DOUBLE ISSUE AUG. 8 / AUG.

15, 2022

INTO THE METAVERSE

THE NEXT DIGITAL ERA WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING BY MATTHEW BALL

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 VOL. 200, NOS. 5–6 | 2022

CONTENTS

7 40 46 54 79
The Brief Putin’s Very Meta The Long Time Off
Prisoner The metaverse will Game
31 What the detention of alter our lives. Possibly Jim Clyburn’s unsung
The View Brittney Griner says
about the clash of
for the better
By Matthew Ball
quest for Black
political power
superpowers The false promise By Molly Ball
By Sean Gregory of a play-to-earn
blockchain game
By Chad de Guzman
and Andrew R. Chow

62 72 △
Power Train Enjoying The View Andean flamingos
may be affected by
A new lithium mine in Argentina How Joy Behar both lithium mining
could fix EVs’ dirty secret gets away with it all and climate change
By Ciara Nugent By Belinda Luscombe
A Vietnamese electric-car company Photograph by
goes global by way of North Carolina Sebastián López
By Charlie Campbell Brach for TIME

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2 Time August 8/August 15, 2022

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 C O N V E R S AT I O N T I M E 1 0 0 H E A LT H S U M M I T

On the Covers

Illustration by Micah
Johnson for TIME

Clockwise from top left: TIME’s Alice Park

with Dr. Ashish Jha; Michael Acton Smith;
Lola Ogunnaike with Michelle Williams;
and Representative Lauren Underwood
Artwork by Lorna
Simpson for TIME

A matter of health
HOW LONG THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC
will last is one of the biggest questions fac-
ing the world at present—and one of the
major issues addressed at the TIME100
Health Summit that took place on July 15.
Looking for a
and co-founder of meditation app Calm, specific cover?
and James Park, Fitbit vice president and Order your favorites at
general manager, about their work at the timecoverstore.com
intersection of health and technology.
Park said Fitbit has helped him person- TA L K T O U S

At the summit, White House COVID-
19 adviser Dr. Ashish Jha said this pan-
demic will end, just as all previous pan-
demics have ended, but that’s not likely
to happen in the next few months. “We
need to get to a point where we have vac-
cines that are truly variant-resistant,” he
told senior correspondent Alice Park at
the virtual event, which was sponsored by
Fujifilm. He said such vaccines could still
be three to five years away, though that
timeline might be sped up with strategic
investments, as the science is “moving
very quickly.”
The TIME100 Health Summit also ad-
ally develop healthier habits, like spread-
ing out exercise throughout the workday,
and Smith explained how, when Calm
data showed usage spiked around 11 p.m.
as people listened to meditations to fall
asleep, he worked to create a line of bed-
time stories read by stars like LeBron
James and Harry Styles.
Representative Lauren Underwood, a
nurse and Democratic Congresswoman
representing a northern Illinois district,
talked about the challenges of governing
since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned
Roe v. Wade in June. She called for the
end of the filibuster so that the U.S. Sen-
▽
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G R I N E R : P H O T O G R A P H B Y S T E P H E N G O S L I N G — N B A E /G E T T Y I M A G E S

dressed mental well-being. Michelle Wil-
liams, a mental-health advocate and for-
mer member of Destiny’s Child, opened
up about how she has struggled with de-
pression since the seventh grade—even
though she didn’t receive an official di-
agnosis until her 30s. She told TIME100
Talks host Lola Ogunnaike that while her
success did not “heal the pain” of mental
illness, it gave her a way to afford therapy,
hospitalization, and retreats.
Executive editor John Simons inter-
viewed Michael Acton Smith, the co-CEO
ate, which has a narrow Democratic ma-
jority, could take up the Women’s Health
Protection Act, passed by the U.S. House
of Representatives, which enshrines abor-
tion protections into law. “The Senate Re-
publicans are united in their opposition
to protect[ing] our health care despite the
majority of the American people wanting
this solution,” she told senior correspon-
dent Janell Ross.
You can watch the entire summit at
time.com/time100-talks.
—OLIVIA B. WAXMAN
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$79 Auroralumina
billion attenboroughii
Value of the Colosseum NAME OF THE OLDEST KNOWN
in Rome, according ANIMAL PREDATOR,
to a July 25 report announced July 25 in honor of British naturalist
by Deloitte and broadcaster David Attenborough

‘WE PUT 35
OUR LOVE Age of An An,
the oldest male
giant panda under

FOR
human care,
upon his July 21

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 ; S O U R C E S : D E L O I T T E ; N AT U R E E C O L O GY & E V O L U T I O N ; R E U T E R S ; C B S N E W S ; T H E W A S H I N G T O N P O S T; D E A D L I N E ; K S AT -T V
death at a theme
park in Hong Kong

CHADWICK
INTO THIS
FILM.’
RYAN COOGLER,
director, on BRETT CROSS,
July 23, on Black
Panther star
Chadwick Boseman,
who died in 2020,
‘I want it
ahead of the
release of a to be good,
teaser for sequel
Wakanda Forever and I wasn’t
sure I could
‘We know this may be be. I didn’t
sound too
very disappointing. We hope bad tonight ’
you’ll try our other delicious JONI MITCHELL,

frozen treats.’
singer, to CBS, on her
July 24 performance
at the Newport
Folk Festival—her
KLONDIKE, first since suffering
announcing July 25 it is discontinuing the Choco Taco a brain aneurysm
after nearly 40 years in 2015

6 Time August 8/August 15, 2022

The Brief TEMPERATURE
TANTRUM
BY CIARA NUGENT

As the U.K. hit record

highs, some on the right
urged Britons to ‘stay
cool and carry on’

CHINA’S MORTGAGE PAYERS THE MONKEYPOX REMEMBERING THE

REVOLT AGAINST THE SYSTEM TESTING SHORTAGE REAL IVANA TRUMP

PHOTOGR APH BY DAN KITWOOD 7

THE BRIEF OPENER

C
alm down, it’s just a sunny day.” that
was the refrain from a small but powerful sec-
tion of the British establishment, as tempera-
tures in the U.K.—where summer highs rarely
reach 30°C (86°F)—topped 40°C (104°F) for the first time
in recorded history in mid-July.
Deputy Prime Minister Dominic Raab of the ruling Con-
servative Party told the public to relax and “enjoy the sun-
shine.” Conservative lawmaker John Hayes called people
who worried about the heat “cowardly.” Right-wing news-
paper the Daily Mail bemoaned that sunny day snowflake
britain had a meltdown. Another tabloid, the Daily Express,
offered a cheery spin on the U.K.’s famous wartime slogan:
“It’s not the end of the world: just
stay cool and carry on.”
The Blitz spirit couldn’t stop
the Po, has run dry, endangering this year’s harvest at thou-
sands of nearby farms. This is just the beginning.
The auThors of the U.K.’s heat-minimizing editorials are a
minority. But they hold great sway over the future of the gov-
ernment. Following the resignation of Prime Minister Boris
Johnson on July 7, the Conservative Party is in the middle of a
leadership contest. The winner will be the next Prime Minister.
The two contenders left in the race have largely voted against
measures to respond to climate change. They will now seek en-
dorsements from right-wing media outlets that are skeptical of
the U.K.’s 2050 net-zero target and frame fossil-fuel investment
as the answer to the current crisis in energy prices.
The back-and-forth of right-
wing commentators and politi-
cians functions as a closed loop

runways from melting at U.K. air-
ports, though, or help London fire-
fighters put out blazes that raged
across overheated buildings, or give
schoolkids enough energy to learn.
For most people, sweltering in
homes designed for a different cli-
mate, the heat was oppressive and
disruptive, if not terrifying.
If you’re reading this in the U.S.,
the disconnect might sound famil-
iar. The impacts of climate change
People want
that leaves out the vast majority of
people who live in the U.K. Those
twisting climate impacts into a
‘freedom culture war claim they’re fight-
ing against progressive dogma,
from all the and for greater flexibility in how
we address our environmental
challenges. But that definition
things that of freedom amounts to a distrac-
tion, argues Tom Burke, a vet-
will disrupt eran U.K. government adviser
and co-founder of climate think

our lives if we
have been politicized in American tank E3G. “There’s a whole group
public discourse since the 1990s. of the public who are really in-
Now the U.K. has imported what terested in freedom from all the
is an argument less about science
than culture. And money: Hayes don’t deal things that will disrupt our lives if
we don’t deal with climate change.
receives a nearly $60,000-a-year
salary from an oil trading com-
pany; the Daily Mail ran an op-ed
with climate They are in battle with a [smaller]
group of people who want the
freedom to burn all the fossil fuels
arguing against meteorologists’
“doom-laden” heat warnings, change.’ they want.”
The U.S. offers a warning for all
written by an energy-company —TOM BURKE, countries that allow their national
consultant. CO-FOUNDER OF CLIMATE THINK TANK E3G climate-policy debate to become di-
And like the mainstream U.S. vorced from how the public actually
right, U.K. conservatives have experiences its impacts: as weather
moved beyond questioning the has become more extreme, support
existence of climate change to disputing the need for ac- for policy action has increased. According to research pub-
tion. An editorial for the Telegraph claimed that the U.K.’s lished in April by Yale University, 87% of registered voters sup-
heat wave is a sign that efforts to stop global warming port tax incentives to make buildings more energy-efficient,
“are probably not possible,” so we should focus on adapt- 77% back tax rebates for energy-efficient vehicles or solar pan-
ing to it instead. els, and 74% want carbon dioxide regulated as a pollutant.
The problem is, at the rate global temperatures are rising, Yet Congress has failed to pass meaningful climate leg-
neither Brits nor the billions of people who live in more vul- islation, the effort repeatedly blocked in the Senate by a
nerable countries can adapt to the disruption that will take West Virginia Democrat who made a fortune selling coal.
place if we don’t also rapidly cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Meanwhile, in June, a bold new conservative majority on
P R E V I O U S PA G E : G E T T Y I M A G E S

The U.K.’s neighbors in Western Europe, one of the richest the Supreme Court sharply limited the EPA’s ability to
parts of the world, are already struggling to cope with even curb greenhouse-gas emissions from power plants.
today’s climate-change impacts. Extremely high tempera- As this historic summer continues, on both sides of the
tures killed some 2,000 people in Portugal and Spain over Atlantic, people will keep feeling the heat. The climate
one week in mid-July. In France, more than 75 sq. mi. of for- movement needs to work a lot harder to make sure those
ests have been destroyed in wildfires. Italy’s longest river, in power feel it too. 
The Brief is reported by Anisha Kohli, Tara Law, Sanya Mansoor, Ciara Nugent, Billy Perrigo, and Julia Zorthian
THE BRIEF NEWS

NEWS TICKER

agreed to a deal on
July 23 that would
allow grain to be
shipped out of the
blocked Ukrainian
port of Odessa,

Papal apology
Pope Francis pauses in front of the site of the former Ermineskin Residential School in
Maskwacis, Alberta, on July 25 as part of a “pilgrimage of penance.” The Pope is meeting
with Indigenous communities during his tour of Canada to apologize for the church’s
harmful legacy. He has condemned, in particular, the system of largely Catholic-run
residential schools that aimed to eliminate Indigenous culture and were rife with abuse.

THE BULLETIN
U.S. manufacturers
$52 billion to produce
China’s mortgage boycotts spell trouble
semiconductor chips
CHiNeSe AUTHORiTieS ARe WORKiNG
to quell a mortgage boycott before it sends
shock waves across the entire economy.
The protest was started by home buyers
dismayed by a slump in property prices and
worried that indebted developers might not
be able to finish their homes. Boycotts have
now spread to hundreds of developments
across the country. Plummeting prices
“may trigger social instability,” warns
Tianlei Huang of the Peterson Institute
for International Economics.
HARD HIT Developers were already suffer-
ing from a slump, with construction stalled
on millions of apartments over the past
year. In China, it’s common for buyers of
new properties to begin paying mortgages
Russia said it would before construction is finished—and some
focus on building its of these buyers have stopped paying. The
CONTAINING THE CRISIS A property-sector
bust could have major implications for
China’s wider financial system, which is
heavily exposed to real estate. Everything is
at stake for jittery middle-class Chinese buy-
ers who have piled their savings into prop-
erty. Regulators are urging banks to extend
loans to property developers. Censors have
also been working overtime to scrub men-
tions of the strikes. Experts are hoping that
tough down-payment requirements—30%
is normal for first-timers—will mean that
most home buyers won’t walk away.
A DEPENDENT ECONOMY The crisis strikes
at the heart of China’s development
model, which has used construction and
property sales to drive economic growth.
Any attempt to reduce such investment
would cause growth “to slow sharply,”
COLE BURSTON — GE T T Y IMAGES

own space station, boycotts now threaten to leave struggling
property firms even more strapped for
cash. Property behemoth China Evergrande
Group defaulted on its debt in 2021, and
at least a dozen other developers have de-
faulted on offshore bonds.
10 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
says Michael Pettis, a professor at Peking
University. “In that case it is hard not to
get caught up in a vicious circle, in which
less investment means less growth, and
less growth means less investment can
be justified.” —Amy GUNiA
Crisis can break us
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Ian Bremmer draws lessons from global
challenges of the past 100 years—including
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THE BRIEF NEWS
GOOD QUESTION
Why is it so hard to get
tested for monkeypox?
ON JULY 23, THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZA-
tion declared monkeypox a global health emer-
gency, with more than 16,000 cases in 75 coun-
tries. In the U.S., as of July 26, more than 3,500
cases have been reported in 46 states, according
to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Pre-
vention (CDC). Yet more than two months into
the outbreak, Americans are still finding it too
difficult to get tested for the disease.
Part of the reason is that there just aren’t
enough tests. Sixty-seven federal labs and five
private ones are authorized to perform mon-
keypox testing, giving the U.S. the capacity to
process about 70,000 per week. But that’s not
enough to meet demand in hot spots. “The New
York City [lab] does under 20 tests a day, and
they are at or near that capacity,” says Joseph
Osmundson, a molecular biologist at New York
University.
Only people with lesions can get tested—
even though other monkeypox symptoms, like
fever and headache, often develop first. Test re-
sults can take days to return, delaying a patient’s
12 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022
treatment and increasing the odds of passing
on the virus. In any infectious-disease outbreak,
“Time is spread,” says James Krellenstein, an
AIDS activist and co-founder of the LGBTQ ad-
vocacy group PrEP4ALL. The vast majority of
monkeypox cases so far have occurred in men
who have sex with men. “When we allow our-
selves to be blinded to the extent of the out-
break, we allow this virus to spread, and we
allow our communities to get harmed.”
The location of the lesions matters as well.
Hot spots Earlier in the outbreak, “the CDC indicated
like New that only external lesions could be swabbed to
be tested,” Osmundson says. Yet this is out of
York are step with reality, given that internal lesions—
struggling particularly in the anus or rectum—can also
occur as a result of sexual transmission. Confu-
to meet sion persists even among health care providers,
demand Osmundson says, because test-kit directions say
to only swab for external lesions.
Roadblocks like these create exactly the
kind of environment in which viruses thrive
and spread, as we’ve seen all too recently with
COVID-19. “The vast majority of my epidemi-
ologist friends believe this virus is not going
away,” says Osmundson. “We need to [go]
pedal to the metal with all possible interven-
tions now.” —JEFFREY KLUGER
BUSINESS
MA JA HITIJ — GE T T Y IMAGES
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THE BRIEF MILESTONES

DIED
DIED
Paul Sorvino
The two most iconic
images of the actor Paul
Sorvino could hardly be
more different. In the
first, he’s slicing garlic
with a razor blade as the
ruthless Paulie Cicero in
Goodfellas. In the second,
he’s weeping inconsolably
at the 1996 Academy
Awards while his daughter
Mira dedicates her newly
won Oscar to him.
Sorvino, who died on
July 25 at 83, excelled at
playing both the mobster
and the softie, as well as
everything in between.
The son of an Italian Ivana Trump at her home in New York City in 2017
immigrant, he carved
out a five-decade acting DIED
career, appearing in more
than a hundred films, Ivana Trump
television series, and
plays. He received a Tony
Straight-talking style icon
Award nomination for BY DENNIS BASSO
That Champion Season
in 1973, played Henry IVANA TRUMP HAD A VERY DEFINITE STYLE. SHE WAS REALLY A
Kissinger in Oliver Stone’s product of the ’80s and early ’90s. She was tall, she was gorgeous.
Nixon and Lord Capulet in During that period, every major designer was clamoring to dress
Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo her. She loved life. She loved beautiful jewels, clothes, and furs.
She left us too early (at age 73 on July 14).

+ Juliet, and starred for a
season on Law & Order.
Mira Sorvino said at
the 1996 Oscars that
her father “taught me
everything I know about
acting.”
While perhaps best
known for his hard-bitten
roles, Sorvino admitted
that he really preferred
show off his gentler side.
“I’m a poet,” he said
in 2015. “I’m an opera
singer, I’m an author …
none of it is gangster.”
A d R Ch
SORVINO: WARNER BROS./E VERE T T COLLECTION; TRUM P: GILLIAN L AUB F OR TIME; DUKUREH: K ANE SK ENNAR — WARNER BROS.
We first met when a mutual friend invited her to one of my fash-
ion shows. I was in disbelief. She had been at the front row of every
major fashion show in Paris and Milan; her husband Donald had
just built Trump Tower. That evening, she showed up and took her
front-row seat in a beautiful gray cashmere outfit, dressed to the
nines. The show finished, and she came up to me and said: “I don’t
know you; I want to know you. I like your collection—well done.”
She arrived unannounced at my office the next morning
and told me she liked that I was working at 9:30 a.m. She said,
“You know, you’re cute. You’re not cute, actually, you’re rather
handsome—a little chubby, but we could fix that.” She bought
seven coats. On the way out, she said, “We will be friends; send the
bill to Trump Tower and write ‘Attention: To the Donald.’” Soon I
was escorting her to the Met Gala and fancy dinners. It was just un-
believable. We became real friends. We weren’t just “chit chit kiss
kiss” at a party friends. She was clearly not going to tell you what
you wanted to hear. She was going to tell you what she thought.
Divorce is always a difficult thing, but as time progressed, she
and Donald were able to maintain a solid relationship. That’s be-
cause they chose to rise above their differences and do it for their
children and grandchildren. Ivana was a career woman, but she
was also dressed 24/7. I imagine her philosophy as being: if you
can’t do it in five-inch heels, then don’t bother doing it.

Basso is a designer
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THE BRIEF BUSINESS

WORLD

Democratizing
real estate investment
BY NICOLA CHILTON

INVESTING IN PROPERTY HAS BEEN A FOCUS OF RAMI

Tabbara’s life since he was young. In Dubai, “our parents
always tell us that as soon as you make money, you have to
put it in property,” he says. At 23 years old, he bought what
he could afford: a one-bedroom apartment that was still
under construction.
It didn’t go to plan, taking three years for him to get the
keys. But that experience taught him “a lesson to focus on
ready and income-generating properties,” he says. It ul-
timately led him to co-found a company with the goal of
making investing in real estate affordable and accountable.
Dubai’s real estate market is booming, with cranes dotting
the skyline, new property developments being advertised,
and neighborhoods popping up out of the desert. The market
is at a high point with no signs of slowing down, says Prathy-
usha Gurrapu, head of research and advisory at Dubai-based
property consultancy Core. The second quarter of this year
“has seen the highest amount of residential transactions in
Dubai ever, in terms of both number of transactions and com-
bined sales values,” she says. According to the Dubai Land
Department, over 43,000 property transactions exceeding
$31.3 billion were recorded in the first half of 2022 alone.
This level of activity has led to rental growth in Dubai
outpacing that in New York, London, Singapore, and Hong
Kong, according to data from Savills. Efforts to broaden
Dubai’s visa system have made it increasingly attractive for
people to come and live and invest there, but challenges △
remain for foreign investors. It is difficult for foreigners to Rami Tabbara, Authority (DFSA) and worked with
bank and get a mortgage in the UAE, so most international co-founder graduate students from MIT to develop
investors have to buy properties in cash, says Gurrapu, leav- of Stake an algorithm that evaluates the quality
ing the opportunity open only to the wealthiest. of potential real estate deals.
Gurrapu says that there’s a gap
TABBARA WANTS TO ENABLE smaller retail investors to get in Dubai’s market for retail inves-
involved in the buoyant Dubai real estate market. He co- tors, and that platforms like Stake
founded his company, Stake, in 2019 with the goal of low- are quickly gaining popularity as the
ering the barrier of entry for investors who don’t have ac- real estate market soars.
cess to a large down payment or the full sale price in cash. But bringing real estate into the
Using Stake’s app, people around the world can invest in
property in Dubai with as little as $136 (AED 500). Inves-
‘We have digital space is still a challenge. Al-
though the tradition of real estate
tors browse and buy into properties that have been fully to educate investing is strong in Dubai, “the
vetted by the company. When a property is fully funded, the process of investing is clunky, full of
Stake buys it and investors get shares proportionate to their hassle, and still mostly done offline,”
investment. Stake manages the property and investors re-
market.’ says Tabbara. He’s hoping a new gen-
ceive monthly dividends. —RAMI TABBARA, eration of investors can transform
Tabbara also hopes to guide new investors. Before found- CO-FOUNDER, STAKE the real estate market from one full of
ing Stake, he worked in sales for Dubai-based property de- cumbersome bureaucracy to simple,
ANNA NIELSEN FOR TIME

velopers and encountered what he describes as a lack of accessible, and completely global.
transparency. “I was seeing retail investors not getting the
best deals, putting their life savings and children’s college
funds into the wrong property,” he says. To counter this,
the company is regulated by the Dubai Financial Services
16 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022
 A weak password is the
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Cybersecurity experts say the best way to prevent cyberattacks is to

