AUG. 14, 2023
AI by the People,
For the People
by
BILLY PERRIGO
Workers for Karya, a nonprofit
artificial-intelligence-data
company, in Karnataka, India
VOL. 202, NOS. 5–6 | 2023
CONTENTS
5
The Brief
15
The View
30
20
Voice of the People
John Fetterman
Begins Again
Thanks to a small Indian startup,
millions of people whose
languages are marginalized online
could gain better access to the
benefits of AI
By Billy Perrigo
After surviving a stroke and winning
the most expensive U.S. Senate race
ever, he fought depression—and is
now fighting its stigma
By Molly Ball
38
Sweatshop
With no federal protections in place against extreme heat, the choice
facing outdoor workers in the U.S. is either risk your life, or quit
By Aryn Baker
49
Time Off
△
Pennsylvania
Democrat John
Fetterman outside
a U.S. Senate office
building on May 16
Photograph by
Shuran Huang
for TIME
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1
Last year, Ben was too sick to dream.
He has Primary Immunodeficiency or PI.
Thanks to the Jeffrey Modell Foundation,
he has been properly diagnosed and treated.
Now he can search for the cure.
helping children reach for their dreams
info4pi.org
CONVERSATION
God and TIME
Emmy
nominations
“WE DIDN’T CALL IT A REVOLUTION,” SAYS PASTOR GREG
Laurie, of the surge in young people adopting the Christian
faith in the ’70s, first in California, then across the U.S. and
around the world. “TIME magazine coined that phrase. We
called it ‘The Jesus Movement.’ But I think actually TIME editors had it right, because they saw something bigger.”
In April 1966, TIME had published one of its most controversial covers ever, posing a not-so-simple question:
“Is God Dead?” The issue was greeted with enraged sermons
and more than 3,000 letters to the editor. A mere five years
later, God’s son was the cover star, looking
like the lead guitarist in a folk-funk band
proclaiming that reports of a divine death
were premature. “Jesus is alive and well
and living in the radical spiritual fervor
of a growing number of young Americans
who have proclaimed an extraordinary
religious revolution in his name,” the
June 21, 1971, cover story declared.
The cover art, which is by Stanislaw
Zagorski and now in the collection of the
National Portrait Gallery, is among TIME’s grooviest. Laurie
had no role in the story and knew nothing of it until he saw
the issue, but remembers it feeling exactly right. “It felt very
current to us,” he says. “Kind of this psychedelic Jesus that
wasn’t just traditional Christianity.”
Now a senior pastor at Harvest Christian Fellowship in
Riverside, Calif., he was at the time one of those fresh-faced
rebels. His story and the role of the two TIME covers were recently dramatized in a movie, also called Jesus Revolution. The
film was released in February and surprised industry watchers by taking in more than $50 million in theaters.
The TIME story talks of baptisms taking place “on a
cul-de-sac beach at Corona del Mar, Calif.” Laurie was baptized there in 1970. This July, he was the one doing the dunking, as people inspired by the movie gathered to reprise
the baptisms. Until the TIME cover, Laurie says, he and his
friends weren’t aware how far the movement had spread.
“I think the writer of the article had an understanding that
some of us didn’t even have at that moment,” says Laurie.
“When we saw that cover, it sort of officially told us, Wow,
this is a lot bigger than we thought.” —BELINDA LUSCOMBE
Tune in
TIME Studios has
earned four 2023 Emmy
nominations. Territory, a
documentary that details
Indigenous peoples’ fight
against deforestation in the
Amazon, racked up three
nods; it’s available to stream
on Disney+. MLK: Now
Is the Time, co-produced
with Meta, was nominated
for Outstanding Emerging
Media Program. TIME has
been nominated for 21
Emmy Awards to date.
On the covers
Photograph by
Greg Kahn for TIME
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ISRAEL’S
WAR WITH
ITSELF
BY KARL VICK
The roots of the
country’s fight over
democracy, and
where it could go next
S
HOW DOES COVID-19
AFFECT THE BRAIN?
REMEMBERING MUSIC ICON
TONY BENNETT
PHOTOGR APH BY OHAD ZWIGENBERG
YA AUTHOR ELIZABETH ACEVEDO
ON HER FIRST BOOK FOR GROWNUPS
5
THE BRIEF OPENER
F
or decades, the threats that
parts of North Africa; they are more likely to
defined Israel arrived from without, be working class and religious, and are hisand produced a basic cohesion. On
torically underrepresented in positions of
security, Jewish Israelis spoke as
power. Netanyahu, though Ashkenazi, has
one, historically giving the Israeli Defense
long channeled Mizrahi resentments. They
Forces (IDF) approval ratings near 90%.
see the real goal of the protesters, a former
But the paroxysm convulsing the country in
Israeli ambassador to the U.S. argued in a reits 75th year is wholly internal. The current
cent op-ed, as “to preserve the power lost at
crisis rises not from any Arab neighbor—
the polls by the Ashkenazi elite.”
several of which now enjoy cordial relations
ILLIBERAL ALLIES Critics have claimed that
with the Jewish state—but over how JewNetanyahu’s intentions for Israeli democish Israelis choose to live. The question is
fraught, and appears to threaten the fabric
racy can be detected in his embrace of Hunof the nation.
gary’s Viktor Orban and other elected EuroLike its borders, Israel’s government
peans with authoritarian leanings. Closer to
structure is not fixed. It’s a parliamentary
home, Arab kingdoms that once promoted
democracy without a constitution. The
the Palestinian cause have found common
Prime Minister sits in the Knesset, the legground with their erstwhile opponent: the
Saudis admire Israel’s tech industry—its
islature, and the only check on the majority
is the Supreme Court, which at times desecurity products, like NSO’s Pegasus surcides its role for itself. Now,
veillance tool, have found
users among authoritarhowever, the Knesset has
moved to take control of
ian regimes—and share
with the country an enmity
the court. A law narrowly
passed on July 24 that bars
for Iran. For Israel, these
justices from overruling
newer alignments serve
as a counterweight to the
government actions. The
power play, pushed by the
West and its demands.
most right-wing governWASHINGTON WATCHES
ment in the country’s history, had already sparked
The U.S. guarantee of Israeli security has many
30 weeks of massive street
—PRESIDENT BIDEN
protests at the time of the
sources, but “the core of
IN MARCH, ON THE STATE OF
vote, with no end in sight.
that relationship is cerDEMOCRACY IN ISRAEL
tainly on democratic valRIGHT-WING ASCENT To win
ues,” the White House
in last November’s elections, Prime Minister press secretary declared after the July 24
vote, which President Biden had repeatedly
Benjamin Netanyahu had to assemble a cowarned against. His invitation for Netanyahu
alition that included parties so far right that
to visit the U.S. remains in place, however, as
they existed on the fringe. (His Nationaldoes support for Israel on Capitol Hill, and
Security Minister was deemed unfit to
$3.8 billion a year in military aid.
serve in the IDF because of his extremism.)
Their grudge against the high court dates to
MORE TO COME The crisis is expected to
2005, when the justices approved the govcontinue for months, not least because the
ernment’s removal of 8,000 settlers from
the Gaza Strip. Now their eagerness to exhigh court is set to review the new law in
September. And when the Knesset returns
pand Jewish control in the West Bank and
from recess a month later, it may take up
their antipathy toward Arabs, including the
another judicial reform, giving lawmakers a
20% of Israeli citizens who are Palestinian,
hand in naming jurists. Meanwhile, dissenthas found traction in the 73% of young Israeli Jews who identify as being on the right. ers continue the search for leverage. ThouWith young people the least liberal demosands of IDF reservists, for example, have
graphic, time is on the conservatives’ side.
vowed to stand down in protest. Netanyahu
seemed sanguine about any security threat
INTERNAL DIVISIONS Israel has long been led
their loss might pose—perhaps understandby European, or Ashkenazi, Jews even though ing that at this point, a threat from outside
most Israelis today are Mizrahi, who trace
the nation may be the one thing guaranteed
to bring it together.
their origins to the Middle East and other
‘They cannot
continue
down this
road. And I’ve
sort of made
that clear.’
The Brief includes reporting by Leslie Dickstein, Sanya Mansoor, Simmone Shah, Olivia B. Waxman, and Julia Zorthian
-
-
Spain’s political pains
Workers strip an electoral banner of conservative People’s Party leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo from the group’s
Madrid headquarters on July 24. A day earlier, that faction and its main rival, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s
Socialist party, both failed to secure a governing majority in elections, leaving the country’s political future uncertain.
THE BULLETIN
O P E N I N G PA G E : A P ; S PA I N : E M I L I O M O R E N AT T I — A P
Why a tuberculosis drug will reach millions more patients
The paTenT on The Tuberculosis
drug bedaquiline expired on July 18.
But while its manufacturer, Johnson
& Johnson, could use secondary patents to extend its exclusive right to sell
the drug, it instead struck an innovative deal that will lower the drug’s price
and expand access to it for millions
of poorer people around the globe—
a major public-health win against the
world’s deadliest infectious disease.
BY THE NUMBERS Tuberculosis infects
approximately 10 million people per
year, killing some 1.5 million. Over the
decades, some strains of the bacteria
that cause TB have evolved and can no
longer be treated with the most common TB medicines. Roughly half a
million people become infected with
multidrug-resistant TB each year,
requiring treatment with bedaquiline.
The drug reduces the risk of death by
approximately 10 percentage points,
according to a study in BMC Infectious Diseases. Yet because bedaquiline prices are so high, many low- and
middle-income governments buy
fewer courses of bedaquiline and use
older, more toxic, and less effective
drugs to treat TB.
PATENTED PROFITS Johnson & Johnson
initially planned to enforce a secondary patent on a slightly altered version
of the drug in more than 30 lower- and
middle-income countries including
South Africa, Pakistan, and Indonesia.
Secondary patents are awarded to pharmaceutical companies for drugs that
are similar to ones it has already patented. By carefully timing the second
patent, a pharmaceutical company can
effectively maintain its exclusive right
to manufacture a drug for years after
the expiration of its original patent.
A NEW TYPE OF DEAL An unprec-
edented deal between Johnson &
Johnson and Global Drug Facility, a
nonprofit, could dramatically expand
access to bedaquiline. The agreement,
which was finalized in June and announced July 13 after a social media
campaign spearheaded by author
John Green, will allow for the sale and
manufacture of generic bedaquiline in
most lower- and middle-income countries. “This is the first I’m aware of an
innovative company like J&J giving
a license to a unique entity like GDF,”
says Brenda Waning, chief of Global
Drug Facility. —anna Gordon
7
THE BRIEF NEWS
GOOD QUESTION
How does COVID-19
affect the brain?
MILESTONES
changes. Their findings pointed to the
latter—but researchers still haven’t ruled
out the possibility that the virus has direct
effects on the brain.
BY JAMIE DUCHARME
Indeed, sInce nath’s brain-scanning
project early in the pandemic, other researchers have found the virus in the brains
early in The COViD-19 panDemiC,
of people who died from COVID-19. For
doctors noticed that for what was originally
a 2022 paper, researchers analyzed brain
described as a respiratory virus, SARStissue from 11 people who had COVID-19
CoV-2 seemed to have a strong effect on
when they died. In all but one of those peothe brain, causing everything from loss of
ple, the researchers found the virus’ genetic
taste and smell and brain fog to, in serimaterial in central-nervous-system tissue—
ous cases, stroke. Years later, cognitive dewhich, they wrote, “prov[ed] definitively
cline, changes in brain size and structure,
that SARS-CoV-2 is capable of infecting
depression and suicidal thinking, tremors,
and replicating within the human brain.”
seizures, memory loss, and new or worsTo Nath, however, that’s still an open
ened dementia have also been linked to
question. The research is “inconsistent,”
SARS-CoV-2 infections. In some cases,
he says. “Some have found it, some have
these longer-term problems occur even
not, and some people who have found it
in patients who had mild COVID-19.
have found very small amounts. There’s
The question now is what, exactly, is
still a gap in knowledge there.”
going on in the brains of people infected
Dr. Wes Ely, who researches
by SARS-CoV-2—and whether
brain disease at Vanderbilt Unithe damage can be reversed.
‘There’s
versity Medical Center, says he’s
Not long after the pandemic
began, Dr. Avindra Nath, clinistill a gap in convinced SARS-CoV-2 can attack the “support cells” of the
cal director of the National Instiknowledge
brain, which ensure neurons
tute of Neurological Disorders
can keep the brain and body
and Stroke (NINDS), and his colthere.’
functioning normally. Damagleagues analyzed the brains of 13
—DR. AVINDRA NATH,
ing these support cells, Ely says,
people who died from COVID-19.
NATIONAL INSTITUTE
OF NEUROLOGICAL
can start a domino effect that
They didn’t find SARS-CoV-2 in
DISORDERS
leads to brain-tissue death.
those brains—but they did find
AND STROKE
But, Ely says, “almost cerdamage to the blood vessels there,
tainly there are multiple prowhich were coated with anticesses going on”—it could be that the virus
bodies. It looked as if the body’s immune
both directly affects the brain and causes
system had gone haywire, attacking its own
changes to the immune system. “We’re not
blood vessels and setting off a cascade of eflooking for a magic bullet that will solve all
fects that led to significant inflammation in
these problems” at once, he says.
the brain, potentially culminating in fatal
At the moment, altering the immune sysdamage to the part that controls breathing. In
people who survive COVID-19, brain inflam- tem to reduce inflammation in the brains
of people with Long COVID is a promismation may also explain lasting symptoms
ing route. NINDS is enrolling patients for
like brain fog and memory loss, Nath says.
a study on immunotherapy as a potential
Dr. Lara Jehi, who researches COVID-19
treatment for neurologic Long COVID. That
and the brain at the Cleveland Clinic, also
approach is exciting, Nath says, because it
points to inflammation as a possible trigger.
