen playin’ the clarinet: I don’t wanna hear it.” He values the contributions of his staff and treats women with respect. In Season 2, we learn that he’s even a superlative lover. “So eager to please,” a satisfied one-night stand raves. Surrounding Ted are deeply flawed people—mostly men. Season 1 finds hothead team captain Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), once a powerhouse, past his prime and too defined by his past to imagine life after football. Star player Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster) has a massive ego and a taste for bullying. His favorite punching bag is nebbishy equipment manager Nathan (Nick Mohammed). Ted figures out how to get the best out of these men as players and as people. Over the course of that season, he pumps up Nate, who turns out to have great strategic insights. He benches Jamie to prove that bad behavior won’t fly even from a top goal scorer, before realizing the lad could use some fatherly TLC. Instead of taming Roy, Ted counsels him to harness his anger as an asset. Ted’s superpowers are traits more often associated with women: he listens to people, intuits what they need and cares enough to help. Gandolfini as mob boss Tony Soprano in HBO's The Sopranos. HBO James Selflessness sets Ted apart most from so many other TV protagonists framed as epitomizing masculinity. In the late ’90s, The Sopranos ushered in the age of the antihero. Brilliant, flawed, messy if not outright violent characters like Don Draper, Walter White, The Wire’s Stringer Bell and Al Swearengen of Deadwood were men of action, not emotion. They would literally murder people, build meth empires or drink themselves into stupors instead of going to therapy. (Tony Soprano famously went to therapy but never stopped killing.) Their creators solved the problem of representing masculinity by making these characters terrible, enviable and internally conflicted all at once. Comedy has seen its share of influential male antiheroes as well, from “social assassin” Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm to New Girl’s prickly, problem-drinker love interest Nick Miller. Lovable sitcom dads are harder to find in the 21st century, and might be altogether absent if it weren’t for a wave of uplifting shows featuring queer (Modern Family) or nonwhite (black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat) fathers. More enduring has been the neanderthal sitcom husband, forged in The Honeymooners, perfected by All in the Family and regurgitated in The King of Queens and Last Man Standing. The archetype remains so entrenched that it was recently satirized at length in AMC’s Kevin Can F**k Himself. Yet Kevin couldn’t exist without a critical mass of viewers growing weary of the man-baby couch-potato stock character. It’s that same, younger audience that embraced Ted Lasso and his forerunners: the fantasy manly men who populate the gentlest contemporary sitcoms. Parks and Recreation gave us Nick Offerman’s Ron Swanson, a rugged libertarian who holds zero problematic views and is putty in the hands of strong women. Even in a pandemic-set reunion, Ron said nothing negative about what many real people with his politics saw as a mask-mandating nanny state. Consider, also, Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) of Schitt’s Creek. This is a man who gained and lost a fortune without knowingly participating in any nefarious financial schemes; he’s not even incompetent. Resplendent in designer suits, Johnny embraces his downfall as a chance to spend more time with his family. Amy Poehler as Leslie Knope and Nick Offerman as Ron Swanson. Colleen Hayes—NBCU Photo Bank/Getty Images I enjoyed both shows, just as I enjoy Ted Lasso. But there’s something weirdly brittle about the way these characters are constructed. They’re simply too perfect, their personalities so meticulously designed to balance macho cred with sensitive masculinity that they can withstand no external pressure. Why is TV so desperate to create not just a good man, but the best man? Why, when Ted Lasso’s separation comes up, is the only explanation provided that his wife finds his optimism exhausting? Would the whole character crumble if, say, he was just a workaholic? It might. Because, even in the early episodes of a second season that begins to delve deeper into his psychology, Ted isn’t a real person. He’s a role model, like Harry Potter or Mary Poppins or Superman. And there’s something depressing about how Ted, Ron and Johnny come off as teaching tools more than as funnier versions of actual men. It’s hard to address a crisis in masculinity when, as a culture, we can’t imagine what a decent, unexceptional guy might look like. No wonder the entertainment media has gone to such lengths in recent weeks to position Sudeikis as not just a nice person—which, by many moving accounts, he is—but a real-life Ted Lasso. To the extent that TV mirrors society, the creation of positive male characters will be fraught for as long as the cluster of systemic ills known as “toxic masculinity” endures. Meanwhile, though, I’m not sure it helps to tie idealized male characters to traditionally masculine traits—the pro-feminist bootstrapper, the loving soccer coach. In many ways, this Good Man™ reminds me of another fantasy figure, the girlboss, whose female identity magically redeems attributes we associate with ruthless men. Isn’t it possible that gender essentialism is exacerbating things? Whether male, female or nonbinary, the characters we need most now may well be ones defined by anything but their gender. Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . 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India’s “Pink City” was already a famed tourist destination. But this year, Jaipur launched the “Night Sky Tourism” initiative, which provides visitors free access to telescopes to view stars, planets and other celestial bodies.

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India’s “Pink City” was already a famed tourist destination, known for its salmon-hued palaces, colorful festivals and intricate craftwork. But this year, in a bid to boost tourism, Jaipur launched the “Night Sky Tourism” initiative, which provides visitors free access to telescopes to view stars, planets and other celestial bodies. At the heart of this venture is ­Jantar ­Mantar, an astronomical observatory and UNESCO World Heritage Site that houses the world’s largest stone sundial. There are also new luxe lodging options from hospitality group Leela Palaces, whose Leela Palace Jaipur features private plunge pools and personal butlers, and Six Senses, which is set to open a wellness center and resort in Fort Barwara, a refurbished 14th century fortification. —Abhishyant Kidangoor Contact us at letters@time.com.

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After 17 months of having to show up to jobs in person, putting their lives on the line while white collar and knowledge workers stayed home and saw their savings grow, America’s hourly workers may be gaining leverage.

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Xue Vang had long known that his job deicing planes, loading bags and chocking wheels at the Missoula airport was dangerous, especially in the Montana winter, when blinding snow and rain obscure the spinning engines that can suck in a human body. But this past winter, the conditions at Unifi, which services planes for United and Delta, became intolerable. Because of the pandemic, understaffing was so bad that Vang was simultaneously handling two or three planes on the “ramp,” or tarmac, while making sure new trainees didn’t get inhaled into the engines. One day, Vang’s colleague Jared Bonney was complaining that he’d been promised a raise for years that never materialized. “I was like, ‘Join the club,’” Vang recalls. Bonney’s pay was capped at $10.40 an hour; Vang, whose job was more senior, was capped at $11.50. Single adults would need to make $14.13 an hour to support themselves in Missoula, according to MIT’s living-wage calculator. Other Unifi workers started sharing complaints about low pay, lousy conditions and broken promises of raises, even though their jobs required specialized training and were critical to flight safety. A walkout could get them fired—Unifi was not unionized—and plans for one three years earlier had fizzled. But in April, when Bonney says a Unifi HR manager called the workers “unskilled” and undeserving of more money, getting fired didn’t seem so bad. Not when Panda Express and Taco Bell were posting job openings starting around $14 an hour. “It was just a boiling point for me,” says Bonney, 25, who couldn’t save money after paying his bills— even while living with his parents. Jared Bonney, 25 Location: Missoula, Mont. Used to earn $10.40 an hour working outdoors on the tarmac servicing planes at the Missoula airport; now is an assistant manager at a local casino earning $12 an hour plus tips Rebecca Stumpf for TIME The strike happened on a cold Monday in April. Six of the 15 workers who had vowed to participate, including Bonney and Vang, showed up for their 4 a.m. shift and clocked in with the intention of telling their supervisor they were staging a walkout. They were met by the regional manager, who had been alerted to their plans by one of their colleagues. Rather than grounding flights, the workers had their badges confiscated. Undeterred, they regrouped in the baggage area, then went to Target to get supplies to make picket signs. For the rest of the week, they and two other workers who had missed the initial walkout picketed outside the airport. Within two weeks, all had been fired. Vang has no regrets. “I hope that we spark something,” he says. “We want this movement to keep going—people deserve a living wage.” Unifi did not return multiple emails and calls seeking comment. Read More: Companies Are Embracing Empathy to Keep Employees Happy. It’s Not That Easy The pandemic was a breaking point for low-wage workers like Bonney and Vang, who are fed up with being treated poorly while barely making enough to get by. Over the past 40 years, while wages have soared for higher-income workers, they’ve barely budged for people at the bottom of the income scale. From 1979 to 2019, wages for the lowest-paid decile of workers rose 3.3% when adjusted for inflation, while wages for the top 5% of workers rose 63.2%, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning think tank. Over that time, as middle-class jobs were automated or sent overseas, and as more people vied for what was left in the wake of the 2001 and 2007–2009 recessions, employers had the upper hand. By one estimate, 53 million people—around 44% of U.S. workers— were low-wage before the pandemic, making an average of $10.22 an hour. But after 17 months of having to show up to jobs in person, putting their lives on the line while white collar and knowledge workers stayed home and saw their savings grow, America’s hourly workers may be gaining leverage. Entire shifts of employees at fast-food restaurants, amusement parks and airports are walking off their jobs, pasting handwritten notes on the doors that say we quit. In Worcester, Mass., more than 700 nurses have been on strike since March 8, protesting working conditions and reduced staffing as their parent company, Tenet Healthcare, posted a large profit during the pandemic. Frito-Lay workers in Kansas went on strike July 5 to protest low wages and 84-hour workweeks, and Volvo employees in Virginia went on strike in April and again in July, calling for wage increases and signing bonuses. Farmworkers in California are walking off the job to demand higher pay. Staff at a Burger King in Lincoln, Nebraska announced their resignations on the sign outside the restaurant. Rachael Flores—SWNS Employers are being forced to raise wages and offer perks like college tuition and signing bonuses. What economists call the reservation wage for people without a college degree—the lowest pay people are willing to accept to take a job—rose 26% in March compared with the same time last year. It’s too soon to tell if this is just a characteristic of an economy suddenly reopening and leaving employers scrambling for workers, or whether these changes will be permanent. There were signs, however, that workers were losing patience with years of low pay even before the pandemic. The rock-bottom unemployment rate—in November 2019 it hit 3.5%, the lowest in decades—gave them confidence to start pushing back. Read more: Will Animal-Friendly Workplaces Catch on as Workers Demand Flexibility to Care for Pets? In 2019, there were more work stoppages involving 1,000 or more employees than in any other year since 2001. The federal minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour, and 20 states have not increased their minimum wage beyond that. All other states have either tied the minimum wage to inflation, which ensures it will keep rising as prices do, or increased it. Companies like Amazon and Costco announced as early as 2018 that they were increasing pay for all U.S. employees to $15 and $14, respectively, a move that forced competitors to pay more too. (In March, Costco raised its starting wage to $16 an hour.) “The workforce was getting restless after years of stagnant wages and a decline in union representation that traditionally gave them a voice,” says Thomas Kochan, a professor of work and employment research at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. “For low-wage workers, the pandemic demonstrated how much inequality there is—it’s really leading them to ask, Is this the kind of job I want? Or should I leave?” A century ago, widespread labor unrest led to an overhaul in the way workers were treated in America. At the turn of the 20th century, the U.S. had low unionization rates and few social benefits compared with other industrialized nations. But as labor shortages grew during World War I and inflation rose at the end of the war, workers began to revolt. In 1919, one-fifth of the nation’s workforce participated in strikes, including the walkout of 350,000 steel workers. Determined to head off unionization and maintain some control of workers’ lives, companies started to offer more benefits, figuring they could reduce turnover and increase productivity, says Joseph A. McCartin, a professor of history at Georgetown University. “Employers were realizing it simply doesn’t pay to treat workers like machinery that you are going to use up and throw out—when you do that, they organize,” McCartin says. This ushered in an era of “welfare capitalism” in which companies offered benefits like pensions, apprenticeship programs, stock ownership and health insurance. U.S. Steel, which had refused to shorten the 12-hour workday during the 1919 strike, reduced it to eight hours in 1923. General Electric offered a pension plan and paid vacation for blue collar workers; General Motors helped employees buy homes and set aside a portion of its profits for employee bonuses. Accidents decreased, productivity went up, and turnover slowed; General Electric’s turnover rate of 50% in the 1910s fell to half that by 1922. Illustration by Peter Arkle for TIME Get a print of TIME’s “Rethinking Work” cover here What happened a century ago might sound familiar. Some of today’s biggest companies are announcing big pay and benefit increases to attract workers and reduce turnover. Since the pandemic began, Target has said it would permanently raise the starting wage for U.S. employees to $15 an hour, a move that Best Buy followed. Beef producer JBS USA said in March it would start paying two-year-college tuition for its 66,000 workers and their dependent children. In April, national garbage collection and recycling company Waste Management said it would offer 36,000 full-time workers and their dependents free tuition for undergraduate and graduate degrees in a partnership with Guild Education, which teams up with companies to offer educational benefits to employees. This is a reversal from what most employers have been doing over the past few decades—cutting back benefits and pushing more financial responsibilities onto workers. But as America ages, many companies are realizing that a big share of their employees are going to retire soon and that they might not be able to find enough people to replace them. The retirement rate of baby boomers shot up during the pandemic. “It became apparent that we needed to do something fundamentally different and radical to attract and retain talent,” Tamla Oates-Forney, the chief people officer at Waste Management, told me. Even before the pandemic, demographic shifts were making it difficult for Waste Management to find the drivers and technicians they needed; millennials and Gen Z workers were going into other industries, she says. Waste Management hopes that offering free education will attract people who may want to start out driving a truck and then work their way up in the company. It also added more money for backup childcare for workers during the pandemic. Employees who don’t feel their company offers advancement opportunities will leave for one that does. Sara Stark, 20, started working at a Chipotle just north of Atlanta when she turned 16. As she kept working there for two and then three years, she got just one raise, worth 15¢, to add to her $10-an-hour starting wage. “I spent three years of my life there and nothing changed,” she says. When Chipotle lost workers during the pandemic and Stark was pushed harder and harder, cleaning and sanitizing the restaurant with bleach by herself, she got fed up and quit in October. She soon found a job at Starbucks, which offered a college-scholarship program, free mental-health benefits and opportunities for promotion. After just a few months, Stark was promoted to a managerial role, making $12.70. She plans to use Starbucks’ online education program next year to go back to school and study design. “The list of benefits Starbucks offered took up our whole training session,” she says. (In a statement to TIME, Chipotle says it offers benefits like tuition reimbursement, mental-health care, and a bonus program. As of May, it pays $15 an hour.) Sara Stark, 20 Location: Atlanta. Used to earn $10 per hour working at Chipotle; now earns $12.70 per hour at Starbucks Dustin Chambers for TIME Once they raise wages and offer benefits like higher tuition, it will be difficult for companies to reverse them. Professional workers may be quitting their jobs en masse to go live their dreams, but the pandemic has also made low-wage workers take a step back and think about what they’re doing with their work lives, says Rachel Carlson, the CEO of Guild Education. “The plurality of workers are saying, ‘O.K., $15 an hour, but what do I do all day? And is there a job after that for me, and where does it take me?’” she says. “Career mobility is now the value proposition that matters for companies.” Workers’ increased leverage is already playing out in the job market. Wages have risen for three straight months, according to the most recent jobs report. They’re a full 10% higher in the leisure and hospitality sector than they were two years ago—764,000 workers in that industry quit in May alone. Some workers who walked away from bad jobs saw big pay bumps in their new positions. A month after Jared Bonney got fired from the Missoula airport, he went to a local casino to apply for a job. He was hired on the spot and promoted to assistant manager after a few months. His base wage is still low—$12 an hour—but he can make a lot of money in tips, he told me. On a good night, he’ll make $23 an hour. Read More: The Pandemic Reset the Balance Between Workers and Employers. How Bosses Respond Will Shape the Future of Work Sandra Sibert, 48, was one of the 3,400 workers at a Smithfield meat plant in South Dakota who rejected the company’s initial contract offer in June, saying they deserved a raise as food and gas prices increased. Workers have been quitting en masse, she says—as many as 50 a week, up from one or two a week before the pandemic. After workers rejected the initial contract, which would have altered break time and kept pay the same, the company offered a $1.75 raise, kept breaks the way workers wanted and included a $520 bonus for them. Workers accepted. The course of negotiations “was not unusual,” Keira Lombardo, Smithfield’s chief administrative officer, said in a statement. If Sibert and Bonney are making more than they did before the pandemic, they’re still far from middle class. Many workers who participated in walkouts or strikes over the past year, or who switched jobs for higher wages, still may be struggling. They’re squeezed by the highest apartment-rental costs in more than two years and prices for consumer goods that climbed 5.4% from a year ago, the biggest annual increase since 2008. Sandra Sibert, 48 Location: Sioux Falls, S.D. Used to earn $17 per hour at a Smithfield meat plant; got a raise to $18.75 hourly Walker Pickering for TIME Even with a raise, berry pickers in California who walked out will be making around $30,000 a year—if they work full time. Companies like Disney are offering $1,000 hiring bonuses—but housekeepers will still be making just $16 an hour if they take the jobs. That’s the result of four decades of declining union power and a stagnant minimum wage. “The idea that any short-run shortages that do exist would undo 40 years of employers’ ability to suppress wages—it just does not ring true whatsoever,” says Heidi Shierholz, a former Obama Administration economist who works at the Economic Policy Institute. The labor movement saw further setbacks this year when an effort to organize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama failed and the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a California regulation that let union organizers meet with farmworkers on farm property. Progressive groups say that the PRO Act, which passed the House in March and would make it easier for workers to organize, is what’s needed to help employees gain more power in the long term. Conservatives say people will be returning to jobs once all states end more generous additional unemployment benefits offered during the pandemic. Meanwhile, workers are seeking out the companies—and industries—that are giving raises alongside a path to better careers. Those companies aren’t having trouble filling positions. After it announced its educational benefit, Waste Management’s May recruiting drive attracted 1,200 people; the company made 420 offers, and 70% of those people have started working for the company. More than half of applicants mentioned the free college-tuition offer. As Xue Vang is finding out, it can be hard to find work at companies that have decided to treat workers well. After Unifi fired him, it raised wages to keep the remaining workers on—but only to $11 an hour. Vang started applying for other jobs and got a few offers, but he hasn’t accepted one yet. He wants to hold out for something better—he has his sights set on a full-time job with an airline, rather than at an airline contractor. A few of his former Unifi co-workers have gotten jobs at Alaska, where wages are higher, but Vang says the airline told him his timing was bad—it had just hired a flood of employees who had left jobs to work somewhere that paid more than the minimum wage. The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"For a lot of us, September will bring a return of many elements of pre-COVID adult life," writes Dr. Becky Kennedy."While we may expect these transitions to be met with relief or excitement—finally, 're-entry' and 'a return to normal'!—it’s critical to prepare ourselves and our families for relief and anxiety, excitement and sadness."

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I’m feeling a bit confused this July. I can’t figure out if I am living a pandemic life, a post-pandemic life, or somewhere in between. And while I try to stay present in the moment, my mind keeps wandering to what the fall will be like. For a lot of us, September will bring a return of many elements of pre-COVID adult life: working from an office, going on business trips, attending large in-person events, sending kids back to in-person school. While we may expect these transitions to be met with relief or excitement—finally, “re-entry” and “a return to normal”!—it’s critical to prepare ourselves and our families for relief and anxiety, excitement and sadness. After 16 months of COVID-19 in the U.S., we’ve all adapted to a very different life, one marked by restriction and hypervigilance. It will take time to unlearn our pandemic-life habits. A client in my practice shared that she had an anxiety attack when she entered her first meeting with unmasked adults. An Instagram follower just DMed me that she panicked on her first airplane flight since 2019. Here’s the thing: these reactions are uncomfortable and also normal, and the more you expect them, the more prepared you’ll be to manage the post-pandemic transition. And the more ready you are, the more ready your children will feel, too. The first thing parents—and anyone experiencing return-to-normal fears—must do is cope with this sometimes overwhelming anxiety. You can practice this coping strategy in advance: Acknowledge-Validate-Permit or, as I shorten it, AVP. Acknowledge by noticing a feeling, validate by telling yourself why the feeling makes sense, and then give yourself permission to be having that feeling. Think to yourself: “I’m noticing I’m feeling pretty tense as I take the train into work today. That makes sense, after all, I haven’t done this in a while and the world has changed a ton since March 2020! I’m allowed to feel nervous as I make this transition.” AVPs are a critical strategy in coping with anxiety and change. Beyond coping with anxiety, we will, of course, still have to keep moving forward. The fall will bring a return to decision making; instead of the government and medical professionals making decisions for us, it will be up to us to decide whether we want to attend a concert or allow our kids to attend a sleepover. There are no right choices here. Decision making amidst uncertainty is incredibly hard. I often think about anxiety as an equation: anxiety = uncertainty + our underestimation to cope. Most of us, especially when we have to make decisions, try to minimize uncertainty; some amount of information is helpful, but we all know those times when we go down the rabbit hole of Googling for information that we’ll never find, polling friends for their opinions in the hope that something will feel “just right,” wracking our brains for some “aha” moment that doesn’t exist. The more we try to reduce anxiety by searching for certainty, the worse our anxiety will get. Instead, remind yourself: “There is no certainty here. There’s no right. I am making the best decision I can with the information I have available at this time. That’s all I can do.” Take a deep breath and remind yourself: “I am a person who has gotten through hard moments before and I will get through this one now. I can cope with this. I can cope, I can cope, I can cope.” This is how we manage anxiety—not from the uncertainty side of the equation, but from the coping side. Only after you’ve thought about your own coping methods, help your kids with theirs. Kids are on the verge of a major transition. Children are set up to explore the world around them—to learn by doing, touching, and moving around the world. For the past 16 months, we’ve essentially told our kids, “The world is not safe enough to explore. Stay close.” Come September, many of us will be changing our tune, sending our kids back to school buildings they haven’t seen in years. This is a big change for our kids, one that, like our transitions, is likely to be met with a mix of feelings. This is when you can do something I call “emotional vaccination”—we prepare for future feelings and can even “pre-regulate” the feelings by surrounding them with understanding, empathy, and care. A summer conversation with your child might sound like this: “I’m thinking about how you’ll be going back to in-person school, meaning going back to your school building. Did you know that we all, kids and adults, can feel many feelings at the same time? You may feel excited… and nervous! You may feel happy… and sad. That would all make sense. After all, it’s a big change.” Over the next few weeks, wonder with your child: “I wonder what it will be like to go back to school…” and “I wonder what it will be like at drop-off that first day” and then after that, “Let’s make sure to practice a goodbye routine so we have something we know we will do, something that feels familiar to us, as you go back to school.” Separation routines are critical for kids—and parents—to feel safe during this transition, as they add predictability and routine to moments that feel unfamiliar and out of control. Now, take a moment for yourself. Place your feet on the ground and a hand on your heart. Give yourself credit for all you’ve been through. What a year it’s been. You are so strong. Yes, the transition to fall will be tricky, and yes, we can do it. We’ve got this. Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Trump is “the leader of this movement,” Vance tells TIME, “and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.”

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“I’m not just a flip-flopper, I’m a flip-flop-flipper on Trump,” J.D. Vance says with a laugh, slicing into a half-stack of breakfast pancakes. The Hillbilly Elegy author and newly minted Republican Senate candidate is sitting at the counter of a Cincinnati diner on July 2, explaining why he thinks he can win. The prior evening, Vance had launched his 2022 bid at a steel-tube factory in his hometown of Middletown, Ohio, with paeans to the American Dream and blasts of populist rhetoric. “The elites plunder this country and then blame us for it in the process,” he told a crowd of several hundred. Running for office was a predictable next step for Vance, whose hit 2016 memoir traced his rise from troubled Appalachian roots to the Marines and Yale Law School. Hillbilly Elegy was cited by Hillary Clinton and feted at pointy-headed panel discussions, though some liberals criticized its up-by-the-bootstraps framing. At a time when elites struggled to comprehend Trump’s appeal, Vance’s diagnosis of rural white Americans’ disillusionment with a government and society that had left them behind seemed prescient. These days, Vance’s persona is more right-wing provocateur than establishment darling. But it’s his stance toward Trump that seems destined to dominate his campaign in a primary that could be a bellwether for the post-Trump GOP. As his rivals strain to outdo one another with displays of fealty to the former President, Vance’s past opposition has been cited as proof of an all-too-convenient conversion. Vance admits it took him time to come around, but points to his book and commentary as evidence he understood Trump’s appeal before most. “I sort of got Trump’s issues from the beginning,” Vance says. “I just thought that this guy was not serious and was not going to be able to really make progress on the issues I cared about.” But as the longtime Democrats he grew up with, including his family, embraced Trump, Vance, who voted for independent candidate Evan McMullin in 2016, reconsidered. Once he looked beyond the hysterical media depictions of Trump, he claims, he saw someone changing the debate around issues like China and immigration. In March, the two men held an hourlong meeting brokered by Vance’s friend and former boss Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley titan who has seeded a $10 million super PAC on Vance’s behalf. Trump is “the leader of this movement,” Vance tells me, “and if I actually care about these people and the things I say I care about, I need to just suck it up and support him.” Republican voters still love Trump, but it’s unclear what that means for other aspiring pols. Should they be loud and racist and lie a lot? Should they spout conspiracy theories? Should they be businessmen and “outsiders”? Should they adopt Trump’s positions on issues, to the degree that he had positions on issues? However you define Trumpism, it had a powerful effect in Ohio. Barack Obama took the state twice before Trump won it by back-to-back 8-point margins. The GOP’s conundrum is how to hang on to Trump’s white working-class supporters as suburban and college-educated white voters jump ship. “This is our first post-Trump test case,” says Josh Culling, a Toledo-based GOP consultant. “How many of Trump’s positions have staying power vs. the old Chamber of Commerce priorities of lower taxes, less regulation and smaller government?” READ MORE: Feds Are Fed-Up with Trump-Era Meddling The former President has not endorsed a candidate, leaving Vance’s rivals to compete to embody Trumpian outrageousness. Josh Mandel, who aligned himself with Mitt Romney during his unsuccessful 2012 run, now gets himself suspended from Twitter for posting about “Mexican gangbangers” and “Muslim terrorists.” Jane Timken, a Harvard-educated lawyer and longtime GOP donor, also tries to channel the former President’s furies. To some Ohio Republicans, the field is not inspiring. “There’s a significant void,” says Republican state senator Jay Hottinger, who has served in the legislature for more than two decades, of “serious candidates that are trying to address the real issues and talk about potential solutions.” Hottinger would prefer someone like Senator Rob Portman, the straitlaced fiscal conservative whose retirement created the vacancy Vance hopes to fill. Vance thinks the party is looking for a new direction. “Rob’s a good guy and he’s done a lot of good, but he’s sort of out of alignment with where a lot of voters are right now,” Vance tells me at breakfast. “He’s a cautious guy, and the voters are not in a cautious mood.” Vance, 36, believes he has a finger on the pulse of this new GOP, for whom Fox News host Tucker Carlson and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are role models. “Voters really want us to do something about the tech industry,” he tells me by way of example as the server delivers his plate of bacon. It’s not uncommon, he says, for people to approach him “and say things like, ‘I love what you said, but why don’t we break up these companies and put all the CEOs in jail?’” Vance is a venture capitalist with deep ties to Silicon Valley, but says knowing the industry will help him figure out how to fix it. He answers charges of hypocrisy by pointing out that Thiel is a conservative outlier: “It’s not like I’m being funded by Mark Zuckerberg.” When I ask if any of the policies he favors would affect Thiel adversely, he replies, “Oh, absolutely, I think Peter should pay higher taxes,” and lets out a big laugh. In his Middletown speech, Vance excoriated corporations for not paying their fair share to the country that’s given them so much: “Who built the roads and bridges that allow you to do your business?” The sentiment echoes Obama, but when the former President said, “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that,” in 2012, conservatives lambasted his “demonization” of industry. Vance supports free markets, but only to a point. “This is a mistake of the modern conservative movement, to say, Well, these are private companies; we have to keep our hands off,” he tells me. “I do generally think that cutting people’s taxes is a good thing. On the other hand, when there are companies that have effectively rigged the economy- such that they pay a lower tax rate than my middle-class sister, that’s not fair.” Vance favors punitive tariffs and pulling out of Afghanistan, and he’s taken up the faddish right-wing crusade against critical race theory. He won’t say the 2020 election was stolen, exactly, but contends it was “unfair.” “I think Josh Hawley did the right thing,” he says of the Senator’s objection to certifying electoral votes on Jan. 6. Nor does he think Trump deserved to be impeached over the insurrection. “There were some bad apples on Jan. 6, very clearly, but most of the people there were actually super peaceful,” he says of a riot that left five dead and more than 100 police officers injured. “Some of them were, like, let into the Capitol by the police officers!” As for his evolution on Trump, Vance describes it as an awakening. “It’s sort of a—what is the word people online use—-blackpilling or redpilling or whitepilling,” he says. “I’m not trying to cop his style. But when you stop trusting what the press is saying in the same way, it does have a transformative effect on the way you see not just Donald Trump the man, but the whole movement.” Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Molly Ball at molly.ball@time.com.

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"While Spears’ catalog is part of the canon that defines the first 20 years of this millennium, one hopes that her public struggles, and the strength she’s shown while enduring them, will lead to her cementing her true legacy: Reshaping the machine that turns those songs into cultural touchstones," writes Maura Johnston.

https://time.com/6082333/britney-spears-legacy/

time

Over the weekend, Britney Spears took to her Instagram account for a broadside against “those of you who choose to critique my dancing videos,” hyperactive clips soundtracked by hits like Prince & the New Power Generation’s “Sexy MF” and Lenny Kravitz’s “Fly Away” that the pop star has been posting to the photo-sharing service for months now. The profanity-laced missive, which was accompanied by an image inviting any questioners to “step on Legos,” touched on how even though Spears had been hurt by her support system, she still had hope. Not to be ignored were the two potent words “I quit,” emphasized by four exclamation points. It’s unknown whether Spears was indeed quitting music or just over trying to please people. But the note did echo a recent statement by her now-ex-manager Larry Rudolph, who said that she had “been voicing her intention to officially retire” in a letter resigning from his managerial post earlier this month. One thing that Spears voiced objection to in her Instagram post was the way she had been ignored by her team while “begging to put my new music in my show for MY fans.” While this plea for agency highlights recent revelations of her utter lack of it, both in her conservatorship hearings and this year’s documentary Framing Britney Spears, it also brings up a compelling question about Spears’ career and artistic legacy. Spears was the biggest pop star of the Y2K teen pop era, and she still looms large today, with artists as varied as the nightmare-conjuring Billie Eilish and the alt-rock doyenne Courtney Love spotlighting her impact on the pop world through interviews and cover songs. If the Britney Spears catalog turns out to be complete as it stands today, how will we look back on her career? Read More: Britney Spears’ Case Is Back in Court. Here’s What Could Happen Next With Her Conservatorship Spears grew up in Kentwood, La., and appeared off Broadway and on Star Search before her big break as a pre-teen: a role in the Disney machine as part of the revived The Mickey Mouse Club, which also featured eventual stars like Christina Aguilera, Keri Russell and Ryan Gosling. While some suits believed she would only succeed as a member of a band like the Spice Girls, her precocious delivery and girl-next-door appeal led to her eventually signing a solo deal. “It’s very rare to hear someone that age who can deliver emotional content and commercial appeal,” Jeff Fenster, an executive at her eventual label Jive Records, told Rolling Stone in 1999. How those assets were managed wasn’t entirely up to her at first. In John Seabrook’s The Song Machine, which came out in 2015, the writer notes that Spears’ original artistic vision had her making “Sheryl Crow music, but younger” during her come-up in the late ‘90s. Superproducer Max Martin, who spearheaded “…Baby One More Time” and a slew of other Spears hits, wanted to work with the singer because of her young age, which made her more malleable in his eyes. “She’s fifteen years old; I can make the record I really want to make, and use her qualities appropriately,” he reportedly told Spears’ A&R, Steve Lunt, in the run-up to her debut album …Baby One More Time. That full-length project, released in 1999, wasn’t a full-spectrum showcase of those “qualities,” but it did offer listeners a crash course in her strengths. Chief among them is her voice, which balances the husky, knowing qualities it displays on the title track and other upbeat songs like “(You Drive Me) Crazy” with the wounded, searching emotionalism heard on ballads like the sparkling “Sometimes” and the pleading “From the Bottom of My Broken Heart.” Pop songwriting is more laden with mythology than most entertainment products; credits can include people charged with writing toplines (vocal melodies), snatches of melody, or even bits that sound like already-existing hits (a la Right Said Fred’s credit for a borrowed cadence on Taylor Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do”). Run down the credits of Spears’ albums and you’ll see her name pop up under the lists of songwriters. What that actually might mean is fairly opaque; she could have written an entire song or just a line. Still, Britney Spears wouldn’t be Britney Spears without the outsized, appealing personality at the megastar’s nucleus. Martin was onto something when he said he would “use [Spears’] qualities appropriately,” even if the phrasing does give one pause in the context of her present life under conservatorship. Over the years, her catalog has been studded with songs that reflect the facets of the singular traits at which she’s offered glimpses. Her 2011 comeback single “Hold It Against Me” pivots on a pickup line that sounded dated in the swingers’ era four decades prior–”If I said I want your body now, would you hold it against me?”–but her attitude, half-winking, half-serious, makes it work. Tracks like the defiant “Stronger” and the hip-shaking “Overprotected,” meanwhile, showed off her inner strength, presaging her recent courage in speaking out against her current situation. And other pieces of her catalog, particularly in the depths of special-edition bonus tracks, show off her personality’s quirks and depth, from the loopy 2016 track “If I’m Dancing” to the chilling video for her 2004 single “Everytime.” This was why her performance at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards, during which she sleepwalked through the brooding Blackout opener “Gimme More,” was such a blow for fans. That show, which followed a string of highly publicized personal challenges exacerbated by the cruel tabloid landscape of the era—felt like a sign that Spears’ spirit, which had propelled her into the American mainstream, had been if not snuffed out, at least misplaced. Read More: At Last, Britney Spears Gets a Voice in Her Future—And We Have Her Fans to Thanks Blackout, which contained production and songwriting contributions from the likes of Pharrell Williams (with his duo The Neptunes) and “Toxic” hitmakers Bloodshy & Avant, was hailed upon its release, presaging the synth-heavier, moodier sounds embraced by the likes of Kanye West on 808s & Heartbreak and Lady Gaga on The Fame. While Spears was reportedly more in control on that record than any other, Blackout succeeds in part because she’s a mysterious presence at its core, her signature wail refracted by effects and shrouded in synths. The shadowy vibe reflects the atmosphere surrounding her at the time, with songs like the glitchy paparazzi rebuke “Piece of Me” and the spare synth pop banger “Radar” feeling of the always-on digital age. Since Blackout, Spears has released four albums, all of which have sold well; their reception, though, seems to parallel just how weird she can get on them. The lead single from 2013’s Britney Jean, the brittle “Work Bitch,” was shrug-worthy upon release, and lyrics like “You want a hot body, you want a Bugatti/ you want a Maserati? You better work, bitch” land uncomfortably after her conservatorship hearings. In contrast, her most recent full-length, 2016’s Glory, was hailed for its explorations of post-millennial pop’s fringes. It concludes with “Coupure Électrique,” an icily minimalist track in which Spears whisper-sings, in broken French, of love in the dark, a throwback to the Blackout era that also lets her display her playful side. More than two decades after her debut, Spears’ legacy as a pop artist is complex, made up of dazzling musical heights and music-business-borne lows. This year, Olivia Rodrigo’s path from Disney stardom to pop-chart domination bears broad similarities to Spears’. The “drivers license” singer was born a few years into Spears’ era of TRL superiority, though, and in a recent interview with Nylon, her response to a question about Framing Britney Spears indicated that she sees the treatment of the elder pop supernova as a sign of how easily pop stardom can be undermined by supposed allies. “I just hope that this next generation of women don’t get asked [invasive] questions…. I hope reporters don’t think that that’s OK. It’s just disgusting,” she said in the interview. The twists and turns in Spears’ story over recent years have fundamentally altered the dream of becoming a pop star, even as the appeal of finding one artist who can make a song that changes the world for five minutes remains. While Spears’ catalog is part of the canon that defines the first 20 years of this millennium, one hopes that her public struggles, and the strength she’s shown while enduring them, will lead to her cementing her true legacy: Reshaping the machine that turns those songs into cultural touchstones. Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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An international media effort reports that governments tracked the phones of activists, politicians and journalists.

