DOUBLE ISSUE F E B .

2 8 / M A R C H 7, 2 0 2 2

19 KIDS
CHANGING
THE WORLD

AMBASSADOR
FOR KINDNESS

ORION
JEAN, 11
INTERVIEW BY
Angelina Jolie

time.com
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CONTENTS

5 32 40 48 56
The Brief Disturbing Road Bringing Army
Content Worriers Comfort Green
23 Facebook moderators The U.S. needs more End-of-life doulas, Is it possible for the
The View in Nairobi make $1.50
an hour to look at the
truckers, but the
industry prospers
once rare, have seen
their numbers grow
U.S. military to be both
combat-ready and
worst things on the by churning through significantly during the carbon-neutral?
89 internet drivers pandemic By Alejandro de
Time Off By Billy Perrigo By Alana Semuels By Melissa Chan la Garza
C O V E R : S T Y L I N G : O R N E L L A S U A D ; S H I R T A N D PA N T S : O S H K O S H B ’G O S H

62 70 74
△
Local Heroes What Lies Kid of the Year A busy
How villages high in Ahead 2021 vaccination center
India’s mountains Nothing is more Orion Jean, age 11, in Padampuri,
hit vaccination stressful than talks to Angelina India, on Sept. 3
milestones long before uncertainty. And yet Jolie about spreading Photograph
the rest of the country here we are, kindness. Plus by Saumya
By Nilanjana in Year Three 18 others from a Khandelwal
Bhowmick By Rebekah Taussig generation of hope for TIME

TIME (ISSN 0040-781X) is published twice a month by TIME USA, LLC. PRINCIPAL OFFICE: 3 Bryant Park, New York, NY 10036. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offi ces.
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1
FROM THE EDITOR
How we chose
Kid of the Year
MUCH HAS BEEN SAID, AND RIGHTLY
so, about what a heartbreaking time this
period has been for so many kids around
the world: “The Lost Year,” we called it
in a TIME cover about how COVID-19
affected a generation of students. This
year’s TIME Kid of the Year, 11-year-old
Orion Jean, from Mansfield, Texas, has
turned that script on its head—finding,
and sharing, positivity in hardship: “You
have to find something that breaks your
heart for you to really get out there and
make a difference,” the sixth-grader told
TIME contributing editor Angelina Jolie.
Choosing the Person of the Year,
something we’ve done here at TIME
for nearly a century, is always a daunt-
ing and heady endeavor. Choosing the
Kid of the Year, now in its second year, is
sheer inspiration. And Orion personifies
it. When he was just 9 years old, he won
a student kindness contest and donated
his $500 prize to a local children’s hos-
pital. Since then, he’s collected and do-
nated hundreds of thousands of books,
meals, and toys to those in need. Orion
not only launches big efforts to fix prob-
lems he sees in everyday life, like food
insecurity and lack of access to educa-
tion. He also inspires others to join him,
bringing local communities and gov-
ernments together to help the neediest
among us.
Kid of the Year begins with a nation-
wide search—this year saw thousands of
submissions—in which parents, teach-
ers, and friends can nominate a kid,
age 8 to 16, who is helping to make the
world a better place. We also, in part-
nership with Nickelodeon, look across
social media and school districts, at ac-
tions big and small by kids from around
the country.
Panelists, including representatives
from the Special Olympics and Laureus
Sport for Good Foundation USA, form
an advisory committee to help judge
the candidates on the positive impact
they’ve had this past year and signs
that they’ll continue to lead in the fu-
ture. A committee of kids—including
Nickelodeon stars Alaya High, better
2 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
known as That Girl Lay Lay; Dylan
Gilmer of Tyler Perry’s Young Dylan;
and Wolfgang Schaeffer from The Loud
House—weighs in as well. We then work
with host Trevor Noah to narrow down
the finalists and select the ultimate Kid
of the Year.
This year’s finalists include Orion
as well as environmental activist Cash
Daniels, 12, from Chattanooga, Tenn.;
inventor Lino Marrero, 15, from Frisco,
Texas; Mina Fedor, 13, from Oakland,
Calif., who organized a rally to raise
awareness about anti-Asian hate during
the pandemic; and DJ and antibullying
advocate Samirah Horton, 13, from
Brooklyn. Each of them will be desig-
nated a TIME for Kids Kid Reporter,
with opportunities through the year to
contribute to TIME, and will receive
a cash award from Paramount Global,
Nickelodeon’s parent company.
“WE LOOKED FOR the attributes we
want to see more of in the world:
determination, passion, kindness,
bravery, and innovation,” says TIME for
Kids editor-in-chief Andrea Delbanco.
In addition to Andrea, the TIME team
supporting the project included senior
△ editor Emma Barker, who edited the
Contributing editor stories in this package, and Mike
Angelina Jolie speaks Beck, Maria Perez-Brown, Rebecca
to Kid of the Year Gitlitz, Ian Orefice, and Jeff Smith,
Orion Jean over Zoom who produced the one-hour TV special
highlighting these kids.
The special is now available to watch
on Nick.com, the Nick app, and Nick
On Demand.
“Kindness is a choice, and while we
can’t force others to be kind, we can be
kind ourselves and hope to inspire other
people,” Orion told Jolie. “I want others
to know that they can start today.”
Edward Felsenthal,
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF & CEO
@EFELSENTHAL
 CONVERSATION

On the covers

Photograph by
Justin J Wee for TIME

The race against climate change

TIME is partnering with British motor-racing team Envision
Racing at Formula-E, the world’s only all-electric car-
racing championship, to promote discussion of global
environmental challenges and green futures. TIME
branding will appear on Envision Racing cars at races
E N V I S I O N : J A I M E L O P E Z—J A M M E D I A /G E T T Y I M A G E S ; I N S P I R AT I O N 4: C H A N D A N K H A N N A — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; K I D O F T H E Y E A R C O V E R : S T Y L I N G : O R N E L L A S U A D ; S H I R T A N D PA N T S : O S H K O S H B ’G O S H

held throughout the spring and summer months in Rome,

Monaco, New York City, London, and Seoul.
Photograph by
Aart Verrips for TIME

What to watch
Following the Feb. 8
announcement of this
year’s Oscar nominations,
TIME staff writer Eliana
Making an impact Dockterman compiled
Last fall, we told you that a handy list of where to
a copy of TIME’s Aug. 22/ watch the nominated
Aug. 30, 2021, issue—which films, featuring tidbits from
went into space alongside TIME film critic Stephanie
four civilian astronauts on Zacharek’s reviews to help
the Sept. 15–18 Inspiration4 those who aren’t planning
mission—fetched $40,000 to binge-watch everything
at a charity auction. The final curate their viewing
fundraising totals are now lists. While most of the
in: across the auction as nominees can already be
well as large donations from streamed online, popcorn
Jared Isaacson (one of the See all the newsletters fans will still have to go to
Inspiration4 astronauts) and theaters to see some, like
SpaceX founder Elon Musk Licorice Pizza (up for Best
among others, $243 million Picture) and Spider-Man:
was raised for St. Jude Chil- No Way Home (for Best
dren’s Research Hospital, Visual Effects).
the Chronicle of Philanthropy Read the full roundup at
reported Feb. 8. time.com/movies-oscars

TA L K T O U S
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3
 FOR THE RECORD

‘The 1,200 ‘WE HAVE ATTENDED

situation years TOO MANY VIGILS.’
is highly Length of time since a
YUH-LINE NIOU, New York State assemblywoman,
undesirable drought in the American
Southwest—like the
who represents the New York City district where
and the ongoing one—lasted two
an Asian American woman, Christina Yuna Lee,
was fatally stabbed on Feb. 13, in an interview
decades, according to a
government Feb. 14 report in Nature
later that day with the New York Times
Climate Change
feels
worried
and sorry
about it’
CARRIE LAM,
Hong Kong’s chief
executive, in a Feb. 14
965
Weight in metric
statement addressing tons of avocados
the “onslaught” of a sent to the U.S. from
fifth wave of COVID-19 Mexico in 2020; on
on the city Feb. 12, Mexico’s
department of
agriculture confirmed
that exports had
been suspended
“until further notice,”

4%
following a threat
made to a USDA
inspector

Amount of stock in
Saudi Arabia’s state-
run oil giant Aramco
that the country will
move to a sovereign
wealth fund, per an QUEEN ELIZABETH II,
announcement on
Feb. 13—a transfer
of wealth valued at
nearly $80 billion

‘Do not
eat soap.’
‘They were not allowing U.S. CONSUMER
PRODUCT SAFETY

me to go inside, just because

COMMISSION, in
I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y B R O W N B I R D D E S I G N F O R T I M E

a Feb. 13 tweet
responding to

I was carrying the burqa.’

an Uber Eats
commercial that
aired during the
2022 Super Bowl
MUSKAN KHAN, a college student who has become a symbol of featuring celebrities
resistance against a spate of decisions by government-run schools in the eating household
Indian state of Karnataka to ban the hijab, in a Feb. 8 interview with news outlet NDTV products (to show
the service delivers
more than food)

4 Time February 28/March 7, 2022 SOURCES: REUTERS, NBC NE WS, CBS NE WS, N PR, CNN, A P
The Brief

SCHOOL’S OUT
BY KATIE REILLY

School districts across the U.S.

are grappling with financial
challenges—and fewer students

A ‘SELFIE’ MOMENT FOR THE HOW CAN SPOTIFY CLEAN UP A DOPING SCANDAL OVERSHADOWS
JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE ITS JOE ROGAN MESS? OLYMPIC FIGURE SKATING

PHOTOGR APH BY CARLOS AVILA GONZALEZ 5

THE BRIEF OPENER

F
ive years ago, there were 37,049 students
enrolled in Oakland, Calif., public schools.
Today that number is down nearly 10%—a de-
cline the district attributes to lower birth rates,
a lack of affordable housing, and the pandemic causing
more families to leave the Bay Area. And after a marathon
debate that stretched eight hours, the city’s school board
did what many others may soon have to consider, voting
on Feb. 9 to close or merge nearly a dozen schools.
Education experts say the Oakland plan, which will af-
fect the district’s now roughly 33,000 students and their
families, refects the hard choices facing school districts
nationwide as they contend with enrollment declines and
funding challenges that have been exacerbated by the
COVID-19 pandemic.
“School districts are between a rock and a hard place.
They need to be financially responsible, but they also
have a fundamental responsi-
bility to the well-being of their
students,” says Thomas Dee, a
professor at Stanford Univer-
sity’s Graduate School of Educa-
tion who has researched public-
‘We’re both
school enrollment loss. “I don’t
envy the difficult choices addressing
they’re facing right now.”
The Oakland unified school not only a
a new school farther from home. While Black students
represent 23% of students across the school district,
they make up 43% of students at the schools slated for
closure, according to the local news site Oaklandside.
“Instead of investing time to close down schools that
serve majority Black and brown students, invest your
time as a district to build community and to empower
students,” Samantha Pal, a student director on the OUSD
board of education, said during the meeting. “This is a
school district and not a business.”
Other schOOl districts around the country are
facing similar issues. Dee tracked an unprecedented
decline in public-school enrollment during the pandemic
and found that public K-12 schools lost roughly
1.1 million students in fall 2020, with enrollment declines
concentrated in districts that started the year with
remote-only learning.
Total public-school
enrollment in the U.S. fell 3%
in the 2020–21 school year
compared with the previous
year, according to the National
Center for Education Statistics.
Marguerite Roza, director
of Georgetown’s Edunomics
Lab, which studies education

financial
district (OUSD) board of finance, says Oakland’s school-
education voted 4 to 2 to close closure plan is “a glimpse
seven schools over the next two of what’s coming for a lot of
years, merge two other schools,
and eliminate some grades in crisis, but a districts,” as she sees many
losing students and stretching
two others. Board member Mike
Hutchinson, who opposed the
measure, said it amounted to
quality crisis.’ limited resources across too
many schools.
Chicago public schools saw
—KYLA JOHNSON-TRAMMELL,
“war on the community.” SUPERINTENDENT, OAKLAND a 3% enrollment drop for the
But Oakland Superintendent UNIFIED SCHOOL DISTRICT 2021–22 school year, compared
Kyla Johnson-Trammell said with 2020–21. The district
it was a necessary step toward had nearly 439,000 students
addressing “serious dilemmas” in 2002–03; now it has about
facing the district, citing long-term financial challenges 330,000. St. Paul public schools in Minnesota saw en-
and the high costs of operating a large number of schools rollment fall 6.3% this school year, and the school board
while trying to offer students a quality education. voted to close six schools.
The district says declining enrollment and attendance “A lot of districts right now are holding on to some of
have led to a decrease in revenue, as it faces pressure from their federal relief money and using it to kind of backstop
county officials to reduce a $90 million budget shortfall. these cuts,” Roza says, referring to the $190 billion
P R E V I O U S PA G E : S A N F R A N C I S C O C H R O N I C L E /G E T T Y I M A G E S

(The closures and mergers could save Oakland schools
$4 million to $14.7 million annually, according to an anal-
ysis by the district.)
“We’re both addressing not only a financial crisis, but a
quality crisis in terms of reaching our mission and vision
of having high-quality community schools across the dis-
trict,” Johnson-Trammell said.
The measure drew fierce protest from students,
parents, and educators. Many argued the plan will
disproportionately affect Black students in low-income
neighborhoods, taking them away from a familiar school
community and, in some cases, forcing them to attend
6 The Brief is reported by Eloise Barry, Madeleine Carlisle, Tara Law, Sanya Mansoor, Ciara Nugent, Billy Perrigo, and Olivia B. Waxman
given to schools in COVID-19 relief packages passed by
Congress. “And that money is going to run out.”
When it does, more schools could face drastic budget
decisions, and students will be most affected.
Dee says it’s important to pay attention to where
students are sent after their schools close—whether they
are sent to high-quality schools with better resources or
to lower-performing schools that lack necessary funding
to accommodate that infux.
“Simply speaking of closures without talking about
thoughtful strategies for reinvestment in these vulnerable
children would be problematic,” he says. 
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THE BRIEF NEWS

A shot in
NEWS TICKER
the dark
One million miles
from home, the
James Webb
Space Telescope is
preparing for its job
of peering deeper
settled
a lawsuit brought into space than
by Virginia Giuffre, any telescope ever
has before. But on
Feb. 11, an onboard
camera looked
much closer, taking
this selfie of the
telescope’s 21-ft.-
wide, 18-segment
main mirror.
Each of those
segments can be
moved in seven
axes for pinpoint
focusing; in this
image, the single
bright segment is
pointed directly at a
star. —Jeffrey Kluger

alleges that THE BULLETIN

the CIA has for years
been collecting data in What Florida’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill means for LGBTQ kids
bulk
On Feb. 8, PresidenT JOe biden cOn-
demned legislation swiftly moving through
Florida’s state legislature that would ban
public school districts from “encouraging”
classroom discussion of sexual orienta-
tion or gender identity. Supporters of the
bill claim it would keep parents involved in
their kids’ educations; critics have labeled
it a discriminatory attempt by GOP law-
makers to stir support among their base at
the expense of LGBTQ students.
CURRICULUM CHANGES Specifically, the
Florida bill seeks to ban LGBTQ instruction
at “primary grade levels.” (Florida doesn’t
have a statutory definition for that term at
the moment, however, so critics argue it’s
unclear what age range it would apply to.)
At a recent state senate hearing, a lawmaker
gave the example of math problems framed
with details like “Sally has two moms.”
That, the bill’s sponsor said, is “exactly”
what it aims to prevent.

reopen TARGETED EFFORTS The “Don’t Say Gay”
an embassy in the bill is part of a wave of legislation target-
Solomon Islands ing what can and cannot be said in public
school classrooms across the U.S. A Feb. 15
report by PEN America, a nonprofit orga-
nization that advocates for free expression,
found that 2022 has seen a rise in “educa-
tional gag orders” in state legislatures, in-
LEGAL THREATS The legislation also allows
parents to sue school districts over class-
room discussions they deem inappropriate—
opening the door to “frivolous lawsuits,”
argues Kara Gross, legislative director and
senior policy counsel of the American Civil
Liberties Union of Florida. Critics say the
bill will stop students from discussing
N A S A /A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S

cluding 15 bills that would ban discussion
of LGBTQ identities. GOP lawmakers also
introduced a record number of bills in 2021
targeting LGBTQ students, limiting their
ability to play sports or access medical care.
8 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
LGBTQ friends or family members—and
prevent LGBTQ students, who often al-
ready face increased rates of stigma and
isolation, from speaking about their very
existence. —mAdeLeine cArLisLe
 We keep more
people safe online
than anyone else
in the world.
THE BRIEF NEWS

GOOD QUESTION

NEWS TICKER How can Spotify regain trust

after its Joe Rogan crisis?
As ArTisTs And fAns boycoTT spoTify
over its loyalty to Joe Rogan’s controversial
podcast, the popular streaming service now
finds itself at a crossroads. Should it sup-
port dissatisfied subscribers and moderate
potentially harmful content or keep Rogan
$7 billion in
frozen funds from on its platform and chase the most profit
Afghanistan’s central possible? So far, it has tried to do both—and
bank that’s not going to help regain trust, crisis-
management experts tell TIME.
Spotify’s stance over Rogan has raised
questions about the company’s responsi-
bility to police the content on its platform,
and to take a stance on the podcasts it hosts.
Despite its exclusive deal with Rogan, the
company has tended to avoid labeling itself
as a publisher since it doesn’t have advance
approval of his shows, and can remove epi-
sodes only if they run afoul of its content
guidelines. It has removed about 6% of Ro-
gan’s episodes and added an advisory to any
koalas podcast that discusses the pandemic, but
in eastern Australia
are officially listed
it is not cutting ties with the wildly popu-
as endangered lar host, who has been accused of spreading
false narratives about COVID-19 and con-
demned for his repeated use of a racial slur.
“It shows that they care more about prof-
its than their reputation,” says Steven Fink, a
crisis consultant and author. “That’s never a
good position to be in.”
For Spotify, Rogan’s podcast is a cash
cow: it reaches an estimated 11 million
listeners per episode, making it the stream-
ing service’s most popular podcast—and
its millennial audience closely aligns with
Spotify’s target customer. But from a social-
consciousness perspective, experts say the
company has mismanaged its crisis response
and should have placed a greater emphasis
on its long-term reputation.
The first thing a company should con-
sider when dealing with a controversy is how
its various stakeholders are reacting—spe-
cifically, its customers, says Jonathan Ber-
nstein, a crisis manager. Choosing between
stakeholders won’t be an easy decision for
a company like Spotify, crisis experts warn,
but executives should let their values guide
the way. “Do they want to be known as a
company that forgives Joe Rogan and sup-
ports antivaxxers?” Fink asks. “Or do they
want to be known as a company that pro-
tects its customer base?”
According to Eric Pliner, CEO of YSC
Consulting, the most effective leaders are
those who answer questions like these by
looking at the intersection of their morals,
ethical contexts, and job responsibilities.
“You have to realize that there is no way
to make everyone happy,” he says. “In-
stead of trying, and thereby making no
one happy, the alternative is to figure out
what we really stand for and what we won’t
stand for.” —nik popli

CULTURE

Art attacks
On his first day at work at a Russian art gallery last
year, a security guard doodled eyes on the faceless
figures in a valuable avant-garde painting, the gallery
said on Feb. 7. He reportedly said he was “depressed”
by the artwork. Though the piece was restored
sea levels along the successfully, Russian police have since opened an
U.S. coast will, on investigation into the incident. Here, more scandalous
average, rise by about a vandalism and misguided touch-ups. —Eloise Barry
foot by 2050.

MIRACULOUS MAKEOVER STICKY SITUATION GALLERY GRAFFITI

T H E A R T N E W S PA P E R R U S S I A /A P

An 81-year-old amateur painter
was credited with reviving the
tourist economy of her town in
northeastern Spain in 2012
after her botched restoration of
a centuries-old fresco of Jesus in
a local church went viral.
After staff at Cairo’s Egyptian
Museum dislodged the beard
on King Tutankhamun’s
3,300-year-old funerary
mask in 2014, they stuck
it back on with adhesive,
scratching it in the process.
In 1974, a man in New York’s
Museum of Modern Art spray-
painted “KILL LIES ALL” across
Picasso’s Guernica, in a protest
over the Vietnam War. Escorted
out by guards, he shouted, “Call
the curator. I am an artist.”

10 Time February 28/March 7, 2022

 Every day Google blocks
100 million phishing attempts,

out of your inbox.

We keep more people safe online than anyone else with products that are
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THE BRIEF MILESTONES

SETTLED

Sandy Hook suit

DIED
Ivan Reitman
Comedic auteur
BY ERNIE HUDSON
IVAN REITMAN WASN’T ALWAYS THE
funniest guy in person, but in his body
of work, he was one of the greatest co-
medic geniuses of our time. He directed
and produced so many beloved films,
including National Lampoon’s Animal
House, Space Jam, Kindergarten Cop,
and Ghostbusters, which I starred in.
Reitman, who died on Feb. 12 at 75,
knew what was funny, and he had the
ability to bring it out on screen.
In 1982, I ran into Reitman by ac-
My career would not have been the
same if it weren’t for Reitman. Ghost-
busters didn’t launch my career, but the
movie resonated with so many people.
It amazed me just how popular it be-
came. The fandom grew in the weirdest
ways and crossed generations.
So many directors get in the way;
I really admired that Reitman knew
how not to. He didn’t interfere, and
he trusted talent. I wonder how many
comedians became comedians after
watching his movies.
There’s a humanity that’s vibrant and
alive in Reitman’s work. That is rare,
and very special. And he showed over
and over again that he had an intuitive
A historic victory
REMINGTON ARMS HAS SET-
tled a wrongful-death lawsuit
with nine families who lost loved
ones in the Sandy Hook Elemen-
tary School shooting for $73 mil-
lion, attorneys announced on
Feb. 15. The settlement ends a
long-running legal battle over
how Remington marketed the
rifle used in the 2012 massacre.
Though it means the suit
ended without a verdict, it’s the
first time a U.S. gun manufac-
turer has been held liable in a
mass shooting, the plaintiffs’
lawyers said, and could open the
door to future lawsuits against
gunmakers.
Josh Koskoff, an attorney
representing the families, says
it should be a “wake-up call” to
the firearms industry, which is
largely immune to lawsuits under
federal law.
“Our hope is that this victory
will be the first boulder in the av-
alanche that forces that change,”
he says. “These nine families
have shared a single goal from the
very beginning: to do whatever
they could to help prevent the
next Sandy Hook.”
While the families remem-
bered those they lost, they ex-

cident on an elevator while shooting a
movie. That’s when he first mentioned
Ghostbusters—and that there was noth-
ing in it for me. So I said, “Good luck
with that.” But then I auditioned any-
way and they loved me.
understanding of what brought people
together—and what people would re-
spond to.
Losing him feels like losing family.
Hudson is an actor
R E I T M A N : M C A U N I V E R S A L / E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N ; D AV I S : A N T H O N Y B A R B O Z A — G E T T Y I M A G E S
pressed relief at the outcome.
“Today is about what is right
and what is wrong,” says Francine
Wheeler, whose 6-year-old son,
Ben, was killed in the shooting.
—MELISSA CHAN

DIED P.J. O’Rourke, DISMISSED RESIGNED ARRESTED

> conservative Former Alaska Cressida Dick, Former Honduran
celebrated funk author, satirist, Governor Sarah London’s police President Juan
singer-songwriter, at and political Palin’s defamation commissioner, Orlando Hernández,
77, on Feb. 9. commentator, on case against the on Feb. 10, after on Feb. 15, on drug-
> Lata Mangeshkar, New York Times, by a recent report trafficking charges.
playback singer a district judge on found widespread
known as India’s RECORDED Feb. 15. (A jury misogyny and RENAMED
“Queen of Melody,” The Cook Islands’ later also ruled in racism within the Facebook’s News
at 92, on Feb. 6. the Times’ favor.) city’s police force. Feed on Feb. 15—
as, simply, “Feed.”
12
 Every day Google protects
4 billion devices from risky sites,

from malware.
We keep more people safe online than anyone else with products that are
secure by default, private by design, and put you in control.

