FEB.

27 / MARCH 6, 2023

by
ANDREW R. CHOW
& BILLY PERRIGO
(humans)

time.com
 VOL. 201, NOS. 7–8 | 2023

CONTENTS

5 32 42 61
The Brief ‘You Are Being The Patriot Time Off
Punished’ Veteran and Rhodes scholar
23 In the first days of the war, Wes Moore is Maryland’s
The View Russian troops locked an entire new governor, and perhaps
Democrats’ new hope
Ukrainian village in a school
basement for nearly a month By Molly Ball
By Svitlana Oslavska

50 56
Machine Yearning The Feminist △
In their rush to get in on AI, And the Law Maryland Governor
tech companies are making Spain’s embattled Minister Wes Moore in
the same mistakes they of Equality confronts Baltimore on Jan. 9
did with social media unintended consequences Photograph
By Andrew R. Chow and Billy Perrigo By Lisa Abend by Jared Soares
for TIME

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2 TIME February 27/March 6, 2023

 CONVERSATION

Impact Awards
At TIME’s second annual TIME100
Impact Awards in Dubai, the
honorees were actor Idris Elba
and model Sabrina Dhowre Elba,
philanthropist Jeffrey Katzenberg,
rain-forest-preservation activist
Farwiza Farhan, and Mozambique’s
first female cabinet minister, Graça
Looking for a Machel. TIME CEO Jessica Sibley
specific cover? spoke during the ceremony about
the power of influence, and the
host, journalist Raya Abirached, led
a moment of silence for victims of
the Syria and Turkey earthquakes.
Read more at time.com/impact

Clockwise from top

left: TIME CEO Jessica
Sibley; Idris Elba and
Sabrina Dhowre Elba;
Farwiza Farhan, center,
with collaborator Prio
Sambodho, right, and
fellow environmental
activist Elizabeth
See all the newsletters Wathuti, left; former
Walt Disney Studios
CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg;
the venue, the Museum
of the Future
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 S

HOW TO BE MINDFUL WHY THE U.S. KEEPS JAIR BOLSONARO’S LIFE

IF YOU HATE MEDITATING SHOOTING DOWN UFOS AS A ‘FLORIDA MAN’

PHOTOGR APH BY EMILY GARTHWAITE 5

THE BRIEF OPENER

I
N TURKEY—LOCATED BETWEEN SEVERAL PLATE
boundaries and directly on two main fault zones—
earthquakes are a fact of life.
But the two that hit the country’s southern
reaches on Feb. 6 brought a level of destruction that num-
bers can only suggest—a 7.8-magnitude quake, followed
nine hours later by a temblor registering 7.5. The death toll
nine days later stood at 41,000, including thousands killed
across the nearby border in northern Syria.
“These are the kinds of quakes we’d expect to see
10 or 20 years apart,” says Cuneyt Tuzun, an earthquake
engineer based in Izmir, Turkey. “They happened within
a few hours of each other.”
They also happened in a country that, despite every
warning, had not prepared. Ten years after a 1999 earth-
quake in the northern city of Izmit killed over 17,000 peo-
ple, the Turkish government answered the outrage over
shoddy construction, pledging new building standards
and a plan to strengthen existing structures, and desig-
nating hundreds of open urban spaces as evacuation safe
zones. The measures were crucial, in a rapidly urbanizing
nation where millions reside in the multistory concrete
apartment buildings that carpet Turkish cities.
Yet, on Feb. 6, more than 5,600 buildings collapsed across
southeastern Turkey. Within days, Turkish officials issued
over 100 arrest warrants for contractors allegedly connected
to the collapse of buildings that were not up to code. But ex- △
perts tell TIME the requirements for earthquake-readiness Mesut Hancer Erdogan, has been increasingly seen
improvements often went unenforced. holds his deceased as corrupt, according to annual rank-
15-year-old ings by Transparency International.
AS RECENTLY AS LAST NOVEMBER, following a daughter Irmak’s The party faces a challenge from a
5.9-magnitude earthquake, Turkey’s Union of Engineers hand on Feb. 7 united opposition in March elections
and Architects released a statement saying the nation “has that analysts say the catastrophe will
failed in terms of what needs to be done before the earth- loom large over.
quake.” The union added that site supervision “continues The country’s southeast—where
to be seen as a procedure on paper only,” and civil engi- the earthquakes occurred—has long
neers warned that the country’s infrastructure was incapa- lagged in income in comparison with
ble of handling a large earthquake. the western region, according to a
H. Kit Miyamoto, a structural engineer at Miyamoto In- study by the Centre for Economic
ternational, went to Turkey to help assess the latest dam- Policy Research, also making the
age. He says that in 1997, Turkey passed a code that re- area more vulnerable to insufficient
quired buildings to be constructed using ductile concrete,
a material that is more flexible in the event of an earth-
quake, but he estimates that only 1 in 10 buildings in the
country meets the standard. Black
Sea GEORGIA
Engineers can reinforce older buildings through retro-
fitting, a process that is more cost-effective than con-
7.5-
structing a building from scratch. But Miyamoto, who has magnitude
worked with the World Bank to retrofit schools in Turkey, quake
says it is difficult to force private buildings to do so.
“It costs on average 10% to 15% of the replacement 7.8-
magnitude
cost,” says Miyamoto. “You could retrofit eight build- quake
ings for the price of [building] one,” he adds, “but seismic
retrofitting does not add market value.” CYPRUS SYRIA IRAQ
“The construction industry is a big source of money,” LEBANON
explains Tuzun, the earthquake engineer, alluding to poli-
Mediterranean
tics. Turkey, which has been governed for 20 years by the Sea
Justice and Development Party of President Recep Tayyip
The Brief is reported by Sanya Mansoor, Olivia B. Waxman, and Julia Zorthian

infrastructure standards, says Tuzun.
Ayhan Irfanoglu, a civil-
engineering professor at Purdue
University, says early photos of the
earthquake damage show that tall
buildings “pancaked” or slumped
on their sides “like a deck of cards.”
Irfanoglu notes that local jurisdic-
tions often don’t enforce codes or
contractors on the ground don’t un-
derstand the complex codes they’re
meant to be implementing.
O P E N I N G PA G E : T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S/ R E D U X ; T H E S E PA G E S : A D E M A LTA N — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S
To prevent a tragedy like this
from happening again, stakeholders
will need to follow through on com-
pliance. Irfanoglu says that as the re-
gion recovers, this experience might
make towns more aware of the im-
portance of proper building prac-
tices. “There is an undeniable field
of evidence of what works,” he says.
Tuzun adds that engineers know
the infrastructure changes that
are necessary to prevent build-
ing collapses at this scale, espe-
cially in an area where earthquakes
are inevitable. Now they must be
implemented.
“Nature is warning us,” Tuzun
says. “If we take the proper action,
we will have less loss in the future.” 
WORLD
How to help victims
of the earthquakes
THE DEVASTATING EARTHQUAKES 3.6 million Syrian refugees living
that hit Turkey and Syria on Feb. 6 within its borders, many in southeast-
struck the heart of the displaced ern Turkey near the epicenter of the
Syrian community on both sides of earthquakes.
the border—dramatically affecting AlBaraa Haddad, a 27-year-old
one of the most vulnerable popula- Syrian living in Turkey and currently
tions in the world. Some 4 million in Antakya, says rescue aid was scarce
Syrians who rely on immediate in the immediate aftermath. “You
humanitarian aid live in the re- could hear people who were still alive
gion, according to the U.N. Office under the rubble, trying to scream
for the Coordination of Humani- and say they were alive, but there was
tarian Affairs. absolutely no one helping at that mo-
More than 41,000 people had ment,” Haddad tells TIME.
died as of Feb. 15, and the af- In major disasters like earthquakes
fected area of Syria was already in Turkey and Syria, experts say the
confronting a cholera outbreak. best way to help people is by send-
Harsh weather makes the situation ing money to relief groups, instead of
worse: many buildings that were sending goods. “Cash allows us to not
left standing are damaged and in only be faster,” says Patricia McIlreavy,
danger of collapse, meaning peo- president and CEO of the Center for
ple can’t go home even if they have Disaster Philanthropy, “but it allows
one to return to. those who are helping these communi-
Turkey is the world’s biggest ties be adaptable to what the commu-
refugee host country, with about nity needs.” —SOLCYRÉ BURGA
THE WHITE HELMETS SYRIAN AMERICAN TURKISH RED
A volunteer group that MEDICAL SOCIETY CRESCENT
operates in Syria, A relief organization Turkey’s largest humani-
that needs donations tarian organization and
especially in territory
not under government to purchase trauma part of the International
control. Rescuers need supplies for the injured Red Cross and Red
supplies to provide relief and to continue to Crescent. It is providing
to survivors left home- provide emergency mobile kitchens and
less by the earthquake. aid to patients. temporary shelters.
DOCTORS WITHOUT SAVE THE INTERNATIONAL
BORDERS CHILDREN RESCUE COMMITTEE
Medical teams are on A nonprofit coordinat- The U.S.-based aid
the ground providing ing with local partners group has been work-
immediate emergency to distribute goods to ing on the ground with
support in northwest- children and families. Syrian refugees for
ern Syria, as well as An emergency team years. It is sending
blankets and relief is also on the ground emergency supplies for
kits for survivors. providing medical care. children and families.
7
8 TIME February 27/March 6, 2023
 1 1 2
The Feb. 6 earthquakes Survivors huddle in a relief
2 reduced entire blocks tent in Hatay province on
of buildings in Hatay, Feb. 7. The damage displaced
3 4 5 Turkey, to smoking millions of people across
piles of rubble Syria and Turkey

3 4 5
Miners joined the rescue Responders from the Israeli In northwest Syria, residents
efforts. Sinan Durdu, center, Defense Forces and a Turkish in the town of Jindayris
pictured on Feb. 9, saved rescue team transport a work together to extract an
a teenager trapped under 14-year-old girl to safety in injured girl from a collapsed
26 ft. of rubble southern Turkey on Feb. 9 structure on Feb. 6

C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: B U R A K K A R A — G E T T Y I M A G E S ; B U L E N T K I L I C — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; R A M I A L S AY E D —
A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; R O N E N Z V U L U N — R E U T E R S ; E S R A H A C I O G L U K A R A K AYA — A N A D O L U A G E N C Y/G E T T Y I M A G E S 9
THE BRIEF NEWS

Champion Chiefs
Kansas City Chiefs players celebrate their Super Bowl LVII win on Feb. 12 under an explosion of red and gold confetti
inside State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. After Kansas City fell behind in the first half, Chiefs quarterback Patrick
Mahomes led his team to a 38-35 win over the Philadelphia Eagles in one of the highest-scoring Super Bowls ever.

THE BULLETIN

Bird flu isn’t a danger to humans ... yet

A PARTICULARLY NASTY STRAIN
of the H5N1 virus is currently caus-
ing the worst outbreak of the disease
among birds since it was first identi-
spread to wild species—there’s been
a record number of deaths among
seabirds, which travel great distances,
enabling the spread of H5N1. Fur-
strain has already been found in other
mammals, including foxes, bears, and
in an outbreak at a Spanish mink farm
S U P E R B O W L : C A R M E N M A N D AT O — G E T T Y I M A G E S ; B I R D F L U : M AT T H E W H AT C H E R —
in October. If it mutates into a strain A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; H E A LT H : I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y B R O W N B I R D D E S I G N F O R T I M E

fied in China in 1996. Across the U.S.,
some 58 million birds have died or
had to be killed because of infection,
with similar die-offs in poultry farms
in Europe and Japan—one of the main
reasons that eggs have been so ex-
pensive lately. The good news: there
is no record of any human getting in-
fected with bird flu from eating eggs
or poultry products.
WILD BIRDS Experts aren’t sure why
the current bird flu has spread so
far, so fast, but do have one theory:
while avian flus infect mainly domes-
tic poultry, the recent outbreaks have
10 TIME February 27/March 6, 2023
ther, wild birds make for a nearly
impossible-to-track disease vector,
moving too fast for researchers to
count the infected.
MUTATING STRAINS In
humans, cases have been
fairly rare, and there are
only a handful of recorded
instances of H5N1 being
spread from one human
to another. As we’ve seen
with SARS-CoV-2, how-
ever, viruses can evolve to
sidestep biological obsta-
cles. Unusually for H5N1, th
better suited to attack human cells, it
could cause trouble.
WHAT TO DO “Treat the virus with re-
spect,” says Gino Lorenzoni, an avian-
health expert at Penn State. If you
ep chickens, put them where
wild animals can’t touch them
and wear full protective gear
when handling them. If you
have pets, be vigilant about
stopping them from picking
up any bird carcasses or ex-
crement. And if a seagull tries
to steal your sandwich, maybe
t it. —HALEY WEISS
HEALTH
1. Listen to music

BY ANGELA HAUPT

4. Focus on your
movements

2. Use the 5-4-3-2-1 method

5. Pay attention to your pet

3. Do a puzzle

11
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THE BRIEF NEWS
GOOD QUESTION
Why does the U.S. keep
shooting down UFOs?
BY SANYA MANSOOR
in The firsT Two weeks of february, The u.s.
Air Force shot down four flying objects that had intruded
on the skies over North America, a deployment of force
unprecedented during peacetime.
The first object shot down, on Feb. 4, was a Chinese
balloon that the Biden Administration says was part of
a yearslong scheme to spy on nations across the earth.
But so far, officials have been much less detailed about
what the other objects are. One shot down over Alaska on
Feb. 10 was described as a “car-sized object” that did not
appear to have a propulsion source. One downed over Can-
ada on Feb. 11 was described as “cylindrical,” potentially
a balloon, but smaller than the Chinese one. And it was
not immediately clear what was shot down Feb. 12 over it was shot down
Lake Huron in Michigan.
The Chinese balloon, which U.S. of-
ficials say carried sensors capable of lis-
tening to conversations on the ground,
revealed an entirely new class of threat
to U.S. airspace. Experts say two things
are happening as a result: First, the
North American Aerospace Defense
Command (NORAD) and other agen-
cies tasked with watching for airborne
incursions have recalibrated their detec-
tion methods to pick up slower-moving
objects that they weren’t previously pay-
ing attention to. Second, shooting these
objects out of the sky and collecting the
wreckage has become a priority so that
the military can quickly learn where
they’re coming from and what threat they pose. “We need
to get a better sense of what these things are and whether
or not they’re worth engaging with,” says Ian Williams,
deputy director of the Center for Strategic and Interna-
tional Studies’ Missile Defense Project.
It’s probably not aliens, experts say. The White House
and intelligence officials have echoed this point. “Uniden-
tified flying object” in this case means just that—an object
that is flying and has not been identified. They could, how-
ever, pose a danger, at least to civilian aviation. While the
Chinese balloon was at 60,000 ft. of altitude—well above
the ceiling for passenger planes—the other objects were
flying much lower, closer to the 20,000–40,000 ft. that
commercial aircraft reach.
Since the U.S. shot down the Chinese balloon off
South Carolina—and admitted to at least three previous what these
similar incursions into the country in recent years— things are.’
it has recalibrated its skyward surveillance systems. —IAN WILLIAMS,
Experts say NORAD was previously focusing on spotting MISSILE-DEFENSE
fast-moving objects that generated a lot of heat—think
16 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
missiles, bombers, and fighter jets.
That means it can be easy to miss
slow-moving balloons, which also
might not show up as clearly on radar.
General Glen VanHerck, NORAD’s
commander, previously admitted
that the Chinese balloon exposed a
“gap” in American air defenses. “Now
they have some experience and know
what these things look like, on radar,
they’re able to refine filters to look for
them . . . more efficiently,” Williams
says. “It’s about finding that balance of
getting what you need but not getting
so much that you’re just chasing flocks
▽ of birds around.”
The Chinese
balloon over One advantage of shooting down so
Charlotte, N.C., many of these objects is that once they
on Feb. 4 before are recovered on the ground, they offer
a lot for military and intelligence offi-
cials to analyze.
However, it’s
unlikely that using
Sidewinder air-
to-air missiles at
about $400,000
a pop fired from
$150 million F-22
Stealth fighters,
America’s premier
combat aircraft, will
be an economical
response in the long
term, experts say.
Riki M. Ellison,
chairman and
founder of Missile
Defense Advocacy Alliance, is advocat-
ing for greater radar capabilities to en-
U F O S : P E T E R Z AY— A N A D O L U A G E N C Y/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; B A C H A R A C H : S H U T T E R S T O C K ; J A M E S :
G A R Y A . VA S Q U E Z— U S A T O D AY S P O R T S/ R E U T E R S ; H A L E Y: T H E O W A R G O — G E T T Y I M A G E S
sure that the U.S. can simultaneously
track these flying objects alongside
more traditional threats and under-
stand how best to respond to them.
So far, he worries that the Ameri-
can response has been disproportion-
ate compared with China’s balloon—
which Beijing claims was doing
civilian research. “China wins that
‘We need fight a little bit,” he says. “Look at the
a better cost imposed on us and what we had to
sense of spend to defend against that; it’s very
lopsided.”
It’s likely that all sorts of objects
have been floating through U.S. air-
space, but shooting them down was
not a priority. “We chose to tolerate
EXPERT them,” Ellison says. □
MILESTONES