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time

On Sunday, an international collaboration between The Washington Post, The Guardian and other media organizations, published a massive report detailing the global usage of a spyware tool called “Pegasus” to infiltrate personal cell phones. The Pegasus tool, which was developed an Israeli cybersecurity organization named NSO Group, was sold to the governments of countries including Hungary, Rwanda and India. The report found those governments used the spyware to surveil many individuals, including the family of slain journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The information in Sunday’s report, obtained from a leaked list provided by Amnesty International and a Paris-based nonprofit media outlet called Forbidden Stories, contained tens of thousands of phone numbers belonging to journalists, activists and politicians, including French president Emmanuel Macron. The phone numbers are purportedly a collection of people of interest to the governments and clients who purchased the Pegasus tool. Of 67 phones suspected to be infected and examined by Amnesty International, 37 devices, mostly iPhones, showed evidence of tampering or attempted tampering. Here’s what to know. What is Pegasus spyware and how is it used? The spyware in question, Pegasus, was developed by Israeli cybersecurity organization NSO Group, which sells its software to various clients, including governments, to track criminal and terrorist activity. Pegasus can be used to infiltrate smartphones via apps like iMessage and WhatsApp, or by having victims inadvertently click a link containing the vulnerability. Spyware like Pegasus usually takes advantage of both known and unknown flaws in a computer’s operating system that have yet to be fixed. In the past, software from NSO Group has demonstrated the ability to be installed on devices with zero interaction from the victim, as actions like receiving a call from someone attempting to infect a device was enough to successfully penetrate the operating system’s defenses without raising any alarms. Like ransomware, the spyware exists in the smartphone’s memory, making detection difficult. The access granted by the Pegasus spyware appears to allow hackers to gather copious amounts of data from a smartphone without issue, according to the report. It allows hackers to read text messages and email correspondence, track a user’s location, activate systems like the microphone and camera, gain access to contact data, and more. Who was targeted with Pegasus spyware? While the leaked list provided by Amnesty International and Forbidden Stories contained around 50,000 phone numbers, that doesn’t necessarily mean the Pegasus spyware tool was used to compromise those phones. That being said, the number included various executives, government officials and pro-democracy activists, along with news reporters and journalists from outlets like Reuters, New York Times and The Guardian. “Apple should block stuff like Pegasus,” says Swati Chaturvedi, an Indian investigative journalist who was potentially surveilled by the NSO software. “I have my doubts, whether it’s something they can’t fix, or whether it has been deliberately left unfixed.” While your average smartphone owner might not be targeted by a nation’s government, the Pegasus revelations shed more light on our phones’ cybersecurity risks. Is your smartphone vulnerable? NSO Group responded to the allegations by denying its software was used on anyone besides its intended targets of criminals and terrorist organizations, and says it has taken steps in the past to stop clients who abuse the company’s surveillance technology. While the number of hacked devices in the report pales in comparison to the billion-plus iOS devices in the world today, Pegasus spyware, unfortunately, reveals that no piece of technology is truly bulletproof. That doesn’t mean you should throw your phone in a Faraday cage, or go out and get an Android device (which are historically more vulnerable to malware attacks than iOS). Apple maintains that iPhones provide users with a high level of security. It still claims the existence of a service like the Pegasus tool is a short-term threat, and not an issue for the vast majority of iPhone users. “Apple unequivocally condemns cyberattacks against journalists, human rights activists, and others seeking to make the world a better place,” says Ivan Krstić, head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture in a statement to TIME. “For over a decade, Apple has led the industry in security innovation and, as a result, security researchers agree iPhone is the safest, most secure consumer mobile device on the market. Attacks like the ones described are highly sophisticated, cost millions of dollars to develop, often have a short shelf life, and are used to target specific individuals. While that means they are not a threat to the overwhelming majority of our users, we continue to work tirelessly to defend all our customers, and we are constantly adding new protections for their devices and data.” Still, Apple did not state whether or not it had patched previous vulnerabilities dating as far back as 2018. The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Patrick Lucas Austin at patrick.austin@time.com and Billy Perrigo at billy.perrigo@time.com.

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From NextAdvisor: Most Americans still feel anxious about their financial situation, with debt and lack of savings as their most common concerns.

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time

Gabriella and Tyler Braddock with their children. The Braddocks were among millions of Americans who faced financial hardship and increased stress about money in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Editorial Independence We want to help you make more informed decisions. Some links on this page — clearly marked — may take you to a partner website and may result in us earning a referral commission. For more information, see How We Make Money. One year ago, Gabriella Braddock and her husband Tyler were “simply trying to survive,” as they told NextAdvisor at the time. New Jersey’s stay-at-home order in response to COVID-19 forced them to close their small business — a recording studio — and move what operations they could online. “We had to completely deplete our savings while we were in shutdown,” Braddock, 26, says now. “Our studio was making next to nothing, but we had all of our regular expenses. We didn’t defer any payments, because we would just have to pay them eventually anyway.” The Braddocks were among a majority of Americans who had anxieties about money at the onset of the 2020 coronavirus outbreak and economic downturn, according to a NextAdvisor survey. One year later, Americans are no less anxious. One third of Americans (34%) say they feel somewhat anxious about their financial situation, and 17% report feeling very anxious, according to a new survey by NextAdvisor undertaken in June. When we asked a similar question in June 2020, we got nearly identical results: 36% were somewhat anxious, and 15% felt very anxious. In each survey, we found a majority of respondents (51%) suffering from financial anxiety. “The pandemic has leveled the field for financial anxiety across the board — it impacted everyone,” says Erika Wasserman, a financial therapist and founder of Your Financial Therapist, who is based in Florida. Many were directly affected, through unemployment and income loss, but even those who weren’t still had to manage through an uncertain economic climate. How anxious do you feel about your current financial situation? Financial Effects of the Pandemic Looking at how Americans’ financial health has changed over the course of the pandemic, our survey reflects the widening inequality and K-shaped economic recovery some experts had predicted: only 20% of respondents say their personal financial situations have been positively affected, while 22% say their personal finances have taken a hit. Another 51% say their financial situation has not changed since one year ago. The pandemic magnified a divide already happening in our society, says Anna N’Jie-Konte, CFP, and founder of Dare to Dream Financial Planning, a virtual financial planning firm. “There are disparate results of the pandemic based on where you stand economically, education-wise, in terms of your socio-economic status.” And some have experienced more hardship than others throughout the pandemic. “We’ve almost gotten even more split in an economic space,” says Dr. Robin Norris, a financial therapist and founder of Windward Optimal Health in Virginia. The wealthy had opportunities to get wealthier, she says — the housing market boomed, and the stock market hit multiple new highs — while millions in more disadvantaged positions lost work and income, and struggled to balance necessary expenses with growing costs like child and elder care. Who’s Been Most Affected? Following what we’ve seen from unemployment numbers over the past year, there is a disparity in how the pandemic has affected already-marginalized groups. According to NextAdvisor’s survey, Hispanic Americans (27%) are more likely than White or Black Americans (both 21%) to have experienced a negative financial impact. And Americans who report an income under $40,000 are most likely to say their financial situation has been affected negatively over the past year (28%, compared to 18% of those with an income of $40,000 or more). When it comes to age, 25% of Generation X (ages 41-56, those most closely approaching retirement age) report experiencing a negative effect on their personal finances, the most of any generation. Why Do We Feel Anxious About Money? Compared to one year ago, debt and lack of savings are still the biggest causes of financial anxiety for many Americans. But the number of respondents who named those among their top three causes for anxiety has grown. The pandemic “really gave each person their individual challenges,” says Norris. We asked survey respondents to cite their top three reasons for financial anxiety. These were their most frequent answers: Debt: 42% (23% credit card debt, 27% other debts) Lack of savings: 42% Retirement planning: 28% Here’s how that compares to survey results from one year ago: Debt: 37% overall (21% credit card debt, 24% other debts) Lack of savings: 35% Loss of employment or income: 31% Loss of employment or income was the third most common financial stressor last year, affecting 31% of respondents. Despite a 6% decline, a quarter of Americans (25%) still consider loss of employment or income among their biggest financial stressors. Which of the following aspects of your personal finances are among your top three biggest causes for anxiety following the coronavirus outbreak? 2020 vs. 2021 Note: Respondents could select up to three options. In addition to these options, respondents could choose “Other” or “None of these.” The 2020 wording of the question was “since the outbreak [of the COVID-19 pandemic],” while the updated 2021 wording was “currently.” While fewer people are feeling anxious about income loss today, concerns about debt payoff and savings have increased. Lack of savings and retirement planning saw the biggest growth — anxiety about savings grew by 7% over the last year, while anxiety about retirement increased by 8%. Nearly 18 months into the pandemic, it’s not difficult to see why. Financial hardship required millions of people to deplete their savings to pay for basic expenses. And those were the people who had an emergency fund. Many do not. Before the pandemic, more than 40% of Americans would have been unable to cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. Emergency fund or not, many unemployed workers took on increased debts just to make up for lost wages. For those who did lose work — at peak unemployment in April 2020, there were 23.1 million Americans out of work — state unemployment benefits, as well as federal supplements under multiple stimulus packages, provided some relief. The Braddocks in New Jersey found some respite through federal relief programs. “The first round of PPP loans, we knew nothing about so we didn’t apply for them,” says Gabriella Braddock. As they learned more about the loan forgiveness process and other restrictions, they decided to take advantage of the second round. For many Americans, that aid went to paying basic necessities, like food and rent. “The reality is, I wouldn’t have survived the last three months without the money,” Danielle Piscatelli, an outdoor guide and educator based in Colorado who lost work during state lockdowns, told us last year. It’s true that things are improving for many: small business owners like the Braddocks have been able to reopen as state restrictions ease up following increased vaccination rates, and the latest jobs report shows the unemployment rate at 5.9%, a marked improvement over last year’s numbers. But, especially for those most affected, the consequences — both mental and financial — may be lasting. “This has been a really traumatic, stressful event for so many people — for everybody really, and I think it’s going to be really important for us as individuals, in terms of our own financial situation, to separate this generalized anxiety from the reality of our financial situation,” N’jie-Konte says. Overcoming Financial Anxiety Financial anxiety can have outsized effects on our lives, and the stress can also appear in different and unfamiliar ways. Wasserman says to look for signs like irritability and lack of sleep, or even physical pain like migraines and toothaches. Stress can also build over time, especially when it’s not dealt with. And the experts we spoke to say they often see people use avoidance tactics to handle their anxiety, which can make things worse. “That’s really, really common, just kind of sticking your head in the sand,” says Kathy Haines, LPC, a financial therapist and founder of Imagine Counseling Services in Georgia. Someone might say, “’I don’t look at it, it’s not there, I don’t have to deal with it.’ And then that snowballs and can lead to embarrassment and shame…And then people tend to not want to ask for help. So it just keeps getting worse and worse and worse.” Braddock says learning to get help was the biggest lesson she learned this year. “I felt so personally responsible for our success and for getting out that I just put so much undue stress on myself that I didn’t need,” she says. Ways to Deal with Financial Stress Asking for help from loved ones and having a support system can be a great place to start. And once you’re ready to take the next steps, there are many strategies for dealing with financial stress: Start With Your Truths A lot of anxiety stems from the unknown. Maybe you’ve avoided your true debt balance or the state of your bank account for a while. Or you have anxiety about the future and any uncertainty to come, as federal unemployment programs and eviction moratoriums are set to end. Simply identifying and naming the cause of your stress can be a big first step. “Try to understand what the worry is because if you’re not writing the fear down, you can’t conquer it,” Norris says. Put your financial fears into words. Make a Plan Wasserman recommends starting with what she calls your actuals. These are the facts of your financial situation, including how much income you’re bringing in and how much you’re spending. Once you have those facts, you’re no longer spiraling through unknowns and can make a plan. And if a big goal like “saving money” sounds overwhelming, especially after this last difficult year, start small. “Don’t lose sight of your goals, just readjust them and maybe make them micro,” Wasserman says. “If your goal is to save money in your emergency fund, start with $5 a week. Instead of buying lunch everyday, put that money each week toward an automatic transfer into your savings account.” Start Tracking Tracking your cash flow is a great habit to start. But Norris says it can help not only to keep track of what you’re spending, but how spending affects your emotions. That information can help you parse the stressors that money is causing you. When you pay bills, or click “Buy Now” online, ask yourself, what do you feel? “Was that relief?” she asks. “Does that fill some sort of need? And then is there regret? That’s where the emotional part of [spending] comes in.” Believe in Change “The one consistent thing in life is change,” Wasserman says. “Your financial goals might change, your salary, your income might change. It’s how you adjust to it.” As Americans have had to shift their career plans, living situations and daily routines through the pandemic, it’s also given people the opportunity to reevaluate their financial goals. “This is not your forever; this is your right now,” Wasserman says. “So if your right now is half of what you used to live on, what can you adjust and change in the short term to live within your means? This doesn’t mean forever, and I think that’s where a lot of anxiety comes in. People feel that this is going to be their forever when it’s not.” Prepare, but Don’t Forget to Live The pandemic’s effects were wide-ranging, and we’re only just beginning to see what recovery means, in every sense of the word. But it will take time. If you have experienced heightened financial anxiety over the last year, N’jie-Konte warns against letting your fear dictate your future and your financial goals. You can build up your emergency savings for when the unexpected happens while also pursuing other financial goals like funding a retirement plan. The goal is to cover your bases without getting caught up in absolutes like, “No matter what happens, I’ll be fine.” “I don’t think that that’s a realistic level of financial certainty that anybody can expect,” she says. That’s a lesson that Braddock has taken to heart, too. “I think that my relationship with money used to be very black and white. It used to be either you’re successful or you’re not, you’re rich or you’re not. And now I think it’s super gray,” Braddock says. “We really learned that money is going to come and money is going to go, but if you always focus on when it’s going to go, you’re not going to really appreciate when you do have it.” She says they’re trying to live in this moment of growth and prosperity while they can, while still building a safety net. “So that when a rainy day does come — or rainy month or rainy quarter or a rainy year — we’re able to say, you know what, we’ve got that covered. We’re going to be okay if we need to stay home for a month, or we’re going to be okay if we need to stay home for a year. Which is something that I never would have said in the past.” Methodology

Article

The U.S. leads the pack going into the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.

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time

We’re less than a week out from the Tokyo Olympics—and it’s time to think about how the international competition in Japan will set into motion age-old rivalries between countries around the world, which will formally start as the Opening Ceremony kicks off on July 23. The Summer Olympics this year will involve 339 events across 33 sports. The Summer Olympics are showcases for different countries than the Winter Olympics: without snow sports, places that don’t have access to cold climates have a better shot at featuring their homegrown talent. The Summer Olympics are where runners, swimmers and team sports players shine. For this summer’s Tokyo Olympics, the country to beat is indisputably the U.S., with a historic tally of 2,542 medals collected over 100-plus years of Summer Olympics dating back to 1896. (In second place is the Soviet Union, which picked up over 1,000 summer medals in its stint as a state from 1955 to 1985. Meanwhile the modern state of Russia, known as the Russian Federation, has over 400, collected on either end of the Soviet experience.) Michael Phelps remains the world’s most decorated individual Olympian, with a decisive 28 medals all of his own, thanks to his dominance in swimming over the past decade-plus. (The runner-up in that ranking, the Soviet Union’s Larysa Latinina, only has 18.) These are the 10 countries with the most Summer Olympics medals: 1. United States — 2,542 2. Soviet Union — 1,010 3. Great Britain — 867 4. Germany — 760 5. France — 739 6. Italy — 592 7. China — 546 8. Sweden — 498 9. Hungary — 495 9. Australia — 495 10. Japan — 441 Read more about the Tokyo Olympics: Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Raisa Bruner at raisa.bruner@time.com.

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According to the most recent data, Americans—independent of their vaccination status—report phasing out many of the public health precautions they took over the previous 18 months.

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time

To encourage more people to get a COVID-19 vaccine and reach herd immunity, U.S. government leaders and their corporate partners are now dangling many carrots to hesitant Americans. Free childcare, free car rides, even free beer has been offered. But new evidence is emerging in places like Ohio where, after state health authorities set up a lottery offering millions of dollars to people who got the jab, vaccination rates flatlined after an initial bump. According to our analysis of Ipsos polling, such incentives won’t persuade about a quarter of American adults. And according to the most recent data, Americans—independent of their vaccination status—report phasing out many of the public health precautions they took over the previous 18 months. Rather than carrots, reaching herd immunity is likely to require the use of sticks: vaccine mandates. Health officials have left mandates as a last resort to be employed when all who might be persuaded have been vaccinated. But more than half of unvaccinated Americans say they would not get a vaccination if it were readily available to them. And problematically, our polling shows that the choices of those who remain unvaccinated may create enduring risks to public health, which could expedite the spread of mandates in order to secure places like universities, hospitals, and restaurants. This only becomes more urgent with the rise of the more transmissible Delta variant, which has spread to almost every state in the U.S. Americans who say they do not intend to get vaccinated and those who plan to get vaccinated but have yet to do so are more likely to engage in “risky” activities this summer than people who are already vaccinated. Perhaps more problematically, these unvaccinated adults are much less likely to wear masks and maintain a safe distance from others compared with people who have already been vaccinated. This matters because the risk of COVID-19 infections among everyone—even the vaccinated—is dependent on the level of COVID-19 spread in a community. Epidemiologists believe that herd immunity will require between 75 and 85 percent of Americans to be vaccinated. There also remains some uncertainty about the vulnerability of children under the age of 12, who currently cannot be vaccinated. When the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) announced on May 13th that Americans fully vaccinated against COVID-19 no longer need to wear masks or physically distance themselves in most indoor and outdoor places, the reversal was based on numerous scientific findings that vaccines would provide enduring protection. However, because “breakthrough” infections depend on how much virus is circulating in a community, the CDC also asked the unvaccinated to take precautions to protect their own health and the health of others. The new Ipsos data suggest that the unvaccinated are unlikely to hold up their end of the bargain, unless they are compelled to do so. Unvaccinated adults say they are actually more likely to dine at restaurants, go to movie theaters, attend a sporting event, go to an indoor concert, use a ridesharing service, and go on a cruise this summer—all activities that pose elevated risks of transmission because of close contact with other people. Despite the risk of contraction and transmission, the unvaccinated are less likely to wear a mask. They are also less likely to say that they have practiced social distancing in the last week. Of course, this is a mismatch of practices. Those Americans who can now afford to relax the precautions they have taken for 16 months are hesitant to do so, and those who should maintain such precautions say they will not. As more Americans become vaccinated and since the new CDC guidelines were released, more vaccinated adults have begun to feel comfortable resuming activities previously thought to be too risky and reducing the health precautions they once took. However, polling data suggests that Americans uninterested in the vaccines were less likely to take precautions before they became available anyway, and they are no more likely to do so now. Numerous studies have shown that this population is disproportionately less educated, lower income, rural, younger, Republican, and supportive of former President Donald Trump—who seeded significant distrust in public health authorities and scientists while in the White House. However, those uninterested in the vaccine already had lower levels of trust in the government and in the vaccine in late 2020 and early 2021, when Trump was still in power. So their behavior is less a reflection of recklessness than it is a result of sustained doubt in the severity of the pandemic and the prescribed actions of government authorities. Encouragement from the White House—or their preferred beer brewery—is unlikely to move them. In fact, the U.S.—which innovated several of the world’s most effective vaccines—features among the world’s most skeptical populations. In an Ipsos study of 15 of the world’s largest economies, only Russia features a smaller share of the unvaccinated population who plan to get the jab. U.S. vaccination rates were recently leapfrogged by numerous countries who received delayed access to the medicine. Once incentives run their course, mandates may be all government institutions and businesses have left at their disposal to end the pandemic in the U.S. The Biden Administration was previously considering issuing a mask-wearing mandate for workplaces, but it is unlikely that the federal government will issue any nationwide mandates for masks or vaccinations. Instead, many businesses and other entities have already started conditioning returns to workplaces and campuses on proof of vaccination. If the U.S. is to reach herd immunity, the polling suggests they are right to do so. The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Thanks to Costa Rica’s conservation efforts, forests now cover 53% of the country’s lands—a dramatic reversal after decades of severe deforestation—and 98% of its energy comes from renewable sources.

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Thanks to Costa Rica’s conservation efforts, forests now cover 53% of the country’s lands—a dramatic reversal after decades of severe deforestation—and 98% of its energy comes from renewable sources, a strong step toward its goal of becoming one of the world’s first decarbonized nations by 2050. The ethos of Costa Rica’s newest hotels aligns with the country’s commitment to sustainability: Nayara Tented Camp, for example, has invested in reforestation efforts while offering cliff-top glamping with unmatched views of the Arenal volcano. The eco-conscious Six Senses Papagayo—with its own organic farm—will be the ultra-luxury hotel brand’s first development in Central America. And solar panels power the new Cielo Lodge, overlooking the Pacific coastal village of Golfito. —Sucheta Rawal Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Northwestern Europeans—accustomed to a mild climate rarely troubled by the extremes of weather they see on the news—were not prepared for the scenes they saw this week after the worst flooding to hit the region in at least 80 years.

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Pia Negro’s family has lived in the same castle in Blessem, western Germany, for 300 years, and spent the last 30 years restoring it to its former glory. But around 4am on Thursday, they were forced to leave it in minutes. Firefighters yelled to them from outside saying that they needed to evacuate, as floodwaters rushed towards their home. “We couldn’t bring anything—not the very old furniture, not even photos that are highly emotional, just our phones,” says Negro, 32. Like many in Germany and neighboring countries, Negro hadn’t anticipated just how bad last week’s floods would be. She and the castle’s 40 inhabitants, including her entire family as well as renters, spent Wednesday moving furniture to higher floors, and went to sleep once the rains had stopped in the evening. But as they slept, the muddy waters continued to rise in Blessem and a nearby dam threatened to break. Soon after the residents evacuated, the castle and the surrounding village were submerged entirely by muddy water. The building remains inaccessible, Negro says, and the family has launched a crowdfunder to try to save it. “We are just in shock that something like that can happen to our home.” That sense of shock is shared by many Northwestern Europeans. Accustomed to robust governance and a mild climate rarely troubled by the extremes of weather they see on the news, few were prepared for the scenes they saw this week after the worst flooding to hit the region in centuries. “People kept saying it was worse than the war,” says Arne Piepke, from the DOCKS photography collective, which captured the scenes in western Germany—the center of the flooding. War was the best analogue locals could think of for the death and destruction wrought by the weather, he says. “This just hasn’t happened here before.” More than 7 inches of rain fell on parts of the western German states Rhineland-Palatinate and North Rhine-Westphalia between Tuesday and Thursday— roughly double the normal expected rainfall for the whole of July, causing major rivers to burst their banks and sweep away entire villages. A view of the flood-damaged village of Dernau from a hillside on July 15. DOCKS Collective Cars and flood damage in the village of Ahrweiler, Germany, on July 15. DOCKS Collective At least 160 people died in Germany and 31 in Belgium, and more are missing. Some 370 miles of railway tracks were damaged. “The German language has no words, I think, for the devastation,” Merkel told reporters as she surveyed the damage in Schuld, a town on the River Ahr. It will need one. Developing countries have long borne the brunt of extreme weather events, especially those with few resources to deal with them. In Madagascar, for example, the worst drought in 40 years is currently pushing 400,000 people into famine. But the summer of 2021 is showing us that nowhere is safe in the climate change era. In June, a normally temperate village in western Canada briefly became one of the hottest places on earth and before 90% of its buildings were razed by a wildfire. Dramatic—though far less devastating—disruption also visited New York and London this month, when several inches of rain fell in a few hours, gushing into subway systems and leaving shocked commuters to wade through waist-deep dirty water. Survivors of the floods in Germany are reeling from the loss of a sense of relative safety in the face of climate change. “We live in a society that thinks it can control nature. And now people are feeling powerless against it,” says Albi Roebke, an emergency chaplain from the city of Bonn, deployed by the government to counsel hundreds of survivors in North Rhine-Westphalia over the past week. “We have to be afraid of water and fire, like our ancestors 40,000 years ago. That’s very difficult for people to understand.” A military unit supports the clean-up efforts in the village of Schuld, Germany, on July 16. DOCKS Collective A sense that wealthy countries with typically mild climates won’t really be affected by extreme weather may have made the death toll worse in Germany. Some have criticized the effectiveness of warning systems in the affected states, arguing they didn’t communicate the seriousness of the rainfall, which meteorologists had flagged early last week, to the public. “We could have been warned much earlier,” Negro says. “Nobody was aware of how severe it would be.” In at least four instances, people drowned in their basements, some of them trying to save their belongings, rather than flee. “People thought ‘yeah, I guess it’s going to rain a lot.’ But they don’t know what that means,” says Karsten Haustein, a climate scientist and meteorologist at Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), a research center. “We have to get rid of this thought that somehow extreme and severe weather cannot impact us—this is the climate hubris we have going on in Europe.” A house damaged by floods in Erfstadt Blessem, Germany, on July 16. DOCKS Collective A soldier helps clear debris in a flooded bakery in the village of Schuld, Germany, on July 16. DOCKS Collective A personal photo of Sadeta and Imer Sokoli on the floor of their flood-damaged apartment in Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany, on July 17. DOCKS Collective Studies will need to be done to determine whether or not these floods would have taken place without climate change. But scientists say it is safe to assume that it wouldn’t have rained so much, for so long, without the warming of the planet. For one thing, warmer air can hold more moisture—7% more for every 1°C increase in temperature—and Germany’s average temperature has risen by more than 2°C over pre-industrial times. Another factor that might have played a role is the slowing of regional air currents as the difference in temperature between the polar regions and the equator decreases, meaning low pressure systems can stay in one place for a longer time. In western Europe this week, that might have allowed the rain to fall on the same place for longer. A similar effect led the intense “heat dome” system to linger over western Canada for a perilously long time in June. With climate change, Haustein says, “at some point, an event which would have been just heavy rainfall without too much damage is suddenly a really catastrophic event. That threshold will simply be crossed more often.” A damaged clothing store in the aftermath of the floods in the city center of Euskirchen, Germany, on July 16. DOCKS Collective Hundreds of people have volunteered to sort through donations for flood victims at a collection point in Nürburgring, Germany, on July 16. DOCKS Collective A temporary collection site for flood debris in Rheinbach, Germany, on July 17. DOCKS Collective Europe has done more than most regions to recognize the risks of climate change and step up efforts to fight it. In the same week that the floods hit, the E.U. presented its plan to drastically overhaul its economy to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030 compared to 1990 levels. Germans themselves are even more concerned about climate change than other European citizens, according to regional polls, and the country’s Green Party is projected to make significant gains at its September elections. Pastor Klaus Kohnz from Nürburg takes calls from the many people who lost their homes in the flood, on July 17. DOCKS Collective A flooded cemetery in Ahrweiler, Germany, on July 15. DOCKS Collective But even the most drastic efforts to cut carbon emissions—which face huge barriers to success—will not reverse the destabilization of our climate that we are beginning to see. A certain amount of further warming is already baked into our future, since carbon dioxide lingers in the atmosphere for at least 300 years, and will keep trapping more heat. As a result, scientists warn that recent weather events are not a “new normal” but the end of any kind of normal or stable climate altogether. Rescuers search for flood victims at night in the village of Dernau, Germany, on July 15. DOCKS Collective For that reason, experts say governments urgently need to widen their focus to include adapting to that instability—as well as emissions cuts—in the coming months and years. Adaptation will mean costly efforts to make homes, transport and infrastructure much more resilient to heat, rain and droughts. It may also mean expanding and formalizing our systems for cleaning up after disasters. At the very least, it means better warning systems and more public awareness that extreme weather is a real threat—whichever country you live in. Photographs are by members of DOCKS, a collective of five documentary photographers: Aliona Kardash, Maximilian Mann, Ingmar Björn Nolting, Arne Piepke and Fabian Ritter. Get our climate newsletter. Learn how the week’s major news story connects back to the climate crisis. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Ciara Nugent at ciara.nugent@time.com.

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"When we went out, we were either holding the handles of a stroller or our children’s hands; we no longer held each other’s."

