Table of contents for May 26, 2025 in TIME Magazine

His second time through, Trump can still shock Thirty minutes into our interview with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on April 22, an aide opened the door to tell the President that India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi was on the line. She gave Trump a typed note, and he picked up the phone on his desk. Hold music could be heard. Earlier in the day, gunmen had killed 26 people at a resort town in Kashmir, and Trump told us to keep our seats while he offered condolences to his fellow world leader. At one point he mouthed the word terrorism to us as an explanation for the call. At another moment during the call he waved at the back wall of the Oval Office, as if…

The new Pope is an American. Do not, for a minute, think he wants to Make America Great Again. When Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost became leader to the world’s 1.4 billion Catholics and took the name Leo XIV, the former missionary stepped into a slot that left him as an ideological check on a certain breed of American-styled Catholicism, which in recent years has been ascendant in Washington as it has drifted into more conservative lanes than its global brethren. With Vice President J.D. Vance and six of the nine Supreme Court Justices as part of his flock, Leo XIV becomes the most powerful Catholic both in the world and among Americans. And Leo XIV, known in Rome as The Latin Yankee, clearly represents a rejection by the Vatican…

TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS GLOBAL-HEALTH ARCHITECT As Director-General of the World Health Organization (WHO), navigating uncertainty is part of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’ job. Health threats don’t give warnings, and the viruses and pathogens responsible for them aren’t always predictable. But even he was surprised by President Donald Trump’s Executive Order on Jan. 20, Trump’s first day in office, announcing the U.S. was immediately withdrawing from the WHO and would cease communication with the organization. Most importantly, it would send no further funds, including what it owed for the 2024–2025 period. Ghebreyesus was in Tanzania at the time, helping officials there manage an outbreak of Marburg virus (kin to Ebola) that killed the handful who were infected. While Trump had also attempted to withdraw from the WHO during his first term,…

RESHMA KEWALRAMANI LANDMARK DRUG DEVELOPMENT ‘We only go after diseases where we understand the causal human biology.’ Dr. Reshma Kewalramani says she was destined to love science and medicine, raised by parents who always dreamed she would become a doctor and who immigrated to the U.S. from India to ensure she could. Fortunately for her, she loved the discipline and curiosity that are prerequisites for being a good scientist, and quickly found her calling in drug development. In the past year and a half, as CEO of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Kewalramani oversaw the approval of a string of breakthrough drugs. In January, the FDA approved the first nonopioid pain reliever in 30 years, Journavx, which targets a pathway specific to pain neurons in tissues located throughout the body but not…

A decade ago, before Celine Song scored two Oscar nominations for her debut film, Past Lives, she was a struggling playwright searching for odd jobs to make ends meet. She didn’t have the latte-art skills to be a barista and couldn’t land a steady babysitting gig without prior experience. But with a tip from a friend already in the industry, she secured a role as a matchmaker in Manhattan. A naive creature might assume Song’s meetings with clients seeking their soulmates involved conversations about hobbies, work-life balance, or procreation. In fact, the initial consultation was far more mathematical: they listed their requirements for height, income, age, and, yes, race. “All of the men would say ‘fit.’ What they meant was 20 BMI, just one level above underweight,” Song remembers.…

You hosted the Golden Globes this year. What was the energy like in the room? When I first walked out, the energy was like, “We don’t know what she’s going to do. We’ve seen her do the Tom Brady roast.” So, in retrospect, I look back on how terrified they all are because they were like, “She’s going to be just as mean as she was to Tom Brady.” I heard from a lot of them afterward that they were really scared. I wish I had known that because I would have done something to defuse that. Next time is going to be a lot more fun, because they know the tone I’m going to have. I’m not going to embarrass you, and if you laugh, I’m only going…

President Donald Trump emerges through a pair of handsome wooden doors on the third floor of the White House. On his way down the wide, carpeted staircase, he passes portraits of his predecessors. Nixon is opposite the landing outside the residence. Two flights down, he has swapped the placement of Clinton and Lincoln, moving a massive painting of the latter into the main entrance hall of the mansion. “Lincoln is Lincoln, in all fairness,” he explains. “And I gave Clinton a good space.” But it’s the portrait around the corner that Trump wants to show off. It’s a giant painting of a photograph—that photograph, the famous image of Trump, fist raised, blood trickling down his face, after the attempt on his life last July at a rally in Butler,…

