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- How Trump Survived Decades of Legal Trouble: Deny, Deflect, Delay, and Don’t Put Anything in Writing

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- How We Chose the 2022 TIME100 Next

Conspiracy Theorists Want to Run America’s Elections. These Are the Candidates Standing in Their Way

Charlotte Alter/Phoenix    20 Sep, 2022

Nobody recognizes Adrian Fontes when he walks into a Phoenix lunch spot near his office. The former recorder of Maricopa County looks like any other Arizona dad: a neat beard, a blue button-down, the kind of guy you’d see cheering on the sidelines at one of his girls’ softball games. He orders a burger with Swiss cheese and bacon (no bun) and launches into a monologue about his work to increase election transparency, like implementing a text-messaging system to inform voters when their ballots were received and their votes have been counted.

Fontes, 52, is a sixth-generation Mexican American who can trace his Arizona ancestry back to 1695. One of his earliest memories is learning to play “You’re a Grand Old Flag” on the autoharp for the 1976 Bicentennial. He enlisted in the Marines at 22, “willing to die for this country,” he says. But Fontes doesn’t think he’s ever taken on a greater patriotic duty than the one he’s attempting right now. “This is my first time being a high-profile candidate in a nationally important race,” he says, pouring hot sauce on his french fries. “Where the stakes are literally the fate of the free world.”

High-profile is a bit of a stretch. Fontes is running for Arizona secretary of state, a typically anonymous role that oversees the tedious details of election administration: training poll workers, managing the statewide voter-registration database, verifying the accuracy of voting machines, and certifying election results. But in 2022, the job has taken on an outsize importance. Fontes’ opponent, Republican Mark Finchem, is an election denier: an avid promoter of former President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen through widespread voter fraud. He is one of many Republicans running to oversee America’s next elections while denying the legitimacy of the last one.

If any of these candidates win, experts warn, they would possess a broad array of powers to undermine future elections if they don’t like the results. A rogue election official could attempt to prematurely stop the counting of ballots, pervert the Electoral College process, turn over the outcome of the election to partisan state legislators, or simply refuse to certify the result, all while publicly sowing doubt about the validity of the contest. It could present an existential test for American democracy. “If you can’t have trusted, neutral people running our elections, then you don’t really have free and fair elections,” says Lawrence Norden, senior director of the Elections and Government Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, a law and policy institute. “Then we’re not a functioning democracy anymore.”

Fontes is part of a loose brigade of unassuming public servants on the front lines of the fight to protect America’s election system from the Trump allies out to disrupt it. They’re paper pushers and bureaucrats, not inspiring orators or ingenious policymakers or even particularly good politicians. (If they were more charismatic, they might have picked a different line of work than election administration.) They are Democrats and Republicans, incumbents and challengers, running for offices as big as governor and as small as county clerk. Many have met only in passing, if at all. They have little in common except a collective purpose: each of them ran this year for an election-oversight position against an opponent who embraces Trump’s “Big Lie.” Fontes calls the group the “most odd mutual support organization in the world.” You could call them the Defenders: the people running to serve as the bulwark between the will of the voters and the conspiracy theorists willing to subvert it.

Read More: TRUTH Social’s Biggest Problem Is Trump

It’s a battle that President Joe Biden has cast as the heart of the midterm campaigns. “Equality and democracy are under assault” by those Republicans who “refuse to accept the results of a free election,” Biden declared in a prime-time speech Sept. 1 in front of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall. “They’re working right now, as I speak, in state after state, to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies, empowering election deniers to undermine democracy itself.”

Voters recognize the stakes. An Aug. 31 Quinnipiac poll showed that two-thirds of Americans agree that democracy is in peril—one of the only issues on which there was broad agreement across party, gender, and age. In an August NBC News poll, voters listed “threat to democracy” as the most important issue facing the country, above “cost of living” and other economic challenges.

Yet Biden’s party was slow to grasp the vital importance of down-ballot contests like secretary of state races. And even as Democrats touted the importance of “protecting democracy,” some party organizations, like the Democratic Governors Association and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, boosted election-denying Republicans in GOP primaries, believing they would be easier to beat in November’s general elections. Democratic candidates and committees spent nearly $44 million to aid Republicans, including many who endorse Trump’s falsehood that the 2020 race was rigged, according to an analysis from OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money in politics. In Pennsylvania, Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro spent $840,000 on ads that helped lift election denier Doug Mastriano to victory in the GOP gubernatorial primary—more money than Mastriano spent on himself. If he wins the general election, Mastriano—who has been subpoenaed by the Jan. 6 committee for his alleged work to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election—would appoint Pennsylvania’s next secretary of state, whose powers would include certifying the results in 2024.

A single conspiracy theorist overseeing elections in a swing state could plunge the next presidential race into chaos or even change the result. “If even one of these people win, and they say, ‘We don’t like these results,’ then we’re in a constitutional crisis,” says Ellen Kurz, founder of iVote, which works to elect Democratic secretaries of state.

“They will stop at nothing,” Kurz adds. “So we have to stop them.”

Cassidy Araiza for TIME  Fontes at the Arizona Capitol in Phoenix on Sept. 5

A few weeks before visiting Fontes in Arizona, I called his opponent. I was surprised Finchem was willing to talk. A state representative and professional realtor, Finchem marched at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He is a member of the Oath Keepers, an antigovernment organization whose leader and other members have been charged with seditious conspiracy for their alleged role in the insurrection. After listening to him rattle off various debunked conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines and “mules stuffing ballots in drop boxes,” I asked him a key question: If Biden wins Arizona in 2024, would Finchem certify that result as secretary of state?

Finchem chuckled. “If the law is followed, and legitimate votes have been counted, and Joe Biden ends up being the winner,” he told me, “I’m required under the law—if there’s no fraud—to certify the election.” But, he added, “I think you’re proposing something that, quite frankly, is a fantasy.”

Why, I asked him, was it so impossible to believe Biden won in Arizona, as many polls predicted and postelection reviews confirmed? “It strains credibility,” Finchem responded. “Isn’t it interesting that I can’t find anyone who will admit that they voted for Joe Biden?” Was it possible that lots of people he didn’t personally know had voted for Biden? “In a fantasy world, anything’s possible,” Finchem said.

There’s always been a political tug-of-war over how elections are administered. Over the years, members of both parties have found reasons to dispute election results they didn’t like. Democratic candidates, party officials, and members of Congress questioned the legitimacy of the elections that installed Trump and George W. Bush (twice) as President, even though the Democratic nominees conceded those races. In 2018, Democratic candidate Stacey Abrams refused to acknowledge that her defeat in Georgia’s governor’s race was legitimate. But such objections were intended mostly to call attention to procedural issues, such as allegations of voter suppression and critiques of the Electoral College. They were grumblings about an allegedly unfair system, not attempts to undo the results themselves, and they did not interfere with the peaceful transfer of power.

The Trumpian Stop the Steal movement is unprecedented for its scale, its longevity, its resistance to established facts, and its embrace of violence as a mechanism to overturn the will of the voters. Proponents believe that the 2020 presidential race was actively stolen, not just that the outcome was unfair. They believe this so strongly that many of them stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 to stop the election’s certification, breaking a nearly 250-year tradition of peacefully transferring power. They believe it even though judges found that more than 60 of Trump’s postelection legal challenges were lacking in merit; even though state and federal investigations have repeatedly found no widespread voter fraud in 2020; and even though Trump’s own Department of Homeland Security, Justice Department, and FBI vouched for the election’s integrity. In Arizona, the Republican-sponsored audit that set out to prove mass voter fraud in the state actually revealed the opposite, uncovering a handful more votes for Biden and fewer for Trump.

Read More: The Republican Party Has Distanced Itself From The Capitol Riot. But Local GOP Officials Fueled Supporters’ Rage Ahead of Jan. 6

Finchem’s refusal to accept these facts does not make him an outlier among Republican candidates. An analysis by FiveThirtyEight found that of 552 Republicans on the ballot in 2022, 201 have stated that the 2020 election was stolen or taken action to overturn the results, and an additional 61 have “raised questions” about the outcome. According to this tally, roughly 60% of American voters will have at least one election denier on their ballot in November. Many of them are running for statewide roles that would oversee the next election. By the end of the primaries, half of all races for governor and more than a third of all races for secretary of state included an election denier, according to States United Action, a nonpartisan organization dedicated to fair elections. At least 11 GOP nominees for secretary of state—often a state’s top election official—have embraced Trump’s Big Lie.

Elaine Cromie for TIME  Michigan secretary of state Benson, outside her office in Detroit Sept. 9

These candidates are part of a sprawling effort to respond to the result of the last election by seizing control of the next one. Trump’s allies have sought to punish Republican officials who acknowledged Biden’s win. They’ve joined local GOP committees as part of the so-called precinct strategy promoted by former Trump adviser Stephen Bannon, and signed up to be poll workers in order to scrutinize election systems. And they’ve orchestrated what experts describe as a mass harassment campaign designed to drive impartial election workers from their jobs. According to a report by the Brennan Center, more than 60% of election workers say they’re worried about interference from political leaders. In Gillespie County, Texas, the entire elections department quit. At least 10 states have passed laws imposing large fines or felony charges on even small human errors or technical infractions by election administrators. “It’s about making these jobs scary so people leave them,” says Joanna Lydgate, CEO of States United Action, “so people who are election deniers can take those positions.”

Jim Marchant, a former state assembly member and former telecommunications executive, is the Republican nominee for Nevada secretary of state. He told me it’s “impossible to answer” whether he would have certified Biden’s 2020 win because he has so many “suspicions” about the use of voting machines. “Computers are very, very hackable, and we just can’t trust ’em,” he told me, alluding to the debunked conspiracy theory that voting machines switched votes from Trump to Biden. When I asked about the multiple audits that found no significant voter fraud in 2020, Marchant responded, “Those aren’t audits in the way that you can trust.”

In the Electoral College battlegrounds of Arizona, Michigan, and Nevada, election deniers have won GOP nominations for secretary of state. In all these races, Republicans see a plausible path to victory. And if Marchant, Finchem, or Michigan GOP secretary of state candidate Kristina Karamo—who has also promoted baseless conspiracies— prevail in November, they would be the top election official in a state that could decide the Presidency in 2024. “You don’t put a bank robber in charge of bank security,” says Ben Berwick of Protect Democracy, a nonprofit organization focused on confronting authoritarianism in the U.S. “You don’t put an arsonist in charge of fire safety.”

Yet before the election deniers can radically reshape American democracy, they have to win their races. And that’s where the Defenders come in. For many of them, what was once a bid for a routine clerical position has become imbued with the weight of saving the American experiment. After Jan. 6, “we looked back and realized that was the end of the beginning,” says Michigan secretary of state Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat. “We had to be prepared to endure a multiyear, multifaceted nationally coordinated effort to enable those who tried and failed to undo the results in 2020 to succeed in 2024.”

Read More: ‘Never Trump’ Groups Hope to Boost Democrats in the Midterms. But Can They Sway Their Fellow Republicans?

Benson has gotten used to living under siege. Shortly after the 2020 election, she had to rush her young son into the bathtub to hide from Trump supporters who had surrounded her home to angrily protest Michigan’s election results. Another time, Benson was unloading groceries in her kitchen when a man started pounding on the door, forcing her to send her son into the basement and call for help. (“Mom, I thought that man was going to kill you,” Benson recalls her son saying.) She’s gotten phone calls about being hung from a tree. They scare her, but they don’t deter her. If anything, she says, the threats have strengthened her commitment to the job. “My determination to lead our state’s election system through this challenging time became etched in granite,” she says.

Steve Simon, who has been Minnesota secretary of state since 2015, says the tone of this year’s race is different. It used to be that angry callers to his office alleged wrongdoing by the other party, he says; now, the callers allege wrongdoing by the election administrators themselves. Simon, a Democrat, is running for re-election against a Republican who called the 2020 election “the big rig” and “our 9/11.” “In the other races, it was a clash of political differences or policy differences,” he says. “Here the stakes are higher. It’s really a referendum or judgment on the entire system.”

