Table of contents for February 24, 2025 in TIME Magazine

The fast-rising Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is sparking U.S. national-security concerns, over fears that its AI models (like R1) could be used by the Chinese government to spy on American civilians, learn proprietary secrets, and wage influence campaigns. Congress, the U.S. Navy, and NASA all banned internal use of DeepSeek’s models. The Senate is considering a bill similar to the TikTok ban that would restrict access to Chinese-created AI. One major concern centers on users’ data. DeepSeek’s privacy policy states that it collects IP addresses, keystroke patterns, and other data from users, and stores personal information on Chinese servers. Generative AI tools are often used in personal or high-stakes tasks: to seek health advice, manage finances, or help with company strategies. That kind of data may now be stored…

The flu is always a nasty foe—and it’s particularly vicious this year. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there have been at least 12 million flu infections since the fall in the U.S., leading to 160,000 hospitalizations and 6,600 deaths. Most of these are influenza A, a strain that causes more serious illness than influenza B. “If you’re getting flulike symptoms and you’re like, ‘This feels worse than before,’ you’re not wrong,” says Dr. Mahesh Polavarapu, medical director of emergency medicine at NewYork–Presbyterian Westchester. “It’s pretty harsh this year.” Fortunately, there are ways to alleviate at least some of the misery of the flu (besides, of course, getting your annual flu shot before you get sick). Doctors often prescribe Tamiflu, an antiviral that can treat…

Dr. Frank Frizelle has operated on countless patients in his career as a colorectal surgeon. But there’s one case that stayed with him. In 2014, he was treating a woman in her late 20s suffering from bowel cancer—already a rare situation, given her age. But it became even more unusual when her best friend visited her in the hospital and told Frizelle that she had many of the same symptoms as his patient. Subsequent testing revealed that his patient’s friend had a lesion that, had it not been caught early, likely would have become cancerous. “That really brought it home to me—how it’s much more common than you think,” says Frizelle, a professor of surgery at the University of Otago in New Zealand. Still, like any good scientist, Frizelle was…

PERCIVAL EVERETT AUTHOR BY ELIANA DOCKTERMAN Percival Everett claims he is not as brilliant as his fans know him to be. He deeply researches the worlds in which his novels are set, yet swears that everything he learns falls out of his head as soon as each book is published. “So I’m no smarter at the end than I was at the beginning,” he says. Years ago, sick of his students asking him if they were good enough to be published, he took a class to a bookstore to prove he was not unique. “Look around,” he told them. “Anyone can be published. ‘Are you good enough to make a difference?’ is the question.” With his latest, James, a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the…

1970s GARRETT MORRIS At SNL from 1975–1980 I had been in show business for about 17 years before Saturday Night Live came along. I was an actor on and off Broadway. I wrote a couple plays, and I did a lot of musicals. SNL was my first television job—a job paying me more than I had ever been paid before, and I was finally paying my rent. I’m an introvert, so I would usually just do the show and go back to my apartment. This was a mistake, because what you’re supposed to do is go to the bar, hang out with the group, and develop relationships. There were some drugs—I was a cocaine fiend, but a teetotaler when it came to alcohol. But back on set, being the…

The standoff at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue was not much of a spectacle. On the first day of February, a handful of men working for Elon Musk had come to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a few blocks from the White House, demanding full access to its headquarters. The agency’s staff refused. No guns were drawn. No punches thrown. Nobody involved the police. But in these early days of the Trump Administration, perhaps no other scene revealed more clearly the forces reshaping America’s government. On one side stood an institution with a 64-year history, a $35 billion budget, and a mission enshrined in federal law. On the other stood Musk’s political wrecking crew. They identified themselves as members of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a collection of temporary…

WON Album of the Year Beyoncé’s moment—finally BY TAYLOR CRUMPTON When Beyoncé won the Album of the Year award for Cowboy Carter at the Grammy Awards on Feb. 2, she became the first Black woman to win the award this century—and the fourth ever. All I can say is: Finally. And what a win it was. It’s one thing to win the night’s most prestigious award. It’s another to win for an album that weaves the singer’s personal story of growing up as a Black girl in Texas with the expansive history of Black country music: from honoring Linda Martell, country music’s first Black woman superstar, to helping propel the careers of modern-day Black country singers, to paying homage to the entertainers who toured the Chitlin’ Circuit. Beyoncé’s win,…

