Innholdsfortegnelse for January 18, 2021 i Time Magazine International Edition

THE CHOICE RE “PERSON OF THE YEAR” [Dec. 21–28]: I’m sorry, what was it that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris accomplished in 2020 to deserve this prestigious honorific? They got themselves elected? The electorate did that. They still have to actually do something (in my mind) to justify being a Person of the Year. Seems to me Dr. Anthony Fauci was hands down Person of the Year. He battled not only the virus, but also his boss, who was often working at cross purposes in this epic war of the pandemic. Gary W. Miller,SARATOGA, CALIF. THANK YOU FOR OFFERING us loyal readers a glimmer of hope with your Person of the Year issue—it was exemplary journalism as always. And thank you for recognizing the amazing artistic talent that worked on…

A MOB WHIPPED UP BY THE PRESIdent stormed police lines, smashed windows and broke into the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in an attempt to block lawmakers from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral victory. The violent scene, which called to mind images of coups in foreign lands, was a culmination of two months of “Stop the Steal” rallies, fueled by Donald Trump’s baseless allegations that widespread voter fraud had cost him the election. The President has repeatedly incited his supporters to challenge the peaceful transfer of power, the essential marker of democracy. Two hours before the assault on the Capitol, Trump had vowed that he would “never concede,” and urged them to pressure Republican lawmakers “to take back our country.” When he finished, a crowd chanting, “Storm the Capitol!” proceeded…

Holy Name Medical Center in Teaneck, N.J., received its first 975 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine on Dec. 17. Hospital staff immediately set to work unpacking, storing, preparing and, finally, administering the shots to staff from departments across the hospital. In the bottom right photo, chief anesthesiologist Melinda Ball tears up after getting vaccinated.…

EVEN THE BEST-LAID PLANS WERE NO MATCH FOR 2020. When TIME sat down with Yuriko Koike in late 2019, Tokyo’s governor was exuberant in anticipation of the approaching Olympic and Paralympic Games. She capped our interview in the city’s hulking Metropolitan Government Building with an impromptu tour of the rooftop viewing gallery, where tourists browsed caps and tees emblazoned with the Tokyo 2020 emblem. In a flash, Koike hopped a security barrier and sat at a yellow-and-black polka-dot piano to play a few bars of “Bohemian Rhapsody.” “Did you know this is Godzilla’s favorite building?” she teased. The monster could hardly have done more damage to Tokyo than the pandemic. The Games have been postponed, tourists have been largely banished from the Japanese capital, and TIME’s conversation with Koike on…

THERE ARE VERY FEW THINGS ÁNGEL LEÓN HASN’T DONE WITH THE FRUITS OF THE SEA. In 2008, as a young, unknown chef, he took a loin from one fish and attached it to the loin of another, using collagen to bind the two proteins together. He called them hybrids and served them to unsuspecting diners at Aponiente, his restaurant in the southern Spanish port town of El Puerto de Santa María, just across the bay from Cádiz. He discovered that fish eyes, cooked at 55°C in a thermal circulator until the gelatin collapsed, made excellent thickening agents for umami-rich sauces. Next he found that microalgae could sequester the impurities of cloudy kitchen stocks the same way an egg white does in classical French cooking. In the years since, León has…

BETWEEN THE GLITZY PARTIES, secret backstories and climactic murder in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby, there’s a tiny detail that readers may have missed: right before he gets in a car with antagonist Tom Buchanan—the ride that kicks off the novel’s tragic end—narrator Nick Carraway realizes he’s forgotten his own birthday. It’s a detail that stuck with author Michael Farris Smith when he re-read the novel in his 40s, and sparked a lingering question: What makes a man so detached from himself that he doesn’t remember his own birthday? In Nick, Smith’s prequel to The Great Gatsby, released on Jan. 5, the author explores Carraway’s life before he arrives in Jay Gatsby’s world in West Egg, ruminating on his travels and search for home during and after…

‘Today he broke my life again.’MOHAMMED KINANI, on Dec. 23, after President Trump pardoned four men convicted of killing his 9-year-old in Baghdad in 2007 as Blackwater security guards ‘Because this is America, the 82-year-old hands that used to pick someone else’s cotton went to the polls and picked her youngest son to be a United States Senator.’THE REV. RAPHAEL WARNOCK, during his Jan. 5 victory speech after defeating incumbent GOP Senator Kelly Loeffler in a special election in Georgia ‘I’LL BE FIERCE FOR ALL OF US, FOR OUR PLANET AND ALL OF OUR PROTECTED LAND.’DEB HAALAND, U.S. Representative (D., N.M.), in a Dec. 19 speech after her nomination as Biden’s Interior Secretary; if confirmed, she would be the first Native American Cabinet member ‘Who is to say what you’re…

