Indice dei contenuti per November 25, 2024 in TIME Magazine

TIME hosted a gala in Los Angeles on Oct. 24 to mark the publication of its second annual Latino Leaders list, presented by Nissan. Above, María Zardoya, lead singer of the Marías, and Josh Conway perform at the venue, Casita Hollywood; below, actors George Lopez and Camila Mendes speak about the importance of representation in Hollywood. See the full list at time.com/latino-leaders-2024 Indigenous films to stream now Film history is rife with harmful stereotypes of Native peoples. To mark November as Native American Heritage Month in the U.S., TIME spoke to Indigenous scholars and filmmakers about the movies that actually get the Indigenous experience right, like Fancy Dance (pictured). time.com/native-films SUBSCRIBE to TIME’s newsletters Find all of TIME’s email lists at http://time.com/newsletters On the covers Photograph by David Butow…

Red Lobster filed for bankruptcy in May. TGI Fridays closed nearly 50 locations abruptly in October, then filed for bankruptcy in early November. Hooters shut down dozens of stores in June, while Buca di Beppo declared bankruptcy in August. Even budget standby Denny’s said in October that it would close about 150 stores in the next two years, citing “choppy economic conditions” and reluctance of cost-conscious consumers. Sit-down chain restaurants may be the quintessential American business, beginning with the expansion of Howard Johnson’s after World War II as families got in the car and started to travel. But the economy is challenging the business model. Although inflation is slowing, reticent consumers are eating more at home or at lower-cost fast-food restaurants, where the average check is $7.92, about half…

Insect shells, rice husks, water bottles, and bamboo charcoal might not be the first things that come to mind when you think of high-performance building products. But Taiwanese upcycling company Miniwiz is using them to create just that. “We take leftover construction waste, leftover fiber waste, leftover plastic or packaging waste, and turn that into a building material you can use for another 30 years,” says CEO Arthur Huang. Carbon emissions from the built environment include “operational” carbon generated through uses like lighting and ventilation, and “embodied” or “embedded” carbon, created during the process of material extraction, manufacturing, and transportation. Embedded carbon is expected to contribute to nearly half of new construction emissions between 2020 and 2050. “We solve the embedded-carbon footprint issue by very dumb logic,” Huang says.…

It was the moment he had fantasized about for four years. At 2:24 a.m. on Nov. 6, Donald Trump strutted on stage in a Florida ballroom, surrounded by advisers, party leaders, family, and friends. The Associated Press had yet to call the race, but it was clear by then that the voters had swept him back into power. Staring out at a sea of supporters sporting red MAGA hats, Trump basked in the all-but-certain triumph. “We’ve achieved the most incredible political thing,” Trump said. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” How Trump, 78, won re-election will be the stuff of history books, and already America’s choice can be traced to some key decisions. To Trump’s top aides, the thesis of the campaign could be summed up in…

The Wicked Witch of the west has been a fixture in American culture for nearly 125 years. After coming to life in 1900 with L. Frank Baum’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, she rose to prominence onscreen in 1939, portrayed by Margaret Hamilton as a sinister old lady intent on ruining an innocent girl’s wish to go home. Decades later, Gregory Maguire gave her an origin story, introducing her as Elphaba in his 1995 novel Wicked. That, in turn, was adapted into a hit Broadway musical in 2003—one of the most lucrative and longest running. Now, Elphaba’s story is coming to the big screen with director Jon M. Chu’s two-part adaptation, starring Cynthia Erivo as Elphaba and Ariana Grande as her perkier counterpart Glinda. The first installment arrives…

Taking care of your cognitive health ought to be—well, a no-brainer. According to a survey published in March, 87% of Americans are concerned about age-related memory loss and a decline in brain function as they grow older, yet only 32% believe they can take action to help control that trajectory. “All of us want to be cognitively intact for as long as possible,” says Dr. Seemant Chaturvedi, a neurologist and stroke specialist at the University of Maryland Medical Center. The good news, he adds, is that “there are definitely risk factors that can be modified.” Changing our lifestyle habits can go a long way: drinking excessive amounts of alcohol, for example, can damage the parts of the brain involved in important functions like memory, decisionmaking, impulse control, and attention.…

When Americans cast their ballots for the next President, they also faced other questions. The entire U.S. House and a third of the U.S. Senate were up for election, plus state and local offices. In addition, voters in many places were asked to make law by voting up or down on referendums. Here’s a look at the results, as of the morning of Nov. 10. ABORTION ON THE BALLOT This election saw the highest number of statewide abortion-related ballot measures in a single year. Voters in seven states—Arizona, Colorado, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, and New York—moved to protect reproductive rights by passing ballot initiatives. But similar measures in three other states (Florida, Nebraska, and South Dakota) failed, in a blow to abortion-rights supporters. And the country ultimately re-elected the man…

Amy Bowers Cordalis FOUNDER AND EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR / RIDGES TO RIFFLES INDIGENOUS CONSERVATION GROUP Amy Bowers Cordalis is an attorney, a mother, a conservationist, and a member of the Yurok Tribe of California who grew up fishing on the Klamath River. Bowers Cordalis served as her tribe’s general legal counsel in its charge to dismantle four hydroelectric dams that were choking the river and the Indigenous people who depend on it. She helped negotiate with the dams’ owner, PacifiCorp, to seal the $550 million deal to demolish the dams and let the river heal. The dam-removal project, the largest of its kind in history, was completed in August. Bowers Cordalis’ Indigenous conservation group, Ridges to Riffles, is now working with the Yurok Tribe to restore the waterway’s once thriving fish…