g.co/safety
THE BRIEF
OLYMPICS
SNOWBOARDING
DOPING
Russia at center
of another Olympic
drug scandal
BY ALICE PARK
CURLING
THE WOMEN’S FIGURE SKATING EVENT IN
Beijing was teed up to be a celebration: a
showcase for a remarkable group of Russian
teenagers who are pushing the boundar-
ies of their sport, with jaw-dropping qua-
druple jumps proving that women are capa-
ble of the same athletic feats as their male
counterparts.
Then one of those women—the young-
est and most talented of the three—tested
positive for a performance-enhancing drug.
Kamila Valieva, 15, failed a drug test taken
on Christmas Day, but because of delays in
reporting, her results didn’t become avail-
BIATHLON
able until after she had competed in the
team event at the Olympics, where she be-
came the first woman ever to land a quadru-
ple jump at the Games, helping the Russian
team top the U.S. for gold. She successfully
appealed a suspension, and ultimately an
independent arbitration court determined
that Valieva could continue to skate while
a separate investigation into her positive
test continued. The International Olympic
14 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
Committee (IOC) has ruled that no medals
will be awarded in either event until the re-
view of Valieva’s doping case is concluded,
which could take months.
The decisions put in limbo not only
the results of the team event, but also the
women’s individual competition, in which
Valieva was the favorite for gold. And it has
VA L I E VA : A N N E - C H R I S T I N E P O U J O U L AT — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; S N O W : D O U G M I L L S — T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S/ R E D U X ; G E T T Y I M A G E S (3)
had disastrous consequences for the efforts
to make the Olympics a model of clean and
fair competition.
For skating fans, the news is at once
shocking and unsurprising. Russian ath-
letes are competing in Beijing under the
IOC flag, as the Russian Olympic Commit-
tee, after the country was sanctioned in
2019 for running a massive state-sponsored
doping program that was unearthed fol-
lowing the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. Sev-
eral dozen Russian athletes have had their
Olympic medals stripped in the wake of the
revelations because of doping violations.
Until now, however, figure skating has
largely escaped the taint.
The Moscow training center where Va-
lieva skates, however, is shrouded in con-
troversy. As a notably quick succession of
‘This is a big hit to the
Olympic movement.’
—SCOTT MOIR, TWO-TIME OLYMPIC
GOLD MEDALIST
◁
The 15-year-old Valieva CLIMATE
has become the biggest
story of the Games for
all the wrong reasons
BY CHAD DE GUZMAN
champions has emerged from the school,
rival skaters and coaches have accused head
coach Eteri Tutberidze and her team of put-
ting medals above their athletes’ long-term
success and health. Until Valieva, however,
none of her skaters has been known to test
positive for a banned substance. “It doesn’t
feel like they are coaches at all, but dog
trainers,” says Adam Rippon, a 2018 bronze
medalist and coach of current Olympian
Mariah Bell. “They’re running a circus.”
Because Valieva is a minor, antidoping
officials are focusing their investigation on
the adults around her. The 15-year-old’s
sample contained trimetazidine (TMZ), a
heart medication prescribed to people with
angina to improve blood flow. TMZ is on
the World Anti-Doping Agency’s banned
list because it can be used by athletes to
enhance performance by helping the heart
muscle endure longer bouts of training. Her
sample also reportedly contained two other
allowed substances that can help improve
blood flow and possibly endurance.
Valieva’s lawyer argued that she could
have been “contaminated” with TMZ, ‘The Olympics have
which her grandfather takes, by sharing a
drinking glass or coming into contact with
landed in a place
a surface where the medication was placed. not climatically
Many experts are skeptical. While he isn’t suitable.’
privy to details of the case, Dr. Steven Nis-
sen, a cardiologist at the Cleveland Clinic,
says the contamination route is “very far-
fetched. It seems very, very unlikely.”
The fact that Valieva continued to com-
pete raises more profound questions for the
Olympic movement and its mission to pro-
mote fair play in sports. Athletes and anti-
doping officials have criticized what they
call the weak punishment of the Russian
program, arguing that only a complete ban
of the country from all international events
could even begin to stop the continued flout-
ing of doping rules. Without such aggressive
action, it’s the athletes who bear the burden
of the consequences. “This is a big hit to the
Olympic movement,” says Canadian Scott
Moir, a coach and two-time Olympic gold
medalist in ice dancing. “I’m questioning
why I walked into schools for the past
12 years of my life and told kids what pride
I took in being an Olympian.” 
15
THE BRIEF
OLYMPICS
FIGURE SKATING
Nathan Chen finally
gets his gold medal
BY ALICE PARK
SNOWBOARDING IT TOOK ONE MORE OLYM-
pics than he—and everyone
else in the figure-skating
world—expected, but
American Nathan Chen
finally has his Olympic
medal. And it’s gold.
The 22-year-old Salt
Lake City native skated the
program of his life in Bei-
jing’s Capital Indoor Sta-
NORDIC COMBINED
dium on Feb. 10 to stand
atop the podium. Japan
filled the remaining spots,
with Yuma Kagiyama earn-
ing silver and Shoma Uno
bronze. “I just had a blast
out there,” said Chen,
who skated to a medley of
Elton John tunes includ-
ing “Rocket Man.” “I’m so
happy; that program is so
much fun to skate.”
It was Chen’s gold to
lose, just as it was heading
into the Games four years
ago. He was considered a
favorite in PyeongChang,
but Chen couldn’t meet
the moment and skated an
uncharacteristically error-
filled short program that
led to his finishing off the
SNOWBOARDING
16 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
podium entirely. The per-
formance fueled the Yale
student over the past four
years. Indeed, talk to any
member of Chen’s team and
they say the same thing: he
knows what he wants. And
in Beijing, Chen wanted to
prove that his performance
in PyeongChang did not de-
fine him. Chen set a world
record with his score in the
short program on Feb. 8,
easily taking the lead with a
margin of almost six points.
He built on the momentum
in the free program, effort-
lessly landing five quadru-
ple jumps and cementing
his reputation as one of the
most talented men’s figure
skaters in history.
The “Rocket Man” pro-
gram was a departure for
Chen, who normally skates
to more abstract music
selections. For the chore-
ography, he approached
noted ice-dance coach
Marie-France Dubreuil,
who coaches the top three
U.S. ice-dance teams. “I
was looking to change up
the choreography, and had
seen the amazing work that
Marie-France was doing,”
Chen told TIME before the
Games. Dubreuil was “puz-
zled” when Chen reached
out. “Normally my head
likes to create for four legs,
four arms, two heads, and
four eyes,” she says. “When
he called me, I said ‘Why?’”
Dubreuil helped intro-
duce Chen to hip-hop cho-
reographer Sam Chouinard.
The fast and boisterous
dance sequence at the
end—a hit with both fans
and judges—was Choui-
nard’s effort to show a dif-
ferent side of Chen. “I tried
to see if he can dance and
perform when he is getting
ready to jump, so it would
be easier to tell the story
and easier to keep the au-
dience involved in what he
was trying to do on the ice,”
Chouinard says. “When
skaters understand the
blend of the two, this is the
perfect recipe for gold.”
For Chen, the gold medal
is the payoff for a lifetime of
training that began on the
practice rink for the 2002
Salt Lake City Olympics,
and for the long hours his
mother spent driving him
a couple of times a month
from their Utah home to Los
Angeles, where he started
taking lessons when he
was 12. “My mom has been
with me since the first day I
stepped on the ice, and even
now is right by my side,” he
told TIME. “When I was 12
we didn’t have the finances
to afford flights, so driving
was the only way to get me
back and forth at the time.”
It finally paid off, with
gold. 
◁
Chen during his gold-
medal-winning skate to
“Rocket Man” in Beijing

Team China freestyle skier Gu flies the flag after medaling on Feb. 15
POLITICS
Eileen Gu skis into
a global standoff
BY AMY GUNIA
COMPETING FOR CHINA ON FEB. 8, THE
U.S.-born freestyle skier Eileen Gu landed
a spectacular left double-1620 with safety
grab on her final run to win gold. She’d
never pulled off the daring trick in competi-
tion before—much less in front of a global
audience—and it instantly made her one of
the Games’ biggest stars.
Excitement was so great over Gu’s first
C H E N : H A R R Y H O W — G E T T Y I M A G E S; G U : T I M C L AY T O N — C O R B I S/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; G E T T Y I M A G E S ( 5 )
medal that chatter about it temporarily
crashed the internet in China, where the
18-year-old has been nicknamed Snow Prin-
cess and has graced local editions of Harper’s
Bazaar and Vogue.
Not everyone is cheering her on, however.
Born to a U.S. father and a Chinese mother,
Gu spent a few seasons competing at major
events for the U.S., where she was raised and
still lives. But in 2019, at age 15, she decided
that she would change national affiliation
and compete for China in 2022. That switch
has prompted critics in the U.S. to call her an
opportunist—even a traitor.
Mary Gallagher, a professor of political
science at the University of Michigan, says
that the backlash against Gu was to be ex-
pected. “When an athlete chooses a nation-
ality, then there’s more focus on the choice
and, in this case, on her timing.” Does it
SPEEDSKATING
mean that Gu supports Beijing’s crackdown BOBSLED
in Xinjiang, which has led several nations,
including the U.S., to stage a diplomatic boy-
cott of the Games? “I don’t know,” says Gal-
lagher, “but her decision seems tone-deaf
given the global condemnation of China’s
policies.”
Some experts say that it was never going
to be possible to avoid politics at the Olym-
pics, given the state of relations between
the two global powers. Washington and Bei-
jing are at loggerheads over everything from OLDER ATHLETES
trade and technology to maritime navigation
and the status of Taiwan.
Gu has tried her best to straddle the geo-
political divide. “I grew up spending 25%
to 30% of my time in China,” she said on
Feb. 8, when asked by reporters if she had
renounced her U.S. passport. “I’m American
when I’m in the U.S. and Chinese when I’m
in China.” But her efforts have done little to
tamp down the controversy.
“Gu is being caught in the wider politi-
cal cross fire between the U.S. and China
in ways that other athletes are not,” says
Jules Boykoff, a sports and politics expert
at Pacific University. “Her decision to com-
FREESTYLE SKIING
pete for China has thrust her into a political
firestorm.”
‘I’m American when
I’m in the U.S. and Chinese
when I’m in China.’
—EILEEN GU
17
THE BRIEF TIME WITH
At 75, cult filmmaker,
author, and “filth elder”
John Waters is having the
busiest year of his life
BY JUDY BERMAN
ConvenTional wisdom holds ThaT 2021’s
much anticipated hot vax summer never hap-
pened, but John Waters knows different. Cin-
ema’s Pope of Trash rents a home in Cape Cod’s
queer party destination Provincetown every
summer, and last year “it was like the movie The
Swarm, but with gay people,” Waters laughs. Al-
though the season marked the filmmaker, au-
thor, and cultural icon’s 57th in Ptown, the con-
vergence was like nothing he had seen before.
“I hid,” he says—writing in the mornings and
spending afternoons on the beach.
A self-described “filth elder” who spent his
20s making movies transgressive enough to
send his parents’ generation into conniptions,
the Pink Flamingos auteur sympathizes with
the youth, whose decadent and libidinous urges
he knows well. “I feel bad for them,” he says.
“They’re quarantined and aroused, horny, and
lonely. That’s not fair when you’re young.”
Now 75 and no longer a slave to hormones,
Waters hunkered down and worked through the
pandemic. In fact, he tells me over a video chat
from an art studio in his hometown of Baltimore,
he’s never been busier than he is right now.
Dressed mutedly in a dark jacket, turtleneck,
and scarf that offset a backdrop papered with
the bright, glittery character portraits that fans
mail him and press into his hands at events, he
has ostensibly logged on to promote his guest
appearance in the fourth season of Prime Vid-
eo’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (premiering
Feb. 18). The man behind Hairspray and Cry-
Baby makes an apt addition to a midcentury
showbiz comedy, and Waters had a ball shoot-
ing on location in downtown Manhattan. “The
whole Village was shut down,” he enthuses.
“Behind us were vintage buses, cars, hundreds
of extras in costumes. It was old-school Holly-
wood, in a great way.” But his character is still
being kept under wraps, and anyway, he has so
many upcoming projects to discuss that he’s
made himself a cheat sheet.
Just two months in, Waters is already booked
solid for 2022. In March, he has an art show
opening in Baltimore. He’ll celebrate his birth-
day in April, with spoken-word dates in New
York and Atlantic City. (He’s titled his pandemic-
era show False Positive.) May brings his biggest
18 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
release of the year: his debut novel,
Liarmouth, for which he’s planning a
live book tour, COVID willing. From
there, it’s a marathon of hosting gigs,
charity events, his annual fan confab
Camp John Waters in September, and
a couple dozen performances of his
show A John Waters Christmas.
“People say, ‘Why don’t you re-
tire?’” Waters scoffs. “I’d drop dead if
I retired. I jump out of bed every day
to go to work.” After six decades of
Grave matter productive perversity, slowing down
would pretty much require shutting
off his brain. “I have to think up some-
thing weird every morning!”
Maybe it isn’t so surprising that
Waters is more in demand than ever.
In some depressing ways, we live in
an America his movies anticipated—
with charlatans, extremists, and ma-
lignant narcissists crowding the public
square, as constant altercations break
out between a repressive far right and
a radical-chic far left.
The difference between his outré
work and the hysterical pitch of our
current public discourse—besides,
of course, that no one’s drafting laws
based on his absurdism—is that his in-
Dear John tentions are always playful and good-
natured. Waters likes to poke fun at
what he still calls “political correct-
ness,” not because he’s joined the self-
serious war on wokeness, but because
he thinks humor is the best route to
social change. He wants to see liberals
form mock “pronoun police” forces
and hand out tickets. So you want to
upstage the insurrectionists who re-
lieved themselves in the halls of Con-
Canon fodder gress? “Maybe we should form fecal
flash mobs,” he chuckles.
Liarmouth is very much in this
punkish tradition. A road novel with
an outrageously Watersian attraction
at every rest stop, the book follows
self-styled criminal mastermind Mar-
sha Sprinkle and a doting accomplice
as they grift their way up the East
Coast. “I think it’s the most insane
thing I’ve ever written,” Waters says.
If Liarmouth seems merciless in its
skewering of political correctness, he
notes that the criticism is intended “in
a good way, because I secretly think
I am politically correct.” Which is to
 say, he shares the inclusive aims of today’s activ-
ists, minus the appetite for sanctimonious Twit-
ter threads. (Waters’ ubiquity does not extend to
social media.)
An optimistic read on why everyone wants a
piece of Waters these days would be that chang-
ing times have revealed the humanism underly-
ing his spectacles. As the aura of transgression
surrounding even his earliest, most extreme
movies fades, what remains is the filmmaker’s
endless fascination with his fellow man. What
kind of person wouldn’t adore Tracy Turnblad,
the plucky plus-size integrationist heroine of
Hairspray? But Waters also has affection for Di-
vine’s monstrously vain Dawn Davenport, from
Female Trouble, whose mad pursuit of beauty ul-
timately lands her in the electric chair.
“Everybody I write about, even the crazy
people in Liarmouth—I love them,” he says. “I
PETER FISHER FOR TIME
want to spend time with them. And I’m amazed
at human behavior. That’s what keeps me going:
to try to understand why people act the way
they do. If I didn’t do this”—by which I assume
he means make art in any and every feasible
medium—“I’d be a good shrink.”
Would it be fair to say that, throughout a ca-
reer commonly associated with the gross and the
‘I try not subversive, Waters’ guiding principle has always
been radical acceptance? “Completely!” he ex-
to judge claims, energized. “I try not to judge people’s be-
people’s havior because I don’t know the backstory.”
For those who grew up loving him, it’s
behavior gratifying to see Waters enjoy the same open-
because mindedness he’s promoted for decades. Call him
I don’t an accepted radical, cherished by cinephiles and
cultists as well as the kids who flock to him at
know the airports following his cameo in an Alvin and the
backstory.’ Chipmunks movie. For his part, Waters is thrilled
JOHN WATERS to support young people in satirizing the pieties
and excesses of their own generations. “I’ve al-
ways made fun of rules,” he says. “In the ’60s, I
made fun of hippie rules, even though I was in
that world and my audience was in that world.
But there’s always extreme people, in all worlds,
that can laugh about it. And I think they’re the
survivors.” □
19
LIGHTBOX

In the trenches
A Ukrainian soldier observes pro-Russian forces amassed
on the front line in the breakaway Donetsk region of Ukraine
on Feb. 8. A massive Russian troop buildup on the border
has sparked fears of an invasion. In a Feb. 15 statement,
President Joe Biden said the U.S. had been engaging in
diplomacy with Russia in an attempt to stave off a major
military conflict. Russia’s demands include legal guarantees
that Ukraine will not join NATO. Biden said the U.S. was ready
to respond “decisively” if Russia invades Ukraine.

Photograph by Maxim Dondyuk for TIME

▶ For more of our best photography, visit time.com/lightbox
NATION

RETHINKING
RISK
BY SCOTT GOTTLIEB

▶
INSIDE

BIDEN’S STRUGGLE TO REVIVE THE BLACK HISTORY THAT WAS THE VALUE OF FACING
THE IRAN NUCLEAR DEAL LOST DURING THE PANDEMIC YOUR REGRETS

23
THE VIEW OPENER
Along with this wall of immunity,
approaches adopted when we had
few tools to prevent spread are no
longer providing benefits that always
justify their costs of social disruption,
diminished classroom experiences,
and economic drag.
But we’ve been slow to adapt our
strategies to the evolving notions
of risk. The CDC is soon expected
to update its policies, moving away
from national recommendations
and instead tying to measures of
local prevalence its guidance for the
protective steps people should take.
This community-by-community
standard may not be enough. We’ve
turned restrictions on but haven’t
turned them off as conditions changed.
In many cases, it’s because we’re still
relying on the same metrics that we
used at the start of the pandemic.
These concepts for measuring risk
have remained mostly fixed since
that time, even as people acquired
protections from the virus.
At the outset of the pandemic, we
had a shared sense of the threat and
a shared willingness to sacrifice a lot
to deal with it. As the pandemic has
evolved, and its burdens accumu-
lated, that social compact has frayed.
Now we need to shift from measures
adopted collectively, to tactics taken
individually by people who are judg-
ing their own individual risk against
their degree of caution. This means we
must accept more regional and local
variation in measures adopted at the
state level. The government’s role will
be to make sure people have the tools
they need to make those choices.
Steps that were critical in 2020 to
reduce death and health care strain
when we were overwhelmed are no
longer justifiable. But what anchors
that change? Even when actions were
adjusted based on risk, in many cases
it came too slow. Without deliberate
guideposts, it’s hard to gauge why one
posture should give way to another,
and how to make these decisions.
We’ll never go back to many of
the tragic steps we had to take in the
spring of 2020 when we were over-
whelmed by the first wave of the virus.
Take the 45 days to slow the spread
put in place by President Donald
24 The View is reported by Eloise Barry, Leslie Dickstein, and Simmone Shah
Trump to try and mitigate that devas-
tating first wave. Reflecting on those
extreme measures, it’s hard today to
remember how bad it was back then
because we haven’t anchored the de-
bate in a consistent measure of danger
and recovery.
Remember that the CDC had failed
to field a diagnostic test that could
tell us where COVID-19 was spread-
ing, and where it hadn’t yet arrived,
so we couldn’t target our steps to the
cities where the virus was already epi-
demic. We didn’t know where COVID
was, or where it wasn’t. People were
still arguing that COVID-19 was no
worse than the flu, with a case fatality
rate of 0.1%. By July 2020, when that
first wave had subsided, 0.25% of the
entire population of New York City
had died from COVID-19, but only
one-fifth of the city’s residents had
been infected.
The risk from COVID-19’s contin-
ued march was a catastrophic pros-
pect. Our tools to limit its spread
didn’t exist. And our vulnerability
seemed unbounded. We had to slow
the spread and buy ourselves some
time to get our response in place. At
the epidemic’s peak during the winter
of 2020, more than 6,000 people in △
the U.S. were dying each week in nurs- A man sits at a bus stop in
ing homes alone. New York City on May 7, 2020,
That was 2020. at the height of the first wave
Now iN 2022, we need to leave
those 2020 notions of risk behind. We’ve also seen dramatic advances in
What was judged to be “moderate” our care of the sick.
prevalence this time last year, when Yet a lot of the other constructs
we were largely unvaccinated, may be have stayed in place, even as the Omi-
the new “low” when our vulnerability cron wave has started to subside. Until
has declined. Especially as we very recently, many children were still
confront a more transmissible but less wearing masks in schools, with no
severe strain like Omicron. agreed-upon standard for when that
Since then, more Americans have will end. When Omicron peaked, some
acquired immunity through vaccina- schools reverted to remote learning.
tion and successive waves of infec- Offices are closed in many big cities.
tion. By some estimates, almost 70% Some states and businesses are still
of Americans have been infected at mandating vaccines, trying to coerce
least once. About 87% of adults have a shrinking pool of vaccine holdouts
had at least one dose of vaccine. We at the cost of increasing acrimony,
have a growing reserve of therapies even as many of the unvaccinated have
that can treat the sick and substan- probably been infected, some more
tially reduce the risk of hospitaliza- than once.
DINA LITOVSK Y
tion or death. The U.S. will soon be Confidence in public health has
producing almost a half-billion “at- eroded because we’ve been too slow
home” COVID tests each month. to adapt the steps we take to changing

notions of risk. Some people are adopt-
ing their own measures to reduce their
risk and voluntarily choosing to avoid
congregate settings, wear masks, and
take other precautions. Many people
are excessively vulnerable to COVID-
19 because of age or health conditions,
and those who remain worried should
have access to tools and support to
keep safe. There’s understandable ap-
prehension among parents torn be-
tween fears of the virus and the steps
to keep kids safe, especially toddlers.
But for those who feel more confident
about the declining risks, we can only
ask so much of the public for so long.
There is an amassed effect from the
disruptions. People are exhausted.
Livelihoods and people’s mental health
have been hurt by the diminished lives
We’ve gradually
found a way to
coexist with this virus
we’ve had to compromise around.
Many children haven’t known a normal
school day for two years. The constant
disruptions take a cumulative toll. We
never agreed that the costs can out-
weigh the benefits. The problem is we
have no way of measuring these trade-
offs, and no framework for deciding
when to turn things on and, equally
important, turn them off.
Take the debate over pandemic and
endemic. There’s no clear nomencla-
ture for what it will mean when the
virus becomes a persistent but man-
ageable risk that doesn’t dominate
our lives. Public-health leaders have
different definitions of what it means
when the pandemic gives way to an
endemic state, where COVID-19 is
part of the predictable repertoire of
circulating pathogens. The simplest
way to define that transition is when
constant waves of excessive infec-
tion no longer plague the country, and
COVID-19 settles into a more predict-
able pattern that follows the seasons.
Some, including me, think that 2022
will be the year that we make this
transition. Others still rate as high the
risk that another unexpected variant
emerges and wrecks that forecast.
Regardless, it will remain an ongo-
ing and persistent risk and will require
us to be more vigilant around respira-
tory diseases, especially in the winter-
time when these pathogens are most
prone to circulate. We’ll need to pro-
tect settings where vulnerable people
congregate and create incentives for
people to stay current with vaccines.
We’ll need to improve air quality and
filtration in indoor settings. We’ll
need to ensure widespread access to
testing and create new cultural norms
around staying home from work or
school when you don’t feel well. We
should distribute home diagnostic
tests widely so consumers have a small
stockpile on hand at all times. Masks
could be used on a voluntary basis
and become a tool for certain settings
and for brief periods, to deal with epi-
demic peaks. We also must continue
to innovate, investing in therapeutics
that can treat the sick and provide for
their wide distribution.
But so long as we remain mired in
a 2020 doctrine for measuring preva-
lence and how it correlates with risk,
we’re going to be unable to adapt
public-health measures to the virus’s
ebb and flow, or find a common touch-
stone for managing risk in our lives.
COVID-19 will remain a fearsome
virus for the foreseeable future, but
one that we must learn how to live
with. Federal health officials have
steered us through one of the hardest
periods in our country’s modern his-
tory, and helped preserve life, even as
we lost more than 900,000 of our fel-
low citizens.
We’ve gradually found a way to
coexist with this virus. Now we need
a glide path to what normal becomes
and a new math to guide how we
adapt to COVID-19 even if we never
fully defeat it.
Dr. Gottlieb was commissioner of the
Food and Drug Administration from
2017 to 2019. He is a senior fellow at
the American Enterprise Institute and
a board member at Pfizer Inc.
25
THE VIEW INBOX

HISTORY
THE RISK REPORT BY IAN BREMMER RECONSTRUCTION’S
BLACK POLITICIANS
At least 34 laws restricting
access to voting were passed
by 19 states in 2021, accord-
ing to the Brennan Center for
Justice.
Some historians argue
that this wave of laws making
it harder to vote echoes the
backlash to the electoral
gains made by African Ameri-
cans during Reconstruction
(1865–1877), the era of politi-
cal revolution in the aftermath
of the Civil War.
“Reconstruction was the
first time that this country
tried to be an interracial
democracy—or a democracy,
in other words,” says Eric
Foner, Pulitzer Prize–winning
historian of Reconstruction.
Foner, the author of Free-
dom’s Lawmakers, estimates
Iran could that about 2,000 Black Ameri-
cans held public office at the
move quickly local, state, and federal levels
toward during Reconstruction. One of
Black officeholders’ biggest
amassing contributions was their role in
enough highly establishing state-sponsored
public schools. Among the
enriched notable Black officeholders
uranium for in this era: Republican Hiram

several bombs
Revels of Mississippi, the first
Black U.S. Senator, and Robert
Smalls, who escaped enslave-
ment and went on to serve
five terms in the U.S. House
of Representatives.
But Black officeholder
numbers started to decline
after 1877. Although the 15th
Amendment to the Constitution
said states couldn’t restrict
voting based on race, state
legislators passed laws that
mandated expensive poll taxes
(fees to vote) and literacy
tests (questions with no right
answers)—and subjected Afri-
can Americans to them more
than white Americans. It wasn’t
until nearly a century later that
the 1965 Voting Rights Act
made literacy tests and poll
taxes illegal.
—Olivia B. Waxman
26 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
 down amid wildfires. All of these can
Climate Is Everything lead to higher prices for consumers.
By Justin Worland The link between climate change
and inflation doesn’t stop there. The
SENIOR CORRESPONDENT
trillions of dollars in spending needed
to transition the world away from fossil
LAST YEAR, THE U.S. EXPERIENCED dramatically, according to the Dal- fuels is bound to shape future inflation,
20 weather and climate disasters that las Fed. That chemical shortage in and a debate has emerged about the ef-
each caused more than $1 billion in turn contributed to shortages across fects. A 2020 report from the European
damage, from tropical storms in Flor- a range of industries, as well as price Central Bank argues that central banks
ida to drought in the West, according increases that were passed along to can manage the effects of climate pol-
to federal data. Those costs include consumers. By mid-April, production icy on inflation—so long as the transi-
things like destroyed buildings, but had recovered—but prices remained tion is “orderly.” The clock is ticking for
the economic implications of such di- high through the end of the year. The the policymakers to deliver.
sasters extend much further. Beneath list could go on and on: cold weather
the headlines about supply-chain harming orange crops in Florida, tor- Sign up to learn how the week’s
challenges, extreme weather events nadoes destroying grain and poultry news connects to the climate crisis
at time.com/climate-newsletter
tied to climate change are contrib- facilities, and lumber facilities shut
uting to the most significant infla-
tion in decades. Across the world,
climate-linked disasters have killed
crops, disrupted energy supplies, and
snarled transportation—and in turn
driven up prices.
One of the clearest examples of
climate-related inflation came in the
wake of a winter storm in Texas in
February 2021 that shut off power
for days for some in the state. Across
Texas, natural gas pipelines ill
equipped to handle winter weather
went offline. This forced Gulf Coast
petrochemical refineries—which
produce three-quarters of the coun-
try’s basic chemicals—to temporar-
ily stop production. These chemicals
are used to make everything from
soda bottles to car bumpers. In the
wake of the freeze, the U.S. lost 28%
of its shipments of chemicals by rail-
car, and prices of basic chemicals rose A worker harvests oranges at a grove in Fort Meade, Fla., on Feb. 1