SCORED

DIED
BACHARACH
HITS IN BRIEF

RAIDED DERAILED DECLARED ANNOUNCED

17
THE BRIEF NEWS
POLITICS
Bolsonaro’s surreal
new life as a Florida man
BY VERA BERGENGRUEN
a liTTle more Than a monTh ago, he was leading
the fifth largest country in the world. These days, he is
wandering around Florida supermarkets, eating fried
chicken alone at fast-food restaurants, and holding court
for supporters from the driveway of a modest home
owned by a former ultimate-fighting champion in a gated
community south of Orlando.
Jair Bolsonaro’s re-emergence in Florida is a bizarre
spectacle even for a state with a long history of providing
haven to eccentric characters. The embattled ex-President
of Brazil, who has refused to concede his loss in Octo-
ber’s election, left the country for the U.S. on Dec. 30, two
days before the inauguration of his successor, Luiz Inácio
Lula da Silva. On Jan. 8, Bolsonaro’s supporters stormed
the Brazilian parliament, Supreme Court and presidential
palace, violently threatening police and destroying prop-
erty in an assault with eerie echoes of the attack on the
U.S. Capitol carried out by supporters of Donald Trump.
Meanwhile Bolsonaro, once dubbed the Trump of
the Tropics, has been hanging out a couple hours’ drive
up the Florida Turnpike from his former presidential
counterpart. While Trump is plotting the moves of his
2024 campaign, it’s unclear what Bolsonaro’s future
in the Sunshine State has in store. His TikTok account
broadcasts carefully curated videos to his 74 million
followers—smiling families in Brazilian jerseys deliver-
ing baskets of bread, strawberries, flowers, and Nutella;
time-lapse montages set to emotional music, showing
18 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
Bolsonaro hugging children; and long lines of people
waiting to snap a photo with him.
What is the ex-President of Brazil doing in Florida with
his country—and his own legal future—enmeshed in tur-
moil? Bolsonaro’s original visa, thought to be an A-1 desig-
nation meant for diplomats and heads of state, would have
expired after 30 days. He has now applied for a six-month
tourist visa to stay in the U.S. and is waiting for the “de-
sired results,” says Felipe Alexandre, a Brazilian American
attorney representing Bolsonaro. “He would like to take
some time off, clear his head, and enjoy being a tourist in
the United States for a few months before deciding what
his next step will be,“ Alexandre tells TIME.
The prevailing Theory is that Bolsonaro’s self-exile
from Brazil is a maneuver to evade legal trouble. He is fac-
ing at least half a dozen probes that could disqualify him
from holding political office in the future or result in poten-
tial prosecution. Brazil’s top court is investigating whether
Bolsonaro—who last year vowed “For God in heaven, I will
never go to prison!”—leaked classified information, used
“digital militias” to coordinate political disinformation
campaigns, and attacked Brazil’s electoral system. The Bra-
zilian Supreme Court also said it would investigate his role
in instigating the events of Jan. 8. New allegations surfaced
on Feb. 2 that Bolsonaro’s aides tried to persuade lawmak-
ers to annul the results of the October elections.
“This is an individual that is basically trying to avoid
criminal investigations by seeking shelter in the United
States,” says Anna Eskamani, a Democratic state lawmaker
who represents an Orlando-area district. “He is hiding
behind a U.S. tourist visa.”
Until recently, Bolsonaro had kept a relatively low pro-
file in Florida. But in the days before his successor’s visit to
the White House on Feb. 10, Bolsonaro broke his silence.
“I am 67 years old, and I intend to remain active in Brazilian

politics,” he said on Jan. 31. Three days
later, he headlined an event alongside
Charlie Kirk, a right-wing activist, at
Trump’s golf resort in Miami. Speak-
ing to a crowd of several hundred sup-
porters, Bolsonaro said he was plan-
ning to eventually return to Brazil to
coordinate the opposition to Lula. He
mused that he did not understand how
he could have lost the election, which
was met with chants of “Fraud!” from
the audience. “All I can say is, that
sounds very familiar,” said Kirk, who
had amplified voter-fraud conspiracies
after Trump’s electoral loss in 2020.
The connections between Bolso-
naro and Trump go beyond the upris-
ings committed on their behalf. Like
Trump, Bolsonaro blamed voter-fraud
conspiracies for his loss. Bolsonaro’s
son, Eduardo, has close ties to the
Trump orbit, with former political
strategist Stephen Bannon, communi-
cations adviser Jason Miller, and Don-
F R O M L E F T: J O E S K I P P E R — R E U T E R S ; M A R C O B E L L O — R E U T E R S
ald Trump Jr., among the MAGA fig-
ures who have joined him in unfounded
narratives about election fraud in Bra-
zil. Eduardo has spoken at American
political events like the Conservative
Political Action Conference and has
been a frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago,
posting photos of himself with Trump,
Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner.
Experts say that’s not the only rea-
son Bolsonaro may have sought ref-
uge in Florida. “There is a very strong
connection between far-right groups and movements in
Brazil and far-right groups in America, especially in Flor-
ida,” says Feliciano Guimarães, academic director at the
Brazilian Center for International Relations. “Florida is a
place where this connection with Brazilian far-right groups
is strongest in the United States.”
AmericAn fAr-right influencers have long been
popular on Brazilian social media, says Michele Prado, an
independent analyst who studies the Brazilian far-right and
digital movements. In some circles, Bannon, conservative
activist Ben Shapiro, and Fox News host Tucker Carlson are
well-known figures, their commentary frequently trans-
lated into Portuguese. “The core of the Bolsonaro govern-
ment was formed largely by individuals who were inspired
and disseminated here in Brazil the concepts produced by
the American far right,” Prado says. Bannon has lauded
the Bolsonaro supporters who attacked the government
buildings as “freedom fighters.” He also helped popularize
#BrazilianSpring, a hashtag that “incited violent action and
the rupture of the democratic order here in Brazil through
△ a populist revolution [and] was one of the most dissemi-
Supporters watch nated” online, says Prado.
Bolsonaro speak During his stay in Florida, Bolsonaro has largely shied
in Orlando on away from publicly commenting on the developments in
Jan. 31, and Brazil, issuing only lukewarm criticism of his supporters’
gather on Jan. 11 actions on Jan. 8. In Washington, Democratic lawmakers
by the home are pressuring Biden to revoke Bolsonaro’s visa, with doz-
where he’s staying
ens including top members of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee signing a Jan. 12 letter urging the President
to “reassess [Bolsonaro’s] status in the country to ascer-
tain whether there is a legal basis for his stay and revoke
any such diplomatic visa he may hold,” and saying the U.S.
should cooperate with Brazilian authorities in investigating
the role he may have played in the Jan. 8 attacks as well as
any other alleged criminal activity he may have been a part
of while in office. The attacks were “built upon months of
pre- and post-election fabrications by Mr. Bolsonaro and his
allies claiming that the October 30 presidential election had
been stolen,” the lawmakers wrote. “The United States must
not provide shelter for him.”
It’s hard to square the seriousness of the actions of Bol-
sonaro’s supporters back home with the surreal scenes in
Florida. At an event organized by a conservative Brazilian
expat group on Jan. 31, Bolsonaro sat under a spotlight on
a small stage in a strip mall in Orlando, perched on a pur-
ple armchair next to a fuzzy ottoman and a single flower.
A small crowd of mostly Brazilian American fans paid
up to $50 to see him. Videos taken from the audience show
‘He is him draped in the Brazilian flag and being serenaded, sur-
hiding rounded by people praying over him.
behind a “I just want to say thank you so much for everything.
In America we’re so grateful for you,” said Jimmy Levy, a
U.S. tourist former American Idol contestant who has become popular
visa.’ with the MAGA crowd, performing hits like “God Against
—ANNA ESKAMANI,
the Government” at antivaccine rallies and other right-
FLORIDA STATE wing events. “Everyone who is a patriot in America is
REPRESENTATIVE standing with the patriots in Brazil.” 
19
THE BRIEF Q&A
SOCIETY
His mission: changing
how we think about racism
BY JANELL ROSS
noT long AfTer How To Be An AnTirAcisT wAs published
in August 2019, the book’s author, the historian and National
Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi, found his work an un-
expected touch point in the conversation about the persis-
tence of racism in American society. Initially I was wary:
The title had the ring of self-help, the ideology that personal
effort can fix anything. It sounded like one of those books
that make the bold and arguably illogical claim that just
about everything is within the individual’s control. They
do not demand system change, but personal effort.
But its new companion volume, How to Be a (Young)
Antiracist, co-authored by young-adult novelist Nic Stone
and published on Jan. 31, illuminates just how much that’s
not the case. In a format accessible to younger readers, the
book explores how we are gradually drafted into the think-
ing and lies that can render a person unable, or at least un-
willing, to challenge the systems and practices that mas-
querade as normal, functional, and fair. In reality, many of
those systems drive inequality along with pervasive belief
in group inferiority or superiority. In it, I found a book that
tries to equip young people living in the midst of surround-
sound injustice and almost gleeful bigotry with the language
and skills to recognize they too have been enlisted. Then it
calls on them to decide if, where, and how they revolt.
Kendi and Stone do this by encouraging the reader to
follow Kendi through his journey from an academically in-
secure Black teen to a leading thinker and writer on race, a
professor and director of the Boston University Center for
Antiracist Research. I sat down with Kendi in January.
Many people are not capable of public vulnerability and
self-critique. You were a Black high school student who
in the 1990s stood before an audience and blamed Black
teens, their clothing, their priorities for educational
achievement gaps, and received resounding applause.
What made you willing, in this book, to go there, to
begin with that speech at an MLK event?
Well, one of the distinguishing factors between being rac-
ist and being antiracist is to be racist is to consistently deny.
They say they “can’t be racist.” But I think to be antiracist,
there are times in which we’re going to say the wrong thing.
We have to be willing to acknowledge it so we can stop
doing it, so we can grow, so we can stop passing policies
that harm people. And so we wanted to show that through
this book. This was probably the most shameful and embar-
rassing moment of my life. I stood before 3,000 almost to-
tally Black people [and spoke about] . .. all types of things
that I imagined were wrong with Black people, particularly
Black youth, on a day where we were showcasing the ex-
cellence of Black people and Black youth. I just wanted to
20 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
show [readers] where I was at, but then
also show how I got to that point, and
ultimately how I was able to move away
from it.
And I think the other thing about
young people, Nic will tell you, if you’re
not authentic they’re going to know it.
Authenticity, we hope, will bring young
people into the story.
There’s a concept in this book around
which you could form an entire
course: the idea that racist is not a
noun but an adjective. Explain that.
Sure. Let me give the example of
Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson
looked upon Native Americans as, to
use his words, “capable of civilization,”
capable of being white. But then he
‘Racist is looked upon Black people as potentially
incapable of civilization, of being civi-
not who lized, of being developed, being white.
you are, but And so he had, from his standpoint,
a higher conception of Native people
what you’re than Black people.
saying ... When we think about even our rela-
what you’re tives, our friends, they may think better
about certain racial groups than others.
doing.’ People advocate for policies that are
—IBRAM X. KENDI, equitable when it comes to education
AUTHOR or the environment, but they support
environmental racism. So how do you
account for all this complexity? Well,
what you can say is racist is not who
you are, but what you’re saying in any
given moment, what you’re doing.
I think to be racist is to support poli-
cies that are leading to inequality or
injustice by your action or inaction. So
you literally live in a society, you work
in a space, where the norm is inequal-
ity. And then when you do nothing, that
allows that norm to persist. By contrast,
to be antiracist is not just to recognize
racial equality and fight for justice and
equity, but you have to activate yourself
constantly to create that equality be-
cause in many places it doesn’t exist.
Today, terms like social-justice
warrior and woke are used as pejora-
tives. What does that make possible?
You’re speaking on one of the major
challenges that young people are facing.
The ways in which the people who have
sought to conserve racism have adopted
the language of social justice as their
own, or they demonized the language

of social justice and racial justice. So what that
requires then is an even deeper and consistent
engagement with young people over what is
right, what is wrong, what is racism, and what is
antiracism. We have young people who are being
targeted for recruitment by white supremacists,
particularly white, male teenagers. And the
way in which they’re seeking to recruit them
is through all these sorts of memes and comedy.
If someone isn’t aware of what racial justice truly
is or what it means to be antiracist, then our
young people are easily able to be hoodwinked
and to be recruited into white-supremacist or-
ganizations, or to be thinking that they’re doing
something that’s going to be helpful for a partic-
ular racial group when it’s harmful.
You mentioned the co-opting of social-justice
language by people who are looking to pre-
D O N AV O N S M A L LW O O D F O R T I M E
serve racism. Please explain that.
One of the most prevailing examples that I think
particularly are affecting young people are stan-
dardized tests. Many young people believe that
their test score is indicative of whether they are
smart or not smart. What those young people
LEADERSHIP SERIES
don’t know is that the SAT, for instance, is
largely going to predict the wealth of the parents
of the test takers, and not necessarily the intel-
ligence level of test takers. What many young
people don’t know is that people who have more
wealth and resources are able to get their kids in
high-priced test-prep courses, or even to get the
teacher of those test-prep courses to personally
tutor their child. And typically, those companies
promise that their score will be boosted by a cou-
ple hundred points.
I’m mentioning this because we currently
have this test-score gap in which white and Asian
kids are getting, on average, higher scores than
Black, Native, and Latinx kids and resulting in
people thinking that their kids or that they them-
selves are smarter, or not. And those very par-
ents who are claiming that their kid is so smart
know that they paid for test prep for their kid,
which boosted their kid a couple hundred points.
So I just think that it’s something we’re not being
honest about. And then when we start pressing
for maybe we should not use the standardized
test, you have parents who are saying, “That’s
hostile to my kid,” or you have parents who say,
for instance, that affirmative action is a race-
conscious policy that “discriminates” in their
mind against their children. But they don’t con-
sider standardized tests to be a race-conscious
policy that literally discriminates against kids
who don’t have money, who don’t have resources.
△ If you were giving a prescription to a young
Ibram X. Kendi person who has decided to lead their life as
popularized an antiracist, what does that require?
the concept of I think that first and foremost, when you decide
antiracism with to live your life and strive to be antiracist in a
his 2019 book racist society, you’re going to certainly be able
to create relationships with all different types
of people that you wouldn’t be able to do if you
were being racist towards those people. You’re
going to be able to be a part of a beautiful move-
ment that could create, whether on a small or
large scale, justice and equity. That’s going to
bring you joy, but at the same time it’s going to
be difficult because there’s going to be many peo-
ple who are going to critique you, who are going
to think that there’s something wrong with you
because they don’t want to look in the mirror.
And that will even include people in your own
The TIME100 family. Change may not be coming fast enough.
And then, sometimes you may have to acquire
Leadership Series,
presented in
partnership with Rolex, courage. In other words, recognize something
profiles members of the is the right thing to do, but it’s also the danger-
TIME100 community—
the world’s most ous thing to do. But you decide to do it anyway.
influential people. I would encourage young people to strive to be
For video conversations
and more, visit
that. There’s going to be positives and negatives,
time.com/leaders challenges and rewards, to being antiracist. □
21
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 A CENTURY OF IMPACT

THE POWER OF
A TIME COVERBY D.W. PINE

INSIDE

LEV PARNAS ON WHAT TRUMP WHAT’S AT STAKE IN WHEN HECKLING HELPS

WANTED IN UKRAINE NIGERIA’S ELECTION A PRESIDENT

23
 That frame came into being another and flying drones—958 of them, to be
half-century before my childhood artis- exact. And since most people now see
tic endeavors, when, in TIME co-founder TIME’s cover digitally, add animation
Briton Hadden’s New York City office, a and motion graphics to the visual mix.
friend of his named Philip Kobbe took The cover of TIME has often been
out a red crayon and drew a thick line called the most important real estate in
around the cover of a 1926 copy of the journalism—making some of the world’s
magazine. These days, we’re often told best photographers and artists its archi-
that to be creative we need to think out- tects. Andy Warhol did five TIME cov-
side the box. But as 5,223 issues (and ers from 1965 to 1986; Roy Lichtenstein
counting) have shown over TIME’s past produced two cover images within three
100 years, creativity can flourish inside weeks of each other in 1968. In 1965
MAN OF THE YEAR the lines. Thank you, Mrs. Matousek. and 1976, respectively, Marc Chagall
and Robert Rauschenberg produced
What I love about TIME is its author- self-portraits to accompany cover stories
ity to cover any topic: from health to about their work.
sports, climate to tech- They fit in well with
nology, business to the renowned com-
culture, world leaders pany of artists, photog-
to society to the Presi- raphers, and thinkers
dent. And that same who produced covers:
variety holds true in Jacob Lawrence, Ben
how the 8-by-10.5-in. Shahn, Robert Vickrey,
space that is the cover Alex Katz, Romare
is approached visually. Bearden, Christo,
Since the charcoal Charles Schulz, Al
portrait and hand- Hirschfeld, Milton
drawn line work of Glaser, Jodi Bieber,
the first cover—dated James Nachtwey,
March 3, 1923—nearly Richard Avedon, Diana
every medium out there Walker, Ai Weiwei,
has been used to cre- Titus Kaphar, Mick-
ate a TIME cover. The alene Thomas, Olafur
first three decades were Eliasson, Beeple,
dominated by litho- Shepard Fairey, and JR,
APPEARANCES BY graphs, gouache, char- Pine’s art from kindergarten, and the list goes on.
RICHARD NIXON lovingly preserved
coal, black-and-white In 1978, the
portrait photography, magazine donated
and watercolors. The 1950s and ’60s fea- 800 works of original cover art to the
tured a little more experimentation: col- National Portrait Gallery, which has
lages, wax sculptures, bold typography, preserved and digitized that history. The
pencil sketches, acrylics, casein, info- collection now includes more than 2,000
graphics, wood sculptures, felt-tip mark- pieces. These covers are noteworthy
ers, nickel-coated plaster, tempera, pas- on their merits, but several among
tels, papier-mâché, cut paper, metal, clay, them turned out not simply to record
oil painting, bronze casting, crayon, and news, but also to make it. TIME covers
landscape photography were the primary have affected government policy and
forms. The 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s brought individual actions, challenged public
with them silk-screen printing, marble, opinion, and launched careers.
slate, photo collage, political cartoons, These pages include just a few stories
news photography, and color portraiture. of that influence, and we’ll be sharing
The past quarter-century has featured more in the magazine and on time.com as
artists working with 3D rendering, sand, our official March 3 birthday approaches.
quilting, quilling, stained glass, typo- May past be prologue, and the space in-
graphic portraiture, photo-illustration, side TIME’s red border remain an essen-
interactive design, 360-degree photogra- tial canvas for another 100 years.
phy, matchsticks, Mylar, augmented real-
ity, illustrated graphics, optical illusions, Pine is TIME’s creative director
The View is reported by Mariah Espada, Simmone Shah, and Julia Zorthian
 100 YEARS OF TIME
Revisiting some of our most influential covers, with the people who lived that history.
Stay tuned for more of this series on time.com and in upcoming issues 5
COVERS CREATED
BY ANDY WARHOL

Hadden, left, and Luce, center, in Cleveland with politician

William R. Hopkins, who is reading a 1925 issue of the magazine

The First Issue
March 3, 1923
By Nancy Gibbs
HENRY LUCE AND BRITON
Hadden and their scrappy team
of 20-somethings piled into a cab
to barrel across town to the print-
ing plant on the last Tuesday in
February 1923. There they spent
the final hours cutting, pasting,
and fine-tuning the first issue of
the magazine that would come to
define the American Century. It
L U C E , H A D D E N : T H E L I F E P I C T U R E C O L L E C T I O N /S H U T T E R S T O C K
column. From the first, this was news
with attitude: “Never did a man em-
ploy the office of Speaker,” TIME de-
clared of Cannon, “with less regard
for its theoretical impartiality.”
The choice of Cannon for the cover
spoke to Luce and Hadden’s con-
viction that people don’t just make
news, they make history, destiny as
personality, and so that week and
every week to come for decades, it
would almost always be a person or
persons on the cover of TIME. Can-
non had made plenty of news and his-
tory in his 46 years in Congress, eight WORDS AND
PICTURES
as Speaker. A staunch conservative

was a skinny issue, stripped-down stories slotted into
22 sections, designed for an age of information over-
load, to be read in an hour—its unique value proposi-
tion signaled in its very name.
The most important fact of this first cover is not the
charcoal portrait or filigree border—it would be four
years before a designer proposed the iconic red one.
It was the name TIME (chosen over Facts), and even
more, The Weekly News-Magazine. No such thing had
existed before—no such artful, even arrogant, arrange-
ment of all the world’s news into tidy categories. The
“cover story” about the coming retirement of legend-
ary GOP lawmaker “Uncle Joe” Cannon ran less than a
and fierce disciplinarian, he wielded
total control over who sat on what
committees and which bills would
ever make it to a vote. “Sometimes in
politics one must duel with skunks,”
he once said, “but no one should
be fool enough to allow skunks to
choose the weapons.”
Gibbs, the first woman to be editor-in-
chief of TIME, is the Edward R. Murrow
Professor of Practice of Press, Politics
and Public Policy at Harvard
THE VIEW OPENER