First-time candidates recognize what’s at risk too. Cisco Aguilar, a former Nevada athletic commissioner and first-time candidate for elected office, says he originally decided to run for secretary of state in Nevada to streamline business licensing and protect voting rights. But when Marchant won the GOP primary, everything about the contest changed. “This is now real. This is no longer rhetoric,” says Aguilar, a Democrat. “This is so serious that if I don’t win this election, it could affect the outcome [of the presidential race] in 2024. I could totally f-ck up the country, and that’s on me.”

At the local level, county clerk candidates are running to defeat election deniers across the country. “You either believe that the election was solid and professional and done right, or you believe it was stolen,” says Stacie Wilke-McCulloch, who is running for Carson City, Nev., clerk-recorder against the former chair of the local GOP. “It’s almost like it’s a one-issue campaign.” At the same time, such races rarely attract sustained media coverage or fundraising interest. Lannie Chapman, a Democrat running for Salt Lake City county clerk against an opponent who spoke at a Stop the Steal Rally, has raised about $90,000—a solid haul for a clerk’s race, but far less than candidates for higher-profile offices typically pull in.

Some of the most important Defenders are Republicans who vouched for the integrity of the 2020 election while beating back election deniers in GOP primaries. “It’s been very challenging as an elections professional and a lifelong Republican to see people embrace that conspiracy so fervently,” says Pam Anderson, who served as clerk and recorder for Jefferson County, Colorado, for eight years and was president of the Colorado County Clerks Association. In June, Anderson won the GOP nomination for Colorado secretary of state over Tina Peters, who has promoted voter-fraud conspiracy theories and was recently indicted on multiple felony charges in connection with an alleged election-security breach. (She has pleaded not guilty.) Anderson is trying to thread the needle between the two parties’ rhetoric about voting. “Security equals suppression for the left, and access equals fraud on the right,” Anderson says. “I don’t believe either of those things.”

In Nebraska, Republican secretary of state Bob Evnen circulated a detailed PowerPoint presentation, titled “Fake vs Fact,” debunking popular conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. In Idaho, Ada county clerk Phil McGrane defeated two election deniers to win the GOP nomination for secretary of state. “One of my opponents suggested they would decertify election equipment, and that’s alarming to me,” says McGrane. “There are some things that are just logistical and practical and have to work.”

Saeed Rahbaran for TIME  Aguilar, the Democratic candidate for Nevada secretary of state

Brad Raffensperger, who has served as Georgia secretary of state since 2019, famously resisted Trump’s demands to “find” more than 11,000 votes to tip the results of the 2020 presidential election in the Peach State. After he refused to bow to that pressure, Raffensperger’s wife was harassed with sexual text messages and his daughter-in-law’s home was broken into, he told the Jan. 6 committee. In May, Raffensperger vanquished a Trump-aligned challenger to win the party’s nomination. “We have hinge points throughout our American history,” he says, pointing to the Civil War as an example. “I think that if we have people of integrity that will stand in the gap and follow the law and do their job … that’s how we move through this.”

The heat is radiating off the pavement at the Arizona strip mall where Adrian Fontes is kicking off an early Saturday morning canvass. It’s the weekend before Labor Day, and signs for Republican candidates for Senate and governor crowd street corners in the Phoenix area. Roughly a dozen volunteers mill around with clipboards, preparing to disperse into the hot morning. Fontes is there to explain why voters should care about the secretary of state race.

Electing Finchem, he says, would create “chaos and uncertainty” that would pervade everything from voting to business. “Elections are the golden thread that run through the entire fabric of our society,” he adds. “If you pull that thread out, the entire fabric disintegrates.”

Read More: Why the Polls May Be Feeding Liberals Another Blue Mirage

Off to the side, Steven Eshleman, 70, is wearing a hat and shirt that say “Protect Democracy/Elect Fontes.” Eshleman is one of Fontes’ most loyal supporters, showing up to many of his events. “If we lose this election, our democracy is in peril,” says Eshleman. “Who knows what they could do next time?”

Other Fontes supporters say they’re annoyed so few people seem to be paying attention to the candidates trying to repel the threat. “They’re giving so much free publicity to all the Republicans,” says Elaine McGuire, 71, as she hoists a Fontes yard sign at an event in Phoenix later that day. “It’s revving up the MAGA people.”

Democrats are waking up to the importance of these races. The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State has raised more than $16 million this cycle, a tenfold increase over the most recent midterm, though still a fraction of what the party raises for other races. For iVote, the group supporting Democratic candidates for secretary of state, its $15 million budget this year is more than double what it spent in 2018. “We are paying more attention than we ever have before,” says Amanda Litman, co-founder of Run for Something, a group that recruits and trains Democratic candidates to run for local offices. Yet for years, Republicans have invested more in those races. “We are starting at a deficit,” Litman says.

Fontes isn’t focused on the national trends or the broader threat; he’s just trying to win his race. “It’s weird being in the eye of the storm,” he says. In the face of conspiracy, suspicion, and lies, he’s motivated by a belief in his fellow Americans. “Voters will see through the nonsense,” he says. “Once they start paying attention, they will see that the faith that they’ve lost in their fellow citizens oughta come back.”

—With reporting by Julia Zorthian and Mariah Espada

Correction, September 20

The original version of this story misstated Jim Marchant’s tenure in the Nevada State Assembly. He is a former State Assembly member, not a current State Assembly member.

How Trump Survived Decades of Legal Trouble: Deny, Deflect, Delay, and Don’t Put Anything in Writing

Brian Bennett    21 Sep, 2022

Nearly fifty years ago, Donald Trump learned the legal strategy that would repeatedly get him out of tight legal jams.

It was 1973 and the Justice Department had just filed a civil rights lawsuit against Trump and his father Fred Trump. The complaint alleged that the Trumps and their company, which managed some 14,000 apartments in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island, had violated the Fair Housing Act by systematically flagging the applications of Black renters and steering them away from available units.

To push back, the Trumps hired the famously combative Roy Cohn—Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel during the 1950s Red Scare hearings—and sued the Justice Department for $100 million, claiming defamation. The Trumps settled the case two years later, agreeing to a consent decree that included giving a weekly list of vacancies to the New York Urban League. Trump later boasted that he ended up “making a minor settlement without admitting guilt.”

That early entanglement with the Justice Department drove home to Trump key lessons he’s carried with him through five decades of lawsuits and tax challenges, two impeachments and now, more legal investigations than any other former President has ever faced.

On Wednesday, New York Attorney General Letitia James compounded Trump’s legal woes, announcing that the state was suing Trump, his three adult children, the Trump Organization, and senior management in the company, alleging business fraud involving the value of assets to banks, insurance companies and the state tax authorities.

The sheer number of investigations and the increasingly tangled defenses his legal team is having to put on paper and argue in court amount to a stress test of Trump’s standard strategy to deny, deflect, delay, and not put anything in writing.

“I don’t think there’s any other president who was in a similar legal jeopardy” after leaving office, says Timothy Naftali, a historian at New York University and former director of the federal Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum. Warren Harding’s administration was investigated by his own vice president and successor, Calvin Coolidge. Nixon would have been the target of investigations for years if Gerald Ford had not pardoned him in September 1974, a month after Nixon resigned from office.

“Even Nixon pales by comparison,” says Norman Eisen, an anti-corruption expert at Brookings Institution and the former special counsel to the Democrat’s House Judiciary Committee from 2019 to 2020 during Trump’s first impeachment. “Nixon just had one Watergate scandal. Trump has had a succession of them, each one more concerning than the last.”

In Georgia, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is looking into how Trump pressured election officials to swing the 2020 presidential election in his direction. The House Jan. 6 Committee and the Department of Justice are both looking at what role Trump played in the lead up to the deadly attack on the Capitol Building to stop the lawful counting of electoral college votes. Federal prosecutors have an active criminal investigation into how and why Trump took thousands of government documents—many containing state secrets—to his residence at Mar-a-Lago and why he refused repeated requests to return them.

And New York’s civil lawsuit announced by James on Wednesday is on top of a separate criminal investigation out of the Manhattan District Attorneys’ Office into the Trump Organization that is set to go to trial in October.

Read More: The Major Ongoing Investigations Into Donald Trump

In all of the ongoing cases, Trump is employing the tried-and-true playbook he first learned all those years ago from Cohn for staying out of prison and staying in business, according to Jennifer Taub, a professor at Western New England University School of Law who has tracked the ways that Trump had evaded accountability for decades.

Sonia Moskowitz—Getty Images   Roy Cohn (L) and Donald Trump attend the Trump Tower opening in October 1983 at The Trump Tower in New York City.

“Here’s what he learned from Roy Cohn: Don’t put things in writing, punch back harder, focus on optics, who cares what the courts say,” says Taub, who is the author of the book, Big Dirty Money: The Shocking Injustice and Unseen Cost of White Collar Crime.

Those methods have been perhaps most apparent in Trump’s actions in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search by the FBI, and are likely to emerge again as he defends himself against the latest lawsuit from New York into his business practices, which Trump has called a “politically motivated Witch Hunt.”

But Trump has found himself in legal hot water before and managed to dodge serious ramifications. Here’s a look at the four key strategies Trump has turned to before to elude legal trouble.

Deny, Deny, Deny

The day that FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago and found dozens of documents with classified markings on them mixed in with Trump’s personal effects, Trump denied he had blocked multiple requests for him to return the records for months. “After working and cooperating with the relevant Government agencies, this unannounced raid on my home was not necessary or appropriate,” Trump said in a statement on Aug. 8. Four days later, on Aug. 12, Trump wrote on his social media account, “They could have had it anytime they wanted—and that includes LONG ago. ALL THEY HAD TO DO WAS ASK.”

The National Archives soon showed that officials had had more than a year of exchanges with Trump’s lawyers about returning government documents held in Florida.

Trump here was continuing a long-established pattern of responding to accusations with a denial, even when he was aware that evidence would most likely later emerge proving him a liar.

In one striking example from his presidency, after notes were made public from a 2019 phone call in which Trump urged Ukraine’s new President, Vladimir Zelensky, to launch an investigation into Joe Biden, Trump denied he had done anything wrong in using the power of the U.S. presidency to pressure a foreign country to investigate one of his political rivals. Trump called it a “perfect call.”

And famously, Trump denied ever asking Russia to help him win the 2016 election, and called the investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the outcome of the election a hoax and a witch hunt. He has made those denials for years, even after a campaign event in July 2016 when he publicly encouraged Russian hackers to find and leak his opponent Hillary Clinton’s emails, saying, “Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing.”

One of Trump’s most far reaching denials is still rattling the foundations of U.S. democracy. On Nov. 7, 2020, when Joe Biden’s tally in the presidential election reached an insurmountable lead, Trump wrote on Twitter, “I WON THIS ELECTION. BY A LOT!” He has stuck to that lie for nearly two years. Trump has refused to back away from this denial even after his supporters violently attacked the Capitol and, now, candidates who openly refute the legitimate results of the 2020 elections are running for office in states that could determine the outcome of the next presidential race.

Deflect to Other Shiny Objects

When cornered, Trump’s approach is to deflect, attack others, and distract from what he’s accused of doing, a strategy that often goes hand in hand with his denials.

In the 1970s, when Trump was under investigation for housing discrimination, his lawyer Roy Cohn accused the Department of Justice of using “Gestapo” tactics and called investigators “storm troopers.”

In 2016, during Trump’s first presidential campaign, Trump criticized the federal judge handling a lawsuit against his business Trump University, saying Judge Gonzalo P. Curiel was “totally biased” and “unfair.” Trump was campaigning at the time on a promise to build a wall on the border with Mexico, and during an appearance on CNN, Trump said Curiel should recuse himself, arguing “this judge is of Mexican heritage, I’m building a wall.” Trump ended up agreeing to a $25 million settlement in the case.

Tom E. Puskar—AP  Former President Donald Trump takes the stage at a campaign rally in Youngstown, Ohio. on Saturday, Sept. 17, 2022.

Last month, four days after the Mar-a-Lago search, Trump compared his predicament, where he kept hundreds of government documents in unsecured personal boxes, to the orderly and conventional process by which former President Barack Obama set up his presidential library. Obama has worked with the National Archives to properly secure the presidential records and make them available for his library in Chicago.

