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All articles

- Behind the Scenes of TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year Issue

- Taylor Swift

- Taylor Swift

- Breaking Down Taylor Swift’s 2023 Impact By the Numbers

- Sam Altman

- Lionel Messi

- The Nation Builders

- The 10 Best TV Shows of 2023

- The 10 Best Movies of 2023

- The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2023

- The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023

- Alex Newell

- Find Every Easter Egg in TIME’s Taylor Swift Artist Portrait

Behind the Scenes of TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year Issue

Sam Jacobs    6 Dec, 2023

This past September, our editors and reporters gathered to debate who should be TIME’s Person of the Year. The annual staff conversation is both entertaining and contentious, as we argue about which one person or group of people, of the nearly 8 billion alive today, had the most influence, for good or ill, on the year. From that first conversation, teams of reporters set out to cover the most promising candidates. The result is the issue you hold in your hands, and the words, photographs, and videos that appear on your screens.

Sam Lansky, the writer of this year’s Person of the Year profile of Taylor Swift, has known the singer for over a decade through his work as an editor. Earlier this fall he visited with Swift at home for her first in-depth conversation with a journalist in nearly four years. With her three Person of the Year covers, photographed by Inez and Vinoodh, Swift makes her fourth, fifth, and sixth appearances on our cover. It’s been 14 years since Swift’s first interview with TIME, when the 19-year-old took questions from her tour bus on Hollywood Boulevard, brushing off concerns about trading a college experience for touring as a musician. “No matter what path you choose,” she said, “you’re going to miss something, and I don’t want to miss this.”

Read More: The Inspiration Behind Inez and Vinoodh’s Taylor Swift TIME Person of the Year Covers

For the 2023 CEO of the Year story, Naina Bajekal and Billy Perrigo visited San Francisco to meet with Sam Altman; he spoke with TIME three times in November, both before and after Altman was removed from and returned to his position leading the world’s most influential AI company. Their profile, accompanied by portraits created by photographer Joe Pugliese, offers a detailed accounting of those tumultuous days.

Sean Gregory has written or co-written all of TIME’s Athlete of the Year profiles since we first created the recognition in 2019. For this year’s edition, Sean interviewed and profiled Lionel Messi, one of the most successful soccer players of all time. The accompanying cover image was created by illustrator (and soccer fan) Neil Jamieson.

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Read More: Behind the Scenes of TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year Issue

Also for this issue, Karl Vick traveled to Israel following the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre. Karl—who was previously TIME’s bureau chief in Israel—and London-based staff writer Yasmeen Serhan set out to find individuals who have made a difference supporting fellow citizens since the outbreak of the Israel-Hamas War. Magnum photographer Moises Saman took portraits to accompany their stories.

Photography for the issue was overseen by Katherine Pomerantz, Dilys Ng, Sangsuk Sylvia Kang, and Kara Milstein; video by Justine Simons and Alex Robson; art direction by Chelsea Kardokus, Chrissy Dunleavy, and D.W. Pine, who has now created 14 years of Person of the Year covers. Digital-audience strategy was led by Samantha Cooney, with support by Meg Zukin. Liz Murray coordinated digital production. And, working alongside Lori Fradkin, Kelly Conniff—who is marking her 11th year at TIME—oversaw the entire project. “This issue demonstrates how many shapes influence can take,” Kelly said. “To be able to include news-making interviews with Altman, Messi, and Swift, three of the most captivating people in the world, each for radically different reasons, makes this year’s Person of the Year particularly special.”

Taylor Swift

Sam Jacobs    5 Dec, 2023

Since 1927, TIME has chosen a Person of the Year, the editors’ assessment of the individual who most shaped the headlines over the previous 12 months, for better or for worse.

As a tradition, Person of the Year springs from the Great Man Theory of history, a belief that individuals have the power to transform society. The selections over the years have tended to follow certain patterns. The person chosen has typically been a ruler over traditional domains of power. He—and yes, usually it has been a “he”—is very often a politician or a titan of industry. Fourteen U.S. Presidents, five leaders of Russia or the Soviet Union, and three Popes have all been recognized.

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And yet the person whose singular influence was revealed throughout 2023 has held none of these roles—or anything remotely similar. Every year contains light and dark; 2023 was a year with significant shares of darkness. In a divided world, where too many institutions are failing, Taylor Swift found a way to transcend borders and be a source of light. No one else on the planet today can move so many people so well. Achieving this feat is something we often chalk up to the alignments of planets and fates, but giving too much credit to the stars ignores her skill and her power.

Swift is the rare person who is both the writer and hero of her own story. Her path is untraveled, something she’s known for some time. “I can’t find anyone, really, who’s had the same career trajectory as mine,” Swift told us in 2014 when she first appeared on the cover of TIME upon releasing her fifth album, 1989. “So when I’m in an optimistic place I hope that my life won’t match anyone else’s life trajectory, either.”

While her popularity has grown across the decades, this is the year that Swift, 33, achieved a kind of nuclear fusion: shooting art and commerce together to release an energy of historic force. She did it by embracing what she does better than anyone, entertaining and writing songs that connect with people. Now she becomes the first Person of the Year to be recognized for her success in the arts, in a year when we were reawakened to questions about who makes and who owns our cultural expressions. Swift is also a symbol of generational change: she is only the fourth solo Person of the Year born in the past half century.

In the 17 years since her debut, Swift has notched more No. 1 albums than any other woman in history. This year alone she had three. She was everywhere in 2023, filling stadiums and breaking records, which meant we were forced to find novel ways to measure the magnitude of her reach. Seismograms were deployed to show the literal impact caused by her fans. As Swift reportedly became a billionaire, countries’ gross domestic products became the yardstick for her financial contributions. University classes to study Swift’s lessons in literature, business, and law were announced. Swift was showered with keys to cities and street signs changed to her name.

Read More: Behind the Scenes of TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year Issue

In 2023, world leaders and mayors competed to bring her monumentally successful Eras Tour to their jurisdictions. Swift has become a feature of American soft power: a U.S. diplomat told me how meaningful it was to get Swift to agree to play in his host country. And Swift, as we now know, has had a Midas touch, improving the fortunes of every place she visits and business she celebrates. Just ask the NFL about its millions of new fans. Or your secretary of state: tens of thousands of fans registered to vote after she encouraged them on Instagram, spiking visits to Vote.org. “She’s done a great job of sticking to her guns and being vocal and political in the ways that she wants to,” says the Chicks’ front woman Natalie Maines.

At the same time, much of what Swift accomplished in 2023 exists beyond measurement. She mapped her journey and shared the results with the world: She committed to validating the dreams, feelings, and experiences of people, especially women, who felt overlooked and regularly underestimated. They know she respects her audience, and trusts them with her story. She held up a mirror to her own life, helping people better see themselves. She embraced her past, foibles and all, and in doing so encouraged others to do the same.

While Swift’s success can feel like a counterweight to traditional forms of power, the secret to her mastery has ancient roots. She is writing her own myth, informed by her own journey. And it has been an epic. So many have turned to those tales because they’ve been so disappointed by the storylines that emerge elsewhere in society. Any student of that Great Man Theory of history knows how deeply intertwined it is with centuries of sexism and the exclusion of women from power. Indeed, this isn’t the first time Swift has been part of TIME Person of the Year; in 2017, she was among the “Silence Breakers” we recognized for standing up and speaking out against discrimination, harassment, and assault faced by too many women for far too long.

Read More: Taylor Swift Makes History as Person of the Year. Here’s How

Swift has been both avatar and author of shifting narratives, never more so than in 2023. Where do they take us? It might look something like what Swift has created, making a space for 70,000 people, night after night, to experience joy together. What is a higher form of influence, after all, than giving millions of fans, young and old, the time of their lives, where they can revel not only in Swift’s voice but in finding their own? These moments were all the more magical for taking place as we exited a pandemic, rediscovering the communal experiences that were so recently taken from us.

For building a world of her own that made a place for so many, for spinning her story into a global legend, for bringing joy to a society desperately in need of it, Taylor Swift is TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year.

Taylor Swift

Sam Lansky    6 Dec, 2023

Taylor Swift is telling me a story, and when Taylor Swift tells you a story, you listen, because you know it’s going to be good—not only because she’s had an extraordinary life, but because she’s an extraordinary storyteller. This one is about a time she got her heart broken, although not in the way you might expect.

She was 17, she says, and she had booked the biggest opportunity of her life so far—a highly coveted slot opening for country superstar Kenny Chesney on tour. “This was going to change my career,” she remembers. “I was so excited.” But a couple weeks later, Swift arrived home to find her mother Andrea sitting on the front steps of their house. “She was weeping,” Swift says. “Her head was in her hands as if there had been a family emergency.” Through sobs, Andrea told her daughter that Chesney’s tour had been sponsored by a beer company. Taylor was too young to join. “I was devastated,” Swift says.

But some months later, at Swift’s 18th birthday party, she saw Chesney’s promoter. He handed her a card from Chesney that read, as Swift recalls, “I’m sorry that you couldn’t come on the tour, so I wanted to make it up to you.” With the note was a check. “It was for more money than I’d ever seen in my life,” Swift says. “I was able to pay my band bonuses. I was able to pay for my tour buses. I was able to fuel my dreams.”

Listening to Swift share this, on a clear fall afternoon in her New York City apartment, I’m struck by how satisfying the story is. There are high stakes at the outset; there are details, vivid and sensory; there’s a twist that flips the action on its head; and there’s a happy ending for its hero. It takes her only about 30 seconds to recount this, but those 30 seconds contain an entire narrative world.

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I’m not surprised. Swift has a preternatural skill for finding the story. Her anecdote about Chesney symbolizes a larger narrative in Swift’s life, one about redemption—where our protagonist discovers new happiness not despite challenges, but because of them. Swift, as we’ll discuss, took a few hits to get here. “I’ve been raised up and down the flagpole of public opinion so many times in the last 20 years,” she says as we tuck into a cozy den off the kitchen to talk, and she kicks off her shoes and curls up onto the sofa. “I’ve been given a tiara, then had it taken away.” She is seemingly unguarded in conversation, reflective about both where she’s been and where she finds herself now. After all, while she’s long been one of the biggest entertainers in the world, this year is different. “It feels like the breakthrough moment of my career, happening at 33,” she says. “And for the first time in my life, I was mentally tough enough to take what comes with that.” This is her story—even if she’s now so high that it’s hard to believe she was ever low.

Swift’s accomplishments as an artist—culturally, critically, and commercially—are so legion that to recount them seems almost beside the point. As a pop star, she sits in rarefied company, alongside Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and Madonna; as a songwriter, she has been compared to Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, and Joni Mitchell. As a businesswoman, she has built an empire worth, by some estimates, over $1 billion. And as a celebrity—who by dint of being a woman is scrutinized for everything from whom she dates to what she wears—she has long commanded constant attention and knows how to use it. (“I don’t give Taylor advice about being famous,” Stevie Nicks tells me. “She doesn’t need it.”) But this year, something shifted. To discuss her movements felt like discussing politics or the weather—a language spoken so widely it needed no context. She became the main character of the world.

If you’re skeptical, consider it: How many conversations did you have about Taylor Swift this year? How many times did you see a photo of her while scrolling on your phone? Were you one of the people who made a pilgrimage to a city where she played? Did you buy a ticket to her concert film? Did you double-tap an Instagram post, or laugh at a tweet, or click on a headline about her? Did you find yourself humming “Cruel Summer” while waiting in line at the grocery store? Did a friend confess that they watched clips of the Eras Tour night after night on TikTok? Or did you?

Her epic career-retrospective tour recounting her artistic “eras,” which played 66 dates across the Americas this year, is projected to become the biggest of all time and the first to gross over a billion dollars; analysts talked about the “Taylor effect,” as politicians from Thailand, Hungary, and Chile implored her to play their countries. Cities, stadiums, and streets were renamed for her. Every time she came to a new place, a mini economic boom took place as hotels and restaurants saw a surge of visitors. In releasing her concert movie, Swift bypassed studios and streamers, instead forging an unusual pact with AMC, giving the theater chain its highest single-day ticket sales in history. There are at least 10 college classes devoted to her, including one at Harvard; the professor, Stephanie Burt, tells TIME she plans to compare Swift’s work to that of the poet William Wordsworth. Friendship bracelets traded by her fans at concerts became a hot accessory, with one line in a song causing as much as a 500% increase in sales at craft stores. When Swift started dating Travis Kelce, the Kansas City Chief and two-time Super Bowl champion, his games saw a massive increase in viewership. (Yes, she somehow made one of America’s most popular things—football—even more popular.) And then there’s her critically hailed songbook—a catalog so beloved that as she rereleases it, she’s often breaking chart records she herself set. She’s the last monoculture left in our stratified world.

It’s hard to see history when you’re in the middle of it, harder still to distinguish Swift’s impact on the culture from her celebrity, which emits so much light it can be blinding. But something unusual is happening with Swift, without a contemporary precedent. She deploys the most efficient medium of the day—the pop song—to tell her story. Yet over time, she has harnessed the power of the media, both traditional and new, to create something wholly unique—a narrative world, in which her music is just one piece in an interactive, shape-shifting story. Swift is that story’s architect and hero, protagonist and narrator.

This was the year she perfected her craft—not just with her music, but in her position as the master storyteller of the modern era. The world, in turn, watched, clicked, cried, danced, sang along, swooned, caravanned to stadiums and movie theaters, let her work soundtrack their lives. For Swift, it’s a peak. “This is the proudest and happiest I’ve ever felt, and the most creatively fulfilled and free I’ve ever been,” Swift tells me. “Ultimately, we can convolute it all we want, or try to overcomplicate it, but there’s only one question.” Here, she adopts a booming voice. “Are you not entertained?”

A few months before I sit with Swift in New York, on a summer night in Santa Clara, Calif., which has been temporarily renamed Swiftie Clara in her honor, I am in a stadium with nearly 70,000 other people having a religious experience. The crowd is rapturous and Swift beatific as she gazes out at us, all high on the same drug. Her fans are singularly passionate, not just in the venue but also online, as they analyze clues, hints, and secret messages in everything from her choreography to her costumes—some deliberately planted, others not. (“Taylor Swift fans are the modern-day equivalent of those cults who would consistently have inaccurate rapture predictions like once a month,” as one viral tweet noted.)

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Standing in the arena, it’s not hard to understand why this is the biggest thing in the world. “Beatlemania and Thriller have nothing on these shows,” says Swift’s friend and collaborator Phoebe Bridgers. Fans in Argentina pitched tents outside the venue for months to get prime spots, with some quitting their jobs to commit to fandom full time. Across the U.S., others lined up for days, while those who didn’t get in “Taylor-gated” in nearby parking lots so they could pick up the sound. When tickets went on sale last year, Ticketmaster crashed. Although 4.1 million tickets were sold for the 2023 shows—including over 2 million on the first day, a new record—scalpers jacked up prices on the secondary market to more than $22,000. Multiple fans filed lawsuits. The Justice Department moved forward with an investigation. The Senate held a hearing. Given these stakes, Swift had to deliver.

“I knew this tour was harder than anything I’d ever done before by a long shot,” Swift says. Each show spans over 180 minutes, including 40-plus songs from at least nine albums; there are 16 costume changes, pyrotechnics, an optical illusion in which she appears to dive into the stage and swim, and not one but two cottagecore worlds, which feature an abundance of moss.

In the past, Swift jokes, she toured “like a frat guy.” This time, she began training six months ahead of the first show. “Every day I would run on the treadmill, singing the entire set list out loud,” she said. “Fast for fast songs, and a jog or a fast walk for slow songs.” Her gym, Dogpound, created a program for her, incorporating strength, conditioning, and weights. “Then I had three months of dance training, because I wanted to get it in my bones,” she says. “I wanted to be so over-rehearsed that I could be silly with the fans, and not lose my train of thought.” She worked with choreographer Mandy Moore—recommended by her friend Emma Stone, who worked with Moore on La La Land—since, as Swift says, “Learning choreography is not my strong suit.” With the exception of Grammy night—which was “hilarious,” she says—she also stopped drinking. “Doing that show with a hangover,” she says ominously. “I don’t want to know that world.”

Read More: Taylor Swift Shares Her Eras Tour Workout and Self-Care Regimen

Swift’s arrival in a city energized the local economy. When Eras kicked off in Glendale, Ariz., she generated more revenue for its businesses than the 2023 Super Bowl, which was held in the same stadium. Fans flew across the country, stayed in hotels, ate meals out, and splurged on everything from sweatshirts to limited-edition vinyl, with the average Eras attendee reportedly spending nearly $1,300. Swift sees the expense and effort incurred by fans as something she needs to repay: “They had to work really hard to get the tickets,” she says. “I wanted to play a show that was longer than they ever thought it would be, because that makes me feel good leaving the stadium.” The “Taylor effect” was noticed at the highest levels of government. “When the Federal Reserve mentions you as the reason economic growth is up, that’s a big deal,” says Ed Tiryakian, a finance professor at Duke University.