Portrait of a Leader
April 20, 1959
The World Is Now My Home
By the Dalai Lama

A single imAge cAn cerTAinly

evoke strong memories. This
1959 TIME cover photo and the
accompanying story of my escape
from Tibet brings movingly back
to me the tragedy of my land and
of my people.
I will soon be 88. This cover
appeared when I was 24. At that
time, in spite of our earnest ef-
forts to coexist, the Chinese authorities did not, un-
fortunately, respond positively. The very survival of
the Tibetan identity was at risk. So, it was decided
that, in the interests of our land and our people, I
should leave Lhasa. Initially I had some fear and hesi-
tation about doing this. But since the Tibetan people
had placed their hope and trust in me, I knew where
my responsibility lay. In the same way, when I was
hardly 16, and even though I was ill-prepared, I had
to take up the political leadership of Tibet. Some-
times I say that at 16, I lost my personal freedom, and
at 24 my country’s freedom was lost. Subsequently,
I became a refugee.
The tragedy of Tibet has yet to be resolved. But my
becoming a refugee in India brought with it many hid- The 14th Dalai Lama photographed in Dharamsala, India,
den blessings. For one, the moment I was able to cross in February 2019, for another TIME cover story
over from Tibet to India on March 31, 1959, I real-
ized the value of freedom. Since then, I have been the experiencing loving-kindness contrib-
longest-staying guest of the Indian government, enjoy- utes to a healthy and happy life. I am
ing every possible liberty. In addition, India has pro- now pledged to devote myself to my
vided me, and those other Tibetans who managed to four principal commitments: promot-
escape, the freedom to preserve and promote Tibetan ing human values; religious harmony;
identity and our culture of peace and compassion, and ONE FOR ancient Indian wisdom, on the basis of
THE AGES
to share them with the entire world. compassion (karuna) and nonviolence
TIME s reporters
Most important, I have enjoyed in exile the freedom in 1959 declared
(ahimsa); and, obviously, Tibetan
to pursue my spiritual development, even as I have that their cover
culture—the basis of our identity. I
tried to take care of Tibetan affairs. For many decades subject was firmly believe that all four can con-
now, I have had the opportunity to engage in dialogue 23 years old. tribute to a more peaceful world.
with leaders of different religious traditions, scholars, Following the Today, I am stateless, unable to
and scientists. These new friends have enabled me to Tibetan system return to my country. But we Tibet-
understand more clearly the state of humanity and the of counting ages, ans have a saying, “Your homeland is
ways in which I can contribute to a better world. His Holiness wherever you are happy. And who-
was 24. ever loves you is your parent.” India
It Is my strong belIef that modern education and its people, as well as many across
does not give sufcient attention to the importance of the world, have provided me with
RUVEN AFANADOR FOR TIME

warmheartedness. We are social animals; our survival constant love and support. When
depends on others. As human beings we thrive on af- I look at this cover from 1959, I am
fection, which is one reason why all religious tradi- grateful that I have been able to
tions stress compassion. People with little or no inter- lead a meaningful life dedicated to
est in religion are also human beings and for them, too, helping others. 
26 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
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 THE VIEW ESSAY
VIEWPOINT
How I helped Trump and
Giuliani undercut Ukraine
BY LEV PARNAS
The oTher day I waTched some sTreeT InTervIews
in Moscow. The first person said the Russian invasion
of Ukraine was justified because Ukrainian government
officials were Nazis. The second said the invasion was
necessary because Ukraine’s President Volodymyr
Zelensky is a Jew and, as such, is stealing everything.
Later, I watched Donald Trump give a campaign speech
praising Russian President Vladimir Putin and calling the
U.S. intelligence community “lowlifes.”
Meanwhile, the people of Ukraine are dying
by the tens of thousands.
If that makes you feel bad, you may
be able to imagine how I feel: I was used
by Trump and his personal lawyer Rudy
Giuliani in ways that helped pave the way
for Putin to invade Ukraine, my native land.
If Trump and Giuliani’s plans had worked,
the Ukrainians might not have had the
weapons, medical equipment, and other
supplies they needed to fight back.
In 2021 and 2022, I was convicted of sev-
eral serious crimes including fraud, making
false statements, and illegally funneling for-
eign money to the Trump campaign. I was
sentenced to 20 months in prison, served
four, and am on home confinement for the
remainder. Now that I am paying my debt to
society, it is important to tell my side of the story.
My connection to Trump came through Giuliani, with
whom I had done business, and through the large campaign
donations I had made to Trump’s campaign. Giuliani, who
desperately wanted to be Secretary of State, recruited me
to help him further Trump’s interests overseas.
I had no official position, but my primary task was to
be their go-between with Ukrainian and Russian oligarchs
and government officials. In retrospect, I concluded that
my real job was to help undermine and destabilize the
Ukrainian government. Trump and Giuliani argued that
Ukraine’s leaders were corrupt and anti-American, but I
believe there were other reasons Trump had it in for them.
J A B I N B O T S F O R D — T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T/G E T T Y I M A G E S
He viewed them as political enemies who had supported
Hillary Clinton in 2016, hurting his feelings and engaging
his unquenchable thirst for revenge.
Trump also hated the Ukrainian government because
Putin did. Some have said that Putin has compromising
information on Trump, I never saw evidence of that.
Rather, I think the Russian leader had a lot in common with
Trump’s father Fred. Both men were authoritarian lead-
ers who valued ruthlessness and considered it the only way
to succeed. I first met Fred when I was selling condos in
Brooklyn as a kid, and he and Putin struck me the same way.
Watch When Truth Isn’t Truth: The Rudy Giuliani Story, a new four-part series
from TIME Studios, beginning Feb. 19 on MSNBC and streaming on Peacock
The plan that Giuliani and Trump
put into operation was simple.
Giuliani sent me to collect compro-
mising information that Eastern Euro-
pean oligarchs had on Hunter Biden’s
activities in Ukraine to use against
Joe Biden. It was also my job to per-
suade the new Ukrainian government
to announce an official investigation
into Hunter Biden. If it didn’t, the
U.S. would not send Trump or Vice
President Mike Pence to Zelensky’s
inauguration, threatening Zelensky’s
domestic stature. Trump also paused
much-needed military aid for Ukraine
while he tried to get
Zelensky to open the
Biden investigation.
Trump didn’T care
if this made Ukraine
vulnerable to Russia,
which had annexed
Crimea in 2014. At
about the same time,
Trump casually asked
me, “How long do you
think Ukraine could
hold out against a Rus-
sian invasion?” I re-
sponded, “Not long,
without our help.”
I eventually realized
△ that not only was I
Giuliani with enabling Trump’s dirty tricks in the
President-elect 2020 election, I was also risking that
Trump in Ukraine would be essentially unarmed
New Jersey on when Putin invaded.
Nov. 20, 2016 Trump weakened Zelensky, but
fortunately Biden won the 2020 elec-
tion and Ukraine received a steady
supply of weapons. Since my arrest,
I have done my best to help the people
of Ukraine with charitable works, but
Giuliani is still peddling his version
of events, and even now Republican
politicians are campaigning to stop
the pipeline of weapons and supplies.
They are just trying to please Trump,
exactly as Giuliani does. And whether
they realize it or not, they are making
it easier for Putin and his gang to steal
everything they can from Ukraine.
Parnas is a businessman and a former
associate of Giuliani’s, serving a sen-
tence for fraud and campaign-finance
violations
29
 N I G E R I A : T E M I L A D E A D E L A J A — R E U T E R S ; G R E E N E : J I M W AT S O N — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S

TIME February 27/March 6, 2023

THE RISK REPORT BY IAN BREMMER
THE VIEW INBOX

30
 Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene at the State of the Union address
The D.C. Brief
By Philip Elliott
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
WHEN A FUR-BEDECKED REPRE-
sentative Marjorie Taylor Greene
yelled “Liar” on Feb. 7, she was
among the loudest in an abrupt
chorus of boos hurled at the oldest
President to ever deliver a State of
the Union address. Joe Biden didn’t
miss a beat; he smiled and went
off script as GOP lawmakers tried
to rebuff his claim that they were
ready to gut social-entitlement
programs.
“Social Security and Medicare is
off the books now, right? We’ve got
unanimity?” he asked. The striking
exchange, and Biden’s ease in han-
dling it in front of an audience of
millions, illustrated why the Dem-
ocratic establishment isn’t ready
to toss their 80-year-old stan-
dard bearer overboard just yet.
Despite a halting start to his
speech, Biden held his own when
Republican hecklers started to
stalk him. In fact, he actually dem-
onstrated how he could troll them
into a self-own in real time. Give
Biden acrimony, he’ll toss back
accomplishments. Throw him hos-
tility, he’ll offer hope.
“As my football coach used to
say, ‘Lots of luck in your senior
year,’” he deadpanned at one point,
mocking lawmakers who seemed to
think high school was the same as
the big leagues of Congress.
For as much as they are gird-
ing for the worst when it comes
to his 2024 campaign, Biden’s
speech gave Democrats reason
to latch onto optimism that they
also might get to keep the White
House. Biden showed he can hold
his ground in the face of Republican
attack, even delighting in the politi-
cal skills he mastered over 36 years
in the Senate. He mightn’t be the
most dynamic nominee-in-waiting
Democrats have ever had, but he’s
hardly the most problematic.
The night also proved why
Republicans who had hoped hec-
toring could rattle a doddering
old man were left hoarse but with-
out much to show for it other than
plenty of eye rolls from voters who
already think Washington unwor-
thy of respect.
For more insights from Washington,
sign up for TIME’s politics newsletter
at time.com/theDCbrief
 The last hours
in the basement,
on March 31, 2022

P H O T O G R A P H B Y O L H A M E N I A I L O — C O U R T E S Y T H E R E C KO N I N G P R O J E C T
 SPECIAL REPORT

INSIDE THE BASEMENT

WHERE AN ENTIRE UKRAINIAN
VILLAGE WAS HELD CAPTIVE
FOR 25 HARROWING NIGHTS
B Y S V I T L A N A O S L AV S K A
SPECIAL REPORT

Seven dayS afTer The invaSion of Ukraine,

Russian troops entered the village of Yahidne.
They forced the residents out of their homes and
into the basement of the local school, which they
had turned into their headquarters. Until they
withdrew on March 30, 2022, the Russians kept al-
most the entire population of Yahidne—more than
360 people, including children and the elderly—in
that basement for nearly a month.
It was so cramped, people had to sleep sitting
up. Instead of a toilet, there were buckets. Food
had to be foraged. There was no ventilation, so the
oldest went crazy and died. The Russians did not
allow the dead to be buried immediately, and when
they finally did, they fired on the funeral.
“People jumped into the pit with the bodies,”
says one six months later, recalling the ordeal, at a
feast for those who emerged alive. Many had not.
In the intervening months, the survivors re-
peated their experience to one another, and to in-
vestigators working for justice. Their confinement
in the basement may serve, one year after Vladimir The school
Putin invaded on Feb. 24, as a microcosm of the beneath which
sadism that arrived with the invaders. But to more Yahidne residents
than one survivor, what comes to mind is a con- were held captive
centration camp.
“What day,” one of them asks, “did people start
going crazy?”
34 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
PHOTOGR APH BY ANDRII BASHTOV YI —THE RECKONING PROJEC T 35
1 2
A year into the invasion, certain places in
Ukraine—the Kyiv suburb of Bucha, the south-
ern city of Mariupol—are known for what Rus-
sian forces did to the civilians there. To the list
add the tiny village of Yahidne, which lay in the
north of the country, directly in the path of the
advancing army. As soon as the artillery barrages 1 “No,” she lied.
began, the informal village leader, a man named Lilia and
Valeriy Polhui, made a bomb shelter out of his cel- Svitlana, back
lar. When Svitlana Baranova and Lilia Bludsha, a in Yahidne six
travel agent and an engineer at Chernobyl, pulled months after
into the village in a car struck by shrapnel, its wind- emerging from
shield shattered, Valeriy took them in too. the basement
There was fighting all around the village. Svit-
lana and Lilia called their families to say that it
was too dangerous to leave Yahidne and that they
would stay there a while longer. On March 3 the 2 It was a gray, cold morning.
military vehicles entered the village in a long col- Valeriy Polhui
umn. Valeriy hurried everyone—the nine members was told by a
of his extended family and the two guests—into his Russian officer,
makeshift bomb shelter. “You’ll be
From inside, they could hear heavy machinery responsible
for everyone.”
driving into his yard, stomping, and gunfire. But
that evening nobody discovered their hiding spot,
thanks to Valeriy’s smart thinking: he hung a lock
on the door to make it look as if it had been shut
from the outside. The Russians pulled at the door
and walked away. But the next day they broke the
lock. Valeriy shouted:
“Don’t shoot, there are children here!”
Everything froze for a second, as if the person
on the other side of the door hadn’t expected to
hear a voice. Then the command came for every-
one to come out, one by one. Valeriy went first. The
next command to him was to lie down on the snow.
The Russians took their phones and searched their
contacts. If they saw the word Kyiv they asked for
more details, as if this word in and of itself was a
threat. They searched the house, found a uniform,
and decided that Valeriy was in the military. He
explained that he wasn’t. He spoke in Russian, but
the soldier didn’t understand him.
36 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
“Military, military,” the soldier repeated, ignor-
ing the explanation. The soldiers looked Asian,
their Russian was broken, and Valeriy later learned
that they were from Tuva, a region in the far east
of Russia, one of the country’s poorest.
“Married?” a soldier asked Lilia.
“Age?”
“32. Are you going to kill us?”
“Yes.”
Then they locked them back in Valeriy’s cellar.
The next day, March 5, the Russians opened the
cellar door and said:
“Get out. We’re taking you to the school
basement.”
The village is bordered on one end by a pine for-
est and on the other by the Kyiv-Chernihiv high-
way. There are five streets, and Valeriy could see
people being frog-marched to the school from
each, slowly, family by family. Behind each family
was a soldier pointing a machine gun at them. The
Russians made the sick and elderly come. Their
families moved them in wheelbarrows.
On the 500 meters that separate his house from
the school, Valeriy counted 80 units of equipment:
Yahidne Russian
Chernobyl
advances
and control
March 22,
2022
Kyiv
UKRAINE
 3 4
armored personnel carriers, tanks, mortars. Sol-
diers with red armbands were bustling about, haul-
ing ammunition. By Lisova Street a dead body lay
on the ground. Anatoliy Yaniuk had been shot in
the head on March 3. He was 30 years old. The
Russians had executed him when he refused to lie
down on the ground in front of them. “I am on my
own land, and I will not lay down in front of you.”
Those were his last words, neighbors who saw the
execution told his mother.
The school is a two-story white brick building
on the edge of the village, in front of the forest.
That morning chalkboards in the classrooms still
had the academic assignments for Feb. 23 written
on them. Armed soldiers scurried about military
vehicles between the swings.
As they were herded into the basement, the
people of Yahidne saw a fellow villager, Anatoliy
Shevchenko, off to the side, blindfolded, his hands
tied. Despite the cold he was sitting on the concrete
parapet in a light sweater, with visible bruises on
1, 3 : N ATA L I YA G U M E N Y U K — T H E R E C K O N I N G P R O J E C T; 2, 4: A N D R I I B A S H T O V Y I — T H E R E C K O N I N G P R O J E C T
his body. The two soldiers next to him were bran-
dishing their machine guns.
Olha Meniailo, an agronomist who was being
forced into the cellar with her husband, son,
daughter-in-law, and their 4-month-old son, no-
ticed some of the military looked more experi-
enced and some were boys in their teens. She felt
sorry for the latter because they were just “kids.”
“Why did you come here?” she asked the Rus-
sian soldiers.
“We came to free you from the Nazis,” they
repeated.
“There are no Nazis here,” said Olha. “You only
‘freed’ us from our homes.”
The largest room of the basement once housed
the school gym, but now it reminded her of im-
ages of hell from ancient religious icons. “A can-
dle flickers here and there,” she would remember
later, “and in the dim light there are people next
to each other with doomed expressions on their
faces. It’s suffocating.”
Valeriy, his family, and Svitlana and Lilia were
already in the basement, sharing the largest room
with 150 other people. Later they calculated
there was about half a square meter per person:
170 square meters, 367 people (including more
than 70 children). They sat on the bench or on
3 the floor, resting their heads on their neighbors’
A reunion shoulders, not knowing if they would live to see
meal hosted by the next morning.
Valeriy’s family
in Yahidne on As the dAys went on people handled their fear
Aug. 27, 2022 differently. Some sat in a stupor, hugging their
pet dogs. Others ran around looking for water and
wondering how to survive.
Olha decided she could stay sane by keeping her
4 diary. Today the words are hard to make out—she
Russian troops wrote in the dark; flashlights were turned on only
killed one when absolutely necessary. Olha used her index
of Mykhailo finger to measure the width of the lines so that she
Shevchenko’s wouldn’t write over things.
sons; the other Day one—We tried to talk to the soldiers.
is missing Day two—They took away everyone’s cell
phones.
Day three—We started boiling water.
She stuck to the bare facts: she knew the diary
could be seized and didn’t want anyone to know
her innermost thoughts.
During the day, people sat in the basement on
chairs, benches, and the floor. They slept sitting
up. They used bulletin boards to make a platform
for the children to lie on. The only way to stretch
your legs in those cramped conditions was to stand
up. Svitlana and Lilia would take turns lying on two
chairs, while the other lay on the floor underneath.
The Russians had claimed that they sent the
villagers into the basement for their “protection,”
but it was clear they were human shields. The Rus-
sian military made their headquarters on the two
floors above.
At first the captives were in such a state of shock
that they didn’t even think much about food. Then
they ate what they were able to bring from home.
37
SPECIAL REPORT

The Russians gave them some of their dry rations.

Aboveground, the Russians took everything from
people’s refrigerators. They slaughtered all the
livestock. All of March the smell of grilled meat
hung over the village.

