Table of contents for October 28, 2024 in TIME Magazine

South Africa has had a hard time of it lately. Economic growth has remained anemic for years. Youth unemployment is sky high. The state-run electricity utility is failing. Road, rail, water, and port infrastructure are in disrepair, and the country has failed to attract enough skilled workers or foreign capital to help turn things around. Voters have no one to blame but the ruling African National Congress, Nelson Mandela’s party, which has dominated the country’s politics since the end of apartheid three decades ago. In 2019, voters punished the ANC, and its election vote share slipped below 58%. Vowing a better performance for South Africa’s long-suffering people, President Cyril Ramaphosa saw his government slide further into dysfunction. Then, on May 29 of this year, an earthquake shook the country’s…

The 2024 TIME100 Next gala celebrated emerging leaders from all over the world on Oct. 9 at Manhattan’s Pier 59. The annual list recognizes those to watch in health, climate, business, sports, entertainment, and more. After walking the red carpet, honorees hit the TIME Portrait Studio, presented by Toyota, to be photographed by Annie Noelker. Top, from left: activist Plaifah Kyoka Shodladd, actor Cole Escola, and actor Anna Sawai. Bottom, from left: singer Reneé Rapp, singer Victoria Monét, and Maryland Governor Wes Moore. At right, pop star Sabrina Carpenter, who performed her hits “Please Please Please” and “Espresso.” See the full list of honorees at time.com/next Fragile beauty Enzo Barracco, a former fashion photographer who is an ambassador for the Prada Group’s Sea Beyond project, has turned his lens…

Claudia Sheinbaum was sworn in as Mexico’s first-ever female President and the first Jewish leader in the nation’s more than 200 years of independence on Oct. 1. HISTORIC MOMENT The 62-year-old former mayor of Mexico City took the oath of office during a ceremony at the Legislative Palace of San Lázaro in the capital city, with U.S. First Lady Jill Biden and the leaders of more than a dozen mostly Caribbean and Latin American countries in attendance. Shortly after taking the oath, Sheinbaum outlined her priorities in a speech at the National Palace. “It is a time of transformation, a time for women,” she said. Sheinbaum recognized “our sisters who from their history managed to move forward and emancipate themselves … and our granddaughters, who dreamed of the possibility…

North Carolina’s western mountains were once seen as a climate haven—safely inland and elevated—but that idea washed away on Sept. 27 with the rains of Hurricane Helene. A few days later, photographer Jack Sorokin returned to Marshall (pop. 800), where his mother still lives. The town is an artists’ enclave, built along the French Broad River. “The contrast between just a half mile away, where life seemed normal, and downtown, where it looked like the entire town had been ripped apart, was staggering.” —JEFFREY KLUGER For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACK FLAME SOROKIN…

Hurricane Helene was a significant human tragedy, with more than 200 deaths reported as of Oct. 9 and thousands more left homeless; Hurricane Milton, close on its heels, brought more devastation. The damage in dollars from those storms is still being tallied, but on an annual basis, the cost from climate-related extreme-weather events easily reaches the tens of billions. Despite the magnitude of these numbers, it’s easy to let them go in one ear and out of the other. After all, historically a mix of government institutions and insurance companies have absorbed the cost of a few of these disasters every year, paying out to rebuild. But past results are not necessarily indicative of future outcomes. As the number of billion-dollar disasters rises as a result of climate change,…

IRELAND NICOLA COUGHLAN Galway girl who bet on herself and won BY OLIVIA-ANNE CLEARY There was a moment during the Bridgerton press tour earlier this year when Nicola Coughlan forgot where she was. Looking at the food on the plate in front of her, she thought she might be in Italy. She was, in fact, in an Italian restaurant in Brazil. The global tour, during which she visited seven countries over six months, had started to take its toll. The journey marked the end of the Netflix phenomenon’s third season, in which the actor took center stage as Penelope Featherington. Coughlan’s season would go on to become the sixth most watched season of TV in Netflix’s history, beating out The Night Agent and installments of Stranger Things. When we…