LAST YEAR, AS THE TEMPERATURE IN OAKLAND, Calif., soared and the outside air appeared gray, I decided upon the revolutionary act of cracking open a window overnight. At midnight I woke to smoke inside my apartment, a snowstorm of ash swirling into my room and coating every surface in delicate lacy patterns, a potent reminder that very close by, homes, animals, forests were burning. The evacuation advisory came early the next morning. Residents of the Bay Area, or at least those privileged enough to have cars, put essentials in their vehicles and got ready to seek shelter elsewhere. I gathered up my passport, a change of clothes and, to my husband’s chagrin, enough journals to fill the trunk. I’ve been an obsessive journal keeper since 1986, when I was 13…

TWENTY MILLION. THAT WAS THE NUMBER OF Americans who were supposed to be vaccinated against COVID-19 by now. Instead, just under 5 million people have received a shot, and 17 million doses have been shipped to the states and other jurisdictions that are distributing them to hospitals, doctors and pharmacies. “There is a complete lack of federal leadership, and it’s just horrifying,” says Dr. Tom Frieden, a former director of the CDC. “We heard, ‘It’s our job as Operation Warp Speed to deliver vaccines to states. Then it’s their job from there.’ But that’s not how public health works in the U.S.” As it is, state and local health departments are struggling to implement an unprecedented mass-vaccination program while also managing a surge in new COVID-19 cases—some 200,000 daily for…

WEDDING CUPCAKES MAY PROPEL A JAVELIN thrower to gold at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. In typical times, such a statement would seem ridiculous. But these days, it sounds plausible. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck last year, Kara Winger, a three-time Olympian and the U.S. national record holder in the javelin, needed to adjust. Since she could no longer access indoor facilities for her typical strength and technique drills, she and her husband, former U.S. discus and shot-put thrower Russ Winger, connected a 30-ft. cable from their back fence to a hook at the rear of their house, running it through a metal tube that’s about a foot and a half long. On this neatly angled wire, which allows Winger to replicate proper javelin-throwing motion, she tosses the tube, once…

The snow had just melted on the streets of Kyiv when Shawn Fuller, a U.S. Navy veteran, arrived in the early spring of 2018, his roller suitcase clattering over the pavestones of the Ukrainian capital. On the western edge of town, he found the address that his recruiter had sent him via Facebook, a flophouse with about two dozen beds, each reserved for a foreign fighter. The men Fuller met inside were mostly from Europe, as was his recruiter, a chain-smoking Norwegian named Joachim Furholm, who had been convicted of bank robbery in Norway in 2010. The two of them had met over Facebook and gotten to know each other well, gaming out their plans to get military training and combat experience from one of Ukraine’s militia groups. When they finally…

IN FEBRUARY 2019, THE KAISER PERMANENTE health system announced a new kind of medical school. The school would be built “from the ground up” to prepare students for the complexities of the U.S. medical system. The curriculum would emphasize cultural competency, patient and provider well-being, mental health and the elimination of socioeconomic disparities in the medical system. Students would see patients right away, and hands-on learning would replace many lectures. What’s more, the first five graduating classes would pay nothing to attend; Kaiser hoped this would attract a student body more diverse than the typical U.S. medical school’s. “The school will help shape the future of medical education,” said Kaiser CEO Bernard J. Tyson, who died unexpectedly, reportedly of a heart attack, about nine months after the announcement. That future…

IT WAS A NIGHT IN MID-APRIL THAT I FELL ASLEEP TO THE phrase this is too hard pinging through my brain, and they were the first words to cross my mind when I opened my eyes the next morning. I texted my sisters: “Remember the easy days when it was JUST a baby and cancer???” I pulled myself out of bed, plopped heavily into my wheelchair and stared in the mirror with my fingers splayed across my growing belly. That day we had to decide if my partner Micah would start a second round of chemotherapy treatments that would weaken his ability to fight against this new virus if he caught it, or forgo the treatment and change his odds against cancer. Our baby would arrive in a few weeks.…

DO YOU REMEMBER HOW IT FELT TO BE alive on Nov. 9, 2016? If you spent the day in a big U.S. city where overwhelmingly liberal masses lived crushed up against each other with no room to escape the ambient mood, you might never forget it: residents trudging around silent, sleepless, dead-eyed, as though something had siphoned off all their serotonin. After the initial shock, conversations turned toward potential silver linings: Hey, wasn’t adversity supposed to be good for art? Certainly Trump would deliver plenty of fodder for late-night hosts and punk bands. Shortly after the election, New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz wrote, “Trump’s victory is a crucible of possibility for a new generation, who will do what artists have always done in times like these: go back…