Carrying an economy on your back is a lot for one person. After she plays a run of shows, Swift takes a day to rest and recover. “I do not leave my bed except to get food and take it back to my bed and eat it there,” she says. “It’s a dream scenario. I can barely speak because I’ve been singing for three shows straight. Every time I take a step my feet go crunch, crunch, crunch from dancing in heels.” Maintaining her strength through workouts between shows is key. “I know I’m going on that stage whether I’m sick, injured, heartbroken, uncomfortable, or stressed,” she says. “That’s part of my identity as a human being now. If someone buys a ticket to my show, I’m going to play it unless we have some sort of force majeure.” (A heat wave in Rio de Janeiro caused chaos during Swift’s November run as one fan, Ana Clara Benevides Machado, reportedly collapsed during the show and later died; Swift wrote on Instagram that she had a “shattered heart.” She rescheduled the next show because of unsafe conditions, and spent time with Benevides Machado’s family at her final tour date in Brazil.)

Swift is many things onstage—vulnerable and triumphant, playful and sad—but the intimacy of her songcraft is front and center. “Her work as a songwriter is what speaks most clearly to me,” says filmmaker Greta Gerwig, whose feminist Barbie was its own testament to the idea that women can be anything. “To write music that is from the deepest part of herself and have it directly speak into the souls of other people.” As Swift whips through the eras, she’s not trying to update her old songs, whether the earnest romance of “You Belong With Me” or the millennial ennui of “22,” so much as she is embracing them anew. She’s modeling radical self-acceptance on the world’s largest stage, giving the audience a space to revisit their own joy or pain, once dismissed or forgotten. I tell Swift that the show made me think of a meme that says, “Do not kill the part of you that is cringe—kill the part of you that cringes.” “Yes!” she exclaims. “Every part of you that you’ve ever been, every phase you’ve ever gone through, was you working it out in that moment with the information you had available to you at the time. There’s a lot that I look back at like, ‘Wow, a couple years ago I might have cringed at this.’ You should celebrate who you are now, where you’re going, and where you’ve been.”

Read More: How We Chose Taylor Swift as TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year

Getting to this place of harmony with her past took work; there’s a dramatic irony, she explains, to the success of the tour. “It’s not lost on me that the two great catalysts for this happening were two horrendous things that happened to me,” Swift says, and this is where the story takes a turn. “The first was getting canceled within an inch of my life and sanity,” she says plainly. “The second was having my life’s work taken away from me by someone who hates me.”

Swift shows me some things she loves in her apartment: a Stevie Nicks Barbie that sits still boxed in her kitchen, sent to her by the artist; the framed note from Paul McCartney that hangs in her bathroom; tiles around the fireplace that Swift found shopping in Paris with her mother. Connections to her family are everywhere, including a striking photo of her grandmother Marjorie, an opera singer and the inspiration for a track on her album evermore. Swift grew up on a Christmas-tree farm in Pennsylvania, with her younger brother Austin; her father Scott was a stockbroker at Merrill Lynch, and Andrea worked in marketing. Her family still works closely with her today. “My dad, my mom, and my brother come up with some of the best ideas in my career,” Swift says. “I always joke that we’re a small family business.”

After moving to Nashville as a teen, she signed with Scott Borchetta’s Big Machine Records. Swift’s songwriting ability was evident from the first lyrics of “Tim McGraw,” her debut single: “He said the way my blue eyes shined put those Georgia stars to shame that night—I said, ‘That’s a lie.’” Even for country music these lyrics are literary—conjuring a romantic fantasy, then deflating it a line later. The fairy-tale promise of love and intimacy became a runner in Swift’s work as a songwriter, something she’d repeatedly espouse, then skewer; she was self-aware about the role narrative played in her expectations. She was seen as a gifted pop-country ingenue when, in a now infamous moment, Kanye West interrupted Swift onstage at the 2009 VMAs while she was accepting an award. The incident set in motion a chain of events that would shape the next decade of both artists’ lives.

It was around that time, Swift remembers now, that she began trying to shape-shift. “I realized every record label was actively working to try to replace me,” she says. “I thought instead, I’d replace myself first with a new me. It’s harder to hit a moving target.” Swift wrote songs solo, incorporated diverse sonic influences, and placed more clues about personal relationships in her lyrics and album materials for fans to decode. Her epic ballad “All Too Well,” from 2012’s Red, epitomizes Swift’s superpower as a songwriter, deploying tossed-off details like a forgotten scarf that comes back at the song’s end to stab you in the heart—but it also had a secret message hidden in the liner notes. When an extended version of the song hit No. 1 last year upon its rerelease, it wasn’t only because the song is extraordinary, but because it has its own lore, like Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” if it came with an experiential puzzle for fans to solve. “She’s like a whole room of writers as one person, with that voice and charisma,” Bridgers says. “She’s everything at once.”

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Swift knew she had to keep innovating. “By the time an artist is mature enough to psychologically deal with the job, they throw you out at 29, typically,” she says. “In the ’90s and ’00s, it seems like the music industry just said: ‘OK, let’s take a bunch of teenagers, throw them into a fire, and watch what happens. By the time they’ve accumulated enough wisdom to do their job effectively, we’ll find new teenagers.’” She went full-throttle pop for 2014’s 1989, putting her on top of the world—“an imperial phase,” she calls it. She didn’t realize it would also give her much farther to fall. Public sentiment turned—sniping about everything from her perceived overexposure to conspiracy theories about her politics. “I had all the hyenas climb on and take their shots,” she says. West wrote a song with vulgar lyrics about her, and claimed that Swift had consented to it, which Swift denied; West’s then wife, Kim Kardashian, released a video of a conversation between West and Swift that seemed to indicate that Swift had been on board with the song. The scandal was tabloid catnip; it made Swift look like a snake, which is what people called her. She felt it was “a career death,” she says. “Make no mistake—my career was taken away from me.”

It was a bleak moment. “You have a fully manufactured frame job, in an illegally recorded phone call, which Kim Kardashian edited and then put out to say to everyone that I was a liar,” she says. “That took me down psychologically to a place I’ve never been before. I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.” (Kardashian wrote, in a 2020 social media post, that the situation “forced me to defend him.”) Swift’s next album, 2017’s Reputation, featured snake imagery; the video for “Look What You Made Me Do” saw her killing off younger versions of herself. She remembers Reputation being met with uproar and skepticism. “I thought that moment of backlash was going to define me negatively for the rest of my life,” she says. She had also satisfied her record deal with Borchetta, and knew she wanted out. “The molecular chemistry of that old label was that every creative choice I wanted to make was second-guessed,” she says. “I was really overthinking these albums.”

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She met with Lucian Grainge, the CEO of Universal Music Group, and Monte Lipman, who runs Universal’s top label Republic Records, to talk about signing a deal that would give her more agency. Today, Grainge is perhaps the most powerful executive in the music industry, but, as I sit with him in his office in Los Angeles, he describes himself as an “old punk” who operates on instinct more than metrics. He told Swift, he says, “We will utilize everything that we’ve got as a company for you.” Swift felt like she’d been given carte blanche: “Lucian and Monte basically said to me, ‘Whatever you turn in, we will be proud to put out. We give you 100% creative freedom and trust.’” It was exactly what she needed to hear most when the chips were down.

Yet the release of Swift’s first album with Republic, 2019’s Lover, coincided with the second big upheaval in her professional life: Borchetta had sold Big Machine—and with it, Swift’s catalog, valued then at a reported $140 million—to Ithaca Holdings, which is owned by music manager Scooter Braun, a former ally of West’s. “With the Scooter thing, my masters were being sold to someone who actively wanted them for nefarious reasons, in my opinion,” Swift says. (“It makes me sad that Taylor had that reaction to the deal,” Braun told Variety in 2021.) The sale meant that the rights to Swift’s first six albums moved to Braun, so whenever someone wanted to license one of those songs, he would be the one to profit. Swift rallied her fans against the deal, but still felt powerless. “I was so knocked on my ass by the sale of my music, and to whom it was sold,” she says. “I was like, ‘Oh, they got me beat now. This is it. I don’t know what to do.’” She went back to work, using the pandemic lockdown to pare back her sound on critically acclaimed albums folklore and evermore.

Around the same time, she started thinking about rerecording her old albums in an effort to wrest back control. “I’d run into Kelly Clarkson and she would go, ‘Just redo it,’” Swift says. “My dad kept saying it to me too. I’d look at them and go, ‘How can I possibly do that?’ Nobody wants to redo their homework if on the way to school, the wind blows your book report away.” Since Swift wrote her own songs, she retained the musical composition copyright and could rerecord them. She also negotiated to own the master rights for her material when she moved over to Republic in 2018, so she now owns her new material and the rerecorded songs. (Major labels have since made it more difficult for artists to rerecord their music.) She began rerecording subtly different versions of her old albums, tagging them “(Taylor’s Version)” and adding unreleased tracks to redirect listenership to them. She frames the strategy as a coping mechanism. “It’s all in how you deal with loss,” she says. “I respond to extreme pain with defiance.”

Grainge calls the rerecording project “bizarrely brilliant and unique”—something that only an artist at her level could pull off. “It’s got such a narrative—there’s a reason for it.” He shakes his head. “Imagine Picasso painting something that he painted a few years ago, then re-creating it with the colors of today.” Part of the success story, Swift says, is the freedom she received from the label to follow her instincts. “If you look at what I’ve put out since then, it’s more albums in the last few years than I did in the first 15 years of my career,” she says. That prolific output has fueled her ascension. “She could serve two terms as President of the United States and then go to Las Vegas,” Grainge says. “Who else can do that?”

In the grand narrative of Swift’s life, as she rose this year, her foes’ fortunes also seemed to turn. Over the summer, it was reported that several of Braun’s key clients—chief among them Justin Bieber and Ariana Grande—were no longer being managed by his company, while West’s antisemitic and other offensive remarks led to his losing key endorsement deals. Swift knows firsthand that fame is a seesaw. “Nothing is permanent,” she says. “So I’m very careful to be grateful every second that I get to be doing this at this level, because I’ve had it taken away from me before. There is one thing I’ve learned: My response to anything that happens, good or bad, is to keep making things. Keep making art.” She considers. “But I’ve also learned there’s no point in actively trying to quote unquote defeat your enemies,” she says. “Trash takes itself out every single time.”

The premiere for Swift’s concert film takes place at the Grove, an outdoor mall in Los Angeles, which has been shut down for the event; Swift has packed 13 screens with thousands of fans. She goes, one by one, to each theater thanking sobbing audience members for being there. Like the tour, the film, which was released directly to theaters without a traditional partner, is an event. “We met with all the studios,” she tells me, “and we met with all the streamers, and we sized up how it was perceived and valued, and if they had high hopes and dreams for it. Ultimately I did what I tend to do more and more often these days, which is to bet on myself.” She credits her father with the idea. “He just said, why does there have to be a—for lack of a better word—middleman?”

Read More: ‘I Bet on Myself.’ How Taylor Swift’s Deal With AMC Came Together

In the theater excitement ripples through the crowd, a mix of fans and Swift’s friends, as we wait for her. To my left are two dedicated Swifties, sisters who introduce themselves as Madison, 23, and McCall, 20, and who are still reeling from taking a selfie with Swift on the red carpet. Their wrists are covered in friendship bracelets, some of which are deep cuts—such as no it’s BECKY, a reference to a beloved Tumblr meme, and BLEACHELLA STAN, for Swift’s 2016 platinum blond bob—and Madison reveals a tattoo on her forearm that says “Taylor’s Version.” Both tell me their favorite album is Reputation. They are my favorite people I have ever met, and I want to talk to only them for the rest of my life. Madison admires Swift for her vulnerability—“which is insane, when she’s under endless scrutiny”—while McCall cites her consistency, which she calls “a lost art form.” When I ask how McCall feels about Swift’s romantic life, she fields the question elegantly. “It’s a disservice to her to focus on that stuff,” she says. “She’s so good at making her personal experience relate to millions of people. When I listen to her songs, I think about what I’ve been through—not what she’s been through.”

Swift’s private life has long served as both grist for the tabloid mill and inspiration for her own work; she split from her longtime boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, earlier this year. Most recently, she’s been dating the NFL star Travis Kelce, as has been well documented when she attends his games. “I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she says. “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when the camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.” She is sensitive to the attention that’s put on her when she shows up. “I’m just there to support Travis,” she says. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”

I point out that it’s a net positive for the NFL to have a few Swifties watching. “Football is awesome, it turns out,” Swift says playfully. “I’ve been missing out my whole life.” (A game she attended in October was the most-watched Sunday show since the Super Bowl.)

Given her complex history with public interest in her dating life, I say, it seems noteworthy that her relationship with Kelce has played out so publicly. Swift gently pushes back: “This all started when Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast, which I thought was metal as hell,” she says. “We started hanging out right after that. So we actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other. By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple. I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game? We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.” The larger point, for her, is that there’s nothing to hide. “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care,” she says. “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”

Swift’s openness is one part of why her fan base leans heavily, though not exclusively, female. The Eras Tour was one critical piece of what Swift calls “a three-part summer of feminine extravaganza”—the other two parts being Gerwig’s box-office bonanza Barbie and Beyoncé’s blockbuster, culture-shifting Renaissance Tour. “To make a fun, entertaining blast of a movie, with that commentary,” she says of Barbie, “I cannot imagine how hard that was, and Greta made it look so easy.” (“I’m just a sucker for a gal who is good with words, and she is the best with them,” Gerwig says about Swift, whom she calls “Bruce Springsteen meets Loretta Lynn meets Bob Dylan.”)

Swift is no less effusive in talking about Beyoncé, who brokered a similar deal with AMC and shows up to Swift’s Los Angeles premiere; the next month, Swift returns the favor by attending Beyoncé’s in London. “She’s the most precious gem of a person—warm and open and funny,” Swift says. “And she’s such a great disrupter of music-industry norms. She taught every artist how to flip the table and challenge archaic business practices.” That her tour and Beyoncé’s were frequently juxtaposed is vexing. “There were so many stadium tours this summer, but the only ones that were compared were me and Beyoncé,” she says. “Clearly it’s very lucrative for the media and stan culture to pit two women against each other, even when those two artists in question refuse to participate in that discussion.”

Read More: ‘The Most Precious Gem of a Person:’ Taylor Swift on Her Friendship With Beyoncé

To Swift, the success of all three feels like an inflection point. “If we have to speak stereotypically about the feminine and the masculine,” she says, “women have been fed the message that what we naturally gravitate toward—” She has a few examples: “Girlhood, feelings, love, breakups, analyzing those feelings, talking about them nonstop, glitter, sequins! We’ve been taught that those things are more frivolous than the things that stereotypically gendered men gravitate toward, right?” Right, I say. “And what has existed since the dawn of time? A patriarchal society. What fuels a patriarchal society? Money, flow of revenue, the economy. So actually, if we’re going to look at this in the most cynical way possible, feminine ideas becoming lucrative means that more female art will get made. It’s extremely heartening.”

Amid so much attention, it seems noteworthy that Swift appears more relaxed in the public eye, not less—although I wonder out loud whether it just appears that way. She nods. “Over the years, I’ve learned I don’t have the time or bandwidth to get pressed about things that don’t matter. Yes, if I go out to dinner, there’s going to be a whole chaotic situation outside the restaurant. But I still want to go to dinner with my friends.” She sounds thoughtful. “Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years—I’ll never get that time back. I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”

She’s also having more fun. At her premiere, Swift sits in the same row as me, Madison, and McCall, singing along and dancing in her seat; we keep craning our necks to look at her, sharing thunderstruck looks: Isn’t this surreal? There are moments in the film when the cameras capture the enormous screens behind Swift onstage, and it feels like a house of mirrors, these myriad reflections of Taylor Swift—us watching her watch herself on a screen, which is itself showing Swift’s image on so many screens, the thousands of fans onscreen in the stadium and us in this theater, with Swift in the middle of it—all of us rapt, unable to look away.

Read More: Taylor Swift Makes History as Person of the Year. Here’s How

Swift and I have been talking for a while now at her apartment, long enough that our coffees have gone cold and her cat Benjamin Button has trundled into the room, then gotten bored and left. She tells me about revisiting Reputation, which is perhaps the most charged era in the tour. “It’s a goth-punk moment of female rage at being gaslit by an entire social structure,” she says, laughing. “I think a lot of people see it and they’re just like, Sick snakes and strobe lights.” The upcoming vault tracks for Reputation will be “fire,” she promises. The rerecordings project feels like a mythical quest to her. “I’m collecting horcruxes,” she says. “I’m collecting infinity stones. Gandalf’s voice is in my head every time I put out a new one. For me, it is a movie now.”

It strikes me then that for all the talk about eras, it’s also worth thinking about genres—how Swift has moved between them in the stories she’s told. At first, it was a coming-of-age story, one about a young woman finding her way in the world and honing her voice before a fickle public. Then there were romances, great ones—tales of enchantment and desire, heartbreak and disillusionment, relationships that she both excavated for her songs and that the media documented for her with either joy or schadenfreude, depending on the day. There have been dramas with stakes so high and turns so twisty they feel Shakespearean in their scope, betrayals both personal and professional that have shaped her life. Occasionally, these stories have tipped into screwball comedy—like when a crowd in Seattle cheered so loudly it registered as an earthquake, or when, on a tour stop in Brazil, the local archdiocese allowed messages celebrating her to be projected onto the 124-ft. Christ the Redeemer statue. But they have one thing in common: Swift.