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Paul video-calls me on Whatsapp from his hospital bed. It’s a couple of days after his open-heart surgery and he still sounds woozy, like he’s slightly drunk. He opens his pajama top and proudly shows me his scar. I’m surprised, firstly, that there’s no bandage on it and all the little black stitches holding his skin together are on view. It looks like a joke scar, something drawn on for Halloween, running for eight inches down the center of his chest. And I’m even more surprised that he’s happy to show it, given how difficult I know he finds thinking about or discussing being sick. He once told me that he was surprised when he got past the age of 25 – supposedly, he said, the average life expectancy of a caveman. Despite the scar and his woozy voice, I’m delighted to hear him and to see that he’s doing O.K., even though I’ve been kept updated via group texts sent by his wife, and by the children he and I had together. Paul is my ex-husband. We have been divorced now for longer than we were married. He is one of my best friends. On our first date, I remember that we laughed a lot and we talked about everything. We got married in the early ‘90s when I was 26 and he was 33, and we ran a small marketing company together with a handful of employees, spending every day in each other’s company. Our son was born a couple of years later, and in between my postpartum depression, changing diapers and hefting the stroller up and down the three flights of stairs in the apartment block where we lived, we still laughed a little, and we still talked a lot. Our second child came along 18 months later – very much wanted, but unplanned. We moved out of the apartment and into a house, and I made a garden. I went back to work sooner than I had with my son and we muddled through the colic, the eczema, two sets of diapers. When we went out, we were either holding the handles of a stroller or our children’s hands; we no longer held each other’s. The business was a struggle; we either had too much work or not enough. Staff came and went. Once Paul and I got home and the children were in bed, we barely laughed but we still talked, about work, about the kids. Read more: Why Would a Long-Term Couple Like Bill and Melinda Gates Get Divorced? Here’s What Marriage Therapists Say One day, when our children were 9 and 10, Paul told me he was in love with one of our employees and that she was his best friend now. There wasn’t much talking that evening, but I did go into work the next day, sitting at my desk opposite this woman and deciding then that I wasn’t going to run away – I would brazen it out. This was my job, my company, my home, my husband, my children. In the evenings, after the kids were in bed, Paul and I no longer laughed, but we did still talk. We lit a fire and took up smoking again, huddling over the grate to blow the smoke up the chimney. We talked about what we wanted from life and what we should do. We cried often. We went to counseling and lasted one session because we were already saying all we had to say in front of the fire every night. Paul continued to maintain that he was in love with our employee, and all three of us continued to work together. Through that autumn and into the following New Year, we carried on discussing the situation. I don’t think we were good parents then. I remember shouting at the children if they got up when we were still talking; there seemed so much to say. On the video call, Paul asks me how the kids – now adults – are doing. Our eldest is sometimes hard to pin down and know what he’s feeling, while our youngest wears their heart on their sleeve. We chat about how we think they’re coping with the idea that their father is not invincible. We talk about how long it will be, given the pandemic and Paul having to self-isolate, until he can see either of them in real life. It feels like a unique and wonderful relationship that I have with Paul – to still share a similar view about parenting, and to have someone who understands exactly what it is like to want our children to be independent adults but to still worry about them intensely. When we went out, we were either holding the handles of a stroller or our children’s hands; we no longer held each other’s. Back in that January 16 years ago, the impasse wore me down. Paul wouldn’t give up this new best friend, the woman he said he loved. He and I continued to sleep in the same bed, to act as if everything was normal, and after a while it felt as though Paul was getting what he was asking for: to be able to keep his wife and this woman. I could no longer live like that. I forced a decision and Paul agreed to move out. For a long time I was angry, but mostly I was very sad. Our marriage had ended, and the children wouldn’t be ever live again with both their parents. But I was also determined not to sour their relationship with their father, so at first for their sake, I agreed to meet with Paul for lunch to talk about the children, how we could make the best of the situation for them, and how we should arrange our finances and our divorce. We continued to meet, and eventually, during our regular lunches we began to laugh and rediscover the friendship we’d had many years before. Six months after we split up, I was sitting with Paul in the garden of the apartment he had rented, drinking tea. “I don’t love her,” he said. “She’s not my best friend. I don’t know what I was thinking.” He wasn’t asking for us to get back together, he was just telling me, like he’d always told me everything. When my first relationship after Paul ended and I was devastated, it was Paul’s house I went to. He sat and listened, poured the wine, and then I slept in the spare room. When a woman he had been madly in love with broke up with him, I spent many evenings listening to how amazing she was and pouring the wine for him. Read more: Pets Are Part of Our Families. Now They’re Part of Our Divorces, Too Eventually I did leave the business and started to write books full-time. I met someone new and married again, and so did Paul. But he and I continued to meet every month or so for a meal, to talk about everything and to laugh. We had gone through some difficult times, but I had discovered that with tolerance and a willingness to recall what had made me fall in love with him in the first place, it was possible to love my ex-husband in both the same and different ways. Now on the video call from the hospital, he shows me his lunch, cooling on the tray over his bed: baked potato and coleslaw, some kind of wobbly pudding. He complains about it – the man who cooked me fish sticks and mashed potatoes when I first went to his apartment. But if Paul is complaining about the food, I know it means he’s getting better. I tell him to thank his wife for keeping me updated, tell him to call me again soon. I give him my love. Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. 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“Our HR colleagues talk about a staff-turnover tsunami. Nobody has left their jobs [during the pandemic], so you’ve got some pent-up kind of movement,” says Neil Murray, CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL.“There’s been a lot of soul-searching over the last 12 months, and as a result, I think companies have to work harder to attract and retain talent.”

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(To receive weekly emails of conversations with the world’s top CEOs and business decisionmakers, click here.) Are you back in the office yet? has replaced Are you vaccinated yet? as the question of the day for a broad swath of U.S. society. Nationwide, about one-third of workers have returned to their offices, according to the most recent data from JLL, a global real estate giant that is anxiously tracking attitudes about how people are feeling about going back to working in an office. In Austin, Dallas and Houston, about 50% of office workers are back at their desks. However, in New York City only 21.9% of workers are back, while in San Francisco, just 19.2% of employees have returned, according to JLL. Big Tech companies are “walking back return-to-office plans after employee backlash,” in contrast to financial firms like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, the company found. The firm’s research also found that working from home, particularly for women, has completely eviscerated the boundaries between work and people’s personal lives. For many women, restoring that sense of separation is the prime driver in returning to the office. For men, the main motivation for getting back to the office is to restore a sense of routine and seeing colleagues. Other findings included that most people wanted to return to the office three days a week, and that flexibility had overtaken salary as the No. 1 concern of workers at this moment in time. Neil Murray, CEO of Work Dynamics at JLL, which is focused on the future of work, expects most companies to eventually adopt a flexible hybrid model. He points out that many businesses “were working in a kind of hybrid way, pre-pandemic. I used to go into the Chicago office every Friday, and it was kind of me, myself and I, and a few people that didn’t want to be at home.” In many cases, the offices where people will return will be configured differently. Clients are asking, “How do we make space more fluid, how do we make it welcoming, how do we make more collaboration space, drop-in space, café space?” says Murray. Subscribe to The Leadership Brief by clicking here. (This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.) So footprints, office space and space utilization are suddenly hot topics. Every chief executive in the world has a view on real estate. They didn’t 18 months ago. How bad did it get from a commercial real estate perspective? As a real estate company, we’ve been through a couple of world wars and global financial crises, but we’ve never been in a scenario where every office on the planet is emptied out. We looked at every eventuality: Were people ever going to come back? As a firm that specializes in real estate, we had some soul-searching to do. You operate globally. What are you seeing around the world? Most countries in Asia now are back to pre-pandemic levels, as if nothing happened. We can’t draw too many parallels, but we always had something in the Far East in our business that was pointing toward where the world was going. In the U.S., what were the various stages that companies went through in thinking about their real estate footprint? We definitely had these phases of people feeling comfortable and excited about being home. CEOs of some of the biggest companies in the world were saying, “This is wonderful. I’m not sure we need all this space.” Then toward the end of the summer [2020], the fatigue started to set in. We felt a distinct change in sentiment. I had a financial-services client telling me that error rates in the business were starting to shoot up. Engagement rates, right across all of our clients and our own, were starting to dip. People are feeling alone; mental-health issues were surfacing. More chief executives then were coming out and saying, “We’re gonna be back to the office.” Several high-profile financial-services companies in particular said, “You know, we’re a work-from-work company. We’re going back.” Are companies still cutting their real estate holdings? Companies were cutting footprint pre-pandemic. It was pretty commonly acknowledged that most companies had about up to 40% underutilization of space, pre-pandemic. What I mean by utilization is not occupancy; utilization is the next level of detail. Technology and access to data helped us understand over the last few years how buildings were really being used. And I think there was a realization across the board that having increased density of people over time, working toward more and more people getting into spaces, that we had a utilization problem. Offices were getting more tightly packed but used less efficiently? We’ve been densifying for the last 25, 30 years. I have spoken to heads of real estate that wore a badge of honor to say, “We’re down to 100 sq. ft. per person! We’re sardining them in!” What’s the solution? We were predicting pre-pandemic that, at some point in 2030, that up to 30% of office space would be occupied by flexible working space [provided by third-party, WeWork-like companies]. This was a trend beforehand: “I’ve got too much space, and it’s in the wrong place.” The pandemic accelerated a lot of trends we’ve been seeing, but I don’t think it profoundly changed much. How has the pandemic changed how companies are thinking about their office design and layout? There’s a realization that it is a manifestation of brand and culture. The office is a bringing to life of how you’re trying to portray your company, what you believe in, your sense of purpose, what you’re about. Every one of our clients, without exception, is thinking about, “What do we need to do with this space now to make it work for a new world, to attract and retain talent, to use it as a differentiator to have people want to come in and work here?” This is an age of workers having choices, and it’s a point of differentiation. How are people feeling about work in general now? Our HR colleagues talk about a staff-turnover tsunami. Nobody has left their jobs [during the pandemic], so you’ve got some pent-up kind of movement. You’ve also got a lot of people asking why, and questioning how they do things and questioning their life, and how they’ve how they’re working and living. There’s been a lot of soul-searching over the last 12 months, and as a result, I think companies have to work harder to attract and retain talent. Your research shows that flexibility is currently very high on the list of considerations for workers. I’ve never really paid much heed to the purported differences between millennials and Gen Xers or whatever else, but certainly what are referred to as Gen Z, new people coming into the workforce, have different expectations in life. What you and I thought of as ambition and career progress are thought of in different ways. They value flexibility; they value fluidity in their careers. My father worked in the same place for 50 years, and that was how you did things. What about the environmental footprint of offices? Sustainability is coming to the fore as never before: the concept that, actually, we do have a responsibility to provide great spaces with clean air. We’ve talked about indoor air quality in our industry for as long as I’ve been in it, 30 years. Nobody’s really done much about it, but now it’s real. This can’t be underestimated: the fact that corporate demand for green space is ever increasing. The vast majority, 90%, of our corporate clients have made some sort of carbon commitments, publicly, so the demand for it is probably the most important trend of the industry. Companies are looking at their space and saying, “Does this really reflect who we want to be as a company?” What specifically is in demand? They’re asking for low-energy-use buildings. They are asking, “How is it ventilated, heated, how is it cooled?” It’s less about the materials and embedded carbon, and more about how the building functions, so: light, sound, energy use. How will this green movement impact the valuations of buildings? When you start to see a delta emerging in the valuations of a building based on its energy usage, that’s when the investor community really changes gears. Obviously you have a vested interest, but do you remain bullish on commercial real estate? Human beings need other human beings. We need to be around each other, and that’s why we feel good about the future of the office. Subscribe to The Leadership Brief by clicking here. The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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A sense of ethnic superiority has allowed a spurious historiography whereby America was discovered by Vikings.

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Who discovered America? The common-sense answer is that the continent was discovered by the remote ancestors of today’s Native Americans. Americans of European descent have traditionally phrased the question in terms of identifying the first Europeans to have crossed the Atlantic and visited what is now the United States. But who those Europeans were is not such a simple question—and, since the earliest days of American nationhood, its answer has been repeatedly used and misused for political purposes. Everybody, it seems, wants a piece of the discovery. The Irish claim centers on St Brendan, who in the sixth century is said to have sailed to America in his coracle. The Welsh claimant is Madog ab Owain Gwynedd, who is said to have landed in Mobile, Ala., in 1170. The Scottish claimant is Henry Sinclair, earl of Orkney, who is said to have reached Westford, Mass., in 1398. The English have never claimed first contact, but in the English colonies John Cabot was sometimes invoked in connection with English origins. After the War of Independence, when the new American republic needed to dissociate itself from England, Cabot was displaced in the popular imagination by Christopher Columbus, despite the fact that he had never visited what is now the U.S. Eventually, the fact that Columbus was an Italian Catholic sailing in the service of Spain caused unease in a country in which the dominant group was descended from English Protestant colonists, and so the myth of a Norse discovery was born in the late 18th century. In the years since, the continued persistence of this myth has illustrated just how easy it is for false history to have serious consequences. The heyday of the idea that the Norse were the first Europeans to have “discovered” America was the second half of the 19th century. The “evidence” took the form of inscriptions and Norse artifacts discovered in areas of Scandinavian settlement. In 1841 an account of the evidence from the Norse sagas was published in English, and in 1874 Rasmus Anderson published America Not Discovered by Columbus, which lent powerful support both to the historic myth that the Norse had visited New England repeatedly from the 10th to the 14th centuries, and to the Teutonic ancestral mythical link between the Norse and the New England cultural elite known (in the memorable phrase of Oliver Wendell Holmes) as “the Brahmin caste of New England.” The difficulty that the Norse were pre-Reformation Catholics was surmounted by treating the eventual conversion of Scandinavia to Protestantism as a retrospective virtue already embedded in the national character of the Norse. Scandinavian Americans are now part of the cultural mainstream, but in the 19th century, Scandinavian farmers struggling to make a living in Minnesota, Wisconsin and the Dakotas were regarded with condescension by the New England cultural elite. The discovery in 1898 of the Kensington Runestone, with its inscription recording the arrival of a group of Norse explorers in 1362, enabled rural Minnesotans to feel proud that their ancestors had visited the region five centuries earlier. Scholarly dismissal of the authenticity of the Runestone has not erased belief that it is genuine. On the east coast, the dominant group was of British rather than Scandinavian descent, but a myth arose that combined the two ancestries. As Charles Kingsley, the Victorian novelist, said in a letter of 1849, “the Anglo-Saxon (a female race) required impregnation by the great male race—the Norse.” This idea led Scottish historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle to declare that a “vacant earth,” in the form of an unpopulated America, needed to be seeded by Anglo-Saxons. It is of course the case that America was already populated by the descendants of those who had arrived many millennia earlier, but native Americans were discounted. Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie (1935) began with a description of the American West as a place where the wild animals wandered free, “and there were no people. Only Indians lived there.” Why do unfounded claims about the Norse in America matter, beyond the simple desire to make history truthful? One of the glories of America is the ambition to realize Thomas Jefferson’s contention that all men are created equal. Yet even today, racial and ethnic equality remains unrealized, and racial entitlement remains a potent force. Some who have touted the idea of the Norse discovery are benignly proud of their ancestry, and curious about exploring it. But such sentiments can become sinister, leading to claims of ethnic superiority. At the extreme, Nazi sympathizers in the U.S., whose numbers included Charles Lindbergh and some other members of the America First Committee, found a link to the Aryan supremacy claimed by Hitler’s followers. The origins of such entitlement can be traced to the colonial period, when English migrants felt entitled to conquer and occupy someone else’s homeland, to disinherit and force to the margins of society the people that they displaced, and to go on to enslave the peoples of another continent. It was this sense of ethnic superiority that allowed a spurious historiography whereby America was discovered by Vikings. The larger context for such questions is the process whereby a settler society creates political and educational power structures, and then fashions an imagined history in which the indigenous people are characterized as uncivilized, and then marginalized with respect to land. The fiction of the Norse discovery was coupled with the idea of northern Europeans as racially and culturally superior, and so the legitimate owners of Native American lands. This ahistorical notion of English settlers constituted of a fusion of Anglo-Saxon and Viking blood has been used to justify the appropriation of the homeland of indigenous peoples in the 19th century; the discrimination against Irish, Italian, and Jewish migrants in the 20th; and the continued marginalization of Americans of African and Latino origin in the 21st. The notion that “true” Americans are the descendants of English settlers whose character has been fortified by the admixture of Viking blood is abetted by the myth of the Norse discovery of America. The myth may be an old one, but the reasons to correct it are as timely as ever. Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! 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"I got a Johnson & Johnson vaccine. With the Delta variant spreading, I’ve heard that some people in my position are also getting shots of Pfizer or Moderna for extra protection. Is that something I should do, too? And if booster shots become recommended later on, should I switch to Pfizer or Moderna?"

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Welcome to COVID Questions, TIME’s advice column. We’re trying to make living through the pandemic a little easier, with expert-backed answers to your toughest coronavirus-related dilemmas. While we can’t and don’t offer medical advice—those questions should go to your doctor—we hope this column will help you sort through this stressful and confusing time. Got a question? Write to us at covidquestions@time.com. Today, N.C. in Washington, D.C., asks: I got a Johnson & Johnson vaccine. With the Delta variant spreading, I’ve heard that some people in my position are also getting shots of Pfizer or Moderna for extra protection. Is that something I should do, too? And if booster shots become recommended later on, should I switch to Pfizer or Moderna? As you’ve probably heard by now, U.S. health officials will soon recommend that people who received mRNA vaccines—those made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna—get a third dose eight months after their second, to make sure they remain protected against the virus. But what about people, like you, who received Johnson & Johnson’s shot? Health authorities have not officially recommended that Johnson & Johnson recipients receive boosters, but it’s certainly trending that way. Andy Slavitt, who advised the Biden Administration on its COVID-19 response, wrote as much on Twitter. But that still doesn’t address your immediate question: Should you go get a dose of Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna for additional protection now, as Delta continues to spread? The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) official stance is that COVID-19 shots are not interchangeable. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s unsafe to mix them; there’re just not a lot of data available to answer the question. Some prominent researchers have decided to forge ahead and get mRNA boosters on top of Johnson & Johnson shots, even without an official blessing from the CDC—and despite the fact that some pharmacies won’t give additional shots to people who are already fully vaccinated. Dr. Hana Mohammed El Sahly, a molecular virology and microbiology expert at Baylor College of Medicine, is not one of those researchers—and she says she wouldn’t recommend that course of action. “Until we have better data, it probably is not wise to go and get [additional] vaccines unless it’s part of a clinical trial,” she says. Those data are on the way. National Institutes of Health (NIH) scientists are studying what happens when people get a booster of a different vaccine than their original shot. That study includes the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, and initial results are expected in late summer 2021. European research teams have also published results suggesting that it’s effective to mix one dose of Pfizer-BioNTech’s vaccine with one dose of the shot made by AstraZeneca-Oxford University—which, like Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, is adenovirus-based. That’s not a direct parallel, but it does support the general concept of mixing and matching doses. Countries including Germany, Canada and the Dominican Republic have tried out such systems. Safety aside, a second shot might not even be necessary. A study published in Nature found that people who were only partially vaccinated (i.e., who received only one shot out of a two-dose regimen) were susceptible to the Delta variant, but that fully vaccinated individuals were much better protected. The study didn’t analyze Johnson & Johnson’s shot, but people who get the one-dose vaccine are considered fully vaccinated by the CDC. Johnson & Johnson says its vaccine—like others authorized in the U.S.—works well against the Delta variant, although that conclusion came from a very small study. Even with the Delta variant spreading, El Sahly notes, the vast majority of people who end up hospitalized or die from COVID-19 are unvaccinated, which suggests the shots continue to work well as authorized. If you’re concerned, El Sahly says your best bet, at least for now, is returning to precautions like masking and social distancing—not getting a second type of vaccine. That advice may change down the road. By the time you’re eligible for a booster (eight months after your initial vaccination was complete), researchers will hopefully have gathered enough data to make a recommendation about whether you should stick with Johnson & Johnson or switch to Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna. And if you’re absolutely desperate to get double-vaccinated in the meantime, the NIH’s study on mix-and-match dosing is enrolling now. “You can volunteer there and help us generate those data,” El Sahly says. More from TIME The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Jamie Ducharme at jamie.ducharme@time.com.

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"I don’t delete these past posts because they’re problematic, or offensive, or because I regret what I shared," writes Courtney Cook. "I delete them because I’m embarrassed that I don’t recognize who I was, or was trying to be."

https://ti.me/3eqwwIH

time

Every morning as I drink my coffee, I check Timehop, an app that tells me what I posted to social media on this day one, two, ten years ago. I have checked Timehop every morning for the last 1,286 days—more than three years straight—and nearly every one of those 1,286 days, I have found something I now find overwhelmingly embarrassing that I have rushed to scrub from whatever platform it dared to exist on. Anyone who knows me knows I am Very Online. I think my compulsion to be overly active on the Internet partially stems from the fact that I grew up in the era of the Internet where every event, even if the “event” was sitting around a mall food court, needed to be documented by at least 30 photos and its own MySpace or Facebook album named after an inside joke created at said food-court hang, and partially because I have borderline personality disorder, which causes me to have an extreme fear of being abandoned or forgotten. To constantly post on whatever social platform is popular at the moment is to constantly show up on my friends’ feeds is to constantly remind them of my existence. For around 23 hours and 56 minutes of each day, I am completely comfortable and cool with my online presence. But for those approximately 4 minutes when I check Timehop and see my past self from an outside perspective, I want to hurl myself off a cliff and live the remainder of my life as kelp or seafoam. Read more: The Pandemic Made My World Small. Social Media Helped Open It Up I often feel sick by the amount of work it would take if I wanted to erase my presence from the Internet, even though I do my very best to trim it down. Another symptom of borderline personality disorder is an unclear sense of self, and this is nauseatingly blatant in the posts I see each morning. I don’t delete these past posts because they’re problematic, or offensive, or because I regret what I shared; I delete them because I’m embarrassed that I don’t recognize who I was, or was trying to be. In 2009, I was heavily entrenched in emo/scene-kid culture, and my social media was littered with status updates like “XxXx*~RAWR~*xxXx means i LUV U in dinosaur XDDD.” In early 2010, I adopted some cottagecore fairy fantasy after returning home from 10 months in a residential treatment center where I didn’t have access to electronics or the Internet, and I began posting about spending my days “climbing trees” and “flying kites,” two things I definitely wasn’t doing, and yelling at people to “get outside!” because “the world is passing you by!!!” even though I was very much inside and not offline. By late 2010, I had smoked weed exactly once and proclaimed myself a stoner, posting Kid Cudi lyrics to Facebook in a way that can only be described as poser-y. In 2011, I transferred to a private arts high school and adopted Tumblr as my religion. All my posts from this time talk about listening to the Pixies (to this day I cannot name a Pixies song aside from “Where Is My Mind”), drinking tea (I didn’t and do not drink tea) and reading Sylvia Plath’s poetry (I didn’t get into Plath until college). Maybe when I say that these posts embarrass me, what I actually mean is that they make me sad. Watching my past self try on different personalities in hopes that I would be accepted, or loved, or find my place in the world, is a big bummer, and this is exacerbated by the fact that when I was posting these things and undergoing these identity changes, I didn’t know I was putting on a performance at all. Even when I was conscious that I was changing everything about myself, I believed I was motivated to do so because I had found the real me. I was the Girl Who Cried THIS IS WHO I REALLY AM!!!! There is that saying: wherever you go, there you are. This remains true even if you don’t know who that you really is. The way I exist in the world feels different now than in the past, both on and offline, though I can’t really identify why that is or what led to that change. Perhaps it’s due to 13 years of intensive therapy, or finally finding helpful medications. Perhaps it’s a result of growing up and having enough time to see what stuck around and continued to hold my interest even after the phase it originated from was rejected or replaced. Perhaps it’s a bit of all of these things, and others I’m not aware of yet, or may never be. Read more: I Thought I Was Doing Pretty Well. Then Came the Pandemic These days, my Timehop shows mostly memories from one, two, maybe three years ago. They rarely trigger the telltale knot in my stomach most of my earlier posts did, which I’d remedy with their deletion. Though these recent posts aren’t necessarily what I’d choose to post now, they don’t feel like they were posted by a stranger. Rather, they feel more like a childhood friend I both love and have outgrown. I don’t need to delete them to prove to myself that I’ve changed, because I’m able to acknowledge who I was then doesn’t cancel out who I am today. That’s not to say the embarrassment over my old posts has vanished, or that I’ve entirely stopped deleting them, but most days I will archive a post or update its privacy settings rather than choose to erase it forever. Sometimes, a rare post from further back in time has slipped through the cracks, and seeing it fills me with nostalgia. If I can move past embarrassment and feel the pain that comes with acknowledging how sad and lost I used to be, then I can also move past that pain and remember what it felt like to live in those moments when I wasn’t putting on an act or playing a role. Because within many of the memories that are clouded by my past self’s inauthenticity, and the years I have categorized as lost to sadness, self-harm and the wish to jump from a cliff and not become kelp but to become nothing at all, there are glimmers of happiness and what I recognize as the beginnings of who I am now. I just have to strain a bit to see them. When one of these posts that’s managed to escape the Great Daily Deletion appears, I begin to wish I hadn’t deleted most of those posts at all. I think that maybe if I hadn’t rushed to delete them, I could have gotten to the point where the first thing I thought of were those happy memories without having to wade through that sadness first. When social media was just beginning, there were constant warnings urging you to remember that everything you post will exist somewhere in cyberspace forever, even if it’s deleted. This may be true, but I’m not equipped with the skills necessary to find where all that I’ve deleted has gone. Like those past versions of myself, those posts now exist only in my memory, or the memories of those who were there to experience that moment or iteration of myself with me. So I keep tweeting, saving Snapchats, posting to Instagram, filming TikToks, updating my Facebook profile. Even if these posts end up deleted in a year or two. Even if they may make me embarrassed or sad or I one day don’t recognize who I was, am now, as I write this. Maybe I’ll forever be the Girl Who Cried THIS IS WHO I REALLY AM!!!! But I swear, this time I mean it. And I want to remember. If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider. Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Anti-Asian hate crimes fueled by false claims Asians brought the COVID-19 pandemic to the U.S. are spurring people who once shunned guns to become gun-owners.

https://ti.me/2W19wd0

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Six months ago, Svetlana Kim was so scared of guns, she couldn’t even look at an image of one without feeling anxious. If she was home watching a movie that suddenly depicted gun violence, the 47-year-old accountant would scramble to hit the fast-forward button on the remote. If she couldn’t skip the scene, she would shut her eyes, and her husband would gently put his hand over hers until the scene was over. Kim knew it was just a movie, but in those moments, she couldn’t help but feel like she was in the victim’s shoes, staring the shooter in the eye. “My brain was always signaling danger. I just felt like, it’s here, it’s present,” says Kim, who blames empathy and imagination for her visceral reaction, since she has never personally experienced gun violence. “It was bad like that, and I couldn’t control it.” That all changed when something scarier came along. Months into the pandemic, people who looked like Kim were being shoved and kicked to the ground, punched, stabbed and slashed, while doing everyday activities like walking around the neighborhood, shopping and riding buses and trains. One after another, unprovoked, racist attacks against Asian Americans being unfairly blamed for the COVID-19 virus started to increase in major U.S. cities. Kim wondered if she could be the next victim. “It was a turning point when I saw that people just randomly got attacked based on their race,” says Kim, a Korean American, who lives in Downey, Calif. On March 3, Kim went from being a “really anti-gun person” to the new owner of a Springfield Armory handgun. Tom Nguyen and Robbie Tarnove of L.A. Progressive Shooters, a group that works to empower BIPOC gun owners, remove targets after a beginner’s class at Burro Canyon Shooting Park in Azusa, CA. Isadora Kosofsky for TIME After months of rising anti-Asian hatred, many others like Kim are having a change of heart about firearms. Tired of relying on bystanders for aid that sometimes never comes, more Asian Americans are bucking entrenched cultural perceptions of guns and overcoming language barriers to help fuel a spike in U.S. gun ownership. While there is no official data on firearm purchases by Asian Americans, a survey by the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) indicated that Asian Americans bought 42% more firearms and ammunition in the first six months of 2020 than they did in the same timeframe the year before. At Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., where guns and pepper spray have been flying off the shelves since the pandemic, gun purchases by Asian buyers have surged 100% due to recent fears of attacks, according to Jimmy Gong and Jay Zeng, the shop’s Chinese-American owners. "It was a turning point when I saw that people just randomly got attacked based on their race." “Everybody got paranoid,” says Gong, 47, adding that some might have good reason to feel that way. Several customers have walked into the business, saying they were targeted in robberies, home invasions and assaults. “Some guys come in with black eyes,” Gong says. From March 2020 to March 2021, reported hate incidents against Asian Americans nationwide jumped 74% to more than 6,600, according to Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic. Anti-Asian hate crimes in 16 of America’s largest cities increased 149% in 2020, according to an analysis of official preliminary police data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. The sustained violence has shaken Asian-American communities, particularly in New York and California, where the majority of the hate incidents have unfolded and where assaults on the elderly have sent shockwaves across the world. Terror grew on March 16 after a white gunman killed eight people, including six Asian women, at Atlanta-area spas. “I’ve never seen this level of fear,” says Chris Cheng, 41, a professional sport shooter in San Francisco, who has been fielding numerous questions from relatives, friends and strangers about buying guns. Jimmy Gong, co-owner of Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., shows a revolver to customers on July 10, 2021. An Rong Xu for TIME A Pew Research Center survey conducted after the Atlanta massacre found that one in five Asians blame former President Donald Trump for the uptick in violence against them. Ericson Reduta, a 49-year-old Californian who had been on the fence about buying a gun for years, armed himself for the first time in 2020, largely due to Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric. Before then, Reduta had done his homework on firearms but had not purchased one, mostly because he thought his Filipino-American family wouldn’t approve and that he wouldn’t feel comfortable in any gun membership groups. “Most gun owners you see on TV or on the internet are white, conservative, Republican, outspoken, former military or hunters in the Midwest,” says Reduta, a Democrat. “That’s just what I saw.” Read more: Racist Slurs, Broken Glass, Then a Return to Business for an Asian-Owned Store But as Trump doubled down on his divisive nicknames for COVID-19, including “the China virus” and “Kung Flu,” Reduta gave in. He says growing up as a person of color in the U.S. gave him the foresight to know that bigotry already existed and would only get worse if a sitting president was singling out an entire race. “Unfortunately, we are the scapegoat,” he says. In the spring of 2020, Reduta participated in a firearm safety class over Zoom, joined a national gun club for liberals, and then purchased three pistols and an AR-15 rifle. Gun ownership is most common among white men, particularly those who live in rural areas and those who describe themselves as conservative, according to the Pew Research Center and other surveys. During the first six months of 2020, gun buyers were nearly 56% white males, the NSSF said, citing an industry survey of 104 retailers, which tracks with other national demographic surveys on gun ownership trends. Only about 3% of gun buyers were Asian males and less than 1% were Asian females, the survey found, so Reduta’s initial concerns about fitting in might have been warranted. Asians have been historically underrepresented among gun owners, so much so that major national demographic surveys conducted on gun ownership trends in the past have left out Asians as a category entirely. A 2013 NSSF report on diversity found some reasons why. About 35% said gun ownership negatively impacts their ethnic community, while 38% said owning a firearm is not desirable in their culture, according to the report, which was based on a national survey of 6,000 white, Black, Hispanic and Asian adults. That was true for Reduta, who waited a year to tell his family that he had bought a gun. Kim still has not shared the news with her two sisters. "If more guns made people safer, this would be the safest country on Earth." “Asians never like guns,” says David Liu, another gun shop owner who has seen a spike in his Arcadia, Calif. business. “They only buy guns after they’ve become a victim.” There’s a lot more to it, says Cheng, who testified before the Senate’s Judiciary Committee on March 23 about the “real and imminent threat” convincing Asian Americans that they need to arm themselves. Besides having to overcome negative cultural perceptions about firearms, language poses a challenge. The vast majority of gun shops and gun ranges in the U.S. have English signage and instruction, Cheng says, and a good understanding of the English language is necessary to fill out federal background check forms. “You have literal language barriers,” he says. Read more: The Long Legacy of Anti-Asian Violence in America On a Monday afternoon in June, the handful of masked customers who trickled into Jimmy’s Sportshop, on a business strip in a suburb about a dozen miles outside of New York City, did not speak English. That’s common, says Gong, who often accompanies those customers to police precincts when their applications are wrongly denied and when they’re unable to fight their case on their own. “It would be a problem for them to buy from a non-bilingual speaking gun shop,” he says. At least one gun group plans to tackle that issue. In the aftermath of the Atlanta shooting in March, Patrick Lopez, 46, created the Asian Pacific American Gun Owners Association (APAGOA), a California-based nonprofit educational resource group, which features on its website downloadable posters of basic gun-safety rules available in multiple languages. More than 500 people have subscribed in just four months—and Lopez says interest grows each week, largely by word-of-mouth. Jimmy’s Sportshop in Mineola, N.Y., promotes itself and caters to Chinese-speaking clients. An Rong Xu for TIME Racial tensions have been spurring gun sales among people of color since 2020. Not everyone sees that as a good thing, including Alex De Ocampo, a Filipino-American who knows firsthand the trauma a firearm can bring. When he was 9, he says three teens burst through the door of his family’s one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles and demanded money. One of them held a gun to his forehead, while his father, in the final stages of spinal cancer, cried and begged them to leave. “I remember vividly thinking of my mom and my dad, when that gun was pointed at my head,” says De Ocampo, who was convinced he would die that day. After his older sister offered the intruders the $4 in her wallet, the robbers fled, leaving De Ocampo and his family unharmed. But the incident changed him. Read more: For Asians Living in the Shadow of the Atlanta Shootings, Anger and ‘Just This Constant Fear’ Now a 41-year-old community activist, De Ocampo tells as many people as he can that more guns are not the answer. His warnings have fallen on deaf ears for at least one of his relatives, who bought a gun because of the increase in anti-Asian hate. The other day, his teenage nephew suggested that the family get his grandmother a gun, too. “That we have to resort to that is terrifying and it’s just sad,” he says. De Ocampo thinks about his father, who died in 1991 after immigrating to the U.S. for a better life, and how this is not the world his father wanted for his loved ones. “If more guns made people safer, this would be the safest country on Earth,” De Ocampo says. “But that’s not the reality.” "Unfortunately, we're the scapegoat." Gun-control advocates agree, saying firearms largely cause more harm than good, despite so many people purchasing them for self-protection. There were more than 43,500 gun deaths and 39,000 gun injuries in the U.S., last year, compared to about 39,500 deaths and roughly 30,000 injuries in 2019, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which uses police and news reports and varioius government sources to tally daily gun-violence incidents. Svetlana Kim sees things differently. Since she became a gun owner, her confidence has skyrocketed, and she no longer feels she has to shrink away from confrontation. “It just opened for me a whole different world,” Kim says. She’s become a regular at the shooting range, where she boasts of hitting targets 75-yards away. Now, she and her husband are going back to finish old movies she fast-forwarded. “The happiest person in the world is my husband,” she says. “We don’t have to skip anymore.” The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Activist groups are calling on governments to step in to regulate the sale of spyware after the revelations.