When people got hungry, they looked to

Valeriy for help. “Valeriy, what do we eat?” they
asked him. He began looking among the Russians.
He chose someone about his age, 38, with a red
beard and red hair. The other soldiers called him
Klen (Maple). None of the soldiers used their rank
or real names with one another, only nicknames.
“There are almost 400 people here,” he told Klen,
“and they all want to eat.” Klen was silent at first.
“OK, make a fire, but no smoke.”
Then he looked at Valeriy: “I see you’ll be re-
sponsible for everyone. Everything goes through
you.” Valeriy’s heart sank. Klen hadn’t made a sug-
gestion. It was an order.
They boiled water for the first time on the third
day. They prepared baby food and every morn-
ing made porridge for the children. They figured
out how to get water from the school well. It was
not drinking water, but water nonetheless. Since
there was no electricity, they pumped by hand. One
stroke brought 100 to 150 milliliters of water; for
food and tea, they needed 150 liters.
The prisoners watched enviously as the Russians
drank from small juice boxes, and dreamed how
they would buy some when they were free again.
Sometimes the Russians would give them crack-
ers from their rations, and one time they brought
a wheelbarrow of sliced bread. Some of the bread
was moldy, the rest was dirty, but the mothers still
ran to the wheelbarrow, grabbed the slices of bread,
and dusted them off to feed their children. The sol-
diers filmed the scene on their phones.
One time they brought bags of cereal and pasta.
Valeriy wondered what brought on this gesture of
goodwill. But when he took a closer look, he saw
that the bags were leaking. They were transporting
diesel fuel in the car, and it spilled on the bags of would die from lack of oxygen, medicine, and care.
cereal. The people washed the pasta in water three The list of the dead is etched on a wall, next to a
times, boiled it, and ate it anyway. △ calendar. Valentyna Danilova maintained both. Be-
The most humiliating thing was going to the toi- Olha Meniailo’s fore the invasion she worked in the kindergarten,
let. They were allowed to use the toilet outside only diary entry for the directly above where she was now being held along
during the day. But you weren’t allowed to leave day of the funeral: with her husband and 83-year-old mother. Valen-
the basement at night. There were three buckets “Yarema managed tyna found an ember near the cooking fire and used
in the gym for about 150 people. People stopped to sing them off and it to write the first date. Then it became a daily rit-
drinking water in the evening to keep from hav- the shelling began.” ual. “Did you remember to write down the day?”
ing to use them. the 5-year-old boy next to her would ask every
morning. Later, she began writing the names of
the first person died on day five. Dmytro the dead next to the numbers.
Muzyka was 92. His wife Maria outlived her hus- The basement wasn’t heated, but the air was hot
band by just a few days. She too died in the base- from the hundreds of bodies. The walls remained
ment. Another person died on day six. Then two cold and condensation from people breathing ran
in one day. From March 5 to March 30, 10 people down them, so that the people by the walls sat in
38 Time February 27/March 6, 2023

puddles. But the real horror was the lack of oxygen.
Valentyna compared it to a sinking ship—they
were suffocating.
Some of the oldest couldn’t handle it. They
didn’t recognize their children. Screamed. Had
B A S E M E N T: A N D R I I B A S H T O V Y I — T H E R E C K O N I N G P R O J E C T
D I A R Y: N ATA L I YA G U M E N Y U K — T H E R E C K O N I N G P R O J E C T;
conversations with dead relatives. Revealed fam-
ily secrets. Then they died, sitting in a chair.
By March 12, several corpses had accumulated.
The Russian soldiers finally gave permission for
them to be buried.
People in villages take their funerals very se-
riously. They spend decades planning what
clothes they will be buried in, preparing embroi-
dered towels that their relatives should hang on
the cross. Now people were being buried with-
out a coffin and without a cross. They were
taken to the cemetery wrapped in sheets, in a
wheelbarrow, their arms and legs hanging out.
Two pits were dug for the five dead. There wasn’t
enough time to dig more—the Russians gave them
only two hours for the funeral. If they took any lon-
ger, they would be shot. When the first bodies were
lowered into the pit and the local priest, who was
also kept in the basement, began saying the prayer,
a Tiger armored vehicle drove up to the cemetery,
stopped, and several men looked at the funeral bri-
gade. They were wearing balaclavas and helmets so
only their eyes were visible. The vehicle drove on,
and a minute or two later the funeral was being fired
on, with explosions all around the graves.
The men jumped into the pits with the bodies.
The priest fell between gravestones and was hit
by a falling tree. After the shelling, the wounded
were taken to the basement in the same wheelbar-
rows they used to bring the bodies to the cemetery.
Klen, the red-haired soldier, ran the base-
ment in what some of the prisoners describe as a
concentration camp.
“You are being punished,” he would say when
he locked the door during the day. People would
plead to be let out, banging on the door, shout-
ing that they were suffocating ... nothing helped.
When someone with cancer asked him for per-
mission to go home and get their medicine, Klen
answered, “If things are so hard for you, there’s the
forest—go hang yourself, it’ll get easier.”
Valeriy thought Klen hysterical and unbalanced,
with a mania for controlling the prisoners in the
basement. “Take one wrong step and he’ll shoot
you on the spot.” He was also a zealous patriot. One
time, Valeriy went up to Klen to ask permission for
people to go home. The redheaded soldier listened
to him, and then handed him a sheet of paper.
“Do you know the Russian anthem?”
“No.”
“What about the Soviet one?”
“I don’t know it.”
“Here’s the anthem. If someone wants to go
home to get food, they have to sing the Russian
△ anthem.”
A corner of the Nobody sang the Russian anthem.
school basement,
photographed on the people in the basement had no idea what
May 12, 2022 was happening on the front, in Ukraine, in Kyiv,
even in the local capital of Chernihiv. “We’ve cap-
tured all your cities,” the soldiers told them. But
the people thought, If Russians had captured all the
Ukrainian cities, why were they still in Yahidne?
A commander was supposed to go to Russia.
He promised to bring back medicine. But he re-
turned in two days.
“People are asking about pills,” Valeriy said.
“Did you bring them?”
39
SPECIAL REPORT

“I didn’t bring them and I won’t,” the com-

mander told him. “Your partisans are mining the
roads, we can’t make it to Russia.”
Great, so there is hope after all, Valeriy thought.
Meanwhile, health conditions were deteriorat-
ing. There was an outbreak of chicken pox. People
coughed from the lack of air and the dust. Many
had a temperature. People’s legs swelled from sit-
ting all the time; they had open sores. The Rus-
sians could have given them antiseptic or cough
lozenges, but most often their response was “We
didn’t come here to treat you.” People continued
to die, and when they did, their bodies were taken
to the boiler room where the living went to wash.
But toward the end of March, speculation began
to spread that the Russians were planning to leave.
The people noticed increased movement; there
was less security. A hidden joyous premonition of
freedom was growing. “Everyone dreams about
freedom,” Olha Meniailo wrote in her diary.
March 30 was the holiday known as Warm
Oleksa. That morning, as they had done for nearly
a month, the people went outside to the toilet and
started preparing food. But at 11 a.m. they were
sent back into the basement and locked in. There
was a hole in the wooden door that was made to
let in air. The soldiers shouted: If anyone goes
near the door, we’ll shoot. But some people stood
at a distance from the door and watched through
the opening as the Russians were removing their
equipment.
A sense of hope was growing inside everyone.
But the prisoners were afraid to betray this hope
even to their closest neighbors. Maybe these sol- The day the Russians had entered the village, a
diers were leaving, but new ones would replace few people had buried their phones in their barns
them? Maybe they were going to pretend to leave, and cellars. Now they dug them up. There were
then hide, and then start shooting as soon as peo- three hundred people but only a few phones: each
ple exited the basement? got a few seconds to make a call. Svitlana tried to
The vehicles hummed and the noise receded. dial her husband, but she kept getting one number
The humming was replaced by gunfire, which con- wrong. Finally, she called her daughter:
tinued for some time, and then there was silence. “Kristina!”
There was complete, utter silence. Footsteps? “Mom!”
Voices? Nothing. Olha the agronomist went to look at her house.
The prisoners kicked open the door, and the It hadn’t burned down, that was good. But the win-
first men left the basement. They went outside and dows were broken, the roof destroyed, there were
didn’t see any vehicles, any soldiers. Slowly, one puddles inside. There was no electricity or gas. In
by one, people started going upstairs, outside. To the middle of the living room was a pile of things
breathe the springtime air. To look at the sky. Birds the Russian soldiers had thrown around while they
flew to the school for the first time in a month. rummaged through the wardrobes. They had sto-
len all the warm clothes, men’s shoes, socks, tools—
The bravesT ones ran to their homes. They re- it was the same in most houses.
turned to the basement to tell the rest: They’re “We all said that as soon as we got out, we
gone, they really are gone! People started to smile. wouldn’t step foot in that basement,” recalls Olha.
Someone found a radio. They had to hear the news, But given the state of their homes, on their first
to understand if Yahidne was now under the con- night of freedom, most people returned to the
trol of Ukraine or Russia. But there was only music place of their imprisonment.
on the radio. Then someone realized the song was That night, nobody locked them in. In the
in Ukrainian. It meant Ukraine was still free. morning, the people went outside whenever they
40 Time February 27/March 6, 2023

wanted. “My first morning of freedom,” Olha
wrote in her diary. Out of habit, they boiled water
and made breakfast. Then someone saw men in
uniform coming out of the forest. The first reac-
tion was to hide. But they looked closer and saw
that it wasn’t a Russian uniform. Then someone
shouted, “It’s our guys!”
The people ran up to the soldiers, touched them
with trembling hands to check that they were real,
laughed, and cried. They surrounded the soldiers
and asked them for the news about the Russian
retreat from the region, how the siege of Kyiv had
failed, again and again, until the soldiers got tired
of repeating it.
Svitlana and Lilia found a car and sped out of
ANDRII BASHTOV YI —THE RECKONING PROJECT
Yahidne. Many locals would follow. The Russians
had mined some homes. People covered their win-
dows in plastic to keep out the rain, got into buses,
and went to relatives’ homes or temporary shelters.
The most important thing was to get as far away as
possible, find heat, comfort, and security.
That April in Yahidne, the only people working
in the gardens were deminers.
When people returned, they began to repair
their homes. They were still coughing from being
in the basement, and chronic diseases got worse.
But nobody rushed to see the psychiatrist who
came to the village. “Nobody thinks they’re trau-
matized. People think they’re OK,” says Valeriy.
The school building remains a crime scene. The
children attend school in the neighboring village.
The yard has been cleaned up, but inside there are
traces of the Russians everywhere—ration boxes,
ashtrays, garbage. The soldiers left drawings on the
walls, including the note “55 br”—55th Separate
Motorized Brigade from the Tuva Republic. The
names of nine soldiers were confirmed by the doc-
uments they left behind in Yahidne.
The regional administration wants to preserve
the school as a war memorial. The writings on
the walls will be important exhibits: children’s
drawings, the words of the Ukrainian anthem in a
child’s handwriting; the calendar that Valentyna
Danilova drew with charcoal.
“If we were to die, other people will learn how
much we endured,” Valentyna explains. This is why
she kept these records.
Thanks largely to the testimonies collected from
the villagers, 22 soldiers from the occupying bri-
gade have been identified as suspects, according
to Ukrainian prosecutors. By January 2023, four of
them had been convicted in absentia by a Ukrai-
nian court for violating laws and customs of war.
Three were given 12 years in prison, and one 10
years. Their sentences are for the atrocities com-
mitted in Yahidne before March 5, before the vil-
lagers were forced into the basement. But there
is a strong argument to hold Russian soldiers ac-
countable for holding people in the basement too.
The Reckoning Project, an alliance of journal-
△ ists and human-rights lawyers, says the Russian
The dates of soldiers used humiliation and what is known in law
captivity. On the as “torture, inhumane and degrading treatment”
left are those killed as a tactic to subdue the population in Yahidne.
by the Russians; Systematic, widespread implementation of such
on the right, ill treatment on a civilian population could be con-
those who died sidered a crime against humanity.
in the basement
The project’s legal analysts also note the ab-
sence of insignia on Russian soldiers’ uniforms,
and concealing their identities from Yahidne res-
idents, actions suggesting predetermination to
commit atrocities. In other words—what happened
at Yahidne was likely no accident. Like so many
atrocities across Ukraine it was planned, deliber-
ate, intentional.
Now comes the reckoning.
Oslavska is a journalist based in Ukraine.
This story is published in partnership with The
Reckoning Project, which brings together the
power of storytelling and legal accountability to
fight disinformation and impunity in Ukraine
41
POLITICS

W HER E W ES MOOR E C
OM ES FROM

By Molly Ball/Easton, Md.

POLITICS
“Patriots,” Wes Moore says,
pausing for effect. The room
falls silent; the slot machines
in the lobby are quiet. “I’m
thankful that I’m in a room
full of people who understand
what that word means.”
About 80 military veterans sit at plastic-clothed tables in front of a bar
topped with metal buckets of Coors Light. It’s a chilly January night at an
American Legion hall on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Moore is wearing a tie
but no jacket, his bald head gleaming under the fluorescent lights. In a few
days, the 44-year-old will be sworn in as Maryland’s first Black governor—
the third elected in American history and the only one currently serving.
Tonight he has come to this mostly red, mostly white swath of an other-
wise very blue, very Black state to connect with his soon-to-be constitu-
ents. “Patriotism is not waving a flag around,” Moore says. “Patriotism
is not telling our neighbors that we are better than them. Patriots—this
is our time to get this right.”
Moore’s theme is both a product and a through line of a remarkable
biography. Growing up fatherless and surrounded by violence, he turned
his life around, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Johns Hopkins University,
and won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. He’s a decorated Army com-
bat veteran, a best-selling author of inspirational memoirs, and a former
Wall Street banker, small businessman, and nonprofit CEO. Just weeks
into his first term in elected office, he is widely considered the Democrats’
most talented political newcomer since Barack Obama.
Headlines already speculate he’ll be the second Black President. The
party’s leading figures clamor to associate themselves with him: Presi-
dent Biden held a rally with him right before the November election, and
Obama himself cut an ad on Moore’s behalf. Representative Steny Hoyer,
the former House majority leader, puts Moore in a category with Obama,
Bill Clinton, and John F. Kennedy. “Wes lifts people up from their cynicism
into their optimism and gives them a sense of the possible,” says Hoyer,
who endorsed Moore and barnstormed his Maryland district for him de-
spite planning to stay out of last year’s crowded gubernatorial primary.
For Democrats, the promise Moore represents can’t come too soon. The
party’s stronger-than-expected midterms did little to quell its underlying
angst: an aging cast of top leaders, a widening cultural gulf with working-
44 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
class voters, and a brand yoked in the public
mind to unpopular left-wing ideas. Biden’s own
pollster, John Anzalone, warned Democrats in
a post-midterm memo not to take too much
credit for 2022’s successes, which were pri-
marily the result of Republicans’ deficiencies.
Liberal scholar Ruy Teixeira says many Demo-
crats’ tendency to see the worst in America puts
them at odds with the mainstream. “It’s very
popular among large sectors of the left to talk
about how fundamentally we’re a benighted
country, white supremacist, bigoted and op-
pressive,” Teixeira says. “This just isn’t where
most people are coming from. Most people are
proud to be Americans.”
In the popular imagination, patriot is a right-
wing term, redolent of camo, pickup trucks, and
guns. To Moore, that’s an outrage. “I’m just
truly offended when I hear people call them-
selves patriots whose definition is trying to de-
stroy democracy,” he tells me. “What’s patriotic
about trying to overturn elections? What’s pa-
triotic about saying that your neighbors don’t
deserve support? I’m not just confused by it.
I’m amazingly bothered and pissed off by it.
Because I know what patriotism is. I’ve seen it
with my own eyes. I saw it with the paratroop-
ers that I led in combat, people who were exem-
plifying bravery every single day.”
Moore is well acquainted with the case
against America. His grandfather, born in

South Carolina, fled the country as a child after
Moore’s great-grandfather spoke out against
racial injustice and was targeted for lynching.
Moore’s own father may have been killed by
racism—an educated, middle-class Black man
whose medical complaint was dismissed by doc-
tors, only for him to die in front of his 3-year-old
son the next day. “I can tell you countless in-
stances of this country’s history of brutality,
of inequity, of heartlessness,” he says. “But if
I do that without also talking about the other
elements of its history, that’s a selective mem-
ory that I think is dangerous. Because what
this country has meant to my family is that I
can literally be the grandson of a man that the
Ku Klux Klan ran out, and also, in the same
breath, be a person who’s about to become the
first Black governor in the history of the state.
Both of those things are true. And we can’t look
at one without understanding the other.”
As governor, Moore’s challenge goes beyond
the normal tests posed by legislatures, agencies,
and budgets. He’s trying to push his party in a
new direction on some of its touchiest issues,
change the conversation about national iden-
tity, and further his own political ambitions,
whatever those may be, all at the same time.
And he must do it in a moment when the post-
racial future that Obama symbolized is a shat-
tered illusion and the nation’s democratic sys-
tem has been shaken to its core.
MEETING A
CONSTITUENT
ON MARYLAND’S
EASTERN SHORE
By reframing patriotism, Moore hopes to do more than just make a
political pitch for himself and his party. It’s an unabashed plea for a new
political culture, one in which we can dare to think of government as a
shared enterprise and force for good, and politics as an avenue to achieve
it. If he can love America, he suggests, anyone can; by believing in him,
we can once again believe in this complicated and difficult nation, find a
shared faith that bridges our bitter divides.
After his speech to the veterans, Moore gets few questions about politi-
cal theory. Most audience members want to ask him about the difficulties
of navigating the VA system, how they can get their benefits, what kind
of services they deserve. Moore calls on a younger white vet in the back,
a man in a hoodie and hunting cap who identifies himself as Chad Baker.
Voice shaking, he describes a scary mental-health episode he experienced
a few years ago: “a part of my life where death was the only way out.”
Baker puts his hand over his face for a long moment before he can finish
describing his ordeal—the lengths he had to go to for treatment, the local
politician who offered no assistance.
Eventually Moore will answer Baker’s question, tell him he’s not alone,
and promise to help. By the time he’s finished, audience members will be
rising from their seats, asking not how they can be helped but how they
can help Moore, pitch in for Maryland, sign up to volunteer. But at this
moment, Moore says nothing. He strides to the back of the room, wraps
Baker in his arms, and holds him as the man sobs, his burden lifted.
Moore has a way of seeming at home wherever he goes, and a recent
morning in inner-city Baltimore is no exception. He steps out of his
gleaming gubernatorial SUV looking like the spokesmodel for a wealth-
management fund, flanked by suited men with sunglasses and earpieces.
Around the corner, a line of people with ragged clothes and shopping
carts wait for an unmarked door on the side of a building to open. When
it does, Moore hands them bags of rolls and packs of raw chicken, dis-
pensing hugs and autographs.
“I come from a family of preachers and teachers,” Moore says. They
taught that “you have a moral obligation to commit to making this place
better than the way that you found it.” He points to the “heroic” example
of this community food bank’s proprietor, Arthur “Squeaky” Kirk, while
lamenting that efforts like these are necessary: “They’re filling the holes
of broken systems.”
Moore came to national attention in 2010 for his first book,
The Other Wes Moore, a hybrid memoir meditating on an eerie coinci-
dence: two Black boys with the same name, born into similar circum-
stances, whose lives took very different paths. Today, the other Moore
is serving a life sentence for a jewelry-store armed robbery that left an
off-duty police officer dead. He was sentenced in 2001, the same year
Moore received the Rhodes.
After he returned from England, Moore began corresponding with and
then visiting his inmate doppelganger. The book tells their stories in par-
allel, picking apart questions of agency, privilege, and fate along the way.
“The chilling truth is that his story could have been my story,” Moore
writes. “The tragedy is that my story could have been his.”
Moore was born in the liberal D.C. suburb of Takoma Park, Md. His
father was a local journalist who met his mother, a Jamaican immigrant,
when she came to work for his radio show. When young Westley was not
quite 4, his father, feeling woozy and struggling to breathe, drove him-
self to the emergency room, where perplexed doctors asked the panicked,
disheveled-looking Black man whether he might be exaggerating and sent
him home with painkillers. He collapsed and died hours later of a rare but
treatable condition, acute epiglottitis, that had swelled his airway shut.
45
POLITICS
Wes’s mother Joy moved him and his two
sisters to the East Bronx to live with her Ja-
maican parents, a retired minister and
elementary-school teacher. While Joy worked
as a freelance writer and took odd jobs, the
family pooled their resources to send Moore
to the tony Riverdale Country School, hop-
ing he could escape the neighborhood’s influ-
ence. But the neighborhood proved more pow-
erful. “We grew up in a very challenging time
in New York City,” says Moore’s childhood best
friend, Justin Brandon, the only other Black boy
in their third-grade class. “It was the birth of
the hip-hop era, but also the crack epidemic,
the Central Park Five—in retrospect, you real-
ize you were exposed to a lot.”
A popular, mischievous kid, Moore started
goofing off and hanging out with the wrong
crowd. In middle school, he was caught writing
graffiti and detained, but police let him off with
a warning. He went right back to tagging, skip-
ping school, and getting middling grades. When
Riverdale finally threatened to suspend him, his
family mortgaged their house to send him away
to military school. It was a nerve-racking deci-
sion for his mother, who’d never even let her
children play with toy guns, but she didn’t know
what else to do. “I lost my husband to tragedy,”
Joy Moore tells me. “I was going to do whatever
I had to do not to lose my kids to the streets—
or to mediocrity.”
Moore initially resisted Valley Forge Military
Academy outside Philadelphia, trying and fail-
ing to run away from campus. But once he com-
mitted to it, the school changed his life. He still
counts earning the “cap shield” that marks the
passage from plebe to cadet
as “the hardest thing that I’ve
done,” he tells me. “It was ‘ T H E RE WAS
the first thing that I know I
accomplished on my own— NO D OU BT
the first thing that I accom- T H AT
plished not because it was a
giveaway or because some- P OL I TIC S
one felt bad for me or what- WAS G OI NG
ever. I earned that.” The feel-
ing of accomplishment was T O COME
intoxicating, he says, and he A F T E R H I M .’
has spent the rest of his life —CONDOLEEZZA RICE,
chasing it. FORMER U.S. SECRETARY OF STATE
Moore was on the foot-
ball, basketball, track, and
wrestling teams, served as student body presi-
dent, and edited the school newspaper. Bran-
don recalls taking a bus from New York to see
his friend compete in an oratory competition
in suburban Philadelphia and being stunned
by his command of the room. Moore’s speech
46 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
BORN IN THE
D.C. SUBURBS,
MOORE MOVED
TO THE EAST
BRONX AS A CHILD
was on the Constitution. “I am proud to be an
American,” the teenager declared, “because I
understand just what my ancestors had to go
through in order for me to be called American.”
He won the statewide contest.
Moore stayed at Valley Forge after finish-
ing high school, accepting a commission in the
Army and earning an associate’s degree at the
school’s junior college. His mother moved back
to the Baltimore suburbs for her job at a foun-
dation for at-risk youth. Moore began spending
time in the city and felt at home, he says. But he
didn’t have a Baltimore address until he trans-
ferred to Johns Hopkins his junior year. That’s
not necessarily the impression you’d get from
The Other Wes Moore, which describes the two
boys as growing up “at the same time, on the
same streets, with the same name.”
In the book, Moore details his family’s vari-
ous moves and accurately describes his birth-
place as being “right on the border of Mary-
land and Washington, D.C.” But the fact that
that border is some 30 miles from the Baltimore
city limits—perhaps even farther, in psychic
terms, from the West Baltimore projects oc-
cupied by his name twin—would be lost on a
reader unfamiliar with the region’s geography.
After the book became a best seller, numerous
interviewers introduced Moore as being from
Baltimore as he nodded along without argu-
ment. A blurb on some editions of the book
identified him as being born in Baltimore; the publisher now says this
was an error Moore tried to correct.
During Moore’s gubernatorial campaign, an anonymous dossier
highlighting these not-quite-discrepancies landed in the email inboxes
of prominent Maryland Democrats, calling Moore and his story “com-
pletely fraudulent.” Moore’s campaign returned fire,
tracing the dossier to a rival campaign and filing an
election-board complaint. His loyalists see a sinister
parallel with Obama: a successful Black man forced
to produce his birth certificate to quiet a chorus of
othering dog whistles.
When I press Moore on his elisions, he grows ani-
mated. There’s a larger point, he says, that his critics are
intentionally missing when they try to paint him as a son
of privilege playacting as an inner-city kid. “When you
ask people, ‘Where are you from?’ it’s an easy answer
oftentimes,” he tells me. “It’s not for me. I moved around
a lot when I was a kid—not because of choice, because of
tragedy. I watched my father die in front of me, and my
mother then is coming up in a home that she did not feel
safe in.” His family’s economic precarity, and the danger
of the Bronx streets, were real; if his family succeeded in going to great
lengths to protect him from them, while the other Wes Moore lacked access
to similar resources, that’s sort of the point. The other Moore also showed
leadership potential, rising through the ranks of street-corner drug deal-
ers and excelling in a job-training program. But he was in and out of jail,
fathered multiple children as a teenager, and ran out of second chances.