She is a maestro of self-determination, of writing her own story. The multihyphenate television creator Shonda Rhimes—no stranger to a plot twist—who has known Swift since she was a teenager, puts it simply: “She controls narrative not only in her work, but in her life,” she says. “It used to feel like people were taking shots at her. Now it feels like she’s providing the narrative—so there aren’t any shots to be taken.”

Read More: Behind the Scenes of TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year Issue

Here, Swift has told me a story about redemption, about rising and falling only to rise again—a hero’s journey. I do not say to her, in our conversation, that it did not always look that way from the outside—that, for example, when Reputation’s lead single “Look What You Made Me Do” reached No. 1 on the charts, or when the album sold 1.3 million albums in the first week, second only to 1989, she did not look like someone whose career had died. She looked like a superstar who was mining her personal experience as successfully as ever. I am tempted to say this.

But then I think, Who am I to challenge it, if that’s how she felt? The point is: she felt canceled. She felt as if her career had been taken from her. Something in her had been lost, and she was grieving it. Maybe this is the real Taylor Swift effect: That she gives people, many of them women, particularly girls, who have been conditioned to accept dismissal, gaslighting, and mistreatment from a society that treats their emotions as inconsequential, permission to believe that their interior lives matter. That for your heart to break, whether it’s from being kicked off a tour or by the memory of a scarf still sitting in a drawer somewhere or because somebody else controls your life’s work, is a valid wound, and no, you’re not crazy for being upset about it, or for wanting your story to be told.

After all, not to be corny, haven’t we all become selective autobiographers in the digital age as we curate our lives for our own audiences of any size—cutting away from the raw fabric of our lived experience to reveal the shape of the story we most want to tell, whether it’s on our own feeds or the world’s stage? I can’t blame her for being better at it than everyone else. It’s also not like she hasn’t admitted it. She sang it herself, in her song “Mastermind,” off last year’s Midnights, in a bridge so feathery you could almost miss that it marks some of the rawest, most naked songwriting of her career: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid/ So I’ve been scheming like a criminal ever since/ To make them love me and make it seem effortless/ This is the first time I’ve felt the need to confess/ And I swear I’m only cryptic and Machiavellian because I care.”

She tells me she wrote that song after watching the Paul Thomas Anderson film Phantom Thread, which—spoiler—culminates in the reveal of a vast, layered manipulation. “Remember that last scene?” she says. “I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have a lyric about being calculated?” She pauses. “It’s something that’s been thrown at me like a dagger, but now I take it as a compliment.”

It is a compliment. After I leave Swift’s house, I can’t stop thinking about how perfectly she crafted this story for me—the one about redemption, how she lost it all and got it back. Storytelling is what she’s always done; that’s why, Chesney tells me, he gave her that gift all those years ago. “She was a writer who had something to say,” he says. “That isn’t something you can fake by writing clichés. You can only live it, then write it as real as possible.”

She must have known that all the references she made had hidden meanings, that I’d see all the tossed-off details for the Easter eggs they were. The way she told me that story about Chesney, she knew there was a lesson, about the power of generosity, and how a crushing defeat can give way to a great and surprising gift. The way she said, “Are you not entertained?”—surely we both knew it was a quote from Gladiator, a movie in which a hero falls from grace, is forced to perform blood sport for the pleasure of spectators, and emerges victorious, having survived humiliation and debasement to soar higher than ever. And the way before I left, she showed me the note from Paul McCartney hanging in her bathroom, which has a Beatles lyric written on it—and not just any Beatles lyric, but this one: “Take these broken wings and learn to fly.” —With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Megan McCluskey •

Styled by Heidi Bivens at Honey Artists; hair by Holli Smith; make-up by Diane Kendal; nails by Maki Sakamoto; production by VLM Productions

On the covers:

Jacket, denim shirt and turtleneck by Polo Ralph Lauren; dress by Area; bodysuit by Bardot, tights by Wolford; earrings are artist’s own

On the inside:

Jacket, denim shirt and turtleneck by Polo Ralph Lauren; tuxedo jacket, tuxedo shirt, vest and pocket square by Ralph Lauren Collection, jeans by Polo Ralph Lauren; dress by Alaia; rings by Anna Sheffield and Cartier; earrings are artist’s own

Breaking Down Taylor Swift’s 2023 Impact By the Numbers

Megan McCluskey    8 Dec, 2023

From her chart-topping album releases to her history-making Eras Tour to her record-breaking concert film, Taylor Swift’s accomplishments throughout the course of 2023 were numerous and unparalleled. The past year has seen Swift—who was just named TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year—reach new and often unprecedented levels of success, by both traditional and novel measures. The graphic below illustrates the reach of everything from Swift’s economic impact to Billboard records to social influence.

Read More: Taylor Swift Makes History as Person of the Year. Here’s How

Sam Altman

Naina Bajekal/San Francisco, Billy Perrigo/San Francisco    6 Dec, 2023

It was a strange Thanksgiving for Sam Altman. Normally, the CEO of OpenAI flies home to St. Louis to visit family. But this time the holiday came after an existential struggle for control of a company that some believe holds the fate of humanity in its hands. Altman was weary. He went to his Napa Valley ranch for a hike, then returned to San Francisco to spend a few hours with one of the board members who had just fired and reinstated him in the span of five frantic days. He put his computer away for a few hours to cook vegetarian pasta, play loud music, and drink wine with his fiancé Oliver Mulherin. “This was a 10-out-of-10 crazy thing to live through,” Altman tells TIME on Nov. 30. “So I’m still just reeling from that.”

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We’re speaking exactly one year after OpenAI released ChatGPT, the most rapidly adopted tech product ever. The impact of the chatbot and its successor, GPT-4, was transformative—for the company and the world. “For many people,” Altman says, 2023 was “the year that they started taking AI seriously.” Born as a nonprofit research lab dedicated to building artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity, OpenAI became an $80 billion rocket ship. Altman emerged as one of the most powerful and venerated executives in the world, the public face and leading prophet of a technological revolution.

Until the rocket ship nearly imploded. On Nov. 17, OpenAI’s nonprofit board of directors fired Altman, without warning or even much in the way of explanation. The surreal maneuvering that followed made the corporate dramas of Succession seem staid. Employees revolted. So did OpenAI’s powerful investors; one even baselessly speculated that one of the directors who defenestrated Altman was a Chinese spy. The company’s visionary chief scientist voted to oust his fellow co-founder, only to backtrack. Two interim CEOs came and went. The players postured via selfie, open letter, and heart emojis on social media. Meanwhile, the company’s employees and its board of directors faced off in “a gigantic game of chicken,” says a person familiar with the discussions. At one point, OpenAI’s whole staff threatened to quit if the board didn’t resign and reinstall Altman within a few hours, three people involved in the standoff tell TIME. Then Altman looked set to decamp to Microsoft—with potentially hundreds of colleagues in tow. It seemed as if the company that catalyzed the AI boom might collapse overnight.

In the end, Altman won back his job and the board was overhauled. “We really do feel just stronger and more unified and more focused than ever,” Altman says in the last of three interviews with TIME, after his second official day back as CEO. “But I wish there had been some other way to get there.” This was no ordinary boardroom battle, and OpenAI is no ordinary startup. The episode leaves lingering questions about both the company and its chief executive.

Altman, 38, has been Silicon Valley royalty for a decade, a superstar founder with immaculate vibes. “You don’t fire a Steve Jobs,” said former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Yet the board had. (Jobs, as it happens, was once fired by Apple, only to return as well.) As rumors swirled over the ouster, the board said there was no dispute over the safety of OpenAI’s products, the commercialization of its technology, or the pace of its research. Altman’s “behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board” had undermined its ability to supervise the company in accordance with its mandate, though it did not share examples.

Interviews with more than 20 people in Altman’s circle—including current and former OpenAI employees, multiple senior executives, and others who have worked closely with him over the years—reveal a complicated portrait. Those who know him describe Altman as affable, brilliant, uncommonly driven, and gifted at rallying investors and researchers alike around his vision of creating artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of society as a whole. But four people who have worked with Altman over the years also say he could be slippery—and at times, misleading and deceptive. Two people familiar with the board’s proceedings say that Altman is skilled at manipulating people, and that he had repeatedly received feedback that he was sometimes dishonest in order to make people feel he agreed with them when he did not. These people saw this pattern as part of a broader attempt to consolidate power. “In a lot of ways, Sam is a really nice guy; he’s not an evil genius. It would be easier to tell this story if he was a terrible person,” says one of them. “He cares about the mission, he cares about other people, he cares about humanity. But there’s also a clear pattern, if you look at his behavior, of really seeking power in an extreme way.”

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An OpenAI spokesperson said the company could not comment on the events surrounding Altman’s firing. “We’re unable to disclose specific details until the board’s independent review is complete. We look forward to the findings of the review and continue to stand behind Sam,” the spokesperson said in a statement to TIME. “Our primary focus remains on developing and releasing useful and safe AI, and supporting the new board as they work to make improvements to our governance structure.”

Altman has spent much of the past year assuring the public that OpenAI takes seriously the responsibility of shepherding its powerful technology into the world. One piece of evidence he gave was OpenAI’s unusual hybrid structure: it is a for-profit company governed by a nonprofit board, with a mandate to prioritize the mission over financial interests. “No one person should be trusted here,” Altman told a Bloomberg Technology conference in June. “The board can fire me. I think that’s important.” But when that happened only for Altman to maneuver his way back, it seemed to underscore that this accountability was a mirage. How could a company that had brought itself to the brink of self-destruction overnight be trusted to safely usher in a technology that many believe could destroy us all?

It’s not clear if Altman will have more power or less in his second stint as CEO. The company has established itself as the field’s front runner since the launch of ChatGPT, and expects to release new, more capable models next year. But there’s no guarantee OpenAI will maintain the industry lead as billions of dollars pour into frontier AI research by a growing field of competitors. The tech industry is known for its hype cycles—bursts of engineered excitement that allow venture capital to profit from fads like virtual reality or cryptocurrency. It’s possible the breakneck pace of AI development slows and the lofty promises about AGI don’t materialize.

But one of the big reasons for the standoff at OpenAI is that everyone involved thinks a new world is not just coming, but coming fast. Two people familiar with the board’s deliberations emphasize the stakes of supervising a company that believes it is building the most important technology in history. Altman thinks AGI—a system that surpasses humans in most regards—could be reached sometime in the next four or five years. AGI could turbocharge the global economy, expand the frontiers of scientific knowledge, and dramatically improve standards of living for billions of humans—creating a future that looks wildly different from the past. In this view, broadening our access to cognitive labor—“having more access to higher-quality intelligence and better ideas,” as Altman puts it—could help solve everything from climate change to cancer.

Read More: The AI Arms Race Is Changing Everything

But it would also come with serious risks. To many, the rapid rise in AI’s capabilities over the past year is deeply alarming. Computer scientists have not solved what’s known in the industry as the “alignment problem”—the task of ensuring that AGI conforms to human values. Few agree on who should determine those values. Altman and others have warned that advanced AI could pose “existential” risks on the scale of pandemics and nuclear war. This is the context in which OpenAI’s board determined that its CEO could not be trusted. “People are really starting to play for keeps now,” says Daniel Colson, executive director of the Artificial Intelligence Policy Institute (AIPI) and the founder of an Altman-backed startup, “because there’s an expectation that the window to try to shift the trajectory of things is closing.”

On a bright morning in early November, Altman looks nervous. We’re backstage at a cavernous event space in downtown San Francisco, where Altman will soon present to some 900 attendees at OpenAI’s first developer conference. Dressed in a gray sweater and brightly colored Adidas Lego sneakers, he thanks the speech coach helping him rehearse. “This is so not my thing,” he says. “I’m much more comfortable behind a computer screen.”

That’s where Altman was to be found on Friday nights as a high school student, playing on an original Bondi Blue iMac. He grew up in a middle-class Jewish family in the suburbs of St. Louis, the eldest of four children born to a real estate broker and a dermatologist. Altman was equal parts nerdy and self-assured. He came out as gay as a teenager, giving a speech in front of his high school after some students objected to a National Coming Out Day speaker. He enrolled at Stanford to study computer science in 2003, as memories of the dot-com crash were fading. In college, Altman got into poker, which he credits for inculcating lessons about psychology and risk. By that point, he knew he wanted to become an entrepreneur. He dropped out of school after two years to work on Loopt, a location-based social network he co-founded with his then boyfriend, Nick Sivo.

Loopt became part of the first cohort of eight companies to join Y Combinator, the now vaunted startup accelerator. The company was sold in 2012 for $43 million, netting Altman $5 million. Though the return was relatively modest, Altman learned something formative: “The way to get things done is to just be really f-cking persistent,” he told Vox’s Re/code. Those who know him say Altman has an abiding sense of obligation to tackle issues big and small. “As soon as he’s aware of a problem, he really wants to solve it,” says his fiancé Mulherin, an Australian software engineer turned investor. Or as Altman puts it, “Stuff only gets better because people show up and work. No one else is coming to save the day. You’ve just got to do it.”

YC’s co-founder Paul Graham spotted a rare blend of strategic talent, ambition, and tenacity. “You could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in five years and he’d be the king,” Graham wrote of Altman when he was just 23. In February 2014, Graham tapped his protégé, then 28, to replace him as president of YC. By the time Altman took the reins, YC had incubated unicorns like Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox. But the new boss had a bigger vision. He wanted to expand YC’s remit beyond software to “hard tech”—the startups where the technology might not even be possible, yet where successful innovation could unlock trillions of dollars and transform the world.

Soon after becoming the leader of YC, Altman visited the headquarters of the nuclear-fusion startup Helion in Redmond, Wash. CEO David Kirtley recalls Altman showing up with a stack of physics textbooks and quizzing him about the design choices behind Helion’s prototype reactor. What shone through, Kirtley recalls, was Altman’s obsession with scalability. Assuming you could solve the scientific problem, how could you build enough reactors fast enough to meet the energy needs of the U.S.? What about the world? Helion was among the first hard-tech companies to join YC. Altman also wrote a personal check for $9.5 million and has since forked over an additional $375 million to Helion—his largest personal investment. “I think that’s the responsibility of capitalism,” Altman says. “You take big swings at things that are important to get done.”

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Altman’s pursuit of fusion hints at the staggering scope of his ambition. He’s put $180 million into Retro Biosciences, a longevity startup hoping to add 10 healthy years to the human life-span. He conceived of and helped found Worldcoin, a biometric-identification system with a crypto-currency attached, which has raised hundreds of millions of dollars. Through OpenAI, Altman has spent $10 million seeding the longest-running study into universal basic income (UBI) anywhere in the U.S., which has distributed more than $40 million to 3,000 participants, and is set to deliver its first set of findings in 2024. Altman’s interest in UBI speaks to the economic dislocation that he expects AI to bring—though he says it’s not a “sufficient solution to the problem in any way.”

The entrepreneur was so alarmed at America’s direction under Donald Trump that in 2017 he explored running for governor of California. Today Altman downplays the endeavor as “a very lightweight consideration.” But Matt Krisiloff, a senior aide to Altman at the time, says they spent six months setting up focus groups across the state to help refine a political platform. “It wasn’t just a totally flippant idea,” Krisiloff says. Altman published a 10-point policy platform, which he dubbed the United Slate, with goals that included lowering housing costs, Medicare for All, tax reform, and ambitious clean-energy targets. He ultimately passed on a career switch. “It was so clear to me that I was much better suited to work on AI,” Altman says, “and that if we were able to succeed, it would be a much more interesting and impactful thing for me to do.”

But he remains keenly interested in politics. Altman’s beliefs are shaped by the theories of late 19th century political economist Henry George, who combined a belief in the power of market incentives to deliver increasing prosperity with a disdain for those who speculate on scarce assets, like land, instead of investing their capital in human progress. Altman has advocated for a land-value tax—a classic Georgist policy—in recent meetings with world leaders, he says.

Asked on a walk through OpenAI’s headquarters whether he has a vision of the future to help make sense of his various investments and interests, Altman says simply, “Abundance. That’s it.” The pursuits of fusion and superintelligence are cornerstones of the more equitable and prosperous future he envisions: “If we get abundant intelligence and abundant energy,” he says, “that will do more to help people than anything else I can possibly think of.”

Altman began thinking seriously about AGI nearly a decade ago. At the time, “it was considered career suicide,” he says. But Altman struck up a running conversation with Elon Musk, who also felt smarter-than-human machines were not only inevitable, but also dangerous if they were built by corporations chasing profits. Both feared Google, which had bought Musk out when it acquired the top AI-research lab DeepMind in 2014, would remain the dominant player in the field. They imagined a nonprofit AI lab that could be an ethical counterweight, ensuring the technology benefited not just shareholders but also humanity as a whole.

In the summer of 2015, Altman tracked down Ilya Sutskever, a star machine-learning researcher at Google Brain. The pair had dinner at the Counter, a burger bar near Google’s headquarters. As they parted ways, Altman got into his car and thought to himself, I have got to work with that guy. He and Musk spent nights and weekends courting talent. Altman drove to Berkeley to go for a walk with graduate student John Schulman; went to dinner with Stripe’s chief technology officer Greg Brockman; took a meeting with AI research scientist Wojciech Zaremba; and held a group dinner with Musk and others at the Rosewood hotel in Menlo Park, Calif., where the idea of what a new lab might look like began to take shape. “The montage is like the beginning of a movie,” Altman says, “where you’re trying to establish this ragtag crew of slight misfits to do something crazy.”