Long before he started watching TV, people started giving my son stuff decorated with cute cartoon puppies dressed in distinctive outfits. There was a Dalmatian dressed as a fireman. A bulldog construction worker. A German shepherd police officer. I could not figure out why these brightly colored dogs seemed to be on roughly half the gear in our house, from shirts and hats to umbrellas and fire trucks. What I learned was that the puppies were characters in a TV show called Paw Patrol, which is about the adventures of a 10-year-old boy named Ryder and a crew of puppies who help people. The show is a children’s-entertainment juggernaut. Paw Patrol, which airs on Nickelodeon and is available to stream on YouTube, Paramount+, and other platforms, has been the third…

JOTAKA EADDY FOUNDER, WIN WITH BLACK WOMEN BY BRIAN BENNETT When Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race in July and endorsed Kamala Harris for President, Jotaka Eaddy was at her childhood home down a dirt road in Johnsonville, S.C., getting ready to host her regular online gathering of Black women leaders. The weekly Sunday video conference quickly ballooned from its usual several hundred attendees to more than 90,000, and the network’s hashtag #WinWithBlackWomen radiated across the Internet, sparking nearly 200 more groups to form under monikers like Cat Ladies for Kamala, Train Lovers for Harris, and Swifties for Kamala. The call raised $1.6 million in 100 minutes for Harris’ campaign. Two months later, as Eaddy sat in the front row at a campaign event hosted by Oprah…

Inflation-weary Americans chose Donald J. Trump for President in part because they were sick of seeing prices continue to rise. Now, experts say, prices for homes, cars, fuel, and food may end up jumping again, this time because of the tariffs Trump announced Feb. 1 on Mexico, Canada, and China. On Feb. 3 both Mexico and Canada struck deals to delay their tariffs by 30 days, but a 10% tariff on Chinese imports went into effect Feb. 4. Here are some of the products that could be most affected. AUTOS Car parts move across borders many times during manufacturing, which means tariffs will add up, says Michael Hicks, a professor at Ball State University in Indiana. He estimates that this set of tariffs could increase the price of a…

Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s political fortunes are far brighter than any other G-7 leader’s. Her Brothers of Italy Party is polling at 30% support—high in a multiparty system—and neither her coalition partners nor the opposition are in a position to challenge her. While incumbents across much of the world keep getting the boot and other European leaders are struggling—with French President Emmanuel Macron weakened and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on his way out this month—Meloni’s leadership remains undisputed. Against this backdrop, Donald Trump’s return to the White House presents both a challenge and an opportunity for Meloni. The U.S. President has threatened to levy massive tariffs on the E.U., reconsider the U.S. commitment to NATO and the transatlantic alliance, and force an unfavorable cease-fire deal on Ukraine. His…

COLMAN DOMINGO THE OSCAR-NOMINATED ACTOR LEADS WITH RADICAL LOVE BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK If you can’t spend an hour or two with Colman Domingo in real life, you can still find the key to his spirit in a photograph from Easter 1976. There’s Colman at age 6, a pint-size gent perched between his older sister and brother, wearing a candy-striped blazer so groovy you wouldn’t be surprised to see it on Sammy Davis Jr. at a Cocoanut Grove show. He brought this picture along when he appeared on The View in November, and after the show’s hosts had finished cooing, he provided the backstory: The navy pants he’s wearing had a matching jacket, but it was too small. He grabbed the striped one instead, though his mother said it didn’t…

TARA DUNCAN PRESIDENT, ONYX COLLECTIVE BY REBECCA SCHNEID Entertainment executive Tara Duncan does not struggle with impostor syndrome. This, she says, is because her work is not about following a designated path of success, but rather about creating new ones. “I’ve had the benefit of being at places during major transitions or truly building from scratch,” says Duncan, 43. “And so in those times, no one really knows what they are doing. The name of the game, and the goal, is to experiment, to try things and be iterative.” In 2014, Duncan started work at Netflix as one of its first creative executives, overseeing production of shows like Orange Is the New Black and Narcos, both of which helped make streaming what it is today. In 2020, she joined…

The new series, out Feb. 27, is about a family running an NBA team, with Kate Hudson playing a version of real-life Lakers president Jeanie Buss. Where did that idea come from? It was actually Jeanie who reached out because she liked The Mindy Project and The Office. So many people have written about her or made shows where she’s a tertiary character. She was like, “I run this. I want to be a producer on a show about my own life.” Did Buss put any guardrails on her life story? She is so open. We consult her for real-life details all the time. There have been very specific players or very specific people in her personal life where she’ll say, “Maybe we won’t touch upon that,” but she says…