Tabla de contenidos para May 13, 2024 en TIME Magazine

TikTok’s 170 million users in the U.S. face losing access to the ubiquitous social media app after President Biden signed into law a bill on April 24 compelling the app’s Chinese parent company ByteDance to either sell it by January 2025 or face a nationwide ban. FORCED SALE Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have increasingly voiced concerns that the video platform is being used as a tool for Chinese propaganda and the surveillance of American users. (ByteDance has denied any ties with the Chinese government.) The House of Representatives has been trying to force ByteDance to sell TikTok for months. In April, it forged an unusual path forward by attaching a TikTok bill to a foreign policy package that included aid for Ukraine and Israel. That measure…

At the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, Calif., maybe the most prestigious nonmajor tournament on the global tennis tour, players conduct their warm-up routines on a patch of grass outside the stadium. Some toss medicine balls to their trainers, while others stretch with elastic bands. A few pedal lightly on upright bikes. One player throws a Frisbee. Then Coco Gauff takes the field. Gauff, who in September became the first American teenager to win the U.S. Open in nearly a quarter-century, grabs a football, sends a guy downfield, and uncoils a tight, 40-yard spiral, right into the receiver’s chest. Then she does it again. And again. Gauff’s cannon is a flex. I see your toe-tapping a soccer ball and raise you a Patrick Mahomes bomb. Gauff, who grew up…

Bashar Murad CARE IN WAR Since the war between Israel and Hamas began in October 2023, Gaza’s health care system has been severely damaged by Israeli airstrikes. As of early March, according to the International Rescue Committee, medical supplies were running scarce and only a dozen of Gaza’s 36 hospitals remained even partially functional—at a time when demand for medical services is off the charts because of the continuing conflict. ‘Catastrophic.’ —Bashar Murad on the health situation in Gaza In a November interview with Al Jazeera, local physician Bashar Murad described the situation as “catastrophic.” But that hasn’t stopped him from doing whatever he can for the Palestinian people. Murad is the executive director of the Palestine Red Crescent Society—part of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement, a global…

Vivek Murthy DOCTOR OF HUMAN CONNECTION Last May, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued an advisory about the profound consequences of loneliness and isolation—a departure from the type of standard medical conditions his predecessors prioritized. While traveling the country, Murthy had heard from college students who felt as if no one truly knew them, and patients who didn’t have anyone to pick them up from the hospital. He came to see it as a systemic public-health crisis. In his advisory, he called on governments, community leaders, workplaces, and health systems to help rebuild social connection. ‘Our relationships are the most tangible and powerful way we can manifest generosity and love.’ —Vivek Murthy The loneliness crisis intersects with another public-health threat Murthy has drawn attention to: he also issued an advisory about…

There are more than 400,000 species of plants on earth, and at least half are suitable for human consumption—yet you’ll find only a small portion at the grocery store. That’s part of the reason why Sam Thayer loves foraging. He started collecting wild food from the woods when he was a kid, and he still has cravings for delicacies he can’t buy. “Last year I gathered about 30 gallons of serviceberries”—blueberry-like fruits that grow on trees and shrubs—“and I make fruit leather and eat it as a snack year-round,” says Thayer, a naturalist who lives in Wisconsin, writes field guides, and posts on TikTok as Well Fed Wild. “I have about eight pounds of wapatoo, which is a tuber, in my pantry, and I grind it up into hot…

Rare is the member of Congress who represents a district that voted for the other party’s nominee for President. Gerrymandering has rendered those political survivors harder to find than unicorns, while reducing truly competitive House districts to so few that they fit on a single whiteboard in strategists’ offices. But oddities draw intrigue and, with that, cash. Looking at the money flowing to those 22 lawmakers, a trend emerges that may indicate something important for 2024. In the first three months of this year, the official campaign committees for the five Democrats who represent districts that voted for Donald Trump in 2020 are outraising the 17 Republicans from Joe Biden–backing districts by more than 2 to 1. Every day of the past three months, these Democratic lawmakers raised, on…

Kyriakos Mitsotakis has a confession to make. “Sometimes I watch the footage from my speeches and I always look much taller than everyone else around,” the 6-ft. 1-in. Greek Prime Minister says with a wry smile, buckled up in the back seat of his car in a pressed blue shirt and black hoodie. “Just so you know, there’s a small platform that I climb up that you can’t see in the videos.” Mitsotakis is addressing his followers on TikTok, where his account so successfully showcases his softer side that it has even brought his team a national award. “We are very biased, but I honestly believe it’s the best TikTok of any politician in the world,” says Alex Patelis, his chief economic adviser. “I loved it,” echoes Mitsotakis, 56, after…

Michael J. Fox CHASING PARKINSON’S TREATMENTS It’s been a long time since there was good news about Parkinson’s disease, a neurodegenerative condition that affects more than 8 million people worldwide. But that changed this year, thanks in part to Michael J. Fox’s perseverance in raising awareness and pushing scientific boundaries in search of a treatment. More than two decades after he created the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, the charity-funded organization is seeing its thoughtfully chosen research efforts pay off. Last year, data from the foundation’s Parkinson’s Progression Markers Initiative (PPMI) helped scientists discover a biomarker for the disease that led to the first Parkinson’s test, which detects abnormal forms of a protein called alpha synuclein—even before symptoms appear. It is also funding ongoing studies of multiple promising…

