Table of contents for August 18, 2025 in TIME Magazine

On July 10 TIME hosted a party in New York City to celebrate TIME100 Creators, our inaugural list of the most influential digital voices, presented by premier partner Ally, and featuring data and insights from #paid. Clockwise from top: Kyle Vieira and model Haley Kalil, right; from left, podcaster Paige DeSorbo, TikTok stars Remi Bader and Tefi Pessoa, podcaster and comedian Hannah Berner, a guest, and creator Cyrus Veyssi; writer Heidi Wong; fitness influencer Leana Deeb; from left, Pessoa, podcasters Natalie Joy Viall and Nick Viall, and Berner. Browse the full list at time.com/time100-creators On the covers Photograph by Greg Kahn for TIME Photograph by Paolo Pellegrin—Magnum Photos for TIME Photograph by Caroline Tompkins for TIME Photograph by Ali Jadallah—Anadolu/Getty Images Looking for a specific cover? Order your favorites at…

Aisha Adkins’ mother Rosetta was adamant that she wanted to age at home. So when Rosetta’s dementia started worsening at age 59, Aisha started looking around for options. She quickly found that round-the-clock at-home care was extremely costly, and that her mother didn’t qualify for government assistance because of her father’s income. Stuck in the middle, Aisha, who was 29 at the time, ended up quitting her job to take care of her mother herself until Rosetta qualified for Medicaid through a complicated process called spousal impoverishment protection, which allowed her father to keep some assets. “It was really a struggle,” says Adkins. She cared for her mother for a decade until Rosetta’s death in 2023. As the U.S. population ages, more families are facing the same challenges. Longterm care,…

This Summer I’ll step onstage to compete as a professional athlete for the first time—at 50. I’ll wear a fuchsia bikini small enough to fit in a Ziploc bag, pose and flex in clear heels, and strike a smile while my muscles glisten under layers of spray tan. I’m a bodybuilder. This is my third season competing, but my first as a pro. I came to the sport six years ago after a string of losses—the death of my father, the end of my marriage, and a spiral into depression and alcohol. A spontaneous conversation with a woman in a hotel gym set me on a different path. Soon, I found a coach, a retired bodybuilder in Bowie, Md., named Tina Peratino, who flipped everything I thought I knew about…

It’s late afternoon on July 4 in Rome’s Palazzo Chigi, seat of the Italian government, and Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is walking the marble-floored halls. She has spent the past hour answering questions about her personal history, rise to power, and record in office with disarming directness. But now, as the interview winds down, she has a question of her own. “You are an honest person,” she begins in the crisp English that she says she learned from Michael Jackson songs. “Is there something about Fascism that my experience reminds you of, about what I’m doing in government?” Fascism is a subject Meloni can’t escape. When she came to power in October 2022 atop a movement founded by Benito Mussolini’s last devoted followers, critics in Italy and across Europe said…

DIED Malcolm-Jamal Warner Beloved sitcom actor BY MYCHAL DENZEL SMITH The Loss of Malcolm-Jamal Warner, who died on July 20 at 54 in a drowning accident while vacationing with his family in Costa Rica, has been widely felt. The cultural impact of The Cosby Show, on which he played the family’s only son, Theo Huxtable, can’t be overstated. And Warner was an integral part of it; the show possibly doesn’t even work without him. For everything it sought to do in presenting a Black family that was not mired in trauma, its heart could be found in Warner’s portrayal of Theo trying his best to navigate the lofty expectations that come with such freedom, while also wanting simply to be a teenager. For eight seasons in the 1980s and early…

Growing up, my family skied. We hiked. While no one would ever have described us as mountaineers, our vacations nearly always involved verticality. What really made us mountain people, though, is that we weren’t beach people. On its face, what set us apart was elevation, but really the divide ran much deeper. In the mountains, you pick a point and work hard to get there. If you’re hiking or climbing, the goal is above you. If you’re skiing, snowboarding, or mountain biking, the goal is below. Either way, in the mountains, a sense of satisfaction and wonder comes through hard work and achievement. You earn your views. Beach people, on the other hand—well, I didn’t really get beach people. I understood beach activities: boogie-boarding, bodysurfing, fishing. But just hanging out…

