Table of contents for December 9, 2024 in TIME Magazine

TIME hosted two events in Baku, Azerbaijan, during the U.N. COP29 climate summit. Above, a Nov. 13 TIME100 Impact Dinner on leadership—presented by Fortescue and MOL—featured, from left, Eileen O’Connor, Hafsat Abiola, Jacqueline Novogratz, Karen Fang, TIME’s chief climate officer Shyla Raghav, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, and Aimée Christensen. At right, TIME senior correspondent Justin Worland moderated a talk on the intersection of business and climate sponsored by Mastercard, featuring Anila Gopal, Aadith Moorthy, Abiola, and Ellen Jackowski. LISTEN UP With the movie musical Moana 2 hitting theaters on Nov. 27, visit TIME.com for our ranking of the 50 best original Disney songs ever. The list includes hits from Disney classics, like Dumbo’s “Baby Mine” (1941), and more contemporary films, like Frozen’s “Let It Go” (2013). See the full list…

H5N1 avian influenza, more commonly known as bird flu, has infected more than 100 million birds in the U.S. and almost 500 dairy-cattle herds across 15 states. The virus has popped up in mammals including elephant seals, goats, foxes, and house cats. But despite its prolific spread among animals, federal health authorities maintain that the risk to the U.S. public remains low. There have been only 46 confirmed human cases in the U.S. during the current outbreak. All but one of those people had a known exposure to affected poultry or cattle, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and all of their illnesses were mild. The CDC says there is no proof that the virus is spreading from person to person at this time.…

When Kari Leibowitz moved to the Arctic in 2014, she braced herself for the impact of long, dark, cold winters. The temperature in Tromso, Norway, hovers around 20°F for eight months of the year, during which time it snows daily. Surely the wind would slap her face and unshoveled snow would sneak down her boots, wetting her socks. But she expected an emotional impact too, akin to plunging headfirst into a deep pool of the winter blues. Most distressing, she assumed, would be the polar night: a two-month stretch during which the sun doesn’t rise above the horizon. Leibowitz, a health psychologist, made the Arctic her home in order to study at the world’s northernmost university. At first, she planned to dive into what was driving a surprising lack…

As a dating coach and the Director of Relationship science at Hinge, I often hear from people who feel like there’s something big they need to disclose on early dates—chronic illness, mental-health struggles, college debt, family estrangement, lack of romantic experience, or trauma. They worry these parts of their lives make them undatable. They don’t know how to share this information, and worry they’ll be rejected. They tense up on dates, waiting for the inevitable moment when the awkward topic will arise. Or they avoid dates altogether. But it doesn’t have to be this way. Because your vulnerability, when shared intentionally and authentically, can make you feel powerful, not powerless. Research shows that we’re attracted to vulnerability because of what psychologists call the “beautiful mess effect”—a phenomenon in which…

In the digital age, a name is more than just a label. It’s tied to our professional history and social media presence. It’s also how we are recognized by AI algorithms. Many traditions dictate that a woman change her surname upon marriage—but when she does so, she often loses data continuity across systems that rely heavily on name recognition. Platforms like job applications, academic records, and social media accounts often fail to connect the dots between the old and new names. For instance, a woman who has built a successful career under her maiden name might find that AI systems struggle to link her past achievements with her new surname. Years of hard work and success may suddenly become invisible in the eyes of a machine. The Female Quotient…

RELEASED New guidance for teens and screens A novel approach Screens are part of modern teenage life—but there are almost no guardrails around what they see. While online videos can educate and connect young people, some content harms their emotional and psychological development. Now, for the first time, experts from the American Psychological Association (APA) on Nov. 20 issued guidance for how parents, educators, platforms, and policymakers can ensure that videos have more positive than negative effects on teen health. “We are not doing enough, in my opinion, to prepare kids for how to live in the digital environment,” says Mitch Prinstein, the APA’s chief science officer. In addition to limiting screen time, parents are recommended to learn what their kids are watching—then guide them toward educational and potentially…