OpenAI launched in December 2015. It had six co-founders—Altman, Musk, Sutskever, Brockman, Schulman, and Zaremba—and $1 billion in donations pledged by prominent investors like Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, and Jessica Livingston. During OpenAI’s early years, Altman remained YC president and was involved only from a distance. OpenAI had no CEO; Brockman and Sutskever were its de facto leaders. In an office in a converted luggage factory in San Francisco’s Mission district, Sutskever’s research team threw ideas at the wall to see what stuck. “It was a very brilliant assembly of some of the best people in the field,” says Krisiloff. “At the same time, it did not necessarily feel like everyone knew what they were doing.”

In 2018, OpenAI announced its charter: a set of values that codified its approach to building AGI in the interests of humanity. There was a tension at the heart of the document, between the belief in safety and the imperative for speed. “The fundamental belief motivating OpenAI is, inevitably this technology is going to exist, so we have to win the race to create it, to control the terms of its entry into society in a way that is positive,” says a former employee. “The safety mission requires that you win. If you don’t win, it doesn’t matter that you were good.” Altman disputes the idea that OpenAI needs to outpace rival labs to deliver on its mission, but says, “I think we care about a good AGI outcome more than others.”

One key to winning was Sutskever. OpenAI’s chief scientist had an almost religious belief in the neural network, a type of AI algorithm that ingested large amounts of data and could independently detect underlying patterns. He believed these networks, though primitive at the time, could lead down a path toward AGI. “Concepts, patterns, ideas, events, they are somehow smeared through the data in a complicated way,” Sutskever told TIME in August. “So to predict what comes next, the neural network needs to somehow become aware of those concepts and how they leave a trace. And in this process, these concepts come to life.”

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To commit to Sutskever’s method and the charter’s mission, OpenAI needed vast amounts of computing power. For this it also needed cash. By 2019, OpenAI had collected only $130 million of the original $1 billion committed. Musk had walked away from the organization—and a planned donation of his own—after a failed attempt to insert himself as CEO. Altman, still running YC at the time, was trying to shore up OpenAI’s finances. He initially doubted any private investor could pump cash into the project at the volume and pace it required. He assumed the U.S. government, with its history of funding the Apollo program and the Manhattan Project, would be the best option. After a series of discussions—“you try every door,” Altman says—he was surprised to find “the chances of that happening were exactly zero.” He came to believe “the market is just going to have to do it all the way through.”

Wary of the perverse incentives that could arise if investors gained sway over the development of AGI, Altman and the leadership team debated different structures and landed on an unusual one. OpenAI would establish a “capped profit” subsidiary that could raise funds from investors, but would be governed by a nonprofit board. OpenAI’s earliest investors signed paperwork indicating they could receive returns of up to 100 times their investment, with any sums above that flowing to the nonprofit. The company’s founding ethos—a research lab unshackled from commercial considerations—had lasted less than four years.

Altman was spending an increasing amount of time thinking about OpenAI’s financial troubles and hanging out at its office, where Brockman and Sutskever had been lobbying him to come on full time. “OpenAI had never had a CEO,” he says. “I was kind of doing it 30% of the time, but not very well.” He worried the lab was at an inflection point, and without proper leadership, “it could just disintegrate.” In March 2019, the same week the company’s restructure was announced, Altman left YC and formally came on as OpenAI CEO.

Altman insists this new structure was “the least bad idea” under discussion. In some ways, the solution was an elegant one: it allowed the company to raise much-needed cash from investors while telegraphing its commitment to conscientiously developing AI. Altman embodied both goals—an extraordinarily talented fundraiser who was also a thoughtful steward of a potentially transformative technology.

It didn’t take long for Altman to raise $1 billion from Microsoft—a figure that has now ballooned to $13 billion. The restructuring of the company, and the tie-up with Microsoft, changed OpenAI’s complexion in significant ways, three former employees say. Employees began receiving equity as a standard part of their compensation packages, which some holdovers from the nonprofit era thought created incentives for employees to maximize the company’s valuation. The amount of equity that staff were given was very generous by industry standards, according to a person familiar with the compensation program. Some employees fretted OpenAI was turning into something more closely resembling a traditional tech company. “We leave billion-dollar ideas on the table constantly,” says VP of people Diane Yoon.

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Microsoft’s investment supercharged OpenAI’s ability to scale up its systems. An innovation from Google offered another breakthrough. Known as the “transformer,” it made neural networks far more efficient at spotting patterns in data. OpenAI researchers began to train the first models in their GPT (generative pre-trained transformer) series. With each iteration, the models improved dramatically. GPT-1, trained on the text of some 7,000 books, could just about string sentences together. GPT-2, trained on 8 million web pages, could just about answer questions. GPT-3, trained on hundreds of billions of words from the internet, books, and Wikipedia, could just about write poetry.

Altman recalls a breakthrough in 2019 that revealed the vast possibilities ahead. An experiment into “scaling laws” underpinning the relationship between the computing power devoted to training an AI and its resulting capabilities yielded a series of “perfect, smooth graphs,” he says—the kind of exponential curves that more closely resembled a fundamental law of the universe than experimental data. It was a cool June night, and in the twilight a collective realization dawned on the assembled group of researchers as they stood outside the OpenAI office: AGI was not just possible, but probably coming sooner than any of them previously thought. “We were all like, this is really going to happen, isn’t it?” Altman says. “It felt like one of these moments of science history. We know a new thing now, and we’re about to tell humanity about it.”

The realization contributed to a change in how OpenAI released its technology. By then, the company had already reneged on its founding principle of openness, after recognizing that open-sourcing increasingly powerful AI could be great for criminals and bad for business. When it built GPT-2 in 2019, it initially declined to release the model publicly, fearing it could have a devastating impact on public discourse. But in 2020, the company decided to slowly distribute its tools to wider and wider numbers of people. The doctrine was called “iterative deployment.” It enabled OpenAI to collect data on how AIs were used by the public, and to build better safety mechanisms in response. And it would gradually expose the public to the technology while it was still comparatively crude, giving people time to adapt to the monumental changes Altman saw coming.

On its own terms, iterative deployment worked. It handed OpenAI a decisive advantage in safety-trained models, and eventually woke up the world to the power of AI. It’s also true that it was extremely good for business. The approach bears a striking resemblance to a tried-and-tested YC strategy for startup success: building the so-called minimum viable product. Hack together a cool demo, attract a small group of users who love it, and improve based on their feedback. Put things out into the world. And eventually—if you’re lucky enough and do it right—that will attract large groups of users, light the fuse of a media hype cycle, and allow you to raise huge sums. This was part of the motivation, Brockman tells TIME. “We knew that we needed to be able to raise additional capital,” he says. “Building a product is actually a pretty clear way to do it.”

Some worried that iterative deployment would accelerate a dangerous AI arms race, and that commercial concerns were clouding OpenAI’s safety priorities. Several people close to the company thought OpenAI was drifting away from its original mission. “We had multiple board conversations about it, and huge numbers of internal conversations,” Altman says. But the decision was made. In 2021, seven staffers who disagreed quit to start a rival lab called Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei, OpenAI’s top safety researcher.

In August 2022, OpenAI finished work on GPT-4, and executives discussed releasing it along with a basic, user-friendly chat interface. Altman thought that would “be too much of a bombshell all at once.” He proposed launching the chatbot with GPT-3.5—a model that had been accessible to the public since the spring—so people could get used to it, and then releasing GPT-4 a few months later. Decisions at the company typically involve a long, deliberative period during which senior leaders come to a consensus, Altman says. Not so with the launch of what would eventually become the fastest-growing new product in tech history. “In this case,” he recalls, “I sent a Slack message saying, Yeah, let’s do this.” In a brainstorming session before Nov. 30 launch, Altman replaced its working title, Chat With GPT-3.5, with the slightly pithier ChatGPT. OpenAI’s head of sales received a Slack message letting her know the product team was silently launching a “low-key research preview,” which was unlikely to affect the sales team.

Nobody at OpenAI predicted what came next. After five days, ChatGPT crossed 1 million users. ChatGPT now has 100 million users—a threshold that took Facebook 4½ years to hit. Suddenly, OpenAI was the hottest startup in Silicon Valley. In 2022, OpenAI brought in $28 million in revenue; this year it raked in $100 million a month. The company embarked on a hiring spree, more than doubling in size. In March, it followed through on Altman’s plan to release GPT-4. The new model far surpassed ChatGPT’s capabilities—unlike its predecessor, it could describe the contents of an image, write mostly reliable code in all major programming languages, and ace standardized tests. Billions of dollars poured into competitors’ efforts to replicate OpenAI’s successes. “We definitely accelerated the race, for lack of a more nuanced phrase,” Altman says.

The CEO was suddenly a global star. He seemed unusually equipped to navigate the different factions of the AI world. “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong, and we want to be vocal about that,” Altman told lawmakers at a U.S. Senate hearing in May. That month, Altman embarked on a world tour, including stops in Israel, India, Japan, Nigeria, South Korea, and the UAE. Altman addressed a conference in Beijing via video link. So many government officials and policy-makers clamored for an audience that “we ended up doing twice as many meetings than were scheduled for any given day,” says head of global affairs Anna Makanju. AI soared up the policy agenda: there was a White House Executive Order, a global AI Safety Summit in the U.K., and attempts to codify AI standards in the U.N., the G-7, and the African Union.

By the time Altman took the stage at OpenAI’s developer conference in November, it seemed as if nothing could bring him down. To cheers, he announced OpenAI was moving toward a future of autonomous AI “agents” with power to act in the world on a user’s behalf. During an interview with TIME two days later, he said he believed the chances of AI wiping out humanity were not only low, but had gone down in the past year. He felt the increase in awareness of the risks, and an apparent willingness among governments to coordinate, were positive developments that flowed from OpenAI’s iterative-deployment strategy. While the world debates the probabilities that AI will destroy civilization, Altman is more sanguine. (The odds are “nonzero,” he allows, but “low if we can take all the right actions.”) What keeps him up at night these days is something far more prosaic: an urban coyote that has colonized the grounds of his $27 million home in San Francisco. “This coyote moved into my house and scratches on the door outside,” he says, picking up his iPhone and, with a couple of taps, flipping the screen around to reveal a picture of the animal lounging on an outdoor sofa. “It’s very cute, but it’s very annoying at night.”

As Altman radiated confidence, unease was growing within his board of directors. The board had shrunk from nine members to six over the preceding months. That left a panel made up of three OpenAI employees—Altman, Sutskever, and Brockman—and three independent directors: Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of question-and-answer site Quora; Tasha McCauley, a technology entrepreneur and Rand Corp. scientist; and Helen Toner, an expert in AI policy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

The panel had argued over how to replace the three departing members, according to three people familiar with the discussions. For some time—little by little, at different rates—the three independent directors and Sutskever were becoming concerned about Altman’s behavior. Altman had a tendency to play different people off one another in order to get his desired outcome, say two people familiar with the board’s discussions. Both also say Altman tried to ensure information flowed through him. “He has a way of keeping the picture somewhat fragmented,” one says, making it hard to know where others stood. To some extent, this is par for the course in business, but this person says Altman crossed certain thresholds that made it increasingly difficult for the board to oversee the company and hold him accountable.

One example came in late October, when an academic paper Toner wrote in her capacity at Georgetown was published. Altman saw it as critical of OpenAI’s safety efforts and sought to push Toner off the board. Altman told one board member that another believed Toner ought to be removed immediately, which was not true, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

This episode did not spur the board’s decision to fire Altman, those people say, but it was representative of the ways in which he tried to undermine good governance, and was one of several incidents that convinced the quartet that they could not carry out their duty of supervising OpenAI’s mission if they could not trust Altman. Once the directors reached the decision, they felt it was necessary to act fast, worried Altman would detect that something was amiss and begin marshaling support or trying to undermine their credibility. “As soon as he had an inkling that this might be remotely on the table,” another of the people familiar with the board’s discussions says, “he would bring the full force of his skills and abilities to bear.”

On the evening of Thursday, Nov. 16, Sutskever asked Altman to chat at noon the following day. At the appointed time, Altman joined Sutskever on Google Meet, where the entire board was present except Brockman. Sutskever told Altman that he was being fired and that the news would be made public shortly. “It really felt like a weird dream, much more intensely than I would have expected,” Altman tells TIME.

The board’s statement was terse: Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the announcement said. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

Altman was locked out of his computer. He began reaching out to his network of investors and mentors, telling them he planned to start a new company. (He tells TIME he received so many texts his iMessage broke.) The board expected pressure from investors and media. But they misjudged the scale of the blowback from within the company, in part because they had reason to believe the executive team would respond differently, according to two people familiar with the board’s thinking, who say the board’s move to oust Altman was informed by senior OpenAI leaders, who had approached them with a variety of concerns about Altman’s behavior and its effect on the company’s culture.

Legal and confidentiality reasons have made it difficult for the board to share specifics, the people with knowledge of the proceedings say. But the absence of examples of the “lack of candor” the board cited as the impetus for Altman’s firing contributed to rampant speculation—that the decision was driven by a personal vendetta, an ideological dispute, or perhaps sheer incompetence. The board fired Altman for “nitpicky, unfireable, not even close to fireable offenses,” says Ron Conway, the founder of SVAngel and a mentor who was one of the first people Altman called after being terminated. “It is reckless and irresponsible for a board to fire a founder over emotional reasons.”

Within hours, the company’s staff threatened to quit if the board did not resign and allow Altman to return. Under immense pressure, the board reached out to Altman the morning after his firing to discuss a potential path forward. Altman characterizes it as a request for him to come back. “I went through a range of emotions. I first was defiant,” he says. “But then, pretty quickly, there was a sense of duty and obligation, and wanting to preserve this thing I cared about so much.” The sources close to the board describe the outreach differently, casting it as an attempt to talk through ways to stabilize the company before it fell apart.

For nearly 48 hours, the negotiations dragged on. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who stepped in as interim CEO, joined the rest of the company’s leadership in advocating for Altman’s return. So on the night of Sunday, Nov. 19, the board appointed a new interim CEO, Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch. Microsoft boss Satya Nadella announced Altman and Brockman would be joining Microsoft to start a new advanced AI unit; Microsoft made it known that any OpenAI staff members would be welcome to join. After a tearful confrontation with Brockman’s wife, Sutskever flipped his position: “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” he posted in the early hours of Nov. 20.

By the end of that day, nearly all of OpenAI’s 770 employees had signed an open letter signaling their intention to quit if Altman was not reinstated. The same canniness that makes Altman such a talented entrepreneur also made him a formidable opponent in the standoff, able to command loyalty from huge swaths of the company and beyond.

And while mission is a powerful draw for OpenAI employees, so too is money. Nearly every full-time OpenAI employee has financial interests in OpenAI’s success, including former board members Brockman and Sutskever. (Altman, who draws a salary of $65,000, does not have equity beyond an indirect investment through his stake in YC.) A tender offer to let OpenAI employees sell shares at an $86 billion valuation to outside investors was planned for a week after Altman’s firing; employees who stood to earn millions by December feared that option would vanish. “It’s unprecedented in history to see a company go potentially to zero if everybody walks,” says one of the people familiar with the board’s discussions. “It’s unsurprising that employees banded together in the face of that particular threat.”

Unlike the staff, the three remaining board members who sought to oust Altman were employed elsewhere, had no financial stake in the company, and were not involved in its day-to-day operations. In contrast to a typical for-profit board, which makes decisions informed by quarterly earnings reports, stock prices, and concerns for shareholder value, their job was to exercise their judgment to ensure the company was acting in the best interests of humanity—a mission that is fuzzy at best, and difficult to uphold when so much money is at stake. But whether or not the board made a correct decision, their unwillingness or inability to offer examples of what they saw as Altman’s problematic behavior would ensure they lost the public relations battle in a landslide. A panel set up as a check on the CEO’s power had come to seem as though it was wielding unaccountable power of its own.

In the end, the remaining board members secured a few concessions in the agreement struck to return Altman as CEO. A new independent board would supervise an investigation into his conduct and the board’s decision to fire him. Altman and Brockman would not regain their seats, and D’Angelo would remain on the panel, rather than all independent members resigning. Still, it was a triumph for OpenAI’s leadership. “The best interests of the company and the mission always come first. It is clear that there were real misunderstandings between me and members of the board,” Altman posted on X. “I welcome the board’s independent review of all recent events.”

Two nights before Thanksgiving, staff gathered at the headquarters, popping champagne. Brockman posted a selfie with dozens of employees, with the caption: “we are so back.”

Ten days after the agreement was reached for their return, OpenAI’s leaders were resolute. “I think everyone feels like we have a second chance here to really achieve the mission. Everyone is aligned,” Brockman says. But the company is in for an overhaul. Sutskever’s future at the company is murky. The new board—former Twitter board chair Bret Taylor, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and D’Angelo—will expand back to nine members and take a hard look at the company’s governance. “Clearly the current thing was not good,” Altman says.

