Table of contents for January 27, 2025 in TIME Magazine

Like our last cover of 2024, the first cover of 2025 features a former U.S. President—this time, one who is known best for what he accomplished as America’s longest-living ex-President. Jimmy Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at 100, is remembered in this issue by Jonathan Alter, the author of the recent Carter biography His Very Best. We’re grateful to Alter, long associated with Newsweek, where he and I briefly overlapped, for sharing his assessment of Carter’s life with TIME. Carter’s life was, Alter writes, “a classic American story,” an “epic journey from barefoot Georgia farm boy to Nobel Prize–winning humanitarian.” THIS YEAR’S ANNUAL MEETING of the World Economic Forum kicks off on the same day as Donald Trump’s Inauguration as the 47th U.S. President. His return to office…

Business is evolving faster than ever before, and companies are rethinking the path to the C-suite. Whereas in the past aspiring leaders might earn their stripes by rotating through another part of the business for a year or two, today more top firms are “constantly providing people with new opportunities,” says Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School. To supercharge the pace of skill-building, workers now have to change jobs more frequently. The ability to not only rapidly learn new terrain but also guide teams in overcoming new challenges is becoming an indispensable leadership skill, Meier says. This is, in essence, what global consultancies like Accenture and Deloitte are designed to do. No surprise, then, that five of the top 10 best companies for future leaders…

In 1989, the sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the concept of “third places,” which are informal spots to gather for socializing outside of home and work. They have been features of societies going back to antiquity, from Greek agoras and Viennese cafés to barbershops and Burger King dining rooms. But, Oldenburg warned, their role had begun to diminish in the American social landscape. He was right to worry. These days, the role of coffee shops and bars, libraries and community centers, civic clubs and houses of worship, has faded as the creep of work and domestic obligation in American life has become all but inescapable. According to the 2021 Census Bureau’s Time Use Survey, Americans were already spending significantly less time with friends before the pandemic rearranged life entirely. Our…

Do you think 2025 will be politically more or less stable than 2024? We’re planning our annual meeting against the most complex geopolitical backdrop in decades. I think that will continue into 2025. In a way, we are in a geopolitical recession. Fortunately, it hasn’t impacted the global economy as badly as it could have. We’re still expecting more than 3% growth. Provided there are no further escalations of conflicts and new crises, we have to expect that 2025 will be, similarly to 2024, a challenging geopolitical year. What does “geopolitical recession” mean? It means that we are in a polarized, fragmented world where we see less cooperation than in the past, and more competition. There is more focus on national interest. That is a challenge, as many of…

Capitalism is a fetish. And when I say fetish, I mean the actual definition of the word: an obsessive preoccupation or attachment; a fixation. The word fetish is derived from the Latin factitius: imitated, opposed to the natural. And capitalism is unnatural—or human-made. Its power has been blown out of proportion precisely through the obsession, devotion, fixation through which it is regarded. But if we rub our eyes, we can see more clearly. And we see a mess. The planet is burning, drowning, suffocating. Living standards fall continuously, millennials are screwed (never mind the following generations). Meanwhile, the five richest men in the world doubled their wealth from 2020 to 2024. And yet, any cries for change to the system, even just for the tiniest wealth tax, remain frowned…

There is huge potential for AI to transform our world for the better. From enabling early disease detection and accelerating drug discovery, to addressing critical environmental challenges by discovering sustainable new materials, AI is already advancing progress on some of society’s toughest problems. As AI reshapes our world, some people are skeptical and leaders face a critical challenge: How do we responsibly harness AI’s potential? Successful product implementation demands more than technical excellence. It requires a fundamental shift in how organizations approach innovation, stakeholder engagement, and solutions. In order to earn people’s trust, leaders must collaborate with local communities, operationalize corporate responsibility, and focus on creating real-world solutions. The most impactful innovations are built in partnership with the communities they’re meant to serve. To do that, organizations must move…