EMMANUELLE SOUBEYRAN TRACKING BIRD FLU Each year, pathogens passed between animals and humans cause more than 1 billion illnesses and millions of deaths globally Each year, pathogens passed between animals and humans cause more than 1 billion illnesses and millions of deaths globally. Last year Emmanuelle Soubeyran took the helm at the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) as one such pathogen was making headlines the world over. H5N1, otherwise known as bird flu, has sickened millions of birds, dozens of species of mammals, and dozens of people around the world, while threatening global food supplies. Under Soubeyran’s leadership, WOAH has played a key role in monitoring the spread and evolution of the avian flu virus in the intergovernmental organization’s 183 member states. In January, WOAH announced that U.S.…

ANDREA CERCEK MOBILIZING THE IMMUNE SYSTEM ‘The bottom line is everyone showed benefit.’ The latest efforts in cancer therapy harness the body’s immune system but have generally been used together with traditional strategies like surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation. Until now. Dr. Andrea Cercek, section head of colorectal cancer at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, is pioneering a new therapy using immunotherapy drugs alone to help patients with certain types of cancer avoid surgery. Last year, she announced stunning results from a small study of people with a specific rectal cancer; after six months of infusions of dostarlimab, a drug that allows immune cells to target cancer cells, none of the patients showed detectable tumors. In 2025, Cercek expanded to patients with other cancers—in the esophagus, colon, stomach, urothelial tissue,…

Addressing an ecstatic crowd gathered in St. Peter’s Square as the newly annointed leader of the Roman Catholic Church, American Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost used the world’s most famous pulpit to promote a vision that, of late, has been more wish than reality. “To all people, wherever they are, to all the people of the earth, may peace be with you,” he said, in fluent Italian. As Pope Leo XIV, he is now tasked with delivering it. Prevost’s appearance on the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica was the culmination of a centuries-old election ritual in which selected Cardinals, sworn to secrecy, gathered behind the closed doors of the Sistine Chapel to pick the man best suited to lead the church through a period of immense change. He succeeds Pope…

Ukraine agreed to hand over half of its future oil, gas, and mineral wealth to the U.S. in a landmark deal signed April 30. While the agreement does not offer Ukraine the explicit security guarantees it had long sought, it does, in effect, give President Donald Trump and his allies a tangible, economic rationale for maintaining U.S. aid. The terms, which include Ukraine’s paying for U.S. military assistance from a new resources fund, dissolved weeks of tension between the inner circles of Trump and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky, after a heated Oval Office exchange in February. OPTIMISM Zelensky’s leadership team was buoyant about the deal. “This is probably as close as we’re going to get to security guarantees with this Administration,” a foreign policy adviser to Zelensky who was…

DAMAR HAMLIN A POWERFUL VOICE FOR CARDIAC CARE ‘Every year, 23,000 kids experience cardiac arrest … Every one of them deserves the same access to lifesaving care that I had.’ After Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered cardiac arrest during an NFL game in early 2023—his life hanging in the balance before millions of horrified television viewers, until emergency responders saved him—he resolved not only to play football again, but also to make a name in public health. Within months of his recovery, he traveled to Washington, D.C., to lobby on behalf of the Access to AEDs Act, which ensured government funds to supply elementary and secondary schools with automated external defibrillators. He also fought for the Cardiomyopathy Health Education, Awareness, Research and Training in Schools Act, which was…

Taylor Jenkins Reid is leaning against a railing outside Los Angeles’ famed Griffith Observatory. We’ve picked this place to talk about her ninth book, Atmosphere, a space thriller and love story set at NASA in the 1980s, but as the iconic Hollywood sign shines in the hills behind her, the scene feels almost too on the nose. Reid, despite her ability to blend in with the tourists around her, is not just any author. She is one of the most successful novelists working today, her books not only beloved by readers but also hot commodities in the film and TV industry. Atmosphere, out June 3, is poised to be one of the biggest books of the summer, if not the year, with a movie adaptation already planned. So it…