But Trump used that allegation as a distraction. “The bigger problem is, what are they going to do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of which are classified, that President Obama took to Chicago?” Trump wrote on Aug. 12.

His legal filings in the Mar-a-Lago case also reflect how Trump is using his unique situation as a former president with ambitions to seek another term to divert attention away from his actions, by suggesting those investigating him are doing so for political reasons. “President Donald J. Trump is the clear frontrunner in the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary and in the 2024 General Election, should he decide to run,” reads the Aug. 31 court filing from Trump’s lawyers requesting a special master review the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago. “Law enforcement is a shield that protects Americans. It cannot be used as a weapon for political purposes.”

Trump has also tried to deflect focus from his actions by raising the specter of political violence if he is charged in the Mar-a-Lago case, a tactic he used in the buildup and aftermath of the deadly attack on the Capitol. Speaking on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show on Sept. 15, Trump said if he were charged, “I think you’d have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps we’ve never seen before.”

Delay, Delay, Delay

Trump’s request that a federal judge in Florida name a “special master” to review the documents seized from Mar-a-Lago takes another page from Trump’s playbook: delay the process as much as possible.

Judge Aileen Cannon has stalled the Department of Justice’s investigation while another federal judge, Raymond Dearie, reviews what was taken to sift out anything that might be considered protected attorney-client privilege or that Trump could claim shouldn’t be handed over because it is part of internal deliberations while President. In a court filing on Sept. 19, Trump’s legal team asked Dearie to extend the timeline of his review, writing, “we respectfully suggest that all of the deadlines can be extended.”

Read more: Special Master Appears Skeptical of Trump’s Claims He Declassified Mar-a-Lago Documents

Delaying procedures and investigations has been a common technique of Trump’s, says Taub, the expert on white collar crimes. “If you can just get someone on your side. If you can just delay, you live another day,” Taub says.

As a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump broke decades of precedent when he refused to make his tax returns public. He continued to put off releasing his returns for two election cycles, insisting he couldn’t because his taxes were under audit by the Internal Revenue Service. Efforts by Democrats in Congress to see them have been stymied in court. House Democrats first sued to get Trump’s tax records in 2019, saying the records would allow Congress to assess if Trump had taken “inappropriate advantage” of the tax laws.

Trump’s delay tactics often eventually conclude with settlements. In 1988, Trump agreed to pay a $750,000 penalty to settle a suit with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission for violating antitrust laws over stock trades he made in 1986. In 2015, the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network imposed a $10 million civil penalty on the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort for violating the Bank Secrecy Act from 2010 to 2012. His $25 million settlement in the Trump University suit followed six years of litigation.

Don’t Put Anything in Writing

There’s little record of Trump owning a personal computer or writing emails. When running his business, his staff have described that he rarely put anything in writing or gave direct orders. Trump’s former in-house lawyer Michael Cohen told Congress in 2019 that Trump spoke to him in “code” when he was giving him instructions about how to lie to Congress and Special Counsel Robert Mueller about Trump projects in Russia.

Being president meant more of Trump’s actions and directives were recorded, even when he didn’t want them to be. Trump’s July 2019 phone call with Zelensky, for example, was documented by notetakers in the White House Situation Room, who routinely document conversations between Presidents and world leaders. Even though Trump denied there was anything wrong in the call, the notes describe Trump telling Zelensky, “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great.”

Now that Trump is back in court and trying to defend his decision to keep government documents at Mar-a-Lago, what he’s written down and what he hasn’t comes with higher legal stakes. The FBI’s list of papers seized from Mar-a-Lago listed documents with Trump’s handwritten notes on them. Trump has said repeatedly that the papers at Mar-a-Lago were declassified. Now it is up to Trump to show that in court. If there’s no record of Trump declassifying those documents, his defense could be more challenging. Suddenly, Trump’s habit of avoiding putting things in writing could be a liability.

Trump once berated his White House counsel Don McGahn for taking notes during an Oval Office meeting about the Mueller investigation. “Why do you take notes? Lawyers don’t take notes. I never had a lawyer who took notes,” Trump said. McGahn said he took notes because he’s a “real lawyer” and it creates a record. “I’ve had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn. He did not take notes,” Trump said.

A NASA Spacecraft Is About To Collide With an Asteroid in an Effort to Keep Earth Safe

Jeffrey Kluger    23 Sep, 2022

Dimorphos is easily one of the least interesting objects in the solar system. It’s a rock—a moonlet, really—measuring just 160 m (525 ft.) across, orbiting the asteroid Didymos, which itself measures only 780 m (2,560 ft). Located 11 million km (6.8 million mi.) from Earth, the Didymos-Dimorphos system is just one tiny part of the river of rubble that circles the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.

But on Monday, Sept. 26 at precisely 7:14 p.m. ET, the attention of much of the astronomical community will be directed at Dimorphos. That’s the moment at which NASA’s DART spacecraft (short for Double Asteroid Redirection Test) will punch the moonlet in the nose—deliberately colliding with it at a speed of about 28,200 k/h (17,500 mph). The results of that cosmic crack-up could go a long way to determining how NASA and the world’s other space agencies can keep the planet safe from incoming asteroids: destroying or deflecting them before they can do the kind of cataclysmic damage that occurred when a 10 to 15 km (6.2 to 9.3 mi.) space rock crashed off the Yucatan Peninsula 65 million years ago, causing the global extinction event that spelled the end of the dinosaurs.

The risk to modern-day Earth is real. NASA’s Center for Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) keeps a running count of what it dubs near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), defined as space rubble that is not locked up in the asteroid belt, but circles the sun in an orbit that brings it within 45 million km (28 million mi.) of Earth. That would seem like a pretty safe miss distance, but there’s always a chance that some other piece of free-flying space debris could collide with an NEA, changing its course and sending it our way. According to CNEOS’s census, there are 855 known NEAs measuring at least 1 km (.62 mi.), and more than 10,000 that are at least 140 m (460 ft.) across. Overall, there are 29,801 known NEAs of all sizes in the CNEOS database.

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Interception and deflection is our best defense against NEAs, and as a first test of the still unproven technique, NASA built DART and launched it towards the Didymos-Dimorphos pair on November 23, 2021. The spacecraft is actually two spacecraft. The main DART body measures 2.6 m (8.5 ft) across, and weighs 600 kg (1,320 lbs). Carried along with it is a small, toaster-sized spacecraft built by the Italian Space Agency (ISA), dubbed the Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids (LICIACube). It is DART itself that will collide with Dimorphos; the job of LICIACube, which separated from DART on Sept. 11, is to fly nearby and take images of the moonlet before and after impact.

“We are working with ASI to get LICIACube to within 25 to 50 miles [40 to 80 km] of Dimorphos just two to three minutes after DART’s impact—close enough to get good images of the impact and ejecta plume, but not so close LICIACube could be hit by ejecta,” said NASA’s LICIACube navigation director Dan Lubey in a space agency statement.

LICIACube’s work will be important when it comes to gathering evidence about the kind of physical damage an impactor spacecraft can do to an asteroid. But the real indicator of the mission’s success will come in measurements of how dramatically DART changes the orbit of Dimorphos around Didymos. That will be determined by an array of Earth-based telescopes, including NASA’s Deep Space Network of radio telescopes in Barstow, Calif.; Madrid, Spain; and Canberra, Australia.

For now, NASA’s best guess is that DART will accelerate the moonlet’s 11.9-hour orbit around Didymos by several minutes. That seemingly small difference is actually very big, since even a slight change in the speed or trajectory of an asteroid when it is millions of miles from Earth could cause it to fly well wide of us when it finally reaches our planetary neighborhood.

Space has always been a dangerous place. The DART mission could help make it safer. Just how much safer will be known as soon as next week.

This story originally appeared in TIME Space, our weekly newsletter covering all things space. You can sign up here.

Cities Keep Enforcing Curfews for Teens, Despite Evidence They Don’t Stop Crime

Josiah Bates    22 Sep, 2022

Philadelphia has had a curfew for kids and teenagers since the 1950s, but faced with a second straight year of record homicides and surging violent crime, the city is doubling down on its efforts to get minors off the streets at night.

A new ordinance expanded the city’s 10 p.m. curfew to 16 and 17-year-olds (previously, they could be out until midnight), and police also stepped up enforcement of the curfew ordinances, community activists and residents tell TIME—picking up more kids and issuing more fines to parents.

For 14-year-old Brian Lemon in North Philly, this means that he’s been detained six times for curfew violations this year. One night, he says, cops picked him up less than 30 seconds after the 10 p.m. curfew, as he was walking home from a friend’s house. “They grabbed me like I killed somebody, like they saw me with a gun or something,” he says.

Most of the time officers just brought him home, but twice police issued $500 fines to his mother for allowing her son to be out late. He says the fines have been particularly hard to bear. “Most people probably don’t got that much money for your kids to just be outside. That’s enough money for food in the fridge and clothes on our backs,” Brian says.

Across the country, more local leaders and police are turning to curfews for teenagers in an effort to tamp down violent crime, which has surged across the country since 2020. This summer, Chicago expanded their youth curfew laws and increased enforcement by law enforcement. Other major cities, including Los Angeles, Houston, and Atlanta also have youth curfews in place.

Read more: U.S. Crime Is Still Dramatically Higher Than Before the Pandemic

In September, officials in Prince George’s County, Md., outside of Washington, D.C., began enforcing a 10 p.m. curfew for anyone under 17 on the weekdays, and midnight on weekends. The announcement was in response to Labor Day weekend violence where four people were killed in shootings, including a 15-year-old girl.

“At this point, these kids don’t just need a hug, they need to be held accountable,” County Executive Angela Alsobrooks said at a Sept. 5 press conference. “I know it’s not a popular thing to say, but it’s a fair question: Where are their parents? Where are the aunties, where are the uncles and other family members who are responsible for them?”

While it may sound like a common sense idea to get kids home and off the streets at night, researchers say that there is no evidence that curfews reduce crime. And community leaders worry that increasing police contact with teens from disadvantaged communities, especially Black teens, could lead to more arrests—and more kids being roped into the criminal justice system for minor infractions.

“There are a handful of studies that have been done on juvenile curfews and unfortunately the overall conclusion is they don’t really have an impact,” Dave Myers, the chair of the criminal justice department at the University of New Haven says. “They tend to be popular at face value. They sound good, look good, and are easy to implement but as far as an impact on crime it’s not there.”

Are curfews effective for stopping crime?

The crime numbers from before and after Philadelphia’s new curfew rules bear this out. In July 2022, when the updated curfew was in effect, most violent crimes did not decrease compared to the same month a year earlier, and certain crimes increased drastically. Robberies with a gun went up 72%, other types of robberies increased by 40%, and auto thefts went up 29%.

Brian Lemon says crime has always been a problem in his neighborhood, but this year he says he and others in the community have noticed a dramatic spike in violence—especially from juveniles.

“It’s a bunch of young kids, like 12-year-olds,” he says. “It’s eye-opening because I’m seeing a lot more armed robberies and [people] taking cars with guns. Before they used to just hop in the car and nobody gets harmed, but now people want to kill somebody and take the car.”

But, research casts doubt on the efficacy of juvenile curfews. A 2015 study by professors at the University of Virginia and Purdue University looked at the impact of youth curfews on gun violence in Washington D.C. Their analysis found the effect on public safety was “ambiguous,” and even suggested that curfews could increase the levels of violence.

“We find that, contrary to its goal of improving public safety, D.C.’s juvenile curfew increases the number of gunfire incidents by 69% [during curfew hours],” the study says. A 2016 study published by the Campbell Collaboration, a nonprofit criminal justice research group, found that these types of curfews do not reduce crime or victimization.

Studies also show that juvenile crime tends to happen during the day. It typically peaks after school hours, and drops dramatically at night.

So why are cities still turning to this tactic? “Nobody is really going to argue that it’s a good thing for kids to be out on the streets after 10 p.m.,” Myers of the University of New Haven says. “The problem is, that doesn’t translate into something like it’s going to have an effect on gun violence.”

