TIME Magazine TIME Best of Person of the Year

A little background on TIME Person of the Year: Ever since Charles Lindbergh was proclaimed the Man of the Year for 1927 in the January 2, 1928, issue, TIME magazine has annually designated one man, woman, couple, or concept that had the most influence on the world during the previous 12 months. The editors apparently didn’t think that naming Lindbergh Man of the Year would be particularly noteworthy—in fact, the actual article about him is fairly brief and not even easy to find within the magazine. But, according to a letter to readers that appeared in 1944’s edition (Man of the Year: Dwight Eisenhower), it all started by accident. Here’s what happened: New Year’s week of 1928 had been a string of slow news days. As the magazine’s publication…

2023 CULTURAL PHENOMENON Taylor Swift Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one is about a time she got her heart broken, although not in the way you might expect. She was 17, she says, and she had booked the biggest opportunity of her life so far—a highly coveted slot opening for country superstar Kenny Chesney on tour. “This was going to change my career,” she remembers. “I was so excited.” But a couple weeks later, Swift arrived home to find her mother Andrea sitting on the front steps of their house. “She was weeping,” Swift says.…

2019 CLIMATE CRUSADER Greta Thunberg In 2019, Greta Thunberg, an ordinary 16-year-old from Sweden, got the world’s attention. Her focus: getting leaders across the globe to take the climate threat seriously and take action. What became a global movement started with breaking the rules. Beginning in August 2018, Thunberg skipped school and spent her days in front of the Swedish Parliament building, holding a sign that read skolstrejk för klimatet: “school strike for climate.” Then, she addressed the U.N., met with Pope Francis, scrapped with President Donald Trump, and called on young people across the world to “climate strike” on September 20, 2019. TIME reported that 4 million did—it was the largest climate demonstration in history. In 2019, Collins English Dictionary made Thunberg’s phrase “climate strike” its word of…

2015 CHANCELLOR OF GERMANY Angela Merkel Time’s 2015 Person of the Year cover story notes that “Leaders are tested only when people don’t want to follow.” The year 2015 was a test for Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel, who spent the first 25 years of her life living in East Germany. In the face of opposition, she offered tough love and mercy to those in need while enduring harsh criticism for doing it. First, Greece’s debts were threatening the euro. Merkel pulled from her experience watching East Germany’s economy crumble when the Berlin Wall fell. She offered a bailout to Greece in exchange for strict austerity measures. The Greeks resisted, but they were eventually forced to accept her terms or get expelled from the European Union. They called her “Little…

2009 CHAIRMAN OF THE U.S. FEDERAL RESERVE Ben Bernanke In 2009, the economy was the overriding news story, and it was a lousy one. Headlines sang of layoffs, bankruptcies, foreclosures, “new frugality,” and “new normal.” They scoffed at the bailouts and bonuses. But there were some hopeful spots too: The Dow was rebounding, signaling that the Great Recession may be ending, thanks to Ben Bernanke. To say that the Federal Reserve is complicated is an understatement—Bernanke’s actions were widely misunderstood and highly criticized. But he was the right man in the right role at just the right time. Before President George W. Bush placed him on the U.S. Federal Reserve, Bernanke was a professor of economics at Princeton University and a scholar of the Great Depression. He was, perhaps,…

2008 | 2012 U.S. PRESIDENT-ELECT Barack Obama In November 2008, when American voters chose Barack Obama to be the next president, the country’s shattered confidence needed a bailout just as much as the failed banks and struggling automakers did. The stock market was plunging, credit was tight, and unemployment was at 6.8% and climbing. Obama’s campaign theme was change—the kind of nuts-and-bolts change that could be seen and measured. The American people selected their first Black president, a relatively unknown Democratic senator from Illinois, because he seemed the most likely candidate to make that change happen. After the election, veteran Democratic pollster Peter Hart put together a focus group to ask Virginia voters why they thought their state that gave George W. Bush an 8-point victory in 2004 chose…