In a 2021 study, Jehi and her colleagues com- entails a therapy that is already used to treat
pared the brains of people with Long COVID autoimmune and neurologic conditions—
so if it proves effective, it could be rolled out
and Alzheimer’s disease. “We found many
to Long COVID patients relatively quickly.
areas of overlap between the two,” she says,
As of now, there are no proven therapies
centered on “inflammation in the brain and
for people with Long COVID symptoms, neumicroscopic injuries to the blood vessels.”
Jehi’s team wanted to determine whether rologic or otherwise. But Ely says he’s optimistic that COVID-related brain changes are
the SARS-CoV-2 virus was entering the
reversible. “The brain is incredibly neuroplasbrain and causing damage directly, or triggering an immune response that led to brain tic,” he says, “and it can do amazing things.” □
8
Time August 14, 2023
DIED
ACQUITTED
SHUT DOWN
TESTIFIED
FINED
DIED
DISCOVERED
DIED
‘Tony Bennett
is the best
singer in the
business.’
9
THE BRIEF TIME WITH
The best-selling YA author
Elizabeth Acevedo has
written her first novel for
adults, and it’s full of magic
BY NICOLE CHUNG
The kernel of The sTory ThaT would
become Family Lore, Elizabeth Acevedo’s first
novel for adults, came to her in college, after a
visit with one of her aunts in the Bronx. Acevedo,
who’d spent many of her childhood summers
hosting cousins from the Dominican Republic or
traveling to see family there, had long been curious about her relatives’ linked but disparate histories, and she began to think about how she might
tell intergenerational stories loosely inspired by
the experiences of the women in her family.
She wouldn’t begin working on Family Lore for
another decade. A former eighth-grade English
teacher, she’s spent much of her career writing for
young people. The Poet X, her 2018 debut novel
in verse about a teenage poet in Harlem, won the
National Book Award; she followed it up with
two more YA best sellers, With the Fire on High in
2019 and Clap When You Land in 2020. Acevedo,
who was named the Young People’s Poet Laureate in 2022, thinks she hit her stride as a YA author in part because she understands how to write
for young people without talking down to them.
“There’s nothing like kids telling me, ‘I’m also a
poet and it’s a secret,’ or ‘Xiomara [in The Poet X]
makes me feel known,’” she says. It’s one reason
she finds widespread book bans so gutting—she
worries about young readers being cut off from
stories both like and unlike their own.
Though she plans to write for young readers
again, she felt eager for a new challenge. “I never
want to be known as this one single thing,” she
tells me, sitting in her cozy office in Southwest D.C., her favorite books artfully arrayed on
the wall behind her. She speaks with a gentle,
thoughtful conviction, and I get the sense that she
answers with care not because she’s worried about
what she might say, but because she has such deep
respect for words and the weight they carry. She
explains that for her, writing for adults is largely
“a difference in register”: she’s drawn to some
of the same questions explored in her YA novels,
including what love in a complicated family can
look like, but she’s OK letting older readers do a
little more work to follow leaps in time and shifts
in perspective, offering them less hand-holding
and an ending that feels more open. “I don’t hold
back,” she says. “It’s bare-knuckle. It felt like
I could take risks that I just have to own.”
10
Time August 14, 2023
Honors and
accolades
Finding
inspiration
Instant
gratification
In Family Lore, out Aug. 1, Flor, a
seer of deaths, summons her family—
including her sisters Matilde, Pastora,
and Camila, daughter Ona, and niece
Yadi—to celebrate her life at a living
wake, causing them to wonder whether
she saw her own death. Endowing her
characters with extraordinary gifts—
one sister grasps others’ truths; one has
a talent for herbalism; Ona possesses
an “alpha vagina”—allowed Acevedo
to consider what had formed them and
what each desired, while grounding
them in a strength all their own.
Acevedo’s treatment of magic as an
everyday possibility is compelling, but
there is also magic in the wonder, surprise, frustrations, and joys the characters experience in their relationships
with one another. She came up with
the idea for a living wake after watching a documentary on how people
commemorate death—she realized it
could hold all of these women’s stories, putting pressure on them in interesting ways. “When you think about
death,” she says, “you begin thinking
about every choice you’ve made.”
When Acevedo WAs smAll, a babysitter with a forest of houseplants suggested she talk and sing to the plants
to help them grow. Young Liz discovered the joy of making up songs, but
felt upset when she couldn’t recall her
verses. One day, she thought, I’ll know
how to write, and then I won’t forget.
She wanted to be a singer. Then her
older brothers sparked an obsession
with hip-hop. She joined the poetry
club in high school, competed in her
first slam, and attended workshops
with teaching artists. She went on to
George Washington University, where
she created an interdisciplinary major,
a blend of poetry and performing arts.
Working as a teacher after graduation, Acevedo struggled to find time
and energy to write. “I’m not a good
person when I’m not writing,” she says.
She applied to M.F.A. programs, and by
the time she graduated from the University of Maryland in 2015, she’d published a poetry chapbook and submitted a draft of The Poet X to an agent.
The author Clint Smith, who first
met Acevedo through the D.C. poetryslam scene in 2012, considers her
M E L I S S A LY T T L E — R E D U X
“an exemplar” of how to take the craft seriously.
“A lot of writers are very skilled, but don’t work
10% as hard as she does,” he says. “Starting out in
a new genre can feel like dipping your toe in, but
Liz is doing cannonballs.”
Acevedo is fascinated by ensemble storytelling—
one of Family Lore’s many strengths—and how we
all participate in it. “It’s curious what people are
incapable of saying about themselves or their past,
sometimes because of trauma, but then you’ll learn
[it] from that cousin who heard from her mom,” she
says. “In some ways, this book is a project about
how to know what’s true.”
It is also, like all her novels, the project of a
poet: her obsession with imagery, interiority,
and making every word count is what makes her
descriptions and dialogue sing; her characters
think and speak in voices that feel distinct and
alive. “We often talk about representation in a
way that feels flat, as if it’s merely the checking
of boxes, when in fact it’s about the rendering of
dimensional humans,” says Naima Coster, whose
novel What’s Mine and Yours is among the many
displayed in Acevedo’s office. “Liz doesn’t just
△
Acevedo,
photographed
near her home in
Washington, D.C.,
in April 2020
‘I never
want to be
known as
this one
single
thing.’
—ELIZABETH
ACEVEDO,
AUTHOR OF
FAMILY LORE
render individuals, she writes about webs of relationships. I see her as someone who’s leaving
important historical and literary records.”
Writing Family Lore helped Acevedo “quit the
desire to be liked” and focus on telling the story
she wanted to tell. She began practicing ancestor
worship a few years ago, and says the idea that
she is loved and being guided has given her “a
clear-eyed approach” to her art that feels new—
she has learned to trust herself and her writing in
ways she didn’t before.
She’s now working on more novels, but “snippets of poems” keep coming to her, as they did
after she gave birth to her first child last fall—
visiting her son in the NICU, nursing or pumping at all hours, she found herself taking notes
she recognized as verse. “Poetry is the first language I was thinking in—it’s what I fall back on,”
she says. “I have to get really close to the bone of
what I’m going through. A poem doesn’t let me
lie to myself.”
Chung is a TIME contributor and the author
of A Living Remedy
11
H E A LT H
1. Focus on relaxing instead of venting
BY ANGELA HAUPT
2. Take a time-out
3. Try the 30-30-30 intervention
4. Keep an anger log
5. Use assertive communication
I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y B R O W N B I R D D E S I G N F O R T I M E
14
Time August 14, 2023
WORLD
NUCLEAR
DÉJÀ VU
BY MARY ROBINSON
▶
INSIDE
HOPE FOR UKRAINE’S
FOOD EXPORTS
MICHAEL BLOOMBERG’S
SUPPORT NETWORK FOR MAYORS
15
THE VIEW OPENER
Oppenheimer was horrified by the
terrible power of the technology he
had helped create. His story should
sound as a wake-up call to global leaders and citizens alike who continue
to exhibit alarming complacency and
fatalism about the existential risk of
nuclear annihilation.
Russia’s war on Ukraine has heightened the threat, and rendered much
more difficult the prospect of meaningful U.S.-Russian dialogue on arms
reduction. Its absence makes it all the
more imperative that Joe Biden and
Chinese President Xi Jinping put reducing nuclear risks at the top of their
agenda whenever they next meet.
Progress could help ease Sino-U.S.
mistrust and improve wider geopolitical stability.
Yet when the nuclear threat is
greater than at any other time since
the height of the Cold War, all leaders in all states bear responsibility. As
a young woman, I marched alongside
hundreds of thousands of protesters
against “the Bomb.” Now a grandmother, I am appalled that my grandchildren still face the same specter of
nuclear war, and I ask myself, “Where
are today’s marchers?”
16
Time August 14, 2023
their arsenals and reaffirm the role of
nuclear weapons within their security
planning.
The U.S. and Russia bear particular
responsibility for this. They possess
around 90% of the world’s nuclear
weapons and have dangerously undermined nuclear arms control over the
past two decades. But other nuclear
states, including China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, and the U.K., are
also expanding their capabilities.
In this context, total nuclear disarmament is not realistic in the near
future. The immediate focus should
therefore be on reducing the threat
of nuclear catastrophe by establishing a new U.S.-China risk-reduction
dialogue and restarting U.S.-Russia
nuclear dialogue. The Elders, the NGO
that I currently lead, has proposed a
nuclear-minimization agenda that we
believe could provide a helpful framework for making progress.
It will be very difficult to tackle
the nuclear threat unless there is sustained international pressure on the
world’s nuclear powers. That means
greater public engagement and grassroots activism to challenge the questionable assumptions that underpin
the thinking of the nuclear establishment. I hope the release of a major
motion picture about the origins of
the nuclear bomb will spur a wider debate about the issue.
While there is good reason to be
alarmed about the current dangers,
we must not despair. History shows us
that progress can be made to reduce
nuclear risks through international
cooperation, as Oppenheimer hoped.
The number of nuclear weapons has
declined from around 65,000 in the
mid-1980s to 12,500 today. With
global leadership and dialogue, further progress is still possible.
In Oppenheimer’s farewell address
to the Association of Los Alamos Scientists in November 1945, he told
them that “atomic weapons are a
peril which affects everyone in the
world . . . I think that in order to handle this common problem there must
be a complete sense of community
responsibility.”
These prescient words remain relevant. They must drive our collective
efforts to contain nuclear risks, if we
are to prevent the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki from being repeated at a scale beyond even what
Oppenheimer could have feared.
Robinson is a former President of Ireland
and chair of the Elders
T H E L I F E P I C T U R E C O L L E C T I O N /S H U T T E R S T O C K
The silence is inTolerable. The
hands of the Doomsday Clock stand at
90 seconds to midnight. The erosion of
the taboo against using nuclear weapons (including from Vladimir Putin’s
open threats to do so), the breakdown
of the remaining nuclear arms control
architecture between Russia and the
U.S., and the emergence of potentially
destabilizing new technologies (including AI) have raised the risk level to
frightening heights.
China’s apparent decision to significantly expand its nuclear arsenal,
political instability in Pakistan, North
Korea’s defiance of the U.N. Security
Council, and instability in the Middle
East add further dangerous pressures.
The record of close calls over the
past 80 years suggests that it has been
more through luck than great statesmanship that we have avoided catastrophe. The only guarantee against
the use of nuclear weapons is their
complete abolition. Yet the world’s
nuclear powers continue to expand
Oppenheimer bends to inspect a melted Trinity nuclear site on July 16, 1945
Healthy. Educated. Safe.
Let’s get there together.
THE RISK REPORT BY IAN BREMMER
Moscow
is aware it
now has
real PR
problems
in poorer
countries
When we all connect,
we make things better
for millions of children
around the world.
And their families.
And their communities.
And their countries.
And you.
Together we can all get
to a better place.
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THE VIEW INBOX
Health Matters
By Alice Park
SENIOR HEALTH CORRESPONDENT
time in nature, and exercising.
The biggest issue, say the
scientists from the University
of British Columbia who
performed the review, involved
adjustments researchers
made from how they originally
planned to analyze the data and
how they actually crunched the
numbers after the data were
collected. “It’s like throwing a
dart on the wall and drawing
the bull’s-eye afterward,” says
Dunigan Folk, the study’s
co-author. While such flexibility in interpreting data is
not uncommon, widespread
adjustments could alter results
of studies and make them less
reliable. In the psychology field,
researchers are addressing
the problem with online repositories where scientists preregister their trials, which holds
them accountable for sticking
to their originally intended
methods for analyzing data.
Only a few dozen of the
happiness studies were preregistered, and those studies
showed that some of the
strategies did indeed improve
mood, but only for short
periods of time. While it’s likely
the methods can help, having
stronger, more rigorous evidence to support them could
be a confidence booster.
For more health news, sign
up for Health Matters at
time.com/health-matters
We need each other.
Now more than ever. Because when we work together to connect
children with what they need to grow up healthy, educated and safe,
we make everyone’s world better.
Including yours.
ChildFund.org
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y K AT I E K A L U P S O N F O R T I M E
There’s no shortage of
recommendations about how
to become happier. But how
effective are they?
A new study reports that
the most popular strategies
endorsed in the media, and
therefore recommended by
experts, aren’t supported by as
much science as people may
think. The analysis of thousands of happiness studies
found that most of them were
not conducted using the most
scientifically rigorous methods
to evaluate the five most
popular happiness strategies—
expressing gratitude, practicing
mindfulness, becoming more
socially engaged, spending
The D.C. Brief
By Philip Elliott
WASHINGTON CORRESPONDENT
AS THE NATION GRAPPLED WITH THE
first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns
in March 2020, a lot of public officials were desperate for information.
Everyone, it seemed, had answers but
not necessarily facts. Contradictions
were as common as anxiety.
So, in a remarkably unsexy manner, Bloomberg Philanthropies swung
into action with the network it had
quietly been building with city leaders
for more than a decade. By the end of
that March, the data-based arm of billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s charity
operation was organizing weekly calls
with mayors, public-health chiefs, and
politicians to help thousands of officials trade information and ideas—and
even blow off some steam.