A RHODES SCHOLAR,
MOORE PLAYED
FOOTBALL FOR JOHNS
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY,
FROM WHICH HE
GRADUATED IN 2001
MOORE DURING
HIS YEARLONG
DEPLOYMENT
IN AFGHANISTAN
WITH THE 82ND
AIRBORNE DIVISION
Real, too, Moore says, was the sense of be-
longing he found in Baltimore when he began
spending time there as a teen, hanging out with
his sister and her school friends on breaks from
Valley Forge. He interned twice for then mayor
Kurt Schmoke, an early mentor who pushed
him to apply for the Rhodes. “I finally get to
a place that accepts me, flaws and all,” he says.
“That became home, and it will always be home.
So if people want to try to manipulate or attack
my trauma for their political gain, then they can
have that. But Baltimore as home is something
that I am proud of.”
The quesTion of home has always preoccu-
pied Moore: what it means to be from a place;
what we owe to the places we’re from, be it city,
state, country, or planet. The Other Wes Moore
and his subsequent memoir, The Work, reveal a
searcher’s soul—a man transformed by the early
realization that perhaps his life could matter
when so many others would not.
Luke Bronin, a fellow Rhodes scholar who
COURTESY WES MOORE
shared a house with Moore at Oxford, remem-
bers the two of them sitting on the steps of the
Bodleian Library at 1 a.m., discussing every-
thing from the 9/11 attacks to criminal-justice
reform. “Wes is one of those people who just
have a gravitational pull, this energy you can
feel,” says Bronin, currently the mayor of Hart-
ford, Conn., “relentless optimism mixed with
an intense sense of purpose.”
Colin Powell’s memoir My American Jour-
ney, the story of a Jamaican American from the
Bronx who rises through the military to achieve
political success, was Moore’s touchstone. Com-
paring it with The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
Moore writes that Powell’s determined opti-
mism resonated more with him than Malcolm’s
revolutionary rage. Moore sympathizes with the
long line of Black thinkers who’ve demanded “resistance to the American
system,” he writes, but Powell “embraced the progress this nation made
and the military’s role in helping that change to come about.”
Moore’s books can read like Oprah for the do-gooder set, full of feel-
good parables about “changemakers.” He’s a curious storyteller with a
restless earnestness—albeit one that never threatens to unsettle the power
structure. Moore is self-aware about his natural glibness, and cites the
“code-switching bonus” that gives him access to different worlds, from
South African townships to corporate boardrooms, poverty-stricken
neighborhoods to Islamist training camps. “The key to answering ques-
tions meant to get at who you are,” he writes, “was to first consider who
the questioner wanted you to be.”
In 2005, Moore voluntarily deployed to Afghanistan with the 82nd
Airborne Division. Returning to the U.S. after his yearlong deployment,
he spent a year as a White House Fellow at the State Department, where
his boss, Condoleezza Rice, remembers him as passionate, levelheaded,
and nonideological. “I didn’t ever talk to him about it, but I would have
been surprised if he didn’t have political ambitions, because he had the
right package,” Rice tells me. “There was no doubt that politics was going
to come after him if he didn’t come after politics.”
Moore spent a couple of years on Wall Street, learning numbers and
budgets, but found the business world unfulfilling and quit Citibank at the
height of the financial crisis. The gamble paid off. His books vaulted Moore
into a career hosting shows on Winfrey’s OWN and giving paid speeches.
In 2017, he became CEO of the Robin Hood Foundation, a New York–
based nonprofit that aims to channel the resources of the city’s wealthi-
est into alleviating poverty. Colleagues there say Moore transformed the
organization’s mission. He created a policy department and a “power
fund” dedicated to funding organizations run by people of color. He also
broadened the organization into other cities, including a pilot project in
Baltimore, where his family continued to live. On the day I met with him
on the Eastern Shore, Moore wore socks with lettering on the side read-
ing, THIS MEETING IS BuLLSH-T—a gift, he told me, from a Robin Hood
colleague paying tribute to his preference for action over deliberation.
In his four years as CEO, Moore raised $650 million for the organization.
In his role at Robin Hood, Moore testified before the Maryland gen-
eral assembly in support of a plan to improve the state’s education sys-
tem, forging a bond with the state’s first Black house speaker, Adrienne
Jones, who became an early supporter and now will be a crucial ally to
his governorship. Moore also pushed New York under then Governor
Andrew Cuomo to expand the state’s child tax credit, lobbying hard to
get the proposal included in Cuomo’s State of the State speech. “They
didn’t use it, and I was frustrated,” Moore recalls. “And I remember hav-
ing a conversation with one of my former colleagues, and they’re like,
‘We worked for six months to try to get them to include a line in the
47
POLITICS

speech. But what if you could write the whole

speech?’” That, he says, is why he decided it
was time to make his run.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Oprah Winfrey was watch-

ing the Capitol riot unfold on television when
Moore called to tell her he planned to run for
governor of Maryland. “I said, ‘You want to run
for governor in this political climate? Where ev-
eryone is so polarized?’” Winfrey recalled at his
inauguration. “‘Look at what’s happening right
now as we speak. You want to run in this cli-
mate?’ And he said, ‘Exactly.’”
Despite his minor celebrity, Moore was a po-
litical unknown in a state with a tight-knit po-
litical culture. In a field that included longtime
state comptroller Peter Franchot and former
U.S. Labor Secretary Tom Perez, critics cast the
newcomer as inexperienced and vague on pol-
icy. Nastier currents flowed beneath the surface.
In addition to the anonymous dossier question-
ing Moore’s biography, an email circulated al-
leging it would be too risky to nominate a Black
man. “Three African-American males have run
statewide for Governor and have lost,” Barbara
Goldberg Goldman, a party donor who backed
Perez, wrote to prominent Democrats. “This is
a fact we must not ignore.” Both the Baltimore MOORE APPROACHES On Jan. 20, Moore released his first budget,
Sun and the Washington Post endorsed Perez. A HOME WITH HIS
CAMPAIGN SIGN TO
a $63 billion proposal to raise the minimum
Moore’s campaign positioned him as an out- THANK THE RESIDENT wage, increase tax credits for immigrants and
sider above grubby Annapolis horse trading. He FOR VOTING FOR HIM childcare, and boost state spending on educa-
emphasized economic opportunity—“work, tion and transportation without raising taxes.
wages, and wealth”—and took as his slogan It would create a new state department to work
the military-inspired “Leave no one behind.” For his running mate, he on Moore’s signature plan, a voluntary year of
selected Aruna Miller, an Indian American state lawmaker from the sub- service available to every high school graduate.
urbs. “It showed the state that we were going to be unafraid,” Moore tells Hogan frequently clashed with or ignored
me, ignoring the conventional wisdom that a white man from a rural part Maryland’s liberal legislature. Moore’s chal-
of the state would better “balance” the ticket. lenge may be the opposite: reining his party
Moore never led a public poll before the July primary. He won with in. O’Malley recalls the best advice he got
32% of the vote, beating Perez by 15,000 ballots. In the general election, from a more senior pol before taking office:
few gave much of a chance to his opponent Dan Cox, a far-right GOP del- Look in a mirror and practice saying no. For a
egate who had hired buses to take people to the Jan. 6 protest in D.C. But people pleaser like Moore, this may not come
Moore and Miller barnstormed the state seeking to run up the score, and naturally. He wouldn’t be the first promising
won by a 2-to-1 ratio. newcomer to be stymied by the messy, slow-
This isn’t necessarily as impressive as it sounds: Maryland is one of moving machinations of government.
the most Democratic states in the country, and Moore’s margin over Cox
was almost identical to Biden’s over Donald Trump in 2020. Still, the suc- What dOes it mean to love America today,
cessive victories and high approval ratings of outgoing Republican gover- and what would it take for Moore to lead a
nor Larry Hogan, who was term-limited in 2022, are proof the state isn’t new charge for Democrats? Ruy Teixeira, the
a gimme for Democrats. “There is a substantial bloc of suburban, well- liberal scholar, says merely saying the word
educated, middle-to-upper-income folks who are super tax-sensitive and patriotism means little if the party isn’t willing
instinctively inclined to believe that Democratic governors want to take to stiff-arm its activist base on hotly charged
their money and send it to poor jurisdictions to educate children not their issues like whether children should get gender-
own,” says former Democratic governor Martin O’Malley. reassignment surgery or criminals should be de-
Beneath the surface of his unifying bromides, Moore has promised tained before trial. “People in a lot of the rest of
an agenda of sweeping liberal proposals, and vowed to move fast to the country look at the cultural concerns of lib-
get things done. Thanks in part to Hogan’s fiscal restraint and federal eral elites in big metropolitan areas and they’re
COVID-19 relief funds, the state is sitting on a $2 billion budget surplus. like, ‘What the f-ck are these people talking
48 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
 about?’” says Teixeira, who left the liberal Cen-
ter for American Progress last year for the right-
leaning American Enterprise Institute because
he didn’t feel he could tell the truth about pro-
gressives’ unpopular approach to race, gender,
and country, and co-authors a newsletter called
the Liberal Patriot.
When I ask Moore whether he believes
America is a racist country, he doesn’t give a
yes-or-no answer. “You can’t look at the his-
tory of this nation without understanding that
race has underscored everything in this country
from its origins,” he says. It’s impossible for him
to speak at the Maryland statehouse, he notes,
without being conscious that it was built by en-
slaved people. The recent death of Tyre Nichols,
the 29-year-old Black man beaten to death by
Memphis police, only highlights the need to
tackle injustice head-on, Moore tells me: “If
we’re not going to take accountability seriously,
we’ll just keep on dealing with the aftermath.”
Black Americans have always faced the dou-
ble bind of having their loyalty questioned in
the face of brutal oppression. In the face of slav-
ery and Jim Crow, it would be easy to sympa-
thize with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s impoli-
tic plea for God to damn America—but if they
do, they’re tarred as traitors. When Moore’s great-grandfather, a How-
ard graduate and Presbyterian minister, left South Carolina in the dead
of night and took his family back to Jamaica, he vowed never to return.
But Moore’s grandfather came back as a young adult because he viewed
America as his birthright. “He said this was his country, and he would
not be chased out of it,” Joy Moore says. As Wes Moore puts it, “I grew
up in a family of people who loved this country, even if
it didn’t always love them back.”
Moore’s invocation of patriotism often calls back to ‘ I WA N T
his Army service. But being a patriot shouldn’t have to
mean that Democrats support the military-industrial T O REM I N D
complex or give up the fight for social justice, says for- P EOP L E:
mer Maryland Congresswoman Donna Edwards, a Black
progressive. “I grew up in a military family, and I think NO T F ORG ET
for too long national Democrats have been reluctant to W H AT W E’
talk in those terms,” Edwards says. “I voted against de-
fense authorization bills. I voted against the war in Iraq. F IGH T I NG F OR.’ rying forward through the
There’s no reason Democrats can’t identify proudly as pa- —WES MOORE
triots and still work to change and improve the country.”
Asked if he wants to be President, Moore doesn’t
equivocate: “No.” But that hasn’t stopped national Democrats from buzz-
ing about his prospects. The comparisons with Obama are as instructive
as they are inescapable: two fatherless Black men with sparkling résumés
who built a political brand on memoirs that grappled with their compli-
cated identities. (Obama, too, was dogged by a publishing error that gave
ammunition to his haters, a 1991 promotional bio that wrongly said he
was born in Kenya and helped spark the racist birther theory.) Both staked
their mass appeal on a message of healing political divides—reclaiming a
United States of America from our patchwork of red and blue.
In the aftermath of Trump and George Floyd, that seems less possible
than ever, and Moore doesn’t pretend otherwise. Instead, he looks our
collective pain in the face, refuses to be defeated
by it, and presents his own love of country as
the reassuring embrace that can knit us back to-
gether. “I walk through life with an understand-
ing of this country’s inequities and its history,”
he says. “But I also walk through life with a hope
of the promise that this country has offered to
some, that we want to make sure that it offers
to all. That was the foundation that this country
was built on. That was its promise. That was its
hope. And so I’m simply asking this country to
live up to its ideals.”
The sun is going down on the Eastern Shore,
and the Legion hall has emptied out. For all his
sunniness, Moore is not exactly sanguine about
the state of things. “I think we’re in pretty
bad shape,” he says. “It’s not just that we’ve
watched how the rhetoric has been pitched
up, even more incidents of political violence,
antisemitism, homophobia, racism, etc. It’s that
we’ve stopped communicating. We’ve stopped
actually speaking to one another. We’re more
than happy retreating to our corners. And I
think it’s leaving a lot of people very frustrated
and stranded and angry and afraid.”
The forces that propelled Trump—forces
Moore sees as a continuation of the ones that
drove his grandfather from the country—
haven’t been defeated. “People have to under-
stand how dangerous this entire movement is,”
he says. “It just means that our pushback has
got to be that much more aggressive, that much
more thorough, and that much more loving. Be-
cause I don’t think that you
are going to be able to defeat
this thing simply by calling it
bad. You’ve got to defeat it by
also offering an alternative.”
L ET ’S Moore speaks of himself
as a receptacle into which his
ancestors’ hopes and dreams
RE have been “poured,” their
sacrifices and struggles car-
generations. “The police of-
ficers and the firefighters
and the teachers, or the en-
gineers or the custodians, or whoever it is who
are working every day to make other people’s
lives better—those are patriots,” he says. “They
didn’t believe in tearing down things. They be-
lieved that we actually had a moral obligation
to make things better than the way we found
it. Not to light things on fire and walk away as
the flames were igniting behind you. That’s not
patriotism. I want to remind people: let’s not
forget what we’re fighting for.” —With reporting
by Julia Zorthian 
49
 TECHNOLOGY

THE AI ARMS
RACE IS
CHANGING
EVERYTHING
Tech companies are betting big on AI.
Are they making the same old mistakes?
BY ANDREW R. CHOW
AND BILLY PERRIGO