Concerns about over-policing

Paul Elam is the Chief Strategy Officer for the Michigan Public Health Institute (MPHI), a nonprofit organization that works on issues including juvenile crime and community violence. He says curfews target a broad section of the population—in an effort to stop a handful of problem teenagers, who are likely to ignore curfews anyway. “For example, if we’re in a community that has 100,000 people the estimates are that there are only 30 to 40 that are carrying weapons and committing crimes,” Elam says. “In a general deterrence theory, a curfew just doesn’t make sense. There’s no data or theory that really supports the approach.”

In Philadelphia, the curfew rules have run into opposition from some community groups. “The reason a lot of us oppose the curfew is that it’s specific communities that become over-policed without having any real impact on crime,” James Aye, who runs a youth organization in Philadelphia called Yeah Philly that provides services for teens in the city who are exposed to poverty and violence. “The police have better things to be doing than worrying about some young people walking to and from the store.”

Aye says that the updates to the curfew enforcement didn’t include enough participation from community members, which is emblematic of the dynamic between poor minority communities and law enforcement.

Research suggests that when Black teens are in contact with police, even over minor infractions like curfew violations, it can have detrimental effects—including over-policing later in life. A Johns Hopkins University study published in 2021 in JAMA Pediatrics found that exposure to police is associated with several detrimental health outcomes for Black kids and teenagers, including mental health issues.

“Black youth in the U.S. experience disproportionate contact with police even when accounting for criminal or delinquent behavior, which some experts say is fueled by racism and discrimination,” the study says. “Evidence shows that police exposures are associated with adverse health outcomes for Black youth.”

Rather than police officers arresting and rounding up all the kids they find on the street after a curfew, experts and community members argue for more direct engagement with the community from law enforcement, as well as more proactive investigations to stem violent crime. That’s separate from addressing the socio-economic factors that play a role in crime and gun violence.

For kids and teens, participation in community-based programs or after-school activities has been shown to reduce the likelihood of criminal behavior, experts say.

For now, Brian, the 14-year-old in North Philly, says the police crackdown on Philadelphia’s curfew makes him and his friends feel targeted. “I feel as though our voices are not being heard and if it is being heard then people just don’t really care,” he says. “It makes Black kids feel like it’s not even worth talking about our experiences.”

The Promise—And Possible Perils—of Editing What We Say Online

Megan McCluskey    23 Sep, 2022

Have you ever sent a text or shared something online that you immediately regretted? Most of us have.

Facing the ramifications of saying something thoughtless, reckless, or rash can be a daunting prospect for anyone who frequently communicates by typing out messages and then flinging them into the digital ether. Now, a growing number of apps and services are offering users the alluring ability to edit those messages.

In the past month alone, two tech giants, Twitter and Apple, have introduced editing features. Twitter kicked off September by announcing it would begin testing an edit button, first internally and then among subscribers of its paid Twitter Blue service. Within two weeks of that move, Apple released its new iOS 16 operating system, which lets users—for the first time—edit and unsend iMessages. Amid these developments, tech analysts have continued to voice concern over how these features could be used for nefarious purposes, such as spreading disinformation.

It’s a trend that speaks to a desire among users to speak freely online without overthinking what they’re sharing, says Mor Naaman, a professor of information science at Cornell Tech. “People want to present themselves in the best light, but also to share freely without excessive cognitive load,” he says. “The edit button, if it works well, can support both goals.”

Editing tools have been a long-sought-after feature on both services. But demand for a Twitter edit button, in particular, reached new heights earlier this year after Elon Musk polled his followers as to whether they wanted one, shortly before he made an offer to buy the company.

How Apple’s edit button works

Given the success of edit tools on platforms like Facebook, Reddit, and Slack, Christina Wodtke, a lecturer in computer science at Stanford University, says it’s somewhat surprising that Twitter and Apple didn’t get there sooner. “It’s been pretty common to be able to edit your web posts for a long time, going back to the early web forums,” she says. “Apple and Twitter have a legacy of being built on mobile, rather than on the web. And a mobile SMS doesn’t normally have edits. But now people are asking, why not?”

Apple has responded by introducing an edit tool to iMessage. Users can now edit an iMessage up to five times within 15 minutes after sending it and unsend any message up to two minutes after it’s sent. To do this, users need only to tap and hold their sent message, then select “edit” or “undo send.”

The message’s recipient will receive an alert that it has been edited or unsent, and can tap “Edited” to see previous versions of the message.

These new capabilities have the potential to alter the way people view private messages, Naaman says. “Messages were seen like postcards. Nobody expects you to come to their home and edit the Hawaii postcard you sent them,” he says. “But we do expect to be able to edit, say, our Facebook profile, at any time. If the implementation is right, expectations will change and edits may become acceptable.”

How Twitter’s edit button works

On Twitter, users will be able to edit a tweet up to five times in the 30 minutes after it’s posted. Once a change is made, a tweet will be marked with an icon, a timestamp and a label that says “Last Edited,” which users can click on to see how the tweet has been edited.

The button will give people a “generous” timeframe to workshop their tweets in the court of public opinion, says Wodtke. “What they’re doing is creating an edit button that allows the Twitter audience to be your personal editor,” she says. “So, if you said something that’s lame, you could quickly change it to be more clear or less open to being misinterpreted.”

Twitter says the feature was intentionally designed to be transparent and protect the integrity of the conversation. “We’re purposely starting this test with a smaller group to learn and address potential issues before bringing it to more people,” a Twitter spokesperson says.

Why edit buttons are controversial

To ensure edit tools are used in good faith, experts say tech companies must take certain precautions. The importance of an “edit trail” that prevents the spread of mis- and disinformation can’t be overstated, says Wodtke. Especially when the information is part of the public record. “[Twitter] has a moral imperative to show the history of edits,” she says.

Twitter’s implementation of an edit button indicates that it’s trying to strike a balance between allowing self-expression and preventing abuse, says Naaman. He says one of the main threats the company is likely trying to protect against is users editing a tweet after its gone viral to completely change its meaning. “Such an edit, while available via the interface, may not be immediately visible to people who are just viewing the shared tweet,” he says.

Even with these safeguards, Wodtke predicts that bad actors will still find ways to take advantage of the feature. “Anytime you put something out there, no matter how well you and your team thought it through, people are gonna find new ways to use it,” she says. “This is definitely no exception. I think we’re going to see a lot of hijinks.”

Aaron Judge’s Home Run Streak Is Pure Magic—Without the Asterisks

Sean Gregory    21 Sep, 2022

It seemed like a lost night. In the bottom of the ninth inning at Yankee Stadium on Tuesday, the Bronx crowd—which came to witness baseball history—had already begun thinning out. Sure, New York right fielder Aaron Judge, the man who had already hit 59 home runs this season, was leading off the inning. But he was 0 for 3 for the evening. He struck out with the bases loaded in his last at-bat. The Yanks were down 8-4 to the Pittsburgh Pirates.

All well. He’d get another shot tomorrow.

With just one swing, however, Judge, 30, offered a reminder that his season was chock full of magic—the kind that will be remembered for a long, long time.

On a 3-1 pitch, Judge smashed 95 miles-per-hour sinker from Pittsburgh Pirates reliever Will Crowe plenty deep into the left field bleachers. The ball was a no-doubter; the blast made him just the sixth player in baseball history to reach the 60 home-run milestone, joining Babe Ruth, Roger Maris, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds in achieving the feat. As Judge rounded the bases, the Yankee Stadium lights flashed, to mark the moment. “I kept seeing 60 on the board as he’s running around the bases,” says Yankees manager, Aaron Boone. In any baseball era, 60 home runs is a monumental achievement. “It’s hard for me to grip,” says Boone.

American sports fans have a special relationship with records. And no game reveres numbers quite like the national pastime. We love obsessing over never-before-seen accomplishments. So it was somewhat easy to shrug off Judge’s march towards 60 home runs, since players like Bonds, who hit 73 homers in 2001, and McGwire, who reached 70 three years earlier in 1998, and Sosa, who eclipsed 60 in three different seasons, including a 66 home-run campaign in 1998, had long obliterated the prior all-time mark, set by Roger Maris, who hit 61 for the New York Yankees back in 1961. (Babe Ruth had slugged 60 in 1927).

But Judge’s feat is special; just a few minutes in Yankee Stadium on Tuesday night could tell you that. On a clear evening, the stadium turned electric on every Judge at-bat. And why not? For we are, in fact, witnessing real sports history. Such moments are rare, and should be cherished.

Let’s face it: the records set by Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa are forever tainted by steroids. As we learned not too long after McGwire and Sosa charmed America in 1998 with their pursuit of Maris’ record, performance-enhancing drugs had taken over the game. In 2010, McGwire confessed to using steroids during his record-breaking ’98 campaign. Bonds also admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs, though he said a trainer led him to believe he was taking flaxseed oil and arthritis cream. In 2009, the New York Times reported that Sosa was one of 104 players who tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003. (Sosa has continually denied using steroids.) To date Bonds, McGwire and Sosa have been denied entry into Baseball’s Hall of Fame despite their feats on the field.

Baseball started steroid testing in 2003. And while the testing system hasn’t totally eradicated PEDs from the game—young San Diego Padres star Fernando Tatis Jr. was suspended for 80 games after testing positive in August—it’s difficult to consider it happenstance that six of baseball’s 60-plus home-run seasons occurred in the 1998-2001 window, a period now universally recognized as the “Steroid Era.”

So any reasonable sports fan should be able to watch Judge over these the following days, and know, in good conscience, that we are indeed witnessing a first. Judge is almost certainly the first “clean” baseball player since Maris in 1961 to hit 60 homers. While there’s no real way to prove, as an absolute certainty, that a player is 100% clean—plenty of athletes have escaped PED detection in the past—it’s beyond cynical to presume Judge is doing anything untoward.

Playing in his sixth full season, Judge, who grew up outside Stockton, Calif., has been setting records from the start. His 52 home runs, in 2017, were a rookie a record, before Pete Alonso of the Mets broke it two years later. Anecdotally, he’s been built like a power forward throughout his career. Judge stands at 6’7″, 282 pounds. Unlike Bonds, McGwire, and Sosa, his body never morphed into something massive; he’s just built that way.

So what he’s doing is a really big deal.

And it’s just fun to take in. Every at-bat becomes appointment viewing. According to Stubhub, Yankees secondary market ticket prices are up 113% since August. Even Judge’s failures are electric. In that bases-loaded plate appearance in the sixth inning on Tuesday night, fans chanted “MVP! MVP!” as Judge stepped in the box. With the stadium organ playing, and a breeze blowing, he worked a full count. Judge swung … and foul tipped. Anticipation builds. Pirates pitcher Duane Underwood Jr. uncorked a 93-m.p.h. cutter … Judge took a huge swing, and missed. The air left the stadium, but just for a second.

It’s as if everyone realized at the same time: Judge would get another shot soon. Like any great performer, Judge leaves you wanting more.

And like any great performer, he delivered; three innings later he smashed his 60th home run 430 feet. In his postgame press conference, Judge said that as he rounded the bases, he kicked himself for not hitting this home run with the bases loaded. “Man, you idiot,” he recalls thinking. He took a reluctant curtain call: after all, Judge’s team was still down 8-5. But more magic was still coming. Judge’s home run sparked an incredible New York rally. Anthony Rizzo doubled. Gleyber Torres worked a walk. A Josh Donaldson singled to load the bases.

Then Giancarlo Stanton—who hit 59 home runs himself as a Miami Marlin back in 2017—smacked a grand slam to win it.

With 15 games to go in the Yankees season, Judge is more likely than not to pass 61, and set a new standard of all-time excellence. What’s more, Judge could also become just the second player since 1967 to win baseball’s Triple Crown: he currently leads the American League in batting average, home runs, and runs batted in. New York plays Pittsburgh again on Wednesday, then hosts the rival Boston Red Sox in a four-game series, starting Thursday. Don’t miss this moment. You likely won’t see it for another generation, if ever.

And if Judge climbs past Maris in the next few days, can he go on a late-season rampage, and get to 70? Or even to Bonds’ 73, the technical all-time mark?

Says Boone: “I’ll put nothing past him.”

How to Find Small Moments of Joy in Dark Times

Angela Haupt    26 Sep, 2022

Sometimes the smallest moments of joy are the only ones that feel possible. That’s what Nora McInerny learned in 2014, when she lost her 35-year-old husband and her father to cancer and her second baby to miscarriage—all within the span of eight weeks.