In a moment that lacked an obvious playbook, Bloomberg Philanthropies provided a lifeline to local
leaders across the country. Yet that
barely scratches the surface of how
this quiet giant has shaped public
policy throughout the country. In the
10 years since he ended his tenure as
New York City mayor, Bloomberg has
become best known for his efforts promoting anti-gun-violence and climate
legislation. But the focus on those endeavors ignores the area where the
mogul is arguably even more influential: the ninth richest man in America has emerged as the nation’s mayoral tutor. Counting the newest class
of mentees, including the new mayor
of Los Angeles, some 275 mayors and
more than 400 top aides have gone
through the program at the Bloomberg
Harvard City Leadership Initiative in
the past six years. Their Bloombergian
government-by-data approach shows
no sign of retreat.
Although Bloomberg Philanthropies funds a range of programs—to the
tune of $1.7 billion last year alone—
the government efforts are probably
seen every day in your cities. For instance, bike lanes have been a long
priority for Bloomberg himself, and
thus for his charities and seminars.
It’s true that many New Yorkers bemoan the Bloomberg era, and efforts
to unspool it seem as common as mandated calorie counts on NYC menus.
But there’s also no denying this network is quietly setting the agenda in
city hall—if you know where to look.
For more insights from Washington,
sign up for TIME’s politics newsletter at
time.com/theDCbrief
POLITICS
T H E
AN UNCONVENTIONAL
SENATOR OPENS UP
ABOUT HIS BATTLE
WITH DEPRESSION
BY MOLLY BALL
FETTERMAN USES AN
IPAD TO AID AUDITORYPROCESSING ISSUES
FROM HIS STROKE
PHOTOGRAPH BY
SHURAN HUANG FOR TIME
S T R U G G L E S
O F
J O H N
F E T T E R M A N
21
POLITICS
WHEN HE
LOOKS BACK
ON THE
PAST YEAR—
a year in which he nearly died, became a U.S. Senator, and nearly
died again—it is the debate that John Fetterman identifies as the
breaking point.
“The debate lit the mitch,” he says, then shakes his head in frustration and tries again. The right word is there in his brain, but he struggles to get it out. “Excuse me, that should be lit the mitch—” He stops
and tries again. “Lit the match,” he says finally.
Oct. 25, 2022: the date is lodged in his mind. “I knew I had to do
it,” he tells me. “I knew that the voters deserve to have what, what
the stroke has done to me—transparency that way.” As soon as it was
over, he knew it had not gone well. “I knew at that moment that I was
going to be considered—consider myself—like, a national embarrassment,” he says. And then the darkness came.
The Pennsylvania Democrat is sitting behind a big wooden desk
in his sparsely furnished Senate office. His 6-ft. 8-in. frame is clad
in a white hoodie, gray sweat shorts, and sneakers—a sartorial signature he has maintained despite Senate rules. (For most votes, Fetterman discovered, he can stand just off the Senate floor and give a
thumbs-up or -down to the clerk, thereby avoiding having to put on
a suit.) Surrounding us are three iPads propped up on stands—two
facing him, one facing outward—that transcribe our conversation in
real time, helping compensate for the auditory-processing difficulties
brought by his stroke just over a year ago.
Fetterman has settled in to talk, through tears, about his treatment for and recovery from the severe depression that followed. In
February, he checked into the neuropsychiatry unit at Walter Reed
National Military Medical Center outside D.C., where he remained
for more than six weeks. By the time he got there, he was a shell of
himself—gaunt, listless, barely able to function. “I didn’t think I
could be fixed,” he says. He didn’t actively contemplate suicide, he
tells me, but he would have welcomed death if it came. “If the doctor
said, oh, by the way, you have six months left, I would have been like,
OK, whatever,” he says. “That’s how bleak it was.” He considers himself lucky to have survived.
Instead, Fetterman emerged transformed, he says, and has become an evangelist for the treatment he believes saved his life. This
openness about a serious, ongoing mental-health ordeal has put Fetterman in uncharted territory for an American politician. A halfcentury ago, Senator Thomas Eagleton, selected as George McGovern’s running mate, was dropped from the Democratic presidential
ticket when it emerged he had previously been hospitalized for depression. Since then, other politicians have been more open about
mental illness, but typically in the past tense. “There’s been a
22
Time August 14, 2023
transition in terms of stigma around these issues,” says Minnesota Democrat Tina Smith,
who disclosed her youthful battle with depression in a Senate floor speech in 2019. “I was
talking about my experiences when I was much
younger. That’s very different from the leap of
faith John has taken.”
When Fetterman set out to shatter that longstanding taboo, it was far from clear what the response would be. But he has been met, by and
large, with an outpouring of goodwill, from colleagues and the public alike. Senators of both
parties have lauded him. People come up to him
on street corners to tell him he saved their life.
On a May day that I interviewed him in Washington, a suit-jacketed Republican congressional staffer carrying a Chick-fil-A takeout bag
approached Fetterman to thank him for talking about his struggles. As he sat on a park
bench in Philadelphia recently, a 28-year-old
Black woman pressed a handwritten note into
his hands: “I just wanted to thank you for your
bravery,” it read. “I have lived with Bipolar II
for years. You have opened a door that has profoundly change [sic] the conversation in my
household and community!”
For so many years, we have demanded our
politicians be perfect—free of scandal, perfectly
groomed, never a hair or a word out of place.
SHUR AN HUANG FOR TIME
trying to shrink inside himself. “—Before it was
too late,” he finally says. “Before some things
could have—damage that can’t be undone. And I
would just implore anybody to get help. Because
it can work. It worked. And I’m so grateful.”
To admit to being broken was to admit to being
deficient. But Fetterman was never the kind
of pol who put much stock in seeming perfect.
And so he embarked on a high-stakes trust fall
with the electorate of his diverse swing state,
gambling that they would see him not as dangerously unstable but as recognizably human.
It turned out that many people loved their broken Senator—not in spite of his brokenness but
because of it.
The stroke left Fetterman’s cognitive abilities
intact, according to his doctors, and in hours of
interviews in D.C. and Pennsylvania—the most
extensive he’s given since his treatment—his
quick wit and grasp of policy were apparent.
Though he may eventually recover full fluency
with time and continued speech therapy, he
sometimes struggles to express the words in his
mind. But his meaning is clear. “My message is,
I don’t care if you’re a Trumper, MAGA, or hard
leftist, or anyone in between. Depression comes
across the spectrum, and get help with it,” he
tells me. “It’s not a Democratic Senator from
Pennsylvania saying this. No. I’m just a husband
and a father, somebody that was suffering from
depression and got help—”
Here his voice breaks; he wipes his eyes,
takes a moment to compose himself. He has
turned sideways and curled up in his chair, as if
The people closesT to Fetterman always knew
there was a darkness in him. “John was always
a sad person, and that was OK,” says his wife
Gisele Barreto Fetterman. “He’d be like, ‘I’m not
too sad, you’re too happy.’ He was just very empathetic, I think, and he carried the pain of so many.
I thought of him as melancholic—I always loved
Abraham Lincoln, and historians would call him
melancholy, which we later learned was really
clinical depression. And I thought, oh, he’s my
Abraham Lincoln. It wasn’t something I wanted
to change about him.”
Born to working-class teenage parents in
Reading, Pa., Fetterman, 53, grew up uppermiddle-class in York after his father found success in the insurance industry. He played offensive tackle at Albright College, his dad’s alma
mater, then got an M.B.A. at the University of
Connecticut, planning to follow his Republican
father into the family business. But when Fetterman was 24, his best friend died in a car accident, prompting a round of soul-searching.
He signed up for AmeriCorps, which sent him
to work with low-income kids in Pittsburgh.
FETTERMAN READS
CLOSED CAPTIONS ON
After earning a degree from Harvard’s Kennedy
HIS DEVICE DURING A
School, he returned to western Pennsylvania to
MAY 16 MEETING
run a G.E.D. program in Braddock, a majorityBlack former steel town.
Braddock’s population had declined precipitously; poverty and violence were rampant. Fetterman ran for mayor in 2005 on a reform
platform, beating the incumbent by a single vote in the Democratic
primary. As mayor, he turned the town into a showcase for hipster
urban renewal—art studios, organic gardens—with help from a foundation funded by his father. He tattooed the local ZIP code, 15104, on
one big forearm; on the other, he inked the dates of every murder in
Braddock during his tenure.
Irreverent, unpretentious, and progressive, the big man with the soft
heart was catnip to coastal media, featured in glossy magazine profiles
and on thought-leader panels. He was re-elected three times. In 2007, a
formerly undocumented Brazilian immigrant, Gisele Barreto Almeida,
wrote Fetterman a letter saying she admired his efforts. He invited her
to visit Braddock. They fell in love and were married a year later.
Fetterman made a bid for Senate in 2016, losing the Democratic primary to a conventional candidate preferred by the
Democratic establishment who went on to lose the general election.
Two years later, he defeated the incumbent lieutenant governor in
the Democratic primary, earning a spot on the ticket with incumbent Governor Tom Wolf, a straitlaced former businessman. He refused the official residence that came with the job to remain in Braddock. Nor was he much for ceremonial glad-handing. Pennsylvania
political insiders I asked about Fetterman’s tenure described him as
a “loner” and a “grump.”
23
POLITICS
The lieutenant governor has few official duties,
but Fetterman managed to make waves. He hung
gay-pride and marijuana-leaf flags from his office balcony, even after the legislature banned the
practice. In his role overseeing the pardon board,
he pushed to dramatically increase commutations
and pardons.
In February 2021, Fetterman announced he
would again run for Senate. As 2022 dawned, he had
a huge lead on his primary opponents. He was drawing big crowds and an avalanche of small-dollar donations. He would sometimes complain he didn’t
feel well, but it never seemed serious.
On May 13, 2022—the Friday before the Tuesday
primary election—Fetterman was in the car with
Gisele, heading to a campaign event near Lancaster,
when she noticed his face seemed to be drooping on
one side. They drove straight to the hospital.
IN NOVEMBER
2022, FETTERMAN
WAS ELECTED
IN THE MOST
EXPENSIVE SENATE
CAMPAIGN EVER
FETTERMAN SHOWS
SUPPORTERS HIS
TATTOOS DURING A
CAMPAIGN STOP
IN APRIL 2016
24
Time August 14, 2023
Fetterman now believes that debate will be
remembered for decades as a debacle, like the
time Dan Quayle couldn’t spell potato. His voice
cracked; he stammered; he struggled to say his
own name. When he managed to string words
together, they were often the wrong ones. Asked
to explain his support for fracking, which he had
previously opposed, he stammered, “I do support fracking, and I don’t, I don’t—I support
fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.”
The reaction was brutal. Fetterman’s own polls
predicted he would lose the election.
Two weeks later, he won by 5 points. Fetterman felt only numbness. Superstitious, and
assuming it would take days to count votes,
he hadn’t prepared a victory speech. “We’re
all jumping up and down, and he’s just in disbelief,” his adviser Rebecca Katz recalls. “He
went out and declared victory, and then we all
went home.”
And the darkness descended.
the Newly elected members of Congress
were invited to an orientation in D.C. the week
after the election. Gisele had to force her husband
to go. “Think of the insanity of that,” Fetterman
says. “I work for two years. And at the end of that,
after nearly dying, after the most infamous debate in American politics, I was going to not show
C L O C K W I S E F R O M T O P L E F T: J E F F S W E N S E N — G E T T Y I M A G E S ; C O U R T E S Y J O H N F E T T E R M A N ; PA U L
W E AV E R — S O PA I M A G E S/ L I G H T R O C K E T/G E T T Y I M A G E S; B I L L C L A R K — C Q R O L L C A L L /G E T T Y I M A G E S
Four days later, Fetterman won the primary in
a landslide. He spent the day of his victory anesthetized, having a pacemaker implanted in his heart.
Before going under the knife, he recorded a video
on his iPhone: a message to his children, in case he
didn’t make it.
From the earliest days after the stroke, doctors
said a full recovery was eventually possible. Staffers and family members could detect glimpses of
the old John in the way he cracked jokes and intuited the rhythms of the race. In the months when the recovery kept
him off the campaign trail, he personally directed a savagely funny social media blitz depicting celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, his Republican
opponent, as an out-of-touch carpetbagger.
Oz could have drawn on the soft-touch persona he’d honed on
The Oprah Winfrey Show to compassionately address Fetterman’s
health. Instead he mocked him. “If John Fetterman had ever eaten a
vegetable in his life, then maybe he wouldn’t have had a major stroke,”
a spokeswoman taunted. Later, Oz’s campaign aired ads showing Fetterman struggling to speak. The Senate campaign would eventually go
down as history’s most expensive—a $300 million barrage of attacks
that Fetterman believes exacerbated his depressive slide.
Returning to the trail in August, Fetterman would ask audience
members to raise their hand if they or their close relatives had experienced serious health problems. “We’ve all been through this; I’m
just doing it in the public eye,” he’d say. “And I have a doctor who’s
making fun of me, and I hope you don’t have that in your life.” The
strategy was a product both of necessity and of Fetterman’s political persona, says Joe Calvello, his communications director. “We
made a bet on empathy—that people are going to relate,” Calvello
says. It worked, he believes, because it was consistent with the Fetterman people knew. “His politics is about struggle,” Calvello says.
“As mayor, as lieutenant governor, he was always about the forgotten
places, the forgotten communities, the people left behind.”
Yet even many who sympathized wondered whether Fetterman
was up to the job. The election’s lone debate loomed as the chance
to prove himself. He prepared furiously. The format had never been
a strength, but he did well enough in prep sessions that his camp
felt optimistic.
While other newly elected lawmakers worked to get their offices
up and running, aides struggled to get Fetterman to engage. “At first
it seemed like he was just having a hard time getting out of campaign
mode,” recalls Adam Jentleson, his chief of staff. “He was always talking about how Republicans would leap on every mistake—‘They’re
going to kill me with that.’ I kept saying, you’re not running anymore,
you don’t have to worry about it.” He became obsessed with a miniscandal surrounding pollster Sean McElwee, who had done work for
AS LIEUTENANT GOVthe campaign before resigning from his firm over his gambling on
ERNOR, FETTER MAN
HUNG MARIJUANA
elections and ties to the disgraced crypto billionaire Sam BankmanAND GAY-PRIDE
Fried. “At freshman orientation he was completely preoccupied with
FLAGS FROM HIS
OFFICE BALCONY
people talking behind his back,” Jentleson says. “I had to constantly
reassure him that everything wasn’t a crisis.”