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THE BRIEF TIME WITH
Economist Emily Oster still
believes that data can ease
(some) parental anxiety
BY ELIANA DOCKTERMAN
emily OsTer dOes nOT Offer parenTing
advice. She is rather insistent on this point. A
Brown University economist who specializes
in health data, Oster prefers to analyze num-
bers that help parents think through a decision.
“When there isn’t any data, you can approach
this in whatever way you want, including finding
a parenting coach to counsel you on what to do,”
she says. “But I’m not that parenting coach.”
Except occasionally she is. A leading voice in
the debate on reopening schools during the pan-
demic, Oster has lately veered into more conven-
tional “mommy blogger” content. She bristles
at that characterization, and it’s true she doesn’t
show off puzzlingly clean kids’ rooms or promote
baby gear with discount links. And she hasn’t left
behind the data-driven approach to parenting
laid out in her best-selling books Expecting Bet-
ter, Cribsheet, and The Family Firm. But she does
seem to be trying to straddle both worlds.
This spring, her newsletter, ParentData—which
she launched just before the pandemic—added
a “wins and woes” section that celebrates read-
ers whose kids slept through the night and com-
miserates with those who lost the battle over
screen time. Every week she fields questions from
her 150,000 Instagram followers on topics ranging
from vaccination (for which she can point to the
data) to dealing with motion sickness (for which
she cannot). On the latter, she suggests keeping
one of those Big Gulp cups from 7-Eleven in the
car for less mess. I point out that this is technically
advice. “That’s totally right,” she says, laughing. “I
definitely mix data about this thing and thoughts
from a fellow parent. What I try not to do is say,
Here is expertise on child-car-sick-vomiting. I real-
ize it’s a subtle, subtle distinction.”
This isn’t a pivot, she says, but it is a deliber-
ate strategy. She wants to broaden her readership
and teach a wider audience data literacy—how to
tell a good study from a bad one—with relatable
anecdotes on parenting, “like the veggies you
sneak into your kid’s food,” she says. And she’s
good at it: her answers, often filmed during her
6 a.m. run, are short and usually comforting.
But Oster, who was one of TIME’s 100 most
influential people of 2022, doesn’t deny that the
past two-plus years have been trying. She spent
many of those months gathering data on COVID-
19 in schools, which she wrote about in national
news outlets. Her analysis suggested the benefits
18 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
of in-person education outweighed
the risks. Some parents greeted her
work as a godsend at a time of uncer-
tainty. Others told her to stay in her
lane and accused her of endangering
children. She defends the work, citing
her findings on how closures were per-
petuating inequality. “I felt bad about
being yelled at. But I don’t regret it. If
the result was more kids got access to
in-person school at the cost of some
people yelling at me on Twitter, that’s
Data-based vino OK.”
She and a fellow Brown professor
are now planning a class on lessons
from the pandemic. She reveals this
with a sigh, anticipating the Twitter
reaction. “I’m quite excited about the
class,” she says. “But I am sure there
will be the regular kind of pushback
that I get when doing anything with
COVID.”
Oster has always sat somewhat
uncomfortably between jobs. When
she was a University of Chicago pro-
fessor, she got pregnant and had the
Square roots typical questions: Could she drink
coffee? Which prenatal tests should
she get? What were the risks? Doctors
offered her restrictions without expla-
nation. Oster, trained in studying pub-
lic health and statistics, examined the
studies and found that many were out-
dated, based on a small sample size, or
otherwise flawed. Her resulting book
Five letters aimed to empower pregnant people to
make their own decisions.
But Oster says those efforts to de-
mocratize data analysis won her few
fans in academia. She speculates that
she did not receive tenure at the Uni-
versity of Chicago in part because
Homework for she had spent time on a book meant
parents for nonacademics rather than writ-
ing papers that would inevitably be
read only by other economists. Still,
as Oster’s kids got older—they’re now
7 and 11—she kept researching child-
rearing queries and pursuing commer-
cial writing. Her books were passed
from parent to parent and climbed the
best-seller list: a certain type of well-
educated mother now quotes Oster
like the gospel.
Her prominence reached a new
level in the pandemic. The U.S.
government produced limited data

on COVID-19’s effects in schools, so Oster led a
team that began collecting publicly accessible
data on schools in 42 states across the country.
“I think it is possible to say, ‘A decision needs
to be made now, and what are the pieces of in-
formation that are feasible to get?’” she says. “I
TONY LUONG FOR TIME
worked hard to be transparent about the limi-
tations of the data we collected on COVID in
schools. I thought it was substantially better
than any of the information that was out there
◁
Oster in her backyard
in Providence, R.I.,
on July 7
while acknowledging that it was not
perfect.”
After she faced criticism that her
funding, in part, came from organiza-
tions that support charter schools or
oppose unions, Oster responded in her
newsletter: “Our sources of funding
have no influence. Full stop. The fund-
ing for this project has run through
Brown, which has strict rules that
would not allow funders to influence
research findings.” Her conclusions
have since been bolstered by research
conducted by the CDC, the European
Union, and other academics. The emo-
tional critiques from COVID-wary
parents hit harder. “I don’t think of
myself as someone who is unsympa-
thetic to the fact that people are very
afraid,” she says. “But I still think that
having information is a way to move
through some of that anxiety.”
It is this belief—that data can be
soothing—that continues to set Oster
apart, even as she dabbles in wins and
woes. It’s what attracts readers who
want information and discomfits them
when they aren’t sure what to do with
it. Oster has found that despite her ef-
forts to hedge, many parents still want
definitive answers. In Expecting Bet-
ter she concludes, “Don’t worry too
much about sushi,” with the caveat
that lower-quality sushi “might carry
bacteria,” yet a friend recently texted
me the following about her pregnancy
diet: “You can eat sushi while preg-
nant. Emily Oster says so.”
In a bid to make nuance more ac-
ceptable, Oster harbors larger ambi-
tions in the zone of data literacy: “I
would like to see us teach everybody
‘I felt bad about in high school how to read and inter-
pret data.” She has spoken with orga-
being yelled at. nizations about ideas for better educa-
But I don’t tion on the subject. But she’s reluctant
regret it.’ to predict what she’ll be doing in a few
years. Given that her books have fol-
—EMILY OSTER lowed her children’s stages of life, I ask
ON THE STRONG REACTIONS
TO HER WORK ON if she might one day graduate out of
SCHOOL REOPENINGS this space. She smiles. “There’s always
menopause.” 
19
T H E B R I E F H E A LT H

There’s a new number

to call for mental-
health crises: 988
BY ALICE PARK

for as long as she could remember, Tonja myles

had thoughts of suicide. After a childhood of sexual abuse,
Myles turned to drugs and prostitution to “mask the pain,”
she says, and twice she overdosed on prescription pills.
After recovery, she worked as an advocate for improving
mental-health care in her home city of Baton Rouge, La.,
by sharing her story and working with others who had
suffered trauma and struggled with mental illness.
Still, in 2016, she had her own mental-health crisis. She
wrote a note to her family, collected some pills, and drove
to a secluded place, where she planned to end her life.
After her family discovered her note, persuaded her
to come home, and called 911, one of the officers who
showed up recognized Myles from her presentations to law
enforcement on crisis intervention and began speaking to
her as someone experiencing an emotional crisis, and not
the way most law-enforcement officers react to mental-
health calls, in which they manage every case as a threat
to public safety.
Myles avoided a trip to jail that day because of the
responding officer’s training. But even six years later,
such a positive outcome from an emergency call involving
mental health is the exception rather than the norm in
the U.S. Even though emergency-response systems for
medical, public-safety, and fire crises are well coordinated
and integrated in nearly every community through 911,
the same isn’t true for behavioral-health or mental-health
crises. The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is the
closest thing the U.S. has to a mental-health hotline,
yet it operates only about 200 unevenly distributed,
underfunded call centers.
Until now. On July 16, the federal government phased
out the lifeline’s clunky number—800-273-8255—and
launched a new three-digit number, 988, for anyone in a
mental-health crisis. The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline
dramatically expands the capacity of existing call centers,
with the goal of instantaneously connecting people in crisis
to mental-health professionals.

When a person calls 988, a certified counselor at a call
center, ideally located near that person, will attempt to
guide them through the crisis. This will be enough to
mitigate most situations, but when more help is needed,
dispatchers will send a mobile crisis team made up of
mental-health experts and peer-support counselors, people
who have recovered from their own mental-health crises
and help others in similar situations. If those interventions
aren’t sufficient, 988 will also direct people to stabilization
facilities—mental-health centers where trained staff can
observe and provide additional counseling and support—
24 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
or residential facilities for longer-term care.
Those settings are more appropriate for people
with mental-health crises than where they currently
end up: in the emergency room, jail, or, in the worst
cases, the morgue, if the incident escalates violently.
“Most of the country still relies on 911 to manage
mental-health crises,” says Dr. Ashwin Vasan, New
York City health commissioner. “988 represents
probably the most potentially transformative federal
legislation in mental health that we’ve seen in decades.”
But there are massive hurdles to turning that vision

into reality. 988 will require building a compassionate
crisis-response system in a country that has historically
underfunded and dismissed mental-health services.
Funding, staffing, and insurance reimbursements will
all be a struggle. “We are sitting in the context of a
system that is fragmented and frankly has a lot of gaps
in terms of providing services for individuals,” says
John Palmieri, director of 988 and behavioral health
crisis at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health
Services Administration (SAMHSA) within the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, which
ILLUSTR ATION BY SAM PEET FOR TIME
funds the lifeline and is helping states implement 988.
The new crisis line represents the first major
investment—$432 million from the federal government—
in mental-health services in the country in decades, and
it couldn’t come at a more crucial time. Mental-health
struggles among Americans have reached unprecedented
levels because of the pandemic and the widespread
anxiety, depression, and emotional stressors that have
resulted from lockdowns, disease, and job losses. Rates
of depression and anxiety among adults in the U.S. were
four times as high from April 2020 to August 2021 as they
were in 2019, according to federal data; every 11 minutes,
an American died by suicide in 2020. Rates of depression
and anxiety are rising especially quickly among teens.
Mental-health professionals are struggling to keep up
with the demand.
988 could help shoulder some of it. “There may be
a wait list for counseling, but if you’re in a crisis, you can
reach out and talk to someone right now,” says Shelby
Zurick Beasley, associate director of crisis services at
Provident Behavioral Health, a nonprofit community
mental-health center in St. Louis.
The transformative potential of 988 is huge, says
Dr. Margie Balfour, chief clini-
cal quality officer at Connections
‘This is Health Solutions, a nonprofit
mental- provider of behavioral-health
services in Tucson, Ariz. “This is
health mental-health crisis care’s carpe
crisis care’s diem moment.”
carpe diem Since it launched in 2005, the
moment.’ National Suicide Prevention Life-
—DR. MARGIE
line network has provided critical
BALFOUR support in de-escalating urgent
mental- and behavioral-health in-
cidents. A 2018 study of lifeline
callers who were interviewed anonymously found that 80%
said follow-up calls from counselors made them feel sup-
ported and diverted them from carrying out suicide plans.
But even as the demand grew, a lack of funding prevented
it from expanding.
In 2018, Congress passed the National Suicide Hot-
line Improvement Act to explore a three-digit, easy-to-
remember hotline number so more people could access
help. In 2020, 988 was designated as the new digits to dial.
Along with the number, the federal government is
providing significant grants to states to increase their
crisis call-center capacity. The American Rescue Plan
of 2021, which was passed to offer emergency funding
to address the pandemic, included $105 million in
additional funding for mental-health resources to enable
the transition to 988. But such funds are finite, and it’s
now up to states to find additional money to continue
supporting the centers after the grants run out. While
states reported in spring 2021 that their collective pot for
supporting call centers was around $30 million, in the past
year, legislatures have committed additional funds and
25
T H E B R I E F H E A LT H

have now allocated $200 million for implementing 988. mental-health issues have been resolved. Connecting
The vision for 988 requires a total reimagining of crisis people to additional care is crucial to making the system
support—and, by extension, of public safety. Across the effective. “We know the safety net is riddled with holes,
country, armed law-enforcement officers are currently the and people are falling through that net every single day,
default responders to almost every situation; a 2015 study whether they end up on the street or in jail,” says Matt
found that the mentally ill were shot by police at a rate 16 Kudish, executive director at the National Alliance on
times that of other civilians. SAMHSA is urging states to Mental Illness New York City Metro. “It isn’t just about the
train 911 dispatchers to recognize and route mental-health crisis response, but about what happens next, and after-
emergencies to 988, where trained professionals can take ward. How do you sustain a person’s wellness? Who sup-
over. Another priority is adding mobile crisis teams—which ports this individual’s recovery in a meaningful way?”
988 responders can deploy instead of law enforcement or To encourage states to make greater investments
emergency medical in follow-up care,
personnel—as well as a SAMHSA and Vibrant
network of stabilization have provided states
facilities. with minimum qual-
Early data suggest ity standards, such
that interventions like as answering 90% of
these are effective. In calls locally and in the
June 2021, for example, WASH.
first 30 seconds. Yet
New York City began only 16% of state and
MONT. N.H. MAINE
N.D. VT.
MINN.
testing an experimental ORE.
IDAHO MASS.
local mental-health
WIS.
program that sends WYO.
S.D.
MICH.
N.Y.
R.I.
CONN.
program directors
a mobile crisis team NEV. NEB.
IOWA PA. N.J. said they had received
consisting of a social UTAH ILL. IND.
OHIO
DEL.
MD.
adequate funding to
worker, peer counselor, CALIF.
COLO.
KANS. MO.
KY.
W.VA. VA.
support their states’
and EMT to address N.C. 988 plans, the RAND
TENN.
mental-health calls in ARIZ.
N.M.
OKLA.
ARK. S.C.
survey found.
Harlem and the Bronx. MISS. ALA. GA. While police
When 911 responded TEXAS LA. budgets have
to mental-health calls ALASKA
risen steadily for
from January to March HAWAII FLA.
decades, funds are
2022, 87% of people proving scarce for
involved were dropped an innovation that
off at emergency would lighten their
rooms. But the mental- burden while saving
health-crisis response lives. Currently, only
team transported only 59% of cases to the ER. They were Medicaid reimburses for crisis services like mobile crisis
also able to provide a broader range of services, including teams; Medicare and most commercial insurers do not,
on-site counseling and referrals to follow-up care in the which means that states must subsidize that service even
person’s community. for people who are insured. And while many psychologists
and community-based facilities are interested in
MOST STATES, however, aren’t prepared to activate 988 call partnering with 988, they are provided little financial
centers at the capacity that’s needed, let alone launch more incentive to do so. The hope is that 988’s popularity
services. Vibrant Emotional Health, which operates the will persuade legislators to demand parity in coverage
network of lifeline call centers, estimates that 988’s call vol- from commercial insurers, says Kevin Ann Huckshorn, a
E R I N W O O D I E L— A R G U S L E A D E R / U S A T O D AY N E T W O R K / R E U T E R S

ume will increase by 50% in its first year, but current capac- registered nurse with RI International, a nonprofit that
ity is already strained. As many as 17% of callers over the operates a national network of mental-health facilities.
past year hung up within the first 30 seconds after failing to States are scrambling to fund 988 centers and the
connect with anyone, according to Vibrant. When local call resources they provide in several different ways. Some
centers are too busy to pick up, the call is routed to a na- have begun leveraging dollars available through Medicaid
tional backup center, and wait times for those lines can be expansion plans or mental-health block grants from the
even longer. 988 will also support text and chat—but about federal government, but those aren’t always sufficient.
60% of states don’t yet have the technological capacity to More continuous forms of funding, like fees collected from
provide robust services across all three platforms, a RAND cell-phone users—similar to the fees charged to maintain
Health Care study found in June. 911, which generate more than $3 billion annually—are
And reaching 988 is only the first step. While counsel- another option. (Virginia is the first state to pass legislation
ors can de-escalate about 90% of emergencies by phone, to make these charges; others, including Nevada and Utah
according to Vibrant’s data, that doesn’t mean the caller’s have created commissions to explore this revenue stream.)
26 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022
 △
And legislators in Washington State passed Trained crisis Ultimately, the best way to persuade
a bill to require insurers to cover the cost of counselors take calls insurers to cover crisis care, and states to
crisis-response services. in Sioux Falls, S.D. budget additional resources, is proving that
doing so saves money in the long run. Already,
To illusTraTe 988’s poTenTial to some pilot studies show that this investment
transform this kind of care, advocates point to Arizona, is more cost-effective than having people cycle repeatedly
whose legislature has budgeted for mental-health crisis through the criminal-justice system or hospital emergency
care since 2009. The funds support mobile crisis teams departments. 988 now provides a unique opportunity to
and reimbursement for care provided by a network collect data on a large scale.
of facilities. For example, the Phoenix metropolitan Tonja Myles knows how life-changing better crisis
area, which includes a population of nearly 5 million, care can be. Being treated compassionately by a trained
operates 30 mobile teams run by a variety of providers professional during her own emergency saved her life.
and mental-health facilities. Medicaid covers these During her stay at the mental-health facility in 2016, she
services for beneficiaries, and the state subsidizes the had a profound realization. “I realized that all the pain
costs for people who are uninsured or privately insured. I had been carrying, that I thought would die with me
The state’s fund also pays for care facilities that accept if I killed myself, would only transfer to my family and
people for longer-term care, regardless of their insurance friends,” she says. “And I never want anybody to be in that
status—which eases the responsibility for officers to kind of pain.” As a result of her experience, Myles sought
serve as “street corner psychiatrists,” says Kevin Hall, therapy, got a PTSD diagnosis, and started medication.
assistant chief of the Tucson police department. Tucson She now works as a pastor and a peer-support specialist,
has also started embedding behavioral-health clinicians helping others in crisis.
in 911 call centers to help dispatchers determine if a “I never thought I would see anything like 988 happen
caller needs to be connected to 988 rather than law in my lifetime,” she says. “While it is a call for help, it also
enforcement or emergency medical support. Replicating has to be a connection to hope.”
such investment won’t be possible in every state, but
officials from other states have consulted with Arizona’s If you or someone you know may be experiencing a mental-
administrators. health crisis or contemplating suicide, call or text 988
27
LIGHTBOX

Hitting home
The fast-moving Oak Fire—pictured engulfing the dining
room of a home in Mariposa County, California, on July 23—
charred more than 18,000 acres near Yosemite National
Park in just three days. Cal Fire officials warned that the
unpredictable behavior of the blaze, which fed on extremely
dry vegetation—a problem aggravated by climate change—
is “really unprecedented.” As of July 27 the fire had burned
dozens of homes, threatened some 1,400 structures,
and forced more than 3,000 people to flee.

Photograph by Noah Berger—AP

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

IRAN IS ON THE
CUSP OF A BOMB
BY EHUD BARAK

INSIDE

ITALY’S UNCERTAIN HOW COVID-19 VACCINES AN ALABAMA CLINIC

POLITICAL FUTURE MAY AFFECT PERIODS RELAUNCHES POST-ROE

31
THE VIEW OPENER
In 2015, the U.S.-led agreement to
delay Iran’s program failed to go far
enough, but in 2018, when the U.S.
withdrew from that same agreement,
the mullahs were some 17 months
away from threshold status. Today
they could be as little as 17 days away.
For unexplainable reasons, after the
U.S. pulled out of the agreement, nei-
ther the U.S. nor Israel prepared a viable
military plan B, a kinetic attack capable
of delaying the Iranian program by at
least several years. Both Israel and the
U.S. can operate over the skies of Iran
against this or that site or installation,
and destroy it. But the surgical opera-
tions that were considered 12 years ago,
and could have been considered four
years ago, will no longer be an option
once Iran is a de facto threshold state.
Indeed, under certain circumstances
such operations might accelerate Iran’s
rush toward assembling a bomb, and
provide it a measure of legitimacy.
It may well be that even when Iran
becomes a threshold nuclear coun-
try, the mullahs will opt to pretend
otherwise, remaining in the Non-
Proliferation Treaty (NPT) regime
in order to avoid even heavier sanc-
tions. But that will not change the re-
ality. After more than 20 years of try-
ing, Iran is about to cross the point of
no return in becoming a member of
the nuclear club. This has been the
mullahs’ ambition all along.
The U.S. can still deter Iran from
going nuclear by a diplomatic ultima-
tum to stop the program, backed by
a credible threat of a wide-scale war.
Nothing short of it can assure a result.
I hope this is still realistic.
The alternative is a new and severe
change for the worse in the security
balance of the Middle East. Iran is al-
ready a tough and bitter rival, operat-
ing against Israel and others directly
in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen,
while spreading terror, chaos, and in-
surgency. However, bear in mind that
creating a preliminary nuclear arsenal
can take a decade or more; it becomes
a potential existential threat to Israel
only in the longer term. Realistically
speaking it’s not about dropping a
weapon on Israel. The Iranian mullahs
are fanatics and extremists, but not
The View is reported by Solcyre Burga, Leslie Dickstein, Anisha Kohli, and Julia Zorthian
Defense Week in Tehran in 2017 featured, at center, a solid-fuel surface-to-
surface missile and a portrait of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
stupid or crazy. They do not want to
end up back in the Stone Age.
Quite the opposite. For Iran, nu-
clear capability is actually about the
survivability of the regime. It assures
that no one will dare to intervene on a
wide scale in Iran, no matter how vul-
nerable the regime appears. Nuclear
capability will also balance its posi-
tioning vis-à-vis Israel and give the
Iranians more freedom to sow con-
flicts and disorder all over the region.
The more realistic risk is the po-
tential collapse of the NPT. If Iran
chooses to go nuclear—a decision that
the Iranian regime alone will make—
Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia will
all feel compelled to go nuclear as
well. And with the possible collapse
of the NPT, every third-rate dictator
on earth might try protecting their
own regime the same way. That may
open the road for the nightmare sce-
nario of a crude nuclear device in the
hands of a terrorist group.
What is to be done? Look reality
in the eye, and act upon it. If a new
agreement with Iran, even a dubi-
ous one, helps preserve the NPT, that
would serve useful purposes. But
more important, the U.S. must estab-
lish a small club of relevant states,
Israel among them, and make sure
that high investments in intelligence
minimize the risk of missing any cru-
cial developments. A lot should be
done with operational and diplomatic
cooperation, from covert ops to public
policy, to prepare much tougher sanc-
tions as well as operational contingen-
cies to be activated if or when Iran ap-
pears to rush toward assembling
a weapon—that is, “breaks out.”
Israel should also be equipped with
the means to carry out an independent
attack on the nuclear program, if both
the U.S. and Israeli governments are
convinced it is absolutely necessary.
The smaller partner should have this
capability because actual breakout
will most likely occur when the U.S.
is engrossed with a crisis elsewhere.
And special attention should go to
convincing Turkey, Egypt, Saudi Ara-
bia, and others in the region that they
are properly protected against Iranian
nuclear blackmail and need not turn
I R A N : VA H I D S A L E M I — A P ; D R A G H I : A N D R E A S S O L A R O — A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S
nuclear themselves.
The ayatollahs are not going to con-
trol Iran forever. The Iranian people
are a great people and great civilization
from the dawn of history. They were
Israel’s best friends in the region just
45 years ago. We have to stand firm
and contain the Iranian Islamic Repub-
lic. At a certain point, hopefully sooner
rather than later, it will collapse and a
new chapter will be opened. Let’s work
together toward it.
Barak is the former Prime Minister
of Israel
THE RISK REPORT BY IAN BREMMER