To creaTe is human. For The pasT 300,000 years

we’ve been unique in our ability to make art, cuisine,
manifestos, societies: to envision and craft something
new where there was nothing before.
Now we have company. While you’re reading this sen-
tence, artificial intelligence (AI) programs are painting
cosmic portraits, responding to emails, preparing tax re-
turns, and recording metal songs. They’re writing pitch
decks, debugging code, sketching architectural blue-
prints, and providing health advice.
Artificial intelligence has already had a pervasive im-
pact on our lives. AIs are used to price medicine and
This image was created houses, assemble cars, determine what ads we see on
by award-winning AI social media. But generative AI, a category of system
artist Pindar Van Arman,
with the help of a
that can be prompted to create wholly novel content,
6-by-4-ft. robot. The is much newer.
robot, guided by AI, This shift marks the most important technological
spent 22 hours and breakthrough since social media. Generative AI tools
13,940 brushstrokes to have been adopted ravenously in recent months by a curi-
create a self-portrait of ous, astounded public, thanks to programs like ChatGPT,
itself and the artist which responds coherently (but not always accurately)
SELF-PORTR AIT BY ARTIST PINDAR VAN AR MAN AND HIS AI ROBOT FOR TIME 51
TECHNOLOGY
to virtually any query, and Dall-E,
which allows you to conjure any image
you dream up. In January, ChatGPT
reached 100 million monthly users, a
faster rate of adoption than Instagram
or TikTok. Hundreds of similarly aston-
ishing generative AIs are clamoring for
adoption, from Midjourney to Stable
Diffusion to GitHub’s Copilot, which
allows you to turn simple instructions
into computer code.
Proponents believe this is just the be-
ginning: that generative AI will reori-
ent the way we work and engage with
the world, unlock creativity and sci-
entific discoveries, and allow human-
ity to achieve previously unimaginable
feats. Forecasters at PwC predict that AI
could boost the global economy by over
$15 trillion by 2030.
This frenzy appeared to catch off
guard even the tech companies that
have invested billions of dollars in AI—
and has spurred an intense arms race
in Silicon Valley. In a matter of weeks,
Microsoft and Alphabet-owned Google
have shifted their entire corporate strat-
egies in order to seize control of what
they believe will become a new infra-
structure layer of the economy. Micro-
soft is investing $10 billion in OpenAI,
creator of ChatGPT and Dall-E, and an-
nounced plans to integrate generative
AI into its Office software and search
engine, Bing. Google declared a “code
red” corporate emergency in response to
the success of ChatGPT and rushed its
own search-oriented chatbot, Bard, to
market. “A race starts today,” Microsoft
INITIAL CAUTION
How powerful AIs went from closely held
secrets to public playthings
2015 MARCH
Stanford and Berkeley 2016 MARCH
researchers first Microsoft releases
describe the diffusion the Tay chatbot, but
algorithm that would quickly takes it offline
underpin later after it becomes
text-to-image tools Holocaust denying
52 TIME February 27/March 6, 2023
CEO Satya Nadella said Feb. 7, throw-
ing down the gauntlet at Google’s door.
“We’re going to move, and move fast.”
Wall Street has responded with
similar fervor, with analysts upgrading
the stocks of companies that mention
AI in their plans and punishing those
with shaky AI-product rollouts. While
the technology is real, a financial bub-
ble is expanding around it rapidly, with
investors betting big that generative AI
could be as market-shaking as Microsoft
Windows 95 or the first iPhone.
But this frantic gold rush could
also prove catastrophic. As companies
hurry to improve the tech and profit
from the boom, research about keep-
ing these tools safe is taking a back seat.
In a winner-takes-all battle for power,
Big Tech and their venture-capitalist
backers risk repeating past mistakes,
including social media’s cardinal sin:
prioritizing growth over safety. While
there are many potentially utopian as-
pects of these new technologies, even
tools designed for good can have un-
foreseen and devastating consequences.
This is the story of how the gold rush
began—and what history tells us about
what could happen next.
IN FACT, GENERATIVE AI knows the
problems of social media all too well.
AI-research labs have kept versions of
these tools behind closed doors for sev-
eral years, while they studied their po-
tential dangers, from misinformation
and hate speech to the unwitting cre-
ation of snowballing geopolitical crises.
2017 JUNE
Google
researchers first
describe the
transformer
algorithm that
would
turbocharge the
power of
chatbots
That conservatism stemmed in part
from the unpredictability of the neural
network, the computing paradigm that
modern AI is based on, which is inspired
by the human brain. Instead of the tra-
ditional approach to computer pro-
gramming, which relies on precise sets
of instructions yielding predictable re-
sults, neural networks effectively teach
themselves to spot patterns in data. The
more data and computing power these
networks are fed, the more capable they
tend to become.
In the early 2010s, Silicon Valley
woke up to the idea that neural net-
works were a far more promising route
to powerful AI than old-school pro-
gramming. But the early AIs were pain-
fully susceptible to parroting the biases
in their training data: spitting out mis-
information and hate speech. When
Microsoft unveiled its chatbot Tay in
2016, it took less than 24 hours for it to
tweet “Hitler was right I hate the jews”
and that feminists should “all die and
burn in hell.” OpenAI’s 2020 predeces-
sor to ChatGPT exhibited similar levels
of racism and misogyny.
The AI boom really began to take
off around 2020, turbocharged by sev-
eral crucial breakthroughs in neural-
network design, the growing availabil-
ity of data, and the willingness of tech
companies to pay for gargantuan levels
of computing power. But the weak spots
remained, and the history of embarrass-
ing AI stumbles made many companies,
including Google, Meta, and OpenAI,
mostly reluctant to publicly release
2020 JUNE
OpenAI reveals
2019 JANUARY the more powerful
Microsoft invests $1 billion GPT-3, but releases
in cash and computing it only to a small
power into OpenAI pool of users
FEBRUARY
OpenAI announces language
generator GPT-2, but doesn’t release
it publicly because of “concerns
about malicious applications”
 their cutting-edge models. In April
2022, OpenAI announced Dall-E 2, a
text-to-image AI model that could gen-
erate photorealistic imagery. But it ini-
tially restricted the release to a waitlist
of “trusted” users, whose usage would,
OpenAI said, help it to “understand and
address the biases that DALL·E has in-
herited from its training data.”
Even though OpenAI had on-
boarded 1 million users to Dall-E by
July, many researchers in the wider
AI community had grown frustrated
by OpenAI and other AI companies’
look-but-don’t-touch approach. In
August 2022, a scrappy London-based
startup named Stability AI went rogue
and released a text-to-image tool, Sta-
ble Diffusion, to the masses. Releasing
AI tools publicly would, according to a
growing school of thought, allow de-
velopers to collect valuable data from
users—and give society more time to
prepare for the drastic changes ad-
vanced AI would bring.
Stable Diffusion quickly became
the talk of the internet. Millions of
users were enchanted by its ability to
create art seemingly from scratch, and
the tool’s outputs consistently achieved
virality as users experimented with
different prompts and concepts. “You
had this generative Pandora’s box that
opened,” says Nathan Benaich, an inves-
tor and co-author of the 2022 State of AI
Report. “It shocked OpenAI and Google,
because now the world was able to use
tools that they had gated. It put every-
thing on overdrive.”
2021 MAY
Google announces
LaMDA, its own
chatbot, but
doesn’t release it
publicly
AUGUST
Startup
Stability AI
releases
text-to-image
tool Stable
2022 APRIL Diffusion
OpenAI reveals publicly
Dall-E 2 but doesn’t
make it widely
accessible
OpenAI quickly followed suit by
throwing open the doors to Dall-E 2.
Then, in November, it released ChatGPT
to the public, reportedly in order to beat
out looming competition. OpenAI CEO
Sam Altman emphasized in interviews
that the more people used AI programs,
the faster they would improve.
Users immediately flocked to
both OpenAI and its competitors. AI-
generated images flooded social media,
and one even won an art competition;
movie editors began using AI-assisted
software for Hollywood hits like Every-
thing Everywhere All at Once. Architects
are devising AI blueprints; coders are
writing AI-based scripts; publications
are releasing AI quizzes and articles.
Venture capitalists took notice, and
have thrown over a billion dollars at AI
companies that might unlock the next
great productivity boost. Chinese tech
giants Baidu and Alibaba announced
chatbots of their own, boosting their
share prices.
Microsoft, Google, and Meta, mean-
while, are taking the frenzy to extreme
levels. While each has stressed the im-
portance of AI for years, they all ap-
peared surprised by the dizzying surge
in attention and usage—and now seem
to be prioritizing speed over safety. In
February, Google announced plans to
release its ChatGPT rival Bard, and ac-
cording to the New York Times said in
a presentation that it will “recalibrate”
the level of risk it is willing to take when
releasing tools based on AI technology.
And in Meta’s recent quarterly earnings
SEPTEMBER
OpenAI publishes
Dall-E 2 for
public use NOVEMBER
Meta
publishes
Galactica, its
own chatbot,
but kills it
after intense
criticism of
NOVEMBER
false answers
OpenAI releases
ChatGPT publicly
call, CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared
his aim for the company to “become a
leader in generative AI.”
In this rush, mistakes and harms
from the tech have risen—and so has
the backlash. When Google demon-
strated Bard, one of its responses con-
tained a factual error about the Webb
Space Telescope—and Alphabet’s stock
cratered immediately after. Microsoft’s
Bing is also prone to returning false re-
sults. Deepfakes—realistic yet false
images or videos created with AI—are
being used to harass people or spread
misinformation: one widely shared
video showed a shockingly convincing
version of Joe Biden condemning trans-
gender people. And companies includ-
ing Stability AI are facing lawsuits from
artists and rights holders who object to
their work being used to train AI mod-
els without permission.
AS WORRYING AS these current issues
are, they pale in comparison with what
could emerge next if this race continues
to accelerate. Many of the choices being
made by Big Tech companies today mir-
ror those they made in previous eras,
which had devastating ripple effects.
Social media—the Valley’s last truly
world-changing innovation—carries the
first valuable lesson. It was built on the
promise that connecting people would
make our societies healthier and indi-
viduals happier. More than a decade
later, we can see that its failures came
not from that welcome connectedness,
but the way tech companies monetized
FEBRUARY
Microsoft previews
new Bing search
2023 engine with ChatGPT
JANUARY integration
Microsoft
plows
$10 billion
into OpenAI
FEBRUARY
Google announces
Bard, conversational-AI-
assisted search
53
TECHNOLOGY
it: by slowly warping our news feeds to
optimize for engagement, keeping us
scrolling through viral content inter-
spersed with targeted online advertis-
ing. True social connection has become
increasingly sparse on our feeds. At the
same time, our societies have been left
to deal with the second-order impli-
cations: a gutted news business, a rise
in misinformation, and a skyrocketing
teen mental-health crisis.
It’s not hard to see AI’s integration
into Big Tech products going down the
same road. Alphabet and Microsoft are
most interested in how AI will make
their search engines more valuable, and
have shown demos of Google and Bing
in which the first results users see are
AI-created. But Margaret Mitchell, chief
ethics scientist at the AI-development
platform Hugging Face, argues that
search engines are the “absolute worst
way” to use generative AI, because
it gets things wrong so often. Mitch-
ell says the actual strengths of AIs like
ChatGPT—assisting with creativity, ide-
ation, and menial tasks—are being side-
lined in favor of shoehorning the tech-
nology into moneymaking machines for
tech giants.
If search engines successfully inte-
grate AI, that subtle shift could deci-
mate the many businesses that rely on
search, either for ad traffic or business
referrals. Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, has
said the new AI-oriented Bing search
engine will drive more traffic, and there-
fore revenue, to publishers and adver-
tisers. But like the brewing pushback
against AI-generated art, many in the
media now fear a future where tech gi-
ants’ chatbots cannibalize content from
news sites, providing nothing in return.
The question of how AI companies
will monetize their projects also looms
large. For now, most are free to use, be-
cause their creators are following the
Silicon Valley playbook of charging lit-
tle or nothing for products to crowd out
competition, subsidized by huge in-
vestments from venture-capital firms.
While unsuccessful companies adopt-
ing this strategy slowly bleed money,
the winners often end up with vise-
like grips on markets they can control
as they see fit. Right now, ChatGPT is
ad-less and free to use. It’s also burn-
ing a hole in OpenAI’s pocketbook:
54 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
each individual chat costs the com- capabilities as the AI arms race heats up.
pany “single-digit cents,” according “When it comes to very power-
to its CEO. The company’s ability to ful technologies—and obviously AI is
weather huge losses right now, thanks going to be one of the most powerful
partly to Microsoft’s largesse, gives it a ever—we need to be careful,” Demis
huge competitive advantage. Hassabis, CEO of Google-owned AI lab
In February, OpenAI brought in a DeepMind, told TIME late last year.
$20 monthly charge for a subscription “Not everybody is thinking about those
tier of the chatbot. Google already pri- things. It’s like experimentalists, many
oritizes paid ads in search results. It’s of whom don’t realize they’re holding
not much of a leap to imagine it doing dangerous material.”
the same with AI-generated results. If Even if computer scientists succeed
humans come to rely on AIs for infor- in making sure the AIs don’t wipe us out,
mation, it will be increasingly difficult their increasing centrality to the global
to tell what is factual, what is an ad, and economy could make the Big Tech com-
what is completely made up. panies that control it vastly more power-
As profit takes precedence over ful. They could become not just the rich-
safety, some technologists and phi- est corporations in the world—charging
losophers warn of existential risk. whatever they want for commercial use
The explicit goal of many of these AI of this critical infrastructure—but also
companies—including geopolitical actors to
OpenAI—is to create rival nation-states.
an Artificial General The leaders of
Intelligence, or AGI,
that can think and
‘YOU HAD THIS OpenAI and Deep-
Mind have hinted that
learn more efficiently GENERATIVE they’d like the wealth
than humans. If future
AIs gain the ability to
PANDORA’S BOX and power emanating
from AI to be some-
rapidly improve them- THAT OPENED. how redistributed.
selves without human
guidance or interven- IT PUT EVERYTHING The Big Tech execu-
tives who control the
tion, they could po- ON OVERDRIVE.’ purse strings, on the
tentially wipe out hu- other hand, are primar-
manity. An oft-cited —Nathan Benaich, ily accountable to their
investor and co-author of
thought experiment is the 2022 State of AI Report shareholders.
that of an AI that, fol- Of course, many Sil-
lowing a command to icon Valley technolo-
maximize the number gies that promised to
of paper clips it can produce, makes it- change the world haven’t. We’re not
self into a world-dominating superin- all living in the metaverse. Crypto bros
telligence that harvests all the carbon who goaded nonadopters to “have fun
at its disposal, including from all life on staying poor” are nursing their losses or
earth. In a 2022 survey of AI research- even languishing behind prison bars.
ers, nearly half of the respondents said The streets of cities around the world
that there was a 10% or greater chance are littered with the detritus of failed
that AI could lead to such a catastrophe. e-scooter startups.
Inside the most cutting-edge AI But while AI has been subject to a
labs, a few technicians are working to similar level of breathless hype, the dif-
ensure that AIs, if they eventually sur- ference is that the technology behind
pass human intelligence, are “aligned” AI is already useful to consumers and
with human values. They are designing getting better at a breakneck pace: AI’s
benevolent gods, not spiteful ones. But computational power is doubling every
only around 80 to 120 researchers in the six to 10 months, researchers say. It is
world are working full time on AI align- exactly this immense power that makes
ment, according to an estimate shared the current moment so electrifying—
with TIME by Conjecture, an AI-safety and so dangerous. —With reporting
organization. Meanwhile, thousands by LesLie DicksTein and mariah
of engineers are working on expanding espaDa/new York □
 COVER STORE

ENJOY T I ME AT H O M E
S H OP S OM E O F T I M E ’S
MO S T IC O NI C C OV ER A R T.
TIMECOVERSTORE.COM
WORLD

SPAIN’S MINISTER OF EQUALITY IS PUTTING ONE OF

EUROPE’S MOST FEMINIST GOVERNMENTS TO THE TEST
By Lisa Abend/Madrid

It was a sunday mornIng In early February In madrId,

and Spain’s Minister of Equality was on a war footing. Having
eschewed business attire for the occasion, Irene Montero rose on
sneaker-clad feet from her seat onstage at a local cultural center
and addressed her supporters. A key reform on sexual violence
that her ministry had spearheaded was under attack, and the
meeting was intended to rally the troops from Unidas Podemos,
the progressive political party that she helps lead and which,
along with the Socialist Party, has formed Spain’s coalition gov-
ernment since January 2020. “This law is more than just a law,”
she said. “It’s a process of democratizing society. It is not the
ministry’s law, or the government’s, or the parliament’s. It is the
law of the women of this country.”
Spain is at an inflection point on gender. Since Montero be-
came Minister in 2020, a nation that not 50 years ago required
women to obtain their father’s or husband’s permission in order
to work has consolidated its position among Europe’s most femi-
nist countries. Her ministry has taken measures to combat ris-
ing rates of domestic violence, and introduced legislation that
extends LGBTQ rights, protects reproductive health—including
guaranteeing menstrual leave—and makes consent the deter-
mining factor in cases of sexual assault. In December, it also ap-
proved the so-called Trans Law, which allows people to declare
‘Sexual violence their own gender, rather than requiring a diagnosis of dysphoria.
In an interview with TIME late in January, Montero, 35, was
clear about her ambitions. “Without a doubt, I believe that the
is enormously function of government is to consolidate in public policy the
rights that the feminist movement, that women, are winning,”
normalized and she said. “As a government, we have to make a decision: Are we
going to dare to be part of the democratizing impulse that comes
invisible in our society.’ from the feminist movement and from civil society, or are we
going to maintain a more cowardly or conservative attitude?”
—IRENE MONTERO, Yet when it comes to social policy, innovation and back-
SPAIN’S MINISTER OF EQUALITY lash are often entwined. Thanks to recent controversy that has
PHOTOGR APH BY MARINA COENEN FOR TIME
Irene Montero
poses for a portrait
in Madrid on
Jan. 25
WORLD
erupted around some of her ministry’s
reforms, the government’s agenda—
and perhaps its very stability—are now
under threat. Is the crisis a sign of un-
bridgeable divisions between the pro-
gressive, feminist Spain that Montero
envisions and a conservative, patriar-
chal reality that remains entrenched?
Or is it a lesson in the perils of applying
ideology to society at large?
Montero has been imagining a more
progressive future for Spain since her
teens, when she first became politically
active. A member of Podemos since its
2014 founding, she rose quickly through
the party, and under her leadership the
Equality Ministry has helped convert
many of its feminist ideals into law.
The reforms she has spearheaded
have elicited both ecstatic praise and
harsh criticism from different sec-
tors of Spanish society. But none has
generated as much controversy as the
government’s new law, nicknamed
Solo sí es sí (Only yes means yes), which
went into effect last fall. The law does
away with distinctions in the penal code
that categorized sexual-assault offenses
based on whether violence and intimida-
tion were employed, and instead puts the
question of consent firmly at its center.
The reform is a direct response to
the notorious 2016 “La Manada” case,
in which a woman was gang-raped by
five men during the San Fermin festi-
val in Pamplona. Although the perpe-
trators, who referred to themselves as
“the wolf pack,” filmed the attacks, two
lower courts found them guilty only of
the lesser crime of sexual abuse since,
in the courts’ argument, there were no
signs the men had coerced the victim.
(Spanish law defined “sexual aggres-
sion,” which carried heavier punish-
ments, as requiring the use of violence
and intimidation.) Later, Spain’s Su-
preme Court would reverse those ver-
dicts and sentence the men to 15 years
in prison for rape. But by then, a pro-
test movement had brought hundreds
of thousands to the streets to denounce
both the sexist culture that had pro-
duced the crime, and a patriarchal ju-
dicial system that did not take violence
against women seriously.
Solo sí es sí does away with the old
distinction between sexual abuse and
58 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
sexual aggression. Now, in a country
in which, according to government fig-
ures, 1 in every 2 women has suffered
some kind of sexual violence, sexual ag-
gression covers everything from work-
place harassment to aggravated rape.
“It’s a good example of a reform that
emerged from the street,” Montero,
who was among those marching in the
protests, says. “Sexual violence is enor-
mously normalized and invisible in our
society: unwanted touching on public
transportation, rape, harassment in the
workplace. All of these need to be un-
derstood as violences that can destroy
women’s lives and that demand a re-
sponse on the part of the state.”
Many welcome the law, which also
created a fund for survivors of sexual
violence and established crisis centers
throughout Spain. “It’s a good and im-
portant piece of legislation that guaran-
tees the rights of women and is already
raising social consciousness,” says Uni-
versity of Cádiz law professor María
Acale Sánchez. But soon after Solo sí es sí
came into effect, it became clear that it
was provoking one major, and appar-
ently unintended, repercussion: some
previously convicted offenders were
having their sentences reduced.
“They created a single penal frame-
work where before there had been two,”
explains José Luis Díez Ripollés, profes-
sor of criminal law at the University of
Malaga. “So if before, sexual aggres-
sion with penetration had been pun-
ished with six to 12 years and sexual
abuse with penetration with four to 10
years, now all those crimes were subject
to four to 12 years.”
In Spain, as in many countries,
changes in sentencing guidelines can
be applied retroactively, and it wasn’t
long before convicted sex offenders
‘I think we may be
waging a political
war over how to
understand feminism.’
—MARISA SOLETO, FUNDACIÓN MUJERES
began petitioning courts to have their
sentences revised. As of publication,
nearly 500 had their jail time short-
ened, and more than 40 who had al-
ready fulfilled the new sentences had
been released.
Some critics have blamed the flaws
on what Díez Ripollés characterizes as
its “pronounced ideological posture
linked to feminist currents of thought.”
Predictably, some of the outcry has
come from Montero’s opponents; one
far-right MP not only called her a “rap-
ist liberator” on the floor of parliament
but also made scathing remarks about
Montero’s personal life—she is the do-
mestic partner of Podemos founder and
former leader Pablo Iglesias—that were
so misogynistic, they were condemned
by all other parties.
“This is what happens when the fem-
inist movement advances,” Montero
says of the verbal attacks. “It’s a contin-
uous strategy of harassment and tear-
ing you down, of scrutinizing your pri-
vate life with the intention, in the end,
to make it so it’s no longer worth it for
the women who are temporarily at the
forefront to continue.”
But even some of those who share
Montero’s objectives have questioned
the penal provisions of the law. Some
“antipunitive” feminists have regretted
that the focus on sentences has main-
tained punishment as a solution, rather
than social improvements and better
education. Others, like Marisa Soleto,
director of the women’s organization
Fundación Mujeres, suggest that the
government failed to prepare for what
the law really meant. “Perhaps some
of those responsible are too ambitious
and have wanted to run further with the
legal text of their reforms than was re-
ally possible at this moment in Spain.”
For her part, Montero says complica-
tions are to be expected with such a pro-
found change. “Like all paradigm shifts,
especially in the Penal Code, there’s
going to be a period of transition. And
that is what we are living now. The ma-
jority of courts are applying the law cor-
rectly and [maintaining] the sentences,
but there are some that are not.”
In November, she was more explicit,
telling the Spanish press that “ma-
chismo” could be inducing some judges
to “apply the law incorrectly.” In a coun-