By Philip Elliott
JOE R AEDLE— GE T T Y IMAGES

27
THE VIEW ESSAY

The Black history

lost to COVID-19
BY JANELL ROSS

i always Take noTe of picTures of women who are

not flashing a camera-ready grin.
They make me wonder what such a woman has done
with her life that it need not be rendered more palatable
with a big, uncomplicated, toothpaste-ad smile. So the first
photo I saw of Claudia Booker—the one the people who
loved her selected for her obituary when it ran nearly two
years ago—held my attention from the beginning.
As I explored the life of Claudia Booker, who died on
Feb. 19, 2020, at 71—after careers as a teacher, a com-
munity activist, a lawyer, a Carter Administration staffer,
an administrative judge, and, finally, a doula, childbirth
educator, and midwife—I found not simply the story of a
woman with a remarkably agile mind. A few days before
she died, Booker texted another Black birthworker, one of
the women into whom she’d poured so much of what she
knew, that she was getting better. She texted about the ba-
bies she was going to catch, the mothers she was going to
calm. Booker had no plans to rest or sit down, her daugh-
ter Canida Azulai Booker told me. But Claudia Booker died
anyway, struggling to breathe and suffering through what
When a developed, many states enacted laws
barring slaves from learning to read
she believed was the flu. Her body was ravaged by cancer person or write. People who are not allowed
but, with her death coming as the pandemic just began to dies, they to read and write don’t leave behind
grip the U.S., those who knew her still wonder if she fell to journals and letters or other personal
an early case of COVID-19.
often documents, explains Kelly Elaine Na-
As the world edges toward the end of a second year of take with vies, a museum specialist and oral his-
disruptions and distancing and death caused by a global them torian at the Smithsonian’s National
pandemic—even if Booker’s demise can’t be confirmed to Museum of African American History
be among its impacts—the loss felt by those who loved her much of and Culture (NMAAHC). So oral his-
has been sadly shared by people around the world. But in what they tory has been a key tool to fill gaps in
the U.S., it has not been equally distributed. Because of dis-
parities long unaddressed, Black, Latino, and Native Amer-
knew the “official” history.
Today, although the written record
ican patients have been considerably more likely to be in- of Black American life has grown and
fected with or die from COVID-19. So for these Americans, continues to do so, oral history main-
layered sadnesses hang particularly heavy. tains a special place. The informa-
tion it can convey remains unique and
When a person dies, they often take with them much of valuable. That’s why the Smithsonian
what they knew, what they have seen, and what they have has made available online a detailed
felt. If they are fortunate, there is time to pass at least some guide for collecting oral histories, a
of it on. In a pandemic, mass unprepared-for death is so place to share some materials with the
common that knowledge loss also becomes part of the toll. museum, as well as information about
Eyewitness accounts of the civil rights movement go un- the particular importance of and ideal
gathered. Recipes passed through the generations but not way to gather Black stories.
written down will never be cooked again. Claudia Booker’s “Oral history can tell us things that
know-how and direct instruction can no longer help a new written records often cannot,” Navies
generation of midwives. As we mark Black History Month, says. “Not just when something hap-
we know that a critical part of that history has, in these past pened or that someone was at a certain
few years, been lost. place but how did they feel about it?
The loss is all the more staggering when one consid- What part of that experience was most
ers that oral history has for Black Americans always been The photo of Booker important, so important that they ac-
essential. that accompanied tually remembered it?”
As the American way of enslaving Black Americans her obituary The experiences of the past two
28 Time February 28/March 7, 2022

years will be essential to an under-
standing of Black life and Black his-
tory in the U.S. in the early 21st cen-
tury, but the museum can’t collect it
all. Navies wants us to take up this
work in our own families and local
historical societies. “Historians will
be looking at this period for years to
come,” she says. “I would really advise
everyone to spend some time record-
ing their elders.”
But, she acknowledges, it’s already
too late for many of those stories to be
collected.
Twice last year, while working on
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y J O E L L E AV E L I N O F O R T I M E ; B O O K E R : C O U R T E S Y C A N I D A A Z U L A I B O O K E R
various stories, I learned that sources,
both Black and under the age of 50,
had, in a matter of weeks, died of
COVID-19. The loss of American life
is now measured in the hundreds of
thousands. What was held in those
minds is less easily tallied.
When navies Was a graduate stu-
dent, she gathered oral histories
from Black midwives in the South.
And this Black History Month, the
NMAAHC anticipates sharing the
stories and work of Black women
who have worked as birth doulas. All
that made me think of the remarkable
things I’ve been told about Booker.
Her story is, in many ways,
a quintessentially American one.
Prior to the 20th century, mid-
wifery was often a tradition passed
from mother to daughter and re-
garded not as a job, but a calling, says
Jenny Luke, who trained as a nurse
before becoming a historian of mid-
wifery. Especially throughout the
American South, Black “granny mid-
wives”—women who are today often
referred to in birthworker circles
as Grand Midwives—were part of
the health care infrastructure. They
provided not just physical care at
the time of a birth but also whole-
person care, Luke tells me. But in the
20th century, amid a gradual but in-
tentional squeezing out of midwives
by doctors, hospitals, and federal law,
“lay midwifery became associated
with poverty, being Black and unedu-
cated, being rural,” says Luke.
As their work was demonized, scru-
tinized, then relegated to the shelves
of history, lay granny midwives—
mostly Black women—became the
subject of a small number of books
and ethnographies; Luke’s Delivered
by Midwives is a detailed history. But
in practice, Black birthing traditions
were in danger of being lost until a
movement of Black women, driven
in large part by grim statistics about
Black maternal and infant mortal-
ity, began to foster their resurgence.
In 2005, Booker became one of those
women, starting the process to be-
come a certified professional midwife.
“Becoming a midwife is something
that happens gradually over time to
you,” Booker said in a 2010 interview
published in the Midwives Alliance of
North America newsletter. “It is some-
thing we grow into. It is the journey
of birthing a midwife—you have to
sit, reflect, and simmer in ‘being with
women.’  ”
When Booker—a fierce advocate
for birth justice—took Black birth-
workers under her wing, she insisted
that they too obtain both a combina-
tion of modern training and an under-
standing of birthing traditions that
had been passed down through gen-
erations and carried across the Atlan-
tic Ocean. When she celebrated a pe-
riod of remission in 2019 by hosting
a training, it covered not just modern
prenatal-care techniques but also
postbirth rituals that for thousands of
years have helped Black mothers heal
and babies thrive, says Taiwo “Tia”
Ikeoluwa Adeloye-Ajao, an attendee
who is a registered nurse training to
become a midwife.
Booker bequeathed her midwifery
bag and instruments to Alaina Snell-
Broach, a doula and midwife-in-
training. But the passing on of all that
Booker knew was cut painfully short.
Birthworkers like Booker often
say that the people in the room when
a midwife catches a baby are pres-
ent when the veil that separates the
living and the dead is at its thinnest.
The ancestors are in the room, sharing
their support and, when needed, their
wisdom.
Not too long after Booker died,
Tamoyia Ragsdale-Hashim, who owns
and operates Rise Birth and Postpar-
tum in Prince George’s County, Mary-
land, was assisting at a birth with a
mother who had worked with Booker
for two previous births. Ragsdale-
Hashim says she could hear her pre-
decessor’s voice, giving her encour-
agement and, in that special Claudia
Booker way, admonitions that she
could do this or it was time to do that.
Ragsdale-Hashim asked if anyone else
in the room was also hearing “Ms.
Claudia.” The mother and father said
they too felt her presence.
“I was so sad, angry. I was like,
‘Why now? I didn’t have enough
time,’” Ragsdale-Hashim says of her
feelings just after Booker died in Feb-
ruary 2020. “The wealth of knowledge
that not only went with her but [that]
she also left here is immense.”
The more I learned about Booker, the
more I was reminded how essential it re-
mains that the stories of people like her
are preserved, that the knowledge they
had is passed on. Some of this history is
gone forever. Some of it, with each pass-
ing day, is intentionally suppressed.
But, experts like Navies say, those of us
who remain can still mitigate the dam-
age. Press recorD on one of our many
devices. Lean away from selfies and into
capturing now what we see, think, and
feel. Ask others questions. Remember
what we learn. —With reporting by Sim-
mone Shah and Julia Zorthian □
29
THE VIEW Q&A

The regrettable rise of And it hurts for a reason. It makes it

much more likely that I’m going to be
the ‘no regrets’ philosophy awake to the possibility of learning
BY BELINDA LUSCOMBE
from that mistake.

Can regret make you a better leader?

Daniel Pink is The auThor of several besT-selling If you deal with it right. Ignoring re-
books that probe human behavior. He’s written on the im- gret is a really bad idea for leaders, be-
portance of timing, the mechanism behind motivation, and cause they’re not going to learn. But
the sociology of selling things. His new book, The Power of wallowing in it, in some ways, is even
Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward, is about worse because it hobbles them. What
the wrongheadedness of the “no regrets” credo. I’d like for leaders is not to proclaim
“no regrets” as this sign
Why write a book on regret? The of courage, but actu-
external reason is that we’ve gotten ally to show courage
it profoundly wrong. If we do not un- by staring their own
derstand this emotion, then we are regrets in the eye and
leaving its capability on the table. doing something about
For me personally, it’s largely because them, and having hon-
I have regrets of my own. I can’t est, authentic conversa-
imagine having written this book tions with their team.
in my 30s. But in my 50s, it felt kind There’s evidence show-
of inevitable. ing that confronting
your regrets can make
You write about four core catego- you a better negotiator,
ries of regret: foundation regrets, a better strategist, and
boldness regrets, moral regrets, a better problem solver.
and connection regrets. Can you ex- There’s even evidence
plain the differences? Foundation that disclosing regrets
regrets are about stability: finances, and mistakes strength-
health, about studying in school and university. Boldness ens your standing and builds affinity
regrets are about “if only I’d taken the chance,” a very large rather than the reverse.
category of regrets. Moral regrets are complicated; it gets
super interesting in the very small category of things. Your steps for dealing with regret
To most people around the world and of different political seem similar to the way people
perspectives, bullying and infidelity are bad things. But who have faith deal with what
I told a left-leaning American of a regret a lot of people had they call sins. You confess, you
about not serving in the military and he said, “That’s not repent, you make amends, and
a regret.” If you believe in a sense of duty, that’s a different ‘The thing you live differently. Would not
moral code. It’s not wrong; it’s not better or worse. about your process be a very familiar one

And connection regrets are about losing touch with

somebody because of a schism? These are often about
relationships that come apart in profoundly undramatic
ways. It’s not people throwing plates at each other; it’s a
slow drift. Then one person doesn’t want to reach out be-
cause they think it’s going to feel awkward and they think
the other side’s not going to care. And they’re wrong.
regret to, say, Catholics? Our brains are
programmed for positive emotions and
is that it negative emotions, because negative
hurts. And emotions are functional. And our most
common negative emotion is regret,
it hurts for because it’s also the most instructive
a reason.’ and clarifying. So the fact that religious
—DANIEL PINK traditions have figured this out and
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y A L E S S A N D R O G O T TA R D O F O R T I M E

tried to reckon with it is a great sign.

Which is the largest category? Connection regrets. Moral And the fact that their steps are similar
is the smallest, but there’s something about those that to the steps science suggests is also a
really stick with people. There’s somebody in my book who great sign. What’s not a great sign is
stole candy from a grocery store when she was 10. And at the utter capture of kind of broader
age 70, she’s still bugged about that. cultural philosophy that suggests that
you shouldn’t have regrets, you should
Is there a difference between using regret and learning never look backward, and that if
from our mistakes? They’re related. Mistake is an action; you have a negative feeling, it should
regret is a feeling. The thing about regret is that it hurts. be banished. 
30 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
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“US Municipal Bond Defaults and Recoveries, 1970–2020.
 INSIDE
FACEBOOK’S
AFRICAN
SWEATSHOP
BY BILLY PERRIGO
TECHNOLOGY

IN A DRAB OFFICE
building near a slum on the outskirts
of Nairobi, nearly 200 young men and
women from countries across Africa sit
glued to computer monitors, where they
must watch videos of murders, rapes,
suicides, and child sexual abuse.
These young Africans work for Sama,
which calls itself an “ethical AI” out-
sourcing company and is headquartered
in California.
Sama says its mission is to provide
people in places like Nairobi with “dig-
nified digital work.” Its executives can
often be heard saying that the best way
to help poor countries is to “give work,
not aid.” Sama claims to have helped lift
more than 50,000 people in the devel-
oping world out of poverty.
This benevolent public image has △
won Sama data-labeling contracts with as $1.50 per hour, a TIME investigation Sama content moderators started
some of the largest companies in the found. The testimonies of Sama employ- working at this office in Nairobi
world, including Google, Microsoft, and ees reveal a workplace culture charac- in 2019
Walmart. What the company doesn’t terized by mental trauma, intimidation,
make public on its website is its rela- and alleged suppression of the right to protection NGO, provided psychologi-
tionship with its client Facebook. unionize. The revelations raise serious cal and legal support for some sources
In Nairobi, Sama employees, who questions about whether Facebook— quoted in this story.
speak at least 11 African languages which periodically sends its own em- “The work that we do is a kind of
among them, toil day and night as Face- ployees to Nairobi to monitor Sama’s mental torture,” one employee, who
book content moderators: the emer- operations—is exploiting the very peo- currently works as a Facebook content
gency first responders of social media. ple upon whom it is depending to en- moderator for Sama, tells TIME. “What-
They perform the brutal task of viewing sure its platform is safe in Ethiopia and ever I am living on is hand-to-mouth.
and removing illegal or banned content across the continent. And just as Face- I can’t save a cent. Sometimes I feel I
from Facebook before it is seen by the book needs them most, content modera- want to resign. But then I ask myself:
average user. tors at Sama are leaving the company in What will my baby eat?”
Since 2019, this Nairobi office block droves because of poor pay and working TIME is aware of at least two Sama
has been the epicenter of Facebook’s conditions, with six Ethiopian employ- content moderators who chose to resign
content-moderation operation for the ees resigning in a single week in January. after being diagnosed with mental ill-
whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Its remit This story is based on interviews nesses including posttraumatic stress
includes Ethiopia, where Facebook is with more than a dozen current and disorder (PTSD), anxiety, and depres-
trying to prevent content on its plat- former Sama employees and hundreds sion. Many others described continu-
form from contributing to incitement of pages of documents including com- ing with work despite trauma because
to violence in an escalating civil war. pany emails, paychecks, and contracts. they had no other options. While Sama
Despite their importance to Face- Most sources spoke on condition of an- employs wellness counselors to provide
book, the workers in this Nairobi office onymity for fear of legal consequences workers with on-site care in Nairobi,
are among the lowest-paid workers for if they disclosed the nature of their most of the content moderators TIME
the platform anywhere in the world, work or Facebook’s involvement. The spoke to said they generally distrust the
with some of them taking home as little Signals Network, a whistle-blower counselors. One former counselor says
34 Time February 28/March 7, 2022

that Sama managers regularly rejected
counselors’ requests to let content mod-
erators take “wellness breaks” during
the day because of the impact it would
have on productivity.
Workers say Sama has also sup-
pressed their efforts to secure better
working conditions. In the summer of
2019, content moderators threatened
to strike within seven days unless they
were given better pay and conditions.
Sama responded by flying two execu-
tives from San Francisco to Nairobi to
deal with the uprising. Within weeks,
Daniel Motaung, the attempted strike’s
leader, who was in the process of for-
mally filing trade-union papers, had
been fired—accused by Sama of taking
action that would put its relationship
with Facebook at “great risk.” Sama told
other participants in the labor action ef-
fort that they were expendable and that
they should either resign or get back to
K H A D I J A F A R A H F O R T I M E (2)
work, several workers told TIME. The
employees stood down before the seven
days were up and got no pay increase.
“At Sama, it feels like speaking the
truth or standing up for your rights is a
crime,” a second employee says. “They
made sure by firing some people that
this will not happen again. I feel like it’s
modern slavery, like neocolonialism.”
Sama disputes this characterization
and said in a statement that its content
moderators are paid triple the Kenyan
minimum wage.
Foxglove, a legal NGO based in Lon-
don, says it has informed Sama it is pre-
paring legal action in relation to its al-
leged wrongful termination of Motaung.
“Firing workers for trying to organize is
against the law,” says Cori Crider, Fox-
glove’s director. “Daniel did a brave
thing by blowing the whistle here—as
was his legal right.” The Katiba Insti-
tute, a Kenyan public-interest law firm,
is assisting with the case.
Sama denies that there was any strike
or labor action. “We value our employ-
ees and are proud of the long-standing
work we have done to create an ethi-
cal AI supply chain,” Shriram Natara-
jan, the head of Sama’s Nairobi office,
said in an emailed statement. “We exist
to provide ethical AI to our global cus-
tomers, and we are proud of the role
△
Sama says it hires many workers
from Nairobi’s slums. Mukuru kwa
Njenga is less than two miles away
our employees play in building new
online experiences and cleaning up the
internet. It’s a tough job, and it’s why
we invest heavily in training, personal
development, wellness programs, and
competitive salaries.”
Facebook says it spent more than
$5 billion on safety measures in 2021.
It contracts the services of more than
15,000 content moderators globally,
most of whom are employed by third
parties like Sama. In response to a de-
tailed set of questions for this story, a
spokesperson for Facebook’s parent
company Meta said, “We take our re-
sponsibility to the people who review
content for Meta seriously and re-
quire our partners to provide industry-
leading pay, benefits, and support.”
Motaung was a 27-year-old univer-
sity graduate from South Africa looking
for his first job when he saw an ad from
Sama seeking Zulu speakers.
35
TECHNOLOGY
It was early 2019, and Sama had re-
cently won a contract to provide content
moderation for Facebook’s sub-Saharan
Africa markets. Sama placed job ads in
countries across Africa—directly and
through agencies—looking for people
with fluency in various African lan-
guages to relocate to Kenya.
Motaung, like many other modera-
tors TIME spoke with, says he had little
idea what content moderation involved
when he applied for the job. He thought
it simply involved removing false infor-
mation from social media. He says he
wasn’t told during his interview that
the job would require regularly view-
ing disturbing content that could lead
to mental-health problems. After he
accepted and arrived in Kenya, Sama
asked him to sign a nondisclosure agree-
ment (NDA), only then revealing to him
the type of content he would be work-
ing with daily. By then, he felt it was too
late to turn back.
Several other content moderators de-
scribed similar experiences. Two, from
separate countries, said they had an-
swered job ads placed by agencies for
“call center agents.”
Elsewhere in the world, similar
working conditions have landed Face-
book in hot water. In 2020, the social
network paid out $52 million to fund
mental-health treatment for some of its
American content moderators following
a lawsuit centered on mental ill health
stemming from their work, including
PTSD. In the U.S. and Europe, many
Facebook content moderators em-
ployed by outsourcing firm Accenture
are now asked to sign a waiver before
they begin their jobs, acknowledging
that they may develop PTSD and other
mental-health disorders. African con-
tent moderators working for Sama say
they are not asked to sign such a waiver.
According to pAy slips seen by
TIME, Sama pays foreign employ-
ees monthly pretax salaries of around
60,000 Kenyan shillings ($528), which
includes a monthly bonus for relocat-
ing from elsewhere in Africa. After tax,
this equates to around $440 per month,
or a take-home wage of roughly $2.20
per hour, based on a 45-hour work-
week. Sama employees from within
Kenya, who are not paid the monthly
36 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
relocation bonus, receive a take-home
wage equivalent to around $1.46 per
hour after tax. In an interview with the
BBC in 2018, Sama’s late founder Leila
Janah attempted to justify the compa-
ny’s levels of pay in the region. “One
thing that’s critical in our line of work is
to not pay wages that would distort local
labor markets,” she said. “If we were to
pay people substantially more than that,
we would throw everything of.”
Employees didn’t see it that way.
One day in July 2019, Motaung got
talking to a group of other moderators
who had been hired four months pre-
viously. He recounts that many said
they felt the job that they had applied
for was not the one they were doing,
and discussed their low pay and poor
working environment. Some said they
had done research that showed content
moderators in other countries were
being paid far more for the same work.
(The typical starting wage for a Face-
book content moderator in the U.S. is
around $18 per hour.) They resolved to
group together and take action to bet-
ter their conditions. Motaung took the
lead, and he and his colleagues created
a WhatsApp group chat to begin can-
vassing opinion more widely. It soon
had more than 100 members.
Based on the discussions in the chat,
Motaung drafted a petition with a list
of demands for Sama’s management, in-
cluding that everyone’s pay be doubled.
The document, seen by TIME, said that
if management did not “substantively content was no longer being moderated,
engage” with the demands within seven and could put significant pressure on
days, employees would go on strike. Sama to accede to workers’ demands.
Motaung knew that Sama employees “I explained that alone, all of us are
stood a better chance of having their de- expendable,” he recalls telling his col-
mands met by acting as a group, because leagues. “They have a contract with the
Sama was dependent on “the client”: client. The terms of the contract are that
Facebook. If they all stopped working [Sama is] to deliver on a regular basis,
at once, he reasoned, Facebook would no interruptions whatsoever. We knew
want to know why so much of its African if all of us stopped working right now,
they would not be able to replace us
within a week or within a month.”
The Alliance, as the group of em-
‘WE KNEW IF ALL ployees began calling themselves, pre-
sented their petition to Sama’s man-
OF US STOPPED agement in a meeting on July 30, 2019.
WORKING, THEY Two senior Sama executives from San
WOULD NOT BE ABLE Francisco joined via videoconference,
but they dismissed the workers’ con-
TO REPLACE US.’ cerns, according to Motaung and others.
—DANIEL MOTAUNG “They told us there are lots of people

△ with everyone face-to-face, and address
Facebook founder and CEO Mark
Zuckerberg testifies before a U.S.
Senate committee in April 2018
who are dying to get this job, that they
did research on the wages and this is a
nice wage considering what people are
getting in Kenya,” says one employee
who was present during the meeting.
A 2021 study carried out by three MIT
researchers found the average salary at
Sama including benefits was approxi-
mately 2.5 times the Kenyan minimum
wage. Workers say these wages cover
only the basic costs of living and don’t
allow them to save or meaningfully im-
prove their financial situations.
ALEX BRANDON—AP
Within days, the two executives
from San Francisco had arrived in Nai-
robi, and Motaung was suspended from
his job pending a disciplinary hearing.
Sama told Motaung some of his col-
leagues had accused him of bullying,
intimidating, and coercing them into
signing their names to the list of de-
mands. He was told to stay away from
the office and barred from talking to
his colleagues. Motaung denies the al-
legations that he bullied any of his col-
leagues into signing a petition for bet-
ter pay and working conditions. He
suspects that Sama intimidated sev-
eral of his former colleagues into mak-
ing statements against him. “It was just
them pretending to follow a process so
that they can get rid of me quickly, so
that everything can go back to normal,”
he says. Sama did not comment on alle-
gations of worker intimidation.
Meanwhile, other employees in-
volved in the attempted strike ac-
tion were being invited to individual
meetings with Cindy Abramson, one of
the executives who had flown in from
San Francisco. Two employees who were
particularly vocal during the worker re-
volt said Abramson flattered them in
these meetings, suggesting they had
leadership potential, and dangled the
prospect of promotion if they could per-
suade their colleagues to stand down.
Three participants in the attempted
labor action told TIME that during their
one-on-one meetings, Abramson—
whose total compensation in 2018
was $194,390, according to Sama’s
public filings—intimidated them into
revoking their names from the peti-
tion, saying they must choose between
disaffiliating from the Alliance and los-
ing their jobs. Her warnings were espe-
cially stark toward Kenyan employees,
said people with knowledge of the dis-
cussions. The Kenyans were reminded
in the meetings that they were easier
to replace than foreign workers, which
many of them took as a threat of being
fired if they did not stand down. Scared,
many workers started revoking their
signatures from the petition. “They
threatened us, and we backed down,”
says one Kenyan employee, who rea-
soned that it was better to have a low-
paying job than no job at all.
“There never was a strike or labor
action,” Sama said in its statement.
“Being a responsible employer, we
wanted to see our team in person, meet
their concerns head-on. It’s why we
flew members of our leadership team
to our offices in Nairobi, and it’s a deci-
sion we stand behind.” The statement
also said that after employees asked for
higher salaries, Sama conducted a pay
audit and found they were already being
paid double the living wage for the re-
gion. Sama said it has since changed
its onboarding processes to “be more
transparent about what to expect and
we intensified our onboarding program
by developing new training modules to
ensure team members were prepared on
how to handle the functions of the role.”
Abramson, who has since left Sama, de-
clined to comment
Two weeks after his suspension,
Sama fired Motaung, claiming he was
guilty of gross misconduct “for engaging
in acts that could amount to bullying,
37
TECHNOLOGY
harassment, and coercion and that led
to the disruption of business activities
and put the relationship between Sama-
source and its client [Facebook] at great
risk,” according to a termination letter
dated Aug. 20, 2019. (Sama was known
publicly as Samasource until early
2021, when it changed its name as part
of a transformation that also included
switching from a nonprofit organization
to a business.) Sama did not respond to
questions about its firing of Motaung,
but said in its statement that it had dis-
missed three employees who had “vio-
lated workplace rules.”
In the days before he was terminated,
Motaung was busy drafting documents
that would have formally established
the Alliance as a union under Kenyan
law. “I think they found out,” he says.
Motaung’s work permit was canceled,
leaving him three weeks to leave Kenya.
Under Kenyan labor law, workers are
protected from dismissal as a result of
“past, present, or anticipated trade union
membership,” and Kenya’s constitution
says every worker has the right to strike.
Before he left Kenya, Motaung says,
he gave the union incorporation pa-
pers to another employee in the move-
ment. But the resolve of the Alliance
had been broken, and the union never
materialized. “We were in shock, devas-
tated, broken,” one employee said. “And
then life continued. After that, nobody
dared to speak about it.”
For a time, though, a spark of re-
sistance remained. Jason White, a for-
mer Afrikaans-language quality ana-
lyst from South Africa, says Sama fired
him around a year later. He had been a
participant in the Alliance, and contin-
ued to ask questions even after most of
his colleagues had given up. He says he
regularly asked managers whether Sama
was deducting too much tax from em-
ployees’ pay, and why his girlfriend, also
a Sama employee at the time, was not
provided a work permit despite being
promised one.
In July 2020, White and a colleague
took their concerns to the South Afri-
can embassy in Nairobi. In emails, re-
viewed by TIME, and then at a meeting
in person, the pair informed South Afri-
can officials about the thwarted strike,
Motaung’s firing the previous year, and
how some of their colleagues believed
38 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
they had been hired under false pre-
tenses. The officials promised to inves-
tigate, he says, but never followed up.
The embassy did not respond to a re-
quest for comment.
After that, “there was a definite
change in behavior from [Sama’s] top
management,” White says. Soon after,
he says, a manager offered him a pay-
ment equivalent to two months’ salary
on the condition that he stop mention-
ing the pay and conditions at Sama to
anybody. He declined.
White says he was then called into a
disciplinary hearing, charged with hav-
ing unauthorized contact with a Face-
book employee, forbidden under his
employment contract. White says he
believes this was because of an email he
had sent to a Facebook staffer who had
previously visited the Nairobi office, in
which he had revealed his pay and asked
her whether she believed Sama was ex-
ploiting him and other employees. Al-
though he never received a reply, he
believes the employee told Facebook,
which informed Sama. “The company
saw that as a good opportunity to use
that against me,” he says. Sama did not
comment on White’s dismissal or the al-
leged payment offer extended to him. A
Facebook spokesperson said the email’s
recipient had followed protocol.
Once every few mOnths, Facebook
employees travel from Dublin to
Nairobi to lead trainings, brief
content moderators on new policies,
and answer questions. Five content
moderators said that ahead of these
meetings, Sama managers instruct
workers not to discuss their pay
with Facebook staff. But satisfying
Facebook is at the center of the work
culture at Sama.
Moderators are expected to view
and take action on one piece of content
around every 50 seconds, regardless of
the complexity of the material, accord-
ing to interviews and documentation
‘THE WORK THAT WE
DO IS A KIND OF
MENTAL TORTURE.’
—AN EMPLOYEE AT SAMA
seen by TIME. (The target can range
from 36 to 70 seconds depending on
workload and staffing, employees say.)
Adding to the pressure they feel, they
are also expected to make the correct
call at least 84% of the time.
Facebook has put some features in
place to help protect moderators, like
the option to render videos in black and
white or add blurring. But one Sama em-
ployee says he doesn’t use these options
because of the pressure to meet quotas.
“How can you clearly see whether con-
tent is violating or not unless you can
see it clearly? If it’s black and white or
blurred, I cannot tell,” he says, add-
ing that he doesn’t use it “because if I
wrongly action that [content], I will be
marked down.”
Employees say they are expected to
work for up to nine hours per day in-
cluding breaks, and their screen time
is monitored. “I cannot blink,” one em-
ployee says. “They expect me to work
each and every second.” In a statement,
Sama said that it caps working hours for
content moderators at 37.4 hours per
week. However, TIME reviewed an em-
ployment contract from 2019 that said
workers can be expected to work up to
45 hours per week without additional
compensation. It is unclear whether
that includes breaks.
Employees say that on a typical
working day, they are expected to spend
around eight hours logged into Face-
book’s content-moderation program.
On such a day, a target of 50 seconds
per piece of content would equate to a
de facto daily quota of nearly 580 items.
This appears to contradict public
statements Facebook has made in the
past about expectations it places on its
contractors. “A common misconception
about content reviewers is that they’re
driven by quotas and pressured to make
hasty decisions,” Ellen Silver, Face-
book’s vice president of operations, said
in a 2018 blog post. “Let me be clear:
content reviewers aren’t required to
evaluate any set number of posts ... We
encourage reviewers to take the time
they need.” A Meta spokesperson said
it asks contractors like Sama to encour-
age moderators to take as much time as
they need to make decisions.
One serving moderator said that
while Sama managers, not Facebook,

