Table of contents for November 24, 2025 in TIME Magazine

TIME hosted a gala Oct. 30 in NYC to celebrate the 2025 edition of its TIME100 Next list of leaders to watch in health, climate, business, sports, entertainment, and more. Clockwise: pop star Tate McRae performed her hits “Tit for Tat” and “Revolving Door”; Emmy winner and Severance star Tramell Tillman offered a toast to his grandparents, who ran an NAACP chapter in Virginia; Bridgerton star Jonathan Bailey’s toast urged audience members to spend more time in person with loved ones; and actor Nomzamo Mbatha presented a TIME Earth Award to Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, co-founder of Urban Oceans Lab. See photos and video at time.com/t100next-gala-2025 TIME in Brazil Jennifer Geerlings-Simons, the newly elected President of Suriname, offered a toast to equitable financial action on climate change at a TIME100 Impact…

Signals are growing louder that U.S. President Donald Trump wants Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of office. He’d like to accomplish this without starting a war that might not go to plan. So far, U.S. military action against Venezuela has been limited to strikes against more than a dozen boats the White House insists are carrying narcotics toward the U.S.—drugs that Trump said in a Nov. 2 interview on 60 Minutes are “destroying families all over our country.” Asked if that meant war, Trump said, “I don’t think so. But they’ve been treating us very badly.” At least 64 people have reportedly been killed by U.S. strikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific in recent weeks. The U.S. has now moved significant military hardware into position in the…

After a year in the political wilderness, Democrats rode frustration over high prices and President Donald Trump’s disruptive economic policies to win a raft of elections across the country on Nov. 4. In Virginia and New Jersey, voters handed the party the keys to the governor’s mansions by larger-than-expected margins. In California, voters overwhelmingly approved new congressional districts to benefit Democrats, after Texas passed its own new map to favor the GOP. But it was a series of decisive victories in down-ballot races against Republican incumbents that stunned leaders in both parties and bolstered Democrats’ hopes that they had landed on a viable playbook for next year’s midterm elections. Pennsylvanians voted to keep three justices backed by Democrats on the state Supreme Court. Democrats in Georgia won two utility commission…

DIED Dick Cheney American regent In a half-century navigating the heights of U.S. executive power, Dick Cheney went from being widely admired as the competent public servant overseeing the U.S. victory in the first Gulf War, to profoundly polarizing, albeit in ways that might now make many wistful: the divisions Cheney inveigled were grounded not in personal aggrandizement but in differing concepts of duty to nation. His legacy, at the time of his death on Nov. 3 at 84, was as the most powerful U.S. Vice President in history, who after 9/11 intrigued for the CIA to use torture; for the National Security Agency to scoop up the communications of every American; and for the invasion of Iraq, which killed hundreds of thousands, shifted the balance of regional power to…

As the government shutdown crossed the one-month mark, the country hit two milestones that made it feel all too real for many Americans. On Nov. 1, food-stamp benefits dried up and open enrollment began for those purchasing health insurance for the next year, complete with steep, double-digit rate hikes. The impact stung. Some found it tougher to put food on the table, although conflicting judicial edicts suggested aid was still flowing, albeit at slower rates. Others wondered if they could still afford insurance. Many found themselves in both groups. Neither challenge is likely to be resolved soon, and both left red states hurting the most. Players on both sides believed they were “winning” this fight and thus saw no need to reach across the aisle. The shutdown that began Oct.…

Winter Olympics Special Report Lindsey Vonn lifts her middle finger in the Southern California sun. Vonn, the Olympic gold-medal skier, all-time leader in World Cup downhill wins, and rare figure in her sport whose talent, charisma, and celebrity have transcended the snow-covered slopes, is hiking a canyon near her Beverly Hills home. Not so long ago, this might have seemed unfathomable, as she struggled with not just standard wear and tear that comes from decades of competing at a professional level but also swelling and pain caused by numerous crashes while flying down mountains. Since her partial knee-replacement surgery in the spring of 2024, however, Vonn, 41, has felt like a new person. The gesture, though, is not just one of defiance as she walks briskly on the somewhat hilly…

Liberation has been called the best play on Broadway this season. What made you want to write it? Because my mom worked at Ms., I grew up steeped in the ideas of second-wave feminism and women’s liberation. I loved sitting on the floor of her office under a giant Wonder Woman poster while I could hear her clacking away. As I got older, I started to come into contact with those ideas in a personal way. I got married, had children, tried to have a career. All of a sudden, I started to experiment with these ideas in my own life: “What was wrong, what was left out? Are these practical?” The structure is unique: a memory play that’s not a memory, because the narrator is telling her mother’s story,…

Jimmy Wales describes himself as a “pathological optimist.” And yet, when the co-founder of Wikipedia spoke with TIME in October, he still seemed somewhat surprised that his online encyclopedia actually worked. “Wikipedia is very trusting, in a way that always seemed a bit crazy,” Wales says. If you think about the chaos of social media, Wikipedia’s model of allowing anyone to edit any entry seems “completely insane,” he says. We’re speaking because Wales just penned his first book, The Seven Rules of Trust, which tries to distill what Wikipedia and a few other bright corners of the internet—Wales cites Airbnb, Uber, and Ebay—can teach us about rebuilding trust in a world awash in skepticism. Since Wikipedia’s launch in 2001, trust in politicians, mainstream media, and “to some extent each other”…

Global failure to adapt to climate change is taking a toll on people’s lives and is responsible for millions of deaths every year, according to a new report from the Lancet. “This year’s health stocktake paints a bleak and undeniable picture of the devastating health harms reaching all corners of the world—with record-breaking threats to health from heat, extreme weather events, and wildfire smoke killing millions,” declared the Countdown on Health and Climate Change report, led by University College London and produced in collaboration with the World Health Organization. ‘Destruction to lives and livelihoods will continue.’—MARINA ROMANELLO, LANCET COUNTDOWN Twelve of the report’s 20 indicators for the health risks and impacts of climate change in the report set new records, including extreme precipitation events and food insecurity from climate extremes.…

It’s been a long time since Alice Charton got a good look at a human face. There are plenty of people moving through her world, of course—her husband, her friends, her doctors, her neighbors—but judging just by what she can see, she’d have to take it as an article of faith that any one person was there at all. It was five years ago that the 87-year-old retired schoolteacher, living in a suburb of Paris, first noticed her eyesight failing, with a point in the middle of her field of vision going hazy, muddy, and dim. Soon that point grew into a spot, and the spot into a blotch—until it became impossible for her to recognize people, read a book, or navigate unfamiliar places on the streets. The cause of…

Vince Gilligan knows better than to try to explain where his stories come from. Like the extraterrestrial transmission that kicks off his new Apple TV series, Pluribus, their origin is a mystery. But the writer, producer, and director best known for creating the era-defining crime drama Breaking Bad can approximate where and when he started mulling the idea for the sci-fi epic that would become his first major project since leaving the Walter White universe. It was probably 2016, in Burbank, Calif., where Gilligan had convened the writers’ room for Season 3 of Better Call Saul, the Breaking Bad spin-off he created with Peter Gould. “We would take lunch breaks that seemed to stretch longer and longer,” he recalls. “I’d walk around the neighborhood, and my mind would wander.” His…