Table of contents for September 8, 2025 in TIME Magazine

D.C. National Guard troops congregate near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., on Aug. 17. President Donald Trump announced on Aug. 11 that the federal government was temporarily taking control of the city’s police force, and that he was deploying the National Guard on the streets of the nation’s capital. Trump cited violent crime as justification for the move—which is a rare and controversial exercise of presidential power—even though data show that violent crime is down in the city. ▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox Photograph by Julia Demaree Nikhinson—AP…

On Nov. 7, 2019, The Government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi revoked my Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI), effectively banning me from the country I grew up in. India was where my mother and grandmother lived. Where four out of my five books of fiction and nonfiction were set. Where I had returned after college in the U.S. with the aim of being “an Indian writer.” The government alleged I had concealed that my father was Pakistani. It was a surprising accusation. My first book—Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands, which was published in 2009—dealt extensively with my relationship to my absent father and my rediscovery of him. I had written countless articles on the subject, not to mention that my father was a public figure. In…

Matthew Prince CEO CLOUDFLARE Matthew Prince had to be converted to the belief that AI is eating the web. It was 18 months ago that he started getting calls from media executives, who complained to him about AI companies copying articles to train their models without compensation. Prince’s first reaction, he says, was to roll his eyes. “Media companies are always complaining about whatever the new technology is,” he tells TIME. But then Prince, the CEO of the internet security company Cloudflare, ran the numbers. His company has 10 years of web-traffc data, a by-product of its main service: protecting sites from being knocked offline by surges in traffic or targeted attacks. What he found shocked him. With the arrival of “AI overviews” to Google’s search results, the data showed,…

Few political leaders realize the rate at which artificial intelligence is racing ahead. For decades, technological progress has been logged at a pace known as Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel who observed that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles approximately every 18 to 24 months. Now, we are approaching Nadella’s Law. “Just like Moore’s Law, we saw the doubling in performance every 18 months with AI. We have now started to see that doubling every six months or so,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, at the company’s annual Ignite conference in 2024. As a result of this disruptive velocity, two significant consequences are on the immediate horizon. One is that we are quickly approaching a world in which AI agents can autonomously…

Crime Dramas, In our distracted times, tend to front-load said crimes. More often than not, there’s a murder within the first five minutes. This is only one of the genre’s many implicit rules that HBO’s Task breaks. The series from Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby opens with a montage of quotidian scenes from the lives of two men. Weary Tom Brandis (Mark Ruffalo) folds his hands in prayer, dunks his face in a sink full of ice water, downs Advil while driving. Rugged Robbie Prendergrast (Tom Pelphrey) carries his sleeping son to bed, pours himself a tall mug of coffee, perks up at a radio ad for a dating app. These tender parallel portraits introduce the characters whose analogous circumstances and divergent choices are, more than any murder or…

To create this year’s TIME100 AI cover, artist Refik Anadol fine-tuned his studio’s AI system on an archive containing each of TIME’s more than 5,000 covers to date, spanning over 100 years. The resulting abstract visualization—featuring Anadol’s signature flowing, molecular aesthetic—represents the AI “dreaming” about a century of TIME’s visual history. Following the success of his 2022 MOMA exhibition, which attracted 3 million people, Anadol aims to offer a hopeful vision. “The future is not a fixed destination to be afraid of, but a fluid reality we can actually shape,” he tells TIME. TIME’s Impact Leadership Forum and dinner TIME’s Impact Leadership Forum took place on Aug. 7 on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. It opened with a discussion on intergenerational collaboration, featuring (above left, from left) panelists María Teresa Kumar of…

212,000. That’s how many women ages 20 and over have left the U.S. workforce since January, according to the most recent jobs numbers released Aug. 1 by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (By contrast, 44,000 men of the same age have entered the workforce since January.) The numbers are especially stark for women with children. From January to June, the labor-force participation rate of women ages 25 to 44 living with a child under 5 fell nearly 3 percentage points, from 69.7% to 66.9%, says Misty Lee Heggeness, an associate professor of economics and public affairs at the University of Kansas. It’s a big reversal. The participation of those women had soared in 2022, 2023, and 2024, peaking in January 2025, as flexible work policies helped women join the workforce…