Her husband, Aaron, was a “naturally buoyant person,” says McInerny, who’s the host of the podcast Terrible, Thanks for Asking and author of the upcoming book Bad Vibes Only. “He just had this otherworldly ability to find the fun and the joy in anything,” she says. “I learned from him the importance of staying as present as possible in the moment, even when the moment sucks. Even as he was literally dying, he could make me laugh.” (Among Aaron’s final words to his wife: “I will always be with you … so you need to stop picking your nose.”)

It was a moment she remembers with levity, plucked out of an unbearable time. During these past few years—plagued by political strife, social unrest, and, well, an actual plague—many of us have struggled to even briefly escape morose moods. But experts say that incorporating just a little bit of joy into our lives can disproportionately enhance our well-being by reducing the risk of chronic illness, strengthening the immune system, and combating stress.

“I think joy feels sometimes like a really big emotion—like crazy happiness,” McInerny says. “But it can be a small point of light in the darkness. It doesn’t have to be throwing the light on in the dark.”

Remind me—what’s joy again?

Joy is the state of feeling freedom, safety, and ease. Unlike some other positive emotions, like compassion and contentment, experiencing joy often depends on preparing for it, rather than spontaneously feeling it, says Philip C. Watkins, a professor of psychology at Eastern Washington University who’s authored many of the leading research papers on joy.

One of the best ways to usher in joy is to strengthen bonds with friends and family. “The most intense joy experiences are probably experienced in relationships,” he says. Filling your life with meaningful goals and purpose is also essential, Watkins notes, as is cultivating an open mindset—and not just to the good stuff. “If you’re open to joy, you have to be open to disappointment,” he says. “Paradoxically, in terms of experiencing joy, there has to be a willingness to experience loss and sadness.”

If you’re not sure how to go about sparking joy, start with some self-reflection, advises Brie Scolaro, a licensed social worker and co-director of the New York City-based and LGBTQ-focused Aspire Psychotherapy. First, take an inventory of what joy means to you, and when you last experienced it. Ask yourself: What’s standing in your way of feeling joyful?

Then, think back on your favorite, happiest moments. Doing so will trigger some of that same joyful energy (just as reflecting on sad memories will make you feel upset). It will also give you a hint of how to achieve more joy in the future.

Next, “make a plan to bridge the gap between what you know brings you joy and what you’re currently feeling,” Scolaro says. What actionable steps can you take today to increase your odds of experiencing joy?

Finally, make sure you’re present enough to soak in joy when it washes over you. “Are you listening to your friends speak? Are you tasting the beer that you’re drinking? You have to be able to register joy,” Scolaro says. “Joy is in the moment. Building the capacity to move back to the present moment—like through meditation—is the best way I can think of to be present to joy.”

Here are a few ways to achieve small moments of joy in dark times.

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Make a joy bucket list

Robin Shear, a life coach, speaker, and author based in Detroit, has an emergency plan for those inevitable times when everything feels awful. Instead of spiraling—and it would be so easy to hop on the merry-go-round of doom—she turns to her “joy bucket list,” a tally of all the things that make her joyful: test-driving fast cars, being spontaneous, sharing new experiences with her family. She suggests others do the same, storing it in their phone or some other easily accessible place.

Having a physical reminder is helpful, “because there will be times in your life when you don’t feel joy. When life really hurts—and when you’re needing to rise out of that—it can be difficult to think about what will bring you joy again,” says Shear. “If you already did the work and made your list on a scrap of paper, you’ll find it’s much less challenging.”

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Incorporate daily habits you look forward to

Every morning, Deborah J. Cohan has a cup of coffee in a colorful ceramic mug. She begins looking forward to it the evening before. Another favorite part of her day: Going for a nighttime swim under the stars. “I think there’s something about joy that’s multisensory,” says Cohan, a professor of sociology at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort. “You smell it, you taste it, you see it—it’s a heightened sensory experience.” Think about ways to schedule pleasurable habits into your day. Then savor the anticipation of them, because that’s part of the magic.

Find a palatable way to express gratitude

There’s strong research indicating that gratitude fuels well-being. But sometimes it feels like too much of a stretch—or, as McInerny puts it, like “a blunt-force object to force people into a better attitude.” If keeping a gratitude journal or otherwise expressing thanks isn’t a path to joy for you, think about more creative ways to reflect on and appreciate the good parts of your life.

When McInerny’s son broke his arm right before the summer, he was sentenced to a giant cast that rendered him unable to swim or participate in other fun activities. “The day he got it off, he was like, ‘Say goodbye to my cast, Gerald,’” she says—revealing that even in a bummer situation, her son had created a cute, funny nickname for his orthopedic device. It reminded her to find something lighthearted and fun in every crummy situation. Now, she looks for a “daily Gerald,” or one small thing that’s good about even a bad day.

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Have a short “recess” every day

You’re never too old for a recess break—a sentiment backed by ample research. Even short amounts of physical activity, in particular, can elevate your mood and cut the risk of depression. Shear likes to schedule a 5- or 10-minute play session once or twice a day. “It’s an appointment with yourself. And whenever that time comes, you stop what you’re doing and get to spend a few minutes doing whatever makes you feel good,” she says. Shear has spent recess breaks hula-hooping, for example, and likes to set a fun ringtone on her phone as a notification that it’s go time—the adult version of a recess bell.

Look for connection

When McInerny gets lost in a black hole of gloominess, she calls someone she loves. The conversation might last just a few minutes, but that’s enough to lift her up.

When she’s particularly overwhelmed, she looks for other small, tangible ways to connect: If she goes for a walk, she’ll try to catch someone’s eye. Or she might mail a friend a card. “Whatever I can do to feel connected to other people is really helpful,” she says.

Dance it out

Music is a reliable way to spark a few minutes of joy, says Melanie Harth, a psychologist based in Santa Fe, N.M. She suggests making a happiness playlist full of upbeat, inspiring songs that make you want to bust a move, and then turning it on whenever your spirits start to falter. “I dare anybody to go on YouTube and watch Pharrell Williams’ Happy or Sara Bareilles’ Brave and not feel a little better”—or give up on your gloom and start dancing, she says.

Illustration by Brown Bird Design for TIME

Help someone, or something

Robust research indicates that helping other people, or getting involved with a cause that’s important to you, is correlated with well-being. Look for an opportunity to give back, in even a small way: by planting a tree, donating blood, or contributing to a friend’s online fundraiser. “It can help us get out of our scary little minds and into something that’s more important,” Harth says. “And it can also help catalyze an unexpected moment of joy. You never know when that’s going to happen.”

Artist Oliver Jeffers Wants to Paint the World Out of a Corner

Eliza Berman    28 Sep, 2022

Oliver Jeffers still keeps a workspace in Brooklyn, where he lived for 17 years before returning to his native Belfast to be closer to family during the pandemic. When I meet the author and artist in his studio on a drizzly afternoon—a few hours before he’ll recite an original poem at a gala for the UN General Assembly—it’s awash in paint-splattered amusements. In one corner sits a ghost, a sheet with eyeholes that Jeffers proudly says glows in the dark and “really freaks people out.” On a ceiling-high chalkboard, written in his signature scrawl—a cross between a child’s handwriting and a ransom note—his list of tasks begins: “Glue moon.” Sure enough, on a large painted moon, he’s been testing out paper cutouts of astronauts from old books. There’s a can of Modelo beer by the sink, old wooden drawers whose labels read “Sorry cards” and “Library cards,” and every artistic instrument imaginable.

The scene is everything the mother of a 4-year-old Jeffers devotee could imagine, and then some. Jeffers, 44, best known for the nearly 20 picture books he’s both written and illustrated since 2004, and another 10-plus he’s illustrated, many of them best sellers and award winners, is a bedtime fixture in my house. In his work, he often balances his playful sensibility with serious topics. Earlier books constructed allegories around grief (The Heart and the Bottle) and friendship (Lost and Found). Recent ones have tackled capitalist greed and environmentalism (The Fate of Fausto) and walls (What We’ll Build).

His latest, Meanwhile Back on Earth, coming Oct. 4, follows a Jeffers-like dad and his son and daughter through the solar system in a car turned spaceship. They look back on dark moments in history—wars, the devastating first encounters of colonization, cavemen fighting to survive. Images depicting tragic chapters are interspersed with those of the trio’s little green car, bickering siblings in the back seat. A dose of reality, a dash of whimsy.

Read more: The 10 Best YA and Children’s Books of 2021

In our conversation, I refer to Jeffers as a children’s book author, and he gently responds that he doesn’t see himself that way—he makes picture books. They’re primarily consumed by kids and parents, but not specifically intended for them. “It just so happens that most 5-year-olds share my sense of humor,” he says. But who’s got much use for boxes these days? When he went to COP26 in Glasgow last fall, none of the options for “profession” fit; whoever made his name tag chose “observer and translator,” which felt just right.

In 2017, Jeffers traveled to Nashville to witness a total eclipse of the sun. He recalls standing “in that path of totality and you’re suddenly looking at a black hole in the sky.” He felt the distance of 93 million miles the way you feel the distance to a tree or a house: “It buckled the knees from under me.”

Meanwhile Back on Earth channels this sense of perspective. Its subtitle is A Cosmic View on Conflict, and it has strong Lennon-esque “Imagine there’s no countries” vibes. It calls to mind Earthrise, the first photo of Earth taken from space, shot by astronaut William Anders during 1968’s Apollo 8 mission, which Jeffers suggests was perhaps less about exploring the moon than it was about looking back at the blue marble we live on.

The book was largely inspired by another experience Jeffers had looking at someplace familiar from a distance: his attempts to explain the conflicts of his native Northern Ireland to outsiders, beginning when he first came to the U.S. at age 11 on a summer camp scholarship to New York state. The Americans he met hardly knew the difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, let alone why they were fighting. Decades later, shortly after his son was born, he watched news reports of violence in his hometown, flare-ups between Catholic and Protestant factions. “It’d be teenagers, 12-, 14-, 16-year-olds. What do they know? They’ve just been told a story,” he says. He looked at his newborn and thought about how he might use his particular talents to offer up a new narrative. “I don’t want to tell you that story,” he remembers thinking. ”I get to change the story.”

Storytelling, a deeply ingrained part of Irish culture, came naturally to Jeffers, much like his penchant for art. The two were intertwined as he grew up in a lively household with three brothers, a lot of cousins, and many nurses, doctors, and family members filing in and out to help because his mother had multiple sclerosis. He found that his talent for drawing had a pleasant effect: “Being in a big family and often ignored, I did whatever the hell I could to get some attention.” He began to specialize in art in secondary school, and as a fledgling artist a friend pointed out to him that his proclivity for creating series of paintings might lend itself to books.

As his bibliography grows longer, it’s also getting deeper. Sure, some of his books are just for fun—“I still need to entertain myself sometimes,” he says. But many of them wrestle with the very survival of humanity, and the many issues we keep failing to adequately face. He’s become increasingly aware of their interconnectedness. In interviews and discussions about the themes of his books, people have asked, “Is this book about the climate crisis?” and “Is this book about equality?” His answer: ”Well, yes. Everything is connected.”

Back in Jeffers’ Brooklyn studio hangs a small replica of a piano that appears to be on fire. It’s from a 2019 exhibit of his work inspired in part by a quote from Buckminster Fuller’s 1969 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. To paraphrase, Fuller writes that if you’re in a shipwreck, and a piano top comes along, it would make for a passable flotation device—but that does not mean it’s an optimal flotation device. The point is: when facing today’s global problems, we are clinging to yesterday’s solutions, despite our potential to do better.

This is what Jeffers is so galvanized by: if we could just see ourselves with a bit more perspective, see with clarity that the systems we’ve built aren’t working anymore, maybe we would be more compelled to try to change them. And he thinks that we can change them. It’s this belief he’s trying to champion in his work. And thank goodness, because what kind of picture books would result from someone who thinks we’re doomed?

But if we’re going to succeed, he says, we need to take a wider point of view, which brings him back to outer space and his latest book. “It’s this notion of the overview effect that happens when astronauts look at earth,” he says, “and are far enough to see that this is one giant, single system.”