OpenAI had tried a structure that would provide independent oversight, only to see it fall short. “One thing that has very clearly come out of this is we haven’t done a good job of solving for AI governance,” says Divya Siddarth, the co-founder of the Collective Intelligence Project, a nonprofit that works on that issue. “It has put into sharp relief that very few people are making extremely consequential decisions in a completely opaque way, which feels fine, until it blows up.”

Back in the CEO’s chair, Altman says his priorities are stabilizing the company and its relationships with external partners after the debacle; doubling down on certain research areas after the massive expansion of the past year; and supporting the new board to come up with better governance. What that looks like remains vague. “If an oracle said, Here is the way to set up the structure that is best for humanity, that’d be great,” Altman says.

Whatever role he plays going forward will receive more scrutiny. “I think these events have turned him into a political actor in the mass public’s eye in a way that he wasn’t before,” says Colson, the executive director of AIPI, who believes the episode has highlighted the danger of having risk-tolerant technologists making choices that affect all of us. “Unfortunately, that’s the dynamic that the market has set up for.”

But for now, Altman looks set to remain a leading architect of a potentially world-changing technology. “Building superintelligence is going to be a society-wide project,” he says. “We would like to be one of the shapers, but it’s not going to be something that one company just does. It will be far bigger than any one company. And I think we’re in a position where we’re gonna get to provide that input no matter what at this point. Unless we really screw up badly.” —With reporting by Will Henshall/Washington and Julia Zorthian/New York

Lionel Messi

Sean Gregory    5 Dec, 2023

That this moment unfolded, on July 21, 2023, in Fort Lauderdale still feels surreal. Lionel Messi, in his first game wearing a pink Inter Miami jersey, was awarded a free kick in the final seconds of his Major League Soccer (MLS) debut. Here was the greatest living soccer player, arguably the best to ever play the world’s most popular game, who last year led Argentina to its first World Cup win in nearly four decades, suiting up for a last-place club in the U.S.

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Before the kick, Inter Miami defender DeAndre Yedlin, who played in that same World Cup for the U.S., went to the sideline with a cramp in his right calf. He cautioned his coach, Gerardo “Tata” Martino, against selecting him to take a penalty kick after regulation inevitably ended in a 1-1 draw between Inter Miami and Cruz Azul at the Leagues Cup, a tournament featuring teams from MLS and Mexico’s Liga MX. Martino, who was familiar with Messi’s magic from managing him for Argentina and FC Barcelona, told Yedlin not to worry: Messi was going to put this shot in the back of the net and end the game. “I was like, OK,” says Yedlin, not at all convinced.

Messi placed the ball on the grass. Kim Kardashian and LeBron James were in the crowd that night, but not a soul was looking at them. The ball left Messi’s left foot, and as the shot began to curl around a wall of a half-dozen Cruz Azul players, Yedlin, who was standing on the field behind Messi, spread his arms in a victory pose. “You know when you can just feel something?” says Yedlin. Messi’s shot continued bending, bending, past the outstretched arms of the diving Cruz Azul goalkeeper, sending the 20,000-plus fans at DRV PNK Stadium—and millions more watching around the world—into absolute hysterics. Inter Miami co-owner David Beckham was moved to tears. “I remember getting in the car on the way back, and I said to Victoria, ‘I’m not even sure I can drive home,’” Beckham tells TIME. “You couldn’t have written it better. It was for MLS, and for America. It was for the future of the game.”

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Few could have imagined this scene—the pink sea of fans losing their minds over their new local sensation—seven months earlier as Messi kissed the World Cup trophy, finally securing the ultimate prize that had long eluded him. Messi finished his 2022–2023 club season, for Paris St.-Germain (PSG), with 21 goals and 20 assists across all competitions. Then, as his contract with that team wound down, speculation about his future ran rampant. Would he return to Barcelona, the team that signed him as a 13-year-old phenom from Rosario, Argentina? Would he further empower Saudi Arabia, a country that has been accused of “sports-washing” its troubling human-rights record by signing global superstars like Cristiano Ronaldo and Karim Benzema? After all, Messi was already a tourism ambassador for the kingdom, for which he can earn some $25 million. (Saudi Arabia is also set to host the 2034 World Cup.)

The call came down to the wire. “The truth is that fortunately, I had several options on the table that were interesting, and I had to analyze them and think, even weigh them up with my family, before making the final decision to come to Miami,” Messi tells TIME. He confirms that a Barcelona homecoming was a real consideration. “My first option was to return to Barcelona, but it was not possible,” Messi says. “I tried to return, and it did not happen.” Saudi Arabia, indeed, was very much in the mix. “It is also true that later I was thinking a lot about going to the Saudi league, where I know the country and they have created a very powerful competition that can become an important league in the near future,” Messi says. “As the country’s tourism ambassador, it was a destination that attracted me, especially because I’ve enjoyed everything I have visited, because of how football is growing in the country and because of the effort they are putting into creating a top competition.”

At the end, he tells TIME, “it was Saudi Arabia or MLS, and both options seemed very interesting to me.” Messi shocked the globe by turning down a contract from a Saudi club reportedly worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year and announcing in June that he was signing with Inter Miami. It wasn’t just the move that was stunning, but the size and scope of the deal. In addition to the more than $20 million a year Inter Miami would pay him, he would be granted an ownership stake in the team upon retirement and an unprecedented cut of revenues earned by a league media partner—in this case, Apple. It was a deal that not only reflected Messi’s undiminished talent on the field but also set a new standard for athlete leverage and empowerment.

Messi marked his arrival in the U.S. by scoring 10 goals in seven Leagues Cup games while leading Inter Miami to the championship. A nagging injury slowed his MLS pace come September, but that hardly mattered. At 36, two decades into his unparalleled career, Messi provided a singular stimulus to soccer in America. Attendance, ticket prices, merchandise sales, and viewership soared. His games took on the feel of a religious revival. After Messi scored a goal against the New York Red Bulls in August, rapper Fat Joe posted on Instagram a video of himself, nearly in tears, shouting “Messi! Messi! Messi!”

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“I had to be electrified,” says Fat Joe in explaining why, despite not being much of a soccer fan, he was at that Saturday-night game in Harrison, N.J. “This man is a culture shifter. He’s a GOAT.”

For reasons that have been bandied around for decades (lack of goal scoring, not as violent as football or fun as basketball, status as a foreign import), the United States, the world’s most lucrative sports market, had never fully embraced the beautiful game. Recently, however, the sport has seen impressive growth, and with the U.S. hosting three major international tournaments in the next three years (Copa America in 2024, the FIFA Club World Cup in 2025, and the grandest of them all, the World Cup, in 2026), it’s sure to attract even more fans. But Messi is an accelerant. With the most revered and influential athlete on the planet playing in Miami for at least the next two years, still performing at the top of his game—he won another Ballon d’Or as the world’s player of the year, his eighth, in late October—the U.S. is now a soccer nation. A fútbol nation.

The unlikely tale of how Messi ended up in South Florida begins in January 2018, when Inter Miami announced it was joining MLS as an expansion team starting play in 2020. Beckham, who as part of the 2007 contract he signed with the L.A. Galaxy maintained the right to buy into an MLS expansion franchise for $25 million, was a co-owner, along with brothers Jorge and Jose Mas, Miami natives who run MasTec, an infrastructure construction company. Their dream was to lure Messi to the team. “The people who know me really well laughed,” says managing owner Jorge Mas. “The people who don’t know me were sort of really respectful. They’d turn around and go, ‘This is way out of his league.’”

An exec for Messi’s longtime sponsor Adidas helped broker a meeting with Beckham, Jorge Mas, and Jorge Messi, Lionel’s father and agent, in September 2019 in Barcelona. The owners laid out their vision for the club and how Messi could fit into a city that’s 70% Hispanic. But Messi wasn’t quite ready for a radical relocation in the summer of 2021, when he left Barcelona for Paris.

Mas was undeterred. While MLS was negotiating a 10-year, $2.5 billion contract for its games to be carried on Apple TV in 2022, Mas told Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, about his quest to sign Messi. “To me, it would be like the London basketball league saying, ‘I want to sign LeBron James,’” Cue says. “‘OK, sure.’” But Mas kept in touch with Messi’s father, and in September 2022, Argentina held a pre–World Cup training camp in Miami. This gave Mas crucial face time with the man himself. “My biggest message to him was ‘Listen, few times in history has an uber-athlete been in a position to change a sport in a country,’” says Mas. “‘You have the opportunity to change the sport in the largest commercial market in the world, which is the United States of America.’”

Mas then took off for the World Cup in Qatar in November 2022 to deepen his Team Messi ties. He attended every Argentina game and secured a spot in Messi’s box for the final, in which Messi scored a pair of goals and prevailed in a penalty-kick shoot-out. “There was a certain trend of thought that said, ‘Oh my god, if Messi wins a World Cup, well, sh-t, we’ll never land Messi,’” Mas says. Mas, however, felt the opposite was true. “If he wins the World Cup, I’m 1,000% convinced that we’re good,” says Mas. “Because it’s the crowning achievement. He needed a new chapter. Completely different. Blank pages.”

As talks between Inter Miami and Messi’s camp advanced, Cue added what would become a carrot in the deal, offering Messi a slice of Apple’s international subscription revenues, which would undoubtedly spike once he joined MLS.

Still, it was hardly a sure thing. “The one that really worried me was Barcelona,” says Beckham. “He never got to say goodbye to the fans, or say goodbye to the club.” Beckham and Mas ultimately convinced him that his family—Messi and his wife Antonela Roccuzzo have three sons, 11, 8, and 5—would enjoy South Florida. “I explained to him, as a family, the six years we had in L.A. were the best six years that we had,” says Beckham. “People welcomed us with open arms, not just in L.A., but the whole of America.”

On June 7, Messi announced he was coming to Miami. His soon-to-be teammates were in Birmingham, Ala., preparing for a game when they heard the news. Midfielder Benjamin Cremaschi, an 18-year-old Miami native whose father played rugby for the Argentina national team, had a fever. Plus, he was too drained from responding to a million messages to outwardly rejoice. “But inside,” he says, “I was going crazy.”

Upon landing in Florida, Messi did his best to blend in. (No simple task when a bodyguard follows you up and down the sideline during games and murals of your likeness pop up around the city.) “You don’t know how he’s going to be off the field,” says Yedlin, 30. “He can come in here and change the colors of the club if he wanted to.” Inter Miami still wears pink; the pink Messi jersey became the most sought-after piece of sports merchandise in the world. “He just wants to be part of the group,” says Yedlin. Messi, for example, joined a team text chain and offered to help secure extra game tickets for players’ friends and family. “It was really nice to see, especially for the younger players,” says Yedlin. “I went through this as a young player: you get on little ego trips when you have a good game. But it really humbles you to see the greatest ever coming in and talking to everybody and making jokes and giving advice to the young guys and saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to everyone in the building. It makes you realize, ‘I have a lot further to go before I can start putting myself on a cloud.’”

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“From day one, Leo arrives early, and he leaves later than any other player,” says Beckham. “He’s the most professional player on our squad.”

Adjusting to life in the U.S., Messi says, has been “pretty easy.” “For now, we can’t complain about anything,” he says. “Perhaps the most difficult thing to adapt to may be the traffic, although in Paris it was also complicated. And then the heat and humidity in the summer. Although being on the beach or on vacation can often be pleasant, for playing sports, training or playing games, especially in the summer, perhaps it is a little too much, and that shows.”

On the day of Messi’s Inter Miami debut, Apple added some 110,000 U.S. subscriptions to its MLS Season Pass service, according to analytics company Antenna, the largest ever single-day spike and a 1,700% increase over the prior day. Since Messi joined Inter Miami, Apple’s numbers in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Europe “went from basically zero to moving the needle in a huge way,” says Cue. After Inter Miami’s win over Cruz Azul, Messi scored four goals in two more Inter Miami home victories in the Leagues Cup before Messimania hit the road to the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex. “It was our highest-revenue night of all time,” says Dan Hunt, president of FC Dallas, an MLS charter franchise. “And it wasn’t even close.” Messi scored another pair of goals, his second on another incredible curling free kick that tied the game, 4-4, late. Inter Miami won in penalties.

“What sets him apart from everyone else is between his ears,” says former MLS player Taylor Twellman, an analyst for Apple TV. “His understanding of pace, his understanding of where to be when no one else is there. It’s always been different. And as he’s gotten older, he hasn’t had the propensity to run at a high intensity for long. But if you know where to be and when to be and how to be, it doesn’t matter if you’ve lost a step or two. He’s still operating at a higher level than anybody else.”

“One of the greatest things I’ve heard one of our academy kids say—in an interview, he was asked, ‘Has Leo given you any advice since he’s arrived?’ And the advice was ‘Walk more,’” says Beckham. “Walk more in the game. Because you see more. That’s what makes Leo great.”

Detractors attributed Messi’s success to inferior MLS competition. But the evidence shows his dominance extends far beyond what he’s done for Miami. Besides winning the Golden Ball as the most outstanding player at the World Cup, Messi was the only player in Europe’s top leagues to have 20 or more goals and assists in all competitions during his final PSG season. Plus, after his standout Leagues Cup performance this summer, Messi continued his brilliance in the fall, scoring three goals in three victories for Argentina in World Cup qualifying matches. “All those people who think that can only happen in MLS, they’re not paying attention to what he did in the World Cup,” says Don Garber, the MLS commissioner. “They’re not paying attention to what he’s just done in World Cup qualifying. They didn’t pay attention to what he did in the French league. It’s nonsense.”

American audiences couldn’t care less if Messi scored on a kids’ travel team. They just wanted to see him live. Inter Miami’s home attendance jumped 40%, the largest spike in the league. A Miami Herald analysis found that Inter Miami became the first MLS team to average more than 30,000 fans on the road. In October, Messi attracted a crowd of 62,124 to Soldier Field, a record for a Chicago Fire game. The Fire averaged crowds of 15,422 against the rest of the league. Messi sat out the game because of injury, but fans still showed up in pink jerseys.

In the 89th minute of Inter Miami’s game against New York, Messi shoved a perfect ball to Cremaschi, who was streaking down the right wing and preoccupying the attention of Red Bull keeper Carlos Coronel. Sensing an opening, Messi sprinted toward the goal: Cremaschi returned the pass, and Messi knocked in the easy shot. David Figueredo, a 38-year-old Argentine living in Brazil, called seeing Messi score that night the greatest moment of his life. “Hands down,” he said.

An hour or so after the game, dozens of fans still lined a street outside the stadium for a potential glimpse at the legend. Two Inter Miami team buses, with very tinted windows, pulled out. “I saw him!” one woman yelled. “He looked right at me!” As the bus exited the parking lot, some people chased it down the street. They kept running after the mere presence of Messi, cocooned in one of those vehicles, until the buses moved past a traffic light, toward the airport, into the night.

Inter Miami failed to make this season’s MLS playoffs. The team had dug too big of a hole before Messi arrived. But with training camp and a full season in store for next year, the team should fare better in the standings. “The most important thing right now is to recover well physically and also mentally, rest, spend time with my family, with my friends and then think about returning with the same desire as always and with some special challenges ahead,” Messi says.

“If we have a month to prepare, we’re going to be a huge team in this league,” says Cremaschi. “It’s going to be hard to beat us.” According to Cremaschi, players his age are already thinking about pursuing professional opportunities in MLS, rather than overseas, since Messi is elevating the league’s stature. Many other top international players—still in their prime—may test the MLS waters. “We are having conversations with people that would not even be remotely possible five years ago,” says Hunt, the FC Dallas president. “And I know we’re not the only ones.”

With the Messi effect at its peak, and the U.S. already considered a contender at the 2026 World Cup on home soil, America should do well against the world’s best for decades to come. “This is one of those big tipping moments,” says Hunt. “Our player pool from 17 to 35 is the greatest player pool we’ve ever had in the history of U.S. soccer. If you think about our player pool from 0 to 16, it’s going to be twice as good, because we have Messi inspiring them.”

On Nov. 10, Inter Miami organized Noche d’Or, an exhibition game to honor Messi for winning his eighth Ballon d’Or. Messi walked onto the field in Fort Lauderdale, raising his trophy to the adoring crowd. “What I would say to the fans is simply the same thing I said when I arrived,” Messi says. “We are going to have some very good times. We are going to compete to continue lifting trophies and enjoy ourselves.” —With reporting by Julia Zorthian

The Nation Builders

Karl Vick/Tel Aviv, Yasmeen Serhan/London, Photographs by Moises Saman—Magnum Photos for TIME    6 Dec, 2023

It was easy to miss, amid the horrors, what answered them. In the blood-soaked weeks that started on Oct. 7, the most consequential acts in Israel and in Gaza may also have been the least noticed, carried out not by those who claimed leadership but by those whom leaders had failed. The people who pulled others out of rubble, or out of hiding, who sheltered strangers, who bent to heal wounds seen and unseen, they all answered unspeakable violence with a shared humanity. But their selflessness did more than save lives. It illuminated the connection at the heart of a contest that has preoccupied the world for most of a century, the fellow feeling that defines a community and, more broadly, a nation. Amid the negation of war, and in the absence of a state, two nations were affirmed.

In Israel, the absence was temporary but catastrophic. As Hamas terrorists marauded across the country’s south, killing 1,200 people in a day and retreating back to Gaza with hundreds of hostages, the Israeli government was simply not in evidence. Into the void surged the people of Israel. Within hours, a matrix of volunteers mobilized to rescue those stranded in safe rooms, sustain those evacuated from border areas, and address the traumas of survivors.

