THE CURRENT INTERNATIONAL SECURITY SYSTEM HAS nearly expired. It’s rotted through. Its remains have collapsed and buried the world order beneath. Trying to revive it is futile. Most of all, it resembles a broken automaton: its limbs are still able to

Sinn Féin won 29% of the vote in the Northern Ireland Assembly election on May 3. The fact that it emerged from the election as the largest single party has a powerful symbolic resonance. Northern Ireland was established 101 years ago for one reason:

THOUGH THE DOWNTON ABBEY TV series had legions of fans during its six-season run, you don’t have to be one of them to enjoy Downton Abbey: A New Era, the second film to spin off from the show. Set in the waning days of the 1920s, A New Era finds the

IF YOU’VE OPENED TIKTOK RECENTLY, YOU’LL HAVE struggled to escape commentary or clips from the defamation trial brought by Johnny Depp against his ex-wife Amber Heard in a Virginia courtroom. The trial, over an opinion piece about domestic violence t

A man bathes under a broken water pipeline on May 2 in New Delhi, among the regions in northwest and central India to face a heat wave with temperatures 8°F to 15°F above normal, according to the NASA Earth Observatory. The extreme heat has led to mo

You reveal a lot of uncomfortable secrets about yourself and your family in Rothaniel. How are you feeling? I feel pretty sturdy, and I feel very adult. In the special, I am honest about things I thought I’d never say out loud. I’ve started feeling m

NOTHING ON EARTH COMPARES WITH THE ICY sweeps of the planet’s polar extremes. It’s why, perhaps, explorers and scientists who have been there often seek more distant analogies, describing the poles’ austere swaths of frozen terrain in lunar terms, un

GISELLE, KARINA, NINGNING, AND WINTER should be tired. They just arrived in California after a long-haul flight from Seoul, after all. But the four stars of the K-pop girl group aespa have an important job to do—and they know the stakes. For one of t

In 2020, when Bolor-Erdene Battsengel would walk into work in Ulan Bator’s national parliament building, security guards would stop her to ask if she was a personal assistant or a janitor. She was neither—she was the youngest member of the Mongolian

AT THE END OF THE FIRST QUARTER of 2021, as the CEOs of the three biggest U.S. oil and gas companies presented their firms’ earnings, investors fired off a range of questions about how they were addressing climate change. The market had already come

Bilal Baig wants to take a pause. In April, they won top honors at the Canadian Screen Awards for Sort Of, a CBC/HBO Max dramedy they co-created and star in about a nonbinary Torontonian of Pakistani descent who is struggling to fuse the fragments of

10 RISING STARS guiding the way to a BRIGHTER FUTURE around the world ■

HOW ZELENSKY LEADS Simon Shuster’s May 9/May 16 cover story from inside Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s compound drew praise on Twitter, including from journalists. Former TIME editor Walter Isaacson called the cover story “brilliant,” showi

FOR MAXIMILIAN DAVIS, fashion isn’t just a career choice—it’s part of his family legacy. In his Trinidadian-Jamaican family in Manchester, England, his sister and mother modeled, and his father studied fashion design. When he was 6, his grandmother t

The stories in this collection were written over more than a decade. What was it like revisiting them? It’s always helpful when time defamiliarizes you from your own work. The short story taught me how to be a writer—it was the most efficient way to

ANTIVACCINE SENTIMENTS HAVE BEEN SIMMERING in the U.S. since at least 1998, when the Lancet, a prestigious medical journal, published—and later retracted—a fraudulent paper falsely linking vaccines to autism. They’ve grown stronger in the past two ye

DEPENDING ON WHOM YOU ASK, MODERN MEN are either suffering a crisis of masculinity or they wield more power than ever. In his tricky psychosexual horror film Men, writer-director Alex Garland explores both angles, suggesting that men don’t know who t

AFTER STARRING IN THE SECOND season of Bridgerton—the lush period drama that has become Netflix’s most watched English-language series ever—the actor Jonathan Bailey could have done anything. He chose something that he knew would be a challenge. “Coc

Chukwuka Ekweani ran away from his small-town home in the north of Nigeria at age 19 to chase his music dreams in Lagos. Sitting alone on the flight south with his parents’ disapproving words ringing in his ears, Ekweani fretted about his choice: “I

THE STAFF OF THE KYIV INDEPENDENT KNEW WAR WAS coming. They had spent long days in February reporting on an invasion that high-level sources had told them was imminent. Editor in chief Olga Rudenko and the other senior editors had consulted with the

THE GENRE WE ASSIGN TO A LIFE STORY DEPENDS a lot on how it ends. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s life has already completed several dramatic arcs. First, the hero’s journey: a child born into poverty moves to the big city, rises to lead a labor union, a

WHEN DEEPICA MUTYALA PARTNERED her beauty brand with Mattel to launch the first ever South Asian CEO Barbie doll—made in Mutyala’s image—she wanted to make sure it was authentic. Growing up in Sugar Land, Texas, she’d had to navigate both colorism wi

The city of Nome, on Alaska’s Bering Sea coast, has long been the home of adventurers, chancers, and the fiercely independent who would rather live off the land than do their shopping at Walmart. Originally a Native Inupiat settlement that was taken

Rich Strike, left, an 80-1 outsider, won the Kentucky Derby on May 7 in one of the biggest underdog victories in racing history. The horse was only admitted to the race at the last minute, after a competitor had dropped out. Rich Strike was in 18th p