33
THE VIEW INBOX
By Kyla Mandel
The D.C. Brief
By Philip Elliott
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
THE DARK JOKE BOUNCED AROUND
the Capitol when Senator Joe Man-
chin announced on July 25 that he
had tested positive for Covid-19
and was isolating: it was an excuse
for the West Virginia Democrat to
skip a second consecutive lunch
with colleagues openly critical of
his unreliability.
There’s one problem with Dem-
ocrats’ rage. Manchin has always
been a proud fly in the legisla-
tive ointment, an unrepentant
naysayer to party orthodoxy who
doesn’t much care about his re-
lationships in the Capitol. And
that’s why he will probably be the
last statewide elected Democrat to
represent West Virginia for a long
time: he values his constituents’
contempt of Washington far more
than he fears his colleagues’ con-
tempt. And when it comes to Presi-
dent Joe Biden’s frustrations with
Manchin’s singular and capricious
veto-proof whimsy, Manchin truly
cannot be bothered.
Manchin had committed in pri-
vate last year to supporting the
parts of the second iteration of
34 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022
Biden’s Build Back Better plan with
plenty of strings attached. Man-
chin didn’t like parts of the first
one, but promised to like the sec-
ond one—that is, until the sequel
also ran afoul of his need to scuttle
huge swaths of Democrats’ agenda,
such as a tax hike on the wealthy.
So Manchin pivoted, and tried a
third time to outline what he could
accept, and Democrats acquiesced.
And then again the proposal ran
aground, because in Manchin’s
mind, more government spending
would only hasten inflation.
Welcome to governing in 2022,
with Prime Minister Manchin run-
ning the show. The entire country’s
agenda is set by the one Senator
who stands in the breach. The Sen-
ate is split 50-50, and on matters
extraneous to the budget, a 60-vote
threshold is needed. However,
‘This is a guy who
J. SCOT T A PPLE WHITE— A P
is a major recipient
of fossil-fuel money.’
—SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS (I., VT.)
 ®

◁
Manchin talks to reporters
outside a hearing room
at the Capitol on July 21

if the Senate rulemaker gives the

lawmakers a pass, Democrats
can play with a 51-vote major-
ity on anything deemed budget-
adjacent, thanks to Vice President
Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
If every member of the Senate’s
Democratic caucus sticks together
to tuck novel ideas into the bud-
get, they can actually get stuff like
fighting climate change done.
Manchin has long insisted that
he cannot hurt his constituents.
That means catering to his state’s
vaunted—but vanishing—coal in-
dustry. Anything broaching green IT ALL
jobs is toxic for his coal-country
neighbors. Voters in West Vir-
ginia prize Manchin’s perceived
indifference to party politics,
and Manchin likes to serve them
a skillet of stick-it-to-the-man
every chance he gets.
It’s a branding exercise that
may perhaps keep him holding
on through the next election
cycle. President Donald Trump
won West Virginia by 39 points
in 2020; Manchin won re-election
two years earlier by three points.
Manchin knows his value to his
party, and Democratic leaders
are careful to give him sufficient
space—but with limits.
Manchin now says he may
support a two-year provision to
cap prescription-drug prices but
wants to wait until the fall for the STARTS HERE
big-ticket items left in the queue,
meaning they’ll slip past Election Strength and stamina out there
Day and likely into a lame-duck start with high-performance nutrition in here.
Congress, when it will be too late
for these measures to energize
voters in tight races around the Optimizes Oxygen
30% Protein & 20% Fat to
country. It becomes clear why so Metabolism (VO2 Max)
Maintain Lean Muscle
many of Manchin’s colleagues in for Increased Stamina
tough re-election fights hold him
in such low esteem.
ProPlanSport.com
For more insights from Washington, Purina trademarks are owned by Société des Produits Nestlé S.A.
sign up for TIME’s politics newsletter Any other marks are property of their respective owners.
at time.com/theDCbrief
THE VIEW ESSAY

NATION

The struggle to save a

clinic that can no longer
provide abortions
BY ROBIN MARTY

On the mOrning the Supreme COurt

announced it had overturned Roe v. Wade, we
had 21 patients in our lobby waiting to have
an abortion. We cried as we were forced to
turn them all away. They cried as they realized
the very same medical procedure that was
legal only a few minutes earlier was no longer
available to them. But the reality was that
each of those people represented a potential
felony for my staff—and up to 99 years
in prison. Within hours of the decision in
Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization,
the injunction on a 2019 law was lifted and
abortion became illegal in almost all instances
in the state of Alabama.
Before the ruling, 95% of the patients we
saw at West Alabama Women’s Center in Tus-
caloosa were terminating pregnancies. By the
time it came down, we were seeing patients
from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas on a
regular basis, some traveling as far as 600 miles
for our care because there were no closer ap-
pointments. We gave medication abortions to
67 people the day before the court upended
nearly a half-century of precedent, in an effort
to meet the needs of this overflow of patients.
Now providing such services was against the
law, even though the need would only grow.
Within days we were warned by legal
advisers that assisting the more than 100
patients who had completed “first day” fear of legal reprisals, we refused to tell them
appointments—an ultrasound, counseling, where the open clinics were or where they could
and a state-mandated information packet that get financial help, as there was no way to know
must be provided 48 hours before a patient who was truly in need and who was an abortion
can return to a clinic for an abortion—may be opponent hoping to catch us breaking a pur-
seen as “conspiracy” under the new law. But posefully vague new law. We turned away pa-
we couldn’t abandon our patients. We offered tients who arrived at our door anyway, patients
them the name of a clinic in another state to who had missed messages telling them their ap-
reach out to, and provided financial resources pointments had been canceled or who just had
to those who needed them in order to travel to give it one try, because being pregnant when
that far. To leave them with no idea of where to In that you do not want to be fills you with a despera-
go next or how to get there wasn’t just morally silence, we tion that will make you try any option, no mat-
wrong; it was medically wrong too. knew we ter how impossible it may be.
First, do no harm. In those first post-Roe days, our voices
At the same time that we were finishing as- were all echoed through the building’s two lobbies,
sisting our now former patients, we fielded exhausted chairs empty for the first time since our
phone calls from other people who didn’t patient numbers began swelling at the
believe the ban was actually in place, or who and beginning of 2022, when the Louisiana
hoped their case could be an exception. Out of heartbroken abortion seekers started showing up regularly,
PHOTOGR APHS BY LUCY GARRETT FOR TIME

◁ what came back was West Alabama Women’s
The author
outside the
West Alabama
Women’s Center
on July 11
and then the Texans followed soon after.
We had been seeing as many as 30 patients
a day, five days a week, without any break
or rest. In that silence, we knew we were all
exhausted and heartbroken and had absolutely
nothing left to give. No medical care. No
financial support. Not even basic, publicly
available information.
Many abortion providers in the U.S. have
closed their doors since the Dobbs decision.
Some are relocating to states with fewer
restrictions in order to continue supporting
patients seeking abortion care. The building
that housed the Mississippi clinic at the center
of the Supreme Court case, for instance,
has been sold, and the owner and executive
director will operate a new clinic in New
Mexico. They are already facing protests from
abortion opponents, and an anti-abortion
organization has bought the space next
door, proving that some battles are never
going to change. Whole Woman’s Health, the
provider involved in the Supreme Court case
that reaffirmed Roe in 2016, announced the
closure of its entire chain of Texas clinics.
Although it, too, will open a new center in
New Mexico, the hole it’ll leave behind will
be impossible to fill. The sole abortion clinic
in North Dakota, meanwhile, will move just
a few miles across the river to Minnesota.
The physical distance is so close a person
could walk it, but the political impact of yet
another state without a single provider is
immeasurable. Even Reproductive Health
Services of Montgomery, the longest-standing
abortion provider in the state of Alabama,
which had survived more than 43 years of
protests, violence, and increasingly hostile
state politics, finally succumbed and closed
down as well.
Five days after the decision, West Alabama
Women’s Center, too, stopped seeing patients,
but only temporarily and with no intention
of leaving. On July 11, 12 days after our last
unfinished patient referral and 17 days after
our last day of providing abortions, we opened
again, this time as a new entity. West Alabama
Women’s Center—the for-profit abortion
provider established in 1993—was gone. But
Center, a new full-spectrum reproductive-
health center dedicated to meeting the needs
of the uninsured, underinsured, and Medicaid
patients neglected in our region. We are also
now a nonprofit, a move that had been in the
works for months, because we believe no one
should ever be making money off someone
else’s health needs.
Alabama is already in a health care crisis,
with the third highest maternal mortality rate,
the fifth highest infant death rate, and the third
shortest life expectancy in the nation. An abor-
tion ban will not improve a single one of these
numbers, and will only make them worse. But
we can, and that’s why we are still here.
Because the truth is, we can’t go away.
Although we can no longer provide elective
abortions, we need to be here for the newly
pregnant single mom who came to us for
prenatal care because no doctor would see her
until her Medicaid approval came through.
We need to be here for the terrified woman
in her 50s who showed up for an IUD, even
though she was near menopause, because
she knew a pregnancy at her age would
potentially kill her and we have no clear rules
37
THE VIEW ESSAY

on how “in danger” someone’s life has to be

before an abortion is legally allowed. We need
to be here for the patient with the ectopic
pregnancy who went to the local hospital only
to find out they didn’t have methotrexate in
stock to terminate that unviable pregnancy.
We need to be here for every patient we
have seen miscarrying who was turned away
by their hospitals even before abortion was
illegal here, even before an accusation of
“illegal abortion” meant the end of a medical
professional’s career at best or a life in prison
at worst.

We Will keep our doors open for as long as

we financially can. Our biggest job now is to
make sure that our community knows we are
here—that we can be a resource for them to
turn to when they don’t have a private doctor,
when they don’t want to go to a hospital, and
that we can offer them the preventive services
that will save them from so many long-term
health issues down the road. We’ve made bro-
chures; reached out to all our local media—
we’ve even hosted a pay-what-you-can emer-
gency-contraception fair—all hoping to get to
the people who will need us most.
We know that we have three months to be-
come sustainable. We also know that we had
seven patients total in our first week—all of
whom received health care for whatever they
could pay out of pocket. Our likelihood of sur-
viving is slim.
If we do shut our doors again, we will do it
knowing we provided the most good we could,
for as many people as possible, for as long as
we were able, and that we can be proud of that.
And we will do it knowing that despite the en-
during need in the community, those doors
will never open again.

Marty is the director of operations at West

Alabama Women’s Center and the author of
The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America:
The Complete Guide to Abortion Legality,
Access, and Practical Support

NAVIGATING A NEW LANDSCAPE

A collection of photos taken at West Alabama
Women’s Clinic after it relaunched in the wake of
Roe v. Wade’s reversal. Because abortion is now
banned in the state, the clinic has focused on other
forms of reproductive health care. In addition to
doing the administrative work necessary to keep
things running, the staff has distributed emergency
contraception and met with patients getting IUDs.
38 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
39
ILLUSTR ATION BY JEFF MANNING FOR TIME
THE TRIALS OF
BRITTNEY
GRINER
IN A CONTEST OF VALUES, A BASKETBALL
STAR DETAINED IN RUSSIA REPRESENTS
THE FIGHT FOR FREEDOM BY SEAN GREGORY

41
WORLD

an inequity long exploited by Mos-

BriTTney Griner speaks To The
world through pictures these days. In
mid-May, nearly three months into her
detention in Russia for carrying canna-
bis oil in her luggage at a Moscow air-
port, fans of the WNBA superstar saw
a stark image of Griner in a courtroom,
handcuffed and head bowed, a figure of
defeat, her face obscured, braids dan-
gling from a hooded sweatshirt. We
saw her eyes in June, at another hear-
ing, but they were popping, frightened,
and bewildered. The courtroom cam-
eras stunned her.
As one of the most dominant play-
ers in the history of women’s basketball,
Griner—affectionately known as BG to
friends and fans—has always repre-
sented something bigger than just ath-
letic excellence. As an out gay woman
who has overcome bullying, hate, and
cow’s propagandists but nonetheless
evident everywhere in American society.
President Biden has approved a
plan to offer the release of convicted
arms dealer Viktor Bout in exchange
for the Russians’ release of Griner and
Paul Whelan, an American held cap-
tive in Russia for more than three years,
sources familiar with the matter tell
TIME. Moscow “should be interested”
in the offer “based on their prior rep-
resentations,” a senior Administration
official says, but as of July 27 had not
responded to the offer. That leaves Gri-
ner at the mercy of the Russian judicial
system, long criticized in the U.S. and
Europe as subject to the whims of Mos-
cow’s leaders. Griner’s Russian lawyers
have told authorities that U.S. doctors
prescribed her medical cannabis. She
pleaded guilty, arguing that she acciden-
tally packed the prohibited substance in
haste. On July 27, Griner testified that
when she was initially interrogated at
the airport, much of the communication
was left untranslated.
In this high-profile battle between
two nuclear powers locked in a his-
toric contest in Ukraine, it’s easy to
forget the core tragedy of Griner’s case. one snapshot, she even flashed a grin—
Despite her hardships in life, she had between the metal bars. “It helps me
thrived. Nike signed her as the compa- sleep better at night,” says Dawn Staley,
ny’s first out gay athlete. She found love. Griner’s coach on last year’s gold-medal
She’s in the prime of her life, hitting Tokyo Olympic team, “just knowing
her stride as a public figure, wife, sib- that she could smile.”

alienation, she has served as inspira-
tion, especially to fellow members of
the LGBTQ+ community, for how to live
out loud and proud. Now, “wrongly de-
tained” in the euphemistic lingo of in-
ternational diplomacy, Griner unwit-
tingly has come to stand for even more.
Griner is the most visible detainee
ling, and daughter, and teammate, and
friend. And now this. “The toughest mo-
ment during this ordeal is when I stop
to think about how BG is doing,” Gri-
ner’s wife Cherelle writes to TIME in an
email. “Those moments are overwhelm-
ing, and I’m consumed with emotions.”
Though her fate remains uncertain,
P R E V I O U S PA G E S : S O U R C E P H O T O S : E T H A N M I L L E R — G E T T Y I M A G E S ; K E N A K R U T S I N G E R — N B A E /G E T T Y I M A G E S ;
Those close To Griner worry that
the longer she remains imprisoned, the
more likely the psychological trauma
she’s spent a lifetime shedding returns.
She grew up in Houston, the daughter
of local sheriff and Vietnam-veteran
father Raymond, and homemaker
T H E S E PA G E S : A L E X A N D E R Z E M L I A N I C H E N K O — P O O L /A F P/G E T T Y I M A G E S

among thousands taken by Russia
amid its invasion of Ukraine this year,
a high-profile prisoner exploited by a
regime looking to showcase the lim-
its of American power. Her imprison-
ment advances President Vladimir Pu-
tin’s efforts to humble U.S. President Joe
Biden, who has been simultaneously
criticized for failing to win Griner’s re-
lease and for prioritizing her case over
those of other long-detained Americans
abroad. At home, Griner’s detention
has fueled outrage at the lack of equal
rights for LGBTQ+ and Black people,
42 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
July delivered moments of hope for
Griner. After Griner, who faces a po-
tential 10-year prison sentence, wrote
Biden a July 4 letter urging him to bring
her home, the President and Vice Pres-
ident spoke to Cherelle, publicly sig-
naling the priority of her case. In her
courtroom cage, she held up a photo
of the WNBA All-Stars who played a
whole half wearing her Phoenix Mer-
cury jersey. There were courtroom tes-
timonials from friends on UMCC Ekat-
erinburg, the Russian team for which
she plays during the U.S. off-season. In
mother Sandra. As a girl, Griner liked
fixing cars with her dad. She wrestled
her dog in the mud. Her mom got her
Barbie dolls. Griner cut off their hair
and painted them green and black.
Griner began to realize she was dif-
ferent. “Everybody always talks about
how we should celebrate the things that
make each of us special,” Griner writes
in her 2014 autobiography, In My Skin.
“The problem is, a lot of people are
full of crap when it comes to following
their own advice.” Kids would poke at
her chest, asking if she was a boy. She

drew pictures in a notebook in her bed-
room: someone was always crying. Gri-
ner wept into her stuffed animals. She
scribbled down thoughts like Please just
make me normal when I wake up.
Griner never played organized bas-
ketball before high school. She joined
the volleyball team in the fall of her first
year at Houston’s Nimitz High. During
a game, basketball coach Debbie Jack-
son spotted the 5-ft. 10-in. freshman and
asked her to try out for hoops. “I remem-
ber the first day she shot the ball,” says
Janell Roy, a high school teammate who
would become Griner’s lifelong best
friend. “It was terrible. We were like,
‘Yo, you really can’t play!’ ”
Her skills improved as she sprouted
nearly a foot in high school. A 2007
YouTube clip, featuring her slamming
it home, was an early viral hit. Diana
Taurasi, Griner’s future pro teammate
with the Phoenix Mercury and over-
seas, recalls watching the video from
Russia, where she was playing at the
time. “These were grownup dunks,” says
Taurasi. “We were just like, ‘Well, that’s
the future of basketball. We might not
△ Things got rocky in her personal life.
An officer removes Griner’s
handcuffs before a July 26 court
hearing outside Moscow
have a job for very much longer.” Some
of her high school stats—like 25 blocks
in one game—were cartoonish.
During her senior year, Griner’s fa-
ther learned his daughter was gay. “You
can pack your bags and get the f-ck
out!” she says he told her. Griner stayed
at the home of her assistant coach for
seven weeks. Tension lingered, though
her father has grown more accepting.
They are now very close.
Griner committed to Baylor, the
world’s largest Baptist university. Dur-
ing her junior year of high school, Gri-
ner told Baylor coach Kim Mulkey she
was gay. “As long as you come here and
do what you need to do and hoop, I don’t
care,” Mulkey said, according to Griner’s
book. But Mulkey, Griner says, acted
different once she got to campus. Gri-
ner was unaware that Baylor prohibited
“advocacy groups which promote
understandings of sexuality that are
contrary to biblical teaching.” After Gri-
ner went out with her girlfriend on Val-
entine’s Day, Mulkey chastised her for
failing to “keep your business behind
closed doors.” A spokesperson for LSU,
where Mulkey now coaches, did not re-
turn an interview request from TIME;
Baylor chartered its first ever LGBTQ+
group this April.
Living in the shadows stressed Gri-
ner out. On occasion, her anger would
appear on the court. As a freshman,
Griner received a two-game suspen-
sion for punching a Texas Tech player,
breaking her nose. Mulkey ordered
Griner into therapy after that incident;
she found talking to someone helpful,
and continued with therapy through
adulthood.
In 2013, the Mercury selected Gri-
ner as the top overall pick. On the court,
Griner at first deferred to Taurasi, an all-
time great. “She’s the most unselfish
superstar player I’ve ever been around,”
says Taurasi. “I would have to get into
her to demand the ball.” The Mercury
won the WNBA title in 2014, Griner’s
second year in the league.
Griner married former WNBA player
Glory Johnson in 2015, despite their
both being arrested after an argument
turned physical just weeks prior. Gri-
ner filed for an annulment after 28 days.
“The biggest thing during that is she did
not want to feel like a failure,” says Roy:
“Where do I go from here—where peo-
ple don’t think I’m this monster?”
Griner’s physicality on the court be-
lies her more personable nature. When
Cherelle first met Griner, at Mooyah
Burgers on the Baylor campus, she was
struck by how she seemed to know
every employee. “She often will go eat
her lunch in the employee lounge at the
arena in Phoenix with the security, be-
cause she says, ‘I want to know all my
co-workers,’” says Cherelle.
When partnering with a local non-
profit, the Phoenix Rescue Mission, to
drive around the city delivering shoes to
those in need, she once opened the doors
of a van, grabbed boxes of shoes, and
took off toward a group of homeless peo-
ple. “It wasn’t, ‘You guys go first,’” says
Danny Dahm, street-outreach supervi-
sor at the mission. “She was like, ‘Let’s do
43
WORLD
this.’ She wasn’t afraid to touch people.”
Griner also has a goofy side. “She’s
one of those who will throw a ball
at you in the middle of the aisle at
Walmart, and take off running,” says
Roy. Griner appreciates the “big per-
son in tiny contraption” sight gag. She
once skittered around the sales floor
of the Mercury offices on a motorized
tricycle, waving to team employees.
Mercury players spend a day working
at a grocery outlet that sponsors the
team. “She’ll end up in a shopping cart
every year, like a 5-year-old would but
with her 6-ft. 9-in. legs hanging out,”
says Mercury president Vince Kozar.
“And every year she ends up on a mi-
crophone asking for a price check on
green beans, or something else that she
doesn’t actually need.”
The slights that once stung now roll
right off her. “She doesn’t let that sh-t
faze her,” says Olympic teammate Sue
Bird. “There are times when she would
get mistaken for a guy. She would walk
into a woman’s bathroom and someone
would stop her and be, ‘Oh, no, this is
not your bathroom.’ I’ve heard people
call her sir at an airport. ‘Excuse me, sir,
can you come this way?’ She’s just like,
‘Whatever.’ She almost has a vibe about
her. ‘No one’s going to ruin my day.’”
“She lives in peace,” says Staley.
“She’s been through things in her life,
trials and tribulations. Yet no one’s going
to shake her equilibrium. That’s who
you love.”
Griner has spent her WNBA off-
seasons since 2014 at the gateway to
Siberia, playing for UMMC Ekaterin-
burg, a club that pays Griner the more
than $1 million salary unavailable to her
in the U.S., where she’ll make $228,000
this year. “BG loved playing in Russia,”
says Cherelle. “They value women’s bas-
ketball.” Griner took great pride in win-
ning four Euroleague championships.
“She called Yekaterinburg her second
home, and this is not an empty phrase,”
Maxim Rybakov, UMMC Ekaterinburg’s
general manager, testified at a July 14
court hearing. “Even after the warn-
ing from the U.S. intelligence agencies,
Brittney was determined to continue
playing for the team.”
He called Griner the team’s “moral
leader.” Her Russian teammate Evgenia
44 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
Belyakova testified it was “difficult to
overestimate” Griner’s contribution to
Russian basketball. “She is currently,”
said Belyakova, “the most beloved
player in Russia.”
Putin doesn’t seem to care. Since
the days of the Soviet Union, Russia
has stoked American racial divisions
for its own gain. In the 1960s, Soviet
newspapers covered the civil rights
movement, pointing out the hypocrisy
of a democratic system that preached
freedom to the world but treated its
own Black citizens so poorly. A 2019
Senate Intelligence Committee report
found that Russian operatives created
social media accounts and advertise-
ments discouraging Black Americans
from voting, in order to boost the can-
didacy of Donald Trump.
Griner’s arrest has already flared ten-
sions in America. “If this was LeBron
James, Tom Brady—you can go into any
professional men’s sport—if this was a
man, he would have been home by now,”
Natasha Cloud of the Washington Mys-
tics tells TIME. “It would have been a
priority. Unfortunately, BG has fallen
into that realm being a woman, being a
gay woman, being a gay Black woman.”
When James himself wondered aloud, on
his talk show The Shop, if Griner would
even want to return to America—“How
can she feel like America has her
back?” he said—conservatives pum-
meled him as anti-American. He National Security Council under Pres-
tweeted a clarification that he “wasn’t ident Trump. With Biden’s approval
knocking our beautiful country.” ratings sinking to new lows, Putin may
Putin delights in such rancor. “He’s be loath to release Griner and hand his
creating mischief and mayhem,” says counterpart any semblance of a PR win.
Fiona Hill, the former senior director “What I and others fear,” says Hill, “is
for European and Russian affairs on the that the more she can become a wedge
issue, the more Biden and the White
House gets castigated, the more valu-
able she becomes for them to keep.”
After an initial strategy of quiet
wrangling to free Griner, the U.S. gov-
‘She lives in ernment has raised the volume on her
peace ... No one’s case. Russian officials have publicly
stated that they don’t appreciate the
going to shake pressure. “The Biden Administration
needs to rein it in,” says Jason Poblete,
her equilibrium. an attorney who has represented U.S.
That’s who citizens held hostage abroad. “They’ve
made a big mistake escalating it the way
you love.’ that they did.”
—DAWN STALEY, U.S. OLYMPIC For now, the U.S. feels the ball is
BASKETBALL COACH AT 2020 GAMES in Moscow’s court. In late April, the