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Activist groups are calling on governments to step in to regulate the sale of spyware after data was leaked to major news outlets showing hundreds of journalists, activists, dissidents and lawyers around the world likely had their phones targeted by invasive surveillance software. “The industry has shown that it is incapable of policing itself, while governments—including democratic states—are hiding behind national security to whitewash these surveillance abuses,” said the digital rights group Access Now in a statement. “We need regulation, transparency, and accountability now.” The dataset, obtained by the non-profit Forbidden Stories and shared with Amnesty International and several publications, contains a list of phone numbers believed to have been selected for surveillance by clients of NSO Group, an Israel-based company that developed a piece of spyware called Pegasus that can harvest information from a target’s smartphone. Among the 37 confirmed victims are well-known public figures such as Hatice Cengiz, the fiancee​ of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and Roula Khalaf, the editor of the Financial Times newspaper. They submitted their phones for forensic analysis to confirm infection. But the number of potential victims is far higher: more than 50,000 phone numbers were included on the leaked list. They include Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and Fatima Movlamli, an Azerbaijani activist who had intimate photos of herself leaked online in 2019. According to NSO, Pegasus infects a target’s phone and can access all data, as well as remotely activate the cameras and microphone. The company says it only sells its software to “vetted” governments and intelligence agencies, but the targets identified in the leaked dataset suggest that its services are being used by authoritarian states with extensive records of human rights abuses. At least 180 journalists around the world were among those selected for targeting, according to the Guardian newspaper. One of them was Swati Chaturvedi, an Indian investigative journalist who in 2016 published an expose of the inner workings of the ruling party’s online disinformation operation. “For me, the most worrying thing was my sources and my family,” she said in an interview with TIME. “For three days, I was literally getting chills. Having a thick skin and doing investigative reporting is one thing. But this is worse than Big Brother. It sends a message of total intimidation: Don’t report. Don’t tell the truth. Because we are watching you, and we can be very aggressive and very nasty to you.” “I was not in the least surprised that I was targeted,” said Paranjoy Guha Thakurta, a journalist whose iPhone was confirmed by Forbidden Stories to have been infected by Pegasus, at a time when he was working on a story about connections between Facebook and the Indian government. “We need an inquiry.” “India describes itself as the world’s largest democracy,” Chaturvedi says. “In a democracy, you’re not supposed to attack your own citizens. This kind of unauthorized surveillance is the fiercest attack that anyone can do in a democracy.” The potential scale of the software’s reach reveals for the first time the extent to which governments around the world are making use of a new private market for spyware. “A couple of decades ago, if you wanted to do this kind of hacking in your government, you basically needed to have a massive STEM sector,” said John Scott-Railton, a researcher at Citizen Lab, in a public talk in March. “But today, all you need is a checkbook.” (Citizen Lab is a digital surveillance research group based at the University of Toronto, which analyzed several of the phones identified in the Forbidden Stories leak.) Several journalists told TIME they were waiting for analyses of their devices to come back, suggesting that the number of confirmed victims could still rise higher. “It’s a profound shift in the balance of power between a state and a population, when the state with almost no friction can slide its way into all of your lives,” Scott-Railton said in March. “If you really want to understand me, get on my phone. That means that it is a profound change in the relationship of power, and it should be the subject of a large public conversation. Unfortunately, many of the people who are pushing for the acquisition and use of these technologies would prefer the use continue to be secret.” “While these revelations are vital in shedding light on the murky industry, there are likely countless others that have been targeted and that are unaware their digital activity is secretly being monitored,” says Samuel Woodhams, a researcher at Privacy.co. The spyware industry continues to be largely unregulated, in part because states themselves are often the customers for these services, but the latest revelations could spur the international community to act. “Until meaningful restrictions are imposed on the creation and distribution of spyware, it will continue to be used to undermine human rights and democracy,” says Woodhams. In a statement to media organizations that broke the story, the NSO group said it “denies false claims made in your report, many of which are uncorroborated theories that raise serious doubts about the reliability of your sources.” The group specifically denied that its technology was “in any way” associated with the murder of dissident Saudi journalist Khashoggi, who was killed by Saudi agents inside the kingdom’s embassy in Turkey allegedly on the orders of Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman. But NSO also added that it does not have insight into what its clients do with its software. The company said in the statement that it “does not have access to the data of its customers’ targets,” and NSO does not “collect, nor possess, nor has any access to any kind of data of its customers.” The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Billy Perrigo at billy.perrigo@time.com.

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Since the U.S. began a massive country-wide vaccination effort against COVID-19 last winter, a majority of adult Americans have been immunized. But now it seems that all of them may need an additional dose next year.

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Since the U.S. began a massive country-wide vaccination effort against COVID-19 last winter, a majority of adult Americans have been immunized. But now it seems that all of them may need an additional dose next year. Public health experts including Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, stress that studies continue to show that the three vaccines currently authorized in the U.S. protect against COVID-19 disease, including against variants of the virus that are more transmissible. But as effective as the vaccines are, they can’t provide 100% immunity against disease. There is also early evidence that part of the immunity generated by the vaccines—specifically the antibodies created to stick to and block SARS-CoV-2 from infecting cells—could start to wane after about six months. That’s why researchers are now studying whether adding an additional dose after about a year could boost levels of immunity back up. For the two-shot vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, that would involve a third dose, while for the single shot Janssen/Johnson&Johnson vaccine, it would mean a second jab. Is a booster dose necessary? Pfizer-BioNTech reported in July that early studies involving people who were given a third dose about six months after their second dose showed strong antibody responses five to 10 times higher than levels after two doses. Based on those results, the companies have requested that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approve a booster dose of its vaccine. While the vaccine makers are understandably eager to sell an additional dose of their shots, the FDA said in a July 8 statement that boosters for the U.S. are premature at this point. “FDA, [Centers for Disease Control], and [the National Institutes of Health] are engaged in a science-based, rigorous process to consider whether or when a booster might be necessary…We are prepared for booster doses if and when the science demonstrates that they are needed.” Will the booster dose be another dose of the same vaccine? Both Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech are studying different versions of their vaccines as a possible third dose, while J&J is studying the effects of a second dose of its existing vaccine. Pfizer-BioNTech’s July study involved another dose of the existing vaccine, but the companies are also investigating whether adding an additional dose of a new vaccine they’ve developed, specifically designed to target the Beta variant, will improve protection as well. Moderna is testing three different third dose strategies: a half-dose of the existing vaccine, an additional dose of a new vaccine that targets the Beta variant, and another dose that combines the existing and Beta variant shots. In May, Moderna reported that serum from people given the half dose of the existing vaccine neutralized SARS-CoV-2 variants at levels similar to or higher than those against the non-variant strain. And neutralizing activity of the other two boosters, which are more targeted against the Beta variant, was higher against that variant than was a booster shot of the original vaccine. Those studies, as well as the others, are continuing and won’t likely be completed until late summer or fall. When those results are available, the FDA will review the data to determine if the added protection warrants authorizing or approving an additional dose. Are any countries already providing booster doses? In July, Israeli health officials announced that it would provide a third dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine to people with weaker immune systems, including those undergoing chemotherapy or people with immune-related conditions such as HIV. The decision was based on increased cases of Delta infections in the region, and data from the Health Ministry showing that protection from getting infected with any version of SARS-CoV-2 among people vaccinated with two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech shot dropped from 95% to about 64% after several months. When will I know if I need another dose? In the U.S., the FDA will review the data submitted by the vaccine makers to decide if a booster dose is necessary. The agency will weigh the strength of the data showing how much another dose might add to protection against both infection and severe disease against potential side effects. For the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna shots, those potential complications include a very small risk of inflammation of the heart tissue, especially among younger people. For the J&J shot, it includes both a slightly higher risk of developing blood clots and Guillain-Barré syndrome, an auto immune condition in which the immune cells attack the body’s nerve cells. The agency will also likely consider the state of the pandemic; specifically, whether the threat of new variants, including Delta, calls for the need for another dose. If I need a booster, where can I get one? It’s not clear yet where the booster doses, if they are authorized, will be distributed. Mass vaccination centers sponsored by the federal government have been closing as the majority of American adults have received at least one dose, but resources are shifting toward more local sites including doctors’ offices, pharmacies, community health centers, hospitals and mobile vaccination units. For now, a White House spokesperson said health officials are focused on ensuring that more Americans get at least the currently authorized doses before turning their attention to booster shots. More from TIME The Coronavirus Brief. Everything you need to know about the global spread of COVID-19 Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. 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"Nonbinary feels comfortable, and it feels correct. He/him and they/them pronouns feel good. We need to create visibility and space for people to be who they are, and to not have to fit into these molds."

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“When I was very young, I was like, ‘oh, I’m a boy. I just am,’” Leo Baker recalls of his childhood. For years, Baker tells TIME, he put questions about his gender on hold as he grew a successful career as a skateboarder, going on to win a series of international skateboarding competitions, including the Street League Super Crown in 2016. But the thoughts never went away and, at the age of 19, Baker realized he was trans. “It was two different worlds, and for a decade, my life was splintered as I was trying to figure out what I was doing,” he says of the divide between his private life and public image. Now 29, Baker is embracing both his gender identity and his passion for skating freely, after resigning from the U.S. Women’s Olympic Skateboarding Team and transitioning publicly last year. Here, he shares his journey. I got into skating when I was around two or three years old. For a brief period I was in foster care, and my two foster brothers had a mini ramp in their backyard. I’d stand out there and watch them skate. I got a board shortly thereafter and have been skating ever since. You can’t really judge skating because everybody’s way of doing it is so unique. I think that’s what’s really special about skating, and that’s why I gravitate towards it so much—it’s such an individualistic thing and inspires so much other creativity. But in the world of competition, it gets saturated by the rules and the boxes and the formats. It all came to a head with the Olympics. People are so excited about the upcoming Games because it’s the first time skateboarding is included. For me, skateboarding competitions are not the be all and end all. There’s people who tailor their skating to win competitions; when I’m skating in competition, I feel like I need to do a certain thing—whereas if I showed up to the skate park, I would be thinking more creatively. I don’t care about winning. Sure, it feels super good to win in the moment, but I don’t need to do it again. I just want to skate. And on top of that, being categorized as a woman in events was just not for me. I’ve been competing for 17 years, and in that space, there’s always been internal conflict. It got to a point where I couldn’t take it anymore. Leo Baker in New York on June 26. Ethan James Green for TIME In February 2020, I decided to resign from the U.S. women’s Olympic team, and to change my name publicly to Leo. It was a big fear that I was going to lose everything that I’ve worked literally my whole life for. I know a lot of trans people go through that: Will I lose my family? Will I lose my friends? Will I lose my job? Will I lose my life? It’s a scary thing to embark on, though in my circle of family and close friends, everyone has always been supportive. So I decided that whatever happens, I’d just take the loss. The compromise was not worth it. I couldn’t keep putting myself on hold. For years, I’d hated being in public spaces because then I had to be something else, this version of myself I’d created to survive and have success. All of the room I created by taking that away was invaluable, because now I’m able to just show up every single day and not have to think about, “who do I have to be today? What do I have to be like? Can I be Leo? Are my worlds overlapping?” And then I’d have been having an existential crisis. Since making that decision, I have never been happier in my life. Coming out has changed my life in so many ways. I can’t even put words to the feeling of going to a skate park and just being one person. When I was younger, I dressed like a little tomboy. I grew boobs, and thought, “God, that sucks.” I started wearing two extra small sports bras. For a good period of time, binders were my saving grace. Up until a friend of a friend sent me theirs back in 2015 because it was too small for them, I would be slouching and uncomfortable; when I first put a binder on, it was the first time I experienced what I guess people call gender euphoria. I was so overjoyed with appearing flat that I cried—I could put on every t-shirt that I’ve ever wanted to wear. I stood up straighter. I was a couple of inches taller. I just felt better and more confident. And I was skating differently. Last June, I started taking hormones—I’m micro dosing. The changes are very minimal, and I like that. I don’t want a full beard. I like being ambiguous. And last October, I got top surgery. Before I resigned from the team, that wasn’t even something I could consider doing, because of competitions and the anti-doping regulations at the Olympics. I couldn’t be on hormones if I was going to compete in a women’s event, and it was hard to schedule the surgery because my competing meant I wouldn’t be able to have the time to recover. From the moment I knew it was possible to get top surgery, I knew I was going to get it. But there are so many hoops you have to jump through to get top surgery as a trans person. You need to get a letter from your doctor, you need to get a letter from a therapist, you need to have been in therapy for all this time. For me, that process was really difficult. Every time it was a failed attempt, it just felt further and further and further away. The amount of times I broke down because it just felt like it was never going to happen—trans health care needs to be more accessible. I can explore life in a new way now that I’ve rid myself of all this sh-t that was holding me back. I almost feel like there is no gender; I don’t identify with any of that. All of it feels so foreign. I’m not a woman, and if you take the “standard” definition of what a man is, I’m definitely not that. I’m floating around in space somewhere between the two. Nonbinary feels comfortable, and it feels correct. He/him and they/them pronouns feel good. We need to create visibility and space for people to be who they are, and to not have to fit into these molds. Read more: Elliot Page Is Ready for This Moment What if I had had the representation at a younger age to know that there was a word for that, and there were people who experienced what I experienced—that I wasn’t just a tomboy? Putting my needs first has taken me 29 years, literally. I want there to be that representation for people like me. People who are queer, and just trying to live their lives. I am grateful to be where I am, but if there was someone like me that I could have looked up to as a child, my entire life’s journey might be different. I have noticed that I am that person for a lot of people. I feel the responsibility; I want to stay humble and do as much as I can with the platform I have while I am here. I started the NYC Skate Project as an exercise in community building, because I just wanted to skate with my peers. It’s an intentional space for queer, trans, and nonbinary folks and cis women. We do lessons with all ages and abilities, to get people comfortable skating. It’s nice when I meet another person who has the same experience, or who is gender queer. The world just is constantly trying to erase us, and we’re not going to be erased. I used to compete against guys all the time when I was a teenager. Technically I could still. It’s just a matter of whether I want that. But I don’t really feel it’s necessary—and also it’s so boring. Maybe there’s some world in the future that has queer skate competitions, maybe that would be a fun time. For now though, seeing the competition happening from afar and knowing I’m not there and why I’m not there, I can rest easy. I feel like I’ve arrived right back where I was at the beginning when I was a kid, and when skating was this pure and sacred thing to me. I’m going to skate, and no one can say anything to me. It’s how I make my living, and it’s how I feel happy. Nothing is going to touch it again. As told to Suyin Haynes More from TIME Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. 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"Most of us are optimists, which might make us better company at the dinner table, but it means we are lousy at predicting the future. We underestimate the amount of time a project will require," writes Christopher Cox.

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Not long ago, I visited a peculiar farm in southwestern Oregon. Year after year, Hastings Inc. produces a single crop: the Easter lily. Every Easter weekend, hundreds of thousands of lilies from this farm appear in supermarkets, big-box stores, and garden centers throughout North America. Each one has to look the same—a single stem, a dark green nest of leaves, and five or more flared white trumpet blossoms—and each one has to bloom at exactly the same time. They can’t miss their target by even a few days. As one of the farmers told me, “The day after Easter, an Easter lily is worthless.” Why was this lily farm so good at meeting its deadline while the rest of us struggle endlessly? I found a clue on the wall of the main office at Hastings, near a window that overlooked the Pacific Ocean: a laminated calendar that showed the date of Easter for every year from 1996 to 2045. That calendar, I discovered, held the secret for how the farmers avoided an all-too-human problem known as the planning fallacy. The term was coined in 1977, when Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman wrote a paper about predictions for DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Kahneman, who won a Nobel Prize in economics for the work he did with Tversky, later said the paper was inspired in part by an experience he’d had writing a textbook with a group of academics. At the beginning of that project, he had asked the participants to estimate how long it would take. The average guess was two years. It took nine. Most of us are optimists, which might make us better company at the dinner table, but it means we are lousy at predicting the future. We underestimate the amount of time a project will require. If it’s a project that has a budget, we underestimate the expense as well. The most famous example of this failing probably the Sydney Opera House, which was commissioned in 1957 with an expected completion date of 1963 and a budget of $7 million Australian dollars. The building wasn’t finished until 1973, and only after the most ambitious versions of the plan had been scaled back, for a final cost of $102 million. The planning fallacy is the tendency to seize upon the most optimistic timetable for completing a project and ignore inconvenient information that might make you revise that prediction. According to Roger Buehler, a professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University, people are pretty stubborn about these conclusions even when presented with evidence of how they’ve been wrong in the past. Although people are aware that “most of their previous predictions were overly optimistic, they believe that their current forecasts are realistic.” More from TIME Buehler and some colleagues at the University of Waterloo in Ontario ran a test on their students to see how bad they were at estimating when they would finish their work. They asked thirty-seven seniors to make three predictions: the date they would submit their honors thesis “if everything went as well as it possibly could,” the date “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could,” and their best guess for what their actual submission date would be. Fewer than 30 percent submitted their work by the date they thought was the best estimate of when they would be done. The optimistic predictions were even worse—they were off by an average of 28 days, and barely 10 percent of the students were done by that date. The most striking result, however, might be the one for the pessimistic scenario. Even when asked to predict what would happen “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could,” the students were still too optimistic. Fewer than half had finished by the worst-case-scenario date. The problem with our predictions is that we treat each task like it’s a novel problem. We construct a story about how we will complete our work but ignore evidence from similar projects we or other people have done in the past. That was true with Kahneman’s textbook: One of the academics later admitted that earlier projects he’d worked on took a minimum of seven years. But when it was time to estimate how long this one would take, he guessed two years like everyone else. It’s not all hopeless, though. There is a way to overcome, or at least mitigate, the planning fallacy. In a follow-up experiment, Buehler and his colleagues had a different group of students complete a one-hour computer tutorial at some point before a one- or two-week deadline. They also asked them to predict when they would finish the assignment, but here the researchers inserted a variable. Some of the students were prompted to think about past assignments they had completed that were similar to this one, and to apply that knowledge to their prediction. The control group was given no such instructions. The results were remarkable: although the control group exhibited the same optimistic bias as the students in the first experiment, that bias almost disappeared among the students who were prompted to forge a connection between their past experiences and the current assignment. They predicted it would take them an average of seven days to complete the tutorial. The actual average: seven days. In that office on the lily farm, there was a reason that a calendar dating back to 1996 was up on the wall. It was a cure for optimism. The farmers were bound by the Easter deadline—they couldn’t afford to let the planning fallacy have its way with them. So they did what those students did, only without the prodding of a group of professors. They took their past experience and used it to build a schedule, counting back from Easter. They knew down to the day how long the lilies had to be in greenhouses, how long in storage, and how long it took to get them out of the ground and into boxes. The calendar was there to remind them to think about how it was done in 1996, or 2006, or 2016. When it comes time for you to build your own Sydney opera house, even if you don’t have a deadline as clear-cut as Easter Sunday, take a cue from those lily farmers. Ignore what you wish were true. Use the past to build your schedule. Keep your eye on the calendar—and then watch those flowers bloom. This article is adapted from Cox’s new book, The Deadline Effect Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Faced with prolonged Arctic isolation as the rest of the world dealt with a growing pandemic, Hilde Falun and Sunniva Sorby started collaborating with climate scientists unable to travel by collecting data and samples to aid their research.

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In late 2019, expeditioners and guides Hilde Falun and Sunniva Sorby went to Norway’s remote Svalbard archipelago to complete a long-term goal of being the first female team to over winter in the Arctic. But the pair’s planned return home to mainland Norway coincided with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and pretty quickly they found themselves stranded. There had been plans for a ship carrying friends and family to come and collect them as the ice began to melt in March, but travel restrictions got in the way, and they couldn’t come home until September. So instead, they spent the winter and much of spring up until May in an isolated, tiny wooden hut high up in the Arctic circle, surrounded by winter darkness. There was a definite upside, though, at least for the global scientific community: just as the two were stuck in Svalbard, fieldwork by climate scientists and researchers came to a standstill, as those who would normally travel to the Arctic to monitor the levels of melting ice as the region transitions from winter to summer were stuck at home. Faced with prolonged Arctic isolation as the rest of the world dealt with a growing pandemic, Falun and Sorby started collaborating with the scientists unable to travel, collecting data and samples to aid their research. Their work proved so useful that, after they finally did get to go home, they came back to their little hut for a second winter at the end of 2020. Every day, they ventured out into the freezing temperatures, traveling by foot or snowmobile to collect samples of ice, sea water and organisms, in an effort to help scientists better understand the impacts of climate change in one of the fastest-warming and most-fragile parts of the planet. “They have provided data from a place where no one else has been observing,” says Kim Holmén, international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute. “They have been watching for megafauna, seals, polar bears, whales, sightings of opportunity. These are not quantitative data but they certainly are qualitative data and population density can be estimated from these types of observations.” Falun and Sorby are not technically scientists. But they have seen the changes in the Arctic first-hand over more than two decades working in the tourism industry and carrying out expeditions at the planet’s extremities. This was the second winter they spent in Svalbard. During the winter of 2019-2020, they became the first all-woman team to overwinter in the Arctic; they documented what they called their “Hearts in the Ice” expedition through blog posts, photography, and video chats to raise awareness of climate change. Northern Lights over Bamsebu, Jan. 2020 Courtesy of Hearts in the Ice The Arctic is ground zero for rising temperatures and is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet. On the Svalbard archipelago where Falun and Sorby were based temperatures have already risen by 3° to 5°C since the early 1970’s. That, plus the devastating knock-on effects melting ice could have on the planet as a whole—melting Arctic ice can change the circulation of the oceans and alter temperature patterns and cause extreme weather—is why it’s so important for scientists to monitor the region closely. Read more: ‘A Climate Emergency Unfolding Before Our Eyes.’ Arctic Sea Ice Has Shrunk to Almost Historic Levels When COVID-19 restrictions kicked in, governments and scientists globally recalled almost all research ships. Commercial ships and airplanes would ordinarily also contribute to ocean and weather observations and data collection, but with cruise ships not traveling and a massive reduction in commercial flights due to travel restrictions, there were fewer resources all around. “In terms of the observing system as a whole, the major thing is aircraft observations from commercial aircraft, they fell by about 90%,” says Peter Thorne, professor of physical geography at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, who also chairs the International Surface Temperature Initiative. These observations and data collection are vital for the understanding of how climate change is affecting the planet. “What you do not monitor, you cannot understand, at a fundamental level,” says Thorne. According to a recent United Nations report, the pandemic has caused “significant impacts” on land-, marine-, and air-based observing systems, leading to gaps in data that could affect the long-term quality of forecasts and climate services, though these, according to the report, are not yet “fully visible or/and understood.” The gaps that developed during the pandemic will “become more and more apparent moving forward,” says Thorne. This is particularly problematic for our understanding of polar regions and oceans, he explains. “It’s really the ocean that worries me, because of the lead time required [for monitoring changes] it may not look obvious over the actual time of COVID-19 but we will come to see the impact on the ocean observing system after everything is back to normal.” In the polar regions, the measurement of glaciers and permafrost is usually carried out once a year as the ice thaws and 2021 will be the second year during which scientists will have been unable to travel to those parts of the globe. Indeed, the pandemic hit right in the middle of one of the largest collaborative climate science expeditions ever undertaken: the Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) a year-long endeavor involving hundreds of researchers from 20 countries that had taken over a decade to plan. In order to closely examine the changing environment in the Arctic, a German research vessel called the Polarstern was purposefully frozen into the ice in the Siberian area of the Arctic in October 2019; the plan was for researchers from around the world to alternate time on board the ship over the course of a year. However, five months into its icy berth, the Polestern instead had to break away and sail out of the Arctic to reach two resupply ships in ice-free waters to allow for restocking and to change over to a new group of scientists and exchange its crew who had been on board for a number of months. While the expedition ultimately went ahead, there was an “almost four-week gap in the year-long time series that we were collecting,” says Madison Smith, a researcher at the applied physics lab at the University of Washington, who was part of the expedition. These sorts of data gaps aren’t the only impact the pandemic has had on climate science. Climate negotiations and conferences where scientists present their work have been cancelled and there have been little-to-no means to collaborate in person. One of the largest examples of global scientific collaboration are the reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body that assesses the science related to climate change. Thousands of scientists and researchers from 195 countries collaborate on the reports, which are produced every four years, and help inform governments on climate change action, like setting emissions targets. “[The pandemic] made so many aspects of all the work that we do so much harder,” says Thorne, who contributes to the report. The IPCC had expected to publish the first part of its final report in April 2021, but that’s been pushed off to August—luckily, still in time for COP26, the global U.N. climate change negotiations that will be held in November. Bamsebu Trappers Cabin built in 1930 for Beluga hunting, March 2020 Courtesy of Hearts in the Ice During their most recent Arctic stay—October 2020 to May 2021—one of Falun and Sorby’s most difficult tasks was ice-core sampling, which involves using a special drill to remove samples from the ice, a few inches wide and almost 2.5 feet in length. Arctic ice sheets trap air bubbles as they are formed so these sorts of core samples give an overview of past atmospheric conditions, along with a kind of biography of microscopic organisms that lived in the area over that time. “We ride our snowmobiles out on the ice and take two ice-core samples,” says Sorby. “The drill bit is probably as tall as we are and very heavy.” The samples can help scientists determine how fast the ice is melting. “They have been sampling the thickness of the ice and the quality of the ice,” says Holmén. Researchers can use satellite imagery to estimate Arctic changes, but the sorts of samples collected by Falun and Sorby give a clearer picture of what is happening on the ground. During their last stay, the duo undertook all sorts of other jobs out on the ice, and the icy Arctic waters. They collected phytoplankton in the sea for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California. They took samples of saltwater and seaweed for the University Center in Svalbard. Using an infrared drone, they measured surface sea-ice temperature for the British Columbia Institute of Technology and monitored wildlife for Holmén and his team at the Norwegian Polar Institute. They also collected physical evidence of the impact of humans on the environment. Despite their remote location they constantly found and collected “plastic and a lot of marine debris. Nets and all kinds of trash, you would not believe what washes up on shore,” says Sorby. (Their work has also made them stand out in another way. One relatively unseen effect of COVID-19 is what it’s done to the careers of female scientists, many of whom have been forced to take up an oversized burden of childcare. “I’m concerned about the careers of female scientists without childcare. At a time when publication track record is really important. Some of them have been really hard hit,” says Valérie Masson-Delmotte, Co-Chair, of the IPCC Working Group I.) German research icebreaker "Polarstern" in the Central Arctic Ocean during polar night on Jan. 1, 2020. Lukas Piotrowski—Alfred Wegener Institut/AFP/Getty Images Falun and Sorby hope they can share lessons from their experience—which they see as an extreme form of the isolation so many people around the world have dealt with in the last year and a half. They learned to live more in the moment and appreciate small things, particularly food, which can be in short supply. “We celebrate every dinner,” said Sorby, speaking to TIME in February. “Even if we have a limp carrot left, we celebrate that limp carrot.” They left the Arctic with a message of encouragement to the world not to feel despondent about climate change but to take action. Having seen the rapid changes in the Arctic firsthand, Sorby says they want to empower people to bring about change by turning “climate despair” into “climate engagement and inspiration.” Get our climate newsletter. Learn how the week’s major news story connects back to the climate crisis. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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The COVID-19 curve in the U.S. is rising again after months of decline, with the number of new cases per day doubling over the past three weeks, driven by the fast-spreading Delta variant, lagging vaccination rates and Fourth of July gatherings.

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The way Texans tell its story relates to how Americans—especially Mexican Americans—see each other more broadly.

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time

Less than a month after Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed into law a bill he described as “a strong move to abolish critical race theory in Texas”—which educators worry will limit how they can talk about the history of systemic racism and current events—the Republican leader put the issue back on the agenda for a special session of the state legislature that began on July 8, as part of a wave of state actions in Republican-led states designed to regulate how the legacy of racism and slavery in the U.S. is taught in public schools. The Governor can call a special session to address emergencies, which in this case, also includes issues of voting rights, trans students competing in sports and perceived censorship of political views on social media. The Texas Tribune reports that lawmakers have already introduced new legislation that seeks to limit teaching on the histories of marginalized groups in the U.S., even as questions remain about how the bill signed into law on a similar vein will be enforced when it is expected to go into effect in September. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick may have provided a glimpse of what may be to come recently when he cancelled a July 1 event at the state’s history museum with the authors of a new book aimed at debunking myths about the 1836 siege at the Alamo. Confirming that he ordered the talk’s cancellation on Twitter, Patrick tweeted that “fact-free rewriting of TX history has no place” at the Bullock Texas State History Museum. Pushback over history that paints a fuller picture of the Tejanos (Mexican Texans) in the state is not new, but in 2021, academic debates are increasingly caught up in the curriculum controversies engulfing school boards nationwide—and, in particular, arguments over whether critical race theory is being taught in schools. Read more: Inside the Fight Over What Kids Learn About America’s History “To me the example of the Alamo is useful in understanding how history gets taken out of context—the story itself has become universalized almost to the point of losing all context,” explains Raúl A. Ramos, an associate professor of history at the University of Houston who teaches an undergraduate Texas history course that some students take to be certified to teach the subject in the state. “At some point the myth itself becomes a stand-in for history.” TIME spoke with Ramos for context on what’s new (and what’s not) about the current controversy over the Alamo’s history, and how the way Texans tell its story relates to how Americans—especially Mexican Americans—see each other more broadly. TIME: What do you see as the impact of not teaching the full history of the Alamo? Ramos: Almost on any [given] day you’ll hear somebody talk about, “this is our Alamo” or “this is our line in the sand.” They’re taking these parts of the myth, versus the reality, and applying it to their particular context. The real story is one of tragedy—particularly for Mexican Americans, and for Tejanos. It’s literally one of brother fighting against brother; of people having to make choices that in the end, ended up hurting them. And look at the building itself: it was a Catholic church that [people might think] was built by Spanish missionaries. To be frank, it wasn’t the missionaries who built the Alamo. It was the indigenous people that they were converting who put stone on top of stone to build the actual physical building that is the Alamo. So one place we can start with the elimination of context is by looking at the building itself as a text that tells us the history of Texas. That history doesn’t start in 1836. Does the current debate about the history of the Alamo feel different compared to times the issue has come up in the past? History has always been political in Texas because Texas history [curriculum] standards are decided through a political process. Every time they’re revised, it becomes a statewide political issue. The State Board of Education oversees K-12 education in the state of Texas, elected commissioners then oversee the creation of these history standards and then textbook companies use those standards to write their textbooks. Texas being such a large market, essentially the State Board of Education ended up writing standards that became somewhat nationalized. There have been scholars analyzing the history of Texas and the 19th century history of Texas, around questions of race, for over 80 years now. The scholarship itself is lengthy and thorough, but mostly within academia. And so what appears to be happening is that as part of this “anti-critical race theory”, essentially, pushback to the George Floyd protests, there was a decision among political leadership in Texas to use the history of 19th century Texas—and particularly the history of the Texas Revolution—as an emphasis point for patriotic education, and as a tool to push back on more expansive document-based histories of Texas and of the American West. My own feeling is that it’s only come up because it’s been made an issue as a litmus test for being patriotic; you have to endorse that myth. You can teach a diverse history as long as it doesn’t contradict the patriotic myth. That’s been very clear all along. You can talk about Tejanos as long as you’re talking about the Tejanos who fought on the Texian side—not the Tejanos who fought on the Mexican side, or didn’t fight at all. Do you see any way that teachers could teach inclusive history with the way the law is written? That’s a tricky question because it’s still unclear how this is going to be applied. When you read the actual legislation, so much of it is written in a way that, you look at it, and you’re just saying, “Nobody teaches history this way.” One [part of the law] says, students should not be made to feel bad about their race. I don’t know a single teacher who wants their students to feel bad about themselves! I think in a lot of urban school districts, nothing’s going to change. It’s in the suburbs, if I were teaching in those areas, where I would feel a little bit more reluctant or when I think you’d see at least initially, a lot of teachers self-censoring, saying, “Well, I don’t want to risk my career.” It’s a question of how much risk they want to expose themselves to; [the law] creates this extra layer of fear that one student or one family might be unhappy with what you’re doing and destroy your career. As you mentioned, the law emphasizes that teachers shouldn’t teach children to feel bad about themselves. How can teachers prepare for that? When I read that, the first thing I thought of was, well, if you’re Mexican American, and you’re being taught that Mexicans are evil in the Texas Revolution—isn’t that supposed to make you feel bad? Wouldn’t that give [teachers] a platform to push back on this mythologized story of Texas, which is to emphasize Anglo American superiority and ethnic Mexican inferiority? But it’s clearly not what was intended; I don’t think the legislation was intended to protect the feelings of Mexican American kids who are being taught that Anglo Americans are superior in the triumphant Anglo mythology of the Texas Revolution. That’s one of the internal contradictions, if you will, of how this legislation is being presented. The subtext is that white families’ feelings are hurt by talking about the racial history that, certainly, Mexican American families are well aware of and African American families are well aware of in Texas. You recently wrote an op-ed in the Houston Chronicle about having taken 7th-grade Texas history. For readers who don’t know about this class, what did you learn? Well, first of all, you actually take [Texas History classes] twice—in fourth grade and seventh grade. You get a double dose of Texas history. When I was growing up in the San Antonio suburbs, we only spoke Spanish at home; after school I’d come home and sit down at the dining table and my father would ask what we learned in Texas history, and then I’d get a different version of Texas history from my parents who are both from Mexico. That, in a lot of ways, shaped my own sense of who I am, but also my sense of the world around me and how history, how the same exact event, can be seen in different ways. A lot of kids at my school didn’t get that. You raise a good point that it’s important to acknowledge that people learn their history not only at school but also through their families or through their church or other community members who pass on these stories. I mean, look at the other Texas history-related national story of the last month: Juneteenth. Juneteenth has been celebrated for decades in Texas, primarily in African American communities unabated—and stories were passed on that way. The place we’re in now, at least in our culture and our history, it feels like we have two contradictory discussions going on. To me, the legislature having to come out and legislate history and culture is a sign that the history and culture has moved on. It’s an acknowledgment that the prevailing view has shifted and has changed, and I don’t think legislating is going to move it back. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.