A lot of people, when confronted with the unfathomable vastness of the universe, feel insignificant to the point of apathy, or even nihilism. Jeffers takes a different tack. “When people feel nihilistic, they haven’t finished that thought: if nothing matters, in a strange way, everything matters,” he says, the levity and optimism that make him a favorite of parents and kids everywhere shining through. So we should try to solve our problems, yes, but also have a little bit of fun while we’re at it. “The chances of being here at all are so infinitesimal. Why not just enjoy it as much as possible?”

Why Iran’s Leading Women’s Rights Defender Thinks the Protesters Could Topple the Regime

Karl Vick    29 Sep, 2022

The protests in Iran are leaderless. They broke out spontaneously across the country after images appeared on social media of a 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini, unconscious in the hospital bed where she would be declared dead on Sept. 16, three days after being arrested on a Tehran street by a “morality patrol.” The officers are notorious for their rough treatment of women deemed to be violating the theocracy’s rules on female religious dress, or hijab.

Nasrin Sotoudeh has been defending these women in Iran’s courtrooms for years. She is the leading human rights lawyer still inside Iran, and the most prominent in a constellation of women’s rights advocates that includes Nobel laureate Shirin Ebadi, a colleague and client. Sotoudeh spoke to TIME on Wednesday via Zoom from her Tehran home, where she is on medical furlough from the prison where she was sentenced in March 2019 to 38 years, and 148 lashes, for her legal work.

TIME: I should start by asking your current situation.

Nasrin Sotoudeh: I have been out of prison for 14 months on a medical furlough. But they can take me back to prison at any point in time that they wish.

And I understand there have been some “preventative arrests” as the state calls them?

Yes, this has been the case whenever we have significant protests. There have been arrests of lawyers, but especially of journalists, because of the speed with which they share the news, and also because they come to the defense of detainees.

Can you describe to me what’s happening now and and if it feels different than previous protests?

This is one of the most extensive protests that you’ve had. It’s spread to cities and towns all over. As you know, the spark for it was the killing of Mahsa Amini, which really embodies by itself the 43 years of pain that women have endured in this country. This is for us a physical, bodily experience. It’s as real an aspect of life here as could be.

Sentence after sentence, ruling after ruling are imposed on our bodies in terms of our dress. And not only that, but rape and other transgressions. They hit you and hurt you and bruise you, and wrap you up in the veil once again that conceals the harm that’s inflicted on you.

[She stifles a sob.] I apologize. This fulfills me with emotion and at times it’s hard for me to speak.

You know the story of the Daughters of Revolution Street and how they were arrested?

Tell me.

The women on Revolution Street were violently arrested by the morality police and security forces. I was the lawyer for some of these women. Often they were actually pulled off or thrown off the pedestal they stood on. When one of them was brought from prison to court for me to represent her, her leg still bore the marks of the injury that she had sustained from falling on a metal pole, such that there was a hole in her leg that went deep into her leg the size of a coin. And that was the condition in which she was brought to court.

My daughter tells me that on her way to university, there are six checkpoints where the morality police inspects women and girls on their way to school. So at virtually any of these points she can be arrested and harassed and taken to prison. We are condemned to live in a tunnel of death.

What will happen next?

I remember during the years when the women’s movement was very active in Iran, I would give many interviews and often also speak to judges. And I would tell them that the colossal injustice and harm that’s being inflicted on women will one day bring Iran to the brink of a precipice, to a point of crisis. Today we have reached that point.

Do you see any evidence of how the government will proceed?

Based on experience, the most likely next steps will be a continuation of crackdown. The word for it in Persian is sarkoob, which literally means “the pounding of the head.” So the crackdown will continue. But so too will the protests. I in no way see a return to the past, no matter the nature of the crackdown. Even if the people’s demands are not met, the reality will have shifted permanently. They will not tolerate the compulsory veil any more.

But everyone says this is not just about the veil. What comes with the veil?

This is a totalitarian system whose presence people feel in their blood and in their flesh on a daily basis. And it’s one that does not grant freedoms of any kind, or accommodate people’s demands in any way. What is increasingly clear is that there is clear demand for change in the regime. What the people want is regime change, and no return to the past. And what we can see from the current protests and strikes that are now being initiated is a very real possibility of regime change.

Does the uncertainty about the health of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei figure in this situation?

Yes, no doubt it’s related but we don’t have a clear picture of what’s going on with him, with his health. We are just hearing rumors.

In my visits to Iran over the years, people who complained about their government also described a limited appetite for confronting it. They often cited the collective trauma of the Revolution—which to Iranians takes in not just the events of 1979 that brought the mullahs to power, but also the eight-year war against Iraq that immediately followed, and claimed at least half a million lives. But are most Iranians today too young to remember that trauma? Did the country age out of its self-restraint?

That’s in fact exactly the case. You can illustrate this with the case of hijab. In the old days, many people who didn’t want to wear the hijab kind of accepted the compulsory hijab, went along with it. But every generation has had its own way. And we see that the new generation is more than willing to take off its veil to shake it in the air, and to directly confront the morality police and say that no, you will not force me to wear the veil. This is something that wasn’t taking place even 10 years ago. Some people who were saying that, you know, the hijab is not a priority. But what the new generation has made abundantly clear is that they are sovereign over their own bodies. This is what younger women and men in Iran are saying.

When protests erupted in Iran in 2019 over fuel prices, the regime shut down the internet, then used live fire on protesters. Access to the internet is being steadily reduced now. Can the protests continue without it?

Consider what was going on in 2009 [when hundreds of thousands of Iranians marched in what came to be known as the Green Revolution, a mass protest of a stolen election]. There were many foreign journalists in Iran because of the elections. And many of my clients were translators who were working with these journalists to help them report on what was going on. The translators were accused of having facilitated “an anti-revolutionary interview.” So there’s no question that internet, WhatsApp, Zoom, and so on are very effective—as well the trial of Hamid Nouri in Sweden [for the war crime of executing dissidents in 1988], and “people’s tribunal” [investigating deaths in the 2019 protests] in London in November.

The fact that there are so many witnesses to what’s going on makes a huge difference. We see that right now with the films and video clips that are coming from Iran that have been spread by artists, football players, lawyers, and politicians. Iranians outside Iran have played a large role in making the plight of the Iranian people inside visible. The breakdown of these connections and communications networks would would be a devastating blow.

May I share one of my concerns with you?

Please.

You know, in many revolutions, there are concerns about violence. In this revolution, women have no need for violence because the act that they engage in is simply taking off a scarf. It’s completely peaceful. All that women have done is to take off their scarf and stand in front of the morality police and say I’m not wearing this. On many such occasions, women have been surrounded and attacked. But all they’re doing is just lifting the veil and refusing to wear it.

So in this revolution, what we are worried about is the violence of the government, not the people.

We expect support from everyone, because we are defending our common values and principles.

3 Threats Christian Nationalism Poses to the United States

Andrew Whitehead    26 Sep, 2022

In a recent national poll, researchers found that a majority of Republicans favor declaring the United States a Christian nation. In July, Marjorie Taylor Greene made waves on social media when she claimed Republicans should proudly embrace Christian nationalism. Politicians like Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano have increasingly used Christian nationalist rhetoric on the campaign trail, likely due to seeing how well it worked for Trump. It is clear more people are paying attention to and using the term; there were more tweets including “Christian nationalism” in July of 2022 than in all of 2021 combined.

But what is “Christian nationalism” and is it really worth the fuss?

Christian nationalism refers to an ideology that asserts all civic life in the U.S. should be organized according to a particularly conservative and ethnocentric expression of Christianity. Christian nationalism is more than theological or religious beliefs. It includes several cultural assumptions including:

- Strict moral traditionalism focused on sustaining social hierarchies.

- Comfort with authoritarian control—exercised by the “right” people—that includes the threat and use of violence.

- A desire for strict ethno-racial boundaries around who is a “true” American, where non-white and non-natural born citizens are viewed as unworthy of full participation in American civic life. (This is why many label it white Christian nationalism)

Christian nationalism centers and privileges the white, Christian experience. It believes the founders of the U.S. were conservative, white Christian men intent on founding a country where they and others like them could lead and flourish. Now, many Americans believe Christianity played an important role in the founding period or that the founding fathers were religious in one way or another. No reputable historian disputes these claims.

However, Christian nationalism moves well beyond such observations. It views this particular expression of Christianity as the undisputed framework of the U.S. and wants all levels of the government to preserve that framework.

This means that Christian nationalism does not want a government for the people by the people. It wants a government for a particular people, by a particular people. Namely, politically and religiously conservative white American Christians.

Survey after survey show between 15-20 percent of Americans strongly embrace the tenets of Christian nationalism, while another one-third support it, albeit less fervently.

Perhaps now we can sense the danger Christian nationalism poses to the U.S. if it sees our country as primarily for the benefit of a small subset of the overall population. A burgeoning collection of recent social science research provides evidence of the threats Christian nationalism poses and here I will identify three.

Christian nationalism is anti-democratic

Christian nationalism is about power. Power in the “right” hands to ensure the U.S. fulfills its covenant with God. However, democracy demands we share power. This places Christian nationalism at odds with democracy.

Americans who embrace Christian nationalism want to ensure the country does not turn its back on God. So when the political winds turn against stances they see as endorsed by God, they must do all they can to stand for what they see as the ultimate good. Candidates like Mastriano are willing to set aside democracy itself, ignoring the results of fair and free elections, to fulfill their interpretations of God’s commands.

This is why in one recent study we find that Americans who embrace Christian nationalism are more likely to:

- Deny voter suppression is a problem

- Believe it is “too easy to vote” in the U.S.

- Believe voter fraud is rampant

- Support having to pass a civics test in order to vote

- Support laws that would disenfranchise anyone who committed certain crimes

And the national poll showing a majority of Republicans favor declaring the United States a Christian nation referenced above? It found Republicans support this stance despite recognizing such a move would be unconstitutional.

The anti-democratic propensities of Christian nationalism preserves the unequal access to the political process enjoyed by white, natural-born, conservative Christian citizens. Moves to expand who can pull the levers of power imperils this access. Therefore, Christian nationalism will discard democracy, if necessary.

Christian nationalism perpetuates racism

Various recent books demonstrate how white Christianity in the U.S. was a key part of the creation and preservation of racial hierarchies. White Christian nationalism served as the ideological mortar that allowed for the walls of racial division and inequality to be built, brick by brick. Today it perpetuates these systems.

Recent research shows Christian nationalism obscures the origins of racial inequality by allowing some to consider the current state of affairs as “just the way things are” or attributing racial inequality to personal or individual shortcomings of Black Americans. In fact, for white Americans, Christian nationalism is linked to affirming whites are the real victims. Christian nationalism is also directly linked to blaming Black Americans when police use deadly force.

According to the ideology of Christian nationalism, the negative experiences of racial and ethnic minorities in our country are mere distractions bent on sowing division.

Christian nationalism approves of political violence

Comfort with violence is a natural byproduct of Christian nationalism’s obsession with power. At times, the only way to get people to do what they should—as God commanded—is with the use (or threat) of force.

Embracing Christian nationalism is a leading predictor of which Americans believe the riots at the Capitol on January 6th were justified and that violence is acceptable in advancing political goals. Christian nationalism is also closely linked to believing true American patriots may have to resort to physical violence in order to save the U.S. These findings suggest that to a subset of the American population, January 6th was no mere aberration.

The next time we hear anyone confidently declare “true Americans” and “faithful Christians” should embrace Christian nationalism, or that the outcomes of elections are battles of biblical proportions of good versus evil, we can remember how Christian nationalism is anti-democratic, perpetuates racism, and approves of political violence.

These three threats are especially concerning when a national poll shows a majority of one political party favors declaring the U.S. a Christian nation.

It is vital we identify and help others recognize the threats Christian nationalism poses if we want to move closer to a country that truly exemplifies liberty and justice for all.

What Giorgia Meloni’s Victory Means for Italy

Ian Bremmer    29 Sep, 2022

After parliamentary elections last weekend, Giorgia Meloni, leader of the Brothers of Italy party, is set to become the first woman to lead her country’s government. That fact is obscured for many Europeans by accusations that she’ll also be Italy’s first post-war fascist prime minister.