are the ones pressuring content mod-
erators over their metrics, he thinks it’s
clear they do so because of concerns
about what it would mean if Sama did
not meet Facebook’s expectations. A
former employee adds, “They only care
about pleasing the client.”
Content moderators at Sama are
meant to receive “wellness breaks” of
at least an hour per week, to help them
deal with seeing traumatizing content.
A ART VERRIPS FOR TIME
But some employees described having
to “beg” to be allowed to take their al-
lotted wellness breaks. A former coun-
selor said that Sama managers, not
counselors, had the final say over when
△ unable to afford a therapist. “If you do
Jason White was fired from Sama in
2020 after he took his concerns to the
South African embassy in Nairobi
and whether content moderators were
allowed to take breaks. The counselor
witnessed managers repeatedly re-
jecting content moderators’ requests
for breaks, citing productivity pres-
sures. “There is a clinical responsibil-
ity in our job to ensure that the mod-
erators are cared for,” said the former
counselor. “This responsibility is not
fully being fulfilled. Sama is more in-
terested in productivity than the safety
of the moderator.”
Almost All the employees TIME
spoke to for this story described being
profoundly emotionally affected by
the content they were exposed to at
Sama—trauma that they said was often
exacerbated by the way they have been
treated in their jobs. Many expressed
the opinion that they might be able
to handle the trauma of the job—even
take pride that they were sacrificing
their own mental health to keep other
people safe on social media—if only
Sama and Facebook would treat them
with respect, and pay them a salary that
factors in their lasting trauma.
In its statement, Sama said it had
“revisited” its mental-health processes
after employees raised concerns in 2019
“and made further enhancements, and
provided additional coaching to team
leads.” But employees say the protec-
tions remain inadequate to this day.
“When it comes to your personal wel-
fare,” one employee says, “you are not
treated like a real human.”
After returning to South Africa fol-
lowing his firing, Motaung, the leader
of the failed 2019 strike, says it felt as
if everything around him fell apart. He
tried to look for work in the capital,
but struggled. He lost a lot of weight.
“I was not OK mentally, emotionally,”
he says. He eventually returned to a
village in the mountains where he has
family. “When I got home, they were
like, ‘What happened to you? What
were you doing in Kenya?’ I couldn’t
even talk about it because I signed
an NDA.”
Motaung says he is still dealing with
the trauma he incurred at Sama, but is
this work, it’s very hard not to experi-
ence permanent scars to your emotions
and mental state,” he says.
In conversation, Motaung avoids
mentioning anything specific he saw on
the job, conscious that he is still bound
by the NDA. What he will say is that he
had a traumatic experience, and that
he still gets flashbacks. He expects to
carry the burden of that trauma with
him until the day he dies. “That sort of
thing can change who you are,” he says.
“It can destroy the fiber of your entire
being.” —With reporting by Mengistu
AssefA DADi/ADDis AbAbA and eloise
bArry/lonDon 
39
Trucker Brita Nowak
heads down a highway
outside of Atlanta on
Feb. 5. Nowak owns and
operates her own big rig
PHOTOGR APHS BY ANDREW HETHERINGTON FOR TIME
 Crash
Courses
WE NEED TO GET MORE TRUCKERS ON
THE ROADS FAST, BUT THERE’S A PROBLEM
WITH THE WAY THEY GET THERE
By Alana Semuels
NATION
I
in mosT sTaTes, aspiring barbers
have to spend as many as 1,000 hours
in training to get a license. To drive a
40,000-lb. truck, though, there’s no
minimum behind-the-wheel driving
time required, no proof of ability to navi-
gate through mountains, snow, or rain.
There’s a multiple-choice written
exam, a medical test, and a brief driv-
ing test—which in some states can be
administered by the school that drivers
have paid to train them.
As trucking companies hustle to hire
more drivers in response to supply-
chain issues, the roads may grow more
dangerous. First-year drivers are in-
volved in more crashes than other truck-
ers, and putting more inexperienced
ones on the roads could increase ac-
cident rates. The 5,005 fatalities from
crashes involving large trucks in 2019
were a 43% increase from 2010, even
though there were only 21% more trucks
registered to be on the roads.
Yet as Canada’s trucker protests
against a COVID-19 vaccine mandate
show, the global supply chain comes to
a standstill without truck drivers. Au-
tomakers including Ford, General Mo-
tors, and Toyota curtailed production
at U.S. and Canadian factories after the
protests closed the Ambassador Bridge,
which carries 27% of all trade between
the two countries. Trucking associa-
tions warned that the vaccine mandate
could further sideline more unvacci-
nated U.S. truckers.
But the demand for people to drive
goods across the country is not going
away, which is why the U.S. government
is scrambling to get more truckers on the
road. In the coming months, the mini-
mum age to be licensed to drive com-
mercial trucks interstate will drop from
21 to 18 for thousands of drivers as part
of a pilot program announced by the
Biden Administration. And on Feb. 7,
standards for driver training that had
been in the works for three decades fi-
nally took effect, but without a critical
component: behind-the-wheel training.
42 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
“We don’t want to do the hard things
in this industry, which is spending
extra money, taking extra time to train
people to safely operate trucks,” says
Lewie Pugh, who owned and operated
a truck for 22 years and is now executive
vice president of the Owner-Operator In-
dependent Drivers Association. OOIDA
has long pushed for higher training stan-
dards, which it says would help the
high-turnover industry retain workers.
The consequences of inadequate
training are most dramatic when big rigs
crash into other vehicles. In Colorado
in April 2019, four people were killed
in a fiery crash when Rogel Aguilera-
Mederos, an inexperienced driver, lost
control of his truck.
Aguilera-Mederos, who was 23 at the
time, had earned his commercial driver’s
license (CDL) in Texas, and was head-
ing to Texas from Wyoming when his
brakes failed coming down a mountain
on I-70. He was sentenced to 110 years
in prison for vehicular manslaughter,
later reduced to 10 years by the Colo-
rado governor. But the responsibility
shouldn’t lie only on the driver’s shoul-
ders, says his lawyer, James Colgan. “My
client never received any formal train-
ing in mountain passes and how to deal
with them,” Colgan told me. The truck-
ing company “let this inexperienced
driver take a mountain pass—they ac-
tually encouraged it.”
The company that hired Aguilera-
Mederos, Castellano 03 Trucking LLC,
has since gone out of business with-
out being held accountable. Aguilera-
Mederos had earned his CDL 11 months
before the crash and his regular driver’s
license two years before that, according
to court transcripts. He had been work-
ing for Castellano 03 Trucking for three the steering wheel tight, and that’s when
weeks when he found himself barreling I thought I was going to die,” he told
down a mountain at 80 m.p.h. with a investigators.
75,000-lb. load and no brakes. “I held
ConCerned with a high level of
truck-driver crashes, Congress in 1991
‘My client never ordered the Federal Highway Adminis-
tration to create training requirements
received any formal for new drivers of commercial vehicles.
training in mountain But there still were no driving training
requirements by 2012, when MAP-21, a
passes and how to law passed by Congress, mandated new
standards.
deal with them.’ In 2014, the Federal Motor Carrier
—JAMES COLGAN, ATTORNEY Safety Administration (FMCSA)—
the FHA’s successor agency—brought
together a committee to negotiate guid-
ance for minimum training require-
ments. The panel came up with a list of
recommendations, including at least 30
hours of training behind the wheel and
some time driving on a public road.
The behind-the-wheel rules were
opposed by only two members of the
25-member committee. Both repre-
sented lobbying groups for the truck-
ing industry, which argued that there
was no scientific evidence that behind-
the-wheel training led to safer drivers,
says Peter Kurdock, general counsel
△ acknowledged that 38% of commercial-
Nowak, a longtime trucker,
refuels outside of Atlanta while
en route from Missouri to Florida
for the Advocates for Highway and
Auto Safety, who was on the committee.
When the final rules were released
in 2016, a minimum number of behind-
the-wheel hours had been taken out.
The FMCSA said that it was not able to
find data proving the value of such train-
ing and that it did not want to impose
extra training costs on proficient driv-
ers. (In the same document, the agency
motor-vehicle drivers said they did not
receive adequate entry-level training to
safely drive a truck under all road and
weather conditions, according to a 2015
survey from the National Institute for
Occupational Safety and Health.)
“That is some of the most invalu-
able experience that a new truck driver
learns—sitting behind the wheel with
someone who is an experienced driver
saying, ‘This is about to happen. This is
how you avoid this critical safety situa-
tion,’” Kurdock says. “We feel it’s a sig-
nificant failing of the rule.”
43
NATION
People seeking a commercial pilot’s
license, by contrast, have to have at least
250 hours of flight time; if they want to
work for passenger airlines, they have to
have 1,500 hours of flight time.
The advisory committee’s recom-
mendations created a training-provider
registry and require would-be drivers to
sign up with a school that is on the reg-
istry. But to be listed on the registry,
schools are allowed to self-certify that
they qualify. “What’s actually chang-
ing?” the American Trucking Association
asks, on a section of its website devoted
to the new regulations. “For organiza-
tions that have a structured program in
place today, the truth is—not much.”
Colgan, the lawyer, blames the situa-
tion on money. More stringent training
would skewer the economics of truck-
ing, which ensures that the company
that can charge the cheapest rates often
gets the business. “It comes down to the
almighty dollar—if you required truck-
ers to be trained like that, it would slow
everything down,” he says.
If anything, there’s a push to speed
things up in the trucking industry as
supply-chain issues create demand
for more drivers to haul more stuff. On
Feb. 2, the FMCSA said it would allow
trucking schools in all states to adminis-
ter the written portion of CDL tests for
drivers in addition to the driving test, a
reversal of previous guidance and one
that could get more new drivers on the
roads faster. In November 2021, 11 Re-
publican Senators asked the FMCSA to
let 18-year-olds obtain commercial driv-
er’s licenses for interstate trucking. “In-
action to grow America’s pool of truck
drivers threatens to drive up shipping
expenses, prolong delays, and burden
already-strained consumers with addi-
tional costs,” they said in a letter.
Partly in response to that letter, the
Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act,
signed by President Biden on Nov. 15,
ordered the Secretary of Transportation
to create a pilot apprenticeship program
for 18-to-20-year-olds.
“Segments of the trucking industry
have been pushing for teenage truck-
ers to drive interstate for years, but
the most recent supply-chain chal-
lenges are being used as a way to push
forward that proposal,” Cathy Chase,
the president of the Advocates for
44 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
Highway and Auto Safety, told me.
THE PROBLEMS WITH TRAINING aren’t
just about a lack of standards. The first
year that people spend driving a truck
usually consists of long weeks on the
road making low wages, a far cry from
the six-figure salary and independent
lifestyle pitched to new students.
Many newly licensed drivers drop
out once they get a taste of that life. Over
the course of four years, only 20% of the
25,796 drivers who started with CRST, a
carrier that promised free training and
a job afterward, finished the training
and started driving independently, ac-
cording to a class-action lawsuit filed in
Massachusetts over the company’s debt-
collection practices. (CRST agreed to
pay $12.5 million to settle this lawsuit,
although a former CRST driver has ob-
jected to the settlement and is still pur-
suing claims against the company.)
“What our current system of train-
ing does is, it throws people into the
deep end with no support, into the ab-
solute worst and toughest and most dan-
gerous jobs, and just burns them out,”
says Steve Viscelli, a sociologist and the
author of The Big Rig: Trucking and the
Decline of the American Dream.
Because new drivers are so expen-
sive to insure, most get trained at big,
long-haul trucking companies that are
self-insured. These companies recruit
would-be drivers by offering to pay for
them to get their CDLs in exchange for
a promise to work for the company once
they’re licensed.
Obtaining a CDL takes a few weeks.
Only after that do most licensed drivers
spend significant time on the road, when
they’re paired with more experienced
‘What our current
system of training does
is, it throws people
into the deep end with
no support, into the
absolute worst and
toughest and most
dangerous jobs.’
—STEVE VISCELLI, SOCIOLOGIST AND AUTHOR
drivers who are supposed to show them
the ropes. This saves the companies
money, because federal regulations stip-
ulate that truck drivers can only drive
11 hours straight after 10 hours off. Put-
ting two drivers together lets one take
the wheel while the other sleeps in the
truck, enabling companies to move
freight in half the time it would take a
solo driver. Newly licensed drivers are
paid cents per mile to haul loads, provid-
ing a major source of cheap labor.
But the system means that new
drivers spend weeks sharing a truck
with a stranger who has the upper hand
in their relationship and the power to
hurt their job prospects, because the
trainer tells the company if the trainee
is ready to drive on their own. Often,
one person sleeps while the other drives,
dimming prospects for the student to
actually learn from the trainer. Some
trainers barely have any more experi-
ence than the students.
This is done in tens of thousands of
trucks across the country, and horror
stories abound.
KAY CRAWFORD, a 25-year-old who
signed up to become a truck driver
during the pandemic after getting sick
of the low pay and danger of being a
sheriff ’s deputy, says she was sexually
harassed numerous times by her train-
ers. One kept telling her he needed a
woman and propositioned her; another
refused to meet her anywhere but her
hotel room. She says the company did
nothing once she reported the incidents.
R A L LY: M O H A M E D K A D R I — N U R P H O T O/G E T T Y I M A G E S; T R U D E A U : D AV E C H A N — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S
“The training coordinator said, ‘I
got you work, you’re not accepting it,
and I have 14 other students I need to
get in a truck,’” she told me. After three
separate bad experiences with trainers,
Crawford decided to give up on truck-
ing. She says she’s still hounded by the
school, which says she owes it $6,000,
despite her sexual-harassment claims.
“At that point, trucking pretty much
disgusted me,” she says. Despite having
her CDL, Crawford says she can’t get a
new job because she’s not insurable
without long-haul trucking experience.
One CRST student alleged that her
trainer raped her in the cab of her truck
and the company then billed her $9,000
for student-driver training; company
employees testified that CRST only
 BRITISH
COLUMBIA
ALBERTA MANITOBA
Vancouver SASKATCHEWAN CANADA QUEBEC
Winnipeg
ONTARIO Montreal
Ottawa
Number of days
COUTTS
cross-border BORDER MONT. AMBASSADOR
traffic blocked, CROSSING EMERSON BRIDGE

18 7
BORDER
from Jan. 29 Toronto
to Feb. 16: 6 U.S. N.Y.

MICH.
Detroit Windsor

considered sexual-assault claims to be
valid if they were corroborated by a third
party or recorded. The case, Jane Doe v.
CRST, was settled last year, and though
CRST agreed to pay $5 million, it did
not admit wrongdoing.
Despite dozens of legal battles like
that one, training has changed little in
the 21st century. (There is now a second
Jane Doe v. CRST complaint making its
way through the courts, filed by another
woman who said she was sexually as-
saulted by her trainer.)
Brita Nowak, a longtime truck driver,
says her trainer hit and slapped her
when she was on the road with a big car-
rier two decades ago; when she reported
him, “they called me a pill” and asked
for proof of the assault, she says. She
didn’t have any proof, so had to put up
with the abuse until her trainer hit an
overpass and damaged the truck; then
the company switched her trainer.
Even some people who’ve had posi-
tive training experiences say they earn
less than the minimum wage in their
first year of trucking, which makes
the sacrifices of being far from family
for long periods of time even harder
to bear. Crawford says she never made
more than $500 a week; even in train-
ing, she spent long unpaid hours waiting
to load or unload. The Massachusetts
lawsuit against CRST alleged that new
drivers made from $0 to $7.19 per hour
between 2014 and 2015 because CRST
deducted money from their paychecks
for housing, physical exams, drug tests,
and training reimbursement.
CRST did not respond to a request
for comment.
“These are bad companies. I wouldn’t
send my worst enemy to them,” says De-
siree Wood, the founder and president
of REAL Women in Trucking, which
45
NATION
advocates for better standards for drivers.
Hardly a week goes by on the REAL
Women group’s Facebook page with-
out women complaining about trainers
who aren’t helping them master driv-
ing skills, or who are creating danger-
ous conditions on the road.
One woman, Memory Collins, told
me that she was so exhausted from a
lack of sleep two days into training
that she felt unsafe driving. She pulled
off the highway, only to find there was
no place to safely stop. She woke her
sleeping trainer, who helped her get
back on the highway, but a week later,
the company told her that a camera
showed that she’d hit a car while trying
to turn around. They fired her. When
she called other companies to try to get
hired, she was told she was too much
of a liability.
“You have some people who come
out of training and know how to drive;
others come out of training not pre-
pared, and know they’re not prepared,
and just hope they’ll be OK,” says Elaina
Stanford, a truck driver who came up
training through a big company.
Training wasn’t always this way.
Before the industry was deregulated in
the late 1970s, trucking jobs were union-
ized, and even people starting out could
have a good lifestyle. But after deregula-
tion, Viscelli says, trucking firms needed
more “cheap, compliant truckers” will-
ing to work more hours for less money.
As more carriers got into trucking
46 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
△ CDL and for on-the-road training, and
Workers clear highway debris in
Colorado after an April 25, 2019,
truck crash that killed four people
post-deregulation, union rates fell,
as did wages. Today, drivers get paid
about 40% less than they did in the
late 1970s, Viscelli says, but are twice
as productive as they were then.
Before deregulation, new drivers
were trained on the job by union mem-
bers, and companies assumed workers
would stay for decades. Now, truck-
driver training has been turned into a
“profit center” where companies make
money off turnover, says Viscelli. Some
new truck drivers get federal workforce-
development money to pay for their tu-
ition, which saves companies’ having to
cover training costs. Then, the compa-
nies pay the newly licensed drivers be-
ginner rates, and when they quit be-
cause of the miserable conditions, the
cycle is repeated. “They have figured
out how to make that inexperienced,
unsafe labor profitable,” Viscelli says of
the trucking companies. In 2020, local
workforce boards in California invested
$11.7 million of federal money on truck-
driver training schools, five times what
they spent on driver training schools the
year before.
The turnover rate at large fleets was
90% in 2020, meaning for every 100
jobs trucking companies needed to fill,
they had to hire 190 drivers. At smaller
companies, called less-than-truckload,
where drivers are often unionized and
receive good benefits, the turnover rate
over the same period was just 13%.
The Biden adminisTraTion says it
is trying to improve training. Its Truck-
ing Action Plan, announced in mid-
December, launched a 90-day program
that aims to work with carriers to cre-
ate more registered apprenticeships in
trucking. It’s also specifically focusing
on recruiting veterans into trucking.
Registered apprenticeships are the
gold standard for workforce training
and could improve trucker training,
says Brent Parton, a senior adviser at the
Labor Department overseeing the pro-
gram. With a registered apprenticeship,
would-be truckers get a guarantee that
a trucking company will pay for their
also commit to wage increases over
time. These types of programs do exist
in trucking, mostly set up by unions like
the Teamsters, which still can guaran-
tee good jobs in trucking. The Teamsters
have a program that holds truck-driver
training on military installations, taking
six weeks to help drivers get a CDL and
learn to drive. They get union jobs with
ABF Freight after they’ve completed
the program, making more money than
most entry-level drivers.
But most trucking companies don’t
have the time or money to invest in ex-
tensive training. The concern among ad-
vocates is that the new apprenticeships,
including the program to license 18-to-
20-year-olds to drive interstate com-
merce, will be akin to slapping a new label
on the subpar training that exists. “We’re
hoping this isn’t a title for what we’re
already doing,” Pugh of OOIDA said.
The White House says its new pro-
gram will be different, that this is the
first step in creating trucking jobs people
will want to keep for life. Advocates al-
ready have doubts. One of the first com-
panies to sign up to work with the White
House on its registered apprenticeships
was CRST. In the past two years, CRST
has agreed to pay at least $17 million in
D AV I D Z A L U B O W S K I — A P
settlements over lawsuits filed against
it for wage theft—and for incidents that
occurred while it was training people to
become truckers. —With reporting by
Nik PoPli 
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NATION

Being There

Death doulas used to be rare. The pandemic changed that By Melissa Chan
PHOTOGR APHS BY SEPTEMBER DAW N BOTTOMS FOR TIME