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The effort was instant, intuitive, unrequested. Its leaders were citizens who had spent the prior 10 months organizing weekly protests against an extremist government angling to erase the only check on its power. Pivoting from protest to service, the loose network of citizens dispatched trauma kits and therapists. When it emerged that no one, least of all the authorities, knew who was dead, who was alive, and who had been abducted, computer experts by the hundreds dove into a digital netherworld, sleuthing for clues.

And just as Hamas made no distinction among the people it slaughtered and stole—Jews, Bedouins, the Palestinian citizens once known as Israeli Arabs, Thai guest workers hired to toil in fields—all of Israeli society reached out. A citizenry riven by inequity and political crisis assembled in the collective spirit that defined Israel at its founding. “We see this as a restatement of the country,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss, a tech entrepreneur who helped organize the response at the Tel Aviv convention center, where as many as 15,000 people showed up with strollers, paper towels—everything, really. “There is a new core.”

In the Gaza Strip, the government stayed gone. Palestinians have no state, but in the Strip the Islamic Resistance Movement, better known as Hamas, has held power for the past 16 years. After the Israeli military began its retaliatory strikes, however, the group’s political apparatus proved as elusive as its armed wing.

“There is no police station, there are no municipalities … There’s almost nothing,” says Amir Hasanain, a 21-year-old student in Rafah who, like uncounted others, responded by assuming the duties of wartime public servant. Organizing themselves into what he describes as “a simulation of government,” the volunteers delivered basic goods to sustain a civilian population suffering bombardment and homelessness. In the first eight weeks of the assault, nearly 16,000 of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents were killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. Some 1.9 million were forced to flee their homes, the United Nations reported.

The uprooting evoked what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe,” that transformed a narrow enclave beside the Mediterranean into one of the world’s most densely populated places, its numbers swollen by refugees from villages lost to Jewish forces in the 1948 war that created Israel. Defending itself in the decades that followed, Israel would occupy and then settle both Gaza and the West Bank (leaving Gaza in 2005). In those same decades, the Palestinian identity took root. Claimed by some 14 million people globally, it is grounded not only in geography and shared experience but also in the aspiration to what the U.N. Charter declares the right of any people: a state of their own.

“What is so inspiring is the communalism,” says Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a British Palestinian physician who hastens from his London practice to Gaza whenever there is a war. If the destruction and death of this one is unprecedented, he says, so is the selflessness. “Everything is being shared,” he says, “and that’s what is keeping society from collapsing. Nobody turns anyone away.”

As entire neighborhoods were flattened by bombs, whole new cities sprang up beneath tarps and blankets. Rida Thabet was the principal at a 500-student vocational college, the Khan Younis Training Centre, built and run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees (UNRWA). But on Oct. 13, the day the Israeli military ordered the Strip’s northern half emptied, Thabet effectively became a mayor, 40,000 people having crammed into the school grounds. “It’s like a city,” she says.

Thirty babies had been born there by late November. Women who gave birth during daylight hours could find help at the shelter’s three medical posts. At night, Thabet recruits volunteer medics from the tents. Mohammed Bardaweel spent most of his career in emergency rooms but now does what he can with a kit from the World Health Organization. The hardest cases arrive from the north. One woman came by foot a day after a cesarean section. Another arrived with a 6-year-old with sepsis from a wound caused by phosphorus munitions, he says. “I hope that the nations all around the world who believe in peace and human rights will try to end this war,” the physician says. He pauses before adding, “I know that nations are different than governments.” By the evidence at hand in both Israel and Gaza, it’s a distinction that might inspire hope. —With reporting by -Leslie Dickstein/New York •

Trauma Teams

Merav Roth

It turns out that just as in a murder investigation, the first 48 hours are also crucial in the treatment of emotional trauma. Merav Roth pointed this out in a video call to fellow mental-health professionals the day after the Hamas massacre. “The psyche asks, Am I supposed to collapse?” she recalls. “Is there anything to hold onto? And if you come immediately with an answer, saying, ‘Hold my hand,’ you can bring the life instinct into service, and begin to put yourself together again.”

Therapists now double as first responders in Israel. Ofrit Shapira-Berman runs a WhatsApp group that within three minutes, and sometimes 50 seconds, matches a psychoanalyst with a trauma survivor, drawing from a list of almost 500 volunteers. Many provide a lifetime of analysis at no charge. “When someone loses someone that he loves, he sort of moves to another continent; there is a continent of bereaved people,” Shapira-Berman says. “This is not a continent. It’s a planet.”

At a lushly bucolic event center north of Tel Aviv, survivors of the Nova music festival, where more than 350 were killed, gather each afternoon and evening for what looks like a lawn party. “There’s so much science on how nature heals,” says Lia Naor, who created the retreat. Survivors steer their therapy by answering the question, What do you feel like doing? There’s music, beanbag chairs to hang out in, a sound bath. There are therapists too. “But they’re not on you,” says Liam Kedem, 24, who ran six miles from Hamas gunmen and comes to the retreat every day. “What makes me really feel like recovering is just sitting with the friends that I’ve been in the situation with. In the city, people look at me with these sad eyes.”

The approach, which seems perfectly suited to people who would attend a rave, can be adapted to meet anyone where they live. “We’re 9 million people in trauma. It’s not one or two,” Naor says. “So the only way to treat is within community.”

The Hamas massacre also activated the 2,000-year communal history of persecution every Jew carries. “We are so trained in trauma,” says Roth, a psychoanalyst and professor at the University of Haifa. “I was raised into the Holocaust.” But if Holocaust survivors were shunned in Israel in the 1950s as damaged or weak, subsequent generations have learned to appreciate the experience of victims and make common cause with their grief.

At the Dead Sea hotel where survivors of the Be’eri kibbutz are lodged, Roth met a woman of 85, who “was black with her death wish. She said, ‘I don’t want to live in such a world.’ And I said, ‘Please look around you for a second. Is this the world you want to leave?’” The sprawling resort was jammed with all manner of goods donated from around the country. “Her eyes filled with tears, but loving tears. And she said, ‘It’s so amazing. From the first moment, people came, and came with everything that we need.’”

“Solidarity,” Roth says, “is a cure.”

Night Medic

Lana Okal

At the shelters where most of Gaza’s residents now reside, there are shortages of almost everything except people. But that can be a blessing, as they bring expertise. When Lana Okal arrived at the Khan Younis Training Centre camp she announced that she was a doctor. The 25-year-old had graduated in January from Cairo University’s Kasr Al-Ainy School of Medicine, an experience she savored after life in Gaza. Her hope was to study in Britain after completing a year interning at Gaza City’s Al-Shifa medical center. She had two months left when the war began. “We had yet to cover anesthesiology and emergency medicine,” Okal says.

She was put to work. By day, she has helped record the health status of the displaced people in the shelter. At night, she is on the list of medics who have volunteered to be roused in emergencies. Trained in primary care, Okal felt useful treating most of the patients brought to her. But one night in late November, she found herself facing a 40-year-old woman who had been pushed in a wheelchair from Gaza City with her children. Her leg had been amputated after being crushed in the bombing; her husband was dead; and the young physician felt as overwhelmed as the Gaza health care system itself. “She said, ‘Help me.’ I cannot. I want to try, but I cannot.” The amputation was “very polluted,” Okal says, and she had neither the equipment nor the expertise to treat it. Cell networks were down, so no ambulance could be summoned. “The situation here,” Okal says, “is very difficult.”

Peacekeeper

Amir Badran

Before there was Tel Aviv, there was Jaffa, an ancient city with the cosmopolitan feel of a Mediterranean port and a population to match: a third of the city are Palestinian citizens of Israel. That might explain Amir Badran’s presence on the Tel Aviv–Jaffa city council. But only faith in human nature could account for his decision this fall to run for mayor just two years after Israel’s “mixed cities” erupted in street fights.

Watching the news on Oct. 7, Badran knew his campaign was in trouble. But he held out hope for Jaffa. With a few phone calls, the attorney founded the Guard for Jewish-Arab Partnership, a joint effort to keep the peace. It advertises and staffs a hotline, sends volunteers to escort people who feel unsafe, and partners with Standing Together, a nationwide solidarity effort. Fear is all around. In the month after the massacre, as many Israelis applied for gun permits (236,000) as had done so in the previous 20 years. Jaffa Arabs like Badran who were appalled by the Hamas massacre were also shaken by Israel’s retaliation. Some 200,000 residents of Gaza trace their families to Jaffa, the home they fled or were expelled from in 1948.

“We will work together, Arab and Jewish residents, to keep each other’s backs,” Badran says, “to be safe in our homes, to secure our mosques, synagogues and churches, and to show the world that we can do it differently, while other people speak in the language of war, especially the mixed cities.” Regaining that equilibrium, he says, is the only way forward for a country where 20% descend from Palestinians who stayed within Israel’s borders in 1948. “The reality is that we are living together, and we will have to still live together.”

Giving Shelter

Rida Thabet

For most people in Gaza, the war is a saga of exodus into smaller and smaller spaces. More than 1.6 million of its 2.3 million residents have been forced from their homes, first into the southern half of the Strip, then into the cramped lots where 1.4 million have sought refuge under the blue flag of the U.N. Some 40,000 are camped in the vocational college run by Rida Thabet.

Their hardship is more than a humanitarian challenge for Thabet; it is a personal one. “I’m displaced myself,” she says. She hails from Gaza City, from which people still arrive, sometimes wounded, always stressed. “They see us as management,” Thabet says. “They come with anger, and they throw that anger on your face.” The face is sympathetic. Thabet comforts not only her 15-year-old daughter, traumatized by the cascades of bombing, but also her guests. On Nov. 24 the oldest was the 95-year-old woman who asked, as she does daily,  “Where am I? Who are you?” The youngest was just hours old.

“You want to help but you feel helpless,” says Thabet. Her answer is action: finding mattresses for those at risk of bedsores, tarpaulins for people sleeping in the open, common ground for feuding spouses, and support groups for children who have seen too much. As an employee of UNRWA, which in peacetime provides schools, medical services, and aid to the 74% of Gazans who are registered refugees, Thabet is both an anchor of Gaza’s middle class, and a conduit for the trickle of assistance reaching them. More than 100 of her colleagues have been killed, including a friend who died “giving training on how to keep safe.” “We have some unique stories,” Thabet says. “Some of them are very sad ones. And some can give hope.”

Brothers and Sisters for Israel

Ron Scherf

Few societies are built around the military the way Israel is. So it made sense that the largest protests against Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts to sideline the judiciary earlier this year were led by a group called Brothers and Sisters in Arms. Started by seven military reservists on WhatsApp, it grew to 50,000 members, many of whom vowed not to serve in protest of the Prime Minister’s power grab.

When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, the group nonetheless urged its members to report for duty “without hesitation.” But the real surprise was that it stepped in for a government that proved unable to function. Brothers and Sisters for Israel, as it was renamed that same day, posted an emergency button on leading news sites: “If you have an emergency, click here.” It sent 400 teams to the communities around Gaza to coax terrified residents out of safe rooms, and 5,000 volunteers to work the depopulated farms. Hospitals got help treating the wounded, evacuees got hot meals, and donations got sorted in an underground parking garage staffed each day by 10,000 to 15,000 volunteers. The Facebook post “Can we just pay taxes directly to Brothers and Sisters in Arms?” became a meme. “You see the power of unity,” says Ron Scherf, a co-founder. “Everybody’s now focusing on helping each other.”

Three weeks after the massacre, the situation room at the Tel Aviv convention center was still humming. A computer whiteboard listed 60 teams, ranging from intelligence to kindergartens, other protest groups having pivoted just as nimbly to whatever needed doing. (A lawyer previously tasked with springing arrested protesters had organized the retrieval of pets from evacuated towns.)

Information scholar Karine Nahon led the effort to sort the dead from the abducted, a daunting task that began with 14,500 names. Some 500 volunteers crawled through social media feeds and 150 Hamas Telegram channels, deploying facial-recognition software and novel algorithms. “We’re a small country,” Nahon says. “We gave a call, and everybody showed up.”

Eyal Shai, an air force reservist with experience running giant call centers, organized the teams. “They’re talking in systems,” he says. “I’m talking people and jobs.” Every hour, a table of volunteers would break to talk with a psychologist. Few knew each other by name, but many recognized each other from the protests that, at the time, had felt like the most important task at hand. “When you look at the motive for our behavior over the last year, it all came from being patriotic,” says Oren Shvill, another of the founders. “True love of country.”

Civil Defender

Amir Hasanain

The future of any society relies on the likes of Amir Hasanain. The résumé of the 21-year-old student is a ladder of civil-society internships and academic scholarships capped by a semester at Missouri State University, sponsored by the U.S. State Department. Hasanain was back in Gaza doing his final undergrad year when Israeli bombs flattened Al-Azhar University. “I have witnessed a lot of things,” Hasanain says. Many are horrible, like “the scream of my little brothers and sisters every time there is an airstrike.” In the first days of the bombardment, the entire family gathered in one room so “we all die at once, and none has to regret his survival.” But he has also witnessed the owners of private wells opening them to all. Those with solar panels charge phones for free. Police stations are not operating, but “elderly people in the neighborhood volunteer to solve the quarrels that arise between neighbors,” he says. “The government is now dysfunctional,” he notes, but the people have stepped up.

Hasanain himself rises at 6 a.m. at his home in Rafah, near the Egyptian border, and walks first to the market and back, then two kilometers to wait four hours for water. He rides a donkey cart to where he volunteers delivering food or other aid via the civil-society organizations that are like the passersby who, in the absence of civil-defense workers, scramble into the rubble in search of survivors. Walking two kilometers home, Hasanain eats his one meal of the day. After two months of war, though, the real concern is mental stamina, he says. “The days are just overlapping with more fear, disappointment, and frustration.”

The 10 Best TV Shows of 2023

Judy Berman    30 Nov, 2023

To say that 2023 has been a tumultuous year for the entertainment industry would be an understatement. Even before writers and actors struck for months in a largely successful effort to raise wages, secure residuals from streaming platforms, and place safeguards on such existential threats to their livelihoods as A.I., the streaming wars entered a chaotic new era characterized by cash-strapped studios’ scramble to turn a profit—or at least cut their losses. Industry giants like Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery, which had invested heavily in building proprietary streaming services, reversed course by licensing titles to other streamers. Shows with fervent fan bases didn’t just get canceled after a season or two; some disappeared from streaming libraries entirely. (A recent New York Times profile likened the strategy of WBD’s CEO, David Zaslav, to that of the Broadway impresarios who made Springtime for Hitler in The Producers.) The dreaded password-sharing crackdown finally happened. Subscription prices skyrocketed.

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As the Hollywood machine lurches back into production mode, the long-term outlook for television as an art form remains uncertain. But if it’s easy to be pessimistic about the future, that’s all the more reason to celebrate the best of a bad year. Looking back at the highlights of 2023 in TV, I’m struck by how many first-time creators—from I’m a Virgo culture jammer Boots Riley and author turned Rain Dogs auteur Cash Carraway to Dead Ringers phenom Alice Birch and BEEF breakthrough Lee Sung Jin—emerged with bold, new visions. Like so many on this list, their shows harnessed the subversive potential of an inherently commercial medium, in stories that spoke to an industry in crisis, a society divided, and a world at war.

More: Read TIME’s lists of the best podcasts and video games of 2023.

10. Poker Face (Peacock)

Natasha Lyonne stars as a rumpled citizen detective in an homage to Columbo created by Knives Out mastermind Rian Johnson. It’s an idea so irresistible, the show could’ve been made on autopilot and still charmed its target audience. Instead, we got 10 episodes of case-of-the-week magic that sent Lyonne’s human polygraph Charlie Cale on a road trip through the contemporary American landscape, pausing to solve murders at barbecue joints, retirement communities, and race-car tracks. Each stop is its own vividly rendered social world, populated by such delightful guest stars as Chloë Sevigny, Nick Nolte, Hong Chau, Judith Light, and Tim Meadows. And before Charlie’s mysteries start to feel too cozy, Johnson not only ups the dramatic stakes, but also challenges viewers prone to worshiping Lyonne’s wabi-sabi sage persona, setting up a second season that’s bound to surprise.

9. The Other Two (Max)

The Other Two premiered, in 2019, with a narrow premise: An adorable teen finds overnight fame as a Gen Z Justin Bieber, and his underachieving adult siblings try to ride his coattails to success. But over the course of three seasons, the series evolved into a sharp satire of the entertainment industry at large—and ended its run this year as one of the funniest comedies on TV. While the rise of young ChaseDreams (Case Walker) sent up the teen-idol-industrial complex, his mom Pat (Molly Shannon) became a window into the cult of the “relatable” daytime talk-show queen. Brother Cary (Drew Tarver) exemplified the humiliations of the struggling actor and would-be gay icon. And sister Brooke (Heléne Yorke) apprenticed with Chase’s bumbling manager, played by the hilarious Ken Marino, learning to swim in shark-infested boardrooms. The show’s final season was the biggest and smartest of all, capturing the demented ambition, streaming fatigue, and fickle politics that define contemporary Hollywood.