countries swapped Konstantin Yaro-
shenko, a convicted Russian drug traf-
ficker jailed in Connecticut, for Trevor
G R I N E R : B A R R Y G O S S A G E — P H O E N I X M E R C U R Y; C H I L D H O O D P H O T O S : C O U R T E S Y G R I N E R F A M I LY (2);
Reed, a former Marine accused of as-
saulting a Russian police officer; Reed
had spent 985 days in Russian deten-
tion. Russia has previously called for
the release of Bout, who was convicted
of conspiring to sell weapons to terror-
ists in 2011 and sentenced to 25 years
in prison. The U.S. judge in Bout’s case,
Shira A. Scheindlin, told TIME that if
she weren’t restricted by minimum sen-
W N B A : M A R Y K AT E R I D G W AY— N B A E /G E T T Y I M A G E S
tencing guidelines, she would have given
Bout some 10 years, which is now about
the length of time he’s been in prison.
Some Biden Administration offi-
cials fundamentally oppose prisoner
swaps, fearing they may further incen-
tivize hostage-taking abroad. And let-
ting go of Bout has been a tough sell for
those focused on human rights, inter-
national crime, and other matters. But
◁ anna Stewart informed Griner her baby
Clockwise from
top left: Griner
at her shoe drive
in 2017; on a
four-wheeler in
seventh grade;
WNBA All-Stars
wear Griner’s
No. 42; at age 5
“the President has been clear about
the need to bring [Griner and Whelan]
home,” says the senior Administration
official. Biden’s approval of an exchange
of Bout for Griner and Whelan was first
reported by CNN.
Bout’s inclusion in any trade proposal
signals Griner’s importance to Biden; the
pro-swap advocates, for now, are win-
ning out. Mickey Bergman, vice presi-
dent and executive director of the Rich-
ardson Center for Global Engagement,
traveled to Moscow with former U.N.
ambassador Bill Richardson in February
to meet Russian officials about Reed’s
and Whelan’s cases. He cites a 2018
Rand Corp. study concluding “there
is little historical evidence to support
the contention that a no-concessions
policy reduces kidnappings.”
Arguments to the contrary are
“intellectually lazy and morally bank-
rupt,” Bergman says, “because the
government efforts to disincentivize
and deter the taking of Americans can-
not be done on the backs of those al-
ready imprisoned.”
Griner is tired and stressed in deten-
tion. But seeing photos of the WNBA All-
Star tribute put her in a good mood. The
support from the basketball community
and her family “is very important to BG
and helps to remain optimistic,” says
her Russian lawyer, Maria Blagovolina.
Besides the Bible, she’s reading
Demons, by Dostoevsky, while in jail;
she’s also finished works by Kafka and
James Patterson, and the memoirs of
rockers Keith Richards and Gregg All-
man. Outside communication is infre-
quent and monitored, but many players
and coaches have penned notes to her.
Staley encouraged her to summon the
dominant BG. Seattle Storm star Bre-
daughter cries whenever she goes near a
Roomba. “You’re trying to give her hope
and strength and things like that, but
also want her to think about some other
silly things,” says Stewart.
Staley says Griner wrote about how
she was the biggest person in jail. “You
can tell she’s trying to find the joy of
just waking up every day,” says Taur-
asi. “The first letter she wrote back,
she said she tried to go vegan the first
week, but that didn’t work. She went
back to eating meat. Which is kind of
funny. Only BG would try to go vegan
in a Russian prison.”
While her loved ones fear for her
mental health, they also believe that all
the strife she’s faced—being taunted
because of her appearance, rejected
because of her sexuality, assumed to
be something she’s not—have pre-
pared her to meet this awful moment.
“People don’t even know how much
she has already pushed through,” says
Roy. “For me to know her past jour-
ney, and some of the things that she’s
dealt with, I can tell you that my sister
is not going to come back weak. That’s
for sure. She’s only going to come back
stronger.” —With reporting by Brian
Bennett, Vera Bergengruen, and
MaSSiMO CaLaBreSi/WaShingtOn;
SOLCyre Burga, Mariah eSpada,
and SiMMOne Shah/neW yOrk; and
Mariia VynOgradOVa/LOndOn □
45
T
TECHNOLOGY
around us. Every few decades, a platform
occurs—such as that from mainframes to PC
the internet, or the subsequent evolution to m
and cloud computing. Once a new era has
shape, it’s incredibly difficult to alter who le
and how. But between eras, those very thing
ally do change. If we hope to build a better f
then we must be as aggressive about shapin
are those who are investing to build it.
SO WHAT IS THIS FUTURE? Think of the
verse as a parallel virtual plane of existenc
spans all digital technologies and will even co
control much of the physical world. This con
helps explain another common description
metaverse as a 3D internet—and why establ
it is so hard, but also likely to be worthwhile
The internet as we know it today spans n
every country, 40,000 networks, millions
plications, over a hundred million servers, a
a billion websites, and tens of billions of de
Each of these technologies can coherently
sistently exchange information, find one an
“on the net,” share online account systems an
(a JPEG, an MP4, a paragraph of text), and
interconnect (think of how a news publisher
Thi k f th
m 1986
a s. Most time in these platform
p starting to see people go
s S A CATEGORY w
t 83
to another outlet’s report). Nearly 20% of the worl
economy is considered “digital,” with much of the
remaining 80% running on it.
Though the internet is resilient, wide-ranging,
and powerful, it wasn’t built for live and inter-
active experiences involving a large number of
participants—especially when it comes to 3D im-
aging. Rather, the internet was designed primarily
so that one static file (such as an email or spread-
sheet) could be copied and sent from one device
to another, such that it might be independently
and asynchronously reviewed or modified. This is
partly why even in the age of the “Streaming Wars”
and multitrillion-dollar Big Tech companies, sim-
ple two-person video calls can be so unreliable. (It’s
a marvel that online multiplayer games work at all.)
Furthermore, there’s no consensus on file formats
48 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022
META ventions for 3D information, no standard sys-
to exchange data in virtual worlds. We also
MOMENTS he computing power to pull off the metaverse
imagine it. And we will want many new de-
to realize it—not just VR goggles, but gad-
ke holographic displays, ultrasonic force-
enerators, and, spooky as it sounds, devices
ture electrical signals sent across muscles.
cannot know in advance exactly how impor-
1935 3D internet might be to our global economy,
we didn’t know the value of the internet. But
have some view to the answer. As internet
ctivity and computer processors have im-
d, we’ve shifted from colorless text to prim-
web pages and web blogs, then online profiles
Facebook page) and video-based social net-
, emojis, and filters. The volume of content
oduce online has grown from a few message-
posts, emails, or blog updates a week to a con-
tream of multimedia content encapsulating
ves. The next evolution to this trend seems
1981 to be a persistent and “living” virtual world
not a window into our life (such as Instagram)
lace where we communicate (such as Gmail)
ne in which we also exist—and in 3D (hence
cus on immersive VR headsets and avatars
eady, nearly a hundred million people a
n to Roblox, Minecraft, and Fortnite
platforms that operate tens of milli
onnected worlds, which support
irtual identity, virtual goods, an
ons suites, and can be accessed
e—playing games, attendin
by the di
1992
m
nove
po -
ity by w da
hammer, an 5 com-
mander David S me on the moon.
(Spoiler: they fall at the same speed.) Such demon-
strations need not go away, but they can be supple-
mented by the creation of elaborate virtual Rube
Goldberg machines, which students can then test
under Earth-like gravity, on Mars, and even under
sul
sph
2007 ould recognize that confusion, conflation,
ncertainty are prerequisites for disruption.
its c l, there are specific issues that can be cleared
the e metaverse is often misdescribed as immer-
this ic loc rtual reality headsets, such as the Meta Quest
or t rd. culus VR), or augmented reality glasses, the
pkin amous example of which to date is Google’s
for nt su ous Glass. VR and AR devices may become
usi ereb erred way to access the metaverse, but they
vid ve d t it. Consider that smartphones are not the
of Tim hing as the mobile internet. The metaverse
Wi nd al not Roblox, Minecraft, Fortnite, or any other
rec rator these are virtual worlds or platforms that are
ene efere 2011 to be part of the metaverse, just as Facebook
im rse r oogle are part of the internet. For similar rea-
aring hink of the metaverse as singular, just as we
e or w he internet,” not “an internet.” (To the extent
ead of entify different internets today, this largely
s regional regulatory differences.) Another
example ent conflation is that between the metaverse
now oper eb3, crypto, and blockchains. This trio may
, allowing a me an important part of realizing the meta-
lation to dete s potential, but they are merely principles
s should be dir chnologies. In fact, many metaverse lead-
decade city projec ubt there is any future for crypto.
to determine how a e metaverse should not be thought of as an
affic flows and emerg aul to the internet, nor as something that will
ow its design will affe e all mobile models, devices, or software. It
unlight of a park on a sp
ostly disconnected simula
2013 roduce new technologies and behaviors. But
oesn’t mean we leave what we prefer behind.
to bring them online—like sh write on a PC, and that’s likely to remain the
icrosoft Word documents to c way to write long-form text. The majority of
orative ones—and turning the et traffic today both originates and termi-
al development platform. on a mobile device, yet nearly all of it is trans
d on fixed-line cables and using the Int
ciety, however, exactly what the col Suite as it was designed in the 19
means is unclear. This gives unders e metaverse is not yet here (even
pause to some, who see billions inves es will claim it is, or at least
hat feels like a game. But think of the met me time, transformation
as a fourth era of computing and network ch flips.” We are in th
succeeding mainframes, which ran from the st cellular network
to 1970s; personal computers and the inter ss data network
the 1980s to mid-2000s; and the mobile and o on until th
era we experience today. Each era change ble to sa
accessed computing and networking reso beg
when, where, why, and how. The results of 2014
changes were profound. But they were also
to specifically predict.
Even the biggest believers in the mobile
net once struggled to predict more than “mor
ple, online more often, for more reasons.” H nd
a detailed technical understanding of digit xperi-
working didn’t illuminate the future, nor d umber of
ploying billions in R&D. Services such as online, tools
book, Netflix, or Amazon’s AWS cloud-comp lt to use, the de-
platform are obvious in hindsight, but no were too costly and
about them—their business models, techn taverse aspirations for
design principles—was at the time. In this r .” he added a few minutes
49
TECHNOLOGY

later, “
of w
2020 entral company gains control of [the metaverse],
y will become more powerful than any gov-
nt and be a god on earth.” It’s easy to find
T claim hyperbolic. But according to Citi and
m G, the metaverse could generate as much as
p illion in revenue per year by 2030. Mor-
s anley has estimated $8 trillion in both the
P nd China, while Goldman Sachs projected
s en $2.5 trillion and $12.5 trillion globally;
m ama is nsey forecasts $5 trillion. Jensen Huang, the
ro y the s er and CEO of Nvidia, which ranked as one
fo 70s, nu 10 largest public companies in the world for
o
b
ed tha
profite 2020 of 2022, believes the GDP of the metaverse
entually exceed that of “the physical world.”
b ach de here that fears of a dystopia seem fair, rather
th as doe alarmist. The idea of the metaverse means
fu act. r growing share of our lives, labor, leisure,
wealth, happiness, and relationships will be
T erne inside virtual worlds, rather than just aided
b work o gh digital devices. It will be a parallel plane
e nd ind tence that sits atop our digital and physical
d hese m mies, and unites both. As a result, the com-
n cused s that control these virtual worlds and their
ta d help l atoms will be more dominant than those
s anothe ad in today’s digital economy.
in ate on f e metaverse will thus render more acute
te e bene of the hard problems of digital existence
th ne cou such as data rights, data security, misinfor-
c y devi n and radicalization, platform power, and
a appiness. The philosophies, culture, and pri-
s from of the companies that lead in the metaverse
ng clos 2021 herefore, will help determine whether the
rietary is better or worse than our current moment,
net en than just more virtual or remunerative.
ng more the world’s largest corporations and most
also preve ious startups pursue the metaverse, it’s es-
telecom co l that we—users, developers, consumers, and
ss is also w —understand we still have agency over our
democratized and the ability to reset the status quo, but
y of the most va f we act now. Yes, the metaverse can seem
orld today were fou ing, if not outright scary, but this moment
internet era. nge is our chance to bring people together,
to imagine how differe nsform industries that have resisted disrup-
e if it had been created by m nd to build a more equal global economy.
conglomerates in order to sel
ds, or harvest user data for profi
2021 ch about the future is uncertain, just as the
et was in the 1990s and 2000s. But we can
corporate internet” is the current e stand how the metaverse is likely to work
n for the metaverse. When the interne hy; which experiences might be available
rn, government labs and universities were why, and to whom; what might go wrong
tively the only institutions with the computa hat must go right. And we can use this in-
talent, resources, and ambitions to build a tion to shape the future, just as Big Tech
work of networks,” and few in the for-profit here are trillions of dollars at stake, as exec-
imagined its commercial potential. None of are wont to remind us—and, more impor-
true when it comes to the metaverse. Instea our lives.
being pioneered and built by private busine
In 2016, long before the metaverse was ser tech executive and founder, is the author of
contemplated by corporate executives world Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize
Epic Games’ Sweeney told VentureBeat, “ thing, from which this piece is adapted
50 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
 A screenshot of
the crypto game
Axie Infinity

BY CHAD DE GUZMAN/MANILA AND ANDREW R. CHOW

TECHNOL

of dollars dow
ing the game
ful, he says,
the dozen pla
this story. “I
I became mo
pect of my li
The story
serves as a ca
its bombasti
the world. M
ers, when reb
unsavory asp
its impact in
Orias and ot
reinforced p
them false h
ideas like Ax
promise—bu
those who fe
tion but to ta
ital unknown

At first bl
lot like Poké
players buy
sters called A
strengths an
battle other
more power
earn in-gam
Love Potion -
changed for
You can als
new, more
Axie monste
fungible tok
corded on th
ger of trans
has been tou
backbone of
Axie Inf
Vietnam-ba
Mavis Inc. as
earn gamer m
ular games l
Fortnite, it’s c
make a living
revenue from
online viewe
earning pote
game play its
future wher
one,” the gam
Sky Mav
transactions
tokens. By l
had raised m
52 Time A
◁ eco-
Samerson Orias, r was
with fellow former with
player Jonathan A sers
ned
the
investors includ
firm Andreessen mak-
The game ini xie’s
pact in the Phil cing
players there mad gin,
user base. Rou They
Southeast Asian the
people lives be ney
and its economy and
on some 2.2 mi
who send money oney
pandemic shut b ock-
and slashed jobs the
were sent home. DAO
19 lockdowns cr in a
omy, many resor But
making schemes the
Owen Convoc xie’s
heard murmurs a pto’s
tential for month aybe
he decided to ent will
he earned $487. H But
to buy his own A on to
the total cost 60 ays.
The early pan told
players like Con rad-
news coverage a way
sands of new pla lars
as the game’s po reds
servers pointed ends
structure was un ini-
of SLP necessit ters
tinually buying Axie
scheme. Sky Mav d re-
edged in its whi ome
was “dependent xies,
“Focusing on ” he
through early in
a Ponzi scheme ame
Sky Mavis wrote after
“Axie Infinity’s m Her
vide entertainm lud-
As the price ying
shoot up last su e to
players found th
ford the cost of p yaki
monsters. So an food
emerged in whic hav-
known as “mana hed
monsters and t Axie,
“scholars,” who w g by
work of leveling □
53
K INGMAK ER
POLITICS

JIM CLYBURN’S LONG QUEST FOR BLACK POLITICAL POWER

BY MOLLY BALL/COLUMBIA, S.C.

On a sticky-hOt night in the sOuth carOlina capital,

Representative Jim Clyburn takes the outdoor stage at his late-
night afterparty. Clyburn—the 82-year-old House Democratic
whip, maker of Presidents, and highest-ranking Black man in
Congress—has a message of hope for dark times. “In spite of all
its faults, there ain’t a better country to be living in,” he says in
his imposing baritone. “And you and I will have to do our jobs
out here at the polls to save this country from itself.”
Of the hundreds in attendance this June evening at the
EdVenture Children’s Museum, some have come from the
fundraising dinner down the street for the South Carolina Dem-
ocratic Party, where the first Black woman Vice President was
the keynote speaker. But many have not. Clyburn throws this
free bash so those who can’t afford to attend a fundraiser have
a way to participate. Wearing a navy suit and holding a mixed
drink, he’s joined on the patio by Congresswoman Shontel
Brown of Ohio, who credits Clyburn’s endorsement for her
victory in a special election last year, coming from 35 points
behind to defeat a Bernie Sanders–backed progressive.
“It’s no coincidence that his initials are J.C.—you can refer-
ence the story of Lazarus by another J.C. in the Bible,” Brown
tells me. “When you think about folks like myself and Joe
Biden, who looked like they didn’t have a chance to win, our
J.C., Jim Clyburn, gave us his stamp of approval and resurrected
what had been perceived by many as an impossible victory.”
Clyburn is in his element, surrounded by the vast political

▷
Clyburn, the House majority whip, says he prefers
making headway to making headlines