The winter was dark and cold. Fetterman’s D.C. apartment was
in a basement. So was his temporary office suite in the Capitol. On
Jan. 10, the New York Times journalist Blake Hounshell died by suicide at 44, leaving behind a wife and two young children. Fetterman
had gotten to know Hounshell, a fellow stroke survivor, during the
campaign. Hounshell had largely recovered from his stroke, but continued to suffer nerve pain that exacerbated the depression that had
plagued him since he was a young man. (The physical and psychological effects of stroke frequently contribute to depression in survivors.)
The news that Hounshell had taken his life hit Fetterman hard.
On Feb. 8, Senate Democrats held a retreat at the Library of Congress in D.C. Fetterman sat by himself and didn’t talk to anybody. “I was
sitting with my wife at a table next to him, and it was clear he was not
having a good day,” recalls Bob Casey, Pennsylvania’s senior Senator.
“I attributed it to him being a little shy, which he is—you know, he’s
not the most extroverted person. And he was still in the early stages of
up for orientation. That’s what depression does.”
using the iPad to deal with his auditory-processing issues.”
In news photographs from that event, FetterFetterman stumbled out of the retreat in a fog. Fearing he was having another stroke, his staff took him to George Washington Univerman looks grim and uncomfortable. Surrounded
by eager new lawmakers, his eyes are dim, his
sity hospital, where he stayed for two nights, receiving fluids and
smile grudging. Colleagues remember wondergetting tests. The following Monday, he consulted Congress’s ating why he barely spoke or made eye contact.
tending physician, Brian Monahan, who diagnosed him with depression, recommended inpatient treatment, and began making arrangeBack in Braddock, the Senator wouldn’t
get out of bed. Not for family meals at restauments for him to be admitted at Walter Reed. Finally, on Feb. 15,
rants. Not for school activities for the
after pleading from staff and family
three kids—Karl, 14; Grace, 11; and
members—Fetterman remembers it as
‘
G
E
T
H
E
L
P.
an “intervention”—he agreed.
August, 9. At Thanksgiving, he came
to the table for a few minutes, downed
Jentleson and another Fetterman
B
E
C
A
U
S
E
I
T
staffer, Bobby Maggio, escorted him
some food, and went back to bed, while
out of the building. “I will always reGisele and the children kept up the
C A N W O R K .’
member
walking to his car parked a
family tradition of watching Planes,
—JO H N F ET T ER MA N
Trains and Automobiles. At Christmas,
block away, thinking, ‘Please don’t
Gisele handled Santa duty. “My family
change your mind,’” Jentleson recalls.
was really confused, my kids especially,” Fet“He’s a large man, and if he decided he didn’t want to go, there was
terman says. “‘Why, Daddy, I thought you won.
going to be nothing me and Bobby could do about it.” It was 5 p.m.,
Why wouldn’t you be happier? What’s wrong
and the car inched along in rush-hour traffic. The drive took an hour.
Fetterman sat silently in the back, not saying a word.
with you?’ And I tried to explain to them that,
oh, Daddy’s tired. But I could begin to sense that
they were blaming themselves.” It still torments
For the First two weeks at Walter Reed, Fetterman continued to
him, the helplessness and guilt that his children
decline. He stopped shaving and showering. His normally bare head
must have felt. “They realized that something
grew fuzzy; his fingernails were like claws; he didn’t get out of his pajamas. Seeing his face in the mirror, he didn’t recognize himself. He
was really wrong, and they started to get more
and more scared,” he says. “And I couldn’t articwas consumed with self-loathing, convinced his own family wanted
ulate to them, because I couldn’t really articunothing to do with him. He knew he belonged in the hospital, but felt
late it to myself at this point, what was going on.”
trapped there.
FETTERMAN
DURING
HIS M.B.A.
STUDIES AT THE
UNIVERSITY OF
CONNECTICUT
25
POLITICS
Dr. David Williamson, director of Walter
Gisele brought the family, and they picked up a packet of Post-it
Reed’s inpatient neuropsychiatry program,
notes that Fetterman’s father had left to help him with his reading.
oversaw Fetterman’s treatment. “Depression to
In black ballpoint pen, they covered the neon pink, yellow, and blue
the public connotes sadness. It wasn’t so much
stickies with pictures and messages: “We love you,” “Best dad ever,”
a sadness presentation,” Williamson tells me.
“YOU WILL GET BETTER.”
“The cardinal feature of the medical illness of
Recounting this memory at the house in Braddock, Fetterman
depression is slowed speech, movement, and a
pauses our conversation and lopes back to the bedroom to retrieve the
Post-its. There are more than 100 of them, preserved in a wood frame.
lack of drive or initiative. He was very passive,
“I’m going to save these till the day I die,” he says, crying. “Their visit
very flat, very unemotional, almost mute, although he did talk. Just a lack of responsiveness
was really kind of a pivot, where I realized that this is a choice. You
and a flatness, a lack of that spark or passion you
have the support, you have the medical community, you have therapy.
would expect to see in humans.”
And this was a catalyst that helped direct me to the way forward.”
Williamson’s team gathered records from
The final two weeks of his hospital stay were spent fine-tuning
a treatment regimen. On March 31, he left the ward and went home
Fetterman’s doctors in D.C. and Pennsylvania
and ran tests—“a 360-degree review of his carto Gisele and the kids. On April 17, he returned to the Senate. Wildiac health, neurologic health, mental state, beliamson says Fetterman’s depression is now in remission. “His proghavior, and daily functioning,” as Williamson
nosis is good,” the doctor adds, ”provided that he continues to take
puts it. They found, among other things, that
his medication, and he’s very strongly committed to medication and
Fetterman’s hearing was severely diminished,
treatment over the long term.”
exacerbating his auditory issues; he now wears
hearing aids. Because he’d lost so much weight,
the senator and his team never considered trying to hide the
his heart medications were at too high a dosage.
cause of his hospitalization at Walter Reed. “We were never for a minCardiac tests and brain scans showed he had not
ute going to say he was being ‘treated for exhaustion,’” Katz says. But
suffered any further physical damage or stroke.
they weren’t sure what the reaction would be when they first announced
(Fetterman gave his doctor permission to dishe’d been admitted. As they hit “send” on the press release, Jentlecuss his treatment with me, but deson and Calvello recall holding their
clined to disclose the names and
breath and exchanging a here-goesdosages of his medications.)
nothing glance.
‘I D I D N ’ T T H I N K
After a couple of weeks of medicaThey needn’t have worried.
I
C
O
U
L
D
B
E
F
I
X
E
D.’
Lawmakers from both parties extion adjustment, Fetterman began to
pressed support, in public and priimprove, Williamson says. His sleep
—JO H N F ET T ER MA N
vate. “Heidi & I are lifting John up
got better; he began to show more
emotion, regain his sense of humor.
in prayer. Mental illness is real & seWilliamson sought to educate Fetterman about
rious,” tweeted Texas Republican Ted Cruz. Tina Smith, the Minnehis illness, to get him to see that it was not mere
sota Democrat, brought doughnuts to his staff, who were soon oversadness but a medical condition rooted in brain
whelmed with similar gifts from Republicans and Democrats alike.
chemistry. The Senator seemed unconvinced
Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama, Fetterman’s neighbor in
until, one weekend, Williamson persuaded him
the Capitol basement, was among the first colleagues to visit him in
to read Understanding Depression, a book by Dr.
the hospital. (Though both have moved to better offices, their bond
Raymond DePaulo. “I came in on Monday mornendures: crossing paths in a Capitol tunnel one recent afternoon, Fetterman yelled, “Alabama!” and gave her a fist bump.) “Unsolicited, so
ing and he was so animated,” Williamson says.
“He had bookmarked and dog-eared and highmany colleagues have expressed both publicly and privately their appreciation that he did this,” says Democratic Senator Peter Welch of
lighted whole sections of that book.” Gisele, it
turned out, had given Fetterman the same book
Vermont, who notes that the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath
triggered a widespread mental-health crisis that the nation is struga decade earlier, but he hadn’t read it.
Fetterman began to venture outside, into the
gling to address. “A lot of citizens have too. It was a powerful and a
ward’s sunny courtyard. But he still refused to
helpful thing that he did.”
Constituents flooded Fetterman’s office with messages of support.
see his family until one day a staff therapist said
something that flipped a switch. “The therapist,
“Attached below is today’s call report,” reads the daily internal email
she’s like, ‘Hey, your wife and your kids want to
tabulating constituent calls to his Washington office from Feb. 16, the
day he went public. “Total number of calls: 56. Top call topics: 1) Well
come, what do you think?’ And I was like, no,
wishes for the Senator—32.” No other topic had more than two callno, the kids don’t want to see me. I ruined my
son’s birthday. I haven’t been a participant in
ers. That pattern continued throughout his hospitalization.
their lives for the last couple of months. And the
Williamson believes Fetterman’s openness about his struggles has
moment that changed everything was when that
the power to help countless others. In a recent Gallup survey, 18% of
Americans said they have depression—a rate that has nearly doubled in
young therapist said, ‘Kids need their daddy’s
hugs.’” He chokes up at the memory of it: it was
the past decade. Studies have found that fewer than 10% of sufferers get
so simple, so clear, so suddenly obvious.
psychiatric treatment. “We struggle in the health care world to message
26
Time August 14, 2023
CONTENT FROM THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR
From left to right:
Beckhoff family:
Johannes Beckhoff
(Research & Development),
Frederike Beckhoff
(General Management),
Hans Beckhoff
(Managing Director and Owner)
D
the world, and an impressive CAGR of 15% since
the turn of the millennium.
“We are in the business of automating machines, buildings, processes and smart devices,
principally using our proven PC control technology, which integrates the best of IT and OT in one
platform,” says Hans Beckhoff. In operational
terms, the main areas that Beckhoff Automation’s
product range covers are industrial PCs, I/O and
fieldbus components, motion technology and
automation software. Its solutions are integral to
clients active in many industries, ranging from automotive, wind turbines and logistics to yachting
and even rock’n’roll.
In 2021, Beckhoff Automation was supplier to
the Emirates Team New Zealand America’s Cup
entry, with its Ethernet for Control Automation
Technology (EtherCAT) being used to control
the ship’s hydrofoil cant system. Meanwhile,
entertainment automation is also proving to be
an increasingly lucrative area for the company, as
a growing number of global musical tours rely on
the Beckhoff’s technology for the smooth running
of their automated AV extravaganzas.
At the very high-tech and nano end of the
spectrum, several leading semiconductor manufacturers have employed Beckhoff Automation’s
products and systems to control the process
chambers used in wafer production. “Automation
technology is a base technology for every part of
our society, therefore, our products’ applications
www.time.com/partnercontent
have to save the world! , says the managing
director.
This high performance can be used to automate
all kinds of machinery. Machine tools, plastics
industry, and packaging machines – to name just
three of many fields of application – account for
the largest share of business for the company.
“The process industry is also a growing market for
us,” adds Hans Beckhoff.
Beckhoff Automation has a worldwide
geographical footprint, with 70% of its revenue
generated outside of Germany. Notably, though,
the company owes its status as a multinational
success story to the family values that Beckhoff
has strictly adhered to from the very outset. “We
have built a reputation for quality and leading-edge innovation, and we also offer trust,” he
says. “One of the most important elements of our
growth strategy has been to guarantee our clients
back-up wherever in the world they might be.”
To be able to deliver this, more than 30%
of the company’s staff are trained engineers,
most of whom are hired local to their client’s
centers of operation. “They don’t just know how
automation technology works, they also have
detailed knowledge of their customers’ specific
applications,” says Hans Beckhoff. “Automation
technology is complex and must be supported by
human beings.”
In such a competitive environment, holding on
to this talented global team is a challenge -- but
and products, for example at exhibitions around
the world, they have become our most effective
ambassadors.”
The financial stability this has brought about
has also been key to the company’s part-evolutionary and part-revolutionary approaches to
technological innovation, “We are constantly
evolving and improving our product offerings,”
Hans Beckhoff says, “but every five to seven
years we introduce something revolutionary as
well.” This approach has raised the bar in the
automation industry through the development of
ground-breaking technology like XTS and XPlanar
motion systems, as well as EtherCAT. In 2021,
Beckhoff introduced its modular and pluggable
MX-System. This innovative solution makes it
possible to achieve control cabinet-free automation of machines and systems. On the software
side, the TwinCAT (The Windows Control and Automation Technology) automation suite has been
at the heart of the control system since 1996 and
is continually being further developed.
So what does the future hold for Beckhoff
Automation? Further international expansion is on
the horizon and, with the next generation of Beckhoffs working with their father, its commitment to
family values seems secure. “Our business model
is very scalable,” says Hans Beckhoff. “I think we
could grow into a $3 billion company by 2030.”
POLITICS
this condition to the public,” Williamson says. “People feel like losing
their drive, their emotional repertoire, their passion, that these things
are somehow an indictment of their personality or something that
they’ve done wrong. If you get chest pains, most people know that’s bad
and you’ve got to go to the ER. We need to get there with depression,
and the way we’re going to get there is when public figures like Senator
Fetterman speak out and say help is out there and you can get better.”
May 16, 2023: a normal day in the life of an abnormal U.S. Senator.
In the morning, Fetterman meets with the CEO of Ikea; later, he will
receive the family of an American held prisoner in Russia. The meetings
will be awkward for all involved. Fetterman is still learning to navigate
his limitations, and for the most part, he expects everyone else to adapt.