Knocking on the front door, it’s already clear that this is one of those dreamy California artist houses, its rich green paint and big windows lighting up a quiet street. Inside there are flowers on the bathroom shelf, music lilting in the background. And the kitchen! A jar of fresh cilantro sprigs on the table. The sea green backsplash, warm wooden cabinets, and the dangling strands of a pothos over the sink. It’s an unfriendly, blustery early-spring day out there in Los Angeles, but everything in here is inviting, most of all its inhabitants: the author and food journalist Rachel Khong and a sweet brown cat she and her husband call Bunny. I was warned about this. A mutual friend told me about Khong’s cozy office, stacked high with…

You’ve been in the public eye since you founded your groundbreaking feminist punk band Bikini Kill, over 30 years ago. When did you decide to write your memoir? I started talking about it when I was maybe 40. Then I got sick with Lyme disease, and the time wasn’t right. When I got better, I was like, “I want to get back to that.” I was moving [from New York] to Pasadena to be closer to my mom, and I wanted to release the me who I used to be. I’m glad I waited till I was 50 because I think I had a better perspective. Now that you’ve finished it, do you feel like you’ve entered a new phase of life? I do. I feel like I’m finally grown…

The first former U.S. President to face a criminal trial and the judge overseeing it are both children of Queens. Donald Trump grew up in a faux Tudor house in Jamaica Estates, and Juan Merchan was raised a few miles down the Grand Central Parkway in Jackson Heights. Their lives diverged sharply from there, before colliding recently in Manhattan, where Trump is relentlessly testing the limits of Merchan’s authority in his own courtroom. Trump has called Merchan a “certified Trump hater” and has insisted he’s biased because his daughter has worked in marketing for Democratic campaigns. People who’ve watched Merchan for years paint a different picture. He is known for being soft-spoken, well prepared, and efficient. Merchan has a reputation for not letting his courtroom be dominated by wild antics.…

When Paris kicks off the Olympic Games on July 26, it will be with athletes floating on an armada of boats down the Seine River, rather than marching in a stadium as it has always been. That will be the first of many breaks with Olympic tradition. Keenly aware that previous Games left cities like Rio de Janeiro and Athens deep in debt from white-elephant stadiums and arenas, Paris officials instead are turning adored monuments into competition sites, with equestrian events in the chateau of Versailles, beach volleyball under the Eiffel Tower—and most notable, diving and swimming in a newly cleaned-up Seine River, from which bathing has been banned for a century because of pollution. Seven years after Paris won the Olympics bid, it’s ready to welcome about 15 million…

The African National Congress has led South Africa’s government since the end of apartheid in 1994. But as voters go to the polls on May 29, there’s good reason to wonder whether the ANC might be in real trouble. During the ANC’s most recent term in power, South Africa hasn’t become more prosperous or more secure. Its economy grew by a tepid 0.6% in 2023. Unemployment levels, a chronic problem, remain among the world’s highest (32%), particularly for young people (40%). The murder rate stands at a 20-year high. Political corruption makes daily headlines. Electricity blackouts and water shortages have become commonplace in parts of the country. Nor can the ANC count on past glories to turn out younger voters. More than half of South Africans are under age…

Now would be a good time to check in on your favorite Taylor Swift fan. After months of anticipation, the superstar delivered her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, on April 19—and Swifties everywhere lost their minds. From a neuroscience perspective, the response makes sense. Research suggests that music activates the brain’s reward system, triggering the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine. But what is it about Swift’s music, in particular, that resonates so deeply? We asked a few psychologists who moonlight as Swifties. She sings about things we all experience Swift spotlights universal themes like loss, a lust for revenge, and falling in and out of love, says Naomi Ekas, a developmental psychologist at Texas Christian University who teaches a class called Psychology (Taylor’s Version). Knowing that Swift feels…

Jens Juul Holst, Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dan Drucker PAVING THE WAY FOR WEIGHT-LOSS DRUGS Newly powerful weight-loss drugs became the biggest story in health in the past year—and Jens Juul Holst, Joel Habener, Svetlana Mojsov, and Dan Drucker played pivotal roles in making those medications possible. The scientists conducted the early work, beginning in the 1970s, on glucagon-like peptides, or GLPs, that first transformed the treatment of diabetes and now that of obesity. ‘If [GLP-1 drugs] show benefit for even half of these conditions, then that will be a tremendous win for people struggling with them.’ —Dan Drucker As with many groundbreaking medical developments, it was a group effort. Holst, at the University of Copenhagen, noticed that after intestinal surgery, patients’ levels of insulin soared while their blood-sugar levels…

Hadiza Galadanci A SIMPLE AID FOR MATERNAL MORTALITY In 2020, for every 100,000 Nigerian women who gave birth, about 1,000 did not survive, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Hadiza Galadanci, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Nigeria’s Bayero University, knows that problem all too well, and decided she would be the one to solve it. Over the past few years, Galadanci, who is also the director of the Africa Center of Excellence for Population Health and Policy, has worked with a network of collaborators in other countries to implement and study a simple yet effective system for preventing fatal postpartum hemorrhages, one of the leading causes of maternal mortality. ‘I get to facilities where [they’re using this system] and they’re telling me they haven’t seen any women…

In Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 love-on-the-rocks heartbreaker Blue Valentine, Ryan Gosling plays a husband and father, Dean, who appears to be nothing but an annoyance to his wife, Michelle Williams’ Cindy, a harried nurse. She hustles to get their young daughter out the door to school, even as Dean, relishing the role of the fun dad, turns breakfast into a game. “Let’s eat like leopards!” he suggests, dotting the kitchen table with raisins plucked from his daughter’s oatmeal bowl, which the two lap up with jungle-animal gusto. In a flashback we see a younger Dean who, in his job as a mover, has been charged with unpacking the belongings of a frail, elderly man who’s just been consigned to a nursing home. He removes plates, pictures, knickknacks from their wrapping…