When you have social anxiety, walking into a room full of people can make you feel like every eyeball in the place is boring directly into your soul, and that nothing you say will possibly be smart or funny or coherent enough. That can trigger an array of physical, cognitive, and emotional symptoms. “For some people, it might mean a racing heart and dizziness and feeling flushed,” says Kirsten Hall-Baldwin, a licensed clinical professional counselor in Chicago. “Others might be in these thought spirals, or feel like their mind is going blank or freezing.” Hall-Baldwin coaches her anxious clients to create a coping plan: a proactive list of strategies and techniques that can help temper their unease. Here, she and other experts share tips on how to carry a conversation…

Over the past 12 years, the small family-health clinic in Melmastok, a remote mountainous community in Afghanistan’s central Daikundi province, has withstood multiple upheavals—from a Taliban insurgency to the withdrawal of international troops and the collapse of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul in 2021. Ever since, as the Taliban returned to power, once again issuing edicts to suppress women and girls, the clinic and its 34-year-old midwife Atifa have continued to provide a lifeline for mothers and young children. Until this summer, that is. Come July, the clinic finally closed its doors. For Atifa, who identifies herself like many local women with only her first name, that means one thing: “Mothers and children will die.” The reason? The wholesale slashing by Washington of U.S. humanitarian aid, until recently the single…

Under a crystal chandelier in a high-ceilinged anteroom in Paris, the moderator of Intelligence Rising is reprimanding his players. These 12 former government officials, academics, and artificial intelligence researchers are here to participate in a simulated exercise about AI’s impact on geopolitics. But just an hour into the simulation, things have already begun to go south. The team representing the U.S. has decided to stymie Chinese AI development by blocking all chip exports to China. This has raised the odds, the moderator says, of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan: the U.S. ally that is home to the world’s most advanced chip-manufacturing plants. It is 2026, and the simulated world is on the brink of a potentially devastating showdown between two nuclear superpowers. Why? Because each team is racing to create…

On the one hand, this is the worst of times: power is concentrated in the hands of people who pray at the opening of Congress, then prey on the people they swore an oath to serve. But a close look at voter demographics suggests that a small percentage of poor voters who understand what they are losing have the potential to upend American politics. Over the past four decades, as inequality has grown exponentially for all Americans, the number of poor and low-income white people—66 million in 2018—has swelled higher than any other demographic. This is one reason low-income, majority-white communities became susceptible to the “populist” appeal of the MAGA movement. If white people are hurting, the divide-and-conquer myth suggests, it must be because Black people or immigrants are taking…

Stuart Russell CO-FOUNDER IASEAI Stuart Russell receives four or five emails a day from people who seem to be in the grips of psychosis, convinced their AI chatbot of choice is suddenly conscious. “It’s appointing them as its emissary to the human race. And in many cases, it’s directing them to contact me, so we can warn humanity, or usher in the human-machine symbiosis, or whatever it is,” he tells TIME. “I’ve had some heartbreaking letters from family members.” Still it’s no surprise that AI systems would direct people to Russell, a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who coauthored the field’s most-used textbook and is among its most respected figures. Since 2013, he’s been warning the world that building AI systems more intelligent than humans, when we…

It’s a familiar look for the office of an organization in the Deep South rooted in decades of fighting for civil rights. Displayed on the wall are inspirational quotes from James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and Killer Mike. In the conference room, the group has hung maps of the six wards of Albany, Ga.—a useful guide for the on-the-ground organizing work that mobilizes residents to protest and vote. But the issue at hand on this balmy August afternoon at the headquarters of SOWEGA Rising isn’t the typical topic for civil rights organizers. Around the table, a group of activists from across the region are talking about something wonky, almost quotidian: electricity bills. For years, residents of this part of south Georgia have faced electricity bills that locals say often exceed their…

The conventions of the animated family sitcom haven’t changed much in the 36 years since The Simpsons set the template for shows like King of the Hill, Family Guy, and Bob’s Burgers. True to the cartoon medium, the characters are outsize and their adventures over the top. And, in a custom that has been key to their longevity, time doesn’t really pass from season to season. Unencumbered by the growing or deteriorating bodies of human actors, these series are set in an eternal quasi present, within which cultural references are constantly updated yet (with the exception of a recent Hill revival that fast-forwards eight years) everyone stays around the same age. In Netflix’s Long Story Short, BoJack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg uses the elasticity of animation to warp time in…