48
MICHELLE THORNHILL
WITH CLIENT ESTELLA
STACKHOUSE, 101, ON JAN. 19

49
NATION
On a cold October
morning in Lander,
Wyo., Liz Lightner
makes a few mental
notes as she sits by
a stranger’s bedside.
The man is 79, has lung cancer, and is in a deep-sleep coma.
He’s wearing a blue scuba-diving shirt that’s worn out and
looks as though it’s been loved, washed, and rewashed for
many years. Besides the company of Lightner and his cat,
the man is alone and moments from dying.
Using only words, Lightner, 49, carries him away from
a home he can’t physically leave anymore and guides him
under the sea, where she knows he used to be happy. She
leans her head against his chest and tells him they’re now
swimming together in the tropical ocean, where so many vi-
brant schools of fish surround them. She describes for him
the striking blues and oranges of their fins, how the sun
pierces the still water and lights up the coral beneath them.
She tells him he’s warm, weightless, and floating.
Lightner sits beside the man for nearly seven hours. Be-
fore she leaves, she gently places his frail hand on his sleeping
cat and reassures him that his beloved pet will be fine when
he’s gone. Then she opens a window—a symbolic and spiri-
tual gesture of passage to whatever comes next.
The man died the next day, which is expected in Lightner’s
50 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
new line of work. She’s a death doula, a coach who helps the
terminally ill be at peace with dying—and she’s among hun-
dreds of Americans who’ve embraced the rising occupation
during the pandemic. Whereas birth or labor doulas provide
support and coaching at the start of life, death doulas step
in to do the same, at the end of life.
Since cOViD-19 tOOk hOlD of the country in early 2020,
organizations that support and train U.S. death doulas have
seen significant spikes in membership and enrollment. The
National End-of-Life Doula Alliance grew to more than
1,000 members in 2021, from just 200 in 2019. More than
600 people enrolled in the University of Vermont’s end-of-
life doula program in 2021, compared with fewer than 200 in
2017 when the program began. Some training groups report
enrollment more than tripled during the pandemic, as has
the number of people seeking help for themselves and oth-
ers facing imminent death. Prepandemic, Merilynne Rush
says her training group, the Dying Year, would get about six
calls a year from people looking for an end-of-life doula. Now

she fields three to four calls a month. “We’re seeing a huge
flurry of interest,” she says.
That’s no surprise as the U.S. death toll from COVID-19
surpasses 900,000. Over the past 22 months, “the aware-
ness of death was in all of our faces,” says Suzanne O’Brien,
whose group, Doulagivers, trained more than 1,000 people
in 2021, up from roughly 380 in 2019. At the height of the
pandemic in New York City, temporary morgues, including
refrigerated trucks, appeared near overwhelmed hospitals.
On the internet, pleas for funeral assistance flooded in from
thousands of families who’d lost loved ones to the virus.
“Whether we wanted to look away or not, we really
couldn’t,” O’Brien says. That has forced many Americans to
reckon with their own mortality in new ways.
For one, more young people are writing living wills, ac-
cording to several estate planners and national surveys. In
2020, a Gallup poll found the percentage of Americans who
said they have a will increased only to 45% from 40% in 2005.
But for the first time, according to a Caring.com survey,
people ages 18 to 34 were more likely in 2021 to have a will
than those ages 35 to 54. The younger
generation was the most likely to cite
COVID-19 as a major reason to plan
for death.
“For the first time in a generation,
everyone is experiencing the possibil-
ity that death may touch their lives—
not someday, but now,” says Ann
Burns, president of the American Col-
lege of Trust and Estate Counsel.
The Sept. 11 attacks prompted a
similar uptick in end-of-life planning
after Americans saw nearly 3,000 peo-
ple die in one day, according to Bill Kir-
chick, a Boston-based estate attorney.
The pandemic was a far greater shock
to the system. “To some people,” Kir-
chick says, “it was a wake-up call.”
For many others, it was a call to
action. After Tracy Yost, who lives in
Danbury, Conn., was furloughed from
her job as a fitness manager at a retire-
ment community in 2020, she says
she’d call 100 of the residents twice
a week to check in. It didn’t take long
to hear how “wildly isolated” they
sounded. At the time, Yost’s friends
were saying their final goodbyes to
their dying parents through video calls.
“I just thought, ‘Oh my God. We
have lost our way,’” says Yost, 52, who
became a death doula largely because
she feared the pandemic would create
a new generation of people traumatized
by death. “We already live in a society
that doesn’t talk about dying,” Yost
says, adding that the taboo nature of
death may be reflected in the majority
THORNHILL, AT HER of Americans who don’t have their ad-
CLIENT’S HOME vanced health care directives in order.
IN PHILADELPHIA,
HAS BEEN A DEATH Without the pandemic, Yost says she
DOULA FOR 12 YEARS likely never would have become a doula.
On a September day in Chattanooga,
Tenn., Sara Web, 38, meets with a young woman in her 20s.
The woman is lost, scared, and confused as her mother nears
the end of her decade-long battle with cancer. Web gently
draws information from the daughter as they talk about what
her mother has meant to her at every stage of life. The way
she cared for her daughter when she was ill; the way they
decorated the house at Christmas; the beautiful moments
the younger woman will always carry with her.
One recurring happy moment stands out—the mother
and daughter’s shared love of The Wizard of Oz. The dying
woman has been sleeping more and more, but when Web
puts on the movie, she smiles and stays mostly awake for
the film. The mother and daughter absorb their final mo-
ments together on the couch as Web watches over them.
51
Soon after, as the mother loses conscious- THORNHILL VISITS Web wishes she and her family could have
ness and enters the final stages of dying, her STACKHOUSE SIX better understood the disease, the dying pro-
TIMES A WEEK, WHICH
daughter quietly sings “Over the Rainbow.” LIGHTENS THE WORKLOAD cess, and how much time they realistically had
Before the pandemic, Web’s job descrip- FOR STACKHOUSE’S left, so they could’ve better comforted their
tion looked vastly different. As a former GRANDDAUGHTER, HER matriarch. “I promised, no matter what, I
PRIMARY CAREGIVER
animal-enrichment coordinator, she spent would never let that happen again,” Web says.
her workdays coming up with creative ways Before she was laid off at the aquarium,
to entertain the creatures at the Tennessee Aquarium—a Web kept two reminders of the finality of life on her office
job she lovingly compares to that of a cruise-ship director. desk: a computer background image of the universe and a
She’s filled kiddie pools with colorful plastic balls for the papier-mâché skull. “My motto was, the universe is big and
mongooses to dive in and out of. She’s made giant turkeys life is short,” she says.
out of construction paper and paper bags, filling them with
fruits and vegetables for the lemurs. She’s fed alligators in Besides a whole lot of compassion, not much is required
front of live audiences. to become a death doula. During a recent day’s work with
When she was laid off in October 2020, Web says, she a woman who had stopped treatments for breast cancer,
faced low prospects of finding another comparable zoo or Yost helped her jot down stories to share with her children
aquarium job, so she pursued a career that’s been at the back about her childhood visits to her family in Italy. When she
of her mind since her grandmother died of pancreatic can- noticed how animated the woman had become, Yost pulled
cer more than 17 years ago. Web became a death doula, in up Google maps so they could virtually walk through the
hopes that fewer people would spend their final moments same mountain village where her grandparents lived. The
surrounded by panicked loved ones the way her 82-year-old woman cried as the memories came flooding back.
grandmother had in 2004. At age 21, it was the first time Web “The gift of time is what makes doula work so special and
had experienced such a major loss. The diagnosis rocked the meaningful,” says Angela Shook, president of the National
rest of the family. End-of-Life Doula Alliance.
“I was very lost in that experience,” says Web, who was Because doulas do not administer or prescribe medica-
more than 1,000 miles away when her grandmother died. tion, the industry is unregulated and does not require a li-
“No one else seemed to know what to do.” cense. Most prospective doulas take training courses that
52 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
several organizations offer in person or online for as little as
$40, up to $1,000. The lessons are as scientific as they are
emotional. Depending on the courses, which can span weeks,
prospective doulas typically learn how to identify end-of-life
stages. They study the 10 most common terminal illnesses
and their leading or unique symptoms. They learn the physi-
ology of how the human body works, the order in which or-
gans usually shut down. Some courses focus on how to care
for a terminally ill child, while others teach doulas simply
how to talk to families.
Death doulas often work in tandem with hospice work-
ers, who are authorized to give pain-relief medication, treat
wounds, monitor vitals, and assist in other clinical tasks that
the doulas aren’t qualified to do. But death doulas, who are
usually less restricted by work schedules, step in to fill the
emotional voids, says Michelle Thornhill, 52, who has been
a death doula for 12 years.
‘The gift of time is what
makes doula work so
special and so meaningful.’
— A N G E L A S H O O K , N AT I O N A L E N D - O F - L I F E D O U L A A L L I A N C E
They can help write farewell letters or stockpile memos
to surviving loved ones for milestones they’ll miss, such as
weddings, birthdays, and graduations. They can listen to
someone’s life story for hours on end or hear about their
proudest moments and worst mistakes. “I hear stories that
maybe they’ve never told anyone before,” Web says. “I hear
stories that may never be heard again.”
Upon request, death doulas can make sure Whitney Hous-
ton is playing in the background, fill the house with scents
of Christmas cookies at the moment of death, or find new
homes for pets that will be left behind.
In June, Shook says, she helped a woman find a loving
new family for her two cats, which was instrumental in giv-
ing her peace. Before the woman entered a hospital for the
last time, Shook bought her stuffed animals that looked just
like the felines, so she’d have them near as she died. “It’s very
human to want to nurture and support somebody through
any type of suffering,” says Shook, who is also a volunteer
hospice manager in northern Michigan.
To free up family members to focus solely on their dying
loved one, death doulas can help make funeral arrangements
and handle other logistics. In Pennsylvania, Thornhill spends
six days a week caring for her 101-year-old client, Estella
Stackhouse, who has dementia. She also supports Stack-
house’s granddaughter and primary caregiver by creating
care checklists and meal schedules, crafting responses to
people who call and text, and limiting the granddaughter
53
to making only one important decision a day. DEATH DOULAS FILL become a doula in spring 2021. “She thought I
With COVID-19 reducing the number of visi- EMOTIONAL VOIDS would be devastated 24/7 because I’m a sensitive
THAT MEDICAL
tors Stackhouse gets, Thornhill’s role as a care- WORKERS OFTEN person,” Web says. But since she launched her
taker and liaison has become more important. CANNOT FILL, SHE SAYS doula business early in June, she hasn’t felt that
“It ranks right up there with oxygen,” she says. way at all. “I can’t stop people from dying,” she
says. “All I can do is be there to support them.”
The impacT, and not the pay, is why many are drawn to the Dying is one experience every person has to go through.
work. Some doulas offer their services for free, Shook says, But that doesn’t necessarily get easier to accept with time,
while some operate on a sliding scale based on the client’s Yost has learned. “Fear is present at all ages,” she says. And
ability to pay. Others, including those who have their own because there’s only one chance to do death right, several
private business, typically can charge $45 to $100 per hour, doulas say it’s common for personal grief and regrets to drive
although prices depend on many factors, including location many toward end-of-life work.
and duration of service. Many doulas offer package rates that In March 2019, Lightner’s father died following complica-
Shook has seen go from $500 to $5,000. “It’s all over the tions from a lung biopsy. Before that, he had spent about two
place,” Shook says, adding that the costs are not covered by months intubated and hooked to a feeding tube and other
any health-insurance plans. life-sustaining equipment before he was removed from life
Web has yet to make a profit after leaving her over– support. Those months were challenging for Lightner, who
$40,000-a-year aquarium job and pouring about $5,000 into knew her father had not wanted that for himself. “We carry
her new doula business, including costs for training courses, guilt and we carry what-ifs,” she says. “Me becoming a death
office space, licenses, advertising, websites, and insurance. doula is partially me grieving this loss.”
But over the past six months, she’s felt her impact, which Every Tuesday evening, Lightner meets virtually with
has helped heal some of her own internal wounds from her about a dozen other new death doulas from around the coun-
grandmother’s death. try. They help one another navigate their careers, understand
The job is often misunderstood, partially because many the logistics of their businesses, and launch their websites.
feel it’s a morbid occupation. But death doulas disagree, say- But most of the time, she says, they’re spending their weekly
ing there’s often more dignity in the work than sadness. Web Zoom sessions working through their personal struggles and
says her mother was horrified when Web started training to renewing one another’s hope.
54 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
 Among the new doulas are Patty and Greg Howe, a long-
time married couple who are both terminally ill. In the five
years since Greg was diagnosed with leukemia, the 66-year-
old says he has come to a “place of just complete liberation.”
His acceptance helped shape Patty’s outlook when she was
diagnosed in February with liver cancer at age 69. “We have
the choice to choose joy in everything,” Greg says. “It trans-
formed me.”
The Howes have shed what they don’t need, including
most of their material possessions and any petty problems
that once burdened them. They now live out of a candlelit
yurt in Ketchikan, Alaska, as they plan arrangements for
other terminally ill people to use their beachfront house
nearby as an end-of-life resort, where they can spend their
last moments with their families. Since the pandemic, the
Howes have immersed themselves in death-doula work,
helping others reach the same sense of peace.
‘I can’t stop people from
dying. All I can do is be
there to support them.’
— S A R A W E B , D E AT H D O U L A
“It’s almost like we’ve taken a master’s class in death,”
Greg says.
Death wasn’t always so industrialized. More than a century
ago, before there were coroners and funeral directors, it was
normal for families and communities to take care of the de-
ceased, according to Nukhet Varlik, a Rutgers University pro-
fessor who specializes in the history of pandemics. Hospice
care wasn’t introduced in the U.S. until the early 1970s, though
people were still informally taking on the role of death doula.
“Death used to be revered as a sacred part of life’s journey, and
we’ve completely removed it from our awareness,” O’Brien
says. “In fact, we’re doing everything to run the other way.”
Death doulas today are trying to change that. In January
2021, when a dying man in frigid northern Michigan said
he wanted to be back on a beach but was too sick to leave
his house, Shook dipped his hand in a bowl she’d filled with
sand. She lit citrus-scented candles around him and brought
in a sunlamp to warm his body as the sound of ocean waves
crashed out of speakers in the background.
A month later, when Shook realized a dying woman
who loved lilacs would not live long enough to watch
them bloom again in her yard, she burned lilac candles in
the woman’s room, hung large photos of the purple plants
on her walls, and massaged her hands and feet with lilac-
scented oils.
“Death doesn’t have to be this medical event,” Shook says.
“There’s a lot of beauty.” □
55
CLIMATE

On the
front
lines of
climate
change
THE U.S. MILITARY SAYS IT
WANTS TO REDUCE EMISSIONS.
BUT IT’S NOT BUILT TO DO THAT
BY ALEJANDRO DE LA GARZA

ILLUSTR ATION BY
TAYLOR CALLERY FOR TIME

57
CLIMATE
In November 2020, a flatbed truck
pulled onto the Sterling Heights,
Mich., campus of military contractor
BAE Systems and unloaded two huge,
lozenge-shaped Bradley vehicles—a
special delivery from the U.S. Army.
Workers moved the vehicles into a
garage and began pulling them apart,
swapping in smaller gasoline engines,
electric motors, and a new lithium-
ion battery (the exact battery capabili-
ties are a military secret). The result, a
hybrid-electric troop transport, is best
likened to a 28-ton Prius, plus tank
treads, a turret, and a 25mm cannon—
all with an expected 10% to 20% im-
provement in fuel economy. “The Army
is getting greater capability, depend-
ability, and survivability with hybrid-
electric drive,” says Jim Miller, head of
business development at BAE’s combat-
systems division. “And then they get the
environmental impact.”
To be clear, even a hybrid-electric
Bradley is about as friendly to the en-
vironment as it is to anyone on the
wrong end of its Bushmaster chain
gun—the electric upgrade could push
fuel economy close to 0.9 m.p.g.,
from 0.75 before. But the improve-
ment could amount to substantial fuel
savings—and accompanying emissions
reductions—across all U.S. forces, espe-
cially if BAE is able to apply its hybrid
technology to other armored vehicles,
as the company hopes.
Military vehicles, along with the
forces that use them and the industries
that supply them, represent a huge cli-
mate problem, accounting for 5% of the
world’s carbon emissions every year.
And there’s no bigger actor in that space
than the U.S. military, which sucks up
more petroleum than any other institu-
tion on earth to fly jets, heat buildings,
and ferry food and supplies to 750 bases
spread across the world, a process that,
all told, produces an emissions footprint
greater than that of the entire country
of Sweden.
That might be changing, though. The
58 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
Department of Defense (DOD) has em-
barked on a decarbonization push in re-
cent months, claiming to be in the pro-
cess of building a greener American
fighting force. But many environmen-
talists and academics say that fully de-
carbonizing the country’s current mil-
itary and its vast network of overseas
bases simply isn’t realistic. Carbon cuts,
they argue, will come with trade-offs,
and at some point we will have to make a
difficult choice to scale down our armed
forces to avert ecological catastrophe.
The U.S. miliTary has actually been
talking about climate change for a long
time, even as the issue has fallen in and
out of political favor. Almost two de-
cades ago, for instance, when the Bush
Administration was still denying that
human-caused climate change was real,
the DOD’s Office of Net Assessment
commissioned a controversial 2003 re-
port on how rising temperatures could
affect U.S. national security. Many more
reports have followed, with strategists
and planners routinely studying how a
changing climate will impact the mili-
tary’s mission.
In general, most of those initia-
tives have focused either on climate
adaptation—finding ways to protect
military installations like Navy bases
from rising seas and extreme weather—
or on a changing geostrategic landscape,
like new theaters of conflict in newly
opened Arctic waterways. What hasn’t
been discussed much is the prospect of
actually reducing the DOD’s own sub-
stantial carbon footprint.
During the Obama Administration,
Congress created a new Pentagon office
that seemed positioned to do just that:
the Assistant Secretary of Defense for
Operational Energy. But although the
purview of the new role did touch on
climate change, its primary impetus
was to reduce fuel expenses during the
costly Afghanistan and Iraq wars, as well
as to cut the required number of fuel-
transport convoys, which were vulner-
able to attack by the Taliban and other
enemy insurgents. Sharon Burke, ap-
pointed to the position in 2010, worked
on incorporating new renewable energy
technologies into field operations, and
tried to get issues of energy usage fac-
tored into military planning and strat-
egies, although she was sometimes sty-
mied by a military structure resistant to
change. “I used to call it ‘affable non-
compliance,’” she says.
The operational energy position lost
influence under the Trump Adminis-
tration. But some important Obama-
era initiatives remained in place,
including a 2016 DOD directive outlin-
ing internal policies and roles to “as-
sess and manage risks associated with
the impacts of climate change.” Not
much happened under that directive
during the Trump Administration, but
it was still technically in effect. And
when the Biden Administration came
in, it provided an institutional frame-
work to build on to turn the military
bureaucracy’s attention toward cli-
mate change.
Now, a year into the Biden presi-
dency, the military’s emissions messag-
ing has undergone an unprecedented
shift. Defense Department appointees
have started talking about emissions
cuts, while the Pentagon has sent out
inquiries to companies about emissions
accounting and reporting and supply-
ing government facilities with renew-
able energy. In September, the DOD
released a climate-adaptation plan
that stated the need to begin consider-
ing emissions in “all the Department’s
strategies and policies.”
Still, the Biden Administration has
avoided imposing hard limits on DOD
emissions. In a December Executive
Order, President Biden pledged to cut
the federal government’s carbon foot-
print to zero by 2050, but exempted
anything related to national security.
Some liberal lawmakers objected to the
carve-out, pointing out that the mili-
tary has accounted for between 77%
and 80% of federal energy use over the

past two decades. And to make matters
even less certain, a future GOP Admin-
istration could reverse any of Biden’s
green efforts.
Still, some military branches are
pushing ahead. The Army, for in-
stance, released a new climate strat-
egy on Feb. 8 declaring its intention
to go net zero by 2050. Some green-
technology projects have picked up
steam, with military contractors build-
ing out new offerings in hopes of cash-
ing in on the climate momentum—al-
though some projects are still only
in the early stages of a long and com-
plex process of actually integrating
them into the military’s operations.
In May, the Army hosted a demon-
stration at Fort Benning, Georgia, for
potential electric reconnaissance-ve-
COURTESY GM
hicle concepts; the branch is plan-
ning for all noncombat vehicles to be
△
Defense contractors are developing
lower-emission offerings like this EV
concept from GM Defense
electric by 2035, and to start using
electric tactical vehicles by 2050.
The Air Force, meanwhile, has
started querying suppliers about pro-
viding new, more efficient adaptive
The Army is
cycle engines for its combat fighters. planning for all
In many cases, though, the military’s
impetus for rolling out greener tech-
noncombat
nologies is really less about climate vehicles to be
concerns than about getting better
at the armed forces’ main job: fight-
electric by 2035,
ing. Those adaptive cycle engines, and to start using
for example, will give Air Force fight-
ers a 25% range boost. And while new electric tactical
hybrid-electric drive systems being de-
veloped for naval warships could have
vehicles by 2050
some fuel-economy benefits, they also
help supply more electricity to power
59
CLIMATE
new laser weapons and powerful radar
systems. EVs and concepts like the hy-
brid Bradley could cut Army emissions,
but they also reduce its reliance on vul-
nerable fuel-supply lines to support its
far-flung bases.
In some sense, it’s a good thing
that some of those green technolo-
gies are a win-win for fighting ability
and the climate. But it also shows that
the military isn’t interested in emis-
sions reductions that run counter to
its broader aims. Jack Surash—who
serves under the unwieldy title of “se-
nior official performing the duties of
assistant Army secretary for installa-
tions, energy, and environment”—has
hinted as much. “Climate change and
its effects obviously pose a very serious
threat,” he said, speaking at the annual
meeting of the Association of the U.S.
Army in October. “But I want to stress
that . . . climate change does not alter
the Army’s overall mission, which is to
deploy, fight, and win.” Joe Bryan, se-
nior climate adviser to the Secretary of
Defense and the Defense Department’s
chief sustainability officer, was more
blunt. “DOD’s mission is to provide
the military forces needed to deter
war and ensure our nation’s security,”
he wrote in a statement to TIME. “We
will never compromise on that.”
ON A VIDEO CALL, Kenneth Agee held
up a plastic cylinder filled with a white
waxy substance. “You think of crude oil
as black,” he said. “But this is synthetic
crude—it’s white as snow.” Agee is
founder and president of an Oklahoma-
based company called Emerging Fuels
Technology, which helped produce jet
fuel from carbon dioxide in the air as
part of an Air Force demonstration proj-
ect last August.
For the project, engineers at a startup
called Twelve shipped Agee a tank of
carbon monoxide that they had made
using atmospheric CO2 and electricity.
Emerging Fuels Technology then fed
that gas through its own process, com-
bining it with hydrogen (which can be
produced either from methane or from
water using electricity) to generate syn-
thetic crude, full of long hydrocarbon
strings like those found in crude oil.
To produce a mixture of hydrocarbons
similar to those in jet fuel, they put
60 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
NEW CO2 FUEL that substance through a “cracking”
process akin to a miniature oil refinery,
then poured a gallon of it into a glass
jar and shipped it off to scientists at the
Air Force for further study.
The Air Force says a 50-50 mix of
that fuel and petroleum could be used
in aircraft, and has expressed opti-
◁ mism that units in the field could use
Jet fuel made
from CO2
synthetic jet fuel made in this way—
could power although it says there are still “unan-
military swered questions,” like where those
aircraft. But soldiers would get the electricity
scaling the needed to power the process in the
tech could field. Another fuel plant using EFT’s
be a serious part of the technology and supported
challenge by the Air Force (but with biomass in-
stead of carbon monoxide as a primary
input) is under construction in Ore-
gon, but the project has endured mul-
Share tiple delays and financing problems.
of global If it’s completed, that plant would
carbon be able to turn out 16 million gallons of
emissions fuel a year—less than 1% of the approx-
5%
imately 2 billion gal. of jet fuel that
the Air Force uses annually. Supplying
the whole Air Force, not to mention
WORLD MILITARY
INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
Army and Navy aircraft, and a com-
mercial aviation sector, would require
many hundreds of such plants—an en-
tirely new industrial sector, built from
Million metric tons scratch.
of CO2 equivalent (2017) Military aviation accounts for about
70% of all the DOD’s energy use, and
U.S. DEFENSE
DEPARTMENT 56 to some researchers, the implications
SWEDEN 51 are obvious. “The only way to reduce
[fuel use] is to reduce how often jets
FINLAND 47 are flying,” says Heidi Peltier, direc-
DENMARK 34 tor of programs at Brown University’s
Costs of War project. That, she says,
means the military cannot maintain its
Military vehicles’ mileage globe-spanning presence and become
limit on 10 gallons of fuel carbon-neutral at the same time. A sus-
BRADLEY tainable military will have to be smaller,
HUMVEE
FIGHTING
B-2 BOMBER with fewer bases, fewer troops to feed
VEHICLE
and clothe, and fewer ships and air-
planes ferrying supplies to personnel
from Guam to Germany. That reduction
2.3 could have climate co-benefits, with all
7.5
MILES
MILES
the public money currently being spent
on EV Hummers and hybrid tanks po-
tentially redirected to projects to help
build America’s sorely lacking green
C O U R T E S Y E F T X T W E LV E
infrastructure, like renewable energy
production, EV charging stations, and
SOURCES: SCIENTISTS FOR
GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY;
NETA C. CRAWFORD, BOSTON
UNIVERSITY public transportation.
60 Doug Weir, research and policy
MILES director at the U.K.-based Conflict
and Environmental Observatory, says
the military will have to bite the bul-
let eventually and start reducing fuel
use in ways that don’t necessarily have
strategic upsides. “There’s going to
have to be a point where they [make]
emissions cuts because there’s a cli-
mate emergency which is going to de-
stabilize the planet and human civiliza-
tion,” he says.
That idea—making emissions cuts
that run counter to U.S. strategic
interests—is laughable to some military
strategists, because it would amount to
an intentional weakening of military
strength abroad. “Electrification for the
military has to be something that’s op-
erationally valuable, rather than being
strictly for the purposes of climate
change,” says Bryan Clark, a fellow at
the conservative-leaning Hudson Insti-
tute. “Your opponents are not going to
unilaterally disarm.”
From the Pentagon’s point of view,
the U.S. doesn’t have a choice but to
maintain a powerful force to engage in
international confrontations, like the
current standoff in Ukraine. “Nobody
wants war, but you don’t always get to
choose,” says Burke, the former Obama
Administration official. “They say in
the military, ‘The enemy gets a vote.’”
Some researchers say that emis-
sions implications of conflict need to
be a bigger consideration as the U.S.
chooses how to meet those threats. But
as climate change ratchets up tensions
around the world, some worry that na-
tions will further militarize in response,
creating a vicious cycle of military emis-
sions. “You can’t win a climate-change
war,” says Nick Buxton, a researcher at
the Amsterdam-based Transnational
Institute. “Our atmosphere observes no
boundaries. It’s just obvious that that
nationalist approach in the end won’t
serve us.”
The U.S. can choose one of two
courses: to completely recast its mili-
tary mindset for the sake of emissions
cuts, or else just slot some greener
tech into its massive war machine—
like a $700 billion Bradley tank with a
new hybrid engine. And for now, it ap-
pears set on the latter—defense bud-
gets are sacrosanct in Congress, and in
the most recent defense authorization
bill, passed in December, legislators
forbade the Defense Department from
closing even U.S. bases that the Pen-
tagon had deemed to be unnecessary.
Even if some representatives agreed to
give up economically precious bases in
their districts, it’s not as if anyone in the
White House or the DOD is talking seri-
ously about pulling back deployments
to counter a bellicose Russia and an in-
creasingly powerful China.
Still, in recent months, emissions
moves from the Defense Department
have at least come as a long-overdue
acknowledgment that the military’s cli-
mate footprint is a serious issue—even
if they don’t seem to be quite getting to
the root of the matter. “I liken it to Al-
coholics Anonymous,” says Weir. “The
first step is admitting that you have a
problem.” 
61
 WORLD

Hitting the
High Mark
HOW A REMOTE HIMALAYAN DISTRICT ACHIEVED
AN EXTRAORDINARY COVID-19 VACCINATION RATE
BY NILANJANA BHOWMICK/UTTARAKHAND, INDIA

Gokuli Devi, 80,

receives a vaccine
at her home near
Aghariya, India, on
Sept. 4 because she
is too frail to walk to
a local site