8. Dead Ringers (Amazon)

The year’s most unlikely reboot was also its most inspired. In repurposing David Cronenberg’s 1988 cult-classic horror movie about twin ob-gyns torn asunder when one of them falls for a glamorous patient, Alice Birch entrusted the brilliant Rachel Weisz with the dual role originated by Jeremy Irons. No shallow gender flip, the adjustment endowed the bloody allegory of siblings desperate to be back in the womb together with new layers of meaning. This Dead Ringers meets a moment when women’s bodies are once again a battleground, a humane birth experience has become a luxury item, and the ghosts of brutal reproductive research past cast dark shadows over the cutting-edge gynecological technology of the present. It also announces Birch, who was able to flesh out such ambitious themes without sacrificing the style or humor audiences cherish in the original, as one of the most exciting new showrunners out there.

7. Telemarketers (HBO)

Documentary series, particularly of the true-crime variety, have exploded in popularity during the streaming era. The problem is, few of the dozens of new titles released in the genre each year are actually good. Some are trashy. Others are just unimaginative, in style and subject matter; do we really need more insight into the psychology of serial killers? Telemarketers couldn’t be more different. Drawing on wild footage he shot in the early 2000s of fellow employees cutting up and nodding out at the anything-goes offices of telemarketing company Civic Development Group, co-director Sam Lipman-Stern embarks on a quest to expose a shady industry that pretends to raise money for good causes but mostly just lines the bosses’ pockets. While the mood of the series is pretty light (think Roger and Me meets American Movie), the investigation couldn’t be more serious. With his former co-worker Patrick J. Pespas in the role of citizen journalist and moral beacon, Lipman-Stern unravels a web of amoral entrepreneurs, corrupt police organizations, and government cowardice in the face of powerful law-enforcement forces.

6. The Curse (Showtime)

How do you follow a revelation like The Rehearsal, which premiered last year as a sort of high-concept makeover show but ended up questioning our most fundamental assumptions about who we are, what we want out of life, and how those identities and aspirations are portrayed on screen? If you’re Nathan Fielder, you team up with two Hollywood luminaries, Benny Safdie and Emma Stone, for a scripted series that burrows even deeper into the fraught relationships between reality TV and reality, how we see ourselves and how others perceive us. The word most often used to describe The Curse, which won’t air its finale until January, is uncomfortable. That’s putting it lightly. In dissecting the interactions of a couple shooting an eco-conscious real estate series for HGTV, Fielder and co-creator Safdie touch third-rail issues like gentrification, cultural appropriation, and colonialism. The precision with which each episode provokes and unsettles echoes such masters of productive discomfort as Hitchcock and Kafka.

5. BEEF (Netflix)

What could be more timely than a show about anger? First-time creator Lee Sung Jin casts Ali Wong and Steven Yeun as two L.A. drivers whose random road-rage encounter escalates into a series of increasingly destructive pranks that threaten to ruin both of their lives. Each party’s fury is rooted in years, if not decades, of repression. Wong’s Amy has a talentless artist husband (Joseph Lee) and a successful houseplant business that she’s desperate to sell to a mercurial billionaire (Maria Bello). Yeun’s Danny is a hapless contractor hustling to bring his parents back from Korea. While the show isn’t about Asian-American identities per se, it’s grounded in the discrete ethnic communities to which the characters belong and feels specific to protagonists grappling with inequality, stereotyping, and the elevated expectations of immigrant parents. Darkly hilarious but also profoundly observant, BEEF pairs “minor feelings” with major stakes.

4. Rain Dogs (HBO)

Streamers are going broke scrambling to scale up television to fit genre-franchise-multiverse specs, but often the most effective small-screen stories are also the most intimate. Rain Dogs is this year’s most compelling case in point, a portrait of a fascinatingly unconventional family. Daisy May Cooper’s Costello is a peep-show dancer and aspiring writer struggling to support her wise-beyond-her-years tween daughter (Fleur Tashjian) with dubious help from her recently incarcerated gay best friend, Florian (Jack Farthing). He comes from a rich family; she can rarely make rent. He’s a gleeful sadist; she has masochistic tendencies. They’re toxic together, and they know it, but that doesn’t mean they can stand to be apart—or make them stop caring about each other. Creator Cash Carraway, an author making her first foray into showrunning, strikes the perfect balance of darkness, warmth, grit, and scathing British humor, ensuring that this emotional dramedy neither trivializes its characters’ pain nor devolves into a pity party.

3. I’m a Virgo (Amazon)

Less than two months after the WGA went on strike and just a few weeks before SAG-AFTRA joined them on the picket line to protest their employers’ greed, the streaming arm of a megacorporation led by one of the world’s richest people unveiled a flagrantly anti-capitalist comedy series devised by radical rapper and Sorry to Bother You filmmaker Boots Riley. It’s a complicated partnership to parse, politically speaking. But from an artistic standpoint, Riley’s surreal allegory about a 13-foot-tall Black teenager (the great Jharrel Jerome) in Oakland is among the year’s boldest and most imaginative statements. Jerome’s Cootie is a folk hero for our times—a gentle giant whose sheltered upbringing makes him slow to realize that powerful forces within American society, chief among them a vigilante billionaire played by Walton Goggins, will always interpret a powerful Black man as a thug and a threat. Riley’s secret weapons are humor and humanism. His message may be militant, but he delivers it in a package cushioned by laughs, love, and a lively vision of liberation. Your move, Jeff Bezos.

1. Succession (HBO) and Reservation Dogs (FX)

Ranking art is a fool’s errand, but I appreciate the annual list-making ritual just the same. If you abandon any pretense that it’s possible to pick an objective “best” show, what you’re left with is a record of the ones that made the most profound impact on you specifically. Well, for the first time in my career, I just couldn’t decide which of two series—both of which wrapped up nearly flawless runs this year—most brilliantly fulfilled the potential of the TV medium in the year 2023.

Succession was the obvious choice, an Emmy-winning, hour-long drama that aired on a platform synonymous with prestige TV and drove water-cooler conversation for practically its entire four-season run. Creator Jesse Armstrong and his virtuosic cast didn’t waste a second of the show’s final arc, which unfolded largely in the aftermath of Murdoch-like media mogul Logan Roy’s (Brian Cox) ingeniously choreographed midair death. Every episode earned the fanfare with which it was greeted: Connor’s (Alan Ruck) miserable wedding! Swedish tech edgelord Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgård) waging psychological warfare on the Roy kids in Norway! Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) and Shiv (Sarah Snook) hosting an election-eve party that damn near ends their marriage! That white-knuckle election episode! That tour de force funeral episode! The bangers just kept coming. And the finale made the biggest bang of all, culminating in a race to the bottom that everyone, but especially the irreparably broken Roy siblings, won.

Reservation Dogs, by contrast, never chased the mainstream zeitgeist. Instead of homing in on the 1% of the 1%, Sterlin Harjo’s half-hour dramedy chronicled the hijinks of disenfranchised outsiders: four Native American teens on an Oklahoma reservation mourning a friend who died by suicide. Profane, poignant, and sometimes psychedelic, the series moved fluidly between coming-of-age awkwardness, small-town character comedy, and the spiritual immediacy that comes with growing up with ancient traditions in a place that has seen so many untimely deaths. While the teenage Rez Dogs remained at the show’s center, learning how to become adults from the elders around them, its circle never stopped expanding until it encompassed the entire fictional community of Okern—young and old, present and absent, living and spectral. In its final season, you never knew, going in, what kind of journey an episode was going to take you on. One rode a time machine to the 1970s; another reunited college-bound Elora (Devery Jacobs) with a long-lost father played by Ethan Hawke. A cast blessed with veterans like Zahn McClarnon and Gary Farmer but anchored by newcomers breathed vitality into every frame.

Yet the two shows had more in common than might be apparent. Both were irreverent. Both mixed comedy and tragedy, and each invented a poetically foulmouthed language of its own; where Logan had “f-ck off,” Rez Dogs has an endless supply of “sh-tasses.” Both shows had profound things to say about the sociopolitical realities of our time. And each accessed those insights through finely wrought characters that felt unique to their respective worlds—lonely masters of the universe in one case, members of a disadvantaged but fiercely loving community in the other. Together, they capture the polarized extremes of American life in the year that was.

Honorable mentions:

A Small Light (Nat Geo), Barry (HBO), The Bear (FX), Extraordinary (Hulu), Fellow Travelers (Showtime), Party Down (Starz), Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story (Netflix), This Fool (Hulu), Wrestlers (Netflix), Yellowjackets (Showtime)

The 10 Best Movies of 2023

Stephanie Zacharek    1 Dec, 2023

No year-end best-movie list is definitive, because no year of moviegoing experience can be reduced to bullet points—nor should it be. Particularly now, when we can watch so many new movies without leaving our homes, the experience of watching has changed drastically, and in ways we may never be able to fully reckon with. When you finish watching a movie at home, you may still be thinking about it as you tee another one up, or head off to bed, or patter into the kitchen to make a sandwich. But a movie watched in a theater, in the company of other human beings, takes up space in a different way. As you drive away, or head to the bus or subway, a great movie—or even a terrible one—follows you. It expands to fill the air, rather than shrinking back into a little box. This is the space in which its greatness, or the overwhelming force of its mediocrity, is fully revealed to you.

You can watch a great movie at home and fully acknowledge its greatness: after all, streaming older movies, or watching them on physical media, is how most of us learn about movie history. But a year of new movies, whether you watch them at home or not, should be much more expansive than your living room. Following are 10 movies—plus a large handful of honorable mentions—that kept me thinking in the hours, days, and months after I watched them. These are the movies that followed me home.

More: Read TIME’s lists of the best TV shows, podcasts and video games of 2023.

10. Passages

It’s impossible to get through life without messing a few things up. But how much messing up is too much? At the center of Ira Sachs’ sometimes funny but also piercing Passages is a self-centered filmmaker, played in a dazzling performance by Franz Rogowski, who windmills through life with reckless disregard for the feelings of those around him, including his husband (Ben Whishaw) and the young woman who has temporarily entranced him (Adèle Exarchopoulos). At best, he’s exasperating; at worst, he inflicts deep and lasting pain. And still, you feel something for him. His electricity is also his curse, and as this love triangle unfolds, it may leave you feeling the charge and the anguish all at once.

Read TIME’s review

9. Dreamin’ Wild

There are two types of people in the world: those who view rock’n’roll dreams as small things you eventually grow out of and those who never stop living them, even if they confine their dream time to the spiral grooves of sides A and B. Bill Pohlad’s Dreamin’ Wild—based on real-life events, and starring Casey Affleck and Walton Goggins—is for the second group, a story about what happens when two people who sought pop stardom as teenagers get a second chance in middle age. Music can mean a lot in one lifetime: it can break dreams, but it can also mend them.

Read TIME’s review

8. Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret

Movies dealing with the specifics of women’s experience are still a relative rarity on the movie landscape. How many studio execs are going to leap at the chance to finance a film about the onset of menses and—by suggestion—its lunar twin, menopause? Featuring a superb cast (including Rachel McAdams, Benny Safdie, and Abby Ryder Fortson), Kelly Fremon Craig’s adaptation of Judy Blume’s 1970 coming-of-age classic is largely about the confusion of adolescence—but also, more subtly, it addresses what it means for women to say goodbye to all that as they hit middle age. This is a great movie for young people, but maybe even a better one for those who find themselves look-ing through the far end of the telescope.

Read TIME’s review

7. Killers of the Flower Moon

To watch Lily Gladstone (above) in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon is to recapture a thread of history that has, until recently, eluded most of us. Scorsese has made a somber, poetic adaptation of David Grann’s account of how a group of greedy white men systematically murdered members of the Osage Nation in early 1920s Oklahoma. As Mollie Burkhart, a rich Osage woman whose family was gradually killed off around her, Gladstone gives face to a million stories that have been conveniently forgotten in modern America. Scorsese’s mournful epic also features bigger movie stars, like Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro. But Gladstone’s Mollie is the soul of his film, and he knows it.

Read more: Martin Scorsese Still Has Stories Left to Tell

6. Past Lives

In writer-director Celine Song’s stirring debut film, a Korean immigrant who has built a life for herself in Toronto and New York (Greta Lee) reconnects with the childhood friend she left behind years ago (Teo Yoo); her husband (John Magaro) stands by, a witness to the subterranean crackle of their connection. In any life, there are an infinite number of roads not taken—we can be on only one road at a time. Song’s movie is all about the mournful beauty of missed opportunities, a recognition of the truth that yearning is part of life. Without it, all we’re left with is false certainty, perhaps the greatest dishonesty of all.

Read TIME’s review

5. Revoir Paris

The brother of French writer-director Alice Winocour survived the 2015 terrorist attack at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris; unable to communicate with him as he hid, she had to wait to hear if he’d made it out alive. In Revoir Paris, Virginie Efira gives a shattering performance as a woman who survives a similar, but fictional, attack—though the meaning of survival here is complex. Efira’s Mia can’t recall much of the horrific event; the experience was too traumatic. But over time, she finds her way back to life, and to feeling, by connecting with others whose lives were also broken by the tragedy. Without preciousness or platitudes, Winocour and Efira plumb the stark and sometimes painful truth of what it means to commit to the world of the living.

Read more: The 100 Best Movies of the Past 10 Decades

4. Priscilla

Elvis is everywhere, even 46 years after his death. But what about Priscilla Beaulieu Presley, the woman he met when he was a 24-year-old soldier stationed in Germany and she was just a girl of 14? Sofia Coppola’s film, adapted from Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir, brings this story to the screen with infinite tenderness. Jacob Elordi plays Elvis, a great artist and a messed-up man who mistreated the woman he loved most. But the movie belongs to Cailee Spaeny as Priscilla, preternaturally self-possessed as a young teenager but both wiser and more resilient by age 27, when her marriage to royalty ended. Spaeny walks us through this extraordinary but also painful span of time in one woman’s life, one satin-slipper step after another.

Read TIME’s review

3. The Zone of Interest

The everyday things many of us want and need—plenty of food, marital companionship, a safe and comfortable home —are the same things German SS officer Rudolf Höss, the longtime commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife Hedwig wanted for themselves and their family. In Jonathan Glazer’s ghostly, ice-cold film—adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel—Sandra Hüller plays Hedwig, who runs her household with starched-linen efficiency, vaguely cognizant of the horrors being perpetrated beyond her garden walls but viewing them as an annoyance rather than an atrocity. Christian Friedel’s Höss is highly inventive when it comes to pleasing the higher-ups; his ideas are a fuel for evil. The Zone of Interest isn’t just a semi-fictionalized view of history. It’s also a story for the here and now—a reminder that happiness built on the suffering of others is no kind of happiness at all.

Read TIME’s review

2. Maestro

Pledging your life to another person is not for the faint of heart. Bradley Cooper’s Maestro, less a biopic than a window into a complex, passionate marriage, is a modern rarity: an example of a starry, big-ticket production put to use in telling a truly grownup story. Cooper stars as conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, complicated and charismatic as both an artist and a man. Carey Mulligan gives one of the finest performances of the year, a portrait of both steeliness and human fragility, as the Costa Rican–Chilean actor Felicia Montealegre, who became Bernstein’s wife and the mother of his three children. This is grand-scale filmmaking that’s also bracingly intimate.

Read TIME’s review

1. Fallen Leaves

A tentative romance between a woman who’s making the best of dreary workaday life (Alma Pöysti) and a metalworker whose perpetual drunkenness keeps him underemployed (Jussi Vatanen), plus a dog who helps his human bridge the expanse between loneliness and the contentment of solitude: those are the main ingredients of Finnish filmmaker Aki Kaurismäki’s Fallen Leaves, and he works magic with them. Kaurismäki is the master of the deadpan humanist comedy, the type of picture that people may think of as merely odd or charming. Yet so much of life is made up of little revelations that form the core of who we are. This is Kaurismäki’s gift: to catch those moments, seemingly snatching them from the wind, and put them onscreen so that we, too, will know them when we see them.

Read TIME’s review

HONORABLE MENTIONS: Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Paul Schrader’s Master Gardener, Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, Guy Ritchie’s The Covenant, Lisa Cortes’ Little Richard: I Am Everything, Frances O’Connor’s Emily, Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning, Anh Hung Tran’s The Taste of Things, Ava DuVernay’s Origin, Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers, Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days

The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2023

Annabel Gutterman    8 Dec, 2023

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

The best works of fiction published this year took us on all manner of journeys. There were big, physical trips across countries and continents, and, in one case, on foot through the untamed woods. And there were heavy, emotional treks to uncover answers about love and loss. In these books, the destination was often less important than the lessons learned along the way. From a bored copywriter in Berlin who follows a K-pop star to Seoul to a girl fleeing a colonial settlement, these protagonists were all searching for something, whether a shot at safety, a sense of purpose, or a chance to finally return home. Their quests were hopeful, daring, and at times devastating. Here, the 10 best fiction books of 2023.

More: Read TIME’s lists of the best nonfiction books, songs, albums, movies, TV shows, podcasts and video games of 2023. Also discover the 100 Must-Read Books of the year.

