TIME Magazine February 24, 2025

On TIME.com and our social media, check out videos featuring the Closers—TIME’s annual list of people working toward racial equity. Above, actor-producer LaChanze talks about Black Theatre United’s efforts to boost diversity on creative teams. Watch at time.com/closers 11 books to read in February Our reading list includes Ali Hazelwood’s making waves with swim romance Deep End; Allegra Goodman’s Isola, inspired by the true story of a noblewoman on a deserted isle; and more, at time.com/february-books BACK IN TIME This issue’s piece about Elon Musk’s impact on Washington (page 7) is his sixth TIME cover story. He was named 2021 Person of the Year just before he took over Twitter, and his work for President Trump made the cover last year. Read more at time.com/vault SUBSCRIBE History newsletter Get…

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

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

It is becoming increasingly common to receive an email or phone call informing you that your personal information was stolen in a data breach. Last year there were 3,158 data breaches, up 70% from 2021, which resulted in an all-time high of nearly 1.7 billion notices going out to potentially affected individuals, according to a report released Jan. 28 by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC). Each data breach makes additional ones more likely because the personal information hackers steal can be used to get into other companies’ systems. That’s one likely reason for the spike in data breaches. But watchdogs point out another reason: there are relatively easy things companies can do to protect information, and many companies aren’t doing them. These steps include using multifactor authentication, a security…

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

The release of DeepSeek R1 stunned Wall Street and Silicon Valley in January, spooking investors and impressing tech leaders. But amid all the talk, many overlooked a critical detail about the way the new Chinese artificial intelligence model functions—a nuance that has researchers worried about humanity’s ability to control sophisticated new AI systems. It’s all down to an innovation in how DeepSeek R1 was trained—one that led to surprising behaviors in an early version of the model, which researchers described in the technical documentation accompanying its release. During testing, researchers noticed that the model would spontaneously switch between English and Chinese while it was solving problems. When they forced it to stick to one language, thus making it easier for users to follow along, they found that the system’s…