PHOTOGR APHS BY SAUMYA KHANDELWAL FOR TIME

WORLD

On the day he was

scheduled for a COVID-19
vaccination, 77-year-old
Jaikishan Ram wrapped
himself in a well-worn wool
jacket, cap, and sweater to
prepare for the three-hour
trek down the mountain.
To access the main road from his home high in
the Himalayan mountains of the Indian state of
Uttarakhand, Ram had to first climb down a mile
of steep, unpaved, sloping path. From there, it was
another 90 minutes on the main road to the village
of Padampuri. That’s where the only government
hospital and walk-in COVID-19 vaccination center
in the Dhari area—home to some 30,000 people
spread across 46 villages—is located.
It was early September, and India was still re-
covering from a devastating second COVID-19
wave, driven primarily by the Delta variant. Ac-
cording to official government figures, more than
400,000 Indians died between June 1, 2020,
and July 1, 2021, but a recent report in the jour-
nal Science estimates that the true toll might have
been as high as 3.2 million deaths. The majority
of those—2.7 million—occurred in three months,
April through June 2021.
In the following months, cases of COVID-19
dropped significantly, and hospitalizations re-
mained relatively low even during an Omicron-
driven third wave, which peaked in late January.
This is in part thanks to nationwide efforts to stop
the virus. India began rolling out COVID-19 vac-
cines in January 2021, starting with health work-
ers, then for people over 50 and those with co-
morbidities. It took a while for the vaccine rollout
to pick up pace, but by Jan. 30 of this year, India’s
government said 75% of its adult population had △
received two doses of a COVID-19 vaccine. this isolated region that spans more than Jaikishan
As a septuagenarian, Ram was eligible early 30 sq. mi.—most of it rugged terrain that rises to Ram, 77, treks
on, but at first he stayed home, uncertain about 7,000 ft. of elevation—by the beginning of Octo- back home after
the safety of the vaccines and wary of the trip he’d ber, 100% of eligible adults had received a first vac- receiving a dose
have to take to get his shots. But months of per- cine dose. That equates to some 28,000 people, ac- of the COVID-19
sistence by health workers in Padampuri—and cording to Himanshu Kandpal, the chief medical vaccine in
Padampuri,
especially by his daughter-in-law, who is part of officer of the Dhari block, who is in charge of Pad- India, on Sept. 3
Dhari’s vaccination team—managed to persuade ampuri’s medical center. The state of Uttarakhand
him. “I saw how hard she worked on this,” Ram as a whole reached that same milestone in mid-
says. “She urged me to take the vaccine, if not for October, with all eligible adults—some 7.4 mil-
myself, then for my family and the community.” lion people—receiving a first dose, usually of the
His change of heart wasn’t unusual. In Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, known locally as
64 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
Covishield. (Those vaccinated in the very first phase
typically received Covaxin, India’s own vaccine.)
Although most Indian cities are now catch-
ing up, Dhari was an early success story, and con-
tinues to get people to show up—more recently,
for their second doses and booster shots. As of
the time of writing, more than 80% of eligible
adults in Dhari, one of the most remote places
in the world, have received a second dose, de-
spite heavy snowfall and road closures in hilly
areas. Kandpal says that by the end of February,
the adult population in the region will be fully
vaccinated—although it’s difficult to be com-
pletely certain in an area where officials struggle
to document the members of every household.
All eligible teenagers of ages 15 to 17 have also re-
ceived a first dose.
Other districts in the state have had similar suc-
cess, as has India’s mountainous state of Himachal
Pradesh. Indeed, the vaccination rate in many hill
districts far outstrips those of much richer places
with better health infrastructure and where vac-
cines are widely available. In the U.S., for example,
64.4% of adults have been fully vaccinated as of
65
WORLD

△
Feb. 14, while 75.9% have had a first dose. thing, the Indian government made a smartphone Clockwise from top
How did a remote Himalayan region manage to app the primary means for booking a vaccination left: Renu Sharma
succeed where so many other places have strug- appointment—in a country where only around half at a school during a
gled? The answer underscores the value of health the population has a smartphone. In rural areas like vaccination drive;
tokens for people
workers who are embedded in their communities Dhari, that proportion is far lower. registering for
and know how best to serve them in a crisis. Another challenge was simple practicality. vaccines; Sharma
“Much of the population here lives in remote areas, preparing an
At first glAnce, Dhari seems an unlikely place and it takes them so long to come to the medical injection; Hema Devi
to hit such a vaccine-success milestone. For one center,” Kandpal told TIME in August, sitting at her farm in Thiroli
66 Time February 28/March 7, 2022

in his office in Padampuri—the only significant
medical facility for 25 miles. The building, cov-
ered in faded yellow paint, stands atop a mountain
slope, approachable only by a long flight of steep
stairs carved out of the mountainside. At about
5,200 ft. of elevation, it is thousands of feet below
many of the mountain villages it serves. “People
have to commit to a full day to get vaccinated. That
didn’t help,” Kandpal said.
Hema Devi knows just how difficult that can
be. In July, the 45-year-old farmer made the steep
mile-long uphill trek from her home in the remote
hamlet of Thiroli to a vaccination camp in the big-
ger village of Dhanachuli. She waited for hours for
her turn, before learning that the camp had just run
out of vaccines. “I hear about people not taking
the vaccines in the cities, and I am puzzled,” she
says. “They don’t even have to climb a mountain
or negotiate broken roads. They also don’t have
to think of who’s going to cook dinner or lunch if
they are stuck at the camp—they can just order
food on the phone.”
On Aug. 2, she tried again, waking before dawn
to cook, clean, and take her buffalos and goats out
to graze before setting off with her husband and
two neighbors. When they arrived in Dhanachuli,
Devi and her husband joined different lines to reg-
ister for their shots. The line for men was much
shorter, with most of them—including Devi’s
husband—there to receive second doses, while
most of the women had yet to receive their first.
That disparity has persisted across India, in part
because of the difficulty in getting time away from
housework and childcare. According to India’s of-
ficial vaccination website, CoWIN, as of Feb. 14,
a total of 1.67 billion vaccine doses have been ad-
ministered in India: 49.5% to women and 50.5% to
men—a gap of some 38 million doses.
Indeed, when Devi’s husband received his
first dose in July at the primary health care cen-
ter in Padampuri around an hour’s drive away, she
couldn’t go with him because of home responsi-
bilities. “It would have taken the whole day, and
who would have taken care of the children and the
housework?” Even on the day Devi finally received
her vaccine, she rushed home after registering at
the camp to cook lunch and tend to the livestock
while her husband saved her spot. She sprinted
back just in time for her shot. “I didn’t want to miss
out this time, too,” she says. “If we run out of vac-
cines, you never know when we will get it next.”
Devi wasn’t always so eager to get the vaccine.
Like many Dhari residents interviewed by TIME,
she was initially scared. “We heard stories of in-
fertility and deaths,” she says. “But then we saw
people taking it and they were OK. Also the health
workers came to the village and explained and en-
couraged us. They are one of us, so we trust them.”
Crucially, these workers have history on their
side. The health care workers in Dhari are mostly
local women who have been trained to act as edu-
cators in their communities through work as ac-
credited social health activists (ASHAs) or hired
by the government as nurse-midwives (ANMs) to
act as the first point of contact between the com-
munity and the public health care system. Across
67
WORLD

India, especially in rural areas, these community and a pharmacist to hand out acetaminophen and
workers have played a crucial role in the pandemic, advise people on what to expect after their shots.
creating awareness about the virus, tracking and Kandpal also set up a WhatsApp group between
monitoring cases, and then rolling out the vaccina- local health workers and the village heads, posting
tion program. In Dhari, this well-earned trust led the weekly vaccination schedule so village heads
locals to buy into the idea that they needed to get could communicate with villagers. “COVID taught
vaccinated to protect themselves and their fami- us to think out of the box. The systems it forced us
lies against COVID-19—even if it meant trekking to create will go a long way in the future, too, to cater
hours through steep terrain. to this population,” Kandpal says. “We have taken
The success of Dhari’s COVID-19 vaccina- an existing but old resource and modernized it.”
tion campaign was also built on years of outreach
within remote communities, especially among On Sept. 4, nurSe-midwife Renu Sharma—a
women and children, notably through India’s ro- member of Kandpal’s team who has been work-
bust universal immunization program that reaches ing with the Dhari population for 13 years now—
around 26.7 million newborns and 29 million traveled with a team of health care workers from
pregnant women each year. That program relies Padampuri to the remote village of Aghariya. There,
on a broad network of district hospitals, primary she received a warm welcome. She knew lots of the
health centers, government health workers, and women by name, having vaccinated their children
community volunteers. It’s also credited with the years earlier, and in a mock-stern voice told them
country’s incredibly successful polio-vaccination to come and get their own COVID-19 vaccines at
campaign, which began in 1994, when India ac- the camp now.
counted for around 60% of Before the arrival of Sharma
global polio cases. Millions of and her team, the nearest place
frontline workers took on the
task of vaccinating 170 million
‘You have to be for Aghariya residents to get
vaccinated was the camp in
children under 5, twice a year. mindful of the Dhanachuli—a tough journey
In 2014, two decades after the
campaign began, India was de-
community’s along an unpaved path that
could be particularly treach-
clared polio-free. sentiments. We erous whenever rain loosened
India’s immunization pro-
gram for children may be “a don’t push too the rocks and soil. That’s why
Sharma and her team decided
well-oiled machine,” says Rajib hard. It takes time.’ to set up a temporary pop-up
Dasgupta, who heads the com- —RENU SHARMA, A NURSE-MIDWIFE
vaccination site in Aghariya.
munity health program at Jawa- WHO WORKS IN THE DHARI AREA They were quickly inundated,
harlal Nehru University, but and by the afternoon the line
the system still needed to be for vaccines continued to grow.
adapted to deploy COVID-19 vaccines to adults. While administering shots, Sharma noticed a
Kandpal and his team of 13 ANMs and 46 ASHAs group of three elderly men who had spent the day
consulted with village heads across Dhari to tweak sitting at the pop-up vaccination clinic. During a
the existing immunizing infrastructure to address lull in activity, she approached them. “Bubbo, have
the practical issues around travel and the lack of you registered?” she asked, using a local term of
smartphones. First—and long before most areas respect meaning grandfather. The men demurred.
in India began doing so—they decided to send out “No, no, we came here just to see what’s happen-
mobile teams to villages because not enough peo- ing,” one said. “We don’t want to take the vaccine.”
ple were coming down to the two walk-in centers. Undeterred, Sharma continued to press: “Look
Although the polio-vaccine program includes a at me, bubbo. I was one of the first ones to take
follow-up door-to-door campaign, this was a sig- the vaccine. Has anything happened to me?” she
nificant scaling-up to cover the entire adult pop- said. At that point, others in the village who had
ulation. These new mobile teams were capable of gotten a shot joined in, saying they too had suf-
trekking into the mountains to get closer to iso- fered no serious side effects. Finally, the men re-
lated communities, where they established pop-up lented. Sharma marched them to the registration
vaccination sites designed to get more shots into table with a triumphant smile and went back to
arms—both for those people who already want the her station to open up another pack of vaccines.
vaccine and for those who aren’t so sure. “Sometimes you have to persist with them a bit,”
Kandpal’s team added fully equipped ambu- she said. “I have had to persist for days and weeks
lances to the mobile teams in case of adverse reac- with some people.”
tions to the vaccines, a data-entry operator to reg- At the end of the day, Sharma consulted her list
ister the villagers on the government vaccine app, of village residents and checked it against those
68 Time February 28/March 7, 2022

who had registered to be vaccinated. She found the
names of three elderly and disabled people with
mobility issues who she knew couldn’t make it to
the camp. She took a bag with vaccine doses and
supplies and walked with her team toward their
homes, a short trek from the vaccination site. An
official door-to-door vaccination policy would only
be announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi
in another two months, but Sharma’s prior work
had taught her that sometimes you need to meet
people where they are.
Health workers like Sharma know well the chal-
lenges, such as travel difficulties or household
commitments, in the smaller communities they
serve—they have a kind of knowledge and intimacy
that are impossible in bigger cities. At the Aghariya
camp, she did not waste the opportunity to advise
mothers who were there for routine immunizations
for their kids that they should also get the COVID-19
vaccine for themselves. “You have to be mindful of
the community’s sentiments,” she says. “We don’t
push too hard. It takes time. Sometimes I request,
sometimes I am stern. But they know I mean well.”
Throughout the last months of 2021, Sharma
and others like her worked unremittingly to get
vaccines to people in remote villages. Hema Devi,
△
who got her first shot in August, was able to get A mobile team
her second in December—although she still had to led by Renu
make the long trek from Thiroli to Dhanachuli. She Sharma, left,
was relieved to get it when she did, as an Omicron- visits the home
fueled surge of COVID-19 cases began sweeping of a local who
the country shortly after. cannot make it
to a vaccination
Several weeks later, India’s COVID-19 cases are
center on Sept. 4
on the decline, and state governments are reopen-
ing schools after long hiatuses. In Dhari, where hos-
pitalizations remain relatively low, health workers
are still working to fully vaccinate 15- to 17-year-
olds, as well as administer booster shots to adults.
Sharma says it’s much easier this time than with
first doses because there’s a much greater un-
derstanding of the need for them. Villagers have
“watched the news about the booster dose on tele-
vision and have been coming up to me asking about
it,” she says. “They understand the importance of
the vaccines in keeping the whole community safe.”
That understanding helps people like Devi
walk the extra mile to get vaccinated. “If I could,
I would urge everyone to take the vaccine. Don’t
think of yourself; think of your friends and fam-
ily and your community,” she says. “If you are safe,
they are safe; the world is safe.” —With reporting
by EloisE Barry/london 
69
 SOCIETY
AGE OF
U NCERTA I N T Y
AFTER TWO YEARS OF INSTABILITY AND WHIPLASH, HOW
DO WE STOP PEERING NERVOUSLY AROUND THE CORNER?
BY REBEKAH TAUSSIG
I recently went back to vIsIt the
high school where I used to teach. I met
with a handful of kids in my old class-
room, and as I looked around at the
same pictures on the walls, the wooden
desks, the view from the window, I was
stunned thinking about the last time
I sat in this room. It was the spring of
2020, and I was seven months pregnant,
trying to talk to a class of 14-year-olds
about this new coronavirus without
being too fippant or too scary. It was
the day before spring break, and we
were fumbling through a crash course
in online learning, because we expected
classes would need to be virtual the
first couple of weeks back. It would be
weird and annoying for a minute, but
then we’d get right back in the swing of
things. To put our complaints in per-
spective, we went around the circle
and shared whom we wanted to protect
from getting sick—a grandpa in a nurs-
ing home, an aunt with a heart defect,
a loved one with cancer.
That was almost two years ago. Now
I have a toddler who runs around the
house hollering about ducks, and the
freshmen I once knew are all taller and
wearing masks and applying to colleges.
None of us in that circle—whether we
PAINTING BY JEREMY MIR ANDA
were rolling our eyes or wringing our
hands—expected it to go this way.
But there was something else that
struck me during that visit, beyond the
fact that we still hadn’t gone back to
“normal,” or that we weren’t even sure
what that meant anymore. I felt a weari-
ness in the school that was deeper than
I’d anticipated. I knew the past two years
had been hard. But as I moved through
the hallways, the weight was palpa-
ble, not in everyone’s words as much
as their faces and shoulders. It was like
they had had the wind knocked out of
them. Their laughter couldn’t quite lift
off the ground. The day I visited, many
teachers were out with COVID-19 or
COVID-19 exposures or kids who had
COVID-19 or whose day cares had shut
down because of COVID-19. Classroom
attendance was low, making any kind of
steady pace or continuity an elusive and
increasingly exhausting goal to chase.
Before Omicron swept the world,
it felt a little like we’d been caught in
some kind of liminal suspension for
nearly two years, our limbs aching as we
scanned for a patch of ground where we
could land—just one stretch of sturdy
earth to rest on with familiar markers
to chart our location and a horizon to
SOCIETY

move toward without wondering about quicksand

pits. It felt like maybe we were close. And then we
realized it was a mirage.
We’re all stuck in a pandemic—we’re all sub-
ject in some way to the uncertainty it creates—but
the puncture wounds have taken a billion different
shapes. I’d imagined the weight of teaching during
a pandemic and thought I had a pretty good sense
of how hard it must be, but I didn’t feel the weight
of it in my body until I returned to the building. It
made me wonder what we’d feel if we were able to
slip into each other’s worlds for even a morning. To
be in the ICU with health care workers, to watch
educators try to juggle safety and desperate par-
ents, to wait in prolonged isolation with those who
live in bodies especially vulnerable to this virus,
to make impossible decisions with small-business
owners as they try to stay afloat, to sit in the room
with people whose mental health is in crisis. Would
we start to understand one another, this pandemic,
the past two years, any better?

I had to leave that visit early—our childcare

plans changed when yet another person in our
orbit tested positive for COVID-19. It wasn’t an
unfamiliar experience. With our only child born
in May 2020, unpredictable childcare has been the
only kind we’ve known. Even so, the uncertainty
in my life is so small and manageable compared
with what others are dealing with. Now that I’ve
switched to freelance work, my schedule can be
flexible and, more often than not, is remote, and
we’ve gotten so much practice pivoting when the
plans change. How many times since Otto was born
have I thought, Soon, things will be safe, life will
settle, we’ll be able to rely on structure, only to feel
the ground give way beneath me again? Which is
exactly why I was taken off guard by my response
when I received the text. I should have been well
equipped to handle this by now. Instead, I felt like
I’d smacked into the bottom of a well, and I might △ secure? Will we ever get back to who we
as well curl up and make a home there. My shoul- The author with her son were before this started? Will our rela-
ders and chest were tight with worry over the per- Otto in September 2021 tionships recover? Should we have that
son who had gotten sick, and I was already so be- celebration? Should we book those plane
hind on work that I couldn’t think about it without tickets? Are we overreacting? Will things
hearing my heart pound in my ears. I took Otto ever get better? Uncertainty is a song I
home, wrapped myself in a blanket, and watched can’t get out of my head. It hits us dif-
him run as fast as he could back and forth across ferently, but I feel it wearing on every-
the 5-ft. stretch of floor in our bedroom. We can’t one in one way or another, leaving us
keep doing this, I thought. And then, Stop being so anxious or angry or humming with our
dramatic. It’ll just be a few days. But I don’t think eyes closed and our fingers in our ears.
my hopelessness was tied to any one day. It feels like we might be approaching
C O U R T E S Y R E B E K A H TA U S S I G

I don’t always know how to talk about it. I’m some kind of turning point in this pan-
doing fine; we’re really fine. But also, uncertainty demic. There are signs that cases are on
hangs heavy in the air around all of us. Will our the decline, and it seems like only a mat-
loved ones survive? Are we keeping them safe? Are ter of time until the vaccine is available
our lives and safety valuable to those around us? for kids under 5. But what are we sup-
Will we be able to find a COVID-19 test? Are our jobs posed to do with these flickers of hope?
72 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
Can we trust them? We’ve been here be-
fore and seen how quickly things can
take a turn for the worse. Are we sup-
posed to let ourselves anticipate safety?
Order? Reliability? And will it be safe
for all of us? Or just some of us?
I can see a tendency in myself to
soothe the discomfort of uncertainty by
insisting on a narrative of certainty—to
crush everything I can’t know or con-
trol into something as simple as a rock
I can clench in my fist. If those people
would just do these things, this would
all be over! I think conspiracy theorists
might be driven by the same desire to
banish the intolerable feeling of un-
certainty. But I’ve found that this im-
pulse to flatten a massive, complicated
problem into one small thing I can yell
about doesn’t actually solve anything
or even make me feel better. As much
as I trust the experts, I’m starting to re-
alize that knowledge and scientific in-
novation are only part of the solution;
they can go only so far without things
like understanding, collaboration, care,
commitment, support. And some days
it feels like we’re moving further away
from these resources. So I clench my fist
tighter, and my brain keeps spinning—
overheating like a blender left on too
long until I simply burn out. How do
we keep going without shutting down
or hardening into shells of ourselves?
YesterdaY, mY partner micah and
I started the morning like many others.
I read him the latest Omicron news,
and we speculated about numbers and
peaks and future variants. Eventually, it
became harder and harder to hear each
other, because Otto was howling at the
ceiling like a wolf pup. Howling is one of
his favorite things these days, especially
in a pack. Micah and I put our conjec-
tures to the side and started howling,
too. Three wolves, noses pointed toward
the ceiling while the morning light cast
shadows on the wall. It felt really good
to howl together.
I also felt a pang, watching Otto pull
us out of our fretful dialogue. Will he
remember his parents as distracted and
stretched thin? Are we raising him to
be stressed out and fearful? What is it
like for your entire life to exist under
the banner of a pandemic? Everyone
is flummoxed by time these days—
How has it been two years? And when did that
happen? A month ago? A year? We’re untethered,
free-floating. Micah and I had been drifting into
an anxious future when Otto yanked us back to
the moment we were actually in and the toddler
squirming in footie pajamas between us.
It makes me wonder if there’s a way to stay pres-
ent without getting swallowed, to keep on without
turning to steel, to let uncertainty be big and to
feel the fear of it, while also finding tiny islands of
certainty, spots on the map to mark with a push-
pin and tether us to solid ground. I don’t know if
I’ll have childcare next week, if our local hospital
will have a bed for my high-risk mom if she should
need it, or how we’ll ever heal from this. But there
are small things I do know, and when I feel my
brain whirring, I can grasp hold of them. Like right
now, this is my tongue, pressing against the backs
of my teeth. I’m here. This is my hand cupping
Micah’s cold fingers like a snug turtle shell. We’re
here. These are the sounds of my baby jumping to
the beat of “Heart and Soul” like a heavy-footed
bunny. Right here. Later, when it’s dark, these are
our voices singing the same three songs we sing
to Otto every night—the first my dad sang to me
when I was little; the second comforted me when
I was an overwhelmed teenager; the third Micah
HOW DO WE heard on his way home the day we found out I was
KEEP GOING pregnant—three points to chart a path. I’m here;
he’s here; we’re here. Mark the spot, before we’re
WITHOUT inevitably sucked back into the storm.
SHUTTING The pushpins in the map don’t change any of the
uncertainty, don’t solve any of the problems caus-
DOWN OR ing the uncertainty, and don’t enact widespread
HARDENING change. But I’m trying to assemble some survival
INTO tools for the long haul. Because the truth that might
be even harder to reckon with is that this pandemic
SHELLS OF is not the only uncertainty keeping us from per-
O U R S E LV E S ? fect peace. Uncertainty is baked into life, ines-
capable and bewildering. My map also marks the
spots when I became paralyzed at the age of 3, when
Micah was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 33,
when Otto’s screaming, wriggly body hit the air and
I realized that the more love you have, the more
terrifying life’s unpredictability becomes. When I
look at it square in the face, it’s too much to bear,
actually. So if I’m going to keep at this—keep mov-
ing, keep loving, keep showing up for the ones right
△ here—I need some tools. After two years of COVID-
A family selfie from 19, each of us has crafted our own: the anchors
February we put down when faced with a future we can’t
predict. This one is mine—that I can name what I
don’t know, but I also know what I have. The pan-
demic isn’t over yet, but maybe this tool will allow
me to stay soft and present a little while longer.
Taussig is the author of Sitting Pretty: The View
From My Ordinary Resilient Disabled Body
73
Kid of the Year
Orion Jean, 11,
says he sees
himself as “a
vessel to spread
kindness”

Photograph by
Justin J Wee
for TIME
Kid
of the
Year
The world in 2021 was overwhelmed
with divisive global issues. A comforting
consistency: the next generation brims
with the positive determination that these
kids—selected from a field of thousands of
8- to 16-year-olds—have already shown
Kid of the Year

