Table of contents for June 9, 2025 in TIME Magazine

When Joe Biden revealed his prostate-cancer diagnosis on May 18, the news entered a conversation Washington was already having. Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again, by journalists Alex Thompson of Axios and Jake Tapper of CNN, reported that Biden forgot top White House aides’ names, occasionally resorting to shorthand descriptions of roles like “Press” for his longtime communications chief; that there were discussions of his possibly needing a wheelchair in a second term; that he sometimes ate dinner as early as 4:30 p.m. The book says Biden seemed completely unfazed by a jarring debate performance that sent the Democrats into a spiral and put donations on ice. At a Hollywood fundraiser for his crumbling re-election campaign, he blanked when face to…

I’m genuinely unsettled by the behavior unrestrained AI is already demonstrating. In one experiment, when an AI model learns it is scheduled to be replaced, it inserts its code into the computer where the new version is going to run, ensuring its own survival. In a separate study, when AI models realize they are going to lose at chess, they hack the computer in order to win. Cheating, manipulating others, lying, deceiving, especially toward self-preservation: these behaviors show how AI might pose significant threats that we are currently ill equipped to respond to. The examples we have so far are from experiments in controlled settings and fortunately do not have major consequences, but this could quickly change as capabilities and the degree of agency increase. Far more serious outcomes…

On May 20, The Federal Government announced a major shift in how it plans to review and recommend COVID-19 vaccines for Americans. Among the biggest changes: when manufacturers want to update the vaccine each year to target the latest variants, they will be required to conduct additional studies. Since 2023, federal health officials have recommended a yearly COVID-19 shot for most people, and vaccine makers have not needed to conduct additional tests on each year’s updated formula. (The flu shot is similarly tweaked each year to target circulating strains, without new studies to reaffirm its safety and effectiveness.) Such studies would not be required for vaccines given to anyone at high risk for COVID-19, such as seniors, immunocompromised people, and anyone with a broad set of risk factors ranging…

At NIO’s design workshop in suburban Shanghai, engineers spread billets of clay onto an aluminum frame of a basic car. A robotic arm with a mechanized drill bit then carves a series of grooves into the clay corresponding to a designer’s sketch. The rough surface is then painstakingly smoothed with palette knives before aluminum foil is pasted on top. Finally, the sleek-looking metallic model is rolled into a sunlit courtyard where every curve and camber is scrutinized. “The artistry really happens with these guys putting color on, taking it off; putting more clay on, taking it off,” says Colin Phipps, senior director of NIO Shanghai Design, who previously worked 12 years for Cadillac. “This is a very labor-intensive process.” It’s also an incongruously artisanal first step of a design…

Meghann Fahy doesn’t have the best luck with vacations. The White Lotus took her to Sicily, where her character’s marriage was tested and many people got killed. In The Perfect Couple, her character was the murder victim, whose death derailed a Nantucket society wedding. Fahy’s latest bad trip, Sirens, feels a lot like this year’s Perfect Couple. Both shows cast big-name actors as rich people summering on exclusive New England islands. Each pits a young heroine of humble means against the formidable, possibly sinister lady of the estate; this time, that quintessential Nicole Kidman role is played by a serenely terrifying Julianne Moore. And while Sirens shows flickers of ambition to transcend the typical A-list crime soap, its admittedly addictive pleasures are chiefly of the sudsy variety. Based on…

Wes Anderson, who specializes in designing fancifully invented societies, probably doesn’t strike anyone as an angry person. But his espionage comedy The Phoenician Scheme, which played in competition at Cannes before opening in theaters May 30, shows glimmers of something that might be called anger, or at least frustration, over the greed and immorality of people who have too much and only want more. The picture is flat and schematic—even more than usual for Anderson, who favors static camerawork and sets that resemble meticulously decorated dollhouses; he also has a penchant for dividing his movies into discrete chapters with deadpan title cards. All those features figure here, but the movie is more muted than usual for Anderson, both in its color tones and story. There’s something somber about it;…

TIME hosted an event on May 13 to celebrate the 2025 list of leaders in health, including a panel on the latest cancer research featuring, from left, TIME correspondent Alice Park, Novartis U.S. president Victor Bulto, CNN’s Sara Sidner, and Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Vinod Balachandran. Read more at time.com/time100health Road to Justice Following the cover package marking the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, TIME hosted a dinner on May 20 in Washington with the Center for Policing Equity. At right, Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement, offered a toast “to truth as our foundation. To hope as our strategy. And to liberation as our destination.” time.com/georgefloyd Become a Kid Reporter TIME for Kids is searching for its next class of junior journalists, like Evelyn Peng on assignment…