Meloni flatly rejects this charge, despite her party’s origins. Her party has “handed fascism over to history” she insists. Some of her supporters say the fascist label is a slur designed to weaken her appeal for euro-skeptic Italians hungry for decisive leadership and change. In truth, 21st century Italy is hardly ripe for dictatorship, and there is no good reason to fear that Meloni, like fascists of the past century, wants to destroy her country’s democracy.

But her blunt anti-E.U. rhetoric, her outspoken homophobia, the intensity of her opposition to inflows of asylum-seekers from across the Mediterranean, and her vocal support for the likeminded governments of E.U. member states Hungary and Poland are key to both her popularity with nationalist voters and the scrutiny she will face in Brussels.

Meloni’s political ascendance is not yet official. Italy’s president must first invite her to try to form a government in a process that will take weeks. But the scale of her election win—the Brothers won about 26% and its coalition partners won another 18% to just 26% total from the entire center-left Democratic Party-led bloc—makes her government all but inevitable. The vote results will also boost her standing within her winning coalition. Support for firebrand Matteo Salvini’s Lega and former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia was limited to single digits. The Europe-hating Italexit party won less than 2%, leaving it without a single seat in parliament.

Meloni’s triumph is due in part to her calibrated campaign plan to shed the label of radical. She told voters and interviewers she wanted to change the E.U., not abandon it. She has reassured Europeans and Americans that she fully supports NATO and Ukraine’s fight to repel Russia’s invasion. She has assured Brussels she wants to improve financial agreements with the E.U., not rip them up.

At least initially, these assurances will protect her government. Italy, with the second-highest debt-to-GDP in the E.U., badly needs access to the 200 billion euros in COVID Recovery funds promised by the European Commission in exchange for fiscal and other reforms. Italy also needs the European Central Bank to continue buying its debt. A sputtering economy, high inflation, and a coming energy crisis intensified by Russia’s war in Ukraine and an E.U. bid to end Europe’s addiction to Russian energy will only make that funding more necessary.

But winter is coming. Economic hardship will also increase demand for help from hurting Italian voters. Pressure from the public and right-wing coalition partners to cut taxes and spend more money to help Italians pay their bills will grow. Will Meloni’s “woman of the people” instincts lead her to pick new fights with the E.U. over money and minority and migrant rights? She’ll soon discover it’s hard to remain a political rock star once you’ve taken a real job—with responsibility for the livelihoods of millions who aren’t predisposed to like her.

She will have to remember too, however, that her coalition’s clear majority of seats in parliament does not reflect support from a majority of Italians. Her chance to form a government owes as much to the inability of the left and center to unite in opposition than to the breadth of her party’s appeal across the country. Unlike other populist parties, Brothers of Italy remained outside the broad unity government she will now replace. Forming and maintaining a government in a country as politically volatile as Italy—which has now had seven governments in the past 11 years—will require a flexibility and dexterity that Meloni and her party have never before attempted. What’s more it was her campaign drive in the other direction—toward the center—that helped lift her party from 4% of the vote in 2018 to 26% today.

Which way will a coming crisis push Italy’s new prime minister? It won’t take long to find out.

The Family Time the Pandemic Stole

Lori Fradkin    17 Sep, 2022

Over the course of Fourth of July weekend, my 4-year-old son stole his teenage cousin’s hat approximately 1,675 times. He did this about the same amount as he grabbed this cousin’s arm and yelled, “Got ya!” We were on a trip with my husband’s parents, his siblings, and their children, and I observed my kids as they swam, watched fireworks, dug in the sand, and generally messed with their older cousins. They were so comfortable with everyone, despite how infrequently we had gotten together over the past few years.

My family unit of four was on the stricter side when it came to COVID-19 precautions, and we had opted out of most group gatherings. We had taken this same trip for my mother-in-law’s birthday the year before, but it was at a dude ranch, all the activities were outdoors, and my husband and I had insisted that our group eat all our meals outside, even though every other family ate breakfast and dinner in the dining hall. We’d done our own thing for the Jewish holidays. We’d celebrated Thanksgiving with only my sister. We’d masked up for a socially distanced bar mitzvah ceremony, leaving our kids at home with a babysitter.

We were worried about the health risks posed by this new virus, especially as we waited for our kids to be vaccinated. Yes, we knew that kids tend to fare better than adults. No, statistics do not always bring comfort when you are making decisions about your own child’s health. But beyond that, we also wanted to avoid the disruptions that would result from a confirmed case. Our now-6-year-old finished pre-K remotely and spent much of kindergarten on a hybrid schedule, meaning he got a significant portion of his early instruction in critical skills like reading over the computer. We did not want him to miss more school than he had to. We also, as much as we love him, did not want our younger son home for 10 days, possibly more since a new positive test in our household could restart the clock. We needed to work, and it turns out children can get bored of TV.

Read More: How I Lost Myself to Motherhood

Doing my job from home, skipping parties, RSVP’ing no to weddings. None of it felt like a major sacrifice to me, or at least I couldn’t justify the participation weighed against the risks. To be fair, I am not someone who needs a lot of in-person interaction. I catch up with close friends when I see them, but even in non-pandemic times, I rely on the fact that we have a solid foundation and sometimes go for long stretches in between. The past few years, I’ve really burrowed into my introversion, finding relief in the hours spent alone in my apartment during the day, the aimless walks around my neighborhood at night. I also know that my children are not me and my older son somehow makes a friend every time he goes to the park.

Still, for all the talk of the very real isolation that children have experienced during the pandemic, I was not especially concerned about mine. We were fortunate to have consistent childcare for all but the first three exhausting months, so our kids spent nearly every weekday of the summer of 2020 in the park with their friends. We got to know families in the neighborhood and met for picnics and soccer. We layered with long underwear and ate under heat lamps when it got cold. Once vaccines became available for adults, we began seeing my sister, who lives nearby, and my in-laws indoors, and after we learned that breakthrough infections were not just possible but probable, we did not go back.

My parents came up from Texas in December 2020 to quarantine and test before seeing us and then returned at intervals after that. We tried to visit them too but got derailed twice—first when Delta made the trip too intimidating, then when my grandma and my older son separately contracted Omicron. Finally in February 2022 we got there. It had been more than two years since my kids had seen my grandparents, and my younger son did not remember being on a plane. (When I told him we would eat breakfast at the airport, he responded incredulously: “For real life?!”)

Read More: I Thought I’d Get to See My Mother Again. Then the Pandemic Hit

I thought we were doing OK. We drew the lines that made sense to us as we tried to strike a balance. I was tightly wound in the way most parents were and certainly the conditions were not ideal, but I kept thinking the kids, at least, were not missing much.

Now I’m a little less sure. This summer, the month after the trip with my husband’s family, we traveled to meet my parents, grandparents, aunt, uncle, and cousins in Colorado. We stayed in a handful of units in the same condominium, and most of us were together for a full week. My kids got to meet their baby cousin, and they asked for her every morning as soon as they woke up. They enlisted family members for games of Candy Land and jumps on the wobbling bridge at the playground. They finally got everyone’s name straight after years of knowing some largely from photos. I watched my little one hold my 28-year-old cousin’s hand to cross a stream and my older one inspecting maps with my 86-year-old grandfather.

Perhaps it is simply vacation I’m romanticizing, or having more grown-ups around to entertain my kids, but I don’t think so. One day, as my younger son and I walked down the road, he told me he really likes our family. Several times, I looked over at my kids playing with my relatives, their relatives, forming their own bonds, and felt something that I rarely feel about being with other people: longing, the desire for more of this.

I don’t regret how my husband and I have behaved during the pandemic. We’ve done our best to take care of our kids in the face of a disease whose long-term effects are not yet fully understood. And as COVID-19 is very much not over, we are still trying to keep our exposures limited. But with our younger son finally vaccinated and these summer memories fresh in my mind, we are cracking open the door, just a little, to be around the people we love. Our kids are fine, but they also need this. We all do.

Inside the Ukrainian Counterstrike That Turned the Tide of the War

Simon Shuster, Vera Bergengruen    26 Sep, 2022

It would be easy to underestimate Valeriy Zaluzhny. When not in uniform, the general prefers T-shirts and shorts that match his easygoing sense of humor. When he first heard from aides to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in late July 2021 that he was being tapped to lead the country’s armed forces, his stunned response was, “What do you mean?” As it sank in that he would become commander in chief, he tells TIME in his first interview since the Russian invasion began, he felt as if he had been punched “not just below the belt but straight into a knockout.” George Patton or Douglas MacArthur he is not.

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Yet when the history of the war in Ukraine is written, Zaluzhny is likely to occupy a prominent role. He was part of the Ukrainian brass who spent years transforming the country’s military from a clunky Soviet model into a modern fighting force. Hardened by years of battling Russia on the eastern front, he was among a new generation of Ukrainian leaders who learned to be flexible and delegate decisions to commanders on the ground. His dogged preparation in the run-up to the invasion and savvy battlefield tactics in the early phases of the war helped the nation fend off the Russian onslaught. “Zaluzhny has emerged as the military mind his country needed,” U.S. General Mark Milley wrote for TIME of his counterpart last May. “His leadership enabled the Ukrainian armed forces to adapt quickly with battlefield initiative against the Russians.”

Photo illustration by Neil Jamieson for TIME (Source Photo: Gleb Garanich—Reuters Pool Photo/AP)

That initiative has now taken a key turn in Ukraine’s favor. In Kyiv’s biggest gains since the war began in February, a lightning counteroffensive in the country’s northeast in early September stunned Russian troops, who fled in disarray and ceded vast swaths of occupied territory. Combined with a second operation in the south, Ukrainian forces say they wrested back more than 6,000 sq km from Russian control in less than two weeks, liberating dozens of towns and cities and cutting off enemy supply lines. The Ukrainian army’s deft game of misdirection, touting a counter-offensive in the south before attacking in the northeast, caught Russia off guard. And it validated the Ukrainians’ arguments that intelligence collaboration and billions of dollars in weapons and materiel supplied by Western allies would yield results on the battlefield.

The sudden victories came at a critical point in what had become a grinding war of attrition. As the economic pressures built across Europe and around the world, skeptics were beginning to doubt whether Ukraine could endure a protracted fight. The dramatic rout rattled Moscow, forcing Kremlin propagandists to admit the setback and upping the military and political pressures on Russian President Vladimir Putin. On Sept. 21 he responded by announcing the first mass conscription since World War II, a partial mobilization of up to 300,000 citizens.

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Ukrainian and U.S. officials alike believe the war will be longer and bloodier than most imagine. Putin has shown he’s willing to sacrifice his troops and commit atrocities to exhaust his adversary. In a menacing speech, he warned that he was “not bluffing” when he threatened to use everything at his disposal to defend Russia—an allusion to nuclear weapons. The recent Ukrainian offensive may be a turning point, but it is not the decisive blow. “In hindsight, we’ll look at this like the Battle of Midway,” says Dan Rice, a U.S. Army combat veteran and leadership executive at West Point who serves as a special adviser to Zaluzhny, referring to the pivotal 1942 clash that preceded three more years of war.

Juan Barreto—AFP/Getty Images  A woman rides a bicycle on a street in Izyum, Sept. 14.

Zaluzhny is just one of many Ukrainians responsible for the grit and progress of the nation’s outmanned army. Other key officers include General Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, who led the defense of Kyiv and, more recently, the counteroffensive in the east, and Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence service. But after the President, Zaluzhny has become the face of the war effort. His persona is omnipresent on Ukrainian social media. One widely shared image shows the “Iron General” kneeling in front of the sobbing mother of one of his soldiers, head bowed in grief in front of a casket. In another he flashes a grin presiding over the wedding of one of his servicemen during a lull in the fighting. Fan channels on Telegram have hundreds of thousands of followers, with many changing their profiles to a photo of the general with his hands held in the shape of a heart. “When Zaluzhny walks into a dark room he does not turn on the light, he turns off the darkness,” one viral TikTok video jokes.

It’s hard to predict where the war is headed or the part Zaluzhny will play in the end. But perhaps for the first time, it now seems possible that the army he commands could achieve victory.