It’s been a good run for Arm, the chip and software company you lead: your market cap has risen 2.5 times since your September 2023 IPO. Where do you see future growth coming from? We have two components to the business model: licensing to get access to our technology, and then customers pay us a royalty. Some chips have one Arm microprocessor; some have hundreds, meaning we collect a much more significant royalty. And because every digital device is based on Arm, it’s a very healthy and highly sustainable growth driver. Yes, your company estimates that 99% of “premium smartphones” run on Arm central processing units (CPUs). What is it about Arm’s architecture that makes it so indispensable? The CPU not only runs the operating system—Android, iOS—but it needs…

Now that the world has adjusted to living with COVID-19, a new infectious disease threat is looming—this time from wild birds. Highly pathogenic avian influenza, or H5N1 bird flu, is spreading among dairy cattle that provide our milk and starting to cause serious disease in people. An elderly man with underlying health conditions became the first to develop severe disease in the U.S. and died in early January, and a 13-year-old girl with asthma in Canada became so sick with H5N1 in late 2024 that she had to be put on a ventilator. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) maintains that the risk to the general public is low, since H5N1 doesn’t generally cause serious illness in people, but these recent cases are reason for public-health…

For 54 years, the Assad Family ruled Syria, relying on the ruthlessness of internal security forces that imprisoned and killed more than 100,000 people, and turned peaceful 2011 protests of the Arab Spring into a bloody civil war. That war ended on Dec. 8, when a militia once allied with al-Qaeda swept into a capital President Bashar Assad had fled for Russia. (Busy fighting in Ukraine, Russia held back forces that had ridden to his rescue in the past. Ditto a weakened Iran.) Jubilant Syrians poured into the streets, waving the three-star flags of the Syrian Revolution, throwing open the doors of the regime’s most notorious prisons, and making anguished searches of morgues and mass graves. Next came envoys from the U.S. and Europe, anxious to take the measure…

Over the past two years, we’ve witnessed advances in AI that have captured our imaginations with unprecedented capabilities in language and ingenuity. And yet, as impressive as these developments have been, they’re only the opening act. We are now entering a new era of autonomous AI agents that take action on their own and augment the work of humans. This isn’t just an evolution of technology. It’s a revolution that will fundamentally redefine how humans work, live, and connect with one another from this point forward. Today, we’re already used to “predictive AI”—which analyzes data to provide recommendations, forecasts, and insights—and “generative AI,” which learns from data and uses patterns to seamlessly generate text, images, music, and code. Agents are software components that go far beyond this. They can…

Paradoxically, Sudan is home to both the worst humanitarian crisis in the world and the most heartening possible response to it. The government of the Northeast African country has ceased to function, the first casualty of a feud between rival generals whose war has also shattered the economy and driven farmers from their land, placing half the population of 50 million at risk of starvation. The same combat that has devastated Sudan has made it so dangerous that international aid organizations cannot ride to the rescue. So the people have instead. Across Sudan, ordinary citizens have organized themselves to feed their neighbors, accommodate strangers, rescue the wounded, and aid children traumatized by what is happening around them. More than 600 pop-up community centers, known as Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs),…

There’s lots of discussion about human-centered AI, which augments the human experience rather than replaces it. But aren’t humanoid robots a displacement technology? It’s a touchy subject for many. The fact is we’ve been building a pyramid scheme throughout mankind’s existence. Every generation banks on the next generation paying for the people that exist today. And now we’re at a potential crisis, where the next generation in many places is actually going to be smaller. We just don’t have enough labor. Robots are the only hope we have of producing the services we need to sustain our society. How are we going to do all of that stuff if we don’t have advanced manufacturing, advanced transportation, that are using agents that are superhuman in many of those capabilities? Your…

If 2023 was the year of AI fervor, following the late-2022 release of ChatGPT, 2024 was marked by a steady drumbeat of advances as systems got smarter, faster, and cheaper to run. AI also began to reason more deeply and interact via voice and video—trends that AI experts and leaders say will accelerate. Here’s what to expect from AI in 2025. 1. MORE AND BETTER AI AGENTS In 2025, we’ll begin to see a shift from chatbots and image generators toward “agentic” systems that can act autonomously to complete tasks, rather than simply answer questions, says AI futurist Ray Kurzweil. In October, Anthropic gave its AI model Claude the ability to use computers—clicking, scrolling, and typing—but this may be just the start. Agents will be able to handle complex…