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The future of the Internet is under threat and democratic governments need to step up, says human rights group.

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time

The future of the Internet is under greater threat than ever before from authoritarian governments, according to literary and human rights group PEN America, which called on the world’s democracies to unite to defend freedom of expression online. Repressive governments are imposing new regulations that invoke “digital sovereignty,” but in reality can be used for censorship, surveillance and crackdowns on dissent, PEN America warns in a new report published Tuesday. Also on Tuesday, the U.N.’s human rights chief Michelle Bachelet pointed to “authorities in various countries” who have shut down the Internet and demanded takedowns of social media posts. “I remind these and other States that criticism – online or offline – is not a crime,” she said in a statement. “It is a necessary element of any vibrant society.” In its earliest days, cyberspace was like the Wild West, with no way for governments to enforce national laws, and very few even trying. But as the Internet’s impact on society has grown, so have efforts to regulate the negative effects it can have on individuals and societies. Many democratic governments around the world are grappling with laws to mitigate privacy risks, disinformation and hate speech, often making the argument that national laws must also apply online, known as digital sovereignty. But authoritarians, PEN America warns, are using similar rhetoric to consolidate their own power. States crack down on digital freedoms “The most consistent, earliest, and most enthusiastic champions of digital sovereignty have been authoritarian states,” James Tager, the lead author of the report, tells TIME. “When they say digital sovereignty, they have a very specific idea of what they mean. And it’s not consistent with international human rights standards.” The practice extends beyond traditional authoritarian states like Russia or China, whose “great firewall” is a longstanding example of how governments can attempt to control what their citizens see online. Smaller countries like Belarus and Myanmar are increasingly adopting similar approaches. And democratic states like India and Nigeria are using the argument for digital sovereignty to mask repressive crackdowns on freedom of expression, PEN America says. On June 4, the Nigerian government banned Twitter nationwide after the platform removed a post from President Muhammadu Buhari for what it said was a violation of its rules. And in April, the Indian government forced Twitter and Facebook to remove dozens of posts critical of its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing national law. Analysts and advocates have stepped up their concerns that moves toward digital sovereignty could lead to internet fragmentation, the report says, adding that: “The ability of writers, journalists, and others to communicate across national boundaries will be subject to political diktats, online communities will fracture, and a new toolbox for state repression will open.” So far, it has been left to the technology companies to push back, with limited success. Twitter has posted records of the takedowns ordered by the Indian government to a public database. After an earlier incident in February, it said that it had refused to take action on some of the tweets belonging to politicians, journalists and activists “because we do not believe that the actions we have been directed to take are consistent with Indian law.” In May, Indian police visited the Twitter office in New Delhi after the social media platform labeled several tweets by ruling party members as “manipulated media.” Calls for a new approach Democratic governments must do more to stand up for online free expression, the PEN America report argues. “We’re calling for a renewed and more muscular commitment to democratic digital multilateralism,” Tager says. “A coalition of democracies should be developing new digital standards for the future of the Internet.” The Trump Administration’s unilateral approach to international diplomacy coincided with digital regulation coming to the forefront of the global policy debate. “We lost a lot of critical time during the Trump years,” says Jason Pielemeier, a former U.S. diplomat who worked on Internet freedom issues at the State Department, who now works for the Global Network Initiative, an NGO that aims to encourage democracies to set global standards for safeguarding digital rights. “The crux is that democracies are not winning the battle of ideas when it comes to how to address the critical risks of our increasingly connected world.” The Biden Administration says it is restoring the promotion of human rights and democracy to the center of U.S. foreign policy, and earlier this month called on Nigeria to reverse its Twitter ban. Former President Trump conveyed the opposite sentiment in a statement on June 8. “More countries should ban Twitter and Facebook … perhaps I should have done it while I was president.” READ MORE: India’s New Internet Rules Are a Step Toward ‘Digital Authoritarianism,’ Activists Say. Here’s What They Will Mean The Biden State Department also says that it promotes Internet freedom through both bilateral and multilateral channels. At the G7 meeting in the U.K. last week, members and allies signed a joint statement affirming “freedom of expression, both online and offline, as a freedom that safeguards democracy and helps people live free from fear and oppression.” India was one of the signatories to the “open societies” statement, but only after seeking some tweaks to the language. But to some observers, these steps don’t go far enough. “The Biden Administration really needs to step up and articulate a broader vision [of Internet freedom] to guide Congress, and also to demonstrate to other partners around the world what they think the right way to handle these risks in a rights-respecting manner is,” Pielemeier says. Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Billy Perrigo at billy.perrigo@time.com.

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"Passive-aggressiveness comes in varying degrees, which can make it tricky to know if you work, live or socialize with a passive-aggressor." (2017)

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Human aggression doesn’t have much going for it. Every war, bar brawl or playground smackdown ever fought has resulted from our habit of lashing out first and talking it through only later. But if aggression has one virtue, it’s that it’s unambiguous. It’s hard to misunderstand the meaning of a missile launch or a punch in the nose. But passive-aggression — regular aggression’s sneaky little cousin? That’s a whole other thing. Passive-aggression is there but it’s not, you see it and you don’t. It’s aggression as steam — hard to frame, impossible grasp. You see it in the competitive colleague who would never confront you directly but accidentally leaves your name off an email about an important meeting. It’s the spouse who’s usually punctual but takes forever to get out of the house when it’s your turn to choose the movie. Sometimes there’s an innocent explanation, but often there’s not — and the passive-aggressors themselves might not even know which is which. Either way, passive-aggression is more than just the nettlesome habit of a few maddeningly indirect people. Clinicians differ on whether it qualifies as a full-blown personality disorder like, say, narcissism or paranoia, but they agree on the symptoms: deliberate inefficiency, an avoidance of responsibility, a refusal to state needs or concerns directly. Passive-aggressiveness comes in varying degrees, which can make it tricky to know if you work, live or socialize with a passive-aggressor — or if you’re one yourself. The behavior is practically defined by its plausible deniability. So we’ve compiled seven of the most commonly reported ways passive-aggressive character traits can show up in your life: Leaving things undone. Passive-aggressors are champions of the almost complete job: the room that’s painted except for the molding; the laundry that’s washed but doesn’t get folded; the dishwasher that’s loaded except for the utensils, because really, who needs clean utensils when we can always spear our food with sharpened sticks or the fondue forks we’ve had in the back of the closet since 1997! (Not that I’ve ever experienced this at home.) It’s a nifty strategy, signaling resentment at having to do the job and leaving just little enough undone that you’d feel picky criticizing it and will ultimately decide just to do it yourself for, like, the twelve billionth time. (Not that I’ve ever experienced that either.) Running late. If you’re a passive-aggressor you live in an Einsteinian universe of eternally elastic time, where a few minutes can turn into a few hours. Actually, all of us live there — which is why we have watches. To passive-aggressors, a watch is a bother. If they don’t want to go to a dinner party but feel obligated to be there? No worries. They’ll just accept the invitation and then — oopsies! — only vaguely remember the time it starts so they don’t show up till the middle of the soup course. The same is true when they resent having to attend a meeting so they wander in 20 minutes late with a mystified expression that says you’re all here already? The behavior is occasionally deliberate, more commonly unconscious — and always infuriatingly effective. The non-compliment. Compliments are easy. Compliments can even be fun. Here are some nice compliments: “Great haircut!” or “Terrific soup!” Here are some less nice compliments: “Great haircut — I used to get the same one in college,” or “Terrific soup — I didn’t even taste all that cilantro.” It’s no secret which kind of compliment the passive-aggressor goes for — usually out of competitiveness. If you’re not sure which kind of compliment you’ve gotten, pay attention to your own responses: If you feel like saying “thank you,” you’ve probably gotten a good one. If you feel like running screaming from the room, not so much. Silence. Shhh… Hear that? No? Exactly. That’s the sound of a passive-aggressive person who’s cheesed off about something. If you were upset with something a friend or family member did, you might say — and we’re just spitballing ideas here — “I’m upset with something you did.” A passive-aggressive person would instead say: [insert your favorite cricket sounds here]. Silence is always a go-to strategy for passive-aggressors and it’s not hard to see why. It says nothing at all and yet says volumes. It ostensibly avoids a conflict but in fact provokes one—with the very lack of communication serving as a taunt and a goad. It’s thus passive, and yet, um, aggressive. Hey! We might be onto something. Wistful wishing. You know what I wish? I wish passive-aggressive people wouldn’t dreamily announce something they want and then immediately conclude — always out loud — that it’s probably not going to happen. But I guess that’s too much to ask. See what I did there? Annoying, right? I could have said, “Hey! Passive-aggressive people! Knock off that out-loud wishing.” But instead I came at it sideways. If that sounds like things you’ve heard in your life — “It would be great if you could get the project done by Wednesday, but I guess it’ll have to wait till Friday” — it’s a pretty safe bet there are passive-aggressors in your circle. The objective, of course, is to get an idea out there, then immediately disown it — thus putting the burden of getting it done or not done on you. Sabotage. It’s not hard to tell the bad guy in a movie. He’s the one who’s always tampering with the brakes in the hero’s car or sneaking the bad lines of code into a computer. Passive-aggressors might not go that far, but you can see where they get their inspiration. That deadline your colleague forgot to tell you about until it was just a day away? Those work clothes your spouse tossed in with the dry-cleaning the day before you went off on that business trip you’d been arguing about? As with lateness, this is sometimes deliberate but usually not. Either way the point has been made — and yet not made too. The disguised insult. The social contract under which the rest of us live has a special provision passive-aggressors have added just for themselves. It typically comes in the form of a “but” clause, like, “I don’t want to sound mean, but…” “I hope you don’t think I’m insensitive, but…” “Not to be judgmental, but…” after which they say something mean, insensitive or judgmental — and sometimes all three at once. An uncharacteristically honest variation on this disguised insult is the “You’re going to hate this, but…” which at least has the virtue of being true, because you will inevitably hate it down to your very last strand of DNA. This is as close to pure aggression as the passive-aggressor gets. Feel free to hold up a hand and halt the conversation before any passive-aggressors in your life get past the comma that ends the clause — but don’t be surprised if they drive right through that stop sign. If you’re a victim of passive-aggression, there are a few basic coping strategies. For starters, remember that you’re not nuts. If you see a pattern it’s probably real. So respond — and know that it’s OK to draw sharp boundaries. The chronically late dinner guest can be invited once more on the proviso that the start time of the evening is honored. After that? It’s Chipotle for you, bub. And what if you’re the passive aggressor? Well, the knock-it-off suggestion is a good place to start. That’s not always easy, and it can take work and even the help of a good therapist to determine why directness is so hard for you. It’s a lot better than indirectness, however—and it’s a whole lot less work. Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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Close to 60 Texas House Democrats fled the state and were headed on two planes to Washington, D.C., on Monday to stall the passage of two controversial GOP-backed bills that would restrict access to voting across the state.

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More than 50 Texas House Democrats fled the state and headed on two planes to Washington, D.C., on Monday to stall the passage of two controversial GOP-backed bills that would restrict access to voting across the state. Texas House Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, one of the organizers of the trip, told TIME in a phone call shortly before the Democratic lawmakers’ flight that the group was heading to the capital to call on Congress “with courage and conviction” to ask the Senate to protect voting rights and pass the For The People Act. By fleeing the state—and risking arrest—Texas House Democrats are denying their Republican colleagues the quorum needed to vote on the bills during a special session of the state legislature that is underway. It’s a temporary fix, Fischer admits, but he says they are trying to send a bigger message. “We are holding the line here in Texas,” he says. “If Republicans are silencing our voices here, they’ll do it anywhere in America and we’re going to stand up to that.” Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott said Monday that Democrats who left the state Monday would face arrest upon their return. “As soon as they come back in the state of Texas, they will be arrested, they will be cabined inside the Texas Capitol until they get their job done,” Abbott told Austin’s KVUE-TV. Republicans in Texas’ State House voted Tuesday morning to formalize Abbott’s arrest threat by approving a Call of the House, which enables the Sergeant-at-Arms to compel Democrats to return to the House chamber—even detaining them if necessary. (Texas law enforcement does not have jurisdiction in D.C., however, so the vote will likely only have an impact once lawmakers return home.) Abbot had said in a statement earlier on Monday that Democrats’ actions “inflicts harm on the Texans who elected them to serve.” “As they fly across the country on cushy private planes, they leave undone issues that can help their districts and our state,” Abbott said. On Tuesday, Texas House Democrats joined two of the states’ Democratic representatives in Congress—Lloyd Doggett and Marc Veasey—for a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol. “(Republicans) wouldn’t be doing this if they didn’t think it would have a negative outcome, particularly on Brown and Black voters in the state of Texas and in the other states that are doing similar style legislation,” Veasey said. In late May, a group ofTexas House Democrats staged a walkout from the State Capitol to break quorum and prevent the passage of voting restrictions hours before the end of the legislature’s regular session. Abbott has since called a 30-day special session, which began last week, to revive efforts to pass the voting bills, among others. Texas Democrats also fled the state in 2003 to break quorum in response to Republican redistricting legislation. The Texas voting bills would empower partisan poll watchers, ban drive-thru and 24-hour voting as well as mail ballot drop boxes and no longer allow local election officials to send out vote-by-mail applications to voters unless they are explicitly requested. Democrats say they will restrict voting access and disproportionately impact voters of color in the state. Republicans say they are necessary safeguards after widespread claims of fraud during the 2020 election, though no evidence of such fraud has been presented in the state. Voting experts in Texas argue that while the Democrats’ escape to Washington may be effective in garnering publicity for their opposition to the GOP’s legislation, it may not be a viable long-term strategy. Abbott has the power to keep on calling special sessions, and it’s unclear how long lawmakers will be able to remain apart from their families and jobs outside the legislature. “This is definitely the nuclear option in approaching this legislation,” says Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “Republicans control every level of government and can continue their legislative blitzkrieg after they wear the Democrats down. They can’t stay away forever.” Mark Jones, a political science professor at Rice University, says the Democrats’ move is “very polarizing,” and a stunt to portray “Democrats as the saviors of democracy and the Republicans as the dark forces trying to destroy democracy.” For Republicans and their base, standing firm to their position will likely be viewed as “fighting the good fight,” he says. For Democrats to succeed at stopping or restraining the bills, Jones says public opinion either must turn against Abbott and Texas Republicans or Democrats must obtain some sort of concessions in the legislation. Texas Democrats’ actions did draw praise from Vice President Kamala Harris, who said during a voting rights meeting that she applauds the lawmakers for “standing for the rights of all Americans,” according to CBS News. President Joe Biden is expected to deliver a speech focusing on voting rights tomorrow. James Slattery, an attorney with the Texas Civil Rights Project, which advocates for voting rights, hopes the Democrats’ move will send a clear message to the President and to lawmakers in Washington who do not support doing away with the filibuster, which could make it easier for Senate Democrats to pass federal voting rights legislation. “There’s a particular message here to Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin, Senate Democrats and President Biden,” he says. “Elected officials in Texas are now literally fleeing the state and avoiding arrest to protect voting rights. Isn’t the most minimal thing that [they] can do is kill the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation?” During last weekend’s public hearing for the legislation, many members of the public who arrived at 8 a.m. to testify were waiting until late at night and the early hours of the morning to be heard. “That isn’t an accident,” Slattery says. “That is a choice to lard up the agenda of the hearing so that most members of the public who wanted to testify would not be able to stay until they had the opportunity to.” Voting rights advocates say the legislation being considered in the special session in Texas are largely the same as the bills that failed to pass during the regular session. The bills would “make it even more difficult to vote, especially for senior, disabled, and low-income Texans,” says Anthony Gutierrez, executive director for Common Cause Texas. In response to Democrats’ earlier walkout from the state legislature in May, Abbott vetoed funding for the state legislature and its staff. A bill to restore that funding is also on this special session’s agenda; if Democrats remain in Washington, many staffers’ salaries remain in the air. While Democrats blame Abbott for creating this funding crisis, Republicans say Democrats bear responsibility. “These actions put at risk state funding that will deny thousands of hard-working staff members and their families a paycheck, health benefits, and retirement investment so that legislators who broke quorum can flee to Washington D.C. in private jets,” Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan said in a statement on Monday. Fischer, for his part, is not deterred, nor is he sure when he will return home. “I’ve got the largest suitcase I have in my house and I threw in extra socks and so…,” he said before his plane to Washington took off. “We’ve got 27 days left in the session and I’m prepared to stay out those 27 days.” Get our Politics Newsletter. The headlines out of Washington never seem to slow. Subscribe to The D.C. Brief to make sense of what matters most. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Sanya Mansoor at sanya.mansoor@time.com.

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How do you apologize for something hurtful? Crafting an apology that can make the person you’ve hurt feel better is no small feat. (2018)

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How do you apologize for something hurtful? Crafting an apology that can make the person you’ve hurt feel better is no small feat. In fact, in order to be truly effective, an apology must contain these six components, a 2016 study published in Negotiation and Conflict Management Research found. Expression of regret Explanation of what went wrong Acknowledgment of responsibility Declaration of repentance Offer of repair Request for forgiveness And that doesn’t even take into account the specific person you’re addressing. Dr. Jennifer Thomas, co-author of When Sorry Isn’t Enough, TED speaker and psychologist, has conducted research, alongside Dr. Gary Chapman, author of the The 5 Love Languages: The Secret to Love That Lasts, to come up with five apology languages: expressing regret, accepting responsibility, making restitution, genuinely repenting and requesting forgiveness. “Apologies really differ from person to person according to what their apology language is and so I found, for example, that saying, ‘I’m wrong and I’m sorry’ will reach 77% of people,” Thomas explains. “But the remaining 23% are waiting to hear three other things and that’s why we have our five apology languages.” Still, apologies should be tailored to the person you’re apologizing to. Here, experts share research-backed tips for creating the perfect mea culpa for each and every person in your life. Apologizing to a romantic partner: “Staying connected emotionally is key to maintaining a healthy relationship,” says Amy Morin, a psychotherapist and the author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do. “So it’s important to express your regret and request forgiveness. That means never placing any blame on the other person or say things like, ‘I’m sorry you feel that way.’ Instead, say, ‘I’m sorry I raised my voice,’ to show that you take full ownership for your actions.” Thomas also says that you need to make your devotion to your partner clear. “If it’s a romantic partner, something that’s really important is your commitment,” she says. In order to do this, Thomas recommends incorporating her fourth apology language — declaration of repentance — by specifically outlining how things are going to be different moving forward. Thomas says this lets them know you’re thinking about your future together. Apologizing to a co-worker: The future matters when it comes to a peer you work with too, but the approach should be different. “I think a key word with coworkers is trust,” Thomas says, emphasizing they need to know you won’t hurt their reputation. In order to get this across in your apology, she recommends combining the two most popular apology languages: 40% of people most want to hear us say ‘I was wrong,’ while the other 40% of people most want to hear us say ‘I’m sorry.’ By combining the two, you may guarantee that you’ve crafted an apology that 80% of people will feel connected to. Keep it between the two of you, Morin says. “Resist the urge to bring anyone else into the situation when you’re apologizing to a co-worker,” adds Morin. “Don’t blame the boss, the company, or your other team members for your behavior. Stick to ‘I messages’ like, ‘I really let my emotions get the better of me,’ as you take responsibility for your actions.” Apologizing to a friend: “When apologizing to a friend, it may be appropriate to offer to repair your wrongdoing,” says Morin who suggests offering to take your co-worker to lunch after that missed coffee date. “While you can’t undo what you did wrong, you can offer to do something that shows you value the relationship and you’re invested in doing whatever you can to make it work.” A friend wants to know you’re dedicated to preserving the friendship too. “Your commitment to the friendship is a good thing to reiterate at the beginning or the end of the apology,” says Thomas. Her advice also mirrors Morin’s by suggesting you go with apology language number three on her list — making amends — in order to truly aim to make up for a wrongdoing with a friend. Get the latest career, relationship and wellness advice to enrich your life: sign up for TIME’s Living newsletter. Apologizing to a parent: People make three common excuses when they’re apologizing to people: they blame, they excuse and they deny what they’ve done, according to Thomas’s research. “I think people make the mistake of making excuses when they’re apologizing to their parents, and I think they need to make the apology and let it stand on its own,” she says. In order to do this, she recommends incorporating all five apology languages and biting your tongue to avoid making any sort of explanation or excuse. People are looking for recognition, not the reason you let them down. “Your parents know that you’re not perfect and they’re well aware of your not-so-great qualities,” adds Morin. “But that doesn’t mean your offenses should be brushed off. If you hurt one of your parents, acknowledge it,” she says, recommending an apology that centers on both regret and a request for forgiveness. “Say something like, ‘I’m so sorry that I didn’t show up to your family get-together after I said I would. I know how important that was to you. Please forgive me for missing it.’ Then, focus on changing your behavior in the future to show that you truly are sorry.” Apologizing to a child: Yes, apologies matter to kids, and they want to hear a lot of the same things adults do. Bonus: it’s a teachable moment. “An expression of regret is key to giving an effective apology to a child,” Morin says. “Be willing to use feeling words like, ‘I feel really sad that I let you down,’ or ‘I am mad at myself for messing up.’ Then, make it clear that you’re going to try and do better next time. Your child will learn a lot about life from the way you apologize so be a good role model and accept full responsibility for your actions.” “If you’re apologizing to your child, first, I would give you a gold star because it’s so important for us to do that,” Thomas says. “We need to model the apology languages for them. Avoid a common mistake: expecting a child to return the apology. “Your apology needs to stand on its own so you just offer it and make sure that, even if they don’t reciprocate, that your apology still stands.” Apologizing to a sibling: When apologizing to a brother or sister, Thomas believes that simply saying “I apologize” can actually go a very long way. “It lets them know that you’re not going to blame, excuse or deny — those three mistakes,” she says. “It sets the stage for you to use whichever apology language you think is best — or all five if you have time — and it gets their attention.” Apologizing shows respect to that sibling who, because you grew up with them and may have a history of offending each other, might feel like you don’t respect them, according to Thomas. Resist the temptation to drudge up old history, Morin warns. “Reminding your sibling of all the times they’ve hurt you, only makes things worse. Stick to the facts about the current situation by explaining what went wrong in the current offense only. Try saying something like, ‘I messed up. I shouldn’t have told that story about you in front of everyone. I’m really sorry.’” Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. 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"I don’t delete these past posts because they’re problematic, or offensive, or because I regret what I shared," writes Courtney Cook. "I delete them because I’m embarrassed that I don’t recognize who I was, or was trying to be."

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Every morning as I drink my coffee, I check Timehop, an app that tells me what I posted to social media on this day one, two, ten years ago. I have checked Timehop every morning for the last 1,286 days—more than three years straight—and nearly every one of those 1,286 days, I have found something I now find overwhelmingly embarrassing that I have rushed to scrub from whatever platform it dared to exist on. Anyone who knows me knows I am Very Online. I think my compulsion to be overly active on the Internet partially stems from the fact that I grew up in the era of the Internet where every event, even if the “event” was sitting around a mall food court, needed to be documented by at least 30 photos and its own MySpace or Facebook album named after an inside joke created at said food-court hang, and partially because I have borderline personality disorder, which causes me to have an extreme fear of being abandoned or forgotten. To constantly post on whatever social platform is popular at the moment is to constantly show up on my friends’ feeds is to constantly remind them of my existence. For around 23 hours and 56 minutes of each day, I am completely comfortable and cool with my online presence. But for those approximately 4 minutes when I check Timehop and see my past self from an outside perspective, I want to hurl myself off a cliff and live the remainder of my life as kelp or seafoam. Read more: The Pandemic Made My World Small. Social Media Helped Open It Up I often feel sick by the amount of work it would take if I wanted to erase my presence from the Internet, even though I do my very best to trim it down. Another symptom of borderline personality disorder is an unclear sense of self, and this is nauseatingly blatant in the posts I see each morning. I don’t delete these past posts because they’re problematic, or offensive, or because I regret what I shared; I delete them because I’m embarrassed that I don’t recognize who I was, or was trying to be. In 2009, I was heavily entrenched in emo/scene-kid culture, and my social media was littered with status updates like “XxXx*~RAWR~*xxXx means i LUV U in dinosaur XDDD.” In early 2010, I adopted some cottagecore fairy fantasy after returning home from 10 months in a residential treatment center where I didn’t have access to electronics or the Internet, and I began posting about spending my days “climbing trees” and “flying kites,” two things I definitely wasn’t doing, and yelling at people to “get outside!” because “the world is passing you by!!!” even though I was very much inside and not offline. By late 2010, I had smoked weed exactly once and proclaimed myself a stoner, posting Kid Cudi lyrics to Facebook in a way that can only be described as poser-y. In 2011, I transferred to a private arts high school and adopted Tumblr as my religion. All my posts from this time talk about listening to the Pixies (to this day I cannot name a Pixies song aside from “Where Is My Mind”), drinking tea (I didn’t and do not drink tea) and reading Sylvia Plath’s poetry (I didn’t get into Plath until college). Maybe when I say that these posts embarrass me, what I actually mean is that they make me sad. Watching my past self try on different personalities in hopes that I would be accepted, or loved, or find my place in the world, is a big bummer, and this is exacerbated by the fact that when I was posting these things and undergoing these identity changes, I didn’t know I was putting on a performance at all. Even when I was conscious that I was changing everything about myself, I believed I was motivated to do so because I had found the real me. I was the Girl Who Cried THIS IS WHO I REALLY AM!!!! There is that saying: wherever you go, there you are. This remains true even if you don’t know who that you really is. The way I exist in the world feels different now than in the past, both on and offline, though I can’t really identify why that is or what led to that change. Perhaps it’s due to 13 years of intensive therapy, or finally finding helpful medications. Perhaps it’s a result of growing up and having enough time to see what stuck around and continued to hold my interest even after the phase it originated from was rejected or replaced. Perhaps it’s a bit of all of these things, and others I’m not aware of yet, or may never be. Read more: I Thought I Was Doing Pretty Well. Then Came the Pandemic These days, my Timehop shows mostly memories from one, two, maybe three years ago. They rarely trigger the telltale knot in my stomach most of my earlier posts did, which I’d remedy with their deletion. Though these recent posts aren’t necessarily what I’d choose to post now, they don’t feel like they were posted by a stranger. Rather, they feel more like a childhood friend I both love and have outgrown. I don’t need to delete them to prove to myself that I’ve changed, because I’m able to acknowledge who I was then doesn’t cancel out who I am today. That’s not to say the embarrassment over my old posts has vanished, or that I’ve entirely stopped deleting them, but most days I will archive a post or update its privacy settings rather than choose to erase it forever. Sometimes, a rare post from further back in time has slipped through the cracks, and seeing it fills me with nostalgia. If I can move past embarrassment and feel the pain that comes with acknowledging how sad and lost I used to be, then I can also move past that pain and remember what it felt like to live in those moments when I wasn’t putting on an act or playing a role. Because within many of the memories that are clouded by my past self’s inauthenticity, and the years I have categorized as lost to sadness, self-harm and the wish to jump from a cliff and not become kelp but to become nothing at all, there are glimmers of happiness and what I recognize as the beginnings of who I am now. I just have to strain a bit to see them. When one of these posts that’s managed to escape the Great Daily Deletion appears, I begin to wish I hadn’t deleted most of those posts at all. I think that maybe if I hadn’t rushed to delete them, I could have gotten to the point where the first thing I thought of were those happy memories without having to wade through that sadness first. When social media was just beginning, there were constant warnings urging you to remember that everything you post will exist somewhere in cyberspace forever, even if it’s deleted. This may be true, but I’m not equipped with the skills necessary to find where all that I’ve deleted has gone. Like those past versions of myself, those posts now exist only in my memory, or the memories of those who were there to experience that moment or iteration of myself with me. So I keep tweeting, saving Snapchats, posting to Instagram, filming TikToks, updating my Facebook profile. Even if these posts end up deleted in a year or two. Even if they may make me embarrassed or sad or I one day don’t recognize who I was, am now, as I write this. Maybe I’ll forever be the Girl Who Cried THIS IS WHO I REALLY AM!!!! But I swear, this time I mean it. And I want to remember. If you or someone you know may be contemplating suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 or text HOME to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line. In emergencies, call 911, or seek care from a local hospital or mental health provider. Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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The changing popularity of the tale offers a unique window into what our culture expects of and for women.

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It is often thought that fairy tales live on because they express unchanging truths about the human condition. Cultural historians might question this. These stories shift and evolve, refracted through the values of the societies that retell them. The story of Cinderella has mutated through time, from 17th century France to the present, though some would trace it back even earlier. But it has not always been equally popular—and the narrative’s rise and fall offers a unique window into what our culture expects of and for women. Few moments in Cinderella history can compare to the 1950s in North America and Britain. The story’s cultural dominance at that time in part reflected the phenomenal success of Walt Disney’s animated Cinderella, in 1950. But the story was already being retold in countless children’s picture books, romance literature, and in ballet and theater performances in the late 1940s. The CBS Rodgers and Hammerstein version of Cinderella, screened in 1957, attracted what was then the largest TV audience in history. Julie Andrews played Cinderella—neat as a new pin and not remotely servile. References to Cinderella proliferated in popular culture and were widely used to sell consumer goods. Shell Petroleum used an image of a fashionably dressed Cinderella exiting her pumpkin coach in an advertisement of the 1940s, Revlon lipstick boasted a new lipstick in a “Cinderella pumpkin” shade of orange, and Coty packaged perfume in a faux glass slipper. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter Why did the story have so much resonance in the late 1940s and 1950s? “Rags to Riches” stories had long appealed in North America. In postwar Britain, a weariness with rationing and austerity helps to explain women’s delight in transformations and the idea of release from domestic drudgery. Both a Royal Wedding (1947) and the coronation of the young Elizabeth II (1953) fueled dreams of fairy-tale romance, golden coaches, dreamy dresses and sparkling crowns. Most of all, the idea of a girl meeting her prince, marrying young and living happily ever after chimed with the dreams of many young women in the 1950s. The age of marriage was falling in both the United States and Britain and it became common to think of oneself as “left on the shelf” if not married by 21. This was the message purveyed in a rash of new romance comics and magazines aimed specifically at young women, with titles such as Young Romance and Young Love. By the early 1950s there were some 150 similar titles on the newsstands. Cinderella Love was one such example. It featured stories with titles such as “Rustic Cinderella” or “My Prince Charming,” and gave advice on finding and making sure of Mr. Right. Young men didn’t always see eye to eye with their female counterparts on the issue of early marriage, these titles told their readers, but might be baited with the promise of sex. There was something predatory about this, on both sides. Finding the right man was imagined as a happy ending. A tall order for a girl barely out of her teens, and a form of imaginative and narrative closure. By the time the next decade came to an end, it was clear that the dream was not very realistic, as it turned out. Early marriages proved themselves particularly vulnerable to breakdown, especially as life expectancy was increasing. With better education and a widening of employment options, women were becoming more independent and resourceful. The advent of the contraceptive pill and access to legalized abortion helped to weaken the assumption that sexual activity should be properly confined within marriage. By the 1970s, both men and women were questioning the desirability and usefulness of traditional gender roles. The idea of one true love—a spouse who would provide for every possible need, economic and emotional, and would go on doing this for some 60 years or more—was looking, to say the least, optimistic. Historians of the family such as Stephanie Coontz and Claire Langhamer have emphasized how rising expectations of marriage, and particularly the idea that it should be built on love and lifetime romance, rather than on the more practical considerations of property and family, have undermined the stability of the institution itself. The strains on marriage, in an era that prizes individuality and sexual self-fulfillment alongside lifetime fidelity, are clearly immense. Belgian psychotherapist Esther Perel’s books and Ted talks, which address some of these strains and tensions, currently attract a massive following. Social scientists such as Eric Klinenberg and Bella DePaulo show that for an increasing number of us, the “traditional” nuclear family model of living, with breadwinner husband, dependent wife and two or three children, is no longer relevant. Patterns of loving and living are changing. The princesses have changed, too. Female heroines in Disney films of recent years have been much spunkier than those of the 1950s. Tiana, Rapunzel, Merida and Moana have much more about them than ever did the wide-eyed and wiltingly compliant innocents Snow White, Cinderella or Aurora. Where the earlier princesses sang alongside the bluebirds and mice who helped them with household chores, the more recent heroines wouldn’t take kindly to being boxed up in pumpkins or palaces. Nor do they fall instantly in love with anything princely in tights. Meanwhile, versions of Cinderella have been modified for more modern times. The 1997 Walt Disney TV Cinderella, based on Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical version, was more feminist and ethnically inclusive, with Brandy Norwood starring in the title role. But it is the heroines of Disney’s 2013 Frozen who have really captured the hearts and imagination of modern viewers. Sisters Anna and Elsa are flawed and personable. Elsa is far too preoccupied trying to deal with the conflict in her own life to obsess about princes. Anna goes for sisterly loyalty and adventure over a less-than-charming prince. The girls are intrepid, have courage, and thrive on adventure. There’s no facile romance, nor any suggestion that falling in love is easy, or that it marks a full stop in life, a form of narrative closure. A man may be a comrade or a companion on a journey for a woman, but he is no longer an ending. This is perhaps the crux of the matter. Cinderella dreams an impossible dream: she isn’t a helpful role model for today’s young girls thinking about their future, and is unlikely to regain the intense hold over the female imagination that was evident in the 1950s. Is it time to call time on the threat of the midnight curfew, and maybe on Cinderella stories altogether? OUP Carol Dyhouse is Professor (Emeritus) of History at the University of Sussex. She has written extensively about the social history of women, education and popular culture. Her most recent book is Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Three Black players who missed penalty kicks for England in the decisive European Championship shootout against Italy on Sunday night were subjected to racist abuse online, prompting the English Football Association to issue a statement condemning the language used against the players.

