Table of contents for December 29, 2025 in TIME Magazine

Person of the Year brings together hundreds of people across our company While the results may be different each year, the Person of the Year issue always starts the same way. Every fall, we ask TIME’s journalists to submit nominations for the people who had the most impact on the year. The newsroom meets, debates, and argues. Over the following weeks, we narrow the field to a small group of contenders and choose our selections across our categories—including, in 2025, CEO, Athlete, Entertainer, and Breakthrough of the Year. A project of this scale brings together hundreds of people across the newsroom and our company, led by CEO Jessica Sibley. This year’s Person of the Year reporting team included Charlie Campbell, based in Singapore; Andrew R. Chow in Washington, D.C.; and…

The pilot of the world’s most powerful distraction machine is surprisingly mellow. He’s quiet-spoken, deliberative, hard to ruffe. He likes watching sports, going to his daughters’ dance recitals, and open white shirts, just normal stuff. His favorite candy is the not-very-exciting Butter-finger. If you ask him to be in your YouTube video, he’ll probably do it. He won’t be great in it, but neither will he be horrible. In an era when tech titans are also sometimes trying to win medals in Brazilian jiujitsu or dismantle a government agency or take tourists into space, Neal Mohan is focused on one thing. He just runs YouTube. For him, that’s more than enough. “The entire dynamics of the entire media industry are changing before our eyes,” he says. “It’s incredibly disruptive, and…

Just after lunchtime on a Saturday in November, a sea of purple braids bobs in unison, barely clearing the tops of the movie-theater seats behind them. The high-pitched voices emerging from the violet-coiffed children sing softly at first, crescendoing as the animated character they’re dressed as bares her soul: “No more hiding/Now I’m shining/Like I’m born to be!” But it’s not just the kids whose attention is rapt. When the next song begins, a father announces, “This one’s my favorite,” and a few minutes later is telling his restless little one they can’t leave yet. “No,” he says, pointing at the animal sidekicks onscreen. “This is really funny.” The scene at this Brooklyn theater, during the second sing-along event staged since Netflix released KPop Demon Hunters on June 20, laid…

1 HEART THE LOVER LILY KING What begins as the hormone-fueled story of a campus love triangle, punctuated by bad sex and the heady banter of English majors, reveals itself to hold far greater weight. In Lily King’s Heart the Lover, aspiring novelist Jordan initially dates Sam, but it’s their 17th century literature classmate, Sam’s roommate Yash, who becomes a great love—and who, more than 20 years later, reappears in Jordan’s settled life and cracks her heart open. Heart the Lover showcases King’s mastery at rendering intimacy and its enduring impacts, and how little in life and love is truly within our control. 2 THINGS IN NATURE MERELY GROW YIYUN LI In 2017, Yiyun Li’s elder son Vincent died by suicide at the age of 16. Seven years later, her…

As TIME’s creative director, I’ve been privileged to work with some of the world’s best artists and photographers in creating thousands of images for our cover. Their voices and immense creativity bring TIME’s iconic red-bordered canvas to life, and have been critical to our visual storytelling for more than 100 years. That won’t change. But while considering how to illustrate TIME’s choice for the 2025 Person of the Year, I did wonder how AI would create an image of itself. Like millions of people over the past year, I turned to a pair of powerful tools, OpenAI’s GPT-5 and Google’s Gemini 3. What do you look like as a person? I asked. Or, Create an illustration using the letters AI. On this page, you can see a sampling of the…

A’ja Wilson is a picture of sheer joy and utter domination. As she approaches the vehicle that will drive her and her Las Vegas Aces teammates up the Strip for a parade feting the team’s third WNBA title in four years, her right hand grips a cocktail glass containing a pink slushy adult beverage, a pink Stanley tumbler for hydration and libation, and a pink tambourine. As a child, Wilson would shake this instrument during sermons in her South Carolina Baptist church. Today she’ll rock it on the bus while waving at delirious fans. Aces win. Again. Amen. Covering Wilson’s left hand is the golden gauntlet worn by Thanos, the Marvel supervillain. Under each of the six Infinity Stones that control the universe, Wilson, the 6-ft., 4-in. superstar, has written…

Since 1801, American leaders have gathered in Washington, D.C., to attend the Inauguration of a new President. It is a day of great tradition, one that often brings together the most powerful people in the country. Prominent at Donald Trump’s return to office in January were the chiefs of U.S. technology companies, which long have led the world. But something unexpected was happening offstage: that same day, a little-known Chinese firm called DeepSeek released a new artificial-intelligence model that spooked markets and led to a rallying cry from Silicon Valley. The next day, tech titans Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, and Masayoshi Son appeared at the White House with an announcement of their own. They pledged to invest up to $500 billion to build AI data centers around the U.S., calling…

At 15, Leonardo Dicaprio sat down with a pile of rented VHS tapes and gave himself a crash course in movie history. He’d recently, and miraculously, landed his first major movie role, playing opposite Robert De Niro, and figured he’d better brush up on the classics, fast. He watched film after film, but no performance awed him more than the one James Dean gave in Elia Kazan’s 1955 East of Eden, as Cal Trask, the rebellious son of a disapproving, rigidly principled, Bible-thumping father. Craving attention, he’s a cutup, a jittery postadolescent clown, a kid perpetually showing off on the monkey bars; if only his yearning could be seared right out of him, the way a teenager burns off calories. Dean’s Cal is simultaneously self-protective and exposed—the tenderness he needs…

1 GETTING KILLED GEESE Three albums in, this ecstatic breakthrough dropped the quartet of 23-year-old Brooklyn art rockers square into the eye of hype’s storm. If the coolly calamitous sound of Getting Killed is any indication, they’ll weather the chaos of Geesemania just fine. High-octane discord hasn’t gone down this easily in decades. In his destabilized croon, front man Cameron Winter warbles through irreverent, mimetic lyrics about God and taxes, loneliness and death, like “I’m getting killed by a pretty good life” or “The Lord has a lot of friends/In the end, he’ll probably forget he’s met you before.” Fevered rave-ups and corporal rhythms teeter just on the edge of collapse and take half a century of New York noise with them. 2 LUX ROSALÍA For her third full-length release,…