If any place had experience seeing civilians through war, it was the Gaza Strip. It’s much of why the place exists. That stretch of Mediterranean coast was only even named while being demarcated as a refuge for Palestinians driven off their land by Jewish forces in the 1948 war that created Israel. Gaza’s permanent status, like the fate of the Palestinians, was never decided, however. And as the decades churned on, so did the conflict. There was a devastating rhythm to it. Palestinian militants launched missiles into Israel from Gaza. Israel’s military replied with airstrikes, at times with sustained campaigns dubbed wars. The longest lasted 50 days. In each round of fighting, civilians knew where to find safety: in the schools, clinics, and hospitals run by the U.N., which also…

“Don’t you ever want revenge?” Donald Trump asked Mike Johnson. It was late May, and the President was in the Speaker’s office venting about House Republicans who were standing in the way of his signature tax-and-spending legislation, the socalled One Big Beautiful Bill. Trump was half-kidding, but he expected allegiance, not agita. Johnson explained that seeking vengeance cut against his Christian faith. When the President gave him a stone-faced look, the Speaker offered a more practical reason: with a narrow majority, vendettas aren’t an option. “We don’t have the luxury,” he told Trump. Johnson became Speaker of the House in October 2023, emerging from relative obscurity to take what one of his Republican predecessors, John Boehner, calls “the toughest job in America.” It requires managing a conference that has for…

Two of the most valuable feet on the planet are burning. It’s a stifling mid-June afternoon and Erling Haaland, the superstar Manchester City striker from Norway who looks like Thor but sometimes celebrates goals by meditating in the lotus pose, is walking on the piping hot sand in Boca Raton, Fla. The heat is so intense that I start skittering to the wet sand in desperate need of relief, but Haaland, who has insisted on removing his sandals, simply saunters to a cooler stretch of seashore. “No pain,” he says, flashing a smile. Manchester City has landed in the U.S. for the FIFA Club World Cup and set up base camp at an oceanfront Boca hotel. Haaland’s tired from an extended training session that morning, but he’s still in a…

On July 14, 48 students walked through the doors of the Alice L. Walton School of Medicine in Bentonville, Ark., to become its inaugural class. Some came from neighboring cities, others from urban centers in Michigan and New York. Almost all had a choice in where they could become doctors but took a chance on the new school because of its unique approach to rethinking medical education. Named after its founder—the world’s richest woman and an heir to the Walmart fortune—the school will train students over the next four years in a radically different way from the method most traditional medical schools use. Instead of drilling young physicians to chase symptom after symptom and perform test after test, Walton wants her school’s graduates to keep patients healthy by practicing something…

On July 29 The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC)—the global gold-standard initiative charged with assessing hunger and food insecurity—released a devastating but predictable analysis: famine, the worst-case scenario humanitarian actors have been warning about for the past 21 months, is unfolding in Gaza. According to the IPC, a body that prides itself on technical expertise and is not given to hyperbole, two of the three thresholds required to classify famine in Gaza have been surpassed. Food consumption and acute malnutrition have reached catastrophic levels. The third threshold, mortality from starvation and related causes, remains unverified. This is not because people are not dying. This is because the conditions on the ground—lack of humanitarian access, raging conflict, and the collapse of the health system—make data collection very hard. Why wait…

The Great Hall in the City of London’s Guildhall might seem like an odd place to anchor a climate summit. At a time when leading climate thinkers are increasingly calling for systemic change, it screams tradition. Built in 1411, the medieval auditorium is a homage to age-old British institutions and customs with stained glass windows honoring lord mayors and monarchs. The dissonance is only amplified by its surroundings: a square mile housing the world’s leading financial institutions, gleaming towers of banks and investment firms with proprietors historically far more focused on adding up their financial returns than on calculating progress toward net-zero emissions. And yet Guildhall—and the City, as the financial district is known—were the center of the action in June when 45,000 climate advocates from around the world descended on…

No other filmmaker loves the dirty old town that is New York more than Spike Lee. Some of us who live there will return from a day out and about—traversing streets strewn with trash or riding in subway cars that smell like an animal stall—and still think, This, and nowhere else, is home. Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest (in theaters Aug. 22 and on Apple TV+ Sept. 5) is a new entry on the scroll of great New York films. It’s smart, hugely entertaining, and profound in a way that’s anything but sentimental. With Akira Kurosawa as his guiding star—the film is a reimagining of the Japanese master’s 1963 High and Low, a police procedural with a deep moral underpinning—Lee’s film feels modest and grand at once, a movie you…