On Sept. 5, 1972, a 32-year-old producer named Geoffrey S. Mason was working in a control room for ABC Sports in Munich while 12 hostages, including several members of the Israeli Olympic delegation, were being held in a building nearby. As Mason’s team was in the midst of covering the breaking news—having pivoted from their regularly scheduled athletic programming—the doors suddenly burst open and Mason found himself staring through the cigarette haze at German police machine guns pointed straight at his face. The Germans were upset that one of the network’s cameras was showing that German sharpshooters had taken positions on the roof above the hostages, threatening to thwart a rescue effort. The camera was quickly turned off, but Mason’s indelible memory of that confrontation lives on, not only in…

You don’t have to love opera to love Maria Callas. Her voice reflected all the colors of paradise, before Adam and Eve were kicked out. Her beauty was halfway between mythical and mischievous, as if she’d been drawn by the gods’ caricaturist-in-chief. No wonder Pablo Larraín wanted to add her to his gallery of troubled ladies, which includes Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2016’s Jackie) and Princess Diana (2021’s Spencer). In Maria, Angelina Jolie plays La Diva Callas in her final days, in 1977 Paris. Like a gothic ghost, she glides through her gilt-and-brocade apartment in fairy-tale dressing gowns, eating nothing but popping sedatives. Jolie’s Maria mourns the presence she used to be. Every gesture Jolie makes is tragic and quivering, rendering the great artist’s final days with a self-conscious sheen…

Thanksgiving is a time for celebration with our families and communities—but for the millions of Americans who are living with hunger, it can be an intensely difficult reminder of their daily challenges. We may be as divided as ever, but we can agree that no one deserves to be hungry. And there’s no better time than the holidays for us to commit to working together to end the food-insecurity epidemic. Many intelligent, well-meaning people have succumbed to the idea that “you’re either with us or against us.” It has become possible to forget how much we have in common. But no ideology has a monopoly on values. This year, when our politics have served to divide us intensely, we must find a way to unite with a common purpose:…

Hang on a minute. Whom did we just elect? The Republican ticket had two names at the top: Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. But parts of this delirious November created the impression that someone else has taken hold of our collective destiny. We already knew him in various roles—the guy who bought Twitter and fired more than half its staff, the inventor who brought the space program back to life, the carmaker whose new trucks make kids stop and stare on the sidewalk. All of a sudden, Elon Musk had moved into the realm of politics, headlining rallies, steering government appointments, shaping the agenda for the next President of the United States. For more than three years he’s been one of the world’s richest and most powerful men. Markets…

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Very rarely does the right movie arrive at precisely the right time, at a moment when compassion is in short supply and the collective human imagination has come to feel shrunken and desiccated. Jacques Audiard’s operatic musical Emilia Pérez is the story of a disillusioned lawyer working in Mexico, Zoe Saldaña’s Rita, who gets a mysterious phone call and is whisked, blindfolded, to a secret location. There, the gruff leader of a drug cartel, Juan “Manitas” Del Monte, outlines a delicate but lucrative mission. Manitas wants to transition to living as a woman and wants Rita to arrange the surgery and subsequent disappearance. Rita pulls it off: In a few years, Manitas re-emerges as the person she always knew she needed to be. She is now Emilia Pérez (Karla Sofía…

Muncie Daniels is just trying to make his voice heard over the cacophony that passes for public discourse. An ambitious CNN commentator, the protagonist of the conspiracy thriller series The Madness (now streaming on Netflix) has been neglecting his personal life and losing sight of his progressive values. But his careerism can’t prevent Muncie, played by the versatile Emmy winner Colman Domingo, from getting dragged into a war between the far right and the radical left, edgelord billionaires and misfits living communally at society’s fringes. In fact, that war threatens to annihilate everything he’s achieved. It’s a timely premise, following an election that empowered one extreme, alienated the other, and left us with an even more chaotic public square than we had before. Creator Stephen Belber (Tommy) and his…