10. Tremor, Teju Cole

The protagonist of Teju Cole’s first novel in over a decade shares many similarities with the author. Like Cole, the incisive Tunde is a Nigerian American artist and photographer who teaches at a prestigious college in New England. Tremor begins in Maine as Tunde hunts for antiques with his wife Sadako while meditating on colonialism as it relates to the objects he sees. Tunde is always pulling at the loose threads of the history that surrounds him, contemplating how the world has been shaped by the past. Forgoing a traditional narrative structure, Tremor takes a philosophical form to investigate everything from how Americans view art to how a marriage can quietly unravel.

Buy Now: Tremor on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Y/N, Esther Yi

In an age when parasocial relationships run rampant, Esther Yi’s daring debut couldn’t be more relevant. Y/N begins with an unnamed narrator living in Berlin whose boring job as a copywriter for an artichoke company leaves something to be desired. She spends much of her time in the fantasy worlds inside her head and online, where she writes fan fiction about a popular K-pop star named Moon. When the real-life Moon unexpectedly announces his retirement, the young woman feels compelled to drop everything and go to Seoul in search of the man she views as her soulmate. What ensues is a snarky and astute takedown of internet culture.

Buy Now: Y/N on Bookshop | Amazon

8. The Hive and the Honey, Paul Yoon

The third short-story collection from Paul Yoon spans centuries of the Korean diaspora, with each piece centering on everyday people as they navigate what it means to belong and question how much of their identities are wrapped up in collective history. There’s an ex-con attempting to understand the world, a Cold War–era maid looking for the son she left behind in North Korea, and a couple living in the U.K. whose quiet existence is complicated by the arrival of a boy at their corner store. Yoon tells the stories of characters at odds with their relationships to home and explores how trauma can linger in the most unexpected ways.

Buy Now: The Hive and the Honey on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Tom Lake, Ann Patchett

Don’t let the setting of Ann Patchett’s latest novel fool you. Yes, it’s the spring of 2020 and her characters are in COVID-19 lockdown, but this is no pandemic story. Tom Lake takes place in Michigan, where Lara and her husband are enjoying the rare opportunity to live once again with their three grown daughters. There, as the family passes the days tending to their cherry trees, Lara finally tells her girls the story they’ve been longing to hear—about how, in her young adulthood, she fell in love with a man who would go on to become a movie star.

Buy Now: Tom Lake on Bookshop | Amazon

6. Temple Folk, Aaliyah Bilal

The 10 stories in Aaliyah Bilal’s collection examine the lives of Black Muslims in America. In one, a daughter is haunted by her father’s spirit as she writes his eulogy, and the ghost makes her reconsider his commitment to Islam. In another, an undercover FBI agent reckons with unexpected empathy for the Nation of Islam. Throughout, parents and their children learn about the limitations and possibilities of faith. The result is a collection of wide-ranging narratives that touch on freedom and belonging.

Buy Now: Temple Folk on Bookshop | Amazon

5. The Vaster Wilds, Lauren Groff

When Lauren Groff’s novel opens, a young, unnamed girl has just escaped her 17th century colonial settlement. Starving and cold, she doesn’t know where she’s headed and is constantly on the verge of collapse. But, somehow, she finds the will to keep pushing forward. In Groff’s timeless adventure tale, the girl endures the physical threats and mental tests of navigating the woods, all while remaining determined that there is a life worth living on the other side.

Buy Now: The Vaster Wilds on Bookshop | Amazon

4. The Bee Sting, Paul Murray

Paul Murray’s domestic drama follows the four members of the troubled Barnes family after an economic downturn sends patriarch Dickie’s car business hurtling toward bankruptcy. Feeling the crush of impending doom surround them, the once functional unit is falling apart. Dickie’s wife Imelda has become obsessed with selling her belongings on eBay, their teenage daughter Cass is drinking instead of studying for her final exams, and their preadolescent son PJ is talking to a stranger he met online. Murray probes what it means to love and be loved in a world that feels increasingly like it’s on the cusp of expiration.

Buy Now: The Bee Sting on Bookshop | Amazon

3. Our Share of Night, Mariana Enriquez

In Mariana Enriquez’s transporting novel, translated from the original Spanish by Megan McDowell, a young boy and his father take a terrifying road trip. The boy’s mother has just died under mysterious circumstances, and the duo is traveling across Argentina to confront members of the Order, the cult she was born into. The Order is made up of wealthy families who will do anything to achieve immortality. And the boy just might have the skills they are looking for—a possibility that makes him vulnerable.

Buy Now: Our Share of Night on Bookshop | Amazon

2. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store, James McBride

It’s 1972 and a skeleton has just been found in Pottstown, Pa. The question of who the remains belong to—and how they made it to the bottom of a well—pulls James McBride’s narrative decades into the past, to a time when the Black and Jewish residents of the neighborhood came together to protect a boy from being institutionalized. As McBride makes connections between the two storylines, he spins a powerful tale about prejudice, family, and faith.

Buy Now: The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Biography of X, Catherine Lacey

At the center of Catherine Lacey’s novel is the fictional writer and artist X, one of the most celebrated talents of the 20th century. Though she’s hugely popular, most of her background is unknown; not even X’s wife CM knows her real name. When X dies, CM finds herself incensed by an inaccurate biography of her late wife. So she decides to write her own. The mystery of X’s identity is just the beginning of this daring story that seamlessly blends fiction and nonfiction to question the purpose of art itself.

Buy Now: Biography of X on Bookshop | Amazon

The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023

Annabel Gutterman    7 Dec, 2023

These are independent reviews of the products mentioned, but TIME receives a commission when purchases are made through affiliate links at no additional cost to the purchaser.

The best nonfiction books of the year dug deep, mining both personal and global history to uncover essential truths. John Vaillant captured the horrors of a wildfire to study the consequences of climate change. Matthew Desmond dissected how poverty persists in the United States and made a compassionate call for greater equity. Tracy K. Smith detailed her complicated mission to learn more about her ancestry and urged us to examine whose stories we deem worth preserving. Their books are among the most impactful nonfiction published in 2023. Here, the 10 best books of the year.

More: Read TIME’s lists of the best songs, albums, movies, TV shows, podcasts and video games of 2023.

10. King, Jonathan Eig

In the first major biography of Martin Luther King Jr. in decades, journalist Jonathan Eig paints a complex and fully human portrait of an American leader. Drawing on newly released FBI files, telephone transcripts, and more, Eig presents King like he’s never been seen before. The author unveils this research in fresh and exciting turns, unpacking the activist’s public work alongside his private life. King is a nuanced new look at a civil rights icon.

Buy Now: King on Bookshop | Amazon

9. Fire Weather, John Vaillant

At the center of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather is a horrific real-life story that serves as a deafening wake-up call. The book traces the events of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, in which 88,000 Canadians were displaced after their homes and neighborhoods were destroyed in a fiery blaze over the course of just one afternoon. In describing the natural disaster, Vaillant breaks down the science in accessible terms and offers an important account of the consequences of climate change.

Buy Now: Fire Weather on Bookshop | Amazon

8. Liliana’s Invincible Summer, Cristina Rivera Garza

For three decades, poet Cristina Rivera Garza has been haunted by her sister’s murder. In July 1990, Liliana, an architecture student living in Mexico City who loved swimming and cinema, was killed. Though an arrest warrant was filed for Liliana’s ex-boyfriend, he disappeared during the investigation. So, in 2019, Rivera Garza decided to seek answers to what happened to her beloved sister herself. She recounts her quest for information and justice, and uses her sister’s story to tell a larger one about domestic violence and femicide.

Buy Now: Liliana’s Invincible Summer on Bookshop | Amazon

7. Poverty, By America, Matthew Desmond

In 2017, sociologist Matthew Desmond won a Pulitzer Prize for Evicted, which analyzed why so many American families were facing eviction in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. His latest book revisits similar themes, this time focusing on why poverty is so prevalent in the U.S. With an empathetic hand, he writes about the systems that keep Americans from living above the poverty line, and implores us all to fight for ways to bring prosperity to the masses.

Buy Now: Poverty, By America on Bookshop | Amazon

More: The 100 Must-Read Books of 2023

6. How to Say Babylon, Safiya Sinclair

As a child growing up in Jamaica, Safiya Sinclair had to adhere to her Rastafarian father’s strict rules, which governed everything from the clothes she wore to the people she was allowed to see. But the author managed to educate herself on other ways of living and decided to use her voice to break free. In her memoir, Sinclair captures her turbulent coming of age, and how she grappled with realizing that the traditions she was raised in were suffocating her. The result is a moving portrait of a woman’s self-empowerment.

Buy Now: How to Say Babylon on Bookshop | Amazon

5. You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Maggie Smith

After her marriage falls apart, Maggie Smith inspects the pieces of the life she once knew to pave a path forward. You Could Make This Place Beautiful finds Smith dissecting the very form in which she is writing as she constantly questions the purpose of memoir and the stories we tell ourselves. Mining her heartbreak and memories both with her husband and without him, Smith moves between rage, sorrow, and grief. And through it all, she illustrates her unwavering love for her son and daughter.

Buy Now: You Could Make This Place Beautiful on Bookshop | Amazon

4. A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall

In February 2012, 5-year-old Milad Salama boarded a bus with his fellow Palestinian classmates en route to a theme park. But he never made it there. The bus crashed outside Jerusalem, and the children aboard it were injured or killed. This devastating scene propels Nathan Thrall’s book, which follows Milad’s father Abed from his first romance to the day of the collision, all told against the backdrop of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Thrall tackles the subject with care and expertise, introducing the lives of several Israelis and Palestinians to illuminate their struggles and complex histories.

Buy Now: A Day in the Life of Abed Salama on Bookshop | Amazon

3. To Free the Captives, Tracy K. Smith

In her memoir, Pulitzer Prize winner and former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith crafts a searing narrative about being Black in America. She excavates her past to better understand the racial violence that persists today, wading through generations of her family’s history. But as she tries to learn more about her lineage, beginning with the Alabama town where her father grew up, Smith realizes that the research process itself is fraught and riddled with missing pieces.

Buy Now: To Free the Captives on Bookshop | Amazon

2. Doppelganger, Naomi Klein

What would you do if all of a sudden people started mixing you up with a person whose beliefs you can’t stand? Leftist activist and author Naomi Klein has been forced to answer this exact question: she is constantly confused with Naomi Wolf, who has spent the past few years spreading antivaccine rhetoric and fringe conspiracy theories. Klein investigates how “other Naomi” became the type of public figure she is today, taking a dizzying trip through the current cultural landscape to examine politics, misinformation, and the slippery path to radicalization.

Buy Now: Doppelganger on Bookshop | Amazon

1. Some People Need Killing, Patricia Evangelista

The title of Patricia Evangelista’s memoir is rooted in a conversation the journalist once had with a vigilante who made that unnerving declaration. Her home country, the Philippines, was full of people who shared the same belief as this man—like those working for the state, who carried out thousands of killings of citizens during President Rodrigo Duterte’s “war on drugs.” Evangelista tells the stories of those who were lost in the struggle, and interrogates the language we use to describe violence.

Buy Now: Some People Need Killing on Bookshop | Amazon

Alex Newell

Laura Zornosa    5 Dec, 2023

About a year ago, Alex Newell had just returned to New York City after the pre-Broadway tryout of the musical Shucked in Salt Lake City. A Utah alt-weekly was already calling Newell’s number “Independently Owned,” sung from the perspective of the self-reliant whiskey distiller Lulu, a “knockout show-stopper.” Broadway agreed: in June, Newell won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical, becoming one of the first two out nonbinary people to win in an acting category, alongside Some Like It Hot’s J. Harrison Ghee.

But Newell started breaking boundaries long before the corn-centric musical comedy opened on the Great White Way in April. Their breakthrough role—as Unique Adams on Glee in 2012—was one of the first transgender characters on prime-time TV. Five years later, they made their Broadway debut in the revival of Once on This Island. In 2020, they played the gender-fluid DJ Mo in the musical NBC series Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. Ahead of the Tonys, in May, Newell told TIME that winning the award would just be a cherry on top of what they had already achieved: “I created a lane for somebody after me to come and do exceptional. I have created space and created conversation and made the ruckus to create active change.”

In late November, Newell spoke to TIME again, about what it really felt like to win that Tony, their vision for their career as an artist, and their ideal role.

What was going through your head when you won the Tony?

It was the perfect storm. You think about, “Well sh-t, how am I gonna get up these stairs? Will I fall if I go up these stairs? It’s really, really hot. This could be anyone’s. Please say my name.” You have everything spiraling at one time. My mother could feel me shaking, and she just grabbed my hand.

Your father was a deacon, and you grew up singing in church. What role does faith play in your life now?

The lessons and values that I’ve learned by being someone that was raised in the church still hold true to me. I always look at my faith as something to pour into for places of solace or security through anguish. If I’m going through a hard time, it’s something that I can give that hardship to. It’s something that I can unburden that to, rather than holding it in all the time.

What are you trying to give the world as an artist?

Normalcy. I want every story that someone has, that’s personal to them, to be something that is not taboo, but normal. I don’t want to ever feel othered, and I don’t want anybody else like me to feel [othered]. I want any story that I tell to just be another run-of-the-mill story that just happens to look like me and be who I am.

Between your Tony win and J. Harrison Ghee’s, theater seems to be taking strides toward greater inclusivity. Does that feel true to you?

I can see them trying. I can feel them trying. And you know, with trying comes mistakes, and with trying comes error. You might not always see the incremental change, but you can feel the bubbling of it. It’s taking another step forward. You can start a fire, but can you keep that flame growing and maintain it, or do you let it fizzle and die out?

You’ve said your dream role is Effie from Dreamgirls. Why is that?

Effie rang so true to who my career has almost modeled in a way: Being told you were too loud or too big or too boisterous or too much. It’s this give-and-take of growing up in this industry and being plus-size and other and different: They want you for one thing, but don’t want you for the other thing. And when you become a little too shiny, they want to dim that light a little bit.

I have to think that an end date in sight for Shucked—on Jan. 14, after 10 months of work—must feel good.

Honey, I see the light at the end of the tunnel, and she’s blinding, and I can’t wait to bask in her.

Find Every Easter Egg in TIME’s Taylor Swift Artist Portrait

Chelsea Kardokus    6 Dec, 2023

One of the many storylines that emerged from Taylor Swift’s incredible year was her unrivaled dedication to entertaining her fans–often in messages carefully hidden throughout her music, videos, and concerts. To capture this creative spirit of TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year, we commissioned London-based artist Jane Perkins to create a portrait of the singer featuring dozens of “Easter eggs.”

Perkins’ artwork is typically crafted from found materials whose shape and color lend themselves to the specific vision for each project. “I am a ‘re-maker,’ taking inspiration from found objects and working them into something new,” says the artist, who is based in Devon, England and whose previous portraits include Adele, Princess Diana, and Frida Kahlo. “I work with materials that have a history, often things that have reached ‘the end of the line’ which even charity shops cannot sell—broken or unfashionable jewelry and items unsold for a long time.”

For the Swift portrait, I knew every piece used needed to have meaning. So we compiled a detailed list of ideas for Perkins to incorporate: mirrorball, red scarf, the number 13, dice, Scrabble pieces, cats, friendship bracelets, champagne bottle, and a seagull—just to name a few.

“Of course, I’d heard of Taylor Swift and knew some of her music,” said Perkins, “but I needed a crash course in her universe. Swifties, friendship bracelets, and ‘meaningful things’ from song lyrics were all new to me—75 emails were exchanged before I was ready to begin.”

[video id=ZNHPu9Wg autostart="viewable"]

Perkins spent three weeks researching and sourcing the materials and four weeks creating the artwork that features more than 35 secret items. To create the final image, whose glittery, colorful buttons and beads evoke the song and video for “Bejeweled” and the costumes seen on concertgoers at the Eras Tour, she worked on a firm inverted box frame, using combinations of paper collage and paint beneath the items. “I work intuitively, building up a composition that feels pleasing,” she said. “Items get moved around many times before I am happy with the result. I loved making this piece.”

Want to be in on the secrets? Here’s a list to help you locate most of the hidden items:

- A red scarf

- Cowboy boots

- Snake

- Butterfly

- Newspaper

- Guitar pics

- Heart

- Mirrorball/disco ball

- Champagne bottle/flute

- Heart-shaped sunglasses

- Cardigan

- Thread/string

- Clock set to midnight

- Woods/trees

- roses

- The number 13 (2)

- Stars

- Cat

- Glitter/sparkle

- Red lipstick

- Sunflower

- Flowers

- Snowflake

- Red lips

- A nod at NYC

- Seagull

- Puzzle piece

- Dice (totaling 13),

- Jewels

- Diamonds

- Friendship bracelets

- Acoustic guitar

- Scrabble pieces

- Beads with secret message

- Smile

- Sneakers

- Moon

Table of Contents

TIME: December 25th, 2023 | Vol. 202, No. 21 | Worldwide

All articles

Behind the Scenes of TIME’s 2023 Person of the Year Issue

Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift

Breaking Down Taylor Swift’s 2023 Impact By the Numbers

Sam Altman

Lionel Messi

The Nation Builders

The 10 Best TV Shows of 2023

The 10 Best Movies of 2023

The 10 Best Fiction Books of 2023

The 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2023

Alex Newell

Find Every Easter Egg in TIME’s Taylor Swift Artist Portrait