The day’s main event is a hearing of the Senate Banking Committee. The former executives of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature
Bank, which failed in March and were taken over by federal regulators, are set to testify. Fetterman, the most junior of the 23 Senators
on the committee, is scheduled to speak last. In his first-floor suite in
the Russell building, his staff brainstorms ways to channel the righteous indignation Fetterman feels toward the executives—fat cats, as
he sees them, who got off easy and left the little guy holding the bag.
“None of the Democrats are being big enough a--holes to this guy,”
Jentleson says as he watches the start of the hearing. They land on the
idea of berating the former SVB boss, Gregory Becker, for jetting off
on a Hawaiian vacation the same day he was ousted as CEO.
As the hearing nears the two-hour mark, Fetterman changes into a
suit and heads through the Capitol’s winding underground passages.
With his hulking posture and lumbering gait, he is impossible to miss,
and he is repeatedly stopped for selfies. Other than that, he walks in
Dumbfounded or confused, they don’t answer.
silence. His body man, Luke Borwegen, holds the iPad in front of him,
but the ambient hubbub has rendered it useless.
By late afternoon, Fetterman’s questioning beShortly before his turn to speak, the plan goes out the window.
comes the subject of more than 30,000 tweets.
Britt, the Alabama Republican, has also latched onto the Hawaii tidSome of them are from the left, celebrating the
bit and is grilling Becker about taking the trip while declining to repoint he was trying to make. But the exchange
turn his bonus. Fetterman has to come up with a new angle on the
really goes viral on the right, with critics mockfly. He settles on a complex idea related to the debt-ceiling negotiing his inarticulateness. Fox News airs three segments on his performance. GOP Representative
ations, in which some Republicans called for work requirements for
Ronny Jackson of Texas, the former
recipients of the Supplemental NuWhite House physician, calls Fettertrition Assistance Program, better
F
E
T
T
E
R
M
A
N
’
S
known as food stamps. If poor people
man “an absolute disgrace,” adding,
have to prove they’re working to col“He’s completely incapable of doing
O
P
E
N
N
E
S
S
lect taxpayer-funded benefits, Fetterthe job he was sent here to do.”
man wants to know, shouldn’t CEOs
Many on the right remain obABOUT HIS
getting billion-dollar bailouts have to
sessed with the idea that Fetterman
STRUGGLES HAS
is, as Tucker Carlson once put it,
do the same?
That’s the idea, at least. But when
“unapologetically brain-damaged.”
THE ABILITY TO
Fetterman takes his seat and sets
Borwegen, the bearer of the iPad,
H
E
L
P
C
O
U
N
T
L
E
S
S
went on a couple of Bumble dates
out to make his point, what comes
with a woman who kept prodding
out is less clear. “The Republicans
OTHERS
him to admit that his boss was incawant to give a work requirement
pacitated, only to find out that she
for SNAP, for a hungry family has
was actually an operative surreptitiously taping
to have this kind of penalties, some kinds of word—working requirements,” he stammers. “Shouldn’t you have a working requiretheir encounters for the right-wing activist James
ment after we sail your bank—billions of your bank? Because they
O’Keefe. The video, posted in May, contains no
seem to be more preoccupied when, then, SNAP requirements
such admission.
for works, for hungry people, but not about protecting the tax—
Once, these types of attacks would have sent
Fetterman spiraling. Today he’s able to let the
the taxpapers, you know, that will bail no matter whatever does
negativity slide. He’s no longer on social media.
about a bank crashing?” The executives aren’t sure how to react.
28
Time August 14, 2023
SHUR AN HUANG FOR TIME
“So anyone who reads your article and thinks,
Goddammit, I’m throwing my A+ material
directly at John, the good news is, I don’t know
what you’re saying!” he jokes.
The freshman lawmaker is beginning to carve
out his identity in the Senate. He co-sponsored
pending bipartisan rail-safety legislation in
response to the February Norfolk Southern
train derailment, which occurred just over the
Ohio-Pennsylvania border. In May, he joined
other Democrats in calling on President Biden to
use the 14th Amendment to raise the debt ceiling
unilaterally. The following month, he was one of
five Democratic Senators to oppose the debt deal
negotiated by Biden and House Speaker Kevin
McCarthy, a vote that put him in the same camp
as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. “Honestly, I swear, I don’t consider myself a progressive,” he says. “I’m just a guy with three kids, and
it scares me to death that a bank president 3,000
miles away can crash and blow up, like, my kids’
college savings or whatever. I don’t call that progressive. I call that an outrage.”
On a sweaty saturday in June, the Fettermans
line up for the start of the Pittsburgh Pride Parade.
Gisele wears a rainbow-striped cotton sundress,
while the Senator, clad in his usual work shirt
and sweat shorts, has draped a full-size rainbow
flag over his shoulders like a superhero cape. He
had to miss last year’s parade, which was soon
after his stroke.
A pair of Black women in matching rainbow
jerseys approach and are enveloped in Fetterman’s embrace. A decade ago, as mayor of Braddock, he began marrying same-sex couples in
defiance of state law. Princess and Judy Craighead were the first Black couple he married,
and have stayed friends with the Fettermans
ever since. “We wore dashikis at the ceremony,
so he wanted to wear one too, so we had to find
a dashiki in size 5XL,” laughs Princess, 57, who
works in a restaurant. Judy, 65, a disabled Army
veteran, says her elderly mother suffers from
aphasia. “Same as him, the stuff you want to
come out doesn’t come out right all the time,”
she says. “But she’s still the same person.”
Other Democratic elected officials make a
quick appearance and leave, but not Fetterman.
He starts at the front of the parade but quickly
falls back to the rear, stopping every few feet
for selfies, hugs, and fist bumps. Young people squeal like they’ve just seen Taylor Swift.
A stocky white woman in jean shorts buries
her head in his chest. Diane DeGregorio, 58, is
a Teamster who works on the loading dock of
the nearby convention center. “I suffer from depression, but it’s not something you talk about,”
she tells me. “Hopefully, with him admitting it
FETTERMAN HEADS
TO A VOTE IN THE
and getting treated, it lets more people know
SENATE IN MAY
that it’s OK to say you have a problem, especially men that look like him.”
After the parade, Fetterman settles into an easy chair by a window in the converted car dealership in Braddock that his family
calls home. It’s a massive, loftlike space with exposed-brick walls,
full of salvaged furniture and thrift-store finds. The three kids are
getting ready to go to the pool. Two rescue dogs, Levi and Artie,
roam the premises.
Fetterman, in his sardonic fashion, wants me to know he’s aware
how cheesy some of his newfound gratitude sounds. “Like, you know,
when I was getting out, I didn’t think, ‘Woo-hoo! I’m on top of the
world!’” he says. “But, like, you have a life to live, and you’re excited
to live those—that life. And knock on wood, every day has been wonderful. And now I have a duty to pay it forward. Because I’ll be honest with you, I would be scared where I would be right now if I didn’t
have the kind of help that I got at Walter Reed. And it’s a shame that
those types of resources are not available to everyone. But what is
available is that I have a duty to be a champion of that.”
In retrospect, Fetterman believes that what happened to him was
inevitable—that his natural melancholy would combine with the stroke
and the “blowtorch” of the campaign to ignite his depression. While he
knows many see him as diminished or disabled, he believes what he’s
been through has made him stronger: wiser, more thoughtful, more
appreciative. “I thought I was really empathetic before, but after the
stroke, and then after this—I think it made me a much better Senator.”
What he wants now, he says, is to be the voice that might have pulled
□
him out of the darkness. —With reporting by Julia Zorthian
29
PHOTOGR APHS BY SUPR ANAV DASH FOR TIME
WORLD
AI
By the
People,
For the
People
THE WORKERS MAKING
AI POSSIBLE RARELY
SEE ITS REWARDS.
ONE INDIAN STARTUP
IS TRYING TO DO
THINGS DIFFERENTLY
BY BILLY PERRIGO/
KARNATAKA, INDIA
31
WORLD
In the shade of a coconut palm, Chandrika
tilts her smartphone screen to avoid the sun’s
glare. It is early morning in Alahalli village in
the southern Indian state of Karnataka, but
the heat and humidity are rising fast.
As Chandrika scrolls, she clicks on several audio clips in
succession, demonstrating the simplicity of the app she recently started using. At each tap, the sound of her voice speaking her mother tongue emerges through the phone.
Before she started using this app, 30-year-old Chandrika
(who, like many South Indians, uses the first letter of her father’s name, K., instead of a last name) had just 184 rupees
($2.25) in her bank account. But in return for around six hours
of work spread over several days in late April, she received
2,570 rupees ($31.30). That’s roughly the same amount she
makes in a month of working as a teacher at a distant school,
after the cost of the three buses it takes her to get there and
back. Unlike her day job, the app doesn’t make her wait until
the end of the month for payment; money lands in her bank
account in just a few hours. Just by reading text aloud in her
native language of Kannada, spoken by around 60 million
people mostly in central and southern India, Chandrika has
used this app to earn an hourly wage of about $5, nearly
20 times the Indian minimum. And in a few days, more money
will arrive—a 50% bonus, awarded once the voice clips are
validated as accurate.
Chandrika’s voice can fetch this sum because of the boom
in artificial intelligence (AI). Right now, cutting-edge AIs—for
example, large language models like ChatGPT—work best in
languages like English, where text and audio data is abundant
online. They work much less well in languages like Kannada,
which, even though it is spoken by millions, is scarce on the
internet. (Wikipedia has 6 million articles in English, for example, but only 30,000 in Kannada.) When they function at
all, AIs in these “lower resourced” languages can be biased—
by assuming that doctors are men and nurses women, for
example—and can struggle to understand local dialects. To
create an effective English-speaking AI, it is enough to simply collect data from where it has already accumulated. But
for languages like Kannada, you need to go out and find more.
This has created huge demand for datasets—collections of
text or voice data—in languages spoken by some of the poorest people in the world. Part of that demand comes from tech
companies seeking to build out AI tools. Another big chunk
comes from academia and governments, especially in India,
where English and Hindi have long held outsize precedence in
a nation of some 1.4 billion people with 22 official languages
and at least 780 more Indigenous ones. This rising demand
means that hundreds of millions of Indians suddenly possess a scarce and newly valuable asset: their mother tongue.
Data work—creating or refining the raw material at the
heart of AI—is not new in India. The economy that did so
32
Time August 14, 2023
much to turn call centers and
garment factories into engines of productivity in the
late 20th century has quietly
been doing the same with
data work in the 21st. And,
like its predecessors, the industry is once again dominated by labor arbitrage
companies, which pay wages
close to the legal minimum
while selling data to foreign clients for a hefty markup. The AI
data sector, worth over $2 billion globally in 2022, is projected
to rise to $17 billion by 2030. Little of that money has flowed
down to data workers in India, Kenya, and the Philippines.
These conditions may cause harms far beyond the lives
of individual workers. “We’re talking about systems that are
impacting our whole society, and workers who make those
systems more reliable and less biased,” says Jonas Valente, an
expert in digital work platforms at Oxford University’s Internet Institute. “If you have workers with basic rights who are
more empowered, I believe that the outcome—the technological system—will have a better quality as well.”
In the neighboring villages of Alahalli and Chilukavadi, one
Indian startup is testing a new model. Chandrika works for
Karya, a nonprofit launched in 2021 in Bengaluru (formerly
Bangalore) that bills itself as “the world’s first ethical data
company.” Like its competitors, it sells data to big tech companies and other clients at the market rate. But instead of
keeping much of that cash as profit, it covers its costs and
funnels the rest toward the rural poor in India. In addition to
its $5 hourly minimum, Karya gives workers de facto ownership of the data they create on the job, so whenever it is resold,
the workers receive the proceeds on top of their past wages.
It’s a model that doesn’t exist anywhere else in the industry.
“The wages that exist right now are a failure of the market,”
Manu Chopra, the 27-year-old CEO of Karya, tells me. “We
decided to be a nonprofit because fundamentally, you can’t
solve a market failure in the market.”
The work Karya is doing also means that millions of people whose languages are marginalized online could stand to
gain better access to the benefits of technology—including
AI. “Most people in the villages don’t know English,” says
Vinutha, a 23-year-old student who has used Karya to reduce
her financial reliance on her parents. “If a computer could understand Kannada, that would be very helpful.”
The catch, if you can call it that, is that the work is supplementary. The first thing Karya tells its workers is: This is not
a permanent job, but rather a way to quickly get an income
boost that will allow you to go on and do other things. The
maximum a worker can earn through the app is the equivalent of $1,500, roughly the average annual income in India.