try where 56% of judges are women, the
accusations have infuriated some mag-
istrates and exacerbated the tension.
“We consider those words incorrect,”
says Concepción Roig, a magistrate and
a spokesperson for the progressive asso-
ciation Judges for Democracy. The real-
ity, she says, is that differences in courts’
interpretations—nearly 40% of the sen-
tences reviewed have been lowered—are
a regular part of the judicial process. And
while some of the reviewed cases do leave
room for judicial interpretation, others
do not. In the case of attempted but un-
consummated rape, for example, “a judge
has no choice but to lower the sentence,”
says Roig. “The law obliges it.”
A few dAys after Montero told TIME
that her ministry had no intention of
revising the law, Spain’s Justice Min-
ister Pilar Llop, a member of the So-
PA B L O B L A Z Q U E Z D O M I N G U E Z— G E T T Y I M A G E S
cialist Party, proposed doing just that.
Her revision—while maintaining con-
sent as the determining factor in sexual
crimes—would restore violence and in-
timidation as considerations and raise
the sentences accordingly.
Montero objects. “We feminists
didn’t fight for a name change,” she
told the radio station SER on Feb. 9.
△
Protesters demonstrate in
Madrid against the “La Manada”
gang-rape verdict in April 2018
“We fought because our credibility and
the gravity of the crimes don’t depend
on whether there are marks on your
body ... We fought for a different way of
judging sexual crimes, where the focus is
not on the victim and whether she fought
back or kept her legs closed tightly.”
Amid the impasse between the
Equality and Justice ministries, calls
for Montero’s resignation—heard since
Solo sí es sí was passed—have become
louder. With elections due this year
and other parties exploring joining
forces to pass the proposed revision, it
is not inconceivable that she will decide
to step down. What that would mean
for the governing coalition is unclear,
but at a press conference on Feb. 10,
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez felt com-
pelled to say “all the Ministers have my
trust, including the Minister of Equal-
ity,” and assure the public that the gov-
erning coalition “is not going to break.”
Montero’s supporters appreciate
her tenacity. “We believe the Minister
has been very courageous and has held
her ground, despite all the pressure,”
says Encarní Bonilla, spokesperson for
Chrysallis, a trans organization, which
has watched with dismay similar efforts
to weaken a law that allows people to
declare their own genders.
But others suggest Montero may be
more entranced with ideology than is
good for a politician—or for Spanish
feminism. “I think we may be waging
a political war over how to understand
feminism around the decisions that the
Ministry of Equality is making,” says
Soleto. “The organizations we work
with are always reminding them that
women have other kinds of real needs.”
On Feb. 9, Montero’s ministry re-
sponded to some of those needs by im-
plementing a new protocol that gives
police the ability to inform women if
their partners have a history of domes-
tic violence. And in any case, she em-
braces the notion that she is driven by
ideology. “Politics is ideology,” she says
with characteristic passion. “Thinking
about how we want our society to be is
a fundamentally ideological question.
Confronted with a form of organizing
society that is unjust, that generates
inequality, that causes suffering: What
are we going to do?” —With reporting by
Simmone Shah/new York 
59
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TIME100 LEADERSHIP SERIES

KING
OF THE
WORLD
BY ELIANA DOCKTERMAN

After weathering a
decade of skepticism,
James Cameron
revels in the success
of the Avatar sequel

WELCOME TO THE ERA REBECCA MAKKAI’S ENIGMATIC NOVEL A NEW FILM FILLS IN THE GAPS
OF THE COZY MYSTERY TAKES US BACK TO HIGH SCHOOL IN EMILY BRONTË’S LIFE

PHOTOGR APH BY NIKI BOON 61

TIME OFF OPENER

J
ames Cameron wanted a vegan set
on Avatar: The Way of Water. Anything
less would be hypocritical. The sci-fi
epic, which reportedly cost more than
$350 million, centers on aliens fending
off invading humans who have depleted earth’s
resources. “We couldn’t lecture oil companies
and turn around and eat hamburgers,” he says.
Cameron may have also intended to make
a larger point to Hollywood. When the direc-
tor brought the idea for the first Avatar to
20th Century Fox, he says executives asked
him to strip the script of “tree hugging” be-
cause they thought it wouldn’t sell tickets. He
refused. Avatar went on to achieve massive suc-
cess, grossing nearly $3 billion globally. Since
then, other movies like Avengers: Infinity War
have tackled climate change. Still, that Marvel
blockbuster doesn’t exactly endorse green activ-
ism. In fact, it’s the villain who becomes so con-
cerned with waning resources that he uses magic
to snap his fingers and demolish half of all life in
the universe. “I can relate to Thanos,” Cameron
says. “I thought he had a pretty viable answer.
The problem is nobody is going to put up their
hand to volunteer to be the half that has to go.”
As one of the most successful directors in his-
tory, Cameron could have snapped his fingers ‘All the
and mandated the new on-set catering rules. naysayers
After all, he has made three of the four highest-
grossing movies of all time, and never lost a suddenly
single dollar on any of his nine feature films. don’t exist.’
Over Super Bowl weekend, two of his movies,
Way of Water and a 25th-anniversary rerelease
of Titanic, topped the global box office. indication that at 68 years old, the exacting vi-
But the famously mercurial director is at- sionary has started to chill out.
tempting to become a more collaborative leader. Way of Water, which Cameron admits is a per-
So he solicited the opinion of his crew. “We all sonal film, charts a similar journey for its hero
sat down together in a council circle,” he says. Jake Sully (Sam Worthington). After infiltrat-
“I said, ‘This is what I want to do. If everyone ing the alien race known as the Na’vi in the origi-
wants to start screaming and throwing stuff at nal, Jake has settled down with his love, Neytiri
me, maybe we won’t do it. But if people grudg- (Zoe Saldaña), and their brood of children—five
ingly nod, then we’re going ahead.’” They grudg- kids, just like Cameron. An ex-soldier, Jake barks
ingly nodded. Whether it occurred to Cameron orders at his family, not unlike a director. The kids
that one of the 200 crew members might not feel chafe, and Jake has to learn how to trust them.
comfortable objecting to their boss is unclear. But even this more enlightened Cameron
Still, he’s trying. The shoot for Titanic was no- hasn’t lost his edge. In the 1990s, Hollywood
toriously grueling: Kate Winslet said she almost executives predicted Titanic would fop. It not
drowned twice, chipped a bone in her elbow, only set box-office records, but the movie is still
and endured tirades from Cameron—though she tied for the most Oscars won in a single night.
added that he yelled at the crew even more than A similar narrative dogged both Avatars. Be-
at the actors. She insisted that a studio would fore its release, the general consensus was that
have to “pay me a lot of money to work with Way of Water’s delays, bloated budget, and lack
Jim again.” Decades later, she not only signed of diehard fans would kill the franchise. But
on to Way of Water but also learned to hold her Way of Water has made $2.2 billion so far and is
breath for over seven minutes for the role. Her currently vying with Titanic to become the third
decision to return to the water tank with Cam- highest-grossing film of all time. (The original
eron, despite previous grievances, is perhaps an Avatar is still the first.)

Cameron can’t help but crow. At this point,
who can blame him? “Everyone made a big deal
out of ‘It’s been 13 years, there’s no cultural foot-
print, blah blah blah,’” he says. “All the naysayers
suddenly don’t exist.”
Cameron logs on to our video call from
O P E N I N G PA G E : T H E H O L LY W O O D R E P O R T E R ; T H E S E PA G E S : 2 0 T H C E N T U R Y S T U D I O S
New Zealand. He is working out of the office
where Peter Jackson once labored over the Lord
of the Rings movies. His production team has
projected a massive photo of the Titanic behind
him for our two-hour conversation, a looming re-
minder of his success. When I ask if we can begin
the interview he quips, “Fortune favors the bold.”
“Well, maybe not always,” I say, gesturing to
the picture of the high-tech marvel on which
some 1,500 people lost their lives. Cameron nods
and raises a finger to punctuate an addendum.
“Fortune doesn’t favor the careless.”
Cameron’s critics have called him stubborn,
abrasive, and unrealistically ambitious. But
he’s not careless. The director, who was born
in Northern Ontario, is entirely self-taught: He
photocopied dissertations on filmmaking that
LEADERSHIP SERIES
he had found in the USC library between shifts
driving a truck to deliver hot lunches to Califor-
nia schools. On those runs, the passenger seat
held binders full of his photocopies on visual-
effects technology, knowledge that would even-
tually allow Cameron help design a camera that
became the basis of the model currently attached
to the Mars rover and another that could shoot
actors underwater.
What he couldn’t study was how to make a
film financially successful. And yet his movies
drive return visits to theaters. Audiences saw
Titanic and came back with friends and family
in tow to watch it over and over again. Though
Way of Water premiered below box-office expec-
tations, it has proved to have a long tail. “There
was a guy in the Netherlands who just hit 100
times he’s seen it in movie theaters,” says Cam-
eron. “Not sure I want to meet that person. But
certainly anecdotally, many, many people are
seeing it two, three, four times.”
After the first Avatar achieved historic suc-
cess in 2009, Fox was eager to make a sequel.
But Cameron took a break—though his vacations
are rarely relaxing: He designed a submarine
and cozied into its 43-in.-wide cockpit to be-
come the first person to complete a solo dive to
the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the sea.
He produced documentaries about the oceans,
invested in a pea-protein factory for vegan food,
and worked with Indigenous groups in Brazil to
advocate for the Amazon. (Cameron has been
criticized for appropriating Indigenous cultures
△ in Avatar. He has said his intention is to celebrate
James Cameron Indigenous cultures.)
talks to actor Cameron then spent years laying out what
Joel David Moore was originally supposed to be a trilogy but bal-
on the Avatar: looned into a five-movie epic about the standoff
The Way between the Na’vi of Pandora and human colo-
of Water set nists. “I was trying to do a simulation of, OK,
I’m Peter Jackson making Lord of the Rings ex-
cept Lord of the Rings doesn’t exist yet, so I need
to go be Tolkien and create Lord of the Rings, and
then I can go be Peter Jackson.” He grins as he
compares himself to two celebrated storytellers.
“A little bit cheeky and ambitious,” he admits.
“But I wasn’t adapting some big pantheon of
books that existed. I had to go do that.”
Yet even Cameron needed help. In 2013,
he provided a writers’ room with 800 pages of
The TIME100 notes, generously whittled down from his origi-
Leadership Series, nal 1,300. The group outlined the story in six
presented in
partnership with Rolex, months and then spent the better part of a de-
profiles members of the cade writing the films that Disney, which bought
TIME100 community—
the world’s most 20th Century Fox in 2019, has pledged to make
influential people. with Cameron. All of the writers, save one, had
For video conversations
and more, visit
episodic-television experience because Cam-
time.com/leaders eron wanted each movie to feel complete while
63

teasing what would come ahead—like a good sea-
son of TV. “We’re not only in the sequel game,”
he says. “We’re also in the saga game.”
That plan may have proved fruitful at the box
office but has yet to win over some critics. De-
spite being nominated for four Oscars, Way of
Water still faces skepticism among Academy
members. More often than not, the Academy fa-
vors smaller, more intimate dramas over sci-fi
epics that rely on motion-capture technology to
render human actors into aliens. Though the film
snagged a Best Picture nomination, Cameron and
the actors were overlooked.
“How do you compare Tár to Avatar?” Cam-
eron asks. “How do you judge which one is bet-
ter? It’s ludicrous on its face.” For years, the Acad-
emy has worried that featuring little-seen films
will only further diminish the shrinking audience
for the Oscars, but it has still resisted honoring
blockbusters. “I think it’s a bit elitist in a way that
at least they shouldn’t be mystified as their au-
dience numbers go down. It’s been a long time
since a crowd pleaser won for Best Picture.” Still,
he admits, “From experience, it’s better to win
than not win. It’s better to be nominated than not
nominated, no matter how much you want intel-
lectually to argue the whole thing away.”
Cameron’s best ideas come to him in dreams.
The filmmaker often quips that he has a free
streaming service running in his mind every
night. He wakes up, sketches, and retroactively
constructs a narrative to reach the image in his
mind’s eye. The Terminator was born from a vi-
sion of the killing machine’s endoskeleton. He
manifested Avatar after a dream about a bio-
luminescent forest.
For me, Cameron’s most indelible image is a
sinewy Sarah Connor (played by Linda Hamilton,
64 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
△
Zoe Saldaña, whom Cameron later married and divorced)
Sam Worthington, doing chin-ups at the beginning of Terminator 2,
Kate Winslet, and her muscles so radical on a female frame at the
Cliff Curtis on set; time that my young mind seized onto her as the
an underwater platonic ideal of a strong woman. Cameron has a
scene; Cameron particular obsession with ruthless mothers, from
takes the helm
Sarah Connor guarding her messiah son with a
shotgun in Terminator 2 to Sigourney Weaver’s
Ellen Ripley donning the exoskeleton in Aliens
to save her surrogate daughter. “There’s noth-
ing more primal than a mama bear protecting
her cub,” says Cameron. The director credits his
mother, who joined the Canadian Army Reserve
and came home with a rifle, as his inspiration.
In Way of Water, Winslet’s pregnant character
Ronal grabs her weapons to head for war. Her
husband suggests that maybe she stay home,
and she snarls, “We ride!” Cameron wrote that
scene seven years ago, before seeing something
similar in John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place in
which Emily Blunt’s character takes on a mon-
ster with a shotgun shortly after giving birth.
“I had already had that idea—I’m not trying to
take credit for being first or anything—but I
loved that because we never see that in movies,”
says Cameron. “Pregnancy is treated as a con-
dition or affliction as opposed to a natural part
of the human life cycle.” He muses that women
have been delivering babies in precarious cir-
cumstances for centuries. “They might be giving
birth, and 10 seconds later spearing a sabertooth
tiger that happened to attack the camp. They
don’t have a choice. That’s how we evolved,”
he says. “If people don’t buy it, they need to do
their research.”
Even as Cameron has been praised for his ca-
pable female characters, he’s also taken heat for
his unwavering definition of what makes for
a feminist hero. The sabertooth-tiger image is
 enticing for a movie director. But it is a fantasy.
The idea of fighting a wild cat after giving birth
may empower some women but isolate many
who have endured complicated or even life-
threatening births. It’s almost as if these musings
come from a man who has never been pregnant.
Similarly, when he opines on how female
superheroes should dress, he does so without
the particular female experience of being judged
based on one’s appearance. When Patty Jenkins’
Wonder Woman debuted in 2017, Cameron com-
plained about the character’s outfit, which he
still believes serves “an objectified paradigm.”
He has a point. But he also admits he’s probably
not the person to be criticizing female direc-
tors. “I don’t have an issue with Wonder Woman.
I loved the movie,” he says, quickly. “What was
elusive to me at the moment was it’s OK if the
woman wants to be beautiful and dress well not
for the male gaze, but for her own gaze in the
mirror, right? I had maybe missed that part of it
at the time,” he says. “You know, life is about
stumbling and people push back and we talk
about it and things get better.”
Still, he can’t help but qualify his mea culpa.
“It was necessary to have a female director own
a major action movie,” he says before adding,
“though Kathryn Bigelow had been doing that
for a while.” He sings the praises of Bigelow,
who happens to be his ex-wife, for directing
movies like Point Break that plumb the depths
of male relationships. In 2010, Bigelow be-
came the first female director to win an Oscar,
for The Hurt Locker, another movie about the
2 0 T H C E N T U R Y S T U D I O S (3)
complex male psyche. (She also happened to
beat out Cameron for Best Picture.) “She would
have turned down any superhero movie she
was offered if it was a female lead. And that’s
the healthier perspective, I think, personally,”
he says. “Why not have women direct male
characters? Have a woman direct Batman.
Now, you’re talking.”
Given that Cameron wrote the first draft of
Avatar in 1995, he will likely spend the rest of his
career in the world of Pandora. “As long as I don’t
get hit by a cement truck, we’re going to try to keep
the quality up,” he says. He describes Movie 4 as a
“corker” and says Movie 5 brings it all home “with
a thunderclap.” He teases that, yes, we will see an
earth decimated by climate change, but none of
the movies will actually be set there. He wants to
focus on how to save a planet, not destroy one.
That’s an awful long time to spend in one imag-
inary universe, especially for a filmmaker who has
ping-ponged from sci-fi thrillers to romantic epics
to underwater documentaries. When I ask if he
ever thinks about doing anything else, he claims
he’s already been there and done most of that:
“I have found a deep vein that I can mine here,
a connection with global audiences—why squan-
der that?” These movies afford him an oppor-
tunity to manifest nearly every image he’s ever
wanted to see onscreen and an unprecedented
platform to spread his conservationist message.
He will remain an activist. “But there are many
other worthy people doing that approach,” he says.
“I made a decision that the best use of my skill set
and my voice was to do what I’m doing right now.”
He has shot Avatar 3 and the first act of
‘Have a Avatar 4, at which point there will be a big
woman time jump in the story. He estimates he will spend
at least eight more years churning out the remain-
direct ing movies—if he stops at Avatar 5. “It might be
Batman. open-ended after that,” he says. “But there will
come a point where I’ll have to pass the baton,
Now, you’re just physiologically. Mortality is going to come
talking.’ knocking on the door at some point.” 
65
TIME OFF CULTURE