Melanie Nakagawa CSO / MICROSOFT Melanie Nakagawa has built her career around championing sustainability: from working as an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, to advising Secretary John Kerry on climate change as a foreign policy priority, to helping the U.S. rejoin the Paris Agreement. Now, as chief sustainability officer at Microsoft, a role she took up in January 2023, she oversees Microsoft’s clean-energy expansion. In May, the company inked an estimated $10 billion deal to help develop 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable-energy capacity around the world—enough to power 1.8 million homes. With that price tag, it’s estimated to be the world’s largest such corporate commitment to clean-energy expansion. The company is also using more energy. Its AI pivot drove Microsoft’s annual emissions to rise 30% since 2020. To…

As a curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Eleanor Nairne is very particular about how an artwork should be placed. “I always say that you have to ask the work if it’s sat comfortably,” she says. “The work will tell you if it is or not.” So it is that on a Tuesday in October, when the museum is closed, Nairne is having one of her most stressful workdays ever, supervising the placement of 288 delicate, diaphanous metal forms not on a wall but hanging from a 41-ft. ceiling with the aid of four rented scissor lifts, a team of installers, layout instructions in the form of a floor plan and a 3D rendering, and a lot of filigree thread. Complicating things is that the artist is not…

The number of people living in urban areas has tripled in the past 50 years, meaning that when a major natural disaster like an earthquake strikes a city, more lives are in danger. Meanwhile, the strength and frequency of extreme weather events has increased—a trend set to continue as the climate warms. That is spurring efforts around the world to develop a new generation of earthquake-monitoring and climate-forecasting systems to make detecting and responding to disasters quicker, cheaper, and more accurate than ever. On Nov. 6, at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center​ in Spain, the Global Initiative on Resilience to Natural Hazards Through AI Solutions met for the first time. The new U.N. initiative aims to guide governments, organizations, and communities in using AI for disaster management. The initiative builds on…

Imagine that you are going to be reincarnated as a domesticated animal, and you can choose whether to be reincarnated in the U.S. or in Spain. Which country would you pick? My hunch is that many of you will think that if you choose Spain, there’s a chance you might be a bull raised to die in a bullfight, and so it is better to pick the U.S. and avoid such a fate. But that would be an unwise assumption. The cruel and bloody ritual of bullfighting does mean that each year an estimated 35,000 bulls die a horrendous death. But, overall, animals in Spain have better lives than those in the U.S. Take, for instance, the matter of egg-laying hens. Around 230 million of them in the U.S.—almost…

The trial of Dominique Pelicot, the man in the South of France who pleaded guilty in September to charges of secretly drugging his wife of 50 years, Gisèle, and, over the course of about a decade, filming dozens of men as they had sex with her while she was sedated, would have been disturbing enough just as the story of an epically vile husband. But perhaps there are even more puzzling and horrifying questions about the other men. Who were they? How could they? How can there be so many men willing to rape an unconscious woman? Over the past five weeks of the trial, which began on Sept. 2 in Avignon, the five judges—and aghast onlookers from around the world—have had the chance to hear from several of…

Merle Bombardieri learned she was a micro-celebrity in 2020, when she happened to Google her own name. Her search led her to a Reddit group of “fence sitters”—people who aren’t sure whether they want to have children—where she is a very big deal. Post after post mentions her book The Baby Decision: How to Make the Most Important Choice of Your Life and its power to help people get off the fence, one way or the other. “It’s a sort of bible,” says Christy Starr, a 36-year-old member of the Reddit community who lives in Wisconsin. Bombardieri, a 75-year-old therapist who also coaches people about whether they should have kids, was tickled by her VIP status among a group of people young enough to be her children or even grandchildren.…

Dickon Mitchell PRIME MINISTER / GRENADA Dickon Mitchell, the Prime Minister of Grenada since 2022, knows all too well the devastation a natural disaster can visit upon a small island nation like his. He also understands why climate resiliency is so urgent for countries facing financial and structural ruin. This July, when Hurricane Beryl made landfall on the Grenadian islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique as a Category 4 tropical cyclone, the destruction was immense: roofs torn from homes, boats scattered across the land, public water supplies and health infrastructure decimated. Three people were killed. Because of the scale of that wreckage, the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility (CCRIF) made a record $44 million payment to Grenada to help it rebuild—and that allowed Mitchell to activate a first-of-its-kind debt clause…

In 1972, at the bloody height of the Troubles, home invaders abducted a widowed mother of 10 named Jean McConville from her Belfast apartment. Her children never saw her alive again. The family spent decades demanding answers from the Irish Republican Army, which was known to have “disappeared” fellow Catholics at the time, as to what had become of McConville and why—a quest that propels Patrick Radden Keefe’s acclaimed 2018 book, Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. Now the best seller has been adapted into an exceptional nine-episode FX miniseries, also titled Say Nothing, that resonates not only as a gripping true-crime drama, but also as an urgently timely work of political art. While the mystery of McConville’s disappearance gives the narrative shape,…