After that point, they make way for somebody else. Karya
says it has paid out 65 million rupees (nearly $800,000) in
wages to some 30,000 rural Indians up and down the country. By 2030, Chopra wants to reach 100 million people. “I
genuinely feel this is the quickest way to move millions of
people out of poverty if done right,” says Chopra, who was
△
born into poverty himself. “This is absolutely
to a for-profit business. Could Karya really be
Karya workers, including
Rajeshwari
N.,
left,
and
a social project. Wealth is power. And we want
a model for a more inclusive and ethical AI
to redistribute wealth to the communities who Chandrika K., center right, industry? Even if it were, could it scale? One
display the Karya app
have been left behind.”
thing was clear: there could be few better testChopra isn’t the first tech founder to rhapsoing grounds for these questions than India—
dize about the potential of AI data work to benefit the world’s a country where mobile data is among the cheapest in the
poorest. Sama, an outsourcing company that has handled world, and where it is common for even poor rural villagcontracts for OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Meta’s Facebook, also ers to have access to both a smartphone and a bank account.
marketed itself as an “ethical” way for tech companies to lift Then there is the potential upside: even before the panpeople in the Global South out of poverty. But as I reported demic, some 140 million people in India survived on under
in January, many of its ChatGPT workers in Kenya—some $2.15 per day, according to the World Bank. For those peoearning less than $2 per hour—told me they were exposed to ple, cash injections of the magnitude Chopra was talking
training data that left them traumatized. The company also about could be life-changing.
performed similar content-moderation work for Facebook;
one worker on that project told me he was fired when he cam- Just 70 miles from the bustling tech metropolis of Bengapaigned for better working conditions. When asked by the luru, past sugarcane fields and under the bright orange arcs
BBC in 2018 about low wages, Sama’s late founder argued that of blossoming gulmohar trees, is the village of Chilukavadi.
paying workers higher wages could disrupt local economies, Inside a low concrete building, the headquarters of a local
causing more harm than good. Many of the data workers I’ve farming cooperative, a dozen men and women are gathered—
spoken to while covering this industry for the past 18 months all of whom have started working for Karya in the past week.
have bristled at this logic, saying it’s a convenient narrative
Kanakaraj S., a skinny 21-year-old, sits cross-legged on
for companies getting rich off the proceeds of their labor. the cool concrete floor. He is studying at a nearby college,
There is another way, Chopra argues. “The biggest lesson and to pay for books and transport costs he occasionally
I have learned over the last 5 years is that all of this is pos- works as a casual laborer in the surrounding fields. A day’s
sible,” he wrote in a series of tweets in response to my Janu- work can earn him 350 rupees (around $4), but this kind
ary article on ChatGPT. “We can pay our workers 20 times of manual labor is becoming more unbearable as climate
the minimum wage, and still be a sustainable organization.” change makes summers here even more sweltering than
It was the first I’d heard of Karya, and my immediate usual. Working in a factory in a nearby city would mean
instinct was skepticism. Sama had begun its life as a non- a slightly higher wage, but also hours of daily commutprofit focused on poverty eradication, only to transition later ing on unreliable and expensive buses or, worse, moving
33
WORLD
away from his support network to live in dorms in the city. Unlike many Silicon Valley rags-to-riches stories, Chopra’s
At Karya, Kanakaraj can earn more in an hour than he trajectory, in his telling, wasn’t down to his own hard work.
makes in a day in the fields. “The work is good,” he says. “And “I got lucky 100 times in a row,” he says. “I’m a product of
easy.” Kanakaraj was surprised when he saw the first payment irrational compassion from nonprofits, from schools, from
land in his bank account. “We’ve lost a lot of money from the government.”
scams,” he tells me, explaining that it is common for villagers
After graduation, Chopra returned to India and joined
to receive SMS texts preying on their desperation, offering Microsoft Research, a subsidiary of the big tech company that
to multiply any deposits they make by 10. When somebody encourages researchers to work on difficult social problems.
first told him about Karya he assumed it was a similar con—a With his colleague Vivek Seshadri, he set out to investigate
common initial response, according to Chopra.
whether it would be possible to channel money to rural IndiWith so little in savings, local people often find themselves ans using digital work. In 2021, with a grant from Microsoft
taking out loans to cover emergency costs. Predatory agen- Research, the pair quit their jobs to spin Karya out as a noncies tend to charge high interest rates on these loans, leaving profit, joined by a third co-founder, Safiya Husain.
some villagers here trapped in cycles of debt. Chandrika, for
Although small, Karya already has a list of high-profile
example, will use some of her Karya wages to help her family clients including MIT, Microsoft (which holds no equity in
pay off a large medical loan incurred when her 25-year-old sis- Karya), and Stanford. In February, Karya began work on a new
ter fell ill with low blood pressure. Despite the medical treat- project for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to build voice
ment, her sister died, leaving the family responsible for both datasets in five languages spoken by some 1 billion Indians—
an infant and a mountain of debt. Other Karya workers find Marathi, Telugu, Hindi, Bengali, and Malayalam. The end goal
themselves in similar situations. Ajay Kumar, 25, is drown- is to build a chatbot that can answer rural Indians’ questions,
ing in medical debt taken out to address his mother’s severe in their native languages and dialects, about health care, agriback injury. And Shivanna N., 38, lost his
culture, sanitation, banking, and career
hand in a firecracker accident as a boy.
development. This technology (think
While he doesn’t have debt, his disabilof it as a ChatGPT for poverty eradication) could help share crucial knowledge
ity means he struggles to make a living.
The work these villagers are doing is
across vast swaths of the subcontinent.
part of a new project that Karya is rolling
“I think there should be a world
out across the state of Karnataka for an
where language is no longer a barrier to
Indian health care NGO seeking speech
technology—so everyone can use technology irrespective of the language they
data about tuberculosis—a mostly curable and preventable disease that still
speak,” says Kalika Bali, a linguist and
kills around 200,000 Indians every year.
principal researcher at Microsoft Re—KALIKA BALI,
LINGUIST AT
The voice recordings, collected in 10
search who is working with the Gates
MICROSOFT RESEARCH
different dialects of Kannada, will help
Foundation on the project and is an untrain an AI speech model to understand
paid member of Karya’s oversight board.
local people’s questions about tuberculosis, and respond with She has specifically designed the prompts workers are given
to read aloud to mitigate the gender biases that often creep
information aimed at reducing the spread of the disease.
The hope is that the app, when completed, will make it eas- into datasets and thus help to avoid the “doctor” and “nurse”
ier for illiterate people to access reliable information, without problem. But it’s not just about the prompts. Karya’s relatively
shouldering the stigma that tuberculosis patients—victims of high wages “percolate down to the quality of the data,” Bali
a contagious disease—often attract when they seek help in says. “It will immediately result in better accuracy of the syssmall communities. The recordings will also go up for sale on tem’s output.” She says she typically receives data with a less
Karya’s platform as part of its Kannada dataset, on offer to the than 1% error rate from Karya, “which is almost never the case
many AI companies that care less about the contents of their with data that we build [AI] models with.”
training data than what it encodes about the overall structure
Not everybody is eligible to work for Karya. Chopra says
of the language. Every time it’s resold, 100% of the revenue that initially he and his team opened the app up to anybody,
will be distributed to the Karya workers who contributed to only to realize the first hundred sign-ups were all men from a
the dataset, apportioned by the hours they put in. “I think dominant-caste community. The experience taught him that
all of us have a keen recognition of the idea that money is a “knowledge flows through the channels of power,” Chopra
cushion from reality,” Chopra says of the Karya team. “Our says. To reach the poorest communities—and marginalized
goal is to give that cushion to as many people as possible.”
castes, genders, and religions—Chopra had to team up with
nonprofits with a grassroots presence in rural areas. Those
Chopra knows firsthand the indignity of poverty. He organizations can distribute access codes on Karya’s behalf
was born in an informal settlement in Delhi, and although in line with income and diversity requirements. “They know
his parents were well educated and from a dominant caste, for whom that money is nice to have, and for whom it is lifethey sometimes struggled to put food on the table. Chopra changing,” he says. This process also ensures more diversity
excelled at the local NGO-run school and won scholarships— in the data that workers end up generating, which can help
first to a private high school in Delhi, and then to Stanford. to minimize AI bias.
‘I think there
should be a world
where language is
no longer a barrier
to technology.’
34
Time August 14, 2023
Shivanna N., 38, lost
his right hand in an
accident at the age of 8.
His disability has made
it hard to find work
35
WORLD
Chopra defines this approach using a Hindi word—
Over the course of two days with Karya workers in southern
thairaav—from Indian classical music that he translates as a Karnataka, the limitations of Karya’s current system begin to
mixture between “pause” and “thoughtful impact.” To him, come into focus. Each worker says they have completed 1,287
it means “at every step, you are pausing and thinking: Am I tasks on the app—the maximum, at the point of my visit, of
doing the right thing? Is this right for the community I’m try- the number of tasks available on the tuberculosis project. It
ing to serve?” It’s a concept, he says, that is missing not only equates to about six hours of work. The money workers can
from the English language, but also “from a lot of the entre- receive (just under $50 after bonuses for accuracy) is a welpreneurial ‘move fast and break things’ behavior” that is typi- come boost but won’t last long. On my trip I don’t meet any
cal of Silicon Valley tech companies. It’s an approach that has workers who have received royalties. Chopra tells me that
led Karya to flatly reject four offers so far from prospective Karya has only just amassed enough resellable data to be atclients to do content moderation that would require workers tractive to buyers; it has so far distributed $116,000 in royto view traumatizing material.
alties to around 4,000 workers, but the ones I’ve met are too
It’s compelling. But it’s also coming from a guy who told early into their work to be among them.
me he wants to scale his app to reach 100 million Indians
I put to Chopra that it will still take much more to have a
by 2030. Doesn’t Karya’s reliance on grassroots NGOs to on- meaningful impact on these villagers’ lives. The tuberculoboard every new worker mean it faces a significant bottle- sis project is only the beginning for these workers, he replies.
neck? Actually, Chopra says, the limiting factor to Karya’s They are lined up to shortly begin work on a transcription
expansion isn’t finding new workers. There are millions who project—part of a push by the Indian government to build AI
will jump at the chance to earn its high wages, and Karya has models in several regional languages including Kannada. The
built a vetted network of more than 200 grassroots NGOs project, he says, will allow Karya to give “significantly more”
to onboard them. The bottleneck is the amount of available work to the villagers in Chilukavadi. Still, the workers are
work. “What we need is large-scale
a long way from the $1,500 that would
mark their graduation from Karya’s sysawareness that most data companies
are unethical,” he says, “and that there
tem. Eventually, Chopra acknowledges
that not a single one of Karya’s 30,000
is an ethical way.” For the app to have
the impact Chopra believes it can, he
workers has reached the $1,500 threshneeds to win more clients—to persuade
old. Yet their enjoyment of the work,
more tech companies, governments,
and their desire for more, is clear: when
and academic institutions to get their
Vivek Seshadri, Karya’s chief technolAI training data from Karya.
ogy officer, asks the room full of workers whether they would feel capable of
But it’s often in the pursuit of new
clients that even companies that pride
a new task flagging inaccuracies in Kanthemselves on ethics can end up comnada sentences, they erupt in excited
promising. What’s to stop Karya doing
chatter: a unanimous yes.
—MANU
CHOPRA,
the same? Part of the answer, Chopra
KARYA CEO
says, lies in Karya’s corporate strucThe villagers I speak to in Chilukature. Karya is registered as a nonprofit
vadi and Alahalli have only a limited unin the U.S. that controls two entities in India: one non- derstanding of artificial intelligence. Chopra says this can be a
profit and one for profit. The for-profit is legally bound to challenge when explaining to workers what they’re doing. The
donate any profits it makes (after reimbursing workers) to most successful approach his team has found is telling workthe nonprofit, which reinvests them. The convoluted struc- ers they are “teaching the computer to speak Kannada,” he
ture, Chopra says, is because Indian law prevents nonprofits says. Nobody here knows of ChatGPT, but villagers do know
from making any more than 20% of their income from the that Google Assistant (which they refer to as “OK Google”)
market as opposed to philanthropic donations. Karya does works better when you prompt it in English than in their
take grant funding—crucially, it covers the salaries of all 24 mother tongue. Siddaraju L., a 35-year-old unemployed faof its full-time employees—but not enough to make an en- ther of three, says he doesn’t know what AI is, but would feel
tirely nonprofit model possible. The arrangement, Chopra proud if a computer could speak his language. “The same
says, has the benefit of removing any incentive for Karya’s respect I have for my parents, I have for my mother tongue.”
co-founders to compromise on worker wages or well-being
Just as India was able to leapfrog the rest of the world on
in return for lucrative contracts.
4G because it was unencumbered by existing mobile data
It’s a model that works for the moment, but could collapse infrastructure, the hope is that efforts like the ones Karya is
if philanthropic funding dries up. “Karya is very young, and enabling will help Indian-language AI projects learn from the
they have got a lot of good traction,” says Subhashree Dutta, mistakes of English AIs and begin from a far more reliable
a managing partner at The/Nudge Institute, an incubator that and unbiased starting point. “Until not so long ago, a speechhas supported Karya with a $20,000 grant. “They have the recognition engine for English would not even understand
ability to stay true to their values and still attract capital. But my English,” says Bali, the speech researcher, referring to her
I don’t think they have been significantly exposed to the di- accent. “What is the point of AI technologies being out there
□
if they do not cater to the users they are targeting?”
lemmas of taking the for-profit or not-for-profit stance.”
‘What we need
is large-scale
awareness that most
data companies
are unethical, and
that there is an
ethical way.’
36
Time August 14, 2023
CONTENT FROM THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR
RESEARCHGATE –
Connecting Scientists Worldwide
have developed a great deal of confidence in
the stability of the core management team
and its willingness to adapt to changing
market conditions.
When British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee came up with
the idea of the World Wide Web back in 1989, his principal
goal was to meet the demand for information sharing between
scientists in universities and institutes around the world.
“THE THREE OF US ARE STILL
WORKING TOGETHER AFTER
15 YEARS, AND WE STILL
BELIEVE IN WHAT WE ARE
DOING, WHICH IS A RARE
THING THESE DAYS,” SAYS
MADISCH.
which his invention would change just
about every aspect of human life or the
possibilities it would unlock in empowering
the world’s scientists and researchers.
In 2008, German-Syrian virologist Ijad
Madisch, along with fellow physician Sören
Hofmayer and computer scientist Horst
Fickenscher, took up the challenge of making
the world of scientific research open to all
with the launch of ResearchGate, a social
network dedicated to helping scientists
connect and exchange information about their
research projects.
ResearchGate has since become a runaway
success as one of the most visited websites
in the world, attracting approximately 130
million visits every month. In the intervening
years Madisch has managed to raise a
significant amount of capital from an A-list
group of supporters, including Bill Gates,
Goldman Sachs and the Benchmark venture
capital firm.
The idea for ResearchGate came about
when, while working as researchers,
Madisch and Hofmayer discovered firsthand
that finding and collaborating with
colleagues across the world was no easy
task. Over time it became clear to them that
there were many inefficiencies in the way
science was shared. “It occurred to us that
most scientists only tend to share positive
results,” Madisch recalls. “The problem
with this is that they don’t learn from
other researchers’ failures, so they keep
on repeating the same failed experiments.”