MANSFIELD, TE X AS / 11

Orion Jean
Ambassador for kindness
BY ANGELINA JOLIE

“if you see a problem, fix iT.” ThaT’s how something happening now they can go out and do
humanitarian Orion Jean sums up his work, over something about it.
Zoom from his home in Mansfield, Texas. Just 11
years old, Jean is TIME’s Kid of the Year for 2021, Jolie: You wrote that kindness is about a choice,
selected from a field of thousands. He sees him- which I think is so important. It’s something that’s
self as an ambassador for kindness—jumping in attainable, that everybody can choose to do right
wherever he sees a need. For Thanksgiving 2020, now. How would you suggest someone do that?
he organized the donation and delivery of 100,000
meals to food-insecure families across the coun- Jean: Well, you’re absolutely right, kindness is a
try. Over summer break, he got 500,000 books to choice, and while we can’t force others to be kind,
kids in their homes. And he always brings others we can be kind ourselves and hope to inspire
with him. At a time when isolation and division other people. So many people have great ideas
are rampant, Jean sees the world as it could be if but never act on them. I think it’s all about really
more people brought their communities together caring about the issues that you’re seeing. Some-
to help their neediest members. one told me that you have to find something that
breaks your heart for you to really get out there
Angelina Jolie: I’ve met many different leaders and make a difference in that area. And I want oth-
around the world, and one of the things that most ers to know that they can start today. If there’s an
people forget is how to explain a simple truth about issue or problem or something that they see that
what matters. That’s why I’m they want to solve, all it takes
so impressed with you. You is really just knowing deep
really reminded me of that. ‘While we can’t force down inside that it’s some-
others to be kind, thing you care about, and you
Orion Jean: Thank you. That can go out and get started.
means a lot coming from you. we can be kind ourselves
and hope to inspire Jolie: I really love that. And
Jolie: Will you explain the other people.’ you’re right about what
focus of your work and how breaks your heart. I think
it came about? when you’re a caring person,
you realize there’s so much happening in the world,
Jean: I’ve always been able to, when I get home from and then you don’t know where to start or what to
school, just watch the news with my parents and do. I think, at the center for me was working with
find out what’s going on in the world. And when the refugees, and that was what broke my heart. So I
pandemic began, I saw a lot of things were happen- think you’re exactly right, people can really pay at-
ing; people were losing their jobs and losing access tention to what moves them.
to food and homes and all of these essential things. What do your friends think about all of this?
And I knew right then that I wanted to do some- Do they join you?
thing to help, but the opportunity actually came
around when my teacher suggested that I enter into Jean: Well, a lot of them don’t really know much
a speech contest. And if I won the prize money about what I’ve done, but I hope that if they see
that came with the contest, that means I could something on the news and are like, “Hey, I know
start a kindness initiative to help these people. him!” hopefully that inspires them to know that,
“Hey, a kid like me can go out and really make
Jolie: What is a kindness initiative? an impact.” It’s not about me; I’m just a vessel to
spread kindness and to help others spread kind-
Jean: Well, to me, it can be a number of things. And ness in their communities as well.
the one that I started was the race to kindness. The
race to kindness is not just a series of events, but Jolie: It feels very nice to be in your presence. You
also a call to action. It’s a way to get people involved really do have a gift of sharing this warmth and this
in the community, you know, and when they see kindness. Do you ever feel sometimes overwhelmed
76 Time February 28/March 7, 2022

or sad when people are unkind or you see cruelty?
Jean: Absolutely. I think that one of the things
about being kind is that you perk up when you
hear other people being unkind or when you hear
about people that aren’t doing the right thing.
And it makes you sad inside. And like I said, kind-
ness is a choice; you can’t force anyone else to be
kind. You hope that by inspiring other people to
spread kindness that they will somehow see it
and, you know, change their ways and be more
kind in the future.
Jolie: It feels better to be kind, doesn’t it? It’s just a
nicer way of communicating with each other.
C O U R T E S Y F A M I LY
Jean: Yeah, I think that kindness sometimes can
just be as easy as not being mean to someone.
Not talking about someone behind their back
or posting that mean comment on social media.
That’s what kindness can be; it can just be as sim-
ple as not being cruel to someone.
Jolie: That’s great advice. So I know also you’re
a reader, and that you also started an initiative
around books. Tell me that story.
Jean: Well, I’ve always loved books ever since I
can remember. I’ve always had a book in my hand
waking up, going to bed. And I knew that after
the race to 100,000 meals, which was another
initiative that I’d done, I knew that I wanted to
be able to do something bigger that would reach
more people. I’ve always been trying to get my
friends to like, you know, “Read this book with
me!” or “We’re gonna do, like, a mini book club,”
or something. But now that I have the platform,
I wanted to be able to reach more people, and to
me literacy is something that can get you off the
ground. It can allow you to eventually get that
good job or out of that neighborhood. Or maybe
it’s just a way for you to escape from your every-
day life, and to read a new story about a new cul-
ture or a new person, and find out something that
you didn’t know before.
Some kids don’t have access to any books, really.
I mean, they live in areas that we call book deserts.
And I wanted to—maybe not eliminate them, but
make those areas smaller, or at least get books out
to those areas. I wanted to be able to partner with
organizations in those communities.
I did not do this by myself; it took a whole team
behind me: my parents, my family, all of the gen-
erous corporate donors and organizations that we
partnered with, and strangers that I’ve never even
met. They are all donating because they feel com-
pelled to help those in their community.
Jolie: Did you meet the beneficiaries of the book
drive?
Jean: Unfortunately, that’s one of the parts of the
pandemic that was tough. We did have to distrib-
With the help of ute the books, and a couple times I’ve been able to
his community, see kids pick out their own books, and that really
Jean assembled put a smile on my face just to see these books put
and distributed a smile on theirs.
100,000 meals
to families in Jolie: A lot of adults are sitting around these days
need in fall 2020 thinking, “I wish there was better leadership.” I
know you’ve even written a book on leadership. Do
you recognize that you might be a leader one day?
You already are, at 11. But do you think of your fu-
ture and what you might want to be?
Jean: I hope that whatever I do, I will be able to
77
Kid of the Year
be a leader. But one of the reasons I was so ex-
cited to write that book is because, from a young
age, I have loved reading. And I’ve always wanted
to write my own stories and be an author when I
grow up. But just knowing that, with all that I’ve
been able to learn, maybe one day I might become
a country or world or state leader in whatever ca-
reer that I may take. I hope that right now I’m able
to be a leader and inspire so many other kids to
become leaders as well.
Jolie: Whatever you choose to be in the future, I
have no doubt you will accomplish many things.
Do you do anything silly?
Jean: I’m a big reading person. I tried to get into
some musical instruments—drums and piano—
and, you know, playing video games with my
friends and just being a kid. Learning to have that
balance between all of the efforts that I’ve done
and also just taking time to relax and be 11.
Jolie: I think a lot of young people who are becom-
ing more active and trying to make change can
burn out. And it sounds like your family knows
very well how important the balance is.
Jean: Self-care is just as important. You know,
you have to practice what you preach. If you
want other people to be able to take care of them-
selves and have all these necessities, then you
have to take time for yourself as well, and just
every now and then know when to take a break
and step back.
Jolie: I feel like I’m taking a class from you. You
seem so grounded in such an understanding of
what is important in life. And it’s really just an
honor to meet you.
Jean: The pleasure, believe me, is all mine. I have
loved your humanitarian work and your movie
work. When did you start your humanitarian
efforts?
Jolie: Oh, well, I was raised by a mom who was
aware of things happening in the world and would
talk to me. She was extremely kind, my mom.
When I started traveling—I was in a film and it
Meet the other
finalists
78 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
took me to Cambodia where I learned about ref-
ugees and land mines—I started to realize how
much I didn’t know. I realized that there was a big
piece of my education that I was going to have to
fill in myself. I asked to go into the field with the
U.N. Refugee Agency and start to bear witness to
what was happening in the world, and then de-
cided it was the most important thing I could do
with my life.
Jean: Wow. I mean, you’re right, just the thought
that not everyone has the same privileges or
opportunities that sometimes I have taken for
granted. It really struck me just knowing that
there are people out there who really do need help,
and they don’t have the resources to be living in a
big home or with books or toys, or maybe even a
meal. Something as simple as a meal could be, you
know, not something that’s guaranteed.
Jolie: I will say also that, speaking of kindness, the
kindest people I’ve met are refugees—people who
don’t have anything. I’ve learned a lot about kind-
ness from those people that probably have a lot of
reasons to be angry, but they found their grace.
Jean: Totally. It’s so much easier to be kind when
your focus is simply on trying to get by, not con-
sumed by all of these other things.
Jolie: I think you’re right. When you’re stripped
of everything, you know what matters. Maybe one
day we’ll go into the field together. I’d really love
to join your race to kindness.
Jean: Thank you. I think you are definitely a part
of the race. You have been doing it for much lon-
ger than I have.
Jolie: You’re very kind to say that. Thank you so
much for this interview. And congratulations on
being named TIME Kid of the Year. You deserve it.
Jolie, a TIME contributing editor, is an Academy
Award–winning actor and special envoy of
the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees. She
recently co-authored the book Know Your Rights
and Claim Them, a guide to human rights for
young people, with Amnesty International
CEDAR HILL, TEXAS BIRMINGHAM, ALA.
Alena Wicker, 13 Ethan Hill, 11
Wicker created the Brown Hill started Ethan’s Heart Bags
STEM Girl, an organization
that offers mentorship
and opportunities to
4 Blessings, which distributes
donations to homeless members
of his community (with help
girls of color in STEM. from local police officers).

CHATTANOOGA, TENN. / 12
Cash Daniels
Environmental activist
CASH DANIELS ONCE FOUND A “CREEPY DOLL
head” in the river. “We find more strange things
than you’d think,” he says: a tiny Mickey Mouse
figurine, two old cassette tapes with songs that
dated back long before 12-year-old Daniels was
born, shotgun shells. But mostly he unearths cans,
straws, and plastic bottles that threaten the wildlife
he treasures. He posts some of his most bizarre finds
on Instagram and then usually tosses or recycles the
trash—although a friend kept the creepy doll head.
Daniels spends several hours every week clean-
ing up cans and bottles in the rivers near his home
with other teen environmentalists in Chatta-
COURTESY FAMILIES
nooga, Tenn. Together, they have collected more
than 1 ton of aluminum cans, nearly 1,000 cans
a week for a year. His goal for 2022 is even more
ambitious. In January, he co-founded a club called
REDMOND, WASH.
Gaurangi Gupta, 11
Gupta founded Youth4Us, Price created Bottles4College, which
which operates programs for funds college scholarships for Hawaiian
young people like a Bookaid students by cleaning up and recycling
(give a book, take a book), and trash in Hawaii. It has recycled
weekly art and reading classes. over 100,000 cans and bottles.
the Cleanup Kids with his best friend, Ella Grace, a
fellow home-school student who lives in Canada.
The project’s mission: to encourage kids to pick up
1 million pounds of trash across the globe before
the end of the year.
Daniels says he first developed a passion for
wildlife when he was 3. “As far back as I can remem-
ber, I’ve always loved animals,” Daniels says with a
charming Southern twang. Marine life especially
intrigues him. He is scuba-certified, and when he
is not running river cleanups or working on home-
work, he’s scuba diving virtually with the VR head-
set that he got as a gift. When he began discovering
trash on walks along the river with his family, he
immediately thought of his favorite sea creatures:
“As soon as I found straws and stuff on the beach,
I knew it would harm the wildlife that I love, so I
had to do something to protect it.”
(Naturally, his favorite superhero is Aquaman,
the guardian of our waterways. Daniels says if he
could have a superpower, it would be “destroying
all plastics in the universe.”)
His mission now is saving the earth’s rivers,
which he points out are even more polluted than
the world’s oceans. “Eighty percent of the ocean’s
trash comes from rivers,” he says. In 2019, he ad-
opted the name Conservation Kid on Instagram,
and started posting about things like how some-
thing as simple as a discarded face mask can en-
tangle, choke, and kill turtles, birds, and fish. Mask
waste has increased an estimated 9,000% since
the pandemic began, and improperly disposed of
masks are a new bugaboo of Daniels.
Although he mostly speaks to other teens, Dan-
iels has found that adults are often persuaded by
his argument that cleaning up, recycling, and
Daniels’ 2019 eradicating plastic ought to be a selfish act for
book, One Small humanity: when plastics break down, they can
Piece, illustrates wind up in our drinking water. He has met with
the impact of the mayor of his city, and his experiences speak-
picking up just one ing with influential grownups has convinced him
piece of trash that adults can change their habits. “I think after
they talk to me, they think twice about dropping
a cup on the ground,” he says.
But, in truth, the burden to save the planet has
landed on children like him. “Kids may be a small
percent of the population, but we’re 100% of the
future,” he says. “And we can save the world.”
—ELIANA DOCKTERMAN
HAUULA, HAWAII WOODLAND PARK, N.J.
Genshu Price, 14 Jayden Perez, 12
Perez established a nonprofit
called From the Bottom
of My Heart to collect
donations and resources
to help those in need.
79

FRISCO, TEXAS / 15
Lino Marrero
Inventor
LINO MARRERO WAS LEAVING CELLO PRACTICE
one day when he noticed several blisters on his fin-
gers. The pain was so bad that the then 10-year-old
from Frisco, Texas, wanted to quit playing for good,
even though he loved music. So he started doing
some research online to find a solution. “I learned
that a lot of musicians actually quit their instru-
ment because of finger pain,” says Marrero, now 15.
“That’s when I realized I need to invent something
for this.” A few months later, the String Ring was
born. It’s an adjustable band that protects string
musicians’ sore and blistered fingers so that they
can keep practicing without a loss of sound quality.
BEAVERTON, ORE.
Jenell Theobald, 15
Theobald created Let’s Peer
Up, an organization that
advocates for representation
for those with mental and
physical disabilities.
80 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
A year later, at age 11, he created an eco-friendly
shoe with replaceable soles. “Shoe waste contrib-
utes a lot to landfills,” he says, “especially since
they have rubber soles that don’t dissolve easily.”
The self-proclaimed “serial inventor” keeps a
log next to his bed, with hundreds of pages of ideas
and mockups. For Marrero, being an inventor is
about social change and creating solutions to every-
day challenges. “I always start with a problem and
how it affects other people,” he says. “Can I bring
more music to the world? Can I make sports more
accessible for everyone? Can I help the environ-
ment positively?”
He came up with the idea for his latest inven-
tion, Kinetic Kickz, after he finished soccer prac-
tice and tried to call his mom to let her know he
was ready to be picked up. But his phone was dead,
and he didn’t have a charger. As he sat on the soccer
field, he thought back to what his teacher had said
about renewable-energy sources. What if he could
harness the energy he expended playing soccer to
power his phone? After spending hours tinkering
with wires and creating 10 different prototypes,
he fashioned a shoe insert that collects kinetic en-
ergy and converts it into battery power. Marrero
calculates that 12 minutes of walking can gener-
ate enough kinetic energy to charge 10% of a cell-
phone battery.
When a freak winter storm in Texas caused
massive power outages in early 2021, Marrero got
to test his invention during a time of need, and it
worked. But he also realized he needed to make a
few adjustments: now the collected energy goes
straight to a USB power bank so it can be used later.
“No one in my family is an engineer or anything
like that,” Marrero says. “So I went to the library,
I went online, and I found out about piezoelectric
disks and diode bridge rectifiers on my own.”
His dream is that the technology in Kinetic Kickz
could be used to create clean energy and limit the
Marrero honed his effects of climate change. Although solar and wind
power-generating power are gaining more popularity, Marrero says
shoe design during he prefers kinetic energy because “you can’t always
the Texas freeze of depend on the wind to blow or the sun to shine.”
February 2021 Now, Marrero wants to push other kids to be
inventors and solve global problems. “So much
of the world is kids,” he says. “We need to get a
chain going, where I inspire someone and they in-
spire someone.” —NIK POPLI
HARRISON, ALASKA MISSOURI CIT Y, TEXAS
Ruby Kate Chitsey, 14 Khloe Joiner, 9
Chitsey founded Three Wishes for Joiner founded
Ruby’s Residents, a nonprofit A Book and a Smile
organization that works with nursing- with a mission to
home staff across America to fulfill donate 1 million
small wishes for seniors. books to children.
 OA K L A ND, C A L IF. / 13 happens with small actions, from calling out racist
comments or bullying to committing to vote or help-
Mina Fedor ing others register to vote. (AAPI voters have one of
the lowest registration rates among voter groups.)
Campaigning against anti-AAPI hate “If there is one thing that anyone can do for
their community, it’s to treat everyone with respect
FOR MINA FEDOR, THERE WAS NO OPTION BUT TO and kindness,” she says. “Don’t be afraid to stand
speak up. The preteen had witnessed a harrow- up to people who are harming you. Don’t be afraid
ing rise in anti-Asian violence since the start of to speak out about things you feel are unjust, and
the pandemic, including a troubling incident that don’t be afraid to have opinions. You’re never too
happened to her mother, who is Korean, near their young for anything.”
home in Oakland, Calif. Fedor started small, call- Age has never stopped Fedor from taking ac-
ing out xenophobia during a virtual school assem- tion, and she credits her family with instilling the
bly in March 2020. But after seeing the organizing
around the Black Lives Matter movement and a
shooting in Atlanta that killed eight—six of them
women of Asian descent—nearly a year later, she
wanted to do more to stand up to racist hate.
In March 2021, she organized a rally to call for
a stop to racist violence toward Asian Americans,
hoping that at least 70 people would attend; the
rally drew a crowd of 1,200. “I really just wanted
to speak out for my community,” Fedor says.
Energized by the rally, Fedor launched AAPI
Youth Rising, a collective of middle-school activ-
ists who are devoted to uplifting their community
and stopping racist hate. In the fall of 2021, they
joined other student-led coalitions in demonstra-
tions of support for AB 101, an education bill that
would require every public high school student in
California to take an ethnic-studies course.
“Asian American history is American history,
and everyone’s history deserves to be taught and
represented,” Fedor says. “Histories that negatively values of justice and standing up for what you be-
reflect America tend to not be taught as much and lieve in. Her maternal great-grandfather, a political
that’s very wrong, because we don’t learn about our activist in Korea during the Japanese occupation,
previous errors.” She thinks if more people were is her personal hero. Fedor also looks up to inter-
aware of the long history of anti-Asian violence in sectional feminist, activist, and journalist Helen
the U.S., there might not have been the current surge Zia; the activist, poet, and organizer Grace Lee
in racist incidents toward the AAPI community—a Fedor hoped 70 Boggs; and Vice President Kamala Harris; as well
rise that was exacerbated by xenophobic comments people would as her parents, both immigrants to the U.S., and
by former President Donald Trump. attend her rally her friends who fight for justice alongside her in
The bill was signed by Governor Gavin Newsom against anti-AAPI AAPI Youth Rising.
in October, and Fedor feels it will be key to stop- hate in 2021; Now 13, Fedor knows her journey for racial jus-
ping racial discrimination and violence. Now, AAPI more than 1,200 tice will be lifelong. What excites her most about
COURTESY FAMILIES

Youth Rising has turned its sights to advocating for people showed up the future, however, is all that her generation is
ethnic-studies education for students in all states. doing for a brighter world.
While Fedor believes “real change is in legisla- “Youth can make a difference,” Fedor says. “We
tive action,” she is adamant that social change also are the future.” —CADY LANG

AUSTIN MILLERSVILLE, MD. LANTANA, TEXAS

Kai Shappley, 11 Lujain Alqattawi, 13 Sadie Keller, 14
Shappley is a Alqattawi created Sparkle, After surviving cancer, Keller began
trans activist and an organization that offers Sadie’s Sleigh, collecting toys for
testifies regularly online English lessons for childhood cancer patients. She has
against antitrans children, especially those collected over 600,000 tons of toys,
legislation. living in refugee camps. and raised $2 million for research.

81
Kid of the Year

BROOKLYN / 13

Samirah Horton
Antibullying advocate

FROM THE AGE OF 6, SAMIRAH HORTON, ALSO

known as DJ Annie Red, was picked on by her
peers for the things that made her different—
her raspier voice, her unique sense of style, and
her unwavering confidence in herself. Rather
than giving up, Horton decided to pick up a mic
and make sure other children knew they weren’t
alone. “I didn’t want other kids to go through that
experience,” says Horton, “especially at a very
young age.” Now, alongside attending eighth-
grade classes, playing basketball with friends, and
growing a large Lego collection, she’s also build-
ing an antibullying platform to reach students
across the country.
For as long as Horton remembers, she’s felt a
special connection to music. During a Zoom in-
terview, she holds up a photo of herself mixing
on a turntable as a 3-year-old. She remembers her
mother always having the radio on, and her father
teaching her how to deejay. These days, music
fuels her mission. “It’s music that has allowed me Like most teens, Horton’s also got a knack for
to spread this important message,” she says. social media. She recognizes that the online space
Horton’s gigs draw inspiration from the can often be a home for cyberhate, but she’s cho-
broad range of classics her parents would play. sen to leverage the reach of platforms like Insta-
Now when she’s playing a set at a school or as gram, YouTube, and TikTok to connect her music
the Kid DJ for her hometown team, the Brook- and motivational speaking with students from
lyn Nets, you can expect to hear anything from all over the world. “This message connects with
the hip-hop classics of Lauryn Hill to one of her everyone,” she says. “Different age groups, ethnici-
current favorites, Lil Nas X. In the mix are songs Horton, also ties, and backgrounds.”
of her own, including the antibullying anthem known as DJ Horton isn’t sure exactly what the future holds,
“No You Won’t Bully Me.” Annie Red, but for now, she’s passionate about leading her
Her message has reached beyond the DJ created a school’s student government and playing sports.
set. At 8, Horton turned one of her songs into a powerful That could make a career as a politician or a sports-
26-page picture book, The Bully Stop, which she antibullying caster particularly exciting. “I don’t know exactly
says has reached thousands of people across Amer- anthem what I’ll be doing, but I know I’ll be making a posi-
ica. In the book, she references the over 160,000 tive impact on the world,” she says.
students who miss school daily for fear of being She’s already on her way, but her biggest
bullied. Horton, who identifies as Afro Latina, achievement in her own eyes is persuading others
made sure to have the book available in Spanish not to doubt themselves along the way. “I don’t
for bilingual readers. She’s also met with at least care what anybody tells you,” she says. “You are
60 schools and after-school programs to spread never too young to make a change.”
her mission. —MARIAH ESPADA

FORT WAYNE, IND. ST. PETERSBURG, FLA. ATLANTA

Sammie Vance, 13 Miles Fetherston-Resch, 9 Zoe Oli, 10
Vance works to install Fetherston-Resch created Kids Saving Oli founded Beautiful Curly
COURTESY FAMILIES

Buddy Benches, safe places Oceans, which sells items made from Me, a line of dolls, hair-care
to signal that someone plastic that was reclaimed from the products, and books that she
is looking for a friend or a sea, and has donated over $23,000 to hopes can instill self-confidence
connection, in her town. ocean-conservation organizations. in young Black and brown girls.

82 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022

Kid of the Year
KOTY 2020
Catching up with
Gitanjali Rao
GiTanjali rao was TIME’s firsT kid of The
Year, named in 2020 for her work as a scientist
and leader. Now 16, Rao remains focused on her re-
search and on expanding access for kids to use their
unique perspectives to innovate as well. She spoke
with TIME about what she has done with her title.
It’s been a year since you were named TIME’s
Kid of the Year. What have you been up to? It
has been an absolute whirlwind of emotions. I’m
glad that it has given me a more impactful voice.
I work very closely with the Maddox Jolie-
Pitt Foundation and Angelina Jolie, and I worked
with students in Cambodia for their workshop.
Also, I have spoken at so many conferences now.
I’ve talked on the future of education, education
inequality, the use of tech for problem solving,
the need for youth in the workforce, women in
STEM—all sorts of things.
Kindly [Rao’s app to monitor cyberbullying], in
partnership with UNICEF, is now a solution that
can be used all over the country. And it is the same
mission, same goal—it’s just modified to be more
clean, and provide more resources for students.
84 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
Rao speaks on the need to involve
youth in innovation at the 2021 World
Knowledge Forum in South Korea
My newest project is looking at detecting para-
sites in water in third world countries. I’m thinking
of going into biogenetics, product development,
and public administration—some combination of
the three.
Last year, you reached your goal of mentor-
ing 30,000 students through your innovation
workshops. How is that going? I’m at over 57,000
students right now. I also wrote a book that was
released in March 2021. Now it’s available in five
languages all over the world. I’ve raised more than
$70,000 to help refugee camps and Title I schools
with purchasing books as well. And, in partner-
ship with Transformation Ghana, I’ve provided
books to high schools there as well. As a National
Geographic Young Explorer and the laureate for
the Young Activists Summit in Geneva, I was able
to improve the Makerspace in the Kakuma refu-
gee camp, providing them with more laptops and
printers and iPads and ways that they can improve
their own innovation careers. On top of that, I’ve
also been really passionate about mentoring stu-
dents for challenges, so that they have the compe-
tition to bring their ideas to life.
Why do you want to especially mentor kids in
other countries? It’s weird to think that I have
privileges that a lot of other people don’t. I believe
that innovation should have an equal playing field.
We shouldn’t put a price on coming up with ideas.
And that’s exactly why I’m trying to help out some
of the people who do come up with an amazing
idea but sometimes don’t know where to start, or
don’t have the resources to.
What’s next for the year ahead? Honestly, I’m
looking forward to doing some more research
and getting back into the lab. I want to get more
into this era of personalized medicine. And I’m
hoping to develop a more in-depth K-12 curricu-
lum. At the end of the day, the biggest thing that I
want to do is look at inequality in education, and
Rao was picked
how we can create an education system that suits
as TIME’s 2020
Kid of the Year
everyone.
for her efforts to
help kids get into How are you going to do all of that while keep-
STEM fields ing up with high school? Thankfully, I’m almost
done with high school. Just three semesters left.
And, you know, managing college apps and things
like that is a lot. But I strongly believe that if you’re
C O U R T E S Y F A M I LY
doing everything that you want to do—not what
you need to do—it makes everything that much
easier to balance out. —raisa bruner
BRING THE WORLD TO YOUR HOME
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TIMEFORKIDS.COM/WINTER

CHINAWATCH
PRESENTED BY CHINA DAILY
Children wave props designed as doves, symbolizing love and peace, during the
opening ceremony. LI GA / XINHUA
BY DENG ZHANGYU
The topic “the smallest
Olympic flame” quickly became
a talking point on social media
after two young athletes put
their torch into the heart of a
giant snowflake sculpture at the
opening ceremony of the Beijing
Winter Olympics on Feb. 4.
Many expressed their sur-
prise, comparing the scene with
the cauldron being lit in 2008 for
the Beijing Summer Olympics,
which featured a huge flame
burning large amounts of gas ev-
ery hour. The filmmaker Zhang
Yimou, director-general for the
opening ceremony, said lighting
the cauldron was his favorite
part of the evening.
“It’s bold and innovative to
present such a tiny Olympic
flame. It reflects China’s promo-
tion of a green and low-emission
world.”
The giant snowflake com-
prised hundreds of smaller
snowflakes featuring the names
of about 90 countries and re-
gions taking part in the Games.
These small snowflakes were
also used as placards by those
leading the athletes’ parade.
Zhang said the big snowflake
signaled that “we’re building a
shared future together” as the
world tackles the pandemic.
The tiny flame meant the “fire of
hope would last forever.”
“We’re not telling stories of
China. Instead, we are telling a
story of the world.”
The concept for the opening
ceremony was totally differ-
ent to that of the 2008 Beijing
Olympics, he said. Zhang also
China Watch materials are distributed by China Daily Distribution Corp. on behalf of China Daily, Beijing, China.
ADVERTISEMENT
Pageant
of snow,
ice and fire
Novel approach in Olympics opening ceremony
directed the opening ceremony
14 years ago, when he gathered
a cast of 15,000 to show off
China’s 5,000-year history and
its traditional culture.
“In 2008 we were eager to
introduce China to the world,
including who we are and how
we got here,” Zhang said.
“Fourteen years later, with
China now the second-largest
economy and with the world
becoming more familiar with
the nation, it’s time to show a
modern China and tell the planet
that ‘we’re together.’
“This is a stage to show
Chinese people’s values. We are
the same as everyone across the
globe. We’re friendly, sincere, ro-
mantic and hope that everyone
in the world is well,” he said.
About 3,000 people from
many walks of life were invited
to take part in the opening cer-
emony, which featured no stars
or professional performers.
Asked whether she was
nervous singing the Olympic
anthem as the ceremony was
broadcast worldwide, Han
Shuxin, 6, a member of the
Malanhua Choir, who started to
learn music in September, said
she is not afraid to show her
vocal talent.
The choir comprised 44
students from Fuping, Hebei From top: Fireworks light up the National Stadium during the opening ceremony on
province, a mountainous area Feb. 4. LI XIN / XINHUA The small Olympic flame burns in the cauldron, surrounded by
lifted out of poverty two years snowflakes featuring the names of some 90 countries and regions participating in
ago. The choristers, aged 6 to 12, the Games. CAO CAN / XINHUA
had no experience performing
onstage. Their parents are farm- “Some could only sing simple Singing at the opening cer-
ers or migrant workers. children’s songs when I first emony in the National Stadium,
Liu Kai, a teacher in charge of met them,” Liu said. “After five also known as the Bird’s Nest,
the students, said they were se- months’ training they could sing was the first time many of them
lected from five village schools. the Olympic anthem in Greek.” had visited the Chinese capital.
 ADVERTISEMENT

A dazzling light show was just one among the highlight of the Beijing Olympic Winter
Games opening ceremony in the National Stadium on Feb. 4. LI ZIHENG / XINHUA

counted for more than 90% of nology. With high-tech we were

the cast of 3,000 on Feb. 4. They
are students at schools and
universities in Beijing and Hebei,
and began their musical training
in October.
Zhang said that in 2008, when
China was eager to show itself
able to stage a splendid show
with a participating cast.”
Light-emitting diode, or LED,
screens covered a large area of
the stadium floor.
As more than 600 children

‘‘
sang the theme song for Beijing
to the world, he 2022, they played
dared not invite with snowflakes
children who projected on a
knew little about WE ARE THE screen under their
music to sing SAME AS feet. By using
at the opening motion capture
ceremony. EVERYONE technology, the
“Now we don’t ACROSS THE young singers
care so much interacted with
GLOBE. WE’RE
about whether the snowflakes,
they’re the best FRIENDLY, which changed
singers, have SINCERE, shape and direc-
good looks, or are tion based on the
in good shape. We ROMANTIC AND children’s move-
want the world HOPE THAT ments.
to see ordinary EVERYONE IN THE Chang said: “As
young people and far as I know, it’s
a modern China WORLD IS WELL.” the largest screen
represented by ZHANG YIMOU, area to provide
them.” DIRECTOR-GENERAL FOR motion capture
Compared with THE OPENING CEREMONY technology for
the opening cer- such a big group
emony in 2008, of performers.”
which also took Olympic rings
place in the Bird’s rose from a huge
Nest, the number replica ice cube
of cast members about the height
was significantly fewer this of a three-story building.
time due to the pandemic and Reducing the weight of this
From top: Olympic rings rise at the center of the stage during the opening cold weather. structure to allow it to unfold
ceremony. WU WEI / XINHUA Children from Fuping, Hebei province, sing the Full use was made of high- easily posed a challenge to scien-
Olympic anthem. CAO CAN / XINHUA technology to present an eye- tists, who carried out numerous
catching spectacle. experiments to find the right ma-
Chang Yu, director of the terials to produce the ice rings.
The idea to invite children past few years,” he said. “These opening and closing ceremo- The opening ceremony for the
from a mountainous area came children from the mountains are nies department for the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics told a
from Zhang, the director. our future. We should introduce 2022 organizing committee, story about China’s past, while
“China has helped many of them to the world.” said: “China has invested a the Winter Games presented a
its people out of poverty in the Those aged from 5 to 25 ac- great deal in science and tech- story for the future, Chang said.

Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.

Time Off

THE CURSED REIMAGINES FANTASY NOVELIST THE YOUNG-ADULT BOOKS WE

THE GRISLY WEREWOLF SABAA TAHIR GETS REAL CAN’T WAIT TO READ THIS YEAR

ILLUSTR ATION BY KEITH NEGLEY FOR TIME 89

TIME OFF OPENER

T
here is a scene in showtime’s new docu-
drama Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber where
irascible Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick is try-
ing to talk Mark Cuban into investing in his soon-
to-be-notorious startup. It’s 2010, a year before the app’s
public launch, and the Dallas Mavericks owner is skeptical.
“I am not gonna invest in a company where you have
to raise hundreds of millions of dollars to do tens of
millions of dollars in revenue,” Cuban tells the younger
entrepreneur, shutting down Kalanick’s hyperactive sales
pitch with his own no-nonsense, alpha-male energy.
Furious at the rejection, Kalanick warns his would-be
benefactor that if he turns down the opportunity to invest
in Uber now, he’ll never get another one. Cuban passes.
Some version of this exchange did take place during
Uber’s infancy; by 2014, Cuban was looking back on the
decision as “probably my biggest mistake in investing.” But
it’s hard to tell just how true the scene is to what actually
happened. In a casting choice that’s refective of Super
Pumped’s metafictional style, Kalanick, like most of the
characters, is portrayed by an actor—Joseph Gordon-Levitt,
going all-out in every take—while Cuban appears as himself.
Such blurring of fact and fiction is endemic on TV these
days, thanks to a spike in the production of docudramas,
many of which center on larger-than-life newsmakers.
Along with Super Pumped (premiering Feb. 27), 2022 has △
already brought ABC’s civil rights drama Women of the Travis (Gordon- Jeffrey Toobin’s The Run of His Life:
Movement, Hulu’s sex-tape saga Pam & Tommy, and Shonda Levitt) fires up The People v. O.J. Simpson. While its
Rhimes’ Netfix miniseries on the rise and fall of “Soho Uber’s “super subject was as crass as anything a cable
Grifter” Anna Delvey, Inventing Anna. Hulu is getting ready pumped” staff channel might rip from the headlines,
to unveil its Elizabeth Holmes portrait The Dropout on the the show telegraphed prestige. Name
same day, March 3, that Peacock drops Tiger King retelling actors Cuba Gooding Jr. (as Simpson),
Joe vs. Carole. Before the spring is out, we’ll also have docu- Sterling K. Brown, Sarah Paulson,
dramas on WeWork (Apple’s WeCrashed), the ’80s Lakers John Travolta, Courtney B. Vance,
(HBO’s Winning Time), killer Pam Hupp (NBC’s The Thing and Nathan Lane anchored the cast.
About Pam), Michelle Carter’s texting-suicide case (Hulu’s Instead of simply re-creating the
The Girl From Plainville), Watergate (Starz’s Gaslit), and the media maelstrom that surrounded the
making of The Godfather (The Offer on Paramount+). O.J. trial, ACS re-examined it, applying

THIS S PRE AD: SHOW TIME; PRE VIOUS S PRE AD SOURCE PHOTOS: OJ SIM PSON: E VERE T T COLLECTION;
As tends to be the case in the current, streaming-driven progressive analyses of gender, race,
era of rampant programming overlap that I’ve been calling and tabloid culture to maligned figures

T H E C R O W N : N E T F L I X (4); PA M & T O M M Y: H U L U (2); T H E D R O P O U T: B E T H D U B B E R — H U L U;

peak redundancy, there are too many of these shows, like Marcia Clark and Christopher
covering too many of the same subjects: tech, scammers, Darden. A ratings smash, the season
crime, sexual politics. With effects-heavy franchises starting also won nine Emmys, including Best
to crowd out realism on the small screen, as they’ve already Limited Series and awards for Brown,
done in movies, docudrama has become the genre of choice Paulson, and Vance.
for platforms looking to combine the character-driven Since then, Murphy has embraced
storytelling of prestige TV with enough brand recognition the docudrama, in ACS and beyond,
to guarantee an audience. It’s a shrewd choice, financially. amending our cultural hindsight on
Creatively, however, the returns are already diminishing. notorious names from Monica Lewin-
INVENTING ANNA: NICOLE RIVELLI — NETFLIX

And at a time when misinformation keeps sowing confusion sky to Halston. For almost all of these
over what is fact and what is fiction, the prevalence of projects, the megaproducer continued
docudramas threatens to further muddy the distinction. to stunt-cast top actors, lean heavily
on a nonfiction book for source mate-
The proToTypical TV docudrama is a salacious, rial, and filter the past through a re-
slapdash affair—a ’90s Lifetime movie, maybe, about visionist lens. This formula—which
a famous woman’s scandalous life. Ryan Murphy’s FX arrived on time for an industry-wide
anthology American Crime Story renovated that down- shift toward the miniseries, an ideal
market model in 2016, with a debut season adapted from format for true stories with defined
Time Off is reported by Simmone Shah

endings—proliferated from cable to
broadcast, but especially among the
warring platforms of streaming.
Six years later, the docudrama
has become ubiquitous. Even NBC’s
stodgy Law & Order launched its
own true-crime anthology, with a
season on the Menendez brothers
starring Edie Falco. And why not?
Docudramas are magnets for A-list
actors. From Michelle Williams in
Fosse/Verdon to Ewan McGregor
in Halston, portraying a real person
with an extraordinary story is now
understood to be as quick a route to
the Emmys as it is to the Oscars. And
the more crowded the marketplace
gets, the more it helps to center a
show on a topic that already has a
foothold in the public discourse.
What’s likely to draw a bigger
audience—a great series about a
fictional tech startup or an OK one
about an app used by millions of
people around the world every day?
I don’t mean to imply that all, or
even most, docudramas are cynical
branding exercises. There have been
some great ones in recent years,
from HBO’s devastating Chernobyl to
Netflix’s When They See Us, for which
creator Ava DuVernay recruited a cast
of talented young actors to revisit
the story of the Central Park Five.
Mrs. America, FX’s look back at ’70s
feminism and its discontents, used its
all-star ensemble (with big names like
Rose Byrne, Uzo Aduba, and Tracey
Ullman supporting a mesmerizing
turn from Cate Blanchett as Phyllis
Schlafly) as far more than a gimmick.
These standouts have given us new
perspective on current and historical
events in a way that only fiction can.
Whether it’s The People v. O.J. Simpson
spending a full episode on what it
felt like to be Clark, a public servant
who became a tabloid punch line
overnight, or Netflix’s Unbelievable
weighing the impact of a botched rape
investigation on a teenage victim fresh
out of foster care, these shows draw
out human elements of stories that
viewers previously couldn’t or didn’t
want to acknowledge. They also make
connections to the way we live, and the
way society functions, in the present.
Too quirky to be a masterpiece,
Inventing Anna at least builds a
provocative argument about the title
character—that she was more failed
hero than sociopathic villain—while
putting wealth and the transactional
nature of so many interpersonal
relationships under a microscope.
Yet for each docudrama with some-
thing to say, there are several more
(see: Showtime’s The Comey Rule,
Hulu’s Dopesick, Netflix’s The Serpent,
Bravo’s Dirty John) that function as
audiovisual Wikipedia pages, over-
flowing with names, dates, and statis-
tics but light on narrative. Others, like
Pam & Tommy, bungle their attempts
at socially conscious revisionism so
badly that after six or eight episodes,
they abruptly end without arriving
at a meaningful conclusion. And the
Who hasn’t cited a
tidbit about the British
royals, only to realize
it came straight from
The Crown?
few that aren’t indifferent to style can
be astoundingly derivative. Super
Pumped treads the fine line between
bro-friendly entertainment and bro-
critical satire, racking up a major debt
to Adam McKay and Aaron Sorkin.
You could argue that at least the
new wave of docudramas is educating
viewers about current events and
recent history. The thing is, most
just rehash stories that have already
been widely consumed in a different
format—or three. The Dropout,
based on a podcast and notable for
Amanda Seyfried’s sensitive portrayal
of Holmes’ strangeness, follows a
best-selling book, John Carreyrou’s
Bad Blood, and a buzzy HBO doc,
The Inventor; Apple is developing a
feature-film adaptation of Bad Blood
from McKay and Jennifer Lawrence.
(Then again, The Dropout seems
downright necessary compared
with Joe vs. Carole, a restaging of a
docuseries that existed purely to gawk
at weird tiger people.)
Despite performances that can
be thrilling to watch, in 2022,
docudramas’ overlap with nonfiction
storytelling poses a more troubling
threat than mere redundancy. From
fake news to irresponsible punditry,
misinformation has proliferated
on our TV screens as well as in our
social media feeds and podcast
queues. Inventing Anna obliquely
acknowledges this, opening episodes
with a disclaimer: “This whole story
is completely true. Except for all
the parts that are totally made up.”
The tone might be cheeky, but the
transparency is refreshing.
It would be unfair, and bad for TV as
an art form, to expect scripted shows
to stick to the truth. But given the in-
creasingly slippery boundary between
fact and fiction, the current outpour-
ing of docudramas still seems bound
to chip away at our collective under-
standing of how real events happened.
Who among us hasn’t cited a tidbit
about the British royals, only to realize
it came straight from The Crown? The
more fiction dilutes our perception of
reality, the more vulnerable our fragile
historical record is to bad actors. And I
don’t just mean hams. □
91
TIME OFF MOVIES
REVIEW
Where is the love for
the lowly werewolf?
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
The werewolf movie may be a horror sTaple, buT
the sad reality is that compared with vampires, our furry,
fanged friends lag in popularity by a moonlit country mile.
Werewolves don’t ignite the erotic imagination like vam-
pires do; voraciousness isn’t as sexy as neck-biting.
But there’s still poetry to be found in the idea of doomed
beings stuck in a cycle of perpetual hunger. The Cursed,
written and directed by English filmmaker Sean Ellis,
isn’t a werewolf picture in the strict sense: there’s noth-
ing shaggy or wolflike about the beasts in question. But
they are, as the title suggests, beings brought to life by a
deadly bite, their unearthly cravings an affliction foisted
upon them by an unnamed ancient spirit. Set somewhere
in 19th century France, this is a movie low on cheap jump
scares and high on atmosphere; its polished gloominess is
one of its chief attributes, situating you in a time and place
where you don’t feel quite right in your own skin.
The trouble starts when wealthy landowner Seamus
Laurent (Alistair Petrie) rounds up a bunch of thugs to
murder a group of Romani families who claim his land re-
ally belongs to them. The goons notice that the elderly
Roma matriarch (Pascale Becouze) has in her possession
a set of silver false teeth, each sharp little spike marked
with a cross; they decide the things are too scary to seize
and melt down. Before they kill and bury the old woman,
she hisses a warning: “We will poison your sleep until you
summon the dark one. Then you will know what death is.”
92 Time February 28/March 7, 2022
◁
Werewolves
terrorize an 1800s
French town
And before you know it, Laurent’s
children—sweet-natured Edward
(Max Mackintosh) and his protec-
tive older sister Charlotte (Amelia
Crouch)—begin having nightmares.
They dream of a human scarecrow, by
far the movie’s most horrifying image,
and of that set of silver choppers. It’s
only a matter of time before Edward,
Charlotte, and the other kids of the
village make their way to the site of
the massacre, where the old woman’s
curse takes its full, grisly effect.
The Cursed is your classic caution-
ary tale about the price of greed and
bigotry, and less an allegory about the
unruliness of nature. Still, in most
werewolf lore it seems that young
people—like poor, sweet Edward
Laurent—are more susceptible to
mystical wolf power than adults are.
Werewolfdom is sometimes a mani-
festation of adolescent confusion, of
bodily changes that are bewildering
and scary. That’s how we got movies
like the 1957 teenybopper fave I Was
a Teenage Werewolf, and it’s a factor
in the Twilight movies as well: Taylor
Lautner’s Jacob Black is the werewolf
boy that Kristen Stewart’s Bella Swan
just can’t resist. Then there’s John
Fawcett’s brilliant 2000 Ginger Snaps,
in which a goth teenager is attacked—
and transformed—by a wild beast on
the same day she starts menstruating.
The movie’s tagline, “They don’t call it
the curse for nothing,” says it all.
The werewolves of The Cursed
The are different: they carry the weight
Cursed of history, and of discrimination, on
is your their hunched shoulders. At one point
before her death, the Roma grande
classic dame explains the bargain she and her
cautionary people have made with the beastly
tale about spirit behind the curse in question:
“We have protected it for genera-
the price tions, and it has protected our genera-
of greed tions.” There’s nothing cuddly about
the were-creatures of The Cursed. But
and there’s no question that they get the
bigotry job done. 
 REVIEW
Andy Garcia brings the gold to
an idiosyncratic indie comedy
The 1990s and early 2000s were
a golden era of odd but ambitious little
American indies like Burr Steers’ Igby
Goes Down and George Huang’s Swim-
REVIEW ming With Sharks. They may not have
been perfect, but at least they had
chutzpah on their side. Fewer of those
movies find their way into the main-
stream today, but Brian Petsos’ wonky
comedy Big Gold Brick shows a simi-
larly idiosyncratic, go-for-broke spirit.
Its low-key eccentricity—driven by an
affably capricious performance from
Andy Garcia—is its greatest pleasure.
Aspiring writer Samuel (Emory
Cohen) has already found great suc-
cess at being a loser. He’s about to
be tossed out of his apartment, and
he’s had it with life. After stumbling
out onto a dark road, he’s hit by a
car. Behind the wheel is middle-aged
gent Floyd (Garcia), distracted be-
cause he’s shoveling frozen custard
into his mouth while driving. Floyd
T H E C U R S E D : E L E VAT I O N P I C T U R E S; T H E A U T O M AT: L A W R E N C E F R I E D — A S L I C E O F P I E P R O D U C T I O N S ; B I G G O L D B R I C K : S A M U E L G O L D W Y N F I L M S
rushes Samuel to the hospital, and
as the young man recovers from his
injuries—which appear to have af-
fected his brain, or at least his sense
of reality—Floyd wonders if this
wannabe author might be of use to
Samuel (Cohen, left) and Floyd (Garcia) each seize an opportunity
him. He signs Samuel up to write his
biography, offering a stipend of $500 a
week and ensconcing him in his flashy
suburban home, replete with a mal-
adjusted teenage son (Leonidas Cas-
trounis), a kind but emotionally fragile
daughter (Lucy Hale), and a libidinous
second wife (Megan Fox).
Floyd, who favors trim blazers
spruced up with devil-may-care pocket
squares, is a classy guy with money—or
is he? Samuel doesn’t have the best grip
on things, but he begins to sense that
something’s amiss, and his encoun-
ter with a villainous zillionaire (Oscar
Isaac, intentionally hamming it up)
proves him right.
Big Gold Brick may be a bit too en-
amored with its own quirkiness, but
everything Garcia does, no matter how
outlandish, feels perfectly natural. Ar-
riving at the hospital with flowers for
Samuel, he dumps the cotton swabs
out of a glass jar without even looking,
missing nary a beat—he needs a vase;
who cares about dumb old swabs? His
comic timing is as suave as Floyd’s as-
cots, as understated as his darkly pan-
eled office. Sometimes it’s the small
showcase that serves actors best. —s.Z.
93
TIME OFF BOOKS

PROFILE

Sabaa Tahir on the

edge of a desert
BY SANYA MANSOOR

SABAA TAHIR STILL REMEMBERS WHEN A

classmate at her high school in California’s Mo-
jave Desert probed her about whether she had a
green card. The Pakistani American author re-
members countless mispronunciations of her
name. She remembers violent threats. Tahir’s
family owned an 18-room motel off the main
road of their isolated, majority-white town. Her
parents’ accents and the family’s religious tradi-
tions made them different. “We felt it every day,”
says Tahir, now 38, “the things kids said to me at
school—asking questions that indicated not just a
lack of knowledge, but disdain.”
That feeling of being othered runs through
Tahir’s latest young-adult novel All My Rage, out
March 1, which closely follows two Muslim Paki-
stani American teenagers—Noor and Salahudin—
as they navigate grief, faith, love, and trauma
while coming of age in a desert community where
isolation is not only a matter of geography. “So
many of us who feel marginalized, we hold all this
anger inside, and we can’t express it without po-
tentially serious consequences,” Tahir says. Her
characters know the feeling well, and the result is
a book that brings readers closer than ever to the
celebrated author’s inner world.
Tahir broke out with An Ember in the Ashes,
a YA fantasy series about teens defying a brutal
empire that has sold more than a million copies.
All My Rage is a dramatic departure; the novel, al-
ready set to be adapted for television with Tahir
co-writing, is her fifth, and her most personal one
to date. Writing All My Rage was “infinitely more
difficult” than crafting a fantasy world, she says.
“I had to remind myself that I can’t fix these prob-
lems with magic.”
The new book explores exactly what the title
declares: rage, not only in response to racism but
also in response to parents who fail to show up,
the ways in which addiction unravels relation-
ships, and the grief of losing the people who mat-
ter. Noor and Salahudin are high school seniors
navigating a turbulent friendship (and maybe
more) while learning what it means to be there for
each other through hardship.
All My Rage travels back and forth in time, tell-
ing the stories of the teens in present-day Cali-
fornia and Salahudin’s parents when they were
young in Pakistan. Although the book is nuanced
in its inclusion of Pakistani, Muslim, and desert
culture, it speaks to something shared by many:
94 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
the “universal experience of being in
an inescapable situation where you
have no good choices.”
TAHIR TOOK 15 YEARS to write All My
Rage. Crafting a story so closely tied to
her life was a vulnerable undertaking,
and one she pursued largely in private.
“It was just this conversation I was hav-
ing with myself,” she says.
△ A motel setting is the most obvi-
Tahir’s fifth novel ous tie to her reality. Tahir’s parents
is her most worked to hold their business together
personal yet through difficult economic circum-
stances while raising three kids. When
Tahir was in college, her father had a
stroke and her family sold the motel.
She never got closure with a place that
had been so important, so she gave
Salahudin and his family a desert inn
of their own. “I’ve never been a person
who really thought about things like
self-love, but it took a lot of self-love to
write this book,” she says. “It was like
looking back at who I was as a child.”
She drew from several hard, for-
mative experiences. Throughout the
book, Salahudin is disappointed by
his father, who is often drunk. “He’s
looking at someone he loves, who is
just a mess, and thinking, I deserve
better than this,” says Tahir, who has
 felt similar emotions. And the loss of a
friend turned out to be a key moment
in her writing process, solidifying a
theme from her life that she knew had
to be part of the story. In 2017, a friend
of Tahir’s overdosed. “Everything
I witnessed around that incident—
confusion, shame, grief—it had a big
impact,” she says. “The book allowed
me to work out how I felt about things
that I’d experienced, but in a way that
didn’t feel overwhelming.”

IN YA, wherever there’s darkness,

there must also be light. For the teens
in All My Rage, one source is faith.
Tahir aims to portray religion in the
most human way possible, showcasing
her characters’ evolving relationships
with God. For Noor and Salahudin,
Islam is at once a profound source of
comfort, an informal (and often funny)
daily practice, and an aspiration that
feels just out of reach. Tahir herself is
Muslim, and relates to her characters’
ever evolving feelings. “I definitely
don’t think I have it figured out,” she
says. But she does believe strongly that
religion should never be a burden: “It
was very important for me to show that
faith offered these kids a way to feel a
little less alone.”
She hopes the book can help readers
feel seen. Sometimes it takes a grown-
up’s perspective to know the value of
that kind of peace. Last year, the au-
thor returned to the motel, for the first
time since the mid-2000s, with her

‘So many of us who feel

marginalized, we hold
TA H I R : D A I S U G A N O — M E D I A N E W S G R O U P/ T H E M E R C U R Y N E W S/G E T T Y I M A G E S

all this anger inside’

husband and two children. “I needed
to see it,” she says. “We went there and
my brain just went quiet.” She strug-
gled to find the words to explain to her
kids what this place meant. So her hus-
band stepped in, telling them all sorts
of facts about the town, which made
her realize he’d done research of his
own. Looking out, Tahir’s mind circled
back to one thought: “It was crazy how
much it had remained the same,” she
says, “and how much I had changed.” 
95

Art Spiegelman The cartoonist on a Tennessee
school board’s move against Maus, his memoir
of family and the Holocaust
The school board of McMinn
County, Tennessee, voted on
Jan. 10 to stop assigning eighth-
graders to read Maus, your graphic
novel recounting the Holocaust
through your family history. Do
you take personal offense? Yes. But
I can’t tell how malevolent they are.
Are these people really idiots? Or
are they actually sinister forces that
think is actually
have gathered to, like, kill America? I
can’t tell to what degree these people
carried water for more whacked-out
people, the ones who really stand
to profit from getting more charter
schools in the area that teach reli-
gion, thereby taking money away
from a public education that needs
far, far more to do its job well.
Did you read the minutes of the
board meeting? Several times.
The book was removed from a
curriculum. Is that a ban? To use
authority to keep people from things,
yes, it’s a ban. And yet it’s not a book
burning.
Didn’t the burning of comic books
launch your career? The Comics
Code is what made me, yes. The
burning of comic books, literally—in
the ’40s and ’50s by teachers, clergy-
men, parents—focused on the same
thing these school-board people
focus on: we have to protect the chil-
dren, as opposed to educate them.
But those comic books that they
were burning were getting more far
out as they led into the more adult
audience. The horror comics, and
some of the very lurid images in
many of those comics, were among
the comics I love the most, because
they were kind of on the edge of the
forbidden. They were showing me
things to their most exaggerated.
These board members said the
Holocaust should certainly be
96 TIME February 28/March 7, 2022
11 QUESTIONS
taught and the issue is the curse
words and nudity in your book.
Do you take them at their word?
My guess is what they did is be-
cause the law of the land is based
on the 1982 decision that you can
ban things for their effect on young
What do you minds and whatever, but you can’t
on the basis of content. So they focus
on how terrible it was to see what
going on here? they described as a nude woman,
and what I saw as the naked corpse
of my mother in the bathtub, having
slashed her wrists in that bathtub.
And then you curse out your father
for destroying her diary. Can’t
people object to bad language?
They were upset that I was breaking
the commandment to honor thy
father. That was usurping their
authority. They’re all parents. They
don’t want their kids talking to them
like that, thank you. They focused on
that because authority is what they
like the most. They’re authoritarians,
dammit.
Any chance you’ll agree, as the
board’s lawyer suggested, to white
out words like bitch? Maybe we
should just put in blintz or bagel.
Make for a more wholesome Jewish
cultural experience.
Your book is on best-seller lists
again. Isn’t that part nice? Maus
has been really selling steadily
since 1986, when the first volume
came out. Even more so after it won
the Pulitzer Prize. I didn’t need to
boost my income. It’ll give me more
money to donate to things like voter
registration.
Have you ever been to eastern
Tennessee? Never.
Would it help to meet these
S A R A H S H AT Z
people? Through bulletproof glass,
yeah. —KARL VICK
 +

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 It’s the size of the dream,
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