Autumn may be the most atmospheric season, tantalizing the senses with soft sweaters and warm beverages and the crunch of colorful leaves underfoot. But, as we suddenly remember once Sept. 30 gives way to Oct. 1, it isn’t all flannel-swaddled, pumpkin-spice ASMR. This is a time charged with the contradictions inherent in the end of the calendar—cozy and eerie, Thanksgiving and Halloween, harvest and decay. The entertainment industry offers up its own autumnal cornucopia of contrasts. Sandwiched between chummy fall baking competitions and the anodyne made-for-TV Christmas movies that arrive earlier each year is a dollop of bloody, gory, nightmare-inducing horror on screens big and small. Falling somewhere between the two is a third spooky-season sensibility—one epitomized this year by the reunion of Tim Burton, Winona Ryder, and Michael Keaton…

For months after Oct. 7, 2023, the world was newly focused on Palestinians’ aspiration to a nation of their own, the nub of their long conflict with Israel. In the U.S., public sympathy toward Palestinians had already been growing over Israel’s decades-long military occupation of the Palestinian territories. That feeling climbed as the Gaza death toll grew to more than 41,000. Now, a year since Hamas perpetrated the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust, massacring 1,200 people and kidnapping 251, the world’s attention is back on Israel’s conflict with Iran—the contest that had earlier displaced the Palestinian question as the fulcrum of the Middle East. But the region is changing at the speed of missiles. Analysts, and recent history, on what lies ahead: GAZA: ISRAELI TROOPS REMAIN The…

DIED Maggie Smith Empress of dowagers She made imperiousness feel as light and glancing as a chiffon scarf: Maggie Smith, who died on Sept. 27 at age 89, had a sterling, acclaimed career onstage and in the movies long before she began playing chaperone aunties and benevolent boarding-school witches. But she’s one of those rare actors whose second and third acts brought them greater fame than the first. Smith won Oscars in 1970 and 1979, for her roles in, respectively, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and California Suite. But she found new ways to use her gifts as the years rolled on, cultivating an air of frosty charisma that audiences loved. In The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her performance as a Scottish schoolteacher who fills her students’…

Kamala Harris may be leading in many national polls, but a deeper look tells a less rosy story for her party. A new TIME analysis of voter-registration data finds reasons for Democrats to worry that they may have frittered away baked-in advantages in states they need to win. In the four swing states that make it easy to track political alignment in voter registrations—Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina—Democrats have seen their slice of the pie shrink. In Pennsylvania, Democrats have their slimmest voter-registration advantage in decades. On President Joe Biden’s watch, Democratic registrations in the state have gone from a safe 7-point advantage to now hanging ahead by less than 4 points. Sure, in the wake of Biden’s choice to forgo a second term, Pennsylvania Democrats saw their best…

Jeremy Strong is not known for his sense of humor. When getting dressed, he favors brown for its “monastic” connotation. He famously thought that Succession, the HBO show that shot him to stardom, was a straight drama when his co-stars believed it to be a comedy. When he sits down for our Zoom conversation in September—in a brown shirt, of course—he recites poetry and quotes Stella Adler, the godmother of Method acting. He describes Succession as reflecting “the Emersonian notion of the institution as the shadow of a man.” But when I suggest that he could have capitalized on that show’s success by earning a hefty paycheck from a superhero movie—as many in his position have done—he cracks a self-aware smile. The notion that he, an actor who insists…

Somebody Somewhere is a slice-of-life dramedy set amid a tight-knit group of friends and family in your real hometown of Manhattan, Kans. The characters’ arcs are so patient, it’s easy to imagine the show continuing forever. Did you and the creators, Hannah Bos and Paul Thureen, anticipate when you were putting together the third season (premiering Oct. 27) that it would be the last? With this kind of show, you feel like every season is going to be your last. The way we wanted to approach the season was: it’s a snapshot, a moment in time—not wrapping anything up. We just like to live with the characters. Your character, Sam, the show’s protagonist, has made slow but steady progress at learning to value herself and trust other people. Do you…