Today, ResearchGate puts scientists at the
heart of the research ecosystem, enabling
them to share their work and connect
with peers around the globe, traversing
the borders and silos of science and
empowering them to make a better world
for all.
www.time.com/partnercontent
Ijad Madisch
CEO & Co-Founder of ResearchGate
As someone who had gravitated to medical
research because he genuinely wanted to
make a difference, Madisch didn’t plan on
becoming an entrepreneur. But the turning
point came when a friend persuaded him to
fly to California in a bid to stimulate interest
in his project in Silicon Valley. Without a
single contact to his name, Madisch was
nevertheless able to secure a meeting with
LinkedIn co-founder Benchmark’s Matt Cohler.
Suitably impressed by the idea, Cohler asked
Madisch about his exit strategy. “I told him
I was in this for the long haul and that what
I really wanted to do was to win a Nobel
Prize.” Cohler has been one of ResearchGate’s
staunchest champions ever since.
While investors may have been won over by
Madisch’s commitment, they also recognized
that the ResearchGate business model
had the potential to create a participatory
audience of sufficient critical mass to generate
revenue streams that connect scientists with
the products, services, and opportunities they
need to advance both their science and their
careers. Meanwhile, over the years investors
Going forward, Madisch and his team are
working to expand ResearchGate from a
network where scientists interact with each
other to a platform where all stakeholders in
the research ecosystem can connect and make
research more effective for all. The goal is to
provide a space where academic publishers,
societies, funders and universities can interact
with the 25 million researchers who are
members of ResearchGate.
When asked about the future of science,
Madisch sees big changes on the horizon in
how research gets done. ResearchGate has
invested significantly in building a product
that helps the scientific community work
more openly, but it’s clear that the next
challenge will lie in how research data can be
interpreted in a more automated fashion.
While Madisch has high hopes that AI
and large language models will improve the
community’s ability to sift through all the
available research around a specific topic,
such as Alzheimer’s or multiple sclerosis, he
also notes that it’s research teams that truly
drive scientific progress.
“WE NEED TO FIGURE OUT
HOW TO ENABLE MACHINES
AND HUMANS TO WORK
TOGETHER TO BRING
ABOUT A STEP CHANGE
IN GLOBAL RESEARCH
INNOVATION. THIS IS HOW
WE’LL GET TO SCIENTIFIC
BREAKTHROUGHS AT A
MUCH FASTER RATE.”
CLIMATE
THE
P OI NT
PHOTOGR APHS BY JOSÉ IBARR A RIZO FOR TIME
E XT R E M E HE A T
I S E N D A NG E R I N G
A M E R I C A’ S WO RK E R S —
A ND I T S E C O NO M Y
By Aryn Baker/Georgia
Construction workers toil in the heat
working on a new subdivision being
built in Loganville, Ga., in July 2023
CLIMATE
7 A.M.:
COPELAND FARMS,
ROCHELLE, GA.
Just after dawn on a recent July day in Rochelle,
Ga., Silvia Moreno Ayala steps into a pair of sturdy
work pants, slips on a long-sleeved shirt, and slathers her face and hands with sunscreen. She drapes
a flowered scarf over her wide-brimmed hat to protect her neck and back from the punishing rays
of the sun. There isn’t much she can do about the
humidity, however. Morning is supposed to be the
coolest part of the day, but sweat is already pooling in her rubber boots. She drinks deeply from a
plastic water bottle, then squeezes out the air until
it is flattened enough to tuck into her back pocket,
so she can keep her hands free while working the
fields. On some days, it might be hours before
she makes it back to the drinks-filled cooler that
Moreno, a 41-year-old farmworker who came to
the U.S. from Mexico as a teen, has left at the field’s
edge. And she’s heard the horror stories of farmworkers dying because they didn’t stay hydrated.
Moreno accepts headaches, nausea, muscle
cramps, and dizzy spells—signs of severe heat
stress—as an inevitable part of her summer workday, but by sipping a little tepid water as she goes,
she hopes to stave off a worse outcome. “I know
people who work watermelons and get so hot they
end up in the hospital,” she says. Her doctor warns
that she might too one day. He says her kidneys,
already damaged by years of working in hot conditions, won’t be able to take much more.
Dozens of workers have likely already died
from heat exposure this year, shaping up to be the
hottest in U.S. history. The death toll started on
New Year’s Day in Florida when a 28-year-old laborer working on a bell-pepper farm died from
heatstroke. On June 16, with temperatures hovering around 100°F, construction worker Felipe
Pascual overheated and died at his worksite near
Houston. On June 19, a 35-year-old power lineman in East Texas succumbed to heat exposure
on a 96°F day. A day later, 66-year-old postal
worker Eugene Gates Jr. died making his rounds
in Dallas—while a cause of death has yet to be determined, temperatures that day reached 115°F.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nearly 40 workers die every year from heat,
most in outdoor jobs like farming, construction,
and package delivery. But the official statistics
don’t tell the real story, says Doug Parker, director of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). “We’re confident that’s an
undercount. Probably a significant undercount,”
40
Time August 14, 2023
33X
Number of people
globally who will be
subject to dangerous
levels of humidity
and heat by 2100
compared with today
largely because the role of heat is often overlooked
on death certificates for cardiac arrest and respiratory failure. Public Citizen, a D.C.-based advocacy group, estimates extreme heat contributes to
between 600 and 2,000 deaths a year, along with
170,000 injuries.
Climate change is supercharging the problem.
At least a third of the U.S. population was under
an extreme-heat advisory at some point this summer, and next summer is likely to be worse, as
the warming El Niño weather cycle intensifies
through the winter. While the past eight years
have been the hottest in history, they are also likely
to be the coolest of the next century. On a planet
4.86°F warmer—our current end-of-century
trajectory—33 times as many people would be
subjected to dangerously high levels of extreme
or humid heat. But no matter how hot it gets, garbage still must be collected, packages delivered,
houses roofed, roads constructed, and produce
plucked for grocery-store shelves. A 2020 study
found that the average U.S. farmworker already endures dangerous levels of heat for 21 days of the
year. By 2050 that number could jump to 39, and
by the end of the century to 62.
In most states, you can be fined for leaving a
dog outside without water or shade. But outside of
California, Oregon, Washington, and Colorado, agricultural workers don’t have the same protections.
Nor do roofers, road-construction crews, delivery
drivers, or garbage collectors, or almost any other
outdoor workers. With the risk to some 50 million
Americans comes an estimated $100 billion in lost
productivity, increased workers’-comp premiums,
lawsuits, and health care costs.
Protecting outdoor workers from extreme heat
is easy, and in most cases, inexpensive. Public Citizen estimates that requiring employers to provide
workers with cool water and periodic shaded rest
breaks could prevent at least 50,000 injuries and
illnesses a year. In 2021, President Joe Biden asked
OSHA to draft a federal protocol that would do just
that. But OSHA rulemaking is slow, and, meanwhile, opposition is ramping up, led by industry
groups that hold that heat protections are too onerous a burden for business.
9 A.M.: UPS SORTING FACILITY,
ROME, GA.
By 9 a.m., some 90,000 UPS drivers across the
country roll out of distribution centers in their
iconic brown trucks, ready to transport the clothes,
books, frozen fish, furniture, toilet paper, medicines, and overnight mail Americans depend upon.
The trucks, primed for efficiency and easy maintenance, are neither air-conditioned nor insulated.
“Working all day in heat like this is physically
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center
rounds, and both ended up in the hospital with
acute kidney injury. According to company records submitted to OSHA, at least a dozen UPS
workers are hospitalized for heat-related injuries every year. Not all survive. On June 25, 2022,
Esteban Chavez, 24, died of suspected heatstroke while delivering packages on a 95° day in
Pasadena, Calif., a tragedy that renewed calls for
air-conditioning the fleet. Doing so, said company
spokespeople at the time, was impractical given
that drivers were constantly jumping in and out
of the vehicles to make their deliveries.
On June 16, 2023, UPS’s 340,000 Teamsters
Union members voted to strike starting Aug. 1. In
the final stages of contract negotiations, the company had agreed to air-condition all new vehicles
starting in 2024. McBride says the bigger issue is
the relentless pace. Drivers are expected to deliver
between 150 and 300 packages a day, and their
progress is monitored by dashboard-mounted
cameras. “We need more breaks,” he says. “Drivers are doing 10-, 12-hour days in extreme heat.
That is too much for a body to take. It accumulates over time, and you can’t recover. That’s when
things go wrong.”
11 A.M.: RESIDENTIAL ROOFING PROJECT,
MACON, GA.
painful,” says driver Barkley Wimpee as he pulls
his truck out of the lot on a recent 92°F morning.
Unlike farmworkers, drivers can’t take advantage
of the predawn cool—deliveries must be made
during working hours. “By the time we get going,
the sun is already blazing,” says Wimpee, 28. “I’m
sweating before I leave the parking lot.”
Larry McBride, a 46-year-old UPS driver based
in Phoenix, keeps a thermometer in the back of his
van. Some days, the temperature exceeds 135°F.
Drivers spend most of their time in those sweltering holds, shifting and selecting the packages they
need for delivery. “Before you realize it you start
getting disoriented, light-headed, like you might
pass out,” he says. “When you step outside, even if
it’s 115° out, you will feel like you got blasted with
AC because it’s so hot back there.”
Last summer, McBride and Wimpee both succumbed to heat exhaustion while making their
△
Silvia Moreno
Ayala loves her
work as a field
crew leader
on a Georgia
farm. Her
doctor told her
it could kill her
By 11 a.m., George Guzman has turned off his blowtorch, stowed his tools, and called his team off the
roofing project they have been working on since
dawn. They will pick up again at 4 p.m., when the
worst of the sun’s heat has burned away. By taking
a break during the hottest part of the day, Guzman
can let his body recover. He used to be employed
at a company that worked its crews through the
day, no matter the temperature. To him, it wasn’t
worth the risk. He started his own roofing business
instead, with a small crew and one simple rule:
they work hard, but on hot days, they don’t work
stupid. “It’s not all about making money. It’s about
protecting people too,” he says.
A 90°F day might be perfect for the beach. But
once you start working, your metabolism ramps up,
burning fuel and raising the body’s core temperature. Your heart compensates by pumping blood
away from your overheated organs to your skin,
where dilating blood vessels can dissipate the heat
with the help of evaporating sweat. If it’s humid,
and the sweat can’t evaporate, the process breaks
down. That’s why standard temperature measurement is less important than wet-bulb globe temperature (WBGT), which combines thermometer
readings with humidity levels, the effects of sun
angle, cloud cover, and wind factor.
According to research led by Andreas Flouris of
the University of Thessaly’s FAME Lab, workers
41
can handle up to 89.7°F WBGT—100°F with 30%
humidity, or 86°F with 95% humidity—as long as
they are given adequate rest periods and the opportunity to replace electrolytes and liquids lost to
perspiration. If not, they can suffer heat exhaustion, leading to nausea or dizziness, and may start
dropping tools, stumbling off a ladder, or driving
erratically. Over time, it can lead to chronic health
problems as key organs, such as the heart and kidneys, are damaged.
Heatstroke happens when the body’s core temperature surpasses 104°F and it can no longer cool
itself because sweating can cease as basic functions
shut down. If that worker isn’t immediately taken
to a cool location and given a chance to rehydrate,
death comes within a few hours. That’s likely what
happened to 29-year-old farmworker Efraín López
García, whose body was discovered under a tree
by co-workers on July 6, 2023, in Homestead, Fla.
The WBGT that day reached 92°F, more than two
degrees above what the body can safely tolerate.
It was also the planet’s hottest day in recorded history, based on a global temperature average.
When concentrated among the poor and migrants, the deaths and injuries can seem to carry
less weight. “In some ways they are seen as implements of the harvest, not human beings,” says
Dean Florez, a former California state senator who
successfully launched a state heat-protection standard in 2005. “Everybody just kind of says, ‘Well,
they’re immigrants, they know the conditions that
they’re walking into.’”
1 P.M.: WOOD FARMS WATERMELON
FIELD, ROCHELLE, GA.
After a long morning picking watermelon in the
sun, Victor Manuel Montes Jasso and Jesus Lopez
Damian seek out the shade, where they scarf down
a quick lunch of pinto beans and chicken pasta.
They are both grateful for the break and dreading
its end. “It’s always risky,” says Lopez. “The reality is that you have to kill yourself in the sun and
the heat.” Gulping down a two-liter soda bottle,
Montes nods in agreement. “But you need to work,
right? That’s why we came here, to work hard.”
From the cab of his air-conditioned tractor,
Billy Emory can hardly feel the heat and humidity. A work-crew supervisor for Wood Farms, he is
overseeing a chain of men tossing giant green melons, fireman style, from the field and ultimately
through the windows of a converted school bus.
Even from a distance, he can make out the sweat
soaking through their clothes. He shakes his head
in admiration. “These guys, they can take the heat.
We sure can’t.”
Latinos make up 18% of the American workforce, but according to the United Farm Workers
42
Time August 14, 2023
$100B
Estimated annual
loss to the U.S.
economy from heat’s
effects on workers
union, 65% of the country’s 2.6 million farm laborers, one of the most dangerous jobs when it
comes to heat exposure. According to a 2022
study, agricultural workers are 35 times as likely
as other workers to die of heat, which Juanita
Constible, senior climate and health advocate at
the Natural Resources Defense Council, attributes
to indifference, a lack of protections, and a pernicious myth that people of color are better with
heat. “There’s often a perception that people from
hot countries can deal with hot temperatures. It’s
just simply untrue. It’s a racist belief that underpinned slavery that we still see in our agricultural
system now.” In reality, they can “take the heat,”
in Emory’s words, only because poverty and circumstance don’t give them a choice.
Employers are required under OSHA rules to
protect workers from hazardous conditions, but
many farm laborers are scared to speak up because they’re either undocumented or on H-2A
temporary visas and can be deported if they are
fired. “These workers tolerate a lot of bad conditions because they don’t have a lot of options,” says
Solimar Mercado-Spencer, director of the Farmworker Rights Division at the nonprofit Georgia
Legal Services Program. “As long as they’re getting
paid something, they’re probably not going to complain about the excessive heat.” One recent study
found that migrants from lower-income countries
faced an 80% higher risk of dangerous occupational
heat strain in agricultural work compared with native employees. Absent oversight, Constible warns,
as heat increases, so will the human toll of opportunistic exploitation.