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Despite long-standing systemic inequities, a growing set of authors has recently found success with swoony love stories featuring characters from backgrounds that reflect the diversity of the world we live in. TIME spoke to these six romance authors about the evolution of the genre.

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Lingering touches and stolen glances, jaw-dropping revelations and long-awaited reunions—the pleasures of romance novels abound. Yet for so long, one of the most popular (and lucrative) genres in publishing has centered stories by, for and about a homogeneous set of women, bolstering the stereotype of straight white women as the romantic ideal and cementing the economic power of writers who share that identity. But despite long-standing systemic inequities, a growing set of authors has recently found success with swoony love stories featuring characters from backgrounds that reflect the diversity of the world we live in. Writers like Jasmine Guillory, who is about to publish her sixth novel in less than four years, and Tia Williams, whose latest novel was selected for Reese Witherspoon’s book club, celebrate Black women as romantic leads. Helen Hoang populates her best-selling fiction with neurodiverse characters, while Casey McQuiston, whose debut novel is set to be adapted by Amazon, fills her slightly fantastical worlds with queer characters. And with the door to more inclusive storytelling cracked open in the industry, newcomers like debut authors and real-life wives Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta are preparing to enter the scene. TIME spoke to these six romance authors about the evolution of the genre, the craft of writing and the novels that changed their lives. We all have books that have shaped our perspectives. What was the first romance novel you ever read? Onjuli Datta: I stole my mum’s copy of Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret? when I was way too young for it, and I was obsessed. There’s this scene where the heroine steals a scallop from the hero’s plate at dinner that I still think about when writing food—it was such a simple, sexy moment amidst the hijinks and drama. Tia Williams: A Rose in Winter by Kathleen Woodiwiss. I was 8 years old, and way too young to be reading a sweeping bodice ripper. But the story definitely left its imprint on the fiction I’d grow up to write: high-stakes, ultra–dramatic, live-or-die, unreasonably romantic love stories. What are the biggest misconceptions people have about the genre—and about writing it? Helen Hoang: Lots of people think romance is cheap, trivial and the literary equivalent of pornography. To me, it’s an escape, catharsis, a bridge to build empathy, even a political or social statement, all while providing a full mind, heart and body experience. Jasmine Guillory: There’s this idea that all romances are the same. Just because they all have happy endings doesn’t mean the books are the same. What happy means is different for everyone. What’s the worst writing advice you’ve ever received? Hoang: “Write every day.” As someone who struggles with mental–health issues, sometimes writing or working is the last thing I should be doing. Sometimes, in order to write better, I need to stop for a while and give my mind time to heal. Casey McQuiston: To write toward broad market appeal, even if your heart’s not in it. I don’t think you can make good art when your main priority is selling it. Write what you want to write and what you want to read. Williams: Stephen King is my absolute writing idol, but he feels that fiction writers should remove adverbs from their arsenal. How else do you explain that someone “groaned inwardly” or “sighed softly”? Read More: 36 New Books You Need to Read This Summer You all tell stories that combine the fun and levity of romance with social commentary. How do you find a balance between the two? Williams: Honestly, it’s tough to be a Black female writer in 2021 and not have a lot to say, social-commentary-wise, no matter the genre you’re writing in. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo and whatever the hell the last presidency was—you can’t help but infuse reality into your story if it’s at all contemporary. But love stories still need to be told. McQuiston: For me, it’s about finding the sweet spot between suspension of disbelief and punching up. A lot of romance stories take place in settings or under conditions that we may want to challenge in the real world—monarchies, for example—and I like committing to the bit while also subverting the tropes that come with it and inviting the reader to examine them with me. Hoang: Some of my favorite romances are more serious in tone, but I love them for the intense emotions they evoke. Romance with social commentary flows and balances itself very naturally, as social issues create conflict, which in turn inspires emotion, which is the heart of romance. The tricky part for me is in making those emotions inspired by social issues relevant to a love story. Helen, why is it important to you to portray neurodiverse characters in your work? Hoang: That is my life experience, and writing helps me to better understand myself and process what I’ve been through. At the same time, it’s important to share this perspective with readers so they may either see themselves, if they’re neurodiverse as well, or understand and develop empathy and lose the sense that autistic people are “other.” A lot of your books describe sex in visceral and sometimes intense terms. Striking the right tone to avoid cheesiness and make readers invest in these moments seems super- difficult. How do you approach those scenes? Guillory: Sex scenes are part of the way I tell the story of this couple—who they are and how they relate to one another. I want sex scenes to feel fun and exciting, yes, but also to tell the reader something about these characters and their relationship. Is that character emotional? Uptight? Funny? How do these people feel about one another? Tia, the protagonist of your new book, Eva, is a famous erotica novelist. How does your approach to writing sex scenes compare with hers? Williams: I thought it’d be interesting and funny to write a character who invents ultra-steamy sex scenes for a living—and yet hasn’t had sex in ages. At the time I was writing Seven Days, I was extremely single, like Eva. So our sex-scene strategy was pretty much the same: lots of imagination and wish–fulfillment fantasy. Mikaella and Onjuli, as a gay couple, what was it like writing about a straight relationship? Mikaella Clements: It was fascinating to navigate our characters through the many layers of power, desire and difference which exist in a straight relationship and examine the tensions that might arise. At the same time, there are many things about love which are universal. Does every romance novel need to have a happy ending? Guillory: Not every love story does, but every book called a romance does. When readers are specifically looking for a romance, they want a book with a happy ending. Hoang: When readers trust that everything is going to be O.K. in the end, they open their hearts to experience a wider range of emotion, because they’re not protecting themselves from pain. This is something special to the genre. Datta: The most important thing is to leave your characters in a place where the reader can say goodbye to them, even if they don’t want to. Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Annabel Gutterman at annabel.gutterman@time.com.

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The Inspiration4 mission is a real-deal, multi-day civilian space mission.

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TIME Studios is producing the Netflix documentary series Countdown: Inspiration 4 Mission to Space, starting Sept. 6. This has been a big month for billionaires in space. On July 11, Richard Branson flew aboard his Virgin Galactic VSS Unity spacecraft 80 km (50 mi) up to suborbital altitude, returned safely to Earth, and earned his astronaut wings in the process. Tuesday morning, Jeff Bezos followed, flying his Blue Origin New Shepard ship even higher—100 km (62 mi) up—and similarly joined the astronaut club. The media did what the media will always do in situations like this—present company included—which was to find a catchy hook (Billionaire Space Race!) and devote no end of coverage to the Branson-Bezos doings. And with good reason: the technology is nifty, the achievements are real, and both Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic aim to open the flights to the public too—or at least the vanishingly small portion of the public that can afford a six-figure fare for little more than a 10-minute flight to and from space. But the storm of press has thus far largely overlooked a much bigger space deal coming in September, when yet another billionaire—Jared Isaacman, the CEO of Shift4 Payments, an online payments company—goes aloft with three other civilian astronauts aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft in a mission dubbed Inspiration4. Never mind 10 suborbital minutes, this will be a three-day trip to orbital space at an altitude higher than that of the International Space Station (ISS). And never mind the idea of flying the mission simply to open up the market to more tourists, Inspiration4 is intended to raise funds and awareness for St. Jude Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Memphis, Tenn. Isaacman may not have the celebrity sizzle of a Branson or a Bezos, but both the ambition of his mission and its philanthropic purpose set it apart from Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin’s space-hops. “I believe that we do have an obligation to leave the world a better place than we found it,” says Isaacman. “Our mission to space had to serve a bigger purpose, which is why St. Jude is such a big part of this. It can’t simply just be about opening the door to space for everyday people. It’s got to be about taking care of some of the problems we’re all faced with now.” To prepare themselves for the three days they’ll be aloft, the four astronauts of Inspiration4 have been in training since last March, spending weeks at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., practicing in a simulator, devoting long hours to classwork and longer hours still to studying briefing books while at home. Joining Isaacman aloft will be Hayley Arceneaux, 30, a physician’s assistant at St. Jude and a survivor of childhood cancer. She will be the first person to travel to space with a prosthetic—an artificial left femur that replaced the bone she lost to her disease at age 10. “I’m going to be the first pediatric cancer patient to go to space,” Arceneaux says, “but I won’t be the last.” Also flying is Chris Sembroski, 41, a Lockheed Martin engineer in Everett, Wash., and a former member of the U.S. Air Force who served in Iraq and later helped oversee a fleet of Minuteman nuclear missiles. The fourth crew member is Sian Proctor, a professor of geosciences at South Mountain Community College in Phoenix, Ariz., and a two-time NASA astronaut candidate who advanced to the final 47 out of an applicant class of 3,500 in 2009, though she didn’t make the final cut. The difference between the training she would have gotten at NASA and the training she’s getting now is small. “We’re going through the same things NASA astronauts do,” Proctor says. “When we’re not together, we’re back in our individual bubbles, studying at home.” The crew is being aided in no small measure by SpaceX itself, which is aggressively backing their efforts. While the project is undeniably a money-making enterprise for the company—Isaacman purchased all four seats for an undisclosed sum, though judging by the prices in the commercial space market, $50 million each is a not unreasonable guess—SpaceX has also flung open its doors to the astronauts, making its training facilities and instructors available to them. What’s more, since the Crew Dragon spacecraft on which the Inspiration4 astronauts will be flying will not dock with the ISS, the docking collar at the nose of the capsule has been removed and replaced by a domed window, or cupola, measuring 117 cm (46 in.) in diameter by 46 cm (18 in.) tall with a total viewing area of 13,000 sq. cm (2,012 sq. in.). It is the largest window ever built for space—dramatically improving the crew’s ability to see the planet below, and to share their view with the people on its surface. “Clearly, a lot of effort has been put into this by SpaceX,” says Isaacman. “I knew they were an amazing organization, and they have become a huge part of what we are doing.” Read more: TIME Studios wins exclusive documentary rights to Inspiration4 Virgin Galactic will likely never catch SpaceX—and doesn’t appear to be trying; its existing space plane is intended only for suborbital flights and it is not openly exploring the possibility of more flight hardware. Blue Origin has more ambitious prospects: it is developing a heavy-lift launch vehicle named New Glenn and is competing to build the lunar landing vehicle that will return American astronauts to the surface of the moon in NASA’s Artemis program. But for now, both companies are more or less eating SpaceX’s dust. The Bezos and Branson missions themselves may have been thrilling to watch and exciting to root for, but they were far more modest than what Inspiration4 is set to attempt in September. In what is shaping up as America’s summer of space, the best—and certainly the biggest—mission has been saved for last. TIME Studios is producing the Netflix documentary series Countdown: Inspiration 4 Mission to Space, starting Sept. 6. Get our Space Newsletter. Sign up to receive the week's news in space. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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“Tailored to the more inclusive sensibilities of current teens, ‘GG’ 2.0 is less ‘problematic’ and more diverse in terms of identity, if not tax brackets.”

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Gossip Girl was supposed to be obsolete. By the time its anonymous Upper East Side dirt disher (voiced by Kristen Bell) issued a final XOXO, in 2012, ratings for the briefly generation-defining CW teen drama had nosedived—perhaps in part because the Great Recession had come along to make ostentatious wealth suddenly uncool. As young people weathered more than a year of brutal job losses, in 2008 and 2009, it became impossible to gawk at a character’s fresh-off-the-runway cocktail dress without wondering how many unemployment checks it would take to make such a purchase. Soon enough, with Occupy Wall Street happening a hundred blocks south, the adventures of a spoiled, backstabbing one-percenter clique no longer seemed so aspirational. But, just as younger millennials did with Friends—whose overwhelming whiteness, fat-shaming Monica story lines and casually homophobic humor absolutely wouldn’t fly in a contemporary sitcom about young adults—Gen Z streaming natives embraced the show without any expectation of realism. For these viewers, Gossip Girl was meme fuel that made headbands cool again, without anyone taking its wealth porn too personally. And now, as part of its ongoing courtship of this Netflix-loyal cohort, HBO Max has revived the brand. The reboot will premiere on the platform July 8, with each of six new episodes appearing weekly over the summer and six more scheduled for the fall. Tailored to the more inclusive sensibilities of current teens, GG 2.0 is less “problematic” and more diverse in terms of identity, if not tax brackets. In place of blue bloods Serena (Blake Lively) and Blair (Leighton Meester), the central frenemies are girls of color: benevolent influencer Julien (Sacred Lies‘ Jordan Alexander) and her estranged, scholarship-student half-sister Zoya (Whitney Peak from Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), late of Buffalo. Julien dates the richest—and guiltiest, most socially conscious and self-effacing—boy around, Obie (Eli Brown sporting Dan Humphrey curls). Doing her dirty work are two Machiavellian deputies, Monet (newcomer Savannah Lee Smith) and Luna (Zion Moreno of Control Z); think of them as a two-headed Blair with expertise in brand management and crisis PR. But the queen bee’s real confidant is Audrey (veteran child actor Emily Alyn Lind), who looks like a long-lost Fanning sister, dates mellow Aki (model and skatefluencer Evan Mock) and has too many problems at home to obsess over high-school politics. Presumably to avoid glamorizing toxic masculinity, this cast’s lothario is Max (Thomas Doherty of Hulu’s High Fidelity), a bisexual party boy with two dads. Sign up for More to the Story, TIME’s weekly entertainment newsletter, to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Whitney Peak, left, and Jordan Alexander in 'Gossip Girl' Karolina Wojtasik/HBO Max As in the original, parents are part of the story, though in the four episodes sent for review none of their personalities or story lines feel particularly memorable. More promising is a cohort of young Constance Billard School for Girls teachers whose leader is played by actor/writer/proto-influencer Tavi Gevinson. Disrespected, underpaid and vulnerable to unceremonious firing if students with powerful parents complain—how very 2021!—they’re desperate to take back control of their classrooms. The revised premise, which I’ve been asked not to say much more about before the premiere drops, requires some willful suspension of disbelief. But if you can make that leap, the setup works surprisingly well. Suffice to say that this time around, the show is less about ultra-privileged mean girls destroying each other for kicks than it is about relatively decent people getting lured into those same nihilistic power struggles. And with Gossip Girl holding court on Instagram these days (though a Substack deal must already be in the works), showrunner Joshua Safran, who wrote for the original series, keeps the campy, Whartonian bon mots flowing both online and off. Happily, Safran’s team seems both aware that today’s image-conscious teens live in constant fear of social-media cancellation and, unlike so many hysterical cable-news pundits, realistic in their understanding that such a fate almost always turns out to be temporary. Like an IG user on a following spree, the show introduces too many characters in the first episode or two for viewers to keep track of everyone. But where the update falters most in its attempt to bridge GG‘s diabolical past with its comparatively friendly present is in the casting. While the girls, especially Alexander and Lind, shine brighter than the mostly indistinguishable boys, no individual performance hits the soapy heights achieved by Meester or Ed Westwick (who played Blair’s slimy true love, Chuck). No couple—or throuple, as the case may be—has that original duo’s chemistry. Still, although it’s hard to imagine it becoming as addictive as its predecessor (or more recent teenage obsessions like Euphoria and Élite), the new Gossip Girl is certainly watchable. For a show that never should have outlived Lehman Brothers, that’s saying something. Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Prior to prohibition, no less than one-third of all state revenue of the mighty Russian empire came from selling vodka to its own people.

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Prohibition is among the most misunderstood chapters in world history, especially since we falsely assume it was a uniquely American history. In reality, more than a dozen countries banned the liquor trade around World War I. The first to do so was actually imperial Russia, five years before the United States—a policy decision that would hasten the empire’s demise. Russia’s prohibition came not through legislation or imperial decree, but rather via a telegram dated Sept. 28, 1914, from Tsar Nicholas II to his favorite uncle, Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov, which proclaimed “I have already decided to abolish forever the government sale of vodka in Russia.” To understand Russian prohibition, context matters. For centuries, going back to Ivan the Terrible, the tsarist government maintained an incredibly lucrative monopoly on the vodka trade. No less than one-third of all state revenue of the mighty Russian empire came from selling vodka to its own people. Consequently, any temperance movement to promote the health and well-being of the peasantry was quickly snuffed out, lest the tsar’s revenues be diminished. In 1904, the Japanese attacked Russia’s Far-Eastern outpost at Port Arthur, beginning the Russo-Japanese War. What the Russians thought would be a quick victory against a non-European foe quickly turned into an embarrassing debacle. At mobilization points across Russia, the call-up of peasant conscripts often turned into drunken and murderous riots. The front was even worse. At the disastrous defeat at Mukden, Russian newspapers described how, “the Japanese found several thousand Russian soldiers so dead drunk they were able to bayonet them like so many pigs.” With the Revolution of 1905 brewing in St. Petersburg, Russia was forced to sue for peace. “The Japanese did not conquer,” wrote Vienna’s Neue freie Presse, “but alcohol triumphed, alcohol, alcohol.” Military experts around the world suddenly realized that drunkenness could mean the difference between victory and defeat. Even German Kaiser Wilhelm II declared in 1910 that “in the next war, the nation which drinks the least alcohol will be the winner.” So when World War I broke out in 1914, virtually all of the belligerent countries—including Russia—restricted alcohol to conserve foodstuffs and ease mobilization. Indeed, thanks in part to a temporary prohibition, Russia was able to put its armies in the field much quicker than their German and Austro-Hungarian foes, securing early victories in East Prussia and Galicia. That early momentum would not last. The once heavy-drinking Tsar Nicholas II had increasingly been won to the temperance cause. Members of the royal family—including the tsar’s rather bohemian favorite uncle, the aforementioned Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich Romanov—began patronizing temperance. Even the notoriously drunken and debauching Siberian mystic Grigory Rasputin argued: “It is unbefitting for a Tsar to deal in vodka and make drunkards out of honest people. The time has come to lock up the Tsar’s saloons.” In January 1914, Nicholas appointed as minister of finance Sir Peter Bark, with the charge of making the treasury no longer “dependent on the ruination of the spiritual and economic forces of the majority of My faithful subjects.” It was an unenviable task to wean the mighty empire off of its greatest source of revenue, even before the added expense of assembling the largest fighting force in world history later that year. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter One of Russia’s ten million troops was 22-year-old platoon commander Prince Oleg Konstantinovich Romanov, son of the temperate Grand Duke Konstantin. In pursuing retreating German forces in Lithuania in September 1914, Prince Oleg was shot through the right hip—a wound that quickly became infected. The Grand Duke rushed to Vilnius to be by his dying son’s bedside, but was too late. Prince Oleg died on Sept. 27, 1914, making him the only Romanov to die in battle in World War I. Tsar Nicholas‘ prohibition telegram to Konstantin—“abolishing forever the government sale of vodka in Russia”—was dated the following day. Ultimately, this proclamation of Russia as the world’s first prohibition country was little more than Nicholas’ consolation to his temperate uncle who grieved the loss of his beloved son. It was a decision that would hasten the end of the Romanov Empire itself. In the February Revolution of 1917, the tsar was returning from the front to address an insurrection that was roiling his capital of Petrograd. Mutineers stopped his train and forced the tsar’s abdication in favor of an ill-fated Provisional Government. In addition to Russia’s disastrous losses on the war front, historians generally point to three factors that brought down the Russian empire: discontent with the tsar, hyperinflation and the breakdown of Russia’s transportation infrastructure. Prohibition exacerbated each. Forcing poor Russians to quit cold turkey amid the horrors of war likely didn’t enamor the peasant, worker or soldier to the tsar. Read more: ‘You’re Not a Person if You Don’t Drink.’ How This Tiny European Country Developed the World’s Worst Drinking Problem The revenue effects were even worse. In 1915, the head of the legislature’s finance committee boasted that “never since the dawn of human history had a single country, in a time of war, renounced the principal source of its revenue.” Finance Minister Bark busily cobbled together fictitious reports about a “miraculous” upsurge in Russian economic productivity, now that the yoke of vodka had been lifted. Yet in reality, the gaping budgetary hole was patched by the printing press, exacerbating hyperinflation. “What if we do lose eight hundred million rubles in revenue?” rhetorically asked Premier Ivan Goremykin. “We shall print that much paper money; it’s all the same to the people.” Even Russia’s infrastructural paralysis was exacerbated by prohibition. Rather than delivering grain to the starving cities, or necessary war materiel to the front, Russia’s anemic railroad system was clogged by carloads of vodka. Since they couldn’t legally sell their alcohol to the state retail monopoly, well-connected gentry distillers sent their warehouses of vodka by train to the Arctic port cities of Arkhangelsk and Murmansk, hoping to ship them to consumers in allied France, or to Japan and the Pacific across the single-track Trans-Siberian Railway. While there were many proximate causes for the Russian Revolution, the prohibition of the tsarist vodka trade was undeniably one of them. And yet—during the exigencies of wartime—prohibition along with grain requisitioning were the only policies maintained not only by the conservative Romanov regime, but the liberal Provisional Government, and the radical Bolshevik regime of Vladimir Lenin as well. Beyond demanding sobriety and discipline amidst the October Revolution and ensuing Civil War, Lenin was ideologically opposed to building socialism on the livers of the proletariat. “We should not follow the example of the capitalist countries and put vodka and other intoxicants on the market,” he argued, “because, profitable though they are, they will lead us back to capitalism and not forward to communism.” But ultimately, Russia’s prohibition experiment died with Lenin in 1924. Swayed by the allure of easy money, his successor, Joseph Stalin, revived the old tsarist vodka monopoly, rebranded with a hammer and sickle. The dynamics of alcohol politics in the Soviet Union were almost identical to those of the conservative empire that preceded it. In terms of popular drinking practices and the government’s profits, it was almost as if the prohibition period had never happened. In terms of Russian history, however, the consequences of that decade of temperance are impossible to ignore. Oxford University Press Mark Lawrence Schrad, an associate professor of political science at Villanova University, is the author of the book Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition, available now from Oxford University Press, from which this piece is adapted. Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Facebook Inc. wants Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to be recused from participating in decisions about the agency’s monopoly lawsuit against the company, saying her past criticism of Facebook means she’s biased.

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Facebook Inc. wants Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan to be recused from participating in decisions about the agency’s monopoly lawsuit against the company, saying her past criticism of Facebook means she’s biased. On Wednesday, Facebook filed a petition with the FTC, asking that she be barred from any involvement in the antitrust case. “For the entirety of her professional career, Chair Khan has consistently and very publicly concluded that Facebook is guilty of violating the antitrust laws,” Facebook said. Her statements “convey to any disinterested observer that Chair Khan, well before becoming a commissioner, had already decided the material facts relevant to Facebook’s liability.” The petition comes as the FTC must decide by the end of the month whether to refile its antitrust complaint against Facebook. A judge in June dismissed the case, saying the agency hadn’t fully explained its claim that Facebook has a monopoly in social media. He gave the FTC 30 days to fix the error and refile. Facebook’s request mirrors one made by Amazon.com Inc., which also argued that Khan’s criticism of the online retailer made clear she has already judged that the company has violated antitrust laws. U.S. President Joe Biden named Khan chair of the agency in June after she was confirmed by the Senate. The move put one of the most prominent antagonists of big business in charge of the agency, which share antitrust enforcement duties with the Justice Department. The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"It’s funny to think about coming out, because I haven’t gone anywhere. I view today as a reintroduction to me as a woman, having made a transition medically. Coming out is always viewed as this grand reveal, but I was never not out. Today is about clarity: I am a trans woman. My pronouns are she/her. My name is Tommy."

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Hollywood began to take notice soon after I published my debut novel Detransition, Baby—which follows a trans woman, a cis woman and a trans woman who has detransitioned as they try to form an unconventional family—in early 2021. One of the calls was from the actor Tommy Dorfman. I figured Tommy would ask about a role in a potential adaptation. But no—it turned out Tommy just wanted to connect with me as a fellow queer storyteller trying to navigate the waters of the film industry and a culture in flux. We talked for two hours: it was a rare, genuine call from an artist who simply wanted to bond over telling stories. Before then, I knew Tommy only by reputation, as the actor who rose to fame in 2017 in the role of Ryan Shaver, the conniving, scene-stealing poet on the Netflix series 13 Reasons Why. I kept hearing about Tommy from artists I respected. When everyone I knew was debating Jeremy O. Harris’ Slave Play, Tommy was tapped to star in Harris’ next project, Daddy, alongside Ronald Peet, Hari Nef and the legendary Alan Cumming. And now, Tommy is set to direct an adaptation of Mason Deaver’s I Wish You All the Best, is starring this fall in the Channel 4 limited series Fracture and has a role in Lena Dunham’s upcoming film Sharp Stick. But this work is only one part of Tommy’s public presence: with a quick glance at Instagram, it becomes clear—even if you don’t recognize all the brand names (which I don’t)—that Tommy dresses fashionably, with fashionable people, in fashionable places. Tommy embodies a very modern type of celebrity, one that’s increasingly influential—and increasingly scrutinized. And there’s something that both paparazzi and Tommy’s followers began to notice over the past year or so: a change in Tommy’s style and appearance. People began to speculate what that shift might mean in the comments and on blogs; some of the speculation has been lurid, some tentatively supportive. And yet, for the past year, Tommy has said nothing, acknowledged no change, just continued on—until now. Photograph by Gizelle Hernandez for TIME Torrey Peters: We’re friends—we’re casual. So why are we having a formal conversation today in TIME? Tommy Dorfman: We’re talking today to discuss my gender. For a year now, I have been privately identifying and living as a woman—a trans woman. Peters: Would you say that you are coming out? Dorfman: It’s funny to think about coming out, because I haven’t gone anywhere. I view today as a reintroduction to me as a woman, having made a transition medically. Coming out is always viewed as this grand reveal, but I was never not out. Today is about clarity: I am a trans woman. My pronouns are she/her. My name is Tommy. Peters: You’ve been transitioning for a year. That much seemed obvious to me from your Instagram. What’s the difference between announcing it now, and letting your transition be implicit, as you’ve been doing? Dorfman: I’ve been living in this other version of coming out where I don’t feel safe enough to talk about it, so I just do it. But I recognize that transitioning is beautiful. Why not let the world see what that looks like? So I kept, on Instagram, a diaristic time capsule instead—one that shows a body living in a more fluid space. However, I’ve learned as a public-facing person that my refusal to clarify can strip me of the freedom to control my own narrative. With this medical transition, there has been discourse about my body, and it began to feel overwhelming. So, recently I looked to examples of others who have come out as trans. There’s the version I couldn’t really afford to do, which is to disappear for two years and come back with a new name, new face and new body. But that’s not what I wanted. Peters: Do you think that older way of coming out—where you go away and come back and announce a new name and identity—is still viable? Dorfman: For me, personally, it’s not viable. I’m not changing my name. I’m named after my mom’s brother who passed a month after I was born, and I feel very connected to that name, to an uncle who held me as he was dying. This is an evolution of Tommy. I’m becoming more Tommy. Gizelle Hernandez for TIME Gizelle Hernandez for TIME Peters: I like that idea: transition as an amplification of yourself rather than a qualitative change. Dorfman: It is not transition. Or it is, but not as an idea of going somewhere. Just that I am actually myself. Peters: The expectation that trans people must go away to medically transition strikes me as a burden. People have to work, to live their lives, even as they transition. Dorfman: It’s completely unrealistic and unsustainable, especially when trans people are some of the most disenfranchised and disadvantaged people. Peters: It’s an incredibly fraught moment for LGBTQ youth in the U.S. How do you feel about what’s happening in our country? Dorfman: There have been dozens of bills in the last six months [introduced] directly to inhibit the success, safety and livelihoods of trans people, specifically trans youth. I always suggest engaging on a personal level: personalize your activism and advocacy, find the organization closest to you that you can assist. If you don’t feel comfortable using your body to be of service but you have monetary capabilities, do that. Educate yourself as much as possible. Peters: Why did you want to discuss your trans identity in TIME, specifically? TIME was the magazine that declared the “Trans Tipping Point” in 2014, with actor Laverne Cox on the cover. More recently, actor Josie Totah came out in TIME, and Elliot Page gave his first interview to TIME after coming out. What is your intervention in that history of precedents? Dorfman: When we come out, we’re always in conversation with every other coming-out. TIME is a news source that has centered this kind of storytelling for a long time, from Ellen DeGeneres on. My intervention is evolution—I’m just another person transitioning. I’m showing gender fluidity; how fast and dynamic and vulnerable it can be, how it’s an ongoing thing. Peters: Is there a difference for you in coming out personally and professionally? Dorfman: It’s impossible for me to separate my personal and professional transition, because my body and face are linked to my career. I’m most recognized for playing a bitchy gay poet on a soap opera, and I feared that by actively transitioning in my personal life, I would lose whatever career I’ve been told I’m supposed to have. But I’m no longer interested in playing “male” characters—except for maybe in a “Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan” way. Sometimes you just have to say, “No, this is just who I f-cking am.” Photograph by Gizelle Hernandez for TIME Peters: What’s next for you, in work and in life? Dorfman: I’m thinking about how I can infuse my trans body into film and television. Lena Dunham gave me my first role as a girl last year—it was so exciting and validating. And personally, it’s wild to be 29 and going through puberty again. Some days I feel like I’m 14. As a result of that shift, the types of romantic partnerships I seek out are different. I was in a nine-year relationship in which I was thought of as a more male-bodied person, with a gay man. I love him so much, but we’ve been learning that as a trans woman, what I’m interested in is not necessarily reflected in a gay man. So we’ve had incredible conversations to redefine our relationship as friends. Transitioning has been liberating and clarifying. Peters: Is there some grief and loss in that too? Everyone has to say that transition is amazing, but I personally feel that loss is also a part of it. Dorfman: Yes, there’s a way in which in order to justify transition, you have to say everything was terrible before. And the sad part is you don’t get to acknowledge some of what you’re leaving. One doesn’t have to medically transition to be trans, but for me, it was an active choice. I’m aligning my body with my soul. Yet as a result of that, I am losing some things. I have to reckon with the fact that I brought along a lot of people and things who might not end up being there for this part of my journey. All I can do now is look to a future where I am, hopefully, just radically honest. That’s the person I am becoming. —With reporting by Nik Popli and Spencer Bakalar. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. Set production by Daniel Luna Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Nicknamed the Big Island, the vast Island of Hawaii has made use of the pause in visitors to rethink and reset the direction of tourism—and better protect its natural beauty.