PHOTOGR APH BY MIKE BELLEME FOR TIME

Clyburn helped power Barack Obama, seen
here at his 2007 fish fry, to the Democratic
nomination and the presidency
network he’s nurtured. Brown got her
start in a Congressional Black Cau-
cus (CBC) training program Clyburn
helped create; her boyfriend is Cly-
burn’s political adviser Antjuan Sea-
wright. The entire afterparty—which
will turn into a raging dance-off before
the night ends—is packed with people
Clyburn has prodded into politics: local
party officials, members of district ex-
ecutive boards, city council members
from across the state, county auditors
and coroners. “I thought politics was
all deceitfulness and lying, and I didn’t
want any part of it,” Anthony Thompson
Jr., a thin Columbian in a salmon-pink
suit, tells me. “He made me see that you
have to be part of the system to make
change.” After training in one of Cly-
burn’s mentorship programs, Thomp-
son now serves as second vice chair of
the local party and started its first dis-
ability caucus.
Clyburn’s influence in Democratic
politics is as far-reaching as it is un-
sung. Today, he’s widely credited with
swinging the 2020 presidential primary
to Biden, rescuing the flailing cam-
paign with a well-timed endorsement
that buoyed him to a 30-point victory
in South Carolina—and extracting a
promise to name the first Black woman
to the Supreme Court. That wasn’t
even the first time Clyburn helped
make a President: he was instrumen-
tal to Barack Obama’s victory in 2008,
56 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
and before that played a key role in put-
ting South Carolina near the top of the
primary calendar in the first place. His
friends serve in top posts across the
Administration and party. Democratic
National Committee chairman Jaime
Harrison, who Clyburn pushed for the
post, and who was just 29 when Clyburn
made him the first Black executive di-
rector of the House Democratic caucus,
says a large percentage of Black Ameri-
cans in politics today can trace their po-
sitions to Clyburn.
A few months ago, when numer-
ous congressional Democrats were
clamoring to chair the high-profile se-
lect committee investigating the Jan. 6
riot, it was Clyburn who urged Speaker
Nancy Pelosi to name his best friend,
Congressman Bennie Thompson—
native of Bolton, Miss., graduate of his-
torically Black Tougaloo College—its
chairman. In the whispering campaign
that ensued, Clyburn sensed a familiar
‘HE MADE ME SEE
THAT YOU HAVE TO BE
PART OF THE SYSTEM
TO MAKE CHANGE.’
—ANTHONY THOMPSON JR.
Clyburn’s friends Cedric Richmond,
right, and Bennie Thompson, second
from right, serve in key positions
dynamic. “A lot of people wanted to be
chairman,” Clyburn tells me. “And quite
frankly, nobody will admit to this, but
it’s the same thing I had when I ran for
whip. A Black guy from Mississippi,
ain’t from an Ivy League School—they
won’t say it, but they think it: ‘He can’t
chair this.’” Pelosi ignored the whispers,
and Thompson has been widely praised
for his coolheaded handling of the com-
mittee’s hearings, proving what Clyburn
knew all along: “Bennie is perfect for
this,” Clyburn says. “He’s unflappable,
and he ain’t searching for the limelight.
He’s just doing his thing.”
The episode bore all the hallmarks of
Clyburn’s style. As usual, he was quick
to suspect a Black person wasn’t get-
ting his due, and quick to do something
about it. As usual, he pulled strings to
arrange the outcome he thought best for
his party and country. As usual, he did
not seek public credit; as usual, the im-
pact was notable. From poverty relief to
funding for historically Black colleges
to rural broadband, he’s the source of
many significant policy achievements,
but he is more often found behind the
scenes than on the dais.
This quality as much as anything
has put him at odds with today’s left.
To a rising generation of activists, Cly-
burn’s penchant for incrementalism
and backroom dealing represents com-
plicity with an intolerable status quo at
a moment when urgency is required.
 Clyburn and the late Representative
John Lewis, left, were civil rights activists
before being elected to Congress
Campaigning for Brown and the conser-
vative Democrat Henry Cuellar against
more liberal candidates, he’s been called
a corporate sellout and worse, accused
of doing the bidding of his donors in de-
fense contracting and the pharmaceu-
tical industry. At a campaign event in
Charleston in May, he was heckled by a
far-left primary opponent over repara-
C O U R T E S Y F R I E N D S O F J I M C LY B U R N ; C O U R T E S Y T H E O F F I C E O F M A J O R I T Y W H I P J A M E S E . C LY B U R N ; A L L I S O N S H E L L E Y— G E T T Y I M A G E S
tions. “We need those who are willing to
fight fervently for Black people that are
not so committed to the establishment,”
says Amara Enyia, policy and research
coordinator for the Movement for Black
Lives. “Clyburn was very instrumental
in influencing people’s decision to vote
for Biden. As we look back on that now,
people are really wondering, OK, this
was supposed to be the best decision.
How has that manifested in my life?”
In our interviews, I ask Clyburn his
thoughts on the status and trajectory of
Black political power in America. Four-
teen years ago, the election of the first
Black President vindicated his abiding
belief in Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream,
but today he is less sanguine. Over the
course of his six decades in politics,
from 1960s sit-ins to the heights of con-
gressional leadership, Clyburn has seen
many things change for the better. But
these days the momentum seems to have
shifted. The Black Lives Matter move-
ment drove unprecedented millions
into the streets but did not succeed in
spurring Congress to pass police reform
or voting-rights legislation. White su-
premacy and racial dog whistling seem
ascendant; 10 Black people were killed
at a Buffalo, N.Y., supermarket in May
by a white gunman who allegedly tar-
geted them for their race. A school dis-
trict in Pennsylvania, Clyburn notes,
recently banned children’s books on
King and Rosa Parks. “If that ain’t Hit-
lerism, tell me what is,” Clyburn says.
“That’s what this country is coming to.”
Is the point of liberation to not be
shut outside any longer, to gain access
to the levers of power? Or is it a fool’s
game to try to win by the rules of a sys-
tem designed to oppress? “Progress in
this country has never moved on a linear
plane,” Clyburn says. “It goes forward
for a while. And then it goes backward
for a while.”
The following morning, Clyburn
sits in a back room of the convention
center where the state party is hold-
ing its annual meeting, eating a sugar
cookie and pouring a bottle of Diet Coke
into a plastic cup of ice. The tension be-
tween outside passion and inside power
is one as old as protest itself, and was
a perpetual point of contention in the
civil rights movement Clyburn came up
in. His own father thought his youth-
ful militancy was too aggressive. But
today, at a crucial moment for racial jus-
tice in America, Clyburn frets that the
balance is out of whack—that too many
seem content to call attention to prob-
lems without getting into the trenches
to fix them.
“You know, this party of ours is
catching so much flak, because there’s
this contest: How many people get the
most hits on social media? How many
people get the biggest headline?” he
says. “One guy is running against me
right now in the primary, saying I’m
not progressive enough. Show me one
thing in my record. I get A ratings from
all the labor unions. I get an A rating
from the NAACP. Where am I not pro-
gressive? I’m not progressive to them
because I don’t call people names. Be-
cause you ain’t gonna see me on TV yell-
ing at somebody, trying to get a head-
line. I spend my time trying to figure out
how best to hold on to this majority and
get things done. They’re having a con-
test on who can yell the loudest.”
Clyburn was born in 1940 in Sumter,
a racially divided town of 10,000 in cen-
tral South Carolina. His father was a fun-
damentalist preacher, his mother a beau-
tician and entrepreneur. Both fought
against Jim Crow and encouraged their
three sons to dream beyond the limita-
tions placed on them. In 1960, as a stu-
dent at South Carolina State College and
leader in the newly founded Congress on
Racial Equality, Clyburn led a march of
1,000 students through Orangeburg to
demand the desegregation of local es-
tablishments. Officers commanded the
57
POLITICS
quiet, orderly marchers to stop “disturb-
ing the peace,” but said nothing to the
howling white mob pursuing them. The
police turned fire hoses on the protest-
ers and slammed Clyburn into a cruiser;
it took all his self-control to maintain
his commitment to nonviolence as 388
marchers were arrested.
With the local jails full, some were
housed for days in an outdoor stockade,
wearing wet clothes in freezing weather,
passing around cigarette lighters to
warm their hands. As Clyburn waited
at the courthouse for his bond to be
posted, a petite coed offered him a ham-
burger. They were married 15 months
later. (Emily Clyburn, his closest confi-
dante and toughest critic, died in 2019.)
But his impulse was always to be-
come part of the system. In 1970, Cly-
burn helped John West, a racially mod-
erate white Democrat, secure the Black
vote in his gubernatorial run against a
Republican backed by the segregation-
ist Senator Strom Thurmond. After he
won, West appointed Clyburn to chair
South Carolina’s newly created Human
Affairs Commission, an agency charged
with mediating racial disputes in the
wake of desegregation and the Civil
Rights Act. At 30, Clyburn was the first
Black man to serve in the state cabinet,
managing a staff largely composed of
older white people.
Clyburn was perpetually at the cen-
ter of a firestorm, simultaneously beset
by Black activists who thought he was
too compromising and white conserva-
tives determined to undermine and ulti-
mately abolish the commission. When a
young Black man killed in a hit-and-run
was rumored to have been murdered
and castrated, Clyburn authorized an
exhumation and autopsy that showed
he was not, then castigated the rumor-
mongering activists for needlessly di-
viding the community. When white
cadets at the Citadel military academy
terrorized a Black classmate, dressing
in white sheets and waking him in the
middle of the night with a burned paper
cross, Clyburn defended their punish-
ment even though it fell short of expul-
sion. “I not only wanted to advance the
interests of Black people in the state,
but I wanted also to be Exhibit A in the
case for including more African Amer-
ican executives in state government,”
58 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
Clyburn wrote in his 2014 memoir,
Blessed Experiences: Genuinely South-
ern, Proudly Black. When he left the
post after 18 years, he was under no il-
lusion he had solved the problem, but
felt that “we had created an imperfect
reality where there had previously been
only an idealistic dream.”
The work was controversial—and
dangerous. In the 1980s, when Cly-
burn began advocating for the removal
of the Confederate battle flag that flew
over the state capitol, he spent five years
under police protection for the threats
he received. The situation came to a
head in 2000, when Clyburn helped
broker a compromise between the
NAACP and the Republican state legis-
lature to place the flag in a less promi-
nent spot on the capitol grounds. But at
the last minute, the NAACP pulled out
and called the deal unacceptable. The
legislature retaliated by putting the flag
in an even more conspicuous spot. By
refusing to compromise, the activists
ended up worse off than they started.
For years, Clyburn and the NAACP con-
tinued to trade barbs. (In 2015, after
nine parishioners were murdered at a
Black church in Charleston by a young
white supremacist, legislators finally re- civil rights attorney and judge Mat-
moved the flag.) thew J. Perry, over the objections of
In 1992, having already run for state Clyburn’s new congressional colleague
and local office unsuccessfully three Thurmond, who wanted it named after
times, Clyburn decided to seek the himself. Clyburn leveraged his relation-
state’s newly created majority-Black ships with Republicans to overpower
congressional seat. This time, he de- Thurmond while using his vote on
feated four other well-qualified Black other issues as a bargaining chip to get
candidates by a wide margin, becom- the fiscally conservative Clinton White
ing the first African American to rep- House to fund the project. On another
resent South Carolina in nearly a cen- occasion, he managed to secure a cov-
tury. The first bill he authored created eted slot on the Appropriations Com-
a new federal courthouse named after mittee—then voluntarily gave it up in
his childhood hero and mentor, the exchange for votes on other priorities.
As a result of gambits like these, Cly-
burn had plenty of favors to call in when
he ran in 2003 for a position in House
‘WE CAME FROM THE leadership. With the unanimous sup-
port of the CBC, which he had chaired,
BACK OF THE BUS TO THE Clyburn won in a rout. In 2006, he be-
FRONT OF THE BUS WITH
came the second Black majority whip in
history. One white colleague, he wrote,
JIM CLYBURN IN THE “gave an emphatic yes when I asked for
his vote, but expressed some reticence
DRIVER’S SEAT.’ about putting a whip in a Black man’s
hand.”
Of the more than 12,000 Americans
—BENNIE THOMPSON,
MISSISSIPPI CONGRESSMAN who have served in Congress, just 175 to

△ now is so many people who believe that
Clyburn with daughters Angela,
right, and Jennifer at his low-
country boil in Columbia
date have been Black. Clyburn’s ascen-
sion to congressional leadership paved
the way for other Southern Blacks, Ben-
nie Thompson tells me. “If you were
from the South, they assumed that,
because you spoke a little slower, that
had something to do with your brain,”
Thompson says. “We came from the
back of the bus to the front of the bus
with Jim Clyburn in the driver’s seat.”
Former President obama once de-
scribed Clyburn as “one of a handful of
people who, when they speak, the en-
tire Congress listens.” His persona is
a curious mix of gravitas and levity,
with little in between; with his boom-
ing voice and impish smile, he always
MIKE BELLEME FOR TIME
seems to be simultaneously half-joking
and deadly serious. In Washington, he
dines most nights at the private Na-
tional Democratic Club with Thomp-
son; Housing and Urban Development
(HUD) Secretary Marcia Fudge, a for-
mer Congresswoman whom Clyburn
lobbied Biden to put in the Cabinet; and
Cedric Richmond, a former Congress-
man and Clyburn protégé who recently
departed a top Administration position.
Many significant decisions on the 2020
campaign and in the Biden White House
have been hashed out at those dinners,
Richmond tells me. “We fix problems,
we cause problems—we do a little bit of
everything,” he says.
Clyburn has been aggressive in cash-
ing in the political capital he accrued by
powering Biden to victory, sometimes
irking the White House in the pro-
cess. When a Supreme Court vacancy
opened up this year, Biden moved to
make good on his promise to Clyburn to
appoint a Black woman. Clyburn pub-
licly lobbied for South Carolina judge
Michelle Childs, but Biden picked Ket-
anji Brown Jackson, and named Childs
to the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court in-
stead. Clyburn originally urged Biden
to appoint Fudge to a different Cabinet
post, Secretary of Agriculture, instead
of HUD, which Fudge publicly derided
as a stereotypically Black position.
“I was flat out pushing her for Ag,”
Clyburn tells me—a slot in which the
Ohioan would have been positioned to
address the rural poverty that affects
so many of his constituents. Biden,
Clyburn says, called him one night and
implored him to back off; the President
wanted to appoint his friend Tom Vil-
sack, who had served as agriculture sec-
retary under Obama. But Clyburn har-
bored a grudge against Vilsack for his
hasty 2010 firing of department official
Shirley Sherrod based on a deceptively
edited video. (Clyburn had served in the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Com-
mittee with Sherrod’s husband Charles
Sherrod.) He publicly criticized Obama
for the decision, for which Vilsack later
apologized. During their conversation
last year, Clyburn tells me, Biden asked
him to talk with Vilsack and see if they
could come to an understanding. “And
so I did agree to talk with him,” Clyburn
recalls. “And then I relented.”
“Jim is there to do the work. He is
a person that would rather get things
done than worry about who gets the
credit,” Fudge tells me. “What we have
the whole movement to fight for justice
started with them. They need to realize
that people like Jim Clyburn have been
on the battlefield for a long time.”
Clyburn is “instrumental” to the
Democratic caucus, says Speaker Nancy
Pelosi, in ways that are often not pub-
licly apparent. His official job is to count
votes, but he also speaks up for Black
priorities at the leadership table and me-
diates between party factions. Last year,
it was Clyburn who brokered a delicate
agreement between moderate Demo-
crats and the CBC to ensure that Biden’s
infrastructure and spending bills could
both pass after prolonged infighting, ac-
cording to Clyburn and two others who
were in the room. He then refused to ap-
pear at the press conference announc-
ing the deal, he tells me, because he felt
his friend Joyce Beatty, the current chair
of the CBC, needed the plaudits more.
“Some of these fights are long ones,
and you have to recognize that you may
not have immediate success, but you
have to have constant focus,” Pelosi
tells me. “Clyburn is a person like that—
though he prefers immediate success.”
59
POLITICS
When Clyburn held his 27th annual
World Famous Fish Fry in June 2019,
nearly the entire Democratic presiden-
tial field schlepped to Columbia to make
their pitch to the early primary state’s
predominantly Black electorate. The
visit doubled as a chance to kiss Cly-
burn’s ring, even though most suspected
his old friend Biden had the inside track
to his endorsement. From a massive out-
door stage, 21 candidates addressed an
overheated, jostling crowd. More than
4,000 pounds of fish were consumed.
This year, after two years of
COVID-19 cancellations, Clyburn de-
cided against holding the fish fry in its
full glory, replacing it with a number
of smaller events, such as today’s low-
country boil in Columbia’s historically
Black Greenview neighborhood, where
he has long made his home. Some saw
the potential end of the tradition as a
sign Clyburn is making plans to retire.
He tells me he is, but won’t say when,
and plans to serve the two-year term
for which he’s currently running, even
if Democrats lose the House.
The contrast with the 2019 festival is
stark: a few dozen locals sitting in fold-
ing chairs in a half-empty community-
center gymnasium, eating the mix of
shrimp, corn, and potatoes from a few
steam trays at the side of the room.
Media outlets from all over the world
covered the presidential event, but this
time there are just a few local report-
ers in attendance. Taking questions
on the way into the gym, Clyburn de-
livers an impromptu lecture on politi-
cal communication. Democrats’ big-
gest challenge, he opines, is “spending
a little more time understanding peo-
ple’s habits, people’s aspirations, under-
standing how to talk to people on their
own terms.” The party, in other words,
sounds out of touch with regular people.
Clyburn has been harshly critical of the
“defund the police” slogan embraced by
some on the left, comparing its politi-
cally damaging resonance to the “burn,
baby, burn” chant of the 1960s.
Many liberals today feel let down
by congressional Democrats, who they
accuse of offering little but thoughts
and prayers as mass shootings prolifer-
ate, Roe v. Wade is overturned, and the
climate burns. Clyburn’s primary op-
ponent, a 37-year-old teacher named
60 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
Gregg “Marcel” Dixon from rural
Ridgeland, tells me Black Americans
are worse off today than they were dur-
ing the civil rights movement because
leaders like Clyburn have sold them out.
“How much time are Black people sup-
posed to wait for progress?” Dixon says.
Running on a platform of massive repa-
rations that would allow African Ameri-
cans to build institutions separate from
white society, Dixon got about 4% of the
vote in the June primary.
Inside the gym, Clyburn tells the
crowd he’s tired of hearing that Dem-
ocrats haven’t done anything. “We
need to talk more about our accom-
plishments,” he says, brandishing a
flier that lists some of the projects he’s
CLYBURN’S INFLUENCE
IN DEMOCRATIC POLITICS
IS AS FAR-REACHING
AS IT IS UNSUNG
gotten funded: money for Black col-
leges and community health facilities,
hospital upgrades and veterans centers,
rural broadband. The $20 million Lake
Marion Regional Water Agency, which
brought potable water to much of his
district for the first time. Heritage-
preservation corridors and national
parks. Affirmative-action provisions
for government hiring. His “10-20-30”
funding formula, which specifies that
10% of federal spending be reserved
for areas where at least 20% of the pop-
ulation has been below the poverty line
for 30 years or more. The formula now
applies to 15 appropriations accounts—
little provisions tucked into bigger bills
that can have a major impact. Headway,
not headlines, as he likes to say.
This is the change Clyburn practices
and preaches, the unsexy work of im-
proving people’s lives, little by little,
and keeping at it through setbacks. No
single piece of legislation, no revolu-
tion, not even a single election can solve
problems that have mounted through
centuries. Clyburn has never believed
that progress is guaranteed, but he’s
all too familiar with the persistent illu-
sion. “I’ve heard it said so often: ‘Well,
all we have to do is have a few funer-
als,’” he tells me. “‘The younger white
people think differently.’ No, they don’t.
No, they don’t.”
In 1985, Clyburn traveled to Dayton,
Ohio, to speak at a conference also fea-
turing Clarence Thomas, then President
Reagan’s chair of the Equal Employment
Opportunity Commission—the federal
agency with jurisdiction over state com-
missions like the one Clyburn headed.
Clyburn was there to speak in favor
of affirmative action, which he knew
Thomas opposed. Rather than stage a
confrontation, he tailored his remarks
to appeal to Thomas, citing their shared
Southern backgrounds and quoting Lin-
coln. A more aggressive speech would
have delighted the national media in
attendance—but might have alienated
an important federal agency whose help
Clyburn was likely to need in the future.
Clyburn thinks often about the con-
trast in worldviews between himself
and Thomas, now the archconserva-
tive senior Justice on the U.S. Supreme
Court, he tells me in his D.C. office. In
interviews and a memoir, Thomas has
recounted being sternly lectured by the
grandfather who raised him never to
look a white person in the face. “Every
time I think about him, I think about
how different it is for young people
whose parents had, for whatever reason,
a lack of vision for the future,” Clyburn
says. “So every time I see him or read his
opinions, I think, ‘That’s the difference
between us. His indoctrination was to
be less than.’”
Clyburn’s education was the oppo-
site. His father once slapped him for
cowering from an adult’s handshake
and told him to always look people in
the eye. The Rev. Enos Clyburn told
his congregation, “No matter how long
you’ve been down, getting up must al-
ways be on your mind,” the Congress-
man recalled in his memoir.
His father, Clyburn wrote, “viewed
pessimism as a human weakness
with no place in his faith.” It can be
hard to believe in progress at a time
like this. But to Jim Clyburn, there
is no other way. —With reporting by
Simmone Shah/new York □
“The ability for technology to extend care outside
of the hospital can be really revolutionary.”

: time.com/time100-talks
Featuring:
 BY CIARA NUGENT/ANTOFAGASTA DE LA SIERRA, ARGENTINA

PHOTOGR APHS BY SEBASTIÁN LÓPEZ BR ACH FOR TIME

The Vasquez brothers aren’t used to visitors.
Their farm lies in the remote Puna, a vast
plateau region high in the Andes Mountains.
The terrain, in the Argentine province of
Catamarca, is rough and largely empty; fluffy,
big-eyed llamas wander a miles-wide plain
between mountains. Only sparse shrubs pepper
the ground, glowing in yellow-green
Technicolor under the close sun. But one
day in 2016, a tall man in his 50s, speak-
ing heavily Australian-accented Span-
ish, pulled up to the Vasquezes’ remote
farmhouse. He told them that close by,
under the otherworldly surface of the
plateau, lay huge amounts of lithium—
the white metal essential to making the
batteries for electric vehicles and other
clean energy technology—and he had a
plan to extract it.
Such arrivals are often bad news in the
Andean highlands, which stretch across
parts of Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and
Peru. Over the past 30 years, foreign min-
ing companies have descended on the
region to dig up its plentiful deposits of
copper, zinc, silver, and lithium, of which
59% of the world’s known reserves are
here. But mining it interferes with one of
the world’s driest ecosystems: parts of the
Puna can go years without rain, and peo-
ple here rely on a sparse network of rivers
and salt lakes, fed by underground water
stores built up over thousands of years.
Since the 1990s, mines in northern Chile
have pumped water out of salt lakes to ac-
cess the lithium hidden beneath. Courts
and communities in Chile say it has de-
pleted groundwater levels, threatening
the future of entire Indigenous villages.
ArgentinA is now on the forefront
of a global scramble for lithium. The
country, which alone accounts for 21%
of the world’s reserves, has just two
mines in operation today, but dozens
more are planned or under consider-
ation. The global energy transition is
set to trigger a 40-fold increase in lith-
ium demand between now and 2040,
per the International Energy Agency,
and mining companies are competing
64 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
to secure supplies. Many fear local com-
munities in the Argentina Puna, home to
some 50,000 people, will meet the same
fate as those in Chile: seeing their re-
sources pillaged and lands destroyed to
serve richer countries—neocolonialism
dressed up as a green revolution. But
Stephen Promnitz, an Australian min-
ing executive, told the Vasquezes he
had a way to extract lithium while pre-
serving their homeland. “He was very
polite,” recalls Florentín Vasquez, a
friendly 38-year-old, in March 2022.
“He says that they’re not going to use
as much water as other projects—
that they have a new method that has
never been tried before in Argentina.”
A few miles from the farm, Lake Re-
sources, the mining company Promnitz
founded six years ago, is now laying
the groundwork for its lithium mine—
dubbed Kachi. Using technology from
California-based startup Lilac Solu-
tions, the venture aims to start pro-
ducing lithium carbonate (the metal
compound that battery manufacturers
buy) in 2024, and deliver 50,000 metric
tons a year by 2025. Traditional lithium
mines rely on a simple two-year-long
evaporation process to separate lithium
from the salty brines, allowing massive
amounts of water to escape; by contrast,
in a few hours Lilac’s technology can re-
cover up to twice as much lithium and
return “virtually all” of the salt water to
its aquifer, according to Promnitz.
The technology, known as direct lith-
ium extraction, or DLE, is unproven,
however. Experts say it has struggled
to move from the lab to the field. Kachi
amounts to a test case, and some in-
vestor groups have expressed serious
doubts that Lake will make it work
at scale. The company has also faced
internal upheaval: in June, Promnitz
abruptly announced his resignation.
He tells TIME changes to the company’s
leadership were “anticipated” ahead
of starting construction at Kachi, and
Lake’s chair Stu Crow says the depar-
ture “was for purely personal reasons.”
The economic incentives to develop
DLE are clear. At the moment, you can’t
power electric vehicles or store renew-
able energy without lithium. The price
of lithium carbonate has increased 500%
over the past 12 months—although new
investments could ease things, analysts
say. Proponents say DLE’s faster, more
efficient process is crucial to scaling up
lithium production and preventing di-
sastrous bottlenecks in the energy tran-
sition. U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer
Granholm has called it “a game changer.”
David Snydacker, Lilac’s CEO, says it
must succeed: “Conventional players
have not been capable of delivering
new supply and the volumes required
for electric vehicles. By 2030, either
there’s a catastrophe in the electric-
vehicle market, or the lithium indus-
try has been completely transformed.”