It’s a strange sensation, to end up loving a movie that makes you feel physically uncomfortable for nearly its whole runtime. In Hard Truths, from veteran filmmaker Mike Leigh, Marianne Jean-Baptiste plays a woman at war with the world, and herself. She practically vibrates with belligerence: she can’t go to the grocery store without having a run-in with the cashier; her husband mostly avoids her; her grown son spends his time locked in his room—his only relief is to leave the house for long walks to escape his mother’s angry force field. Why would you care about this woman’s story? For much of the film you may be yearning to get away from her. I was. But that’s the magic trick Leigh pulls off. If you’ve seen any of…

The 21st century is, so far, being defined by its dramatic leap in intelligent technologies—a leap that has brought humanity into an era I call the Intelligent Age, in which large segments of global society now have access to unprecedented technological intelligence. These technologies are becoming deeply ingrained in our everyday lives and changing the world at the most profound individual and international levels. Artificial intelligence is, unsurprisingly, the linchpin of this transformation. It has rapidly evolved from a specialized tool to a general-purpose technology that, like electricity and the steam engine, is reshaping industries, economies, and even the way we think about ourselves. This surge of technological development comes, not surprisingly, at the same time that the world is grappling with global challenges that demand our immediate, and…

The drive up to Phulari viewpoint snakes for three miles along dirt tracks flanked by flowering pyoli plants and murals of flaming phalluses, a traditional good-luck symbol here in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan. At the summit, the 1,000-sq.-mi. expanse of what will be Gelephu Mindfulness City (GMC) materializes through fluttering prayer flags. To the east, a strip of palm forest has been cleared to extend the domestic airport’s stunted runway for international flights. To the west, smoke billows from the chimney of an army-run distillery. Over the horizon lies the Indian state of Assam, where much of the labor and materials to construct the $100 billion new special administrative region will come from. “Activity at the site is just beginning,” says Dr. Lotay Tshering, a urologist who served as…

In May 2023, three of the most important CEOs in artificial intelligence walked through the iconic black front door of No. 10 Downing Street, the official residence of the U.K. Prime Minister, in London. Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic were there to discuss AI, following the blockbuster release of ChatGPT six months earlier. After posing for a photo opportunity with then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in his private office, the men filed through into the cabinet room next door and took seats at its long, rectangular table. Sunak and U.K. government officials lined up on one side; the three CEOs and some of their advisers sat facing them. After a polite discussion about how AI could bring opportunities for the…

For those who have been following his career from the start, the idea of Pedro Almodóvar’s growing older—and using his films to reflect on illness and death—is a bitter pill. None of us relishes thinking about our own mortality. But sometimes it feels worse to think about losing an artist we love. One of his finest, most moving works, 2019’s Pain and Glory, reckoned with the nuisances of aging and the trauma of being an artist in crisis. But his first English-language movie, The Room Next Door, delves further into these murky waters. Julianne Moore and Tilda Swinton star as Ingrid and Martha, old friends who have been out of touch for a long time. They reconnect when Ingrid learns that Martha is being treated for cancer, and their…

Whenever westerns surge in popularity, as they have on TV since Yellowstone became a surprise megahit in 2018, it’s a safe bet that American identity is in flux. After decades of simplistic cowboys-and-Indians movies that reinforced the intrepid self-image of a rising world power, revisionist westerns proliferated during the Vietnam War, critiquing the violence of white imperialism. Recent reinventions of the genre have highlighted such contemporary concerns as corporate overreach and the complex set of internecine conflicts that inevitably arise within—and threaten to destroy—pluralistic societies. American Primeval, Netflix’s most ambitious western series to date, is explicit in its aim of exploring the latter theme, with results that range from astutely observant to ham-fisted and jarringly sentimental. The setting is the Utah Territory in 1857, where, as North and South…