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Nicknamed the Big Island, the vast Island of Hawaii has made use of the pause in visitors to rethink and reset the direction of tourism—and better protect its natural beauty. The statewide “Malama Hawaii” initiative encourages visitors to connect with the land in more restorative ways: among other efforts, hotels are partnering with local nonprofits to offer activities such as planting a koa sapling and participating in beach cleaning. Elsewhere on the island, Volcanoes National Park is undergoing a recovery project to repair damage from the 2018 eruption of the Kilauea volcano. Plans include a redesign of its visitor center to better manage the overcrowding that has plagued the park in previous years. And on the Kohala coast, the Four Seasons Resort Hualalai is showing off its multimillion-dollar pandemic refurbishment, with updated guest rooms and villa expansions, as well as a new 1.8 million-gallon swimmable aquarium: the Kumu Kai Marine Center at King’s Pond. —Diandra Barnwell Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"I'll be doing my best to deliver."

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We’ve entered a golden age for graying athletes. Tom Brady, for example, just won his seventh Super Bowl. He’s 43. In May, Phil Mickelson, 50, became the oldest golfer to ever win a major championship. So does America’s oldest Olympian at the Tokyo Games, 57-year-old equestrian rider Phillip Dutton, feel extra pressure to match the age-defying performances that have recently been sweeping sports? Dutton laughs at the question. “Um, yeah,” says Dutton. “I’ll be doing my best to deliver.” The Australian-born Dutton is making his seventh Olympic appearance. He competes in eventing, a sort of equestrian triathlon that combines the disciplines dressage, cross country and show jumping. He won team eventing gold medals for Australia in 1996 and 2000. But after moving to the United States in the 1990s to compete on the American circuit—and settling there after meeting his wife, Evie—he switched to Team USA before the Beijing Games. In Rio 2016, he won individual eventing bronze to become the oldest U.S. medalist since 1952. His hope for Tokyo gold rests on a 13-year-old horse named Z. Dutton rode Z at the 2018 world championships, and believes he’s much more seasoned now. “He’s kind of a workaholic,” says Dutton. “You can sit on him all day and he’ll still be wanting to do it. He’s a beautiful jumper and very bold and honest and trusting, which is nice.” Dutton, who says he often gets ribbed about his age in equestrian circles, credits his own longevity to staying steady. “The number one thing is your balance,” says Dutton. “You’re going at a galloping speed, 20-something miles an hour on a 1,000-lb animal that can turn on a dime or stomp or twist or deviate from the course. You have to stay on the middle of that horse at all times.” More from TIME He does balancing drills, like standing on one leg. But most of his work comes in the saddle. He’ll often ride six to seven different horses a day in training. “If I get on a horse, and it’s only been ridden on once or twice before in its life, that tests your balance out,” Dutton. “Because a lot of the time they’re just jumping around.” He does consider balance a physical gift. “To be fair, I was born with pretty good natural balance,” he says. “So I haven’t had to work too hard at it. I think that’s probably one of the biggest things that starts to deteriorate as you get older.” Dutton, who’s listed at 5’6″ and 150 pounds, has also maintained his power. “The strength part of it is you don’t move,” says Dutton. “It’s like you’re carrying somebody on your back and they’re moving around all the time. So there’s strength involved in that. It’s not so much weightlifting strength but a core strength.” That’s a good thing, as Dutton’s no fan of the bench press. “I don’t go to the gym at all,” says Dutton. “I grew up in Australia on a sheep and cattle farm and that was kind of a bit foreign to me. I would rather sort of walk up and down stairs or not park that close to the restaurant or whatever. When I’m not riding I play tennis or do other things to keep active rather than be on a regimented fitness schedule.” Equestrians can remain in the saddle well past middle age; the oldest female Olympian ever was Lorna Johnstone, a British rider who turned 70 just a few days before competing at the 1972 Olympics. Dutton says there’s no mystery why. “The horse is the athlete,” he says. “There’s no question about that. Our job is basically to get the horse to shine.” If he and Z thrive in Tokyo, Dutton would love to see his horse earn an actual medal. But only the riders collect the hardware. Winning horses, says Dutton, are rewarded with a lifetime of perks. “They get fed really well,” he says. “They’re going to live like kings for the rest of their lives.” While the equestrian horses do much of the hard work at the Games, an athlete like Dutton—who’s put in hours of practice for decades—is still worthy of respect. “I’m flattered if I’m an inspiration,” says Dutton, who is fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and insists he feels safe competing at the Games. “I like to associate myself with up and coming people and try to stay current in the sport, and not sort of dwell on what it was like in the good old days. I try to be looking ahead. I’m excited to test myself. I’m not a person who shies away from something difficult” Brady. Mickelson. In Tokyo, why not Phillip Dutton and Z? Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Sean Gregory at sean.gregory@time.com.

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Since last September, Patagonia National Park has been powered by 100% renewable energy, thanks to the installation of a new hydroelectric-solar microgrid.

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Chile’s Patagonia National Park has long been a destination for travelers from across the globe seeking an adventure in nature and/or a luxury retreat (standouts include Tierra Patagonia Hotel & Spa and Explora Lodge). Now the park has also become a beacon of clean energy. Since last September, it has been powered by 100% renewable energy, thanks to the installation of a new hydroelectric-solar microgrid. And earlier this year, the regional government announced more than $5 million in funding to improve trails, create a state-of-the-art visitor center and add infrastructure—including roads—to better serve the park’s surrounding communities. The park system includes 10 million acres of land where condors, guanacos, pumas and many deer species can roam and be protected. —Nadia-Elysse Harris Contact us at letters@time.com.

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Twitter “actioned” 1,126,990 different accounts between July and December 2020 for infringing its hateful conduct policy, a 77% increase over the prior six-month period. Actions taken could range from removing a tweet to banning an account.

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Twitter Inc. “took action” on a record number of user accounts for violating the company’s hate speech policies during the second half of 2020, a reflection of the company’s decision to expand its rules. Twitter “actioned” 1,126,990 different accounts between July and December 2020 for infringing its hateful conduct policy, a 77% increase over the prior six-month period. Actions taken could range from removing a tweet to banning an account. The social network expanded its hate speech policies last fall to catch more posts. The broader definition included tweets that incite fear or fearful stereotypes about people due to a protected category, like race. The company had seen “increased harassment of some protected categories during the COVID-19 pandemic.” The new data was part of a broader Twitter Transparency report released Wednesday that looked at how the company handled content removal during the second half of last year. In total, Twitter says it removed 3.8 million tweets during the period. The company also saw a 26% increase in the number of legal demands asking the company to remove content from journalists or news outlets. Almost all of the legal demands Twitter receives — not just those affecting journalists — come from five countries: Japan, India, Russia, Turkey and South Korea, which make up 94% of such requests. The Leadership Brief. Conversations with the most influential leaders in business and tech. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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The rogue herd is a social media hit, but conservationists want to ensure their story ends happily.

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time

It’s a wildlife journey that has captivated the globe: A herd of 15 rogue elephants wandering over 300 miles from their home in Xishuangbanna National Nature Reserve, near China’s border with Laos. En route, they have pilfered from grain stores, scoffed mountains of corn and pineapples, and caused over $1 million of damage as they amble slowly through farmland and villages. All the way, millions of Chinese and others from all around the globe have watched via a 24-hour live stream shot by a dozen swarming drones—and this reality TV hit has galvanized a greater awareness of environmental problems in a nation that, despite great strides, remains the world’s worst polluter. “The reality is human activities are becoming more extensive, more wildlife areas are becoming urbanized, and even the so-called nature reserves are increasingly becoming like urban parks,” posted one fan on Chinese social media site Weibo. “More than any other time in history, we are emphasizing ecological conservation, but the reality is still brutal.” The elephants’ antics have been highly watchable. One popular live stream showed a calf trying to clamber out from under a snoozing adult during a group nap. In another, some of the elephants seemed to get drunk after feasting on fermented grain. One calf, trying to drink water, was seen plunging head first into a pond. But, inevitably for viral sensations, interest in the elephants has begun to wane and viewer numbers are dwindling. In recent days, one stray member—a ten-year-old, 1.9-tonne male—was anaesthetized, captured and returned to the reserve after wandering into a congested area. Another youngster has fallen nine miles behind, prompting the rest of the herd to halt and wait for him, while trumpeting encouragement. China’s wild elephants have doubled in number to more than 300 since the 1990s, but their habitat has shrunk by nearly two-thirds over the same period. Now conservationists are trying to leverage the greater public awareness of habitat loss to ensure that real change can come from the elephants’ plight. Not least as the wandering herd appears to be heading towards the city of Kunming, where China is hosting the COP15 U.N. biodiversity conference in October. “Human-wildlife coexistence” has already been added to the meeting’s agenda in honor of the gatecrashers. “We cannot ignore the effect of rapid development of the local economy on the loss of wildlife habitat,” Professor Zhang Li, a renowned expert on Asian elephant migration at Beijing Normal University, wrote on his Weibo page. “Clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver. A healthy and complete ecosystem is the cornerstone of sustainable economic development.” A staff member uses a drone to track and monitor the wild Asian elephants in Hongta District, Yuxi City, southwest China's Yunnan Province, June 1, 2021. Hu Chao/Xinhua via Getty Images The future of elephant conservation in China Nobody is clear why the herd set out on this unprecedented trek. Some suggest that environmental degradation may have spurred them; others believe they are simply lost. Elephants live in matriarchal family groups, meaning an older, usually more experienced female is typically the boss. One possibility is that this leader made a decision to leave the nature reserve, or she was perhaps influenced by other members of the group. Their odyssey begun in March last year when 16 elephants were seen moving from the nature reserve toward Pu’er, a city of 2.5 million. Within a month they had reached Yuanjiang County, about 230 miles north of their starting point. Since then, some have decided to return home, while others have given birth, swelling the herd. Prof. Josh Plotnik, an expert in elephant psychology at Hunter College, City University of New York, tells TIME that they likely left due to gradually increasing human disturbance, which may have led to decreasing availability of food and water. Elephants can eat 200 kg of food every day and much of their traditional habitat near Xishuangbanna has been turned over to rubber plantations. “The individual personalities of the elephants in this group [may have] contributed to their decision to leave,” says Plotnik. “It is also likely that once the elephants got a taste for the high quality food readily available in crop fields, such as sugar cane, they continued to seek it out.” Now environmentalists are calling for the Chinese government to set up dedicated elephant nature reserves like the successful ones created for pandas and snow leopards. Given the price of rubber is extremely low, buying back land from farmers is a possibility. “We hope that elephants can recover their populations in their historic range,” Becky Shu Chen, from the IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group, told state broadcaster CTGN. “But it’s extremely challenging [for them to] coexist with people.” China has extremely harsh penalties for those caught killing elephants. However, rising elephant numbers, plus the destruction of their habitats combined with their new taste for energy-rich crops, means that human-elephant conflict will only rise. “The big fear is that the intensity of conflict between humans and elephants can start as just a nuisance and quickly grow to the point where people or elephants get killed,” says Plotnik. “This is already happening in some countries in Asia, and spells a dire future for elephants if we don’t reverse the trend.” Get The Brief. Sign up to receive the top stories you need to know right now. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Charlie Campbell at charlie.campbell@time.com.

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Bastille Day marks an important French Revolution anniversary, but the real event and its symbolism have sometimes diverged.

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The French national holiday of Bastille Day—celebrated each year on July 14, or le quatorze juillet—may spell fireworks and and a large military parade for some, but for most, it still marks the anniversary of the storming of a grand fortress that was infamous for holding political prisoners, during the first moments of the French Revolution in Paris in 1789. But the meaning behind that action isn’t quite as poetic as the motto of “liberté, égalité, fraternité” sounds, says Dan Edelstein, chair of the Division of Literatures, Cultures and Languages at Stanford and an expert on 18th century France. Back in July of 1789, France had already experienced a rough summer that included food shortages, high taxes (as a solution to King Louis XVI’s debts) and the militarization of Paris. Sensing distress, the king called upon the Estates-General—an assembly that hadn’t met in more than a century—to deliver a new tax plan. That resulted in the Third Estate, the non-noble/non-clergy portion of the assembly, breaking from the clergy and nobility, and demanding a written constitution from France. Their proclamation would form the National Assembly in late June. Weeks later, after the king removed a finance minister, Jacques Necker, of whom the estate approved, fears that Louis XVI was attempting to quash any political revolution began to boil. That fear culminated on July 14 in a march to the Hôtel des Invalides to loot firearms and cannons, and a resulting (and far more famous) trip to the Bastille for proper ammunition. That hunt for gunpowder—not the hope of freeing prisoners—was the main reason for the storming of the Bastille. The events that followed—the freeing of the few prisoners that remained at the Bastille, but also a deadly battle and the brutal beheading of the prison governor and his officers—were more of a side effect of chaotic uprising, rather than its intent. Get your history fix in one place: sign up for the weekly TIME History newsletter It didn’t take long, however, for the symbolism of the Bastille to change. “When news breaks in Versailles that people had stormed the Bastille, [the royalty] thought that this was a disaster and that people were out of control,” Edelstein says. “Within the space of about two weeks, they sort of had to revise their narrative.” Somewhat famously, Louis XVI asked a French duke that evening if the storming of Bastille was a revolt, with the duke replying “No, sire, a revolution.” At first, the royal response was an attempt to compromise with this new situation. The king arrived in Paris days later, Edelstein says, to declare his support of the revolution and don the tricolor cockade. That event bolstered the revolution’s political meaning and the idea of the storming of the Bastille as a demonstration against political tyranny, rather than a violent event. Feudalism was abolished that August. A year later, France would host the Fête de la Fédération on July 14 to celebrate the France’s constitutional monarchy and to honor France’s newfound unity. That unity, students of the French Revolution will know, didn’t last long—and the revolution eventually devolved into the Reign of Terror. July 14 wouldn’t be seen as an official holiday until almost a century later. “If there was ever a shot heard ’round the world,” Edelstein says, “it was when Parisians brought down the Bastille.” Get our History Newsletter. Put today's news in context and see highlights from the archives. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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If you're healthy, then probably not. (2018)

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A yearly check-in with a doctor seems undeniably prudent. He or she can listen to your heart, check your blood pressure and help you nip any looming health issues in the bud. But while annual well visits are a familiar part of the health care system, a growing pile of evidence finds that for healthy people without any symptoms, these yearly physician exams are a waste of time and money—and in some cases may do more harm than good. One large-scale review, published in 2012, found that annual physical exams do nothing to improve a person’s disease and mortality risks. Another recent study found a little evidence that annual physicals could reassure some people of their good health, and therefore reduce worry. But it did not find that these exams save lives or prevent disease. As a result of these lackluster findings, some experts have called for an end to annual physicals. “If you’re healthy, there’s every reason to believe these visits make no difference,” says Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a professor of health care management and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine. “Doing a bunch of unnecessary tests and taking up valuable time for people who are well—that’s not useful.” But it is expensive. Get our Health Newsletter. Sign up to receive the latest health and science news, plus answers to wellness questions and expert tips. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Roughly one in five adults gets an annual physical—also known as a preventive health examination, or PHE—and all those check-ups cost insurers and patients more than $5 billion annually, according to a 2007 study from Dr. Ateev Mehrotra, an associate professor of health care policy and medicine at Harvard Medical School. (That figure doesn’t take into account the billions in lost productivity that result from healthy adults taking time off from work to visit their doctors.) Annual physicals are a big drag on physicians’ office hours and cut into their ability to spend time with sick patients in need, Mehrotra wrote in 2015 in the New England Journal of Medicine. “In our [annual physical exam] trials, we have not seen any improvements in what we care about, which is longer and healthier lives,” Mehrotra says. “While older adults”—those 65 and above—“may benefit, younger people don’t need this exam every year.” Even some doctors who feel less certain that an annual physical is wasteful agree with the research findings to date. “The evidence does not support that an annual physical exam is necessary,” says Dr. Ted Epperly, a physician and president of Family Medicine Residency of Idaho. “Having said that, my sense is that [the annual physical’s] place in American medicine is still felt to be valuable by both physicians and patients.” Epperly says annual physicals help doctors and patients form closer relationships, which can improve the quality of care. “I think having a relationship with my patients builds trust and allows for better counseling around preventive behaviors and lifestyle factors like diet and exercise,” he says. Also, when people feel they have a good relationship with their doctor, they may be more willing to make appointments when they notice new symptoms, or to request advice when debating a health-related decision, he says. Mehrotra says he agrees strengthening the doctor-patient relationship could provide some benefits. “But if the goal is to improve that relationship, we should get rid of the head-to-toe exam elements and the tests that get ordered—like annual bloodwork—and spend more time discussing patient lifestyle and concerns.” Even those who believe the routine physical should stay say changes are needed—and that healthy people probably don’t need to see a doctor every single year. “It is very well known that having a strong and trusting doctor-patient relationship is essential to getting best outcomes in health care,” says Dr. Allan Goroll, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Unfortunately, it’s becoming harder and harder to have this relationship because of the current system’s focus on procedures and generous payments for procedures, rather than on taking time to get to know someone and establishing a relationship.” Goroll says annual physicals shouldn’t be so much an exam as an “annual review of health, both going over concerns and coming up with a plan for prevention.” He says that payers—or insurance companies—are starting to recognize the benefits of this sort of visit, and so are reimbursing doctors better for these sorts of wellness consultations, rather than for ordering tests and analyses. But he says he agrees that much of the current system—physical exams that are “rushed, impersonal, and bureaucratic” affairs that are mostly about ordering tests, as Mehrotra puts it—are not doing patients much good. He also says younger adults (those under 40) without health issues don’t need to see a doctor for an exam every year. As long as you’re going often enough to establish a trusting relationship with your doctor—every few years, or less if you grew up with your doctor—that’s probably good enough. Even for older adults, many experts say that if you’re following the guidelines laid out by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force—guidelines concerning the right age and frequency for cholesterol checks, blood lipid tests, mammograms and other screening services—you don’t need to worry about annual physicals. (To see which tests you need, plug your age and gender into the government’s MyHealthFinder tool.) But if you have health problems, don’t skip your annual. “All of this discussion about annual physicals is not for people with health problems,” Emanuel says. If you’re sick or symptomatic, or if you have a family history of disease, then “yes, you should be seeing a doctor,” he says. Contact us at letters@time.com.

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"To be a fan is to be part of a community, and Questlove’s 'Summer of Soul,' Edgar Wright’s 'The Sparks Brothers' and the Hulu docuseries 'McCartney 3,2,1' remind us of the ways music unites us, whether we’re nestled shoulder to shoulder with likeminded people or plugging in more intimately via headphones or Airpods."

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In Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson’s radiant documentary Summer of Soul, an account of a star-studded concert series that took place in a Harlem park during the summer of Woodstock but received far less attention, a fiftyish gentleman who attended the shows as a kid, Musa Jackson, describes the experience as if it were a dream. Only when he saw footage of the performances, stored away for some 50 years, did he realize how overwhelming this event—a showcase of great Black performers, staged for a nearly all-Black audience—had been: “You put memories away,” he says, “and sometimes you don’t even know if they’re real.” If part of a musician’s skill is knowing just where to put which notes, the other, more elusive gift is knowing how to spin a dream between performer and listener. This summer, as musicians and audiences alike reacquaint themselves with the pleasures of live music, three documentaries help connect us not just with what it means to be an artist, but with the equally crucial act of being a listener, of becoming part of the crackling circuit between artist and audience. To be a fan is to be part of a community, and Questlove’s Summer of Soul, Edgar Wright’s The Sparks Brothers and the Hulu docuseries McCartney 3,2,1 remind us of the ways music unites us, whether we’re nestled shoulder to shoulder with likeminded people or plugging in more intimately via headphones or Airpods. In the six-episode McCartney 3,2,1, premiering July 16, superstar record producer Rick Rubin sits down with once-and-forever Beatle Paul McCartney to walk through some of the signposts of his career, as well as some songs that simply present the opportunity for an amusing anecdote or two. The series, directed by Zachary Heinzerling, is so relaxed that you almost forget you’re watching a veritable rock’n’roll god in action. One minute he’s sitting at the piano, playing a trio of chords that can be mixed and matched into a nearly infinite garden of delights; the next he’s revealing the secrets of an isolated vocal track laid down practically a lifetime ago. Read more: ‘This Film Was My Chance to Correct History.’ Questlove on Summer of Soul and the Oscars Paul McCartney and Rick Rubin in Hulu's 'McCartney 3,2,1' Hulu I know what you may be thinking: Who needs more Beatles stuff? Even people who love the Beatles don’t always love people who love the Beatles, as anyone who’s gone on a first (and last) date with an obsessive Fab Four mansplainer can attest. But the intimacy of McCartney 3,2,1 makes it hard not to feel some tenderness for this megastar, now 79, whose band shook something loose in the world. To hear McCartney reflect on the early days is to be reminded that he and his bandmates started out as kids, honing their chops by playing live shows in humble venues. They didn’t even have a tape recorder to help them work out their ideas. “We were writing songs that were memorable not because we wanted them to be remembered,” McCartney tells Rubin, “but because we had to remember them. A very practical reason, really.” Yet fandom, even at the level inspired by the Beatles, is never an end in itself. It’s also a beginning, an open door to rapture, to finding your place in the world—and, sometimes, to creating new work that builds on the old. Filmmaker Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Baby Driver) has long adored the art-pop act known as Sparks, and The Sparks Brothers, now in theaters, covers the duo’s 50-year-plus career in voluminous, affectionate detail. Brothers Ron and Russell Mael are the performers behind Sparks: born and raised in Los Angeles, they started their first band there in 1967, though their career didn’t ignite until they decamped for London. Circa 1974, the time of the duo’s first big U.K. hit, “This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us,” Russell was a string-bean glam-rocker with a curly mop of hair, a teenybopper idol spinning out semi-surrealist lyrics. Ron, glowering behind the keyboard, favored a narrow smudge of a mustache that’s either Hitlerian or Chaplinesque, depending on your mood. Although this sounds like an unlikely formula for success, Sparks have endured. The Mael brothers continue to make and release strange, innovative albums, and they’ve written a movie, Annette, directed by Leos Carax, which was chosen as this year’s opening film at Cannes. And while their brand of avant-garde weirdness has attracted loyal fans over the years, their influence may be best measured by the number of musicians and bands they’ve inspired. The movie’s trailer touts Sparks as “Your favorite band’s favorite band,” and sure enough, one artist after another shows up in The Sparks Brothers—Beck, Thurston Moore, Flea—to pay homage. Over the years, clueless critics have at times accused Sparks of stealing musical styles they’d in fact originated. They were so ahead of their time that they were practically ahead of themselves. A still from 'The Sparks Brothers' Sundance Institute Artists reach us by surprising us, even if that just means telling us old stories in new ways. But Summer of Soul, now in theaters and streaming on Hulu, shows us another side of that equation: The way an audience’s mere presence—its energy and love, manifested in a sea of faces and bodies—can reach an artist, perhaps moving him or her to tears. Summer of Soul, which broke the sales record for documentary acquisitions out of Sundance after winning major awards there in January, is Questlove’s account of a series of concerts known as the Harlem Cultural Festival, held during a six-week span in the summer of 1969. The location was Harlem’s Mt. Morris Park—now known as Marcus Garvey Park—and the turnout for these free shows was spectacular. Television producer Hal Tulchin filmed the performances, resulting in 40 hours’ worth of material. But Tulchin couldn’t interest anyone in releasing the footage commercially, and it languished in storage until Questlove rescued it. He has artfully assembled that footage here, combining it with present-day accounts from people who were there, either performing on-stage or watching from the audience. It’s hard to believe—or maybe it isn’t—that a festival with so many showstoppers has eluded mass attention until now. A very young Gladys Knight, already possessed of a very big voice, storms the stage with her Pips. Stevie Wonder, at the time only 19 and dressed in a killer apricot and chocolate suit-and-shirt combo, starts a number on the keyboards before wending his way over to the drums—because he can play those too, and he’s not about to let anyone forget it. Sly and the Family Stone breeze onto the stage like a gust of psychedelic butterflies. Mahalia Jackson, dressed in a hot-pink caftan like a heaven-sent cloud, soars high with Martin Luther King Jr.’s beloved “Precious Lord Take My Hand,” a young Mavis Staples, awe-struck, singing at her side. The 5th Dimension performing at the Harlem Cultural Festival in 1969, featured in the documentary 'Summer of Soul.' Searchlight Pictures All of these acts are extraordinary. But the real miracle of Summer of Soul is the audience, vast and varied and nearly all Black: Whole families had come to the park, picnics in tow. We see giddy toddlers wriggling and jiggling, taking to heart Sly Stone’s entreaties to dance to the music. Some young women wear neat shift dresses and straightened tresses; others splash out in African prints, their hair natural, a style that had only recently become popular, in parallel with the Civil Rights Movement. This audience, standing together and filled with joy, was marking the creation of a new world, one that’s still coming into being half a century later. One of the festival’s younger, groovier acts was the Fifth Dimension, who’d recently scored a number-one record with their floaty medley of “Aquarius” and “Let the Sunshine In” from Hair. A few years earlier, they’d released an album keyed to another huge hit, Jimmy Webb’s “Up, Up and Away.” The album’s cover featured the group huddled together—wonderfully, ridiculously—in the basket of a hot-air balloon. In one of the most moving sequences of Summer of Soul, the Fifth Dimension’s Marilyn McCoo, interviewed in the present day, explains why she and the other members of the group—including her husband, the thoroughly charming Billy Davis, who also appears in the film—were so happy to be invited to perform at the festival. Among Black audiences, McCoo says, there was a sense that the Fifth Dimension “weren’t Black enough.” It meant a great deal to her and her fellow musicians to play before, and feel embraced by, her own people. As McCoo and Davis watch younger versions of themselves on a screen that we can’t see, McCoo says—betraying the shyest trace of a tear—“We were so happy to be there.” And so the dream circuit between audience and artist is complete, so cosmically whole it’s impossible to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. Sign up for More to the Story, TIME’s weekly entertainment newsletter, to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Sign up for our Entertainment newsletter. Subscribe to More to the Story to get the context you need for the pop culture you love. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Contact us at letters@time.com.

Article

Eight questions about time, particles, waves, cats and more of the hallucinatory world of quantum physics.

https://ti.me/2TKFR7f

time

The United Kingdom didn’t think much about particles or waves or quantum nonsense when it blew up Helgoland in 1947. It only knew that there were thousands of tons of World War II armaments to dispose of and the little island in the North Sea made a perfect place. The explosion was the largest non-nuclear blast of its time, and it came just 22 years after a much smaller, quieter detonation took place on the same island—when a young German physicist named Werner Heisenberg completed the equations that provided humanity’s first glimpse into the hallucinatory world of quantum physics. Close to a century later, that early revelation is being explained with uncanny insight and lyrical grace by best-selling author and theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, in his latest book, aptly named Helgoland. Rovelli explores such head-spinning notions as the reason observing an event determines its outcome, why time doesn’t really exist, and how it feels to devote your life to a science that even Albert Einstein described as “witchery.” You write that you never would have been a physicist except that when you were registering for college classes, the line at the physics desk was shortest. Is that really the way you picked the discipline that would define your life? Not entirely. I had a restless youth; I did not even want to go to the university. I wanted to take my backpack and go wandering around the world. But what happened is that I had a little Italian motorbike and I lent it to a friend, and the police stopped him and found some marijuana, some hashish. My lawyer said it was not a good moment to leave the country, so I enrolled in school. I was fascinated by large questions about philosophy, but when I started studying physics I really fell in love with it, and I also discovered, to my surprise, that it was good at it. My friends would ask me, “Can you understand these things and can you explain them?” And I said, “Well, actually, I do understand them.” That would put you in unique company. You quote no less a physicist than the late Richard Feynman as saying that nobody understands quantum physics and yet you also write that quantum has never been wrong. How can you reconcile those two ideas? Quantum physics is a fantastic machine that allows us to predict what’s going to happen in physical systems when they interact with something else. But if we take it as a description of what happens when a system is not interacting, it forces us to make implausible statements. A particle opens up and becomes a wave that spreads and goes through two holes at the same time and Schrodinger’s cat is alive and also dead. Quantum theory lets you say, ‘Well I put this ingredient in and that could come out.’ But if you look for an actual description of what goes on in the world, it doesn’t seem to make sense. Does quantum science have any respect for linear time as we think of it, with a beginning, middle, end? From Einstein’s relativity we know that our common notion of time is an approximation. It’s not bad, it’s just not good for thinking about galaxies and atoms—it’s only good for thinking about our daily life. There is a quantum strangeness to time so the interval between two events can mean a quantum superposition of two times taking place at once. The best way is to forget about the idea that there is a spatial time at all. Do you ever find it frustrating to be working in a field that even Albert Einstein described as “an idea of real witchery”? Let me put it this way: Some people went into science because they were attracted by the idea that they could know something with a high degree of certainty. I was attracted by science for the opposite reason. I’m fascinated by what we don’t know beyond this boundary, this side of the hill. I find that the burning core of science. You point out that it drives you a little bit crazy the way people misuse the term quantum. If you could sit the world down and explain to them in a few sentences what quantum is, what would you say? Quantum physics can be summarized by three discoveries. One is that things don’t happen according to exact equations, but only to the probability of them happening. The second is discreteness: for instance, we think of light as a continuous wave, but if we look in detail, it’s actually photons. Quantum is like pointillism—a world made up of little dots. And the third, the controversial one, is that all objects have properties only insofar as they relate to other objects. One of the most head snapping ideas of quantum mechanics is that we affect the outcome of an experiment by observing it. But why does the universe care if we’re watching or not? I think that this is the key confusion about quantum. There’s actually nothing special about me as an observer. The quantum system has properties only with respect to some system interacting with it. I happen to be a human being who takes notes of what I see. But it doesn’t matter that I have a subjective experience. I’m just a physical system like anything else. You have said that you like to smell books before you buy them. How come? I have an emotional relation with books and I need the paper to be nice. There was a biography of Schrodinger which I disliked, but I didn’t know why. And then I realized that the book had a bad smell. It was used, and it probably belonged to somebody who smoked. In one of the more charming observations in your book, you say that as a quantum physicist you are really a simple mechanic. What did you mean by that? I’m not the person who thinks that science is a fundamental explanation of everything. As a scientist, especially one who looks at one side of things, I should not make the mistake of thinking that that’s the overall picture. And so I’m a little mechanic. I think scientists should be humble and not think they’re the masters of today’s knowledge. Sign up for Inside TIME. Be the first to see the new cover of TIME and get our most compelling stories delivered straight to your inbox. Please enter a valid email address. * The request timed out and you did not successfully sign up. Please attempt to sign up again. Sign Up Now An unexpected error has occurred with your sign up. Please try again later. Check here if you would like to receive subscription offers and other promotions via email from TIME group companies. You can unsubscribe at any time. By signing up you are agreeing to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy . This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

Article

The extraordinary government assistance has put a floor beneath the most vulnerable households and workers since the pandemic struck, but there are questions over whether such an approach is sustainable, says Faizal Yahya.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/singapore-growth-help-low-wage-workers-income-households-2125671?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: When Singapore was hit by the full brunt of the pandemic over 2020, the Government provided huge policy support measures for households and companies. This not only prevented workers from being displaced but stopped growth-oriented companies from ceasing operations altogether. This support has continued in sectors recovering at a slower pace such as aviation and the tourism industry. In order to achieve this, Budget 2020 saw the roll out of four supplementary budgets in quick succession to tide the country over needed COVID-19 restrictions. However, there are questions over the sustainability of such an approach given the Singapore economy’s contraction of 5.4 per cent in 2020. Resorting to tapping on past reserves have also raised concerns over financing extra government expenditure. Despite stronger growth forecasts, the Government announced at Budget 2021 it will also draw S$1.7 billion more from the reserves.

Article

Filipinos feeling the strain of another round of lockdowns can't openly talk about it in a society where mental health challenges are seen as a sign of having insufficient religious faith, says Jeoffrey Maitem.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/philippines-lockdown-stress-frustration-suicide-unemployment-distress-2115551?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

MANILA: In the Philippines, worries among Filipinos in Metro Manila are rising with the latest rounds of on-and-off hard lockdowns imposed by the central government to flatten the growing number of COVID-19 infections. A string of suicides over the past two weeks has sparked a conversation about stress, depression and when the Philippines can escape this endless hell of COVID-19 restrictions. A 22-year-old farmer in Roxas City in Capiz took his own life on Aug 2 after a long struggle with severe depression that began when his family income was displaced by the pandemic. The following day, a ten-year-old boy hanged himself his family’s home in Cebu, Philippines. A concerned neighbour called the police but by the time officers arrived at the scene, it was too late. On the same day, a caretaker of a farm in the southern town of Nasipit in Butuan city in the Southern Philippines, also ended his life. These three cases were among the latest alarming cases of suicide in the country blamed on the COVID-19 pandemic. There is little end in sight, with the Delta variant on the loose in the country. And so President Rodrigo Duterte has approved the imposition of more lockdown measures on Metro Manila, home to 14 million, and four outer-lying suburban provinces under a hard lockdown for two weeks in August to curb the latest spike in infections. Only essential business and sectors such as hospitals, supermarkets, delivery services and manufacturing can remain fully operational

Article

US Vice President Kamala Harris will be keen to hear PM Lee Hsien Loong's views on US-China tensions, say two BowerGroupAsia consultants.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/kamala-harris-visit-singapore-what-expect-outcomes-indo-pacific-2125011?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: With her visit to Singapore, US vice-president Kamala Harris will be the second member of US president Joe Biden’s Cabinet to visit the country and third to Southeast Asia more broadly in a month. This recent tempo is significant by US standards and welcomed by the region. Just a couple of months ago, the Biden administration had come under criticism for the slow start in engaging Southeast Asia. A technical glitch which hijacked US secretary of state Antony Blinken’s virtual meeting with his ASEAN counterparts in May dominated the headlines, and a pandemic surge in the region resulted in the nixing of the Shangri-La Dialogue (SLD) in June, thereby delaying a planned US policy rollout on the defence side led by defence secretary Lloyd Austin. Since then, the Biden team has gone into overdrive to correct this perception. Austin’s July make-up trip to the region, including a keynote address at the Fullerton Lecture organised by the International Institute of Strategic Studies, provided a valuable standalone opportunity to articulate a positive US vision for the region without the US-China comparisons that might have dominated at the SLD. And earlier this month, Blinken announced several commitments on economic engagement and the Mekong sub-region during his virtual participation in ASEAN meetings and launched the US-Indonesia strategic dialogue with Indonesian foreign minister Retno Marsudi in Washington DC. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfields also visited Bangkok and affirmed the bilateral relationship with Thailand.