Zaluzhny was drinking a beer at his wife’s birthday party when he stepped outside to take a cell-phone call and learned about his new job. The 48-year-old general’s rank and stature at the time were far below the position Zelensky was offering him. Commander in chief of the armed forces of Ukraine is the nation’s top military title, outranked only by the President himself. The height of that perch induced a feeling like vertigo. “I’ve often looked back and asked myself: How did I get myself into this?” Zaluzhny told TIME in a June interview.

To some, the choice seemed rash. While he had earned a reputation as an aggressive and ambitious commander, Zaluzhny was also considered a bit of a goofball, better known for clowning around with his troops than disciplining them. Born on a Soviet military garrison in northern Ukraine in 1973, he says he had dreams of becoming a comedian, much like Zelensky himself. Instead, he followed in the footsteps of his military family, entering the academy in Odessa in the 1990s as the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine descended into crisis.

Ukrainian Presidential Press Service/Reuters  Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine Valeriy Zaluzhny attends a meeting with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, as Russia’s attack on Ukraine continues, in Kyiv on April 24, 2022.

Zaluzhny rose through the ranks with a new generation of officers that bridged very different eras: raised in Soviet Ukraine, but eager to shed USSR military dogma. For a master’s thesis, Zaluzhny analyzed U.S. military structure. Seeing how Ukrainian forces were still weighed down by the Soviet model that relied on rigid, top-heavy decision-making, he began to implement changes to mirror the forces of U.S. and NATO partners.

Zaluzhny worked his way from commanding a platoon to leading the country’s forces on the eastern front following Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. In that role, he developed junior officers and encouraged more agile decision-making, pushing down authority to commanders on the ground. Unlike in the Russian army, sergeants would not be “scapegoats,” but rather real deputies meant to create a pipeline of military talent, he said in a 2020 interview published by the Ukrainian Defense Ministry. “There is no going back,” he said, to “the army of 2013.”

But Zaluzhny also respected and admired the institutions of his Russian counterparts. In his office, he keeps the collected works of General Valery Gerasimov, the head of the Russian armed forces, who is 17 years his senior. “I was raised on Russian military doctrine, and I still think that the science of war is all located in Russia,” Zaluzhny says. “I learned from Gerasimov. I read everything he ever wrote … He is the smartest of men, and my expectations of him were enormous.”

Metin Aktas–Anadolu Agency/Getty Images  Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attends a flag hoisting ceremony in Izyum after the Ukrainian forces took back control of the city from the Russians.

When Zelensky took office in 2019, the war in eastern Ukraine was already in its fifth year, and Zaluzhny was acting commander in the war zone. It fell to him to brief the new President on military operations and command structures. He knew Zelensky had never served in the military, and had no plans to school him in the tactical details of warfare. “He doesn’t need to understand military affairs any more than he needs to know about medicine or bridge building,” Zaluzhny says. To his surprise, Zelensky seemed to agree. “This has turned out to be one of [Zelensky’s] strongest features,” says Oleksiy Melnyk, a former Ukrainian Assistant Defense Minister. He has allowed his generals to run the show “without direct interference into military business.”

In 2020, Zaluzhny oversaw an ambitious set of military exercises, which included a test of the Javelin anti-tank missile. With the President watching from the observation deck, the demonstration failed, and pundits went on Ukrainian TV to debate the bad omen for the nation’s military. Zaluzhny was sure he would be known in the President’s office as “the loser with the faulty Javelins.”

Yet Zelensky has shown a determination to jettison an older generation of officials in search of new blood, and a habit of elevating leaders with whom he feels a rapport, regardless of rank. In July 2021, with the Russians hauling tanks to the border and the Americans warning that Ukraine could soon face a full-scale attack, the President decided to put Zaluzhny in charge. “I gave my opinion that he strikes me as a fairly professional, smart person,” says Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff. “But the President made the call.”

Unlike Zelensky, who was skeptical of intelligence reports that a mass-scale Russian invasion was imminent, Zaluzhny was part of a corps of Ukrainian officers who viewed it as a matter of time. Within weeks of taking up his post, he began to implement key changes. Officers would be free to return fire “with any available weapons” if they came under attack, with no need for permission from senior commanders. “We needed to knock down their desire to attack,” Zaluzhny says. “We also needed to show our teeth.”

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By early February, the pressure of his new role was starting to show. The launch of an ambitious set of military exercises involving thousands of Ukrainian troops had been a disappointment, with basic maneuvers meant to simulate a Russian attack exposing cracks in Ukraine’s defenses. In Zaluzhny’s view, the drills were a centerpiece of Ukraine’s defensive strategy, its best chance of survival, and the commanders were not taking them seriously enough. “I spent an hour yelling,” he recalls. “I lost it.” The men seated around the table were mostly older and more experienced than Zaluzhny, who did not have a reputation for losing his cool. “I explained to them that if they can’t pull this off, the consequences will not only cost us our lives, but also our country.”

After the outburst, the generals picked up their preparations. They relocated and camouflaged military hardware, moving troops and weapons out of their bases and sending them on tours around the country. This included aircraft, tanks, and armored vehicles, as well as the antiaircraft batteries Ukraine would soon need to maintain control of its skies. “There’s no mistaking the smell of war,” Zaluzhny says, “and it was already in the air.” But when it came to the details of his strategy, Zaluzhny held them close. “I was afraid that we would lose the element of surprise,” he says. “We needed the adversary to think that we are all deployed in our usual bases, smoking grass, watching TV, and posting on Facebook.”

When the invasion started on the morning of Feb. 24, the general had two strategic goals for Ukraine’s defense. “We could not allow Kyiv to fall,” he said. “And, on all the other vectors, we had to spill their blood, even if in some places it would require losing territory.” The aim, in other words, was to allow the Russians to advance and then destroy their columns in the front and supply lines in the rear. By the sixth day of the invasion, he concluded it was working. The Russians had failed to take airports around Kyiv and had advanced deep enough to begin straining supply lines, leaving them exposed.

Milley, Zaluzhny’s U.S. counterpart, was in some ways astounded when he saw the Ukrainians holding out. He asked Zaluzhny whether he planned to evacuate to safer ground. “I told him, ‘I don’t understand you,’” Zaluzhny says. “For me the war started in 2014 … I didn’t run away then, and I’m not going to run now.”

He too was surprised by Russia’s blunders. When the enemy faced heavy resistance or lost the ability to resupply, they did not retreat or shift to a different approach. “They just herded their soldiers into the slaughter,” Zaluzhny said. “They chose the scenario that suited me best of all.”

Even as the U.S. and allies continued to flood the country with billions in military aid, the news was grim. Russia pounded the strategic port city of Mariupol, killing thousands of civilians. In May, hundreds of Ukrainian fighters who had defended the last stronghold in the city, the Azovstal steel plant, surrendered. (More than 150 were returned Sept. 21 in a prisoner swap, including five top Ukrainian commanders.) Mass graves were discovered in towns and villages occupied by Russian troops. Still, Ukrainian officials insisted they could win. “We will fight until the last drop of blood,” Zaluzhny told TIME.

A few weeks later, Ukraine began to do something that struck military analysts as unusual. From the top of the government, Ukrainian officials, including Zelensky and Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov, began to publicly tout their preparations for a large-scale operation to retake territory in the south. In anticipation of an attack, Russia began to reposition troops, including some of its most elite units from other regions to reinforce its positions in the south. On Aug. 29, the Ukrainian military announced that the long-anticipated southern offensive had begun.

Kostiantyn Liberov—AP  A Ukrainian soldier assists a wounded comrade on Sept. 12 in the Kharkiv region.

But there were indications something else was afoot. “We have a war on, not only in the south,” Oleksiy Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, told TIME on Sept. 1. “The front line is 2,500 km long.” Many experts doubted that Ukraine would be capable of mounting a counter-offensive on one front, let alone two.

Five days later, Ukrainian troops launched a surprise strike in the country’s northeast. The Russians were caught off guard. Many fled in disarray, leaving behind weapons and equipment. Local reports painted a humiliating picture of retreat, describing soldiers stealing civilians’ clothes, bicycles, and cars to escape.

In six days, the Ukrainian military retook an estimated 3,000 sq km of Russian-held territory, including strategically important rail hubs used to resupply its forces. The strike stunned the Kremlin, U.S. officials, and even top Ukrainians. “I taught myself to moderate my expectations, so as not to be disappointed later,” Reznikov tells TIME. “Some breakthroughs occurred a little faster than planned.”

Intelligence and advanced weaponry provided by the West also helped. “They gave us the location of the enemy, how many of them are at that location, and what they have stored there,” Reznikov says. “Then we would strike.” The High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) provided by the Pentagon allowed Ukraine to destroy warehouses of ammunition, fuel, and command posts. Lighter vehicles like U.S.-donated humvees, as well as trucks and tanks sent by the U.K., Australia, the Netherlands, Poland, and the Czech Republic, allowed them to outmaneuver the Russians. “Ukrainians have demonstrated much better distributed tactical-level operations,” says Jeffrey Edmonds, a former CIA analyst and Russia director on the National Security Council. “They’re much more disciplined.”

Also crucial, Ukrainian officials say, was the flexible command structure that allowed them to exploit the quick Russian collapse. “The Ukrainian army has the freedom to make decisions at every level,” Reznikov says, likening it to NATO standards. “They do it quickly, unlike the Russians.”

Oleksii Chumachenko—SOPA Images/LightRocket/ Getty Images  A boy rides a bicycle near an armored tank with a Ukrainian flag in the town of Izyum on Sept. 19.

Ukrainian officials are careful to spread the credit for the military successes so far. “It’s not a story of one star, but a constellation of our military elite,” Reznikov says, naming a long list of celebrated officers from the armed forces—the infantry, navy, air force, medical corps and others.

There are rumors of tensions between Zelensky and his top military commander, though the President and his aides have dismissed them. “The so-called conflict with Zaluzhny was invented by our opposition from start to finish,” says Oleksiy Arestovych, a Zelensky aide and veteran of Ukraine’s military intelligence service. “On the one hand, it’s obviously made up. On the other, it has a painful effect, because stirring up conflict between the military commander and the commander in chief is a catastrophe.”

Hardened by war, Ukrainian leaders know the recent successes have only bought time. “Russia has staked everything on this war,” says Danilov, the head of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council. “Putin cannot lose. The stakes are too high.”

Ukraine’s operations in the south have moved slowly. As winter approaches, Kyiv must take care not to overextend its forces. And there are forces at play outside Ukraine’s control. The looming energy crisis could sap Western military support, with Russia already cutting its gas supplies to Europe from 40% to 9%.

For his part, Zaluzhny is girding for a long and bloody slog. “Knowing what I know firsthand about the Russians, our victory will not be final,” he told TIME. “Our victory will be an opportunity to take a breath and prepare for the next war.” —With reporting by Leslie Dickstein and Simmone Shah

How We Chose the 2022 TIME100 Next

TIME Staff    28 Sep, 2022

Every year, TIME publishes the TIME100 Next, a list—inspired by our flagship TIME100—that recognizes 100 rising stars from across industries and around the world.

There is no one way to have an impact, so there is no one way by which TIME measures the influence essential to its selections. As a result, and by design, the 2022 TIME100 Next list features musicians as well as medical professionals, government officials as well as movement leaders, and high-profile whistle-blowers alongside top CEOs—all curated by TIME’s journalists and informed by their reporting.

What unites these individuals are their extraordinary efforts to shape our world—and to define our future.

Buy a print of the 2022 TIME100 Next covers here

Table of Contents

TIME: October 10th, 2022 | Vol. 200, No. 13 | U.S.

All articles

Conspiracy Theorists Want to Run America’s Elections. These Are the Candidates Standing in Their Way

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The Promise—And Possible Perils—of Editing What We Say Online

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How to Find Small Moments of Joy in Dark Times

Artist Oliver Jeffers Wants to Paint the World Out of a Corner

Why Iran’s Leading Women’s Rights Defender Thinks the Protesters Could Topple the Regime

3 Threats Christian Nationalism Poses to the United States

What Giorgia Meloni’s Victory Means for Italy

The Family Time the Pandemic Stole

Inside the Ukrainian Counterstrike That Turned the Tide of the War

How We Chose the 2022 TIME100 Next