There’s also a lot on the line for
environmental justice. Mining for the
so-called green minerals that are essen-
tial for decarbonization is often very de-
structive: in the Democratic Republic
of Congo, dangerous labor conditions
in cobalt mines have led human-rights
activists to dub the resource “blood co-
balt.” In Chile, NGOs call areas dam-
aged by copper and lithium mining
“sacrifice zones.” If Kachi works, it could
help Argentina avoid such nicknames.
“If we’re going to make an energy tran-
sition, we can’t just repeat the sins of
the past,” Promnitz says. “We’ve got to
do better.” But amid the scramble for
lithium, projects like Kachi have yet to
prove they can operate without sapping
freshwater resources or altering a little-
understood ecosystem. The uncertainty
weighs on the Vasquez brothers. “Peo-
ple from outside can come and tell you,
‘Don’t worry, nothing will happen,’” Flo-
rentín says. “But we’re the ones at risk.”
To spoT a liThium mine in South
America, look for the evaporation
ponds: gigantic, lurid, blue-green
pools of brine. Such rectangular pools
cover dozens of square miles in Chile’s
Atacama desert. In Argentina, the ponds
are a rare sight—for now.
Kachi looks different. Early on a
bright morning in March, the contrast-
ing colors of the site almost sting your
eyes: a white salt lake sits at the foot of
a black volcano—all framed by pink and
orange mountains and the blue sky. One
large red drill bores holes into the lake’s
salty crust to extract brine from below.
When construction is complete in two
years, there will be more extraction
wells, and covered tanks for a quick,
three-hour ion-exchange process that
separates out the lithium. The metal
attaches to small, specially designed
beads. The beads are then washed with
an acid to remove the lithium, leaving
behind salt water to be returned to the
aquifer. This is the process developed
by Lilac Solutions, whose investors in-
clude BMW, and Breakthrough Energy
Ventures, an investment fund backed by
Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Both the Ford
Motor Co. and Japanese firm Hanwa
have signed nonbinding agreements
△
The Vasquez brothers at their
farm; a drill extracts lithium-rich
brine samples at the Kachi mine;
Indigenous activisit Román
Guitián stands near the Hombre
Muerto salt lake
with Lake Resources to each buy 25,000
metric tons of lithium carbonate equiva-
lent (LCE) annually from Kachi.
It is likely just a happy coinci-
dence that more efficient—and thus
profitable—lithium-extraction meth-
ods also have a smaller land and water
footprint than traditional approaches.
Argentine environmentalists are in-
trigued, but not comforted, by Lake
and Lilac’s claims to reduce water use.
Patricia Marconi, a Catamarca-based
researcher at the YUCHAN Founda-
tion, a regional conservation group,
is concerned that reinjecting massive
quantities of brine into the aquifer may
affect the geological formations below
the surface. In a 2018 paper, Argentina-
based researchers argued that potential
changes to the brine’s acidity, and the
65
introduction of trace amounts of for-
eign substances used during the ex-
traction process, could alter the eco-
system. And companies may have to
inject spent brine at different points
than where they removed it, essen-
tially to avoid diluting the lithium con-
tent where they’re extracting.
Marconi also worries about how much
fresh water will be consumed in the final
stages of the process, when lithium chlo-
ride is turned into lithium carbonate. She
warns this water will likely be so-called
fossil water—drawn from aquifers con-
fined underground for thousands of years
that are not fed fast enough by today’s
precipitation to be replenished. All this,
she says, will have an unknown impact on
the little-studied geology and ecosystem
of the salt lakes. “If we were really tak-
ing seriously the idea of not intervening
in environmental systems that we don’t
understand, there wouldn’t be 20 com-
panies exploring in Catamarca. There
would be 20 research teams,” she says.
“Because the harms are irreversible.”

catamarca has reason to doubt

DLE’s environmental promise. Three
hours north of Kachi, the yellows and
greens of the Puna’s summer vegetation
are suddenly interrupted by a stretch of
black ground. This is the valley of the
Trapiche River, a source for the mas-
sive Hombre Muerto salt lake. In 1997,
Livent, a Philadelphia-based lithium-
mining company—a key supplier for
both Tesla and BMW—built a dam at
the point where the river meets the lake,
concentrating the fresh water for use in
its mine. On TIME’s visit in March, a
trickle of water a few feet wide ran past decrease in brine or water” in the area. expanding its total capacity to 100,000
the dam, through a parched meadow. Román Guitián blames Livent for the metric tons by 2030. Workers were dig-
The project is Argentina’s oldest lith- valley’s destruction. Guitián grew up ging a pipeline from the Hombre Muerto
ium mine—and it’s also the only one in the next to the river, in a small Indigenous plant to another river, Los Patos, around
western hemisphere to use a form of DLE settlement. Before the mining started 10 miles away. “They destroyed one
at scale. Its process is a hybrid: lithium when he was 17, they used to fetch river, and now they’re going to destroy
brines are left to evaporate in pools, but salt from Hombre Muerto, and raised another,” says Guitián, who is pursuing
for “significantly less time,” according to llamas, goats, and sheep on the valley’s legal recognition for a local Indigenous
Livent, than in traditional methods. The vegetation, he says, standing at the edge community, named Atacameños del
brine is then passed through a DLE pro- of the salt lake. “It was beautiful.” Altiplano, in order to better defend the
cess, and afterward, Livent says, “most” Signs dotted around the river adver- area. “If the day comes when we don’t
of the salt water is returned to “the sur- tise a valley restoration program, which have water, we’ll have to emigrate.”
rounding Salar habitat.” Later, fresh water Livent launched last year with a re- Catamarca governor Raúl Jalil says
from the Trapiche River is used to sepa- gional NGO, the Eco-Conciencia Foun- the province has learned from the im-
rate out the lithium. The company would dation. Yet Livent plans to double the pacts on the Trapiche River. Companies
not disclose any numbers on brine use, plant’s lithium production to 40,000 now undergo monthly environmental
but claims it has “not contributed to a metric tons of LCE by the end of 2023, monitoring, and if problems show up,
66 Time August 8/August 15, 2022

projects will be halted, Jalil says. Livent
says it has installed monitoring stations
at the rivers “to help us use water in a
sustainable manner.” Jalil, however, says
he won’t restrict the number of mines or
ban water-intensive methods. “We can’t
change the whole global energy system
without mining,” he says. “The way for-
ward is to reduce the impact more and
more, through innovation.” He wants
Kachi to be “a leader case” there.
In 2020, Livent used 72.9 metric tons
of fresh water per metric ton of LCE it
produced. In lab tests, Lilac’s method
used 18 metric tons of water per metric
ton of LCE produced. Lake tells TIME
Kachi will use “significantly” less than
that in the field, making savings through
brackish and recycled water. Promnitz,
a trained geologist, also claims the risk
of reinjecting brines is low because the
sediments beneath the salt lake are
packed loosely. “It’s not like [the brine]
lives in just one particular formation.”
In conversation, Jalil and local of-
ficials in Catamarca appear more con-
cerned with mining’s economic poten-
tial than its risks. The remote region
has historically received little invest-
ment from Buenos Aires, and it has
only a few thriving industries. Politi-
cians see lithium as a chance to change
that. The mayors of both El Peñón
and Antofagasta de la Sierra, Kachi’s
◁
Workers monitor machines at the
Kachi lithium mine, which will begin
commercial production in 2024
closest towns, state versions of the
same phrase: “If the company grows,
the town should too.”
Florentín, whose farm sits near the
Kachi site, is conflicted. If environmen-
tal problems did arise from the project,
he wouldn’t know what to do. “There
are a lot of people around here who need
work, and they come and tell me that,”
he says. “So I feel kind of cornered.”
We are entering a global mineral-
mining boom. Carbon-reducing tech-
nologies like wind turbines and electric
cars require a larger volume and more
diverse set of minerals than their dirty
counterparts. That gives the global min-
ing industry a chance at a rebrand: from
environmental villain to climate savior.
But as environmental awareness grows,
communities are pushing back. In Janu-
ary, after weeks of mass protests, Ser-
bia shelved a $2.4 billion project led by
mining giant Rio Tinto, which could
have provided 90% of Europe’s cur-
rent lithium needs. The episode is a
bad omen for plans—such as in the U.S.
and E.U.—to increase domestic mining
for “green” minerals. The risk is that
harmful mining will be farmed out to
poorer countries. Soon after its Serbia
mine was suspended, Rio Tinto acquired
a major DLE-based lithium project in
Salta, Argentina.
Many environmentalists say the
fairest way to reduce emissions would
be a radical transformation of con-
sumption: we would need less lithium
if we bought fewer electric cars, and re-
lied more on public transportation and
traveled less. But that vision is unlikely
to slow mining expansion in places like
Catamarca, which leaves communities
uncomfortably reliant on companies’
sticking to their new green promises—
and officials holding them to account.
If they don’t, the fight against climate
change, and the droughts and heat
waves it will bring, will be irrelevant
here, Guitián says. “In the future, we’ll
have lithium, we’ll have electric cars,
but we won’t have water,” he says. “We
end up right at the same place.” 
67
 Full Speed
Ahead
A VIETNAMESE ELECTRIC CAR FIRM IS OPENING A PLANT
IN NORTH CAROLINA. ITS AMBITIONS ARE GLOBAL
BY CHARLIE CAMPBELL/HAIPHONG, VIETNAM
On nOrThern VieTnam’s red riVer
Delta, the world’s most ambitious
electric-vehicle (EV) upstart occupies
a factory complex fringed with mango
trees and palms. Outside VinFast’s plant
by the port city of Haiphong, fishermen
in conical hats still plumb mudflats
for grass carp and tilapia; inside, each
car negotiates an overhead ergonomic
conveyor assembly line measuring
2.5 miles. A gauntlet of 1,250 robot arms,
twirling like pneumatic ballerinas, adds
some 3,000 components and welds
rivet after rivet in a flurry of sparks.
Everything here is top of the line:
machinery sourced from Germany,
Japan, Sweden. Welding is 98% auto-
mated. Capacity is 250,000 cars a year.
Impressively, instead of individual as-
sembly lines tailored for each vehicle,
the facility can simultaneously assemble
multiple models on the same line. Even
more impressively, Google Maps shows
that half of the 877-acre site sits beneath
the South China Sea—a quirk because it
was reclaimed from the waves and made
operational in just 21 months.
VinFast CEO Le Thuy likes to joke
that not even the Mountain View, Calif.,
behemoth can keep up with the EV mak-
er’s lightning pace. “At the start, every-
body said that building cars in two years
was impossible. Some even called us
crazy,” she says. “But we launched
three car models in those 21 months.”
The global EV market was valued
at $185 billion in 2021 and is expected
to rise by 24.5% annually and reach
68 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
$980 billion by 2028. VinFast is not
alone in craving a slice of that pie, and
is aggressively targeting the U.S. and
European auto markets. To succeed, it
needs to either unseat Tesla or persuade
gasoline-car drivers to switch over.
That’s no small feat: China accounts for
about half of the global market for EVs,
yet none of its firms have tried to broach
the U.S. despite plowing tens of millions
of dollars into feasibility studies.
SkepticiSm iS natural when it
comes to the congested global EV in-
dustry. No sooner does one startup
steal a march on rivals than its latest
funding round burns up and another
overtakes it. Today, the U.S. industry
has consolidated behind Tesla—worth
some $750 billion and turning its co-
founder, Elon Musk, into the world’s
richest man—and legacy automakers
are belatedly turning to a market whose
importance is soaring alongside global
oil prices. How does a parvenu from the
technological backwaters of Vietnam
seriously expect to compete?
It’s a huge challenge. But VinFast’s
parent VinGroup is no ordinary firm.
Controlled by Vietnam’s richest man,
Pham Nhat Vuong, VinGroup is the
country’s largest conglomerate, with a
total market value of $24.4 billion. Its
2020 revenue accounted for 2.2% of the
national GDP, and its reach is staggering.
“It’s a remarkable story,” says Huong
Le Thu, principal fellow at the Perth
USAsia Centre and adjunct fellow at the
Center for Strategic and International
Studies. “There has never been anything
of this size in Vietnam. It’s overwhelm-
ing at one level because now you can do
everything with VinGroup.”
It’s almost a state within a state, at
least for the upscale. A well-to-do Viet-
namese can be born in a VinMec hospi-
tal, study at a VinSchool, live in a Vin-
Home, shop at a VinCom mall, graduate
from VinUni, vacation at VinPearl re-
sorts, and, perhaps, become one of the
leviathan’s 40,000 employees.
And now, they can commute in a Vin-
Fast electric car, EVs having emerged as
the vehicle for the firm’s ambitions to
leap from domestic to international. In
June 2018, VinFast purchased a GM fac-
tory outside Hanoi and, by licensing in-
tellectual property from GM and other
auto giants like BMW, began produc-
ing its first gasoline VinFast vehicles
less than a year later. These initial offer-
ings were essentially ciphers of Western
brands—specifically a Chevrolet Spark
compact and a BMW 5 Series sedan and
X5 SUV. Because of clever marketing
and low costs, they proved immensely
popular, capturing 17% to 19% of each
market segment’s share domestically.
They were also essential learning steps.
Beginning in August, VinFast will
switch to exclusively manufacturing
EVs. The company is also set to build
a $4 billion factory in North Carolina
and is scouting for a European plant.
The 2,000-acre site in Chatham County
plans to start by producing 150,000

electric vehicles annually beginning in
July 2024, creating 7,500 jobs. It’s the
largest single foreign direct investment
in the state’s history, and indicative of
the scale of VinFast’s ambition, which
is “to become one of the top global EV
makers in five to 10 years,” says Thuy,
also a deputy chairperson of VinGroup.
“We think that we can be as good as any-
body in the world.” On July 14, VinFast
opened its first six overseas showrooms
in California, including a flagship store
in Santa Monica. Its first two models set
for the U.S. market are sleek-looking
SUVs, the VF8 and VF9. “It’s a solid car,
no rattles or anything that would indi-
cate a problem,” says Michael Dunne,
founder of the ZoZoGo EV market intel-
ligence firm, after a test drive. “But the
U.S. market is not for the fainthearted.”
VinFast wants to entice American EV
shoppers with a unique proposition: a
10-year warranty and a sticker price that
doesn’t include the cost of the battery—
an EV’s most expensive component. In-
stead buyers will have the option to lease
batteries from the company for a small
△
An aerial view of the VinFast
manufacturing plant in Haiphong,
Vietnam, on July 6
monthly fee. Once the battery life de-
grades to 70%, VinFast swaps in a new one,
free of charge. “Investors really like this
kind of business-model story,” says Yale
Zhang, an auto-industry analyst based in
Shanghai. “The question is, you need to
source more batteries to make it work.”
It’s a bold play in an extremely com-
petitive field. But despite VinFast’s in-
experience and lack of core technolo-
gies, it has much deeper pockets than
many new entrants into the EV market.
VinGroup has so far plowed $6.6 billion
into VinFast, and assembled a leader-
ship team headhunted from firms like
Ford, Renault, GM, and BMW. The styl-
ing is by Italy’s Pininfarina; the dash-
board displays by LG; the batteries by
Samsung. “We leased IP from BMW,
and so that immediately became the
standard we worked to,” says Shaun
Calvert, VinFast deputy CEO in charge
of manufacturing, formerly with GM.
The firm also has some rather influ-
ential champions. In late March, Presi-
dent Joe Biden tweeted that VinFast’s
U.S. investment plans were “the lat-
est example of my economic strategy
at work.” Within days, VinFast says,
it had almost 10,000 preorders from
customers in the U.S. “We keep joking
that President Biden is the best sales-
man that we’ve ever had, and we didn’t
have to pay,” says Thuy. It doesn’t stop
there. When Thuy attended the Select-
USA investment conference in late June,
she was delighted when most of a five-
minute speech by U.S. Commerce Sec-
retary Gina Raimondo was dedicated
to VinFast. “I’m amazed by the level of
support that we’ve received from the
U.S. government,” Thuy adds.
VinFast’s american adVenture
dovetails with the economic and geo-
strategic priorities of Hanoi, which aim
to turn Vietnam into an upper-middle-
income economy by 2030 and a high-
income economy by 2045 by enhancing
PHOTOGR APHS BY LINH PHAM FOR TIME
advanced manufacturing capabilities.
Already, most of the Samsung Galaxy
smartphones sold in the U.S. are as-
sembled here. But rather than rely on
foreign companies, the priority among
Hanoi politicians is to build strong local
champions. “They want companies like
VinGroup to take the lead in the na-
tional economy,” says Le Hong Hiep, a
senior fellow at the ISEAS-Yusof Ishak
Institute in Singapore.
At the center of this ambition sits
Vuong, the oldest of three children, who
grew up poor in Hanoi with his mother
running a tea stand and his father
serving in the Vietnamese army’s air-
defense division. His talent for math led
to a scholarship to study engineering at
Moscow Geology University. After the
collapse of the Soviet Union, he moved
to Kharkiv, Ukraine, where he set up a
Vietnamese restaurant. But soon he di-
versified into instant noodles flavored
with spice blends from his homeland,
eventually exporting to 29 countries.
Fortune swiftly followed. Today, the
brand he founded, Mivina, remains syn-
onymous with noodles in Ukraine, like
Xerox for photocopying in the U.S. In
2010, Vuong sold his company to Nestlé
for a reported $150 million, returning
to Vietnam ready for a fresh challenge.
His first domestic venture was a Vin-
Pearl beach resort on Hon Tre Island
off Nha Trang. A flurry of plush real es-
tate developments followed, includ-
ing Ocean Park, a complex of 45,000
villas and apartments around an arti-
ficial sand and seawater beach in cen-
tral Hanoi. Today, VinGroup boasts 27
urban complexes and 83 shopping malls
across Vietnam. Vuong developed a rep-
utation for bold business decisions and
for pivoting quickly. VinGroup nixed a
foray into airlines in January 2020 as the
pandemic took hold; Vuong repurposed
a factory to make low-cost ventilators.
VinFast’s overseas expansion also
provides protection for Vuong, whose
elitist, capitalist Vin empire chafes with
some of the ruling Communist Party’s
old guard. In 2019, Vuong’s younger
brother was sentenced to three years
for bribery, and a purge of wealthy ty-
coons has gathered pace since, mirror-
ing a similar campaign in China. “If he
is successful overseas, and especially in
the U.S., that will strengthen Vuong’s
70 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
bargaining power in Vietnam and en-
hance his political status,” says Hiep.
Known for shunning the limelight
and demanding high standards, Vuong
is also a champion of women in a region
where sexism is notoriously rife, espe-
cially in business. Four of VinGroup’s
six vice chairpersons are women, includ-
ing Thuy, who joined VinGroup from the
now defunct Lehman Brothers invest-
ment bank, where she was vice presi-
dent covering Asian markets. Asked
about Vuong’s leadership style, Thuy
replies, “Vision, strategy, discipline,
and a lot of humanity . . . We only do
things that have a big social impact.” For
Huong, Vuong is “one of those visionary
entrepreneurs. Maybe you could com-
pare him to a Vietnamese Elon Musk.”
It’s an obvious comparison given
Vuong’s increasingly laser-like focus on
EVs. In December 2019, VinGroup sold
off its VinMart chain of convenience
stores. Last May, VinGroup announced
the shuttering of its consumer-electronic
arm, VinSmart, despite having secured
17% of the domestic smartphone mar-
ket by then and marketing four mod-
els in the U.S. through AT&T. Instead,
the conglomerate said it wanted to
“mobilize all resources” into VinFast.
As the pandemic rumbled on, with
borders closed and even domestic tour-
ism curtailed, the group’s VinPearl re-
sort on Hon Tre Island became an en-
gineering hub. Over a thousand VinFast
engineers and their families were en-
sconced on the island from May to Oc-
tober 2021 to work together uninter-
rupted 24/7. “At least we had the golf
course to occasionally play on!” says
Hoang Vu Nguyen, VinFast chief dep-
uty of power train and a Ford veteran. It
was here the differences of VinGroup’s
‘We think that
we can be as good
as anybody in
the world.’
—THUY LE, CEO OF VINFAST
working style became apparent. Rather
than waiting for layers of local, regional,
and international management to
greenlight decisions, “as a chief deputy,
I have direct communication with our
CEO. The approval layer is almost flat.”
It Is, of course, symbolic that
Vuong’s first venture since returning
from Ukraine became the hub for his
new foray overseas. Given Vuong’s ties
with both Russia and Ukraine, his per-
spective on Vladimir Putin’s Feb. 24
full-scale invasion has been subject
to much conjecture. Vuong, who de-
clined an interview request, has not
commented publicly on the war in
Ukraine, though a close confidant says
he is “heartbroken.” Retaining deep
ties with both nations, VinGroup has
helped arrange visas for Russians who
have faced European travel restrictions.
Vuong’s discretion mirrors that of
Vietnam’s government, which has long
rooted its security in maintaining rela-
tions with all great powers, and is es-
pecially wary of enraging the Asian su-
perpower to its north. For Vietnam’s
leaders, Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was
seen as “validation of their approach to
China,” says Alexander Vuving, a pro-
fessor at the Asia Pacific Center for Se-
curity Studies in Hawaii. For Hanoi, the
lesson of Kyiv’s flirtation with the West
was that it jeopardized the nation’s sov-
ereignty and security. “They know their
position next to China is very similar.”
Still, that neutrality has been buf-
feted by the invasion. Vietnam still pur-
chases around 80% of military hardware
from Russia, and it abstained on the
U.N. motion to condemn Russia’s inva-
sion. Yet it is an uncomfortable position
for Vietnam’s leaders, and investments
like VinFast’s North Carolina factory
that build goodwill in the U.S. Congress
offer a welcome counterweight.
VinFast’s U.S. investment “serves
the geopolitical objectives of Vietnam,
which is to cooperate with the U.S.,
boost ties, and balance trade,” says
Vuving. A touted U.S. IPO for VinFast,
for one, is possible only with the explicit
approval of the Vietnamese Communist
Party. “The Vietnamese government has
been super supportive,” says Calvert.
Geopolitics underpins the U.S. posi-
tion too. As Washington’s relations with