Article

Afghanistan has been infamously described as the “graveyard of empires”. The US, like many that came before, found that invading was easy but occupation much harder, says a Yale-NUS College researcher.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/taliban-us-biden-protect-afghanistan-2123291?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: Two weeks before the United States was set to complete troop withdrawal, the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan. This outcome was not unexpected. And yet, the lightning speed at which events unfolded has been disturbing for the US, its allies and the international community. In just days, the Afghan military and government, which the international community invested so much in and sacrificed so much for over the past 20 years, disintegrated. On Monday (Aug 16), Kabul fell without a fight as the Taliban entered the city and President Ashraf Ghani fled the country. US President Joe Biden’s decision to withdraw the nominal US and NATO presence in Afghanistan was only the latest in a series of missteps that allowed the Taliban to return to power. The planned US departure near the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks now looks like a repudiation of the last 20 years. Interpreters, Afghan staff and activists have been abandoned with few given refuge. Scenes of the airport packed with desperate mobs hoping to flee and embassy staff being evacuated have conjured up comparisons with 1975 Saigon.

Article

As more return to the office from today, many will have mixed feelings. NUS Business School's Rashimah Rajah explains how workers and their supervisors can manage this transition.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/work-home-office-back-work-office-2120671?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: Singapore is entering yet another new phase of COVID-19-related restrictions, with work-from-home requirements to be eased from Thursday (Aug 19). Up to half of employees who can work from home can now return to the workplace. This move has been met with a mix of hesitation and enthusiasm. While many Singapore workers enjoy the flexibility of working from home for the past one and a half years, WFH arrangements have been a key culprit behind workers’ reported mental health woes. They have lost social relationships at work and experienced feelings of isolation. A Straits Times survey carried out a few times in 2020 shows consistently that at least eight in 10 prefer to work from home or have flexible work arrangements. And yet, the challenges of an office in a home too have been well documented – blurred boundaries, space constraints and juggling care-giving duties. The irony of being connected virtually is what I call a “disconnect while connecting”. On the one hand, employees are connected more than ever via information and communications technology. Work-related inquiries can be answered quickly over email, or even instantaneously over the telephone, video calls and direct chat messages using Slack, Skype and Microsoft Teams. Nearly all of us have these apps on our phones too. But despite being constantly connected, employees face a disconnect in trying to fulfil the human need for connection and belonging.

Article

False accusations of sexual assault should be widely condemned, but the number of women who don't take their abusers to task is much higher, says AWARE Singapore's Shailey Hingorani.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/molest-woman-lying-false-accusation-sexual-assault-myth-singapore-2120351?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: The spectre of false sexual abuse accusations looms large in cultural narratives about sexual violence, with public anxiety about the ease and frequency of false reporting remaining high. Although the evidence on false allegations has repeatedly failed to support that fear, many continue to rue that #MeToo’s political dictum of “believe women” has gone too far. Case in point: When a Singapore anaesthetist was acquitted of molesting a 32-year-old woman, after she admitted at trial that she was lying, commentators took to banging the drum, claiming that false allegations are widespread and that all sexual assault complaints - or gender equality movements, even - should be treated with scepticism. “Women can be vile creatures too,” a Twitter user tweeted at AWARE after news of the above case broke. “That is why I have never supported women's rights.” A comment on Facebook reads: “Singapore is a country whereby women have much higher status than men and can always play victim to garner sympathy.” A LOT OF US THINK MANY SEXUAL HARASSMENTS CLAIMS ARE FALSE In an Ipsos survey of 1,019 Singaporeans and PRs in 2019, four in 10 agreed with the statement that false accusations of sexual harassment are becoming more common in Singapore. Forty-one per cent of all Singaporeans agreed or strongly agreed that false accusations of sexual harassment are a bigger problem in our society than unreported acts of sexual harassment. Lest you write this off this as the conservative beliefs of an older population, the survey found that this perspective is more prevalent among younger and middle-aged Singaporeans, aged 18 to 49 years. On the other hand, under-reporting of sexual abuse remains pervasive. Seven out of 10 clients of AWARE’s Sexual Assault Care Centre (SACC) do not file an official report.

Article

They're dismissed as conspiracy theorists and uninformed "covidiots". But we shouldn't mock people who hesitate over getting the COVID-19 vaccine, say Singapore researchers.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/why-people-have-not-taken-covid-19-vaccine-hesitancy-reasons-2115446?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: Singapore has reached a target of getting 76 per cent of its population fully vaccinated against COVID-19. With one of the highest vaccination rates in the world, it has also rolled out “vaccination-differentiated measures”. Dining-in at restaurants has resumed capped at five per group — all diners too must be fully vaccinated. Those not fully vaccinated may be allowed entry if they have recovered from COVID-19 or tested negative within the last 24 hours. These differentiated measures are meant to slow down the transmission of the virus and protect the unvaccinated who are more prone to getting seriously ill. But they have also sparked debate: While some think them crucial, a few argue that differentiated measures run contrary to earlier declarations that vaccination will not be made mandatory.

Article

Just how reliable are those company reviews you see online in deciding whether to take up a job offer? Adrian Tan discusses why you might want to take those ratings with a "fistful of salt".

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/job-reviews-glassdoor-linkedin-how-reliable-2085556?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

Even though Glassdoor states that offering incentives to employees to write good reviews violates their community guidelines, there is practically no way for them to police it. This is exactly the nature of an open platform. Just look at the type of comments that can be made on social media like Facebook. Companies can even hire someone just to do that. For slightly more than US$100, you can get a freelancer on Fiverr to post “real employee feedback” on your Glassdoor company page. These are extreme examples. But let’s say all of the reviews you’ve seen look legitimate and stand a low chance of being artificially boosted. You should still take them with a fistful of salt. For example, when an ex-employee leaves on bad terms, this negative experience can be highly emotional but the facts may not be clear. Are we sure we can rely on a one-sided testimonial? This is the same reason why you might hear more of your friends complaining about their jobs or their bosses and way fewer saying anything good, even if they've stayed at their jobs for many years. Negative events are remembered in great detail, good ones less so. It works the same way when it comes to our experiences with food or sales. When we get angry with slow or bad service, we are quick to fire off negative feedback. This desire to post decreases when we have a positive response – how many of us take the trouble to leave a good review when we get good service? WORK ENVIRONMENTS ARE COMPLEX One thing to keep in mind is that reviews are given over a period of time. A one-star five years ago may no longer reflect the company’s situation today. And a lot of companies have offices in multiple locations or have different teams that bring with them different cultures and work environments. Since team dynamics may differ, it is challenging to ensure company values are being practised in an ideal manner at every office. A bad review for the marketing team may not be an accurate reflection of the stellar management in the finance department. DBS Bank has about 12,000 employees in Singapore alone and more overseas. There are only 3,800 reviews on their Glassdoor page. That's a small percentage. If you are joining a department of 10 people, you are essentially depending on the feedback of one or two people to decide if you want to join – people you don’t know at all. That sounds pretty risky.

Article

With so many restrictions on kissing and scenes with close contact between actors, how did Singapore films continue to be made?Film-makers Juan Foo and Kew Lin reveal how COVID-19 has changed what you see on the big screen and behind the scenes.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/listen/heart-matter/future-singapore-film-first-can-it-survive-covid-19-2123141?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

19 Aug 2021 03:29PM 31 mins Millions have downloaded and streamed movies, plays and sitcoms to survive the pandemic. But what is like on the other side of the screen? Has COVID-19 compromised what the big screen can bring across and shaken up the movie industry? Lin Suling speaks to veteran filmmaker Juan Foo and Kew Lin, a full-time independent filmmaker on the challenges of production, the rise of streaming and how far passion can go in making movies in Singapore.

Article

Scientists "sound like a broken record" on the human impacts on climate change. So will anything fundamentally change with the latest IPCC report? Winston Chow breaks it down in The Climate Conversations.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/listen/climate-conversations/climate-change-ipcc-singapore-2124841?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

The young will inherit a planet very different from their parents. How aware are our students about climate change? What does going green and environmental education in schools look like and how much can they influence others around them with what they learn in class? Jaime Ho speaks to Tampines secondary school students Alexander Chua and Pratibha Naidu, and their teacher, Preeti Sheri.

Article

Uniting behind a new, "untainted" leader could lift an exhausted nation, says Norshahril Saat, PhD of ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute (ISEAS).

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/king-malaysia-meeting-prime-minister-candidates-front-runners-2118296?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: Prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s resignation on Monday (Aug 16) may have ended the bickering about his political legitimacy but his move has only plunged the country into more political turmoil, worse than when Mahathir Mohamad quit in February 2020. To resolve this political stalemate, the country must quickly unite. But if all traditional options for the top role are exhausted, the country should consider rallying behind a new, “untainted” leader. There is a lull with Muhyiddin as caretaker prime minister until the king chooses his replacement. This all feels like déjà vu when Mahathir himself was in the same position last year. Perhaps the more appropriate word is karma when last year’s predicament was exacerbated because Muhyiddin pulled Bersatu out of the ruling Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition. Little wonder then that Muhyiddin’s request for the opposition’s bipartisan support last Friday was ignored.

Article

Did Singapore athletes Quah Ting Wen and Joan Poh read comments on their Tokyo Olympics events? Have they felt so discouraged, they thought of pulling out? They reveal what goes through their minds in those make-it-or-break-it races in this week's Heart of the Matter.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/listen/heart-matter/olympians-quah-ting-wen-and-joan-poh-open-pressures-elite-sports-2108611?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

12 Aug 2021 06:46PM 31 mins One has been a competitive swimmer since 11 while the other switched out her nurse's uniform to train for hours on the water. Swimmer Quah Ting Wen and rower Joan Poh talk to Lin Suling about taking part in the unprecedented Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the extraordinary pressures of competing for international sporting glory, dealing with criticism and why despite it all, they will always choose the tougher life of an elite athlete.

Article

The Malaysian king has absolute discretion over who becomes prime minister but who will he pick? Professor James Chin lays out the options.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/malaysia-muhyiddin-yassin-candidates-prime-minister-2117726?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

HOBART: After a week of high political drama, the inevitable has occurred. Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin and his Cabinet resigned on Monday (Aug 16). Muhyiddin had little choice. He had exhausted all possible avenues to stay in power. Even his ultimate public display of desperation last Friday in going on national television to offer the opposition unprecedented reforms and sweeteners to back his government - term limits on the prime minister, reduction of the voting age, financial allocations for constituency work and granting the leader of the opposition the status of a senior minister – did not help. Never mind that the opposition had asked for some of these precise changes for over 20 years or more. Despite this very public mea culpa, leaders from all the major opposition parties rejected his peace offering. Only two senior Members of Parliament (MPs) from the Democratic Action Party (DAP) said it was worth “further discussion”. By Sunday, it was all but over. In a final meeting with Perikatan Nasional coalition parties, Muhyiddin’s fate was sealed. Some political office holders started to clear out their offices.

Article

Malaysian PM Muhyiddin Yassin's resignation means one thing: UMNO is set to return to power, says Malaysian commentator Tricia Yeoh.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/muhyiddin-resign-prime-minister-what-next-caretaker-2115856?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

KUALA LUMPUR: Malaysian Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin submitted his resignation letter to the King on Aug 16 (Monday) which the latter accepted, but the political impasse has still not yet been resolved. Though Muhyiddin has been appointed caretaker prime minister until a new prime minister is identified, the political crisis has only deepened. And yet Muhyiddin felt he had no choice. His hand was forced when it became clear in the last few weeks that his already razor-thin majority was coming into sharper focus. His government has come under fire for the country’s COVID-19 situation, which has seen infection numbers skyrocket to more than 20,000 cases and a few hundred deaths each day. Last Friday (Aug 13), he offered a slew of political reforms to the opposition that curb the powers of the ruling coalition and office of the prime minister while strengthening diversity of representation in Parliament, in exchange for support for a confidence motion. This last-minute gesture was rejected wholesale by Pakatan Harapan, alongside other opposition parties.

Article

How did Kris Wu go from being one of China's biggest pop stars to becoming the most prominent Chinese figure to be arrested for sexual assault? Zhiyue Bo weighs in.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/china-kris-wu-alibaba-fired-manager-sexual-assault-harassment-2105276?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

WELLINGTON: Is China having a #MeToo moment? Two events over the past week have revived public debate over the issue after a tide of sexual assault allegations triggered outrage. The first was a swift take-down of one of China’s biggest pop stars Kris Wu, who was arrested on Monday (Aug 2) in Beijing on rape and sexual assault accusations from over 30 victims. Wu's arrest came after 19-year-old Du Meizhu’s Weibo post alleged that the star had plied minors like herself with alcohol years ago and pressured them into sex. Though Wu has denied these allegations, Bvlgari, Louis Vuitton and Porsche have since cut ties and endorsement deals. A week later, e-commerce giant Alibaba fired a manager and disciplined several others, after a female employee’s message on an internal communications board sparked calls for accountability among at least 6,000 Alibaba employees. The post, which has been shared widely on social media platform Weibo, accuses her supervisor, Wang Chengwen, of kissing, groping and raping her after forcing her to drink excessively at a client event. The harrowing 11-page account also indicts several Alibaba executives of brushing aside the matter when she reported the incident. Calling the episode “shameful” and emphasising the company’s zero-tolerance against sexual misconduct on Monday, CEO Daniel Zhang has been quick to introduce plans to roll out a whistle-blower policy and anti-harassment guidelines.

Article

It might be tempting to suggest getting rid of tuition like what China did, but it is part of an inter-connected education system, says Cherie Lim-Tseng, a parent of 3 schoolchildren.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/china-tuition-singapore-psle-2096706?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

SINGAPORE: China, in a shocking move, has moved to bar for-profit tutoring in core subjects, threatening to decimate its US$120 billion (S$162 billion) private tuition industry. “All institutions offering tutoring on school curriculum will be registered as non-profit organisations,” CNA reported at the end of July, of the populous nation. There will also be bans on core subject tuition classes on weekends and holidays. Over three in 10 students in China attend some version of post-school enrichment. The pressure for children to succeed in the populous nation is so widespread, there is even a word for it: “Jiwa” or “Chicken Baby”, a term that refers to children whose lives are crammed to the hilt with enrichment classes and activities. Heaven forbid that jiwas waste a single minute of their lives. Perhaps, unsurprisingly then, the for-profit education sector there has come under scrutiny as part of a push to ease pressure on students and reduce the financial cost to parents – factors blamed for a drop in birth rates. A recent New York Times story examined how China had long avoided discussing mental health, until the pandemic. Social stigma and long-term challenges remain, surely, but at least there seems to be decisive strides in the right direction to ease academic stress. “Around the country, (Chinese) schools have expanded mental health counselling and encouraged students to take time to unwind, as the Ministry of Education has warned of a ‘post-epidemic syndrome’,” the story reports. It is unclear if corresponding school loads and examination requirements would change given its recent announcements, but this move by the Chinese government to make tuition a non-profit sector might just be the shake-up the country needs to change its pressure-cooking-chicken-baby narrative.

Article

Some high-pressure jobs are just not compatible with personal life. That's why more money won't help, says this writer.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/pay-salary-raise-long-hours-work-job-2098321?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

channel-newsasia

NEW YORK CITY: Goldman Sachs is acting to stave off a rebellion among burnt-out junior staff in the US — by offering its first-year analysts more money. As a fix for a deep-seated problem with workplace culture, it makes about as much sense as the way the UK is tackling a hiring crunch in the haulage sector: Heavy-goods vehicle drivers, whose hours are already almost as punishing as those of highly paid bankers, will be allowed to work even longer. Meanwhile, France is one of many European countries where hospitality businesses are struggling to hire seasonal workers, because even those willing to raise pay, cut hours or scrap the more onerous tasks cannot offer job security, with COVID-19 cases still fluctuating and new lockdowns possible. Across the developed world, businesses are complaining of labour shortages as they seek to ramp up activity. But many seem to be attempting short-term fixes to old problems, for example, by offering signing bonuses designed to tempt experienced workers away from rivals, rather than to draw new recruits into unpopular sectors.

Article

Stats suggest seniors with depression are not seeking help. But if we listen carefully, they do voice signs of distress – like when they see their GPs, SUSS' Helen Ko points out.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/elderly-suicide-cries-help-helpline-support-2077891?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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SINGAPORE: The Samaritans of Singapore (SOS) recently reported a rise of 13 per cent in the overall number of suicides last year, compared to 2019, the highest numbers since 2012. The increase occurred across age groups, but the spike of 26 per cent by seniors, the highest number of suicides since 1991, is alarming. Moreover, while the number of cases in this category has risen, the number of calls for help received from this group has decreased compared to 2019, suggesting our seniors experience distress but are not coming forward to seek help. More troubling is the underlying link between age and suicide rates. In Singapore, there were 8.91 suicides per 100,000 for all ages in 2017, a figure that is 24.06 per 100,000 for those aged 70 or older in the same year. Physical disability, mental illnesses such as depression, and life stressors intensify the risk of suicides among seniors. We also know Singaporeans are generally living longer but spending more years in poor physical health as a result of heart diseases, stroke and cancer, according to the Singapore’s Ministry of Health. Older adults also typically experience multiple losses within a short span of time, when friends pass on in succession, tensions in marital relationships as caregiving burden strains couples, and financial concerns. COVID-19 has accentuated these issues considerably. With heightened restrictions on social gatherings, face-to-face social activities at senior care centres and community clubs, and visitors at nursing homes, seniors found themselves suddenly having to cope alone and separated from loved ones. Add to this the pervasive use of technological platforms and gadgets for tracing and testing, as well as social connection, lower-income seniors living by themselves are particularly hard hit. Then there are shifts in emotions. If they have ailments and depend on others, they often develop a heightened sense of awareness of their bleak future. They feel like a burden. These often escalate to existential concerns where they question the meaning in continuing living. Considering also recent reports showing older workers aged 50 experiencing the largest increase in retrenchment in 2020 and that retiree households were hardest hit by inflation, there is greater urgency to address this issue. HELP AVAILABLE TO SENIORS It is fortunate therefore that Community Outreach Teams, which tap on neighbours and volunteers to reach out to vulnerable seniors, have been formed through partnerships by the Ministry of Health, Agency for Integrated Care (AIC) and Social Service Agencies. Family and friends are encouraged to identify and refer their loved ones for help.

Article

A latest climate change report has an interactive atlas showing exactly how each region will be affected. Singapore will face great risks from one key element, says climate scientist Winston Chow.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/ipcc-2021-report-climate-change-impact-singapore-2100661?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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SINGAPORE: Over the past three years, approximately 250 experts in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s Working Group I (WGI) writing team volunteered their time and expertise to author the sixth - and latest - assessment on the physical basis of climate change. It is the first of a series of IPCC reports in each assessment cycle spanning approximately seven years, examining climate research undertaken since the last cycle ended in 2014. The writing team faced considerable obstacles. The assessment cycle was extended because of the COVID-19 pandemic, which fundamentally changed how authors met and worked across borders and time zones in collaboratively writing multiple drafts. Almost 80,000 comments on the drafts were submitted from expert reviewers and governments over the past three years; all had to be addressed for the report to pass the IPCC approval process. They also faced the challenge of completing a report concise enough for policymakers seeking authoritative information on climate change, while simultaneously accounting for the explosion of climate literature published since 2014. About 14,000 total citations to relevant literature were assessed - and even that voluminous amount doesn’t cover the staggering breadth of climate science research during that period. As such, the approved report released on Monday (Aug 9) is a monumental feat and the authors’ efforts should be applauded.

Article

Young people tend to rely on peers for comfort but when they share something personal with adults, what we say to them is very important, a Singapore University of Social Sciences (SUSS) adolescent psychologist advises.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/youth-mental-health-counsellor-teacher-2107696?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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SINGAPORE: In light of the recent River Valley High School case, Education Minister Chan Chun Sing pushed for enhanced training in mental health literacy and the deployment of more teacher-counsellors. While welcomed, there is an elephant in the room: Whether young people who face mental health challenges will indeed open up to teacher-counsellors. In an ideal world, kids will turn to their parents for support when they encounter difficulties. However, in my experience working with young people, some don’t or can’t for a variety of reasons. Sometimes parents and their children have differing views, like when the child chooses to be in a relationship or friends with someone their family disapproves of. As these evolve, frayed nerves can deepen. Or parents become worried when certain behaviours become concerning. Problems can arise when concerns are not communicated sensitively, discerningly or effectively. As a result, the child simply ceases reaching out for fear of judgement and rejection. It's no surprise when instead of trying to see things from their perspective, parents can react negatively. I have dealt with cases where some teens resort to violence in retaliation. In one case, a parent tried to stop their child from sending text messages in the wee hours of the night daily by cutting off the wireless network in the house. The teenager, already struggling through a relationship, acted out poorly by damaging household furniture in anger. Parents may feel cutting off Internet access is a small matter, but for a young person, it is a dramatic and unreasonable move. Talking things through could have paved the way for a compromise.

Article

Could Siti Sarah's death finally be the turning point for those in Malaysia who have downplayed or denied the impact of COVID-19 all this while?

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/siti-sarah-death-pregnant-malaysian-singer-celebrity-covid-2108281?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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JOHOR BAHRU: Malaysia’s celebrity scene suffered a number of COVID-related deaths over the last few weeks, from Yuna’s cousin and best friend, Amilya Saila Aminoddin, to singer Joyce Leelyn and on Monday (Aug 9), Siti Sarah Raisuddin. Siti Sarah’s death was heart-breaking. The news garnered international coverage, not because she was an incredibly popular singer (though she is), but because she was heavily pregnant when she tested positive for COVID-19. When her oxygen levels plummeted last week, she was placed in intensive care. Doctors performed a caesarean section to save her baby and put her under an induced coma. Her child, Ayash Affan, survived, but she succumbed three days later. Her death brought the severity of COVID-19 into sharper focus for many who had previously downplayed or even denied its dangers. The outpouring on social media was huge. Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin, even the king and queen, expressed their condolences.

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Parents worry about their children being susceptible to COVID-19 because they are not vaccinated. But getting dirty outdoors is the best way to build up immunity, says a paediatrician.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/children-play-outdoors-nature-covid-19-2093601?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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SINGAPORE: The prolonged COVID-19 pandemic has caused much fear and anxiety for parents. They have had to struggle with keeping their children masked, getting them to perform hand hygiene to protect them from infection while hearing about COVID-19 clusters forming in various sectors including schools and enrichment centres. Children below 12 years of age are also not yet eligible for the COVID-19 vaccines and thus many parents have opted to keep their children at home even on weekends, but are struggling to keep them meaningfully occupied. During the gradual reopening phases, some families have found creative ways to beat cabin fever by exploring new, or lesser known, outdoor locations in Singapore, such as animal farms or the zoo, going on hikes in nature parks or exercising outdoors. Getting dirty playing in the mud or sand and going outdoors in a pandemic may at first seem counterintuitive given the prevailing emphasis on hygiene and safe distancing, but this may in fact have unexpected benefits. Spending time in open, uncrowded and well-ventilated spaces reduces the risk of COVID-19 transmission. It also allows children to expend their pent-up energies in healthy ways, such as running, cycling, and swimming which improves cardiovascular health and fitness, while learning more about nature, the plants and animals around us and the importance of conserving our environment.

Article

Suzanna Farid Tang's garden was once a small, infertile patch - but with family effort, it's now bursting with chillis, lady's fingers and blue pea flowers.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/garden-edible-urban-farm-nparks-grow-vegetable-fruit-food-security-sustainable-2095091?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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SINGAPORE: Each morning, when I step out of my back gate with my two-year-old before sending him to school, I am excited to point out a new bud bursting or another edible item ready for harvest. He would point out a blue pea flower or even a bright red chilli not there the day before. Once in a while, we spot an orange flower and cross our fingers for a pumpkin, but the Singapore weather means such flowers usually wither within a few days. There is great pity when that happens but therein lies lesson number one: Gardening is about the circle of life, of things dying as much as it is about the most suitable and carefully tended plants flourishing. Fruits of our labour have a literal meaning to gardeners. My son has yet to take a liking to our green great hog plums, more affectionately known to us as kedondongs, but we point out the dishes prepared with it to him at the dining table. And it is a labour of love. My edible garden was once an infertile, small grass patch when we first moved in. But thanks to my father who developed an interest in his retirement years and decided to try growing species that could be used in the kitchen, a luscious plot of flowering plants lies before us today. Gardening is also about community and sharing in our collective labouring. It helps that I live in an estate of avid gardeners who readily share tips and their harvests of cherry tomatoes and jackfruits. Moringa, banana and mango trees grow freely in the neighbourhood – reminiscent of the kampung days of Singapore, my father said. BLOOMING INTEREST IN GARDENING With more time spent at home, Singaporeans have been getting their hands dirty and discovering a whole new world of horticulture. Local commercial farms, like Edible Garden City, have seen a surge in volunteer applications, along with an increase in the number of calls asking for home gardening advice. The Urban Farmers (Singapore) Facebook group saw a surge in membership since the onset of the pandemic. Members of the 48,000-strong group post about harvest successes, pro tips and the latest horticulture trends. Some users even swap plant cuttings and seeds. Meanwhile, NParks has been distributing free seed packets to households through their Gardening with Edibles initiative. Many of my friends and family took full advantage and now have a small edible garden in their homes too.

Article

He convinced his grandparents to reduce their use of air-conditioners and she recycles waste. Two Secondary 3 students from Tampines secondary school tell CNA’s Jaime Ho how their own habits have changed in this week’s The Climate Conversations.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/listen/climate-conversations/singapore-schools-climate-change-students-sustainability-2109686?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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13 Aug 2021 07:26AM 32 mins The young will inherit a planet very different from their parents. How aware are our students about climate change? What does going green and environmental education in schools look like and how much can they influence others around them with what they learn in class? Jaime Ho speaks to Tampines secondary school students Alexander Chua and Pratibha Naidu, and their teacher, Preeti Sheri.

Article

There's a reason why India's pushing for cricket to be included at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic Games, says Aarti Betigeri.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/why-india-olympic-medals-so-few-more-tokyo-2020-2108046?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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CANBERRA: India took home seven medals, including one gold, from this year’s Tokyo Olympics. There have been two reactions: The first is, amazing! India has taken home its largest-ever medal haul! What an excellent achievement! The second is one of dismay over India’s relatively poor performance: How can India, with its 1.3 billion-strong population, consistently fare so dismally at the Games? And worse, when compared to 1.4 billion-strong China, second on the medals tally, with 38 gold, 32 silver and 18 bronze medals? Both responses deserve consideration given the confounding situation of India at these Games. The world’s second-largest population is 48th on the list of Olympic medal-winners. INDIA’S BEST OLYMPICS SHOWING EVER Those who think we should revel in India’s moment of triumph aren’t wrong about the reasons for celebration. Indeed, The Guardian labelled Tokyo “India’s greatest ever Olympics” after 23-year-old Neeraj Chopra won big in the men’s javelin event, throwing 87.58m for India’s first gold in athletics. The gold elevates Chopra to an elite club of the very few. For an army soldier and the son of a village farmer in rural northern India, his win is an extraordinary personal achievement that has also become a symbol of hope for future sporting prowess for the country.

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Against a tide of fear, cynicism and some hiccups, Japan gave the world an Olympics which was a glimmer of hope in these trying times, says sports commentator John Duerden.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/tokyo-olympics-covid-19-success-2103591?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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SINGAPORE: The 2020 Olympics finished in the same way they began – awkwardly on Sunday (Aug 8), with teams of athletes at the closing ceremony waving mostly to cameras rather than a stadium full of supporters. When Tokyo was handed the hosting rights back in 2013, organisers probably imagined a much grander, more ambitious event compared to how it played out. Then again, with a raging pandemic, and over 11,600 athletes from all around the world converging in Tokyo, it was a wonder Japan pulled it off at all. WORLD WASN’T IN THE MOOD FOR AN OLYMPICS The games could have gone much worse. COVID-19 not only caused its delay by a year but drained almost all enthusiasm ahead of the opening ceremony on Jul 23. Audiences didn’t seem chuffed about the prospects of watching a pandemic Olympics. An Ipsos global poll in July reported an average of 46 per cent of respondents in 28 countries expressing interest in the Olympics. A May survey in Japan by the Asahi Shimbun newspaper was worse, reporting that over 80 per cent of Japanese did not want the games to go ahead this year. A doctor’s union put out a statement in May that it was “impossible” to hold the games. Even the country’s biggest sporting icon Naomi Osaka who lit the Olympic torch was unconvinced. "Of course, I want the Olympics to happen," she said that same month. "But if it's putting people at risk ... then it definitely should be a discussion.”

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The opposition must also submit a motion of confidence in a Member of Parliament that it is prepared to select as PM, analyst Tricia Yeoh says - but who would this be? #malaysia

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/malaysia-impasse-muhyiddin-no-confidence-motion-2096756?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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KUALA LUMPUR: Events over the last week have deepened Malaysia’s political crisis. Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin’s already questionable majority was publicly challenged when an UMNO minister resigned and the party announced the withdrawal of 11 of its Members of Parliament. This followed a special Parliamentary sitting, in which it was revealed the Cabinet wanted – but failed – to revoke the Emergency Ordinances, resulting in tense public exchanges between the prime minister and the king about whether royal consent was required, unprecedented in a constitutional monarchy like Malaysia. Despite UMNO’s withdrawal from the Perikatan Nasional coalition, Muhyiddin’s government is still in place for several reasons. First, Malaysia’s federal constitution does not recognise political parties, and stipulates that only the king shall appoint as prime minister a Member of the House of Representatives (lower house of Parliament) whom he believes commands the confidence of the majority in the Lower House. Second, there are only three ways in which any one parliamentarian’s majority can be tested: Through a general election, a vote of confidence (or no confidence) in Parliament, or through evidence submitted directly to the king, for example statutory declarations affirmed by members of the Lower House, as was the case that paved the way for Muhyiddin’s assumption of the top office in February 2020. THE OPPOSITION MUST DECIDE ON A LEADER FOR PM The record surge of COVID-19 infections in Malaysia has given Muhyiddin an out. For public health reasons, he can fend off calls for a parliamentary motion of confidence earlier than his announced September session. That at least 11 COVID-19 cases were reported in Parliament last week bolsters the public impression that lawmakers meeting when a pandemic is raging can be risky, despite the fact that all parliamentarians already have been vaccinated and hence parliamentary sessions can actually be held safely with the appropriate restrictions in place. But this doesn’t render the Opposition – which now claims to hold the majority – inert. In fact, opposition MPs have three options at its disposal. First, they can lobby the Agong, for he can advise the government for another special parliamentary sitting to be held sooner rather than later in September.

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Engineers in Singapore helped make this happen. #Qualcomm #SpaceTechnology

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/ingenuity-nasa-mars-helicopter-singapore-qualcomm-14965598?cid=linkedin_traffic_social_10082018_cna

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Occasionally, the issue might not be with the chip, but with the test itself. The team, for instance, once tested the chip in freezing temperatures by hitting it with a jet of cold air and discovered that it was not producing the correct results. "We needed to check if it was due to the programme, the silicon (on the chip), the software or things like that," Mr Yeoh said. "There are so many different pieces that could go wrong as well, so we just have to eliminate step by step and understand the root cause." This tedious process could also involve something called "failure analysis", where the chip - which contains structures so small they cannot be seen by the naked eye - is examined using x-rays. The team kept repeating the cold test and analysing the data, and found that the issue was linked to the test. They tweaked the test programme and the chip eventually passed. "So, it was more understanding that and fixing the programme ... the silicon itself was still good actually," Mr Yeoh added. A HUGE CELEBRATION Nevertheless, Mr Yeoh said the team remained "motivated" despite the grind, especially as it was also testing high-speed interfaces in the processor for the first time. These interfaces connect to different parts of Ingenuity, including its camera. "This was one of the few major projects that we started and we were learning a lot actually. So, it didn’t feel like a dull moment," he added.