ESSAY

The strange case

of the resurgent
whodunit
BY JUDY BERMAN

The Third season of The neTflix Thriller

You ended with a red herring. Fresh of murder-
ing his deranged wife, torching their suburban
California home, and faking his own death, serial
killer and hopeless romantic Joe Goldberg (Penn
Badgley) resurfaced steps away from the Eifel
Tower. Fans joked that Emily “In Paris” Cooper
would be his next victim.
Alas, it was a fake-out. The real action of
Season 4 unfolds in London, where the bookish
Joe, posing as a university literature instructor,
falls in with a clique of posh lowlifes and wakes
up with a corpse in his apartment. Upon receiv-
ing an invitation to “a night to die for,” it dawns
on him: “A circle of privileged suspects, a frame
job, and now a cryptic invite evoking a British
murder mystery. Sh-t. I’m in a whodunit, the
lowest form of literature.”
He’s not alone. A genre that exploded a cen-
tury ago is staging a timely comeback. Because
the term cozy mystery has such a precise mean-
ing, I’ll call them low-stakes murder mysteries;
yes, people die, but the mood remains light. The
category encompasses true cozies like Kenneth all that stands in the way of justice and
Branagh’s Agatha Christie adaptations, Murder harmony is one little murder that’s
on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile, and sure to be solved. Of course, justice
creative, irreverent updates, from Only Murders doesn’t always look the same today as
in the Building and The Afterparty to Rian John- it did in Christie’s time.
son’s Knives Out movies. I’d also include John-
son’s throwback howcatchem Poker Face and Christie, with her idiosyncratic
even The Traitors, a reality competition set in a detectives and telegenic backdrops,
Scottish castle. still casts a tall shadow over the low-
Given contemporary viewers’ seemingly stakes whodunit. Though vastly in-
bottomless appetite for gory, exploitative true ferior to Sidney Lumet’s classic 1974
crime, the resurgence of the comparatively adaptation, Branagh’s Orient Express
wholesome whodunit might seem unlikely. But grossed more than $350 million on a
pop culture is a dialectic; every overplayed trend $55 million budget. Every year or two,
makes its opposite refreshing. Psychology Today British TV cranks out a new Christie
has noted that murder mysteries of all kinds miniseries, which in the U.S. have be-
function as “fairy tales for adults” that “help us come key titles on Anglophile stream-
move from fear to reassurance.” ing services like Acorn and BritBox.
The low-stakes murder mystery adds not just Overt homages to the Queen of Crime
the escapism of a quaint or rarefied setting, but tend to come with a self-aware, meta
also the virtual companionship of an intimate flourish. The droll 2022 mystery movie
IRL milieu—which feels especially precious in See How They Run unfolds among
our internet-mediated, pandemic-stunted times. the 1950s West End cast and crew of
If the whodunit is the hook, then the underlying Christie’s The Mousetrap, which is also
fantasy is of living in a safe, closed system where coming to Broadway this year.
66 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
 But the quintessential contempo-
rary low-stakes murder mystery might
be The Afterparty. Imaginative, funny,
and stacked with beloved comic actors
like Tiffany Haddish and Ilana Glazer,
the Apple TV+ comedy, which returns
for a second season on April 28, takes
place on the night of a high school
reunion where Sam Richardson’s
Aniq has resolved to finally tell his
old friend Zoë (Zoë Chao) he’s in love
with her. Hours later, their classmate,
pop star Xavier (Dave Franco), falls
to his death off his balcony. Xavier
had been hosting an afterparty, and
the colorful guests are still present
when the cops arrive. Motives are
revealed in episode-length flashbacks
that each take on genre conventions
of their own. For Aniq, the evening is
a rom-com; for Zoë’s belligerent ex
(Ike Barinholtz), it’s an action movie.
The show has many hallmarks of a
cozy: eccentric characters, a party, a
large but finite list of suspects, a light-
hearted mood. The victim is too awful
to mourn. Misdirection abounds. Yet
the genre play, along with a diverse
cast, modernizes The Afterparty. And
the element of comfort comes less
from the glamorous setting than from
the show’s hangout-comedy vibe.
For Poker Face, the hangout is the
whole point. More Columbo than Mar-
ple, the Peacock case-of-the-week se-
ries casts Natasha Lyonne as a scruffy
amateur detective on the run from a
powerful enemy. Because we witness
the murder in the opening scenes,
each episode’s pleasure comes out
of watching Lyonne parachute into
distinct social worlds populated by
unique personalities: truckers, BBQ
pitmasters, a washed-up metal band.
According to Johnson, guest stars
ranging from Chloë Sevigny to Cheers
alum John Ratzenberger were cast
purely to “give you joy.”
As chArming as a low-stakes mys-
ART WORK BY G ABRIELLE WIDJA JA FOR TIME
tery can be, Joe Goldberg is hardly the
first to disparage the genre’s weak-
ness for cheap suspense and cliché. In
a New Yorker essay published at the
height of the whodunit craze in 1944,
Edmund Wilson complained that
Christie’s “writing is of a mawkishness
and banality which seem to me literally
impossible to read.” And of the genre at large, he
concluded: “As a department of imaginative writ-
ing, it looks to me completely dead.”
As the literary establishment has grown
friendlier toward genre fiction, the critiques have
changed. In a perceptive 2019 essay for the At-
lantic, Alyse Burnside argued that the cozy, in its
denial of murder’s ugly realities, was more repre-
hensible than its lurid true-crime cousin: “This
sort of world—insulated, replete with homemade
baked goods and chaste love affairs, stripped of
loss—alleviates the need to interrogate what is
so seductive to humans about violence.” The ar-
gument jibes with Wilson’s hypothesis that the
whodunit thrived between the World Wars be-
cause humanity was, at the time, “ridden by an
all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of im-
pending disaster which it seemed hopeless to try
to avert.” In such a morally complex world, what
a relief it was to see an evildoer identified and
find “he is not, after all, a person like you or me.”
The issues of today are still harder to parse.
Justice Yet instead of retreating further from reality, the
isn’t the low-stakes mystery has, in many cases, evolved
same beyond apolitical prudery. While Richard Os-
man’s folksy Thursday Murder Club series is the
today as big hit in bookstores, with over 500,000 print
it was in copies sold in the U.S., according to Nielsen
BookScan, and a movie from producer Steven
Christie’s Spielberg on the way, there’s a long tail of who-
time dunits with queer protagonists and feminist
themes. Others are set among immigrants or
communities of color, or on social media.
Many of these titles evoke a vision of justice
more systemic than individual. Johnson sneaked
critiques of racism, classism, and xenophobia
into Knives Out and took on egomaniacal
tech titans in the 2022 sequel, Glass Onion.
HBO smash The White Lotus—one of TV’s
most provocative social satires, which roasted
economic inequality in its first season and love
under patriarchy in its second—is in many ways
a low-stakes murder mystery. The setting is
luxurious, the tone darkly comic, the scripts
chatty. Someone is killed in each season, but
since we don’t learn the victim’s identity until
the finale, grief and gore never overshadow the
quotidian misadventures of rich vacationers.
And now You takes its turn, pushing the sub-
version to a wonderfully absurd extreme. The
show that skewered wellness culture and influ-
encers in past seasons invents, in the new epi-
sodes, a social-justice-driven murderer nick-
named the Eat the Rich Killer. You know the
whodunit as wealth satire has become a trend-
let unto itself when it’s inspiring parodies of its
own. “The lowest form of literature” has never
looked so sophisticated. 
67
TIME OFF BOOKS
PROFILE
Rebecca Makkai goes
back to high school
BY CADY LANG
if your presenT self could reckon wiTh
the past, what would you try to resolve? That’s
the question that haunts Bodie Kane, the protag-
onist of I Have Some Questions for You, Rebecca
Makkai’s slow-burning crime novel, to be pub-
lished Feb. 21. Bodie, a 40-something film pro-
fessor and popular podcaster, has moved on
from everything that happened at Granby, the
tony New Hampshire boarding school where her
roommate Thalia was murdered during their se-
nior year. But when Bodie is invited back to cam-
pus to teach a podcasting course, she’s forced to
revisit long-buried dark truths.
For Makkai, engaging with the past is a daily
reality. For the past 21 years, the author, 44,
has lived on the campus of the Illinois boarding
school that she attended as a day student in the
1990s. Makkai returned to her alma mater after
her husband got a job teaching there, expect-
ing to stay just a few years—two decades later,
their daughter is a student at the school. With
high school memories lurking around every
corner, Makkai discovered that spending most
of her adult life on her adolescent stomping
grounds is an experience that lends itself to spin-
ning a haunting tale.
“Because of where I live, this idea of rewriting
the self—the palimpsest of who I was and who I
am, while the place stays the same—is often on
my mind,” says Makkai, speaking from her home
office in a girls’ dormitory.
In the novel, Thalia’s murder has become no-
torious in true-crime circles, and questions still
swirl around whether or not Omar, the school’s
Black athletic trainer serving a life sentence for
the crime, was really responsible. Bodie, now
older, wiser, and awakened to the realities of
sexual predation and a racist criminal-justice
system, has doubts of her own. And, because
of a few things she remembers from her time
as Thalia’s roommate, she also has a strong sus-
picion about who might really have killed her
friend. Disturbed by the realization that she
may have played a role in a wrongful conviction,
Bodie nudges her students toward investigating
the case for the podcast class, setting off events
that will find all the key players in the tragedy
back in the insular world of Granby for a high-
stakes reunion.
To build out the murder-mystery element of
68 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
the book, Makkai researched real murder cases
where high school students were primary wit-
nesses, noting how social dynamics like popular-
ity may have affected their testimonies. Tradi-
tional crime-fiction elements aside, the novel is
ultimately a fully adult cultural critique, sweep-
ing into its gaze the proliferation of podcasts,
cancel culture, systemic racism, our obsession
with true crime, and true crime’s obsession with
white women victims. It calls into question our
relationships to memory and power while also
challenging readers to reconsider how we think
about race, sex, and class.
“The original heart of the story was this idea
of what happens when people come back to-
gether,” Makkai says. “Not just to have a few
drinks and look through old yearbooks, but be-
cause they need to reckon with something that
society saw a certain way a long time ago—and
how people’s perceptions really changed.”
△
Makkai’s fifth Makkai is the author of three previous nov-
book explores els and a collection of short stories, and though
cultural tensions
through a
the books take place in distinct worlds, an ob-
boarding-school session with the passage of time runs through
murder mystery them all. Her 2014 novel The Hundred-Year
House focuses on a century of secrets held by
generations of a family, while 2018’s The Great
Believers, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, tra-
verses three decades to tell the story of a friend
group shaped by the AIDS epidemic. But I Have
Some Questions for You tackles the impact of
time most overtly.
In the book, Bodie’s return to the boarding
school presents constant run-ins with the past:
teaching on campus brings back humiliations
she suffered as an outsider, acutely aware of
her socioeconomic class difference as a scholar-
ship kid; a walk across a bridge in the woods
evokes dark recollections of her hidden familial
trauma; a chapel where she helped produce mu-
sical theater productions triggers memories of
a male teacher—now seen in a new light—who
was overly familiar with female students. The
rural New England school is a place where time
stands still in contrast to the rapidly changing
world around it, making Bodie’s re-entry that
much more jarring.
Makkai doesn’t want to overstate the parallels
between Bodie’s experience and her own. Her
school was in the suburbs of Chicago, which felt
far less isolated than the invented Granby. And
while Bodie’s education exposed her to new lev-
els of darkness, Makkai’s parents, linguistics pro-
fessors who were active in the local arts scene,
sent her to the school to find a more welcoming
environment, since she was young for her grade
and a self-described “nerd.”

What Bodie and Makkai do share in com-
mon is that both felt like outsiders at certain
points during their time in school—and both
have gained perspective since then. As a stu-
dent, Bodie was painfully aware of how every-
thing from her clothing and finances to her
MAK K AI: COURTESY BRE T T SIMISON
family history differed from her classmates’;
in adulthood, she’s able to recognize how she
has advanced in life because of her access to
that upper-crust community and, more largely,
her status as a white woman. Makkai, her-
self a scholarship student, drew on her expe-
riences to probe the push and pull of feeling
◁
The author spoke
from her home office
in a girls’ dormitory
like an outsider in a system that still
largely benefits you.
Recent yeaRs have been marked
by a collective desire for reflection
and redemption. From the Me Too
movement to calling out rampant mi-
sogyny in early-aughts media cover-
age, cultural debate has been focused
on revisiting the past to acknowledge
wrongs and correct biased narratives.
For Makkai, the current climate
has been affirming, especially when it
comes to the ’90s, the time when both
she and her protagonist were in high
school. She points to that era as one of
the last when silence was considered to
be an acceptable response to societal ills
like those that take place in the book.
Looking back on her own way of
navigating the world has brought
fresh clarity on how much things have
changed. “I was troubled by things
that happened back then. But the gen-
eral ethos was that it would be my
problem, for not being ‘chill’ enough,”
she says. Bodie remembers a classmate
who consistently made sexual remarks
about her, a friend’s possessive boy-
friend, all the comments that she and
her classmates made about Omar when
he was named a suspect in Thalia’s
murder. She meets her students and
thinks, “Oh my God, these kids would
never put up with the things we put up
with. Why did we?” she says.
But Makkai is less interested in pass-
ing harsh judgments on the past than
in understanding how people reconcile
‘Eventually, their former selves and relationships
every cell in with the present, juxtaposing what we
sacrifice and what we gain as we evolve.
your body is She’s fascinated by the echoes and con-
different.’ tradictions and how no one is limited to
either the past or the present.
“If you think about it, eventually,
every cell in your body is different,”
Makkai says. “If you don’t believe in
the soul, what is the self? It basically
becomes memories. You are the sum
of your memories, the sum of your
experiences.” 
69
TIME OFF MOVIES
REVIEW
The most mysterious Brontë,
revealed and unsolved
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
You probablY know righT off The baT wheTher
you’re a Wuthering Heights person or a Jane Eyre per-
son. Both, of course, are great. But as chilling as Charlotte
Brontë’s mad-wife-in-the-attic yarn may be, her sister
Emily’s book—a story of melancholic obsession, of love
that seeps into the soil of the grave, of pearl gray skies and
majestic, gnarled tree branches—speaks to even darker re-
cesses of the human spirit. It’s a book you either embrace
forever or want to burn after reading.
We know relatively little about the woman who wrote
Wuthering Heights, but Frances O’Connor’s directorial
debut, Emily—which blends fact with fanciful fiction—
paints a haunting and sympathetic portrait of the person
she might have been. Emma Mackey (Sex Education) plays
Emily, the next-to-youngest daughter of an uptight York-
shire curate (Adrian Dunbar), long widowed. The sheltered
and clearly eccentric Emily adores her younger sister Anne
(Amelia Gething), whose extravagant imagination dovetails
with her own, and older brother Branwell (Fionn White-
head), a painter and aspiring writer who strives to live by
romantic ideals. Emily is both shocked and inspired when
she sees the words Freedom in thought tattooed in floating
script on his forearm.
But her relationship with her older sister Charlotte
(Alexandra Dowling) is fraught. Charlotte’s affection for
Emily is electrified by passive-aggressive undercurrents,
and eventually by jealousy. She grasps that Emily is some-
how both of this earth and not. Early in the movie, she
70 Time February 27/March 6, 2023
◁
Jackson-Cohen and
Mackey: a union of
souls, gothic-style
offers a succinct, damning review of
her sister’s manuscript: “It’s an ugly
book—base and ugly!” But one per-
son’s base ugliness is another’s earthy
beauty, and that’s the sturdy vine of
thought O’Connor traces here. As
Mackey plays her, Emily is wild as
a thistle; her eyes seem to be lit by
strange thoughts she dares not speak
aloud. Then she meets the young cu-
rate hottie William Weightman (Oliver
Jackson-Cohen), who appears to see
straight into her soul. In the vision of
Emily, it’s the intensely erotic but ill-
fated love affair between these two
that inspires Wuthering Heights.
Is thAt how it really went down?
Almost certainly not, although Weight-
man was a real person, and one with
whom Emily Brontë would have been
acquainted. (He was also, report-
edly, an enormous flirt.) Still, there’s
a kind of emotional truth to the way
Emily O’Connor—best known as an actor,
Brontë is having starred in Mansfield Park and
A.I. Artificial Intelligence—tells this
somehow story. When Emily finds a tube forth-
both of rightly labeled elixir of opium
among her brother’s things, her curios-
this earth ity is piqued; a few beats later, we see
and not her pinned eyes, looking weirder and
more feral than before.
In real life, poor Branwell really
was undone at least partly by opium.
Might Emily have tried it too? Again,
unlikely—but the suggestion is that
the book she ultimately wrote couldn’t
have been more mystically charged
even if she had. Emily, who died at
age 30 in 1848, is the most mysterious
Brontë, partly because Charlotte, who
survived her, appears to have exerted
some control over her life story. The
best this heady, evocative un-biopic
can do is surf the wave of her unknow-
ability. Even so, Emily poured so much
ardent, forbidden energy into Wuther-
ing Heights that it might be consid-
BLEECK ER STREE T
ered a spiritual fingerprint. Wherever
this book came from, it’s as real as the
sound of the wind. 
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Elizabeth Banks The actor-filmmaker on
helming the horror comedy Cocaine Bear, the right
kind of gore, and defying expectations
What drew you to a project about a
bear overdosing on cocaine during
a botched 1985 drug-smuggling
operation? I read this script in
April 2020, when chaos was all
around, and I just thought, There’s
no greater emblem of chaos than a
bear high on cocaine. More impor-
tantly, this is the movie I want to see.
I knew there was this high concept
hook in the rampaging bear, but
I knew if I did it right, it would be-
come this very entertaining, heart-
felt, fun movie.
It’s a star-studded cast. Who were
you most excited to see tangle with
a CGI bear? There is absolutely no
question: Margo Martindale. The au-
dience is not expecting her to be as
bold as she is. I had to convince her.
She was like, “I don’t do these stunts.”
She’s [71]. But she was down on the
ground and on the wires. We built
special rigs for her, and she did it.
This was one of Ray Liotta’s last
roles. Did anything surprise you
about working with him? I worked
with Ray on a little movie more than
a decade ago, so I knew how profes-
sional and charming he was, what a
big heart the guy had. He didn’t say no
to a single thing: Can you put on this
crazy wig, do these crazy stunts, fly
to Ireland to make this movie? He
did. He came fully game. I’m forever
grateful for the opportunity to work
with the legend Ray Liotta.
There’s a lot of gore in Cocaine
Bear. What do you think gore adds
to a movie? Gore is a way to pro-
cess trauma with a little more fun. If
someone were to pull their fingernail
off, I would throw up. The straight-
up reality of a trauma is not interest-
ing to me. You have to oversell it.
I wanted to acknowledge the reality
of a bear attack. Bears eat their prey
alive. They’re capable of literally
72 TIME February 27/March 6, 2023
8 QUESTIONS
ripping somebody’s body part off.
We did the research. So it was like,
It’s been harder how do we let the audience process
this in a way that remains fun?
for comedies
to succeed at Are there movies with a similar
madcap style that you took partic-
the box office. ular inspiration from? I loved mak-
What gives this ing Slither with James Gunn. But I
also looked further back to Evil Dead
one an edge? and John Carpenter. I had a true
North Star in the original Jurassic
Park because this is less of an animal-
attack movie, more of man’s hubris
is the real villain. Another one was
Stand by Me, with these kids encoun-
tering adult scenarios that challenge
them and they lose their innocence.
And then Pulp Fiction.
How do you decide where to focus
your energy when it comes to
acting vs. directing? Directing re-
quires a commitment of my entire
life. I have to be so passionate about
the material that I’m willing to turn
my life over to it. That doesn’t hap-
pen often. With every job, I have to
have a few reasons to leave the house:
Am I going to be challenged? Am I
going to surprise people? Am I going
to be able to disappear into this?
You told Variety that you wanted
to “break down some of the my-
thology around what kinds of
movies women are interested in
making.” Did you feel like you
had something to prove as a fe-
male director taking on this kind
of story? I didn’t feel personally like
I had something to prove. I just try
and lead by example. I never want to
be put in a box. I don’t want people
to have any expectation about what
JOHN SHE ARER— GE T T Y IMAGES
an Elizabeth Banks movie is or who
I am as an actor. I’ve broken out of
a lot of boxes in my career. I want to
continue to surprise not just the au-
dience, but myself.
—MEGAN MCCLUSKEY