Beijing enter a deep freeze, the White
House is keen to cement ties across the
Asia-Pacific region—even though, po-
litically at least, China and Vietnam are
very similar beasts: regimes ruled by
communist parties with scant respect
for rule of law or human rights. Vietnam
currently holds at least 208 political
prisoners, according to the 88 Project,
a rights watchdog that has documented
“a concerted crackdown on dissent that
has worsened in recent years.”
A key difference, of course, is that
China’s ambitions on the global stage
present a direct challenge to U.S. hege-
mony. President Xi Jinping’s avowed de-
sire to reclaim “center stage in the world”
undermines American interests from
Europe to the Pacific, Latin America
to Africa, most egregiously spotlighted
by his backing of Putin’s invasion. On
Feb. 4, the House of Representatives
passed the America COMPETES Act
to better challenge China technologi-
cally, economically, and diplomatically.
“If you’re Xi Jinping, you have to make
the world safe for autocrats,” one top
State Department official tells TIME.
Any geostrategic ambitions Viet-
nam harbors are reserved for its own
△
Assembly robots put together
car bodies at the VinFast
manufacturing plant on July 6
neighborhood, chiefly retaining influ-
ence in Laos and Cambodia. “China is
competing strategically with the United
States; Vietnam is cooperating strate-
gically with the United States,” says
Vuving. Vietnam also frequently clashes
with Beijing over disputed islands in
the resource-rich South China Sea, and
memories of China’s ill-fated invasion
of 1979 burn brighter than those of
American misadventure in the region.
Today, approval of the U.S. among Viet-
namese stands at a staggering 84%.
It is comfort born of knowing its
place in the world. While China’s leaders
leverage the “century of humiliation”
wrought by colonial powers to justify a
resurgent and toxic nationalism, Viet-
nam has no such baggage; over the past
century, this plucky nation has bested
French, American, and Chinese invad-
ers. Vietnam is under no illusions about
who it is: the toughest, scrappiest little
guy in a rough neighborhood. But can
its premier company compete with the
might of Tesla? Given the scale of the
nascent EV market, it might not have
to. “The real competition of EVs like
VinFast are not Tesla,” says Stephanie
Brinley, principal analyst at S&P Global
Mobility. “The real competition is
internal-combustion-engine owners,
getting those guys to jump on board.”
VinFast and Vietnam are confident
that they can. On a cruise for VinFast
investors tracing the jagged limestone
karsts of northern Vietnam’s Ha Long
Bay, a musician in silk ao dai strums a
whining version of the Eagles’ “Hotel
California” on the single-stringed
zither, as a DJ cranks up a thumping
bass track. It’s a scene that telegraphs
where this Southeast Asian nation
now wants to be: a business-friendly,
tech-savvy industrial powerhouse.
The next South Korea, if you will, an
ambition that feels explicit, given the
DJ’s K-pop-inspired peroxide mop. “A
lot of people in Vietnam take pride in
VinFast, and they want to support the
project, and they want us to be suc-
cessful,” says Thuy. To electrify Amer-
ica’s “dark desert highway” with Viet-
nam’s red star. —With reporting by
EloisE Barry/london 
71
Behar, backstage
with guest co-host
Ana Navarro, just
signed a new three-
year contract, at 79
PHOTOGR APH BY
PETER FISHER
FOR TIME
 C U LT U R E

No Filter
After 25 years on The View, Joy Behar knows
the strong reaction she provokes in people.
She’s fine with it
By Belinda Luscombe
C U LT U R E

P
eople have many issues wiTh Joy Behar, BuT
here is one that has gotten scandalously slight atten-
tion. Joy Behar is a bad driver. A person sitting in the
back of her SUV to, say, drive a short distance on flat
roads, will get nauseated, which will significantly im-
pede that person’s ability to carry out such journalis-
tic duties as noticing whether Behar stops and starts
so much because in two months she’ll be 80 and her
reaction time has slowed, or because she doesn’t care
how she makes people feel.
The View co-host has agreed to go yard-sale shopping near her home
in the wealth-soaked Hamptons area of Long Island. Behar, the publicist
says, loves yard-sale shopping. But she doesn’t seem that thrilled. We are
among the first to arrive at a modest spread in Sag Harbor, and the home-
owners appear a little confused that the pile of castoffs in their garage has
somehow attracted a celebrity. Behar keeps her sunglasses on and does not
linger. “Do I know you?” someone asks. “I don’t know,” says Behar in that
voice. “Was it that night in Paris?” It’s a perfect answer; everyone laughs,
and yet it’s abundantly clear the conversation is over.
Thus loosened up, Behar leans over a stroller. “Is this doll for sale?” she
asks, before doing a pretend double take. “Oh. It’s a baby.” There is an ap-
preciative titter from the parents, and one gets the sense that this is a line
that will be repeated at birthday parties for years to come. Unless of course
the parents are fans of former President Donald Trump, in which case there
will be headlines on Fox News: Joy Behar Disses infanT!
Finding a compelling and amusing thing to say on demand and with-
out offending anybody is a high-wire act, and Behar has been walking that
tightrope on camera now for 25 years, more or less successfully—although
often less. Just days after our yard-sale trip, she told Lindsey Granger, a
Black gun-rights supporter and guest host on The View, that U.S. gun laws
would change “once Black people get guns.”
As if a drawbridge had been lowered, the critics swarmed in. “I think Joy
Behar is just ridiculous,” Byron Donalds, a Representative from Florida’s
19th District, said to Fox News Digital on June 10. “What she said is a lie,”
former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich told Sean Hannity. Other con-
servative pundits call her racist or at least ignorant, observing that 25% of
African Americans own guns and the number is rising, which led progres-
sive media to point out that white people outpace any other race in gun own- sudden, that picture became verboten.”
ership. Another day, another spat sparked by a grandmother from Brooklyn. After the interview, The View’s
Behar claims her comments are never designed to provoke. “I just say publicist, who earns every dollar just
what I say,” she says over takeout Caesar salad in her comfortable but not looking out for Behar (let alone co-hosts
very lavish Manhattan apartment. “And then they’re upset with me. I’m Whoopi Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, and
their favorite target over at Breitbart and Fox.” Sara Haines), sent me a follow-up com-
Just saying what she says gives her attackers plenty to work with. She ment from Behar. “I would never do that
suggested former Vice President Mike Pence might be mentally ill because now. I understand it’s offensive.”
he said Jesus spoke to him. She accused Republicans of being “against ba- In all, there is more than enough
bies” over the formula shortage. She called GOP Representative Lauren material from both sides of the politi-
Boebert’s Christmas photo (which featured children with guns) “obscene.” cal fence to mount a campaign to ban-
But she also frequently says things that could rile her allies. She made ish Behar to the Hamptons for good.
a lewd joke when Carl Nassib became the first active NFL player to come And yet she occupies the same catbird
out as gay. She made fun of a nurse for wearing a stethoscope. She even seat she has for almost 2½ decades. In
has her own blackface incident. In her youth Behar went to a Halloween May, she renewed her contract with
party as what she calls “a beautiful African woman.” The View, which leads the ratings for
“For me, it was like, ‘Look at how pretty I can look as a woman dressed daytime talk shows, for another three
PETER FISHER FOR TIME

like this,’” she says. “It wasn’t anything close to blackface. It was bronzer, years, for a reported $3 million a year.
which I used with my natural curly hair. And the Black community had my Goldberg had to sit out hosting The
back because they understand what blackface is.” She adds that a Black pro- View for a couple of weeks for saying
ducer was the first to put the photo on the air 20 years ago. “And then all of a the Holocaust “was not about race,” but
74 Time August 8/August 15, 2022

△ high school English. What she enjoyed
“My whole career has been me
being me,” says Behar. “So why
would I change it? It’s the thing
that works.”
Behar has mostly remained immune to
any punishment beyond offering regu-
lar apologies, some of which, she has
openly admitted, she doesn’t mean.
Meghan McCain, the most recent
conservative host, has cited Behar’s
cutting remarks as one reason she left
the show. (Following a long search, for-
mer Trump Administration spokesper-
son Alyssa Farah Griffin has reportedly
been chosen as the new occupant of the
rightmost chair, though a View spokes-
person would not confirm this.) In an
era when most women on TV still find
their opportunities drying up after 45,
Behar is She Who Cannot Be Canceled.
“The View needs her more than she
needs to do it,” says Ramin Setoodeh,
co–editor in chief of Variety and au-
thor of a book about the show, Ladies
Who Punch, “because she’s such an es-
tablished brand. She has been a fixture
on daytime television almost as long as
Regis Philbin or Oprah Winfrey.”
To some conservaTives, that
Behar has not been canceled yet is
evidence of hypocrisy. But it may ac-
tually be evidence of something else:
that Behar plays a useful role in the
current media ecosystem. Her age,
willingness to offend, and impen-
etrable hide make her a sturdy dart-
board in the rowdy dive bar political
discourse has become. Conservatives
throw sharp objects her way to whip
up outrage (and traffic) among their
audience, and progressives, including
Behar, decline to award any points.
One of the reasons the darts don’t
score is that Behar, unlike, for instance,
Ronan Farrow or Anderson Cooper,
took the hard way up. Born Josephine
Occhiuto in Brooklyn, she grew up in
a walk-up tenement building. In the
summer, she would put her pillow in
the fridge to cool it down. “And then in
the winter,” she says, “you were freez-
ing because the heat never made it up
to the fifth floor.” Her mother operated
a sewing machine in a local shop and
her father drove a truck for Coca-Cola.
What the family lacked in resources,
it made up for in affection—and ec-
centricity. “My mother used to say,
‘Make sure you sweep the house thor-
oughly or you’ll marry a bald man,’”
says Behar. Her father was a gambler—
a habit he couldn’t afford. (His daugh-
ter can and does, mostly playing black-
jack and craps in Atlantic City, N.J.)
Her grandmother and two unmarried
aunts lived two floors down, and she
was the adored only child of the clan,
regularly called upon to entertain the
adults. “I cannot say that I had a dys-
functional family,” she says. “I’m more
like Mel Brooks, who basically said of his
family that they were crazy about me,
and I just wanted to get more of that.”
She was the first in her family to go
to college; before long she was mar-
ried with a daughter, and teaching
most was working with students who’d
had an entanglement with law enforce-
ment. “Kids would get out of prison
after setting their parents on fire,” she
would later joke, “and they would be
sent to me to learn the difference be-
tween who and whom.”
A brush with mortality from an ec-
topic pregnancy brought her the real-
ization that she had only one life to get
what she wanted, and what she wanted
was an audience. Newly divorced from
Joseph Behar, she began to do stand-up
in the early ’80s, when no venue would
book more than one female comic
per night. “Stand-up comedy, espe-
cially for a woman in those days, was a
particularly suicidal occupation,” says
Behar. “I did some garbage-y gigs for,
you know, a hundred bucks, where I had
to drive to the bowels of New Jersey. I’d
75
C U LT U R E
get lost on the Jersey Turnpike.” She
had inconsistent success, but it taught
her a lot, including how to handle peo-
ple who don’t like you and how to keep
going when jokes don’t land. And it of-
fered a reward she did not expect.
“You have a power when you have
that microphone,” she says. “People
don’t like it. They don’t like it that I’m
a powerful person on The View, say-
ing things that they don’t like, but I’m
sorry, that is where I’m at. I’m a power-
ful person on The View; I was a power-
ful person as a comedian holding a mi-
crophone. Too bad.”
One Of the less garbage-y gigs Behar
scored was Milton Berle’s 89th birthday.
She did a bit about how hard it was to
attract men. Salman Rushdie was under
a fatwa and had married three times,
but women still couldn’t get guys. (Ac-
tually, Behar was dating middle-school
math teacher Steve Janowitz, whom
she eventually married, and who is, as
her mother predicted, a little bit bald.)
Barbara Walters, then plotting a new
TV show made by and for intelligent
women, was among the guests. She de-
cided to give Behar, then 54, a shot.
Behar was hired to be the comic
relief—she did Monica Lewinsky
jokes—but during the Bush Administra-
tion, she started to develop a more artic-
ulated political position. “Her persona in
our culture has evolved as politics have
evolved,” says Setoodeh. “She didn’t
start out as a polarizing figure or even a
political figure. She was the comedian.”
One of the keys to Behar’s longev-
ity is that she takes nothing person-
76 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
Behar doing stand-up; checking Donald Trump’s
hair in 2003; with Betty White; and jousting with
Sunny Hostin and Meghan McCain
ally. She has had two of her own shows
canceled and was even let go from The
View in 2013. “I was glad to be fired,”
she says. “I basically was sick of the
show at that point for some reason, I
don’t even remember why.” Accord-
ing to Setoodeh, while the also-fired
Elisabeth Hasselbeck wept, Behar was
blasé, and offered to leave that day.
“She doesn’t hold a grudge,” says
Hostin, adding, “I think because she
doesn’t remember what happened the
day before.” Her co-hosts often remind
her of a recent insult leveled against her
and she just shrugs it off. “That’s how
she’s been able to deal with this show.
She just leaves it at the table and then
moves on for another day.”
By 2015, The View’s ratings were
slipping, Trump was running for Presi-
dent, and a new slate of producers were
handed the reins. They asked Behar to
come back. “I just knew that we needed
to get back into the cultural conversa-
tion,” says Hilary Estey McLoughlin,
the executive producer who champi-
oned her return. “And I knew she was
going to be the person who could ac-
tually do that. She’s always been the
person who says what the audience
is thinking but is afraid to say.” Thus
began the feud between Trump and
Behar, who had been on good enough
terms that in 2003, in one of his 18 pre-
presidential appearances on The View,
he let her pull his hair. (It was also the
outlet on which he made his notorious
quip about dating Ivanka.)
Behar had been to Trump’s second
wedding; she’d had Melania on her
HLN show to tout her line of jewelry
(and echo her husband’s false claims
about Barack Obama’s birth certifi-
cate). Goldberg too has said he was her
friend. But Trump the candidate was
not a man Goldberg and Behar recog-
nized; they pulled out all the stops in
their coverage. The ratings rose. So did
the negative attention on Behar.
Goldberg took heat as well, but the
attacks on her were perhaps softened by
the fact she was an established celebrity.
Despite her many years on the air, Behar
seemed to come out of nowhere, yet had
the nerve to deliver opinions as if they
were worth something.
As BehAr’s mOckery of Trump gath-
ered steam, so did her detractors. There
are now a dozen anti-Behar pages on
Facebook (most of them tiny). She is
a constant presence in stories on Fox
News’ digital outlet, and they sit atop a
viper’s nest of comments. Kid Rock re-
leased a video in which he makes an ob-
scene gesture at her face. Former White
House spokesperson Kayleigh McEnany
compared the President to her in May.
“Biden sounds a lot like Joy Behar,” she
said on the Fox News show Outnum-
bered. “It’s never a good thing to sound
like Joyless Behar.”
Behar professes to be indifferent to
the invective: “I don’t go looking to see
what they say about what I say.” Mostly,
she claims, she’s trying to land a joke.
But humor can cut both ways. “Be-
cause she’s funny, she’s more threaten-
ing,” says Susie Essman, who came up on
the New York City comedy circuit with
Behar. “Not only can she give her opin-
ion, but she can zing, and when you can
 zing, it’s more powerful.” Funny, more-
over, is in the eye of the beholder: “If
you don’t hear any laughter,” said right-
leaning comedian Greg Gutfeld recently
during a show with no studio audience,
“just pretend you’re watching Joy Behar
do stand-up.”
It probably doesn’t help her image
among her male detractors that Behar
fits the mold of other reputed scolds—
mothers-in-law, ex-wives, librarians,
grandmothers, grammar- correcting
English teachers, female surgeons gen-
eral. Her voice has been referred to as
“a fine Italian whine,” but also “a decent
paint remover.”
But ultimately, say Behar and her co-
hosts, she’s untouchable, because she
means well. “This whole idea of can-
celing people for what they say, I’d say
the answer to that is, What was your in-
tention?” says Behar. “Everything that I
got into trouble for was not intentional.”
On the nurses: “I didn’t understand
what I was saying, to tell you the truth,
right? That’s the thing about the show,
it could be an accident in the moment,
you’re looking at something, you say
something, and then it’s taken com-
pletely out of context.” Everybody,
she contends, knows she’s pro-nurses.
On Pence: “I had no intention of deni-
E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N ; A B C ; G E T T Y I M A G E S (2)
grating anyone’s religion. I was talking
about—that was almost a joke.” After
sponsors began to pull out of the show,
she apologized to him, ex-Catholic to
ex-Catholic. “He understood what I was
doing,” she says.
It’s demonstrably true that Behar is
unguarded. In the course of a post-show
interview, she is happy to talk about
having Botox and fillers, the fact that
she’s started drooling, a weeklong diet
that did nothing, that she has been in
therapy since high school, and her hopes
that her husband still “gropes me a little
bit.” She’ll even talk money. Somebody
stopped her on the street recently and
accused her of being a socialist and hat-
ing the rich. “So, I’m not a socialist,” she
says. “I own a couple of houses.”
One Of the facebOOk pages, Joy
Behar the Worst Show on TV (with 85
followers), is run by Joshua Maroney,
a 43-year-old oil-refinery worker from
Smackover, Ark. Maroney, who has
never voted for anyone, including
Trump, is probably not The View’s key
demographic, but he often works night
shifts, so he’s home during the day and
catches the show. Maroney doesn’t post
much, but he says he gets “thousands”
of messages from like-minded folks.
Behar first irked Maroney—and this
may sound familiar—by running her
mouth. “She straight said I was ignorant
because of where I lived,” he says. “And
she didn’t say it like once for a 30-second
blip. She said it for months. I live [in the
South] so I must not be educated.” But as
he talks, it becomes clear his beef is not
really with Behar. He estimates he’s lost
26 friends to suicide. He takes 16 or 17
pills a day after “getting rolled up twice
in Afghanistan.” His memory is jumbled
after three concussions. His right hand
doesn’t work well, and he thinks “it
would be nice if I can go less than 200
miles from my house to a psychiatrist,
which I’ve asked for numerous times.”
Behar is the repository for Maroney’s
frustration because of the different re-
turns their labor and skills have gener-
ated, not just in income—though there
is that—but in their ability to get heard,
to get people to care about the issues
each considers important. He acknowl-
edges that this is not Behar’s fault, but
thinks she should care more. “It’s the
out-of-touch part that bothers me.”
Being the scapegoat for America’s
most pernicious difficulties is quite a
lot for a comedian to carry. Being able
to opine authoritatively on subjects as
wide-ranging as how to fix America
(abolish the Electoral College), who
makes the best TV (the Brits), and
how to appear on a talk show (don’t
hog the ball) is quite a lot to expect of
a woman on the cusp of her ninth de-
cade. And being funny on live TV in an
era when it’s possible to get slapped in
the face for a misplaced joke is not for
the fainthearted.
But Behar doesn’t seem to mind. “I’m
sort of on extra time now. I don’t have
to work. I don’t have to be on television.
I don’t have to have the microphone.
They want to give it to me, I’ll take it.”
She’s heard all the insults. She doesn’t
care what you say about her looks or
her jokes or her opinions. Behar is legit-
imately a bad driver—even her husband
thinks so. It’s not that she doesn’t care
about how people feel; she just doesn’t
care about how they feel about her. As
we leave the yard sale, I ask if she will
miss the fame when inevitably she can’t
be on The View anymore. “Not really,”
she shrugs. “You know what they say—
the show must go off.” —With reporting
by Julia Zorthian 
77
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Time Off

CHANGING TV
FROM THE
RESERVATION
BY ANDREW R. CHOW

Sterlin Harjo’s communal

approach to Reservation Dogs
has made the comedy more
than just a must-see TV show

THE LAST WHITE MAN A GAY ROM-COM FROM RON HOWARD TELLS A
REIMAGINES KAFKA SEX AND THE CITY’S CREATOR THRILLING RESCUE STORY