President Trump first posed the idea of overhauling the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) while visiting North Carolina in January in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. “I’d like to see the states take care of disasters, let the state take care of the tornadoes and the hurricanes and all of the other things that happen,” he said. “I think you’re going to find it a lot less expensive.” One of his first Executive Orders was establishing a council to assess the effectiveness of the disaster-response agency. At the end of April, Trump appointed 13 people—including Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem—to review FEMA. The group is expected to submit a report to the President within 180 days of its first meeting, according to the…

For decades, some in Europe talked up the need for “collective European defense,” a policy to sharply reduce dependence on Washington for military protection. The debate never got far because Britain and Germany saw no reason to jeopardize transatlantic ties with a drive for security independence. When Russia launched a full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022, it quickly became clear that Europe’s dependence on America for military muscle was deeper than ever. Then Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office, confronting European leaders with the reality that his commitment to Europe had become an open question—especially as war raged in Ukraine. Earlier this year, the center-right CDU/CSU won federal elections in Germany, elevating Friedrich Merz to Chancellor. Merz wasted no time in trumpeting a plan to dramatically boost Germany’s…

The Knicks were clawing their way past the Celtics in Game 1 of an NBA Playofs match so intense, my two young sons morphed into courtside commentators operating at decibel levels usually reserved for jet engines and Skittles-fueled birthday parties. We were shrieking with glee and high-fiving—me half tracking the score, half rummaging for my noise-canceling AirPods before their joy blew out my inner ear. Then, just after Jalen Brunson drove to the basket, a commercial cut in. It was an AT&T ad portraying people suddenly inspired to dial up the ones they love from lush backyards, a boat on the Delta, and … a tightrope bridging a deep canyon. My stomach knotted up as it correctly sensed where this was going. At the end, three little words appeared,…

Hali Lee COLLECTIVE-GIVING LEADER To Hali Lee, the future of philanthropy lies in collective giving. That’s what the philanthropy consultant contends in her new book, The Big We: How Giving Circles Unlock Generosity, Strengthen Community, and Make Change. Social change, she says, can start with people, often women, gathered around kitchen tables, pooling their resources to donate whatever they can afford to local organizations like soup kitchens and libraries. “Everybody’s got a kitchen table,” she says. The movement seems to be taking off. From 2017 to 2023, one study found, nearly 4,000 collective-giving circles in the U.S. donated $3.1 billion to charity. Lee has been doing her part. She started the Asian Women Giving Circle 20 years ago, which has made more than $1 million in small grants to…

If the Neurologist Dr. Daniel Lesley sees 10 patients a day, at least half ask him the same question: Are the brain lapses they’re experiencing a normal part of aging? Or should they be worried? “People have an absolute terror of losing their memory and thinking they’re losing themselves,” says Lesley, who works at Remo Health, a virtual dementia-care company. “They don’t know what’s normal, what’s potentially a sign of something bad, and what’s reversible.” Just like every other organ in the body, the brain changes as you age. Occasional, subtle memory problems—like not remembering where you parked—are usually no big deal. “Part of normal aging is paying less attention to details, and more attention to patterns and dynamics,” Lesley says. “It may also become more difficult to access…

Like a lot of democrats these days, Chris Murphy has been doing some soul searching. For years, the Connecticut Senator, who took office shortly after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, was one of the nation’s most outspoken advocates for tighter gun laws. Gun safety was so important, he argued, that supporting an assault-weapons ban should be mandatory for Democratic leaders. Recently, Murphy has come to believe he was wrong. Not about tougher gun laws, but about trying to force all Democrats to adopt his position. “I bear some responsibility for where we are today,” he told me in a phone interview in April. “I spent a long time trying to make the issue of guns a litmus test for the Democratic Party. I think that…

Katherine Lorenz LEADING NEXT-GEN HEIRS Being an heir to a billion-dollar fortune certainly has its benefits. It can also come with big challenges, from the intricacies of figuring out how best to carry out a loved one’s legacy to the infighting that can sometimes boil over in families when great wealth is passed down. Katherine Lorenz, granddaughter of Texas oilman George P. Mitchell, knows the terrain—and she’s dedicated to helping her fellow heirs navigate it. Lorenz is the leader of the Giving Pledge Next Generation group, the heirs of the ultra-wealthy philanthropists who formally promised to donate the majority of their wealth to charitable causes in their lifetimes or their wills. Lorenz co-founded the group in 2014 with 24 members. It now has 300, ranging in age from 21…

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, the eighth film in the franchise and ostensibly its finale, looks, feels, and sounds like the sort of movie you need to see on the big screen. The powers that be at the Cannes Film Festival clearly thought so too: the picture premiered here on May 14. And even if, some 20 years ago, including a pop-franchise entry might have seemed like a cheap, attention-grabbing stunt, it means something different now. Aside from the fact that Cannes isn’t necessarily above such a stunt, it has always been all about the big-screen experience, which is now so endangered that it needs all the attention it can get. You don’t have to love Cruise to acknowledge that he’s probably the most widely recognizable movie star in the…