PHOTO-ILLUSTR ATION BY SAVANA OGBURN FOR TIME 79

TIME OFF OPENER

W
hile brainsTorming funny scenes for
the second season of his FX comedy series
Reservation Dogs, Sterlin Harjo turned to the
memory of his grandmother’s deathbed. It’s
not that Harjo was callous about her death—far from it. He
had sat by the ailing matriarch for a week with his extended
family before she died, 11 years ago. While she slept, they
sang songs and swapped stories into the wee hours of the
morning. When she finally roused one day for a cup of cof-
fee, they sat around, cracking jokes and making her laugh.
When she died a couple of days later, Harjo grieved, but
he also felt a sense of closure. “It’s a beautiful way to go:
having a community that loves you, singing for you, help-
ing you as you exit this place,” Harjo said during a Zoom
interview from his Tulsa, Okla., office. “It brings out these
better versions of who we are.”
For Season 2 of Reservation Dogs, Harjo and actor-
writer Devery Jacobs co-wrote an episode based on this
experience. In the episode, the show’s rural Oklahoma
Native community—inspired by Harjo’s own Oklahoma
upbringing—comes together to surround an elder in her
last days. For such a heavy topic, it’s surprisingly funny and
uplifting, with filthy jokes told, truces gently forged, and
strong, idiosyncratic voices arising from every corner of the
room. It’s this penchant for bold, communal storytelling—
buoyed by themes and story lines that might seem counter- △
intuitive to mainstream audiences—that makes Reservation Devery Jacobs don’t do much: they sell meat pies,
Dogs one of the most compelling shows on television. And and Sterlin Harjo scrap with neighboring crews, hunt
its arrival has coincided with other Native stories thriving filming Season 2 of deer, and fail driver’s tests. (And yes,
on the small screen, from the Peacock sitcom Rutherford Reservation Dogs they love Quentin Tarantino, as the
Falls to AMC’s thriller Dark Winds. title’s homage to Reservoir Dogs sug-
Critics, fans, and film icons have agreed on Reservation gests.) They’re joined once in a while
Dogs’ quality and originality: it won Peabody and Gotham by a stoner uncle, a naive policeman,
Awards and received the “universal acclaim” tag on Meta- and the spirit of a 19th century warrior
critic. Following the show’s snub at the announcement who is far goofier than the stoic (and
of this year’s Emmy nominations on July 12, Guillermo often racist) archetype familiar to au-
del Toro tweeted, “Nominated or not, RESERVATION diences since the advent of movies.
DOGS is one of the best things on the tube.” Harjo, who is Seminole and Mus-
But Harjo isn’t making Reservation Dogs for the ac- cogee Creek, grew up in Holdenville,
colades. He wants to use it to tell real stories, and to give Okla., getting into similarly mun-
other Native filmmakers a pathway to success. He wants to dane and hilarious hijinks. He initially
do for his Oklahoma what Matt Damon and Ben Affleck did wrote Reservation Dogs as his own ver-
for South Boston in Good Will Hunting, he says: to lift up a sion of Friday; just as Ice Cube and DJ
community that most outsiders hadn’t considered worthy Pooh wrote the laid-back 1995 stoner
of heroic main characters. And he’s doing it by integrat- comedy in part to counteract the vio-
ing his collaborators and community into the process in lent reputation of South Central L.A.,
ways that few creators do. His unorthodox approach might Harjo hoped to show a funnier and
serve as a template for other underrepresented groups as wholly modern side of Oklahoma
they strive to generate lasting growth, respect, and success “rezzy” kids. Many of his experiences
through nuanced representation onscreen. growing up are depicted directly in
“We can’t leave it up to Hollywood to give people the the show. “Mark Schwartzbard, our
opportunity, because they don’t know these people,” Harjo director of photography, always jokes
says. “We are part of this community, and it makes every- that we’re making a really big-budget
thing better if I bring people along.” documentary,” Harjo says.
While Friday is a crucial touch-
The hearT of ReseRvation Dogs is a group of four teen- stone for Harjo, it’s where his L.A.
age friends who live on an Oklahoma reservation. Like a aspirations end. For years, the film-
younger, boonies-set version of the Seinfeld quartet, they maker was told that he needed to
80 Time August 8/August 15, 2022

move west in order to make it in the
industry. Instead, Harjo remained in
Tulsa, making movies on shoestring
budgets about Native characters. They
garnered critical praise but minuscule
audiences. Harjo defined success by
whether his community liked them,
and whether their critical acclaim en-
sured that he could make the next one.
Then his longtime friend Taika
Waititi—the Maori Oscar-winning di-
rector he’d met through the Sundance
Institute, who now helms blockbust-
ers like Thor: Love and Thunder—
helped him land a pilot for Reserva-
tion Dogs on FX. (Waititi is also a
co-creator and an executive producer
on Reservation Dogs.) Harjo could
have used the opportunity to “pro-
fessionalize”: to hold casting calls on
Hollywood back-lot stages, seek out
brand-name TV directors, maybe add
a relatable white main character as a
surrogate for non-Native viewers.
Instead, Harjo defiantly dug even
deeper into his roots. During our in-
terview, he holds aloft a shirt that he
printed for his production company:
we don’t give a sh-t how you do
SHANE BROWN — F X
it in l.a. He scouted for acting talent
on reservations, took a chance on first-
time actors like Lane Factor, and hired
half his crew from his home state. Be-
fore shoots, he asked people from the
community to sing Native songs, pray,
and give a blessing.
These decisions were not just sym-
bolic but also transformative for much
of the cast and crew, who were used
to grinding through cutthroat on-set
atmospheres. “I’ve done shows in
L.A.; there’s a sense that people are
machines at every level,” says Tazbah
Chavez, who directed her first ever
episode of television for Reservation
Dogs’ debut season, and has since been
promoted to co–executive producer.
“When people feel respected and
taken care of, the work each person
puts in comes out in what you see.”
The show’s uTTer disinTeresT in
typical Hollywood storytelling is evi-
dent from the jump. Speech cadences
and punch lines land in unexpected
places; narratives meander; magic is
treated as a matter of fact. The show
nevertheless thrived in front of a
wider audience. TIME’s Judy Berman
was one of the many critics who called
its first season “one of the year’s best
new comedies,” praising its mix of
“absurd humor with gritty realism.”
But Harjo worried that the show’s
very success would breed compla-
cency. When it was greenlighted for a
second season last fall, he doubled the
writers’ room from six to 11 and mostly
abandoned the main plot device. He
then challenged this expanded group
to reject previous winning formulas in
favor of stranger experimentation, and
to bring themselves and their stories
fully into the process.
“We almost fell into ‘We know
what we’re good at,’ without tak-
ing the next step and saying, ‘Is that
too easy?’” he says. “Season 1 was on
a trajectory. So how do we flip that
and mess all of that up?” The writ-
‘We can’t leave it up
to Hollywood to give
people the opportunity,
because they don’t
know these people.’
—STERLIN HARJO, RESERVATION DOGS CREATOR
ers’ room spent its first six weeks just
swapping stories and spitballing ideas.
“We would throw out all the things we
know in our lives and our communi-
ties’ lives: ‘One time, my auntie did
this,’ ‘I used to [install] roof[s] back in
the day,’ going to Indian health confer-
ences to party,” Chavez says. “What
you see reflected onscreen, they’re all
weaved together.”
While in production, Harjo kept
the creative pressure on, ripping up
scripts at the last minute—including
the season finale—and challenging
himself, his writers, and his actors to
rely on their improv chops to forge
less expected and more honest sto-
ries. The result is a season filled with
curveballs, from the aforementioned
death episode to ritualistic Tom Petty
sing-alongs to the integration of Na-
than Apodaca, the jovial skateboard-
ing, Ocean Spray–drinking TikTok
star. (“There’s not a lot of Native Tik-
Tok stars out there,” Harjo says.)
Some high-profile guests pop in
for scenes, including Marc Maron and
Megan Mullally. But Harjo’s focus was
squarely on two things: bringing his
communities’ stories to life, and giv-
ing new opportunities to his cast and
crew. “I was the person no one opened
doors for,” he says. “So it’s my duty
and my job to open those doors.”
Devery Jacobs, who plays the co-
lead role of Elora Danan, nabbed her
first TV writing credit this season.
“I nearly had a heart attack,” she says.
“But I felt so welcome and encour-
aged in that room. And so many of us
wouldn’t have gotten these opportuni-
ties had it not been for Sterlin putting
his hand out and bringing up his com-
munity with him.”
After years of seeing themselves
mostly portrayed as stoic or tragic, the
Native filmmaking community is fi-
nally getting a chance to show off its
range. Chavez, who has directed seven
more episodes of TV since Harjo first
gave her a shot last year, hopes the
movement will continue to spiral out-
ward. The various shows on air today,
she says, “are reservation-based shows
that are nothing alike. We’ve shown
our stories are viable and universal—
and I hope we can keep making what-
ever we want to make.” 
81
TIME OFF REVIEWS
BOOKS
Questioning a
radical change
BY CADY LANG
THE OPENING OF MOHSIN HAMID’S THE LAST
White Man, arriving Aug. 2, invokes Franz Kafka’s
Gregor Samsa—but with a metamorphosis fitting for
the racially charged era in which we live. “One morn-
ing,” Hamid writes, “Anders, a white man, woke up
to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown.”
At first Anders’ surreal transformation upends
his world; he holes up at home, calls in sick to work,
and swathes himself in a hoodie and sunglasses to
hide his skin when he ventures into the world. He
keeps the change a secret from everyone except
his longtime friend turned new lover, Oona, who’s
not as shocked by the shift as she is fascinated by
it—for her, Anders’ situation is a worthy diversion
from grieving her late twin brother, lost to sub-
stance abuse, and the exhaustive caretaking of her
internet-obsessed mother.
For Anders, although his newly brown skin is a
constant physical reminder that he’s no longer who he
used to be, the greatest change may be in his psyche.
He’s now acutely aware of otherness and being
82 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022
observed, how he moves in the world and how he
takes up space. When he returns to work, where
his boss tells him brusquely that he would “kill
himself” if he experienced this transformation,
he’s both drawn to and repulsed by the only other
dark-skinned employee, who, unlike him, has al-
ways known what it’s like to be treated as both
invisible and hypervisible. When Anders drives,
he follows traffic rules fastidiously, so as not to be
pulled over. Appearing with Oona in public draws
undue scrutiny. And after he reveals his new self
to his stoic, ailing father, who gives him a rifle, he’s
apprehensive about using it, heavy with the rec-
ognition that “to be seen as a threat, as dark as he
was, was to risk one day being obliterated.”
Soon, Anders isn’t the only one pondering
these issues. Gradually, his unnamed but primar-
ily white town, and even the country at large, are
rife with newly dark-skinned people, all reckon-
ing with their prejudices and preconceptions,
both private and public, of brownness and other-
ness. Hamid, who has twice been short-listed for
the Booker Prize (in 2007 for The Reluctant Fun-
damentalist and in 2017 for Exit West), is less con-
cerned with how or why this change is happening
than he is with probing a deep-seated and deeply
problematic obsession with whiteness.
ALTHOUGH THE AUTHOR, who was born in
Pakistan, initially came up with the concept for
Anders’ transformation after experiencing racial
profiling following the Sept. 11 attacks, there’s
no mistaking the profound influence of the past
few years on the work. Oona’s mother frequents
QAnon-esque internet forums that drum up her
fervor to protect “our people,” making her hor-
△ ror that much greater when Oona and then she
The Last herself transform. Militant white mobs rioting
White Man in the streets to protest the change bring to mind
is Hamid’s the white-supremacist “Unite the Right” rally
fifth novel and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
The conceit of race transformation is hardly
new; it’s long been used by Black novelists to
challenge and critique the outsize role of racial
identity in the world. From George Schuyler’s
seminal satire Black No More, in which the pro-
tagonist changes his skin color from Black to
white with a medical procedure, to Percival
Everett’s darkly hilarious Erasure, in which a
Black writer participates in a different kind of
transformation by sardonically playing to racial
stereotypes to great success, fantastical treat-
ments of race have long served to underscore just
how absurd it is that this social construct should
wield so much power. Hamid’s novel follows in
this legacy, challenging readers to consider the
ways in which something as superficial as the
color of one’s skin holds sway in their lives. 
 TELEVISION
Sex and the newly single gay man
BY JUDY BERMAN
One Of the Oldest criticisms Of
the Sex and the City franchise is that it
isn’t really about women. According to
this theory, the four main characters are
secretly avatars for gay men like creator
Darren Star and executive producer Mi-
chael Patrick King. Embedded in this
otherwise reductive assumption is the
understanding that when SATC debuted,
in 1998, it would’ve been impossible,
even on HBO, to make an equally blunt
show about queer sexuality.
Now, after two American iterations
of Queer as Folk and with King over-
seeing Carrie Bradshaw’s future in And
Just Like That, Star has made a TV-MA
rom-com whose central characters re-
ally are gay men. Co-created with Jef-
frey Richman and starring Neil Patrick
Harris, Uncoupled chronicles the mis-
adventures of middle-aged men seeking
men in Manhattan. It’s a lighter, more
entertaining show than King’s inert
SATC sequel, but one marked by similar
defects, from overly stylized dialogue
to underdeveloped characters to a bad
case of affluenza.
When we meet Harris’ Michael, a
real estate agent, he’s in bed with Colin
(Tuc Watkins), his finance-guy partner
of 17 years, on the morning of Colin’s
U N C O U P L E D : N E T F L I X ; PA P E R G I R L S : A M A Z O N P R I M E
△
Gilles Marini and Harris in a familiar tale with a few key details switched up
50th birthday. The same day, Colin
quietly moves out of their apartment.
Then he dashes Michael’s hopes of
reconciliation—in a text message. △
Michael’s single friends drag him
into a gay dating scene reshaped by
Grindr and PrEP. In SATC terms, art TELEVISION
dealer Stanley (Brooks Ashmanskas) is
the lonely, career-driven Miranda and
TV weatherman Billy (Emerson Brooks)
the promiscuous Samantha. Which is
fitting: Michael is equal parts vanilla
Charlotte and self-dramatizing Car-
rie. Along with his work wife Suzanne
(Tisha Campbell) and their imperious,
superrich divorcée client Claire (Marcia
Gay Harden), these pals help Michael
realize he can be a handful.
Most characters are hollow arche-
types. And the Manhattan they inhabit,
where everyone is wealthy and talks
like they’re in a racy Neil Simon play,
feels badly dated. “Don’t you just love
New York?” gushes one man Michael
brings home. “Grocery shopping one
minute, hooking up with a hot guy the
next!” And just like that ... it’s as if the
last 24 years of sex and the city, gay and
straight, never happened.
UNCOUPLED comes to Netflix on July 29
83
TIME OFF MOVIES
REVIEW
A superb rescue story, with a
happy ending always in view
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
even Though we know The world isn’T suddenly
spinning faster, it’s hard to shake the feeling that time is
speeding up on us. In early summer 2018, 12 boys and their
assistant soccer coach were trapped for more than two
weeks in the flooded Tham Luang Nang Non cave in north-
ern Thailand, their situation becoming increasingly dire
as heavy rainfall threatened to engulf the cave’s chambers
completely. Volunteers from around the globe rushed to
help, but as the world watched and waited, it seemed in-
creasingly doubtful that the boys and their coach could be
brought out alive. Astonishingly, rescuers pulled it off.
Yet as joyful as that news event was, the world moved on
quickly, as it always does. That’s the wonder of Ron How-
ard’s vivid true-life drama Thirteen Lives: it suspends time
for just a few hours, allowing us to put our current preoccu-
pations on pause and marvel at just how extraordinary this
rescue operation was. If we didn’t know the ending, this
picture might be unbearably tense. Luckily, we have the
benefit of being able to read the future even as we watch
Thirteen Lives, and that leaves us free to enjoy Howard’s
crackerjack storytelling skills, not to mention the picture’s
bracing, casually heroic lead performances.
Colin Farrell and Viggo Mortensen play John Volanthen
and Rick Stanton, volunteer cave divers—who knew there
was such a thing?—from England who are adept at com-
plex rescues. When they arrive on the scene, they’re greeted
with distrust by the Royal Thai Navy SEALs entrusted
with the operation, particularly Commander Kiet (Thira
84 Time August 8/August 15, 2022
◁
Thirteen Lives
dramatizes a risky
real-life rescue
Chutikul). It doesn’t help that they
show up in middle-aged-dad gear, hav-
ing argued earlier about who took one
custard-cream biscuit too many from
the packet. As it turns out, they’re the
ones who locate the boys, after barely
skimming, in their bulky diving gear,
through a series of terrifyingly slen-
der underwater tunnels. “The old men
found the boys!” one of the SEALs ex-
claims in subtitled Thai upon their re-
turn. The “old” part is only half a joke.
But finding the trapped boys was
barely a start. Getting them out
seemed impossible, involving some
three hours of treacherous underwater
swimming. The solution finally settled
upon—requiring the specialized ex-
pertise of yet another rescue diver,
Joel Edgerton’s Harry Harris—was a
gamble, with potentially chilling con-
sequences. In case you don’t remem-
ber, or never knew, the specifics, they
won’t be spoiled here.
This story has been told on film be-
fore, notably in the 2021 documentary
The Rescue, which incorporated foot-
age shot by the Thai Navy SEALs dur-
ing the mission. Similarly, Thirteen
Lives stresses that Volanthen, Stanton,
and Harris, though they’re played by
movie stars, are just three links in the
complex chain that made this near-
miracle possible. One Thai diver died
during the rescue, and another later
succumbed to a blood infection he’d
contracted during the operation.
Howard is particularly sensitive
in his depiction of the boys’ fami-
lies, who waited outside the cave for
days on end, steeling themselves for
a tragic outcome. And the faces of the
If we didn’t boys themselves, alight with joy at
know the having been found by the divers after
10 harrowing days, tell you all you
ending, need to know about why the rescuers
this picture fought so hard to get them out. If you
might be can’t move heaven and earth, then you
move a little bit of water, with all your
unbearably strength, until the open sky comes
tense into view. 
 REVIEW
A thoroughly modern satire jabs
at podcast culture, and more
There’s so much To skewer in
the expensive-sneaker-wearing,
△
podcast-obsessed, swipe-left culture
of the young urban modern citizen
that it’s a wonder any writer-director
knows where to begin. But B.J. Novak
REVIEW covers a surprisingly wide swath of
territory in his directorial debut,
Vengeance. Novak himself stars as
Ben Manalowitz, a New York writer
who’s always hustling for the next
story. He gets a call informing him
that a woman he’d casually hooked
up with, Abilene, has died. Because
she’d led her family to believe he was
a serious boyfriend, he’s summoned
to West Texas for her funeral. There
he learns from Abilene’s brother, Ty
(Boyd Holbrook), that she might have
been murdered.
Ben doesn’t want to get involved—
until he smells a podcast idea. He con-
nects with a hotshot producer back in
New York, Issa Rae’s Eloise, and pro-
poses a series about, you know, the
death of American identity and stuff.
It will be called Dead White Girl.
Novak is a sly one, and though the
script is clever and the direction cer-
tainly serviceable, it’s his face that
T H I R T E E N L I V E S : M G M ; S H A R P S T I C K : U T O P I A ; V E N G E A N C E : F O C U S F E AT U R E S
△
Novak and Holbrook: turning a death into podcast gold
really holds you: with those half-
skeptical, half-trusting eyes, he has
the visage of a person who has prob-
ably always looked a bit like a little
old man, even as a baby. As Ben, he’s
a knowing naif, eagerly exploring the
desolate West Texas landscape in his
rented Prius. He learns the hard way
not to look down on Abilene’s fam-
ily, and he eats his first deep-fried
Twinkie. He absorbs words of wisdom
from a smooth-talking local record
producer, Quentin Sellers (Ashton
Kutcher), who spins a persuasive ar-
gument against the evils of Spotify’s
algorithms: “You’re just hearing your
voice played back at you. How are you
supposed to fall in love?”
But mostly Ben learns about the
necessity of listening to the needs of
other people, and not just for the sake
of a podcast. Vengeance is a small but
ambitious film, and the murder mys-
tery is its weakest element: Novak has
so many threads going that he doesn’t
quite know how to tie them up. But
he’s made a shrewd satire that’s a plea-
sure to watch. His observations are
quietly on the money. And he’s totally
right about Spotify. —s.z.
85
 TIME OFF RECOMMENDS

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86 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022

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C i S id hi d i f l l i id f b k L V LLC (“W ” “U ” “L V LLC”) i k i i

Adam Kinzinger The retiring GOP Congressman on what’s
next for the Jan. 6 hearings, when the party will ditch Donald
Trump, and his beef with House leader Kevin McCarthy
Have the hearings damaged
Donald Trump politically? And
was that a goal of the committee?
That wasn’t a goal. But I do think it’s
damaged him. That doesn’t mean
that he can’t be the Republican
nominee in 2024—and it doesn’t
mean that he can’t win. The goal of
the committee really was just to get
to the answers. We needed to get that
information out, as well as whatever
legislative recommendations. We’ve
also uncovered what I believe to be
various criminal acts, and I think the
Department of Justice has taken
interest in that.
Do you think the committee
should make a criminal referral to
the Justice Department? And if so,
which charges do you think would
be warranted? We need to finish our
investigation before we start doing
that. In terms of what the charges
are, I leave that to the prosecutors
that understand the justice system
far better than I do. But I can say th
on a generic level: if we get to a poin
where an attempted coup, even a
failed one, is not criminal—or there
are people who can give it a shot an
not fear retribution—that’s a conce
for this country.
What more does the committee
have to do before reconvening for
public hearings in September?
Leading up to the hearings, the
investigation team was quite busy
with interviews, following leads,
and gathering evidence. That will
be continuing in August. We’ll start
to have an eye toward writing that
preliminary report, but continuing
to chase down any lead. We still
have some questions with the Secre
Service, for instance.
What would be in the interim
report that wasn’t provided in
hearings? There will be a lot more
88 TIME August 8/August 15, 2022
10 QUESTIONS
evidence. We have basically two
hours in each hearing. What we’re
Do you think presenting is, in essence, the top line.
the hearings so Do you think the committee’s
far have been revelations are going to hurt
Republicans in the midterms?
successful? I think it will have marginal effect,
but I don’t think 2022 is going to be
an election based on Jan. 6. This is
what people have to keep in mind:
getting the answers and saving the
democracy isn’t always the highest
on people’s political mind when you
have inflation, a war, high energy
prices. Where I do think there could
be a pretty significant impact is in
2024. I truly believe you will be very
hard-pressed to find anybody in
five or 10 years who will admit they
supported Donald Trump.
If Republicans do take control of
the House, as many are predict-
ng, who do you think should be
peaker? I don’t know. I don’t think
should be Kevin [McCarthy]. The
ason I have a special disdain for
evin McCarthy is that he was a
iend, and he obviously knows bet-
r. He’s in a position to have a mas-
ve impact on what this country
ill look like and what the party will
ok like. And he has squandered
hat for his own political gain. I think
here’s a great chance that he doesn’t
ecome Speaker. I think somebody
ill stab him in the back. Live by the
word, my friend, die by the sword.
o you think he inadvertently did
TAY L O R G L A S C O C K — T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S/ R E D U X
he committee a great favor by re-
moving pro-Trump Republicans?
h, yeah. You wouldn’t see a fraction
f what you’re seeing in these hear-
gs. You would see the opposition
hrowing wrenches in everything.
very subpoena would be a massive
ght. Every contempt vote, a mas-
ve fight. So yeah, thanks, Kevin.
—ERIC CORTELLESSA