3 P.M.: EL PASO TIENDA MEXICANA,
CORDELE, GA.
The shelves of El Paso Tienda Mexicana minimart in
the farming town of Cordele are stocked with the flavors of home: peanut candies, plantain chips, dried
chilies, and bottled hot sauces. In the refrigerateddrinks section, big jugs of lemon-lime-flavored
Pedialyte are stacked six deep. It’s a cheaper, if
less tasty, option than Gatorade. After a sweltering
day in the fields and a quick shower, Silvia Moreno
Ayala sometimes comes here to restock her cooler
with ice and Pedialyte, prepping for the next day.
On the days she supervises a work crew, she
makes sure they get regular breaks and finish before the peak of late-afternoon heat and humidity.
She keeps the crew cooler stocked with enough
water and Pedialyte to get them through the day,
on her own dime. But not all crew leaders treat
their workers the same. She has watched supervisors for other farms force their crews to toil
straight through the afternoon until 7 or 8.
The Nixon Administration proposed setting up
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CLIMATE
a federal heat-safety standard to protect workers in
1972, not long after OSHA was established, but it
never went anywhere. Such a standard would help
hold employers responsible when workers die or
are injured from entirely preventable causes, says
Andrew Levinson, OSHA’s director of standards
and guidance. It would also even out the playing
field for employers who are trying to do the right
thing for their workers.
Nor would it be that onerous to implement. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has
recommendations indicating how often a worker
should rest and hydrate given a specific heat and
humidity index, which could be the basis for new
rules determining lengths and intervals of mandated paid breaks, says Juley Fulcher, Public Citizen’s worker health and safety advocate. Employers should be obligated to make water and shade
easily accessible, says Fulcher, and a standard
should include an antiretaliation clause, so workers can report violations without fear of getting
fired or deported. In short, says Fulcher, a federal
standard should look like the one California established in 2005, after a spate of farmworker deaths.
Farm owners warned at the time that the bill would
increase costs, and that consumer prices would
spike as a result. “But you know what? I haven’t
seen a decline in productivity since,” says former
senator Florez. “In fact, the California ag industry
seems to be on an upswing. It’s pretty clear that
protecting workers is good for business.”
Washington State was the next to adopt heatprotection standards, in 2008, followed by Colorado and Oregon in May 2022. Since then, efforts
to protect workers elsewhere have been largely
stalled. A New York State bill, which would require businesses to protect outdoor workers and to
air-condition trucks and all indoor workspaces in
certain industries, is languishing in committee. In
Nevada a proposal to require water, rest, and shade
for employees once temperatures exceed 95°F was
44
Time August 14, 2023
△
Migrant
workers on
six-month
visas pick
squash and
peppers on a
farm in
Lyons, Ga.
eventually amended to 105°F, and still failed. Virginia’s state workplace-safety board voted against
a proposal to adopt a heat-illness-prevention rule
in 2021. In the middle of a three-week heat wave
that broke all temperature records, Texas passed
a law that effectively eliminated water breaks for
construction workers in Austin and Dallas.
A federal standard would, of course, apply nationwide. The prospect galvanizes the opposition.
After OSHA opened the floor to public comments in
2021, industry lobby groups objected: The American Farm Bureau Federation said it “appears unnecessary,” and proposed that OSHA “partner with employers” on better training materials instead. The
National Cotton Council argued that heat injuries
weren’t due to the work itself, but rather to “present-day luxuries such as air-conditioning . . . making it more difficult [for workers] to face the severe
change in temperature” and “younger workers who are used to a more sedentary lifestyle.”
According to Pam Knox, the director of the University of Georgia Weather Network and an agricultural climatologist, there are legitimate concerns about cost as well. It’s going to be a struggle
for farmers to take care of their workforce, she
says, while also dealing with the challenges of unpredictable weather extremes brought on by climate change. “Farmers work on very tight margins.
If you have to give your workers more frequent
work breaks, you have to pay them for extra hours.”
“If workers don’t get breaks, they die, and that
costs you money too,” retorts Fulcher. It’s not
just heatstroke deaths, but also injuries and accidents, which can drive up insurance fees and
legal costs. According to Flouris, of the FAME
Lab, heat stress and dehydration can impair
decisionmaking and increase risk-taking, while
decreasing cognitive function. For an outdoor
worker climbing a ladder, wielding a chain saw,
or sitting behind the wheel of a 10-ton delivery
vehicle, a minor episode of heat-stress-derived
dizziness can turn into a major disaster.
“I just don’t know how anybody could sit there
and argue that a safety thing would increase your
cost,” says James Lanier, the managing partner for
waste-management company Ryland Environmental, who has implemented a stringent heat-safety
plan to protect his 200 employees. “If you look
at the cost of implementation, vs. what [one accident] would cost you if you did have one, it is very,
very, very negligible.” California saw a 30% decline
in worker injuries after passing its heat bill, and all
it takes is spending a day mowing the lawn in the
hot sun to realize that heat can be a productivity
killer. “What I say to the people who say that compliance costs are too high is that you’re probably
losing money right now,” notes Constible. “And
you just don’t realize it.”
5 P.M.: RYLAND WASTE-MANAGEMENT
DEPOT, MACON, GA.
When 5 p.m. rolls around, Chris Powell is ready to
clock out. He’s been hanging off the back of a garbage truck for most of the past 10 hours, and his
arms are slicked with sweat in the 91° afternoon
heat. His job, wrestling full garbage cans into the
embrace of the truck’s mechanical arm, is taxing,
but manageable. Lanier, his boss, forces everyone to take at least two 15-minute pauses during
the day in the air-conditioned cool of the garbage
truck’s front cab, in addition to a regular lunch
break. Powell is well versed in heat-stress symptoms and treatment—it’s the principal topic of his
weekly paid safety training these days. Though he’s
never found it too hot to work, if he felt unwell, he
says he’s confident that Ryland would call the truck
back to base. But eventually, he’d be sent out again.
Garbage collection is essential, says his supervisor,
Maurice Dillard. “Regardless of whether it’s 112°F
or 120° or 54° outside, it just has to be done.”
Lanier says that if the Georgia heat ever got
as bad as some climate projections suggest, he
would consider adding more breaks, or rejiggering the pickup schedule for cooler parts of the
day. “I don’t want to ever have to make that call to
somebody’s family to say, ‘Hey, somebody’s had
an issue. They’re in hospital,’ or God forbid, even
worse.” Lanier says he welcomes the idea of a federal heat-protection standard—though he doesn’t
think it will change anything he is already doing.
If other employers complain of government meddling, he has a simple answer: “Well then, do the
right thing. Care about your employees.”
9 A.M.: PHOENIX, TULSA, BATON
ROUGE, JACKSON, LAREDO, KEY WEST,
LAS VEGAS, BAKERSFIELD, MEMPHIS,
MACON, AND DOZENS OF OTHER U.S.
CITIES
By 9 a.m. the next day, temperatures from California to Florida are approaching 100°F, sparking extreme-heat advisories for nearly a third of
the American population. Public-health officials
are urging residents to drink water, stay indoors,
and avoid outdoor exercise. But farmhands in
Florida, road-construction crews in Texas, and
delivery drivers in Phoenix are hard at work,
keeping America running under life-threatening
conditions. Legally, they have no choice. “Why
are we being asked to choose between working and staying alive?” asks UPS driver Larry
McBride, as he texts a photo of the temperature reading from the back of his truck. It shows
137.3°F. “This is just going to continue where we
are dropping like flies.”
Co-reported with Georgia Public Broadcasting’s
Sofi Gratas and Grant Blankenship/Rochelle,
Rome, and Macon, with additional reporting from
Moises Sala/Macon; Diane Tsai/Salt Lake City;
and Leslie Dickstein and Julia Zorthian/New York
45
ADVERTISEMENT
CHINAWATCH
PRESENTED BY CHINA DAILY
The fabric of Chinese culture
BY XU HAOYU
China Watch materials are distributed by China Daily Distribution Corp. on behalf of China Daily, Beijing, China.
ADVERTISEMENT
A musical celebration
of compassion
BY XU XIAOMIN
Produced by a group of toplevel international musicians,
an oratorio telling the story of
exiled Jewish refugees navigating their new life in Shanghai
during World War II will have its
global premiere in the city this
November.
Maestro Yu Long, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra and
the New York Philharmonic have
jointly commissioned the oratorio titled Emigre, composed by
award-winning musician Aaron
Zigman.
The lyrics are by Pulitzer Prizewinning librettist Mark Campbell
and songwriter Brock Walsh.
The oratorio will premiere on
Nov. 17 at the Jaguar Shanghai
Symphony Hall before making
its U.S. premiere in the David
Geffen Hall at the Lincoln Center
in New York on Feb. 29.
The idea for the production
came from Yu, music director
of the Shanghai Symphony
Orchestra, who spoke to Zigman
about it at the beginning of 2020
in New York. Both of them then
agreed to produce a work to
commemorate this moving moment in history.
In the late 1930s, many Jews
fled to Shanghai to escape
the Nazis in Europe as most
countries were limiting Jewish
migration or had closed their
doors completely. The free port
of Shanghai opened its doors to
about 20,000 Jews despite suffering the atrocities of Japanese
invaders at the same time.
This act of kindness led to
many Jews dubbing Shanghai
“the Noah’s Ark of the Orient”.
Zigman said that the production holds a special meaning for
him. “If not for Shanghai and the
good will of the people of China,
some of my ancestors and
someone very close to me would
have perished at the hands of
the Nazis during World War II,”
says the American composer,
who has written scores for films
and TV shows including The
Notebook and the Sex and the
City franchise.
Additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, D.C.
Maestro Yu Long (back) poses
with (from left, front) librettist
Mark Campbell, composer Aaron
Zigman and songwriter Brock Walsh.
PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY
The 90-minute Emigre, spread
over two acts, tells the story of
two Jewish brothers who have
to navigate through their new
lives after arriving in Shanghai in
1938 as refugees. The musical
work, according to Yu, is aimed
at sending a message that the
“survival of a race depends on
diverse communities learning to
embrace a shared humanity”.
There are 17 songs in Emigre,
including A Woman’s Hands, In
a Perfect World, Through a Window, and Shanghai. The work is
sung in English, Yu adds.
“The Chinese and the Jewish
both faced similar types of
persecution before and after
the war, and that in itself always
made me feel that the telling of
this story in some way with music would be important. As such,
I chose the idea of a multicultural
love story to bridge the divide,”
says Zigman.
Gary Ginstling, president and
CEO of the New York Philharmonic, says he believes the
new oratorio will resonate with
audiences.
“The world is one big house. I
think that the writers being able
to write such an amazing story
with so few words tells us the
power of this story. It celebrates
people of Shanghai who were so
great,” he says.
The cast for the November
premiere will feature Ben Bliss
and Arnold Livingston Geis as
the two brothers. The same cast
will be performing in New York,
where Yu will be conducting the
New York Philharmonic.
COVER STORE
C E L E B R AT E T I M E 1 0 0
W ITH TIM E CO VER ART
T I M E C OV E R S T O R E . C O M
TIME ’S FILM CRITIC STEPHANIE ZACHAREK SELECTS THE TOP MOVIES FROM THE 1920S THROUGH THE 2010S
ILLUSTR ATIONS BY JILLIAN ADEL FOR TIME
TIME OFF
MOVIES
ESSAY
THERE’S NO RIGHT OR
WRONG IN MOVIE LOVE
BY STEPHANIE ZACHAREK
I
f you’re like mosT people, you probably freeze when someone asks you what
you think is the best movie of all time.
What if you give a confident answer,
only to wake up in the middle of the night,
certain you should have said something else?
And do you choose the movie you love most,
or one you know is commonly identified as
great? After all, if you go with one of the classic, default choices—Citizen Kane, Casablanca,
The Godfather—no one can accuse you of having
bad taste, or strange taste. Or the wrong taste.
After compiling and annotating my own list of
the 100 best movies of the past century—broken
down by decade, 10 pictures in each—I’m here
to reassure you that there’s no such thing as the
wrong taste. And if there is such a thing as bad or
strange taste, then my advice is to own it. No one
can dictate your preferences to you; they’re as
individual as your fingerprints. Besides, the
issue is further complicated by the fact that there
are so many barometers of greatness. Is the best
movie the one you can watch anytime, the one
that always lifts your mood? Is it the one that
makes you cry the hardest? Is it the one with the
actors you never tire of watching?
Your decisions about what constitutes greatness will be specific to you. In this case, I’m giving you mine. The internet is full of polls that
have divined, by soliciting votes from film critics
and filmmakers, what are ostensibly the greatest movies of all time. This list isn’t the result of
a poll. Aside from the question of whether we
really need yet another film survey, there’s a way
in which choosing by committee irons the idea
of loving movies into a smooth, flat sheet, as if
the right amount of number crunching will yield
the answer. But as with all individuals, our sensibilities are much more nuanced; there is no such
thing as an objective truth when it comes to art.
Our movie tastes are determined by some indefinable electrical current of enthusiasm or joy or
deep, radiating sadness, or some combination
of the three. In that sense, our favorite movies
aren’t about taste at all, but simply about listening to what really speaks to us.
So how did I choose these 100 films? I’ve
spent more than 50 years choosing. These are
movies that entwine craftsmanship and spirit.
50
Time August 14, 2023
△
Our mode of watching films may have changed across the
decades, but our capacity for loving them has not
They often feature striking performances. For
whatever reason, they touch me deeply.
I’M HOPING
THIS LIST WILL
FOSTER A SENSE
OF DISCOVERY,
ADVENTURE, AND
IMAGINATION
And All speAk, in some way, about the era in
which they were made; they’re place markers
for the things we’ve seen and the places we’ve
been and the experiences of our forebears—
or, more accurately, some of our forebears.
The unfortunate truth is that through most of
the 20th century, the world of filmmaking belonged to white men, at least behind the camera. (Women flexed their power with great performances, many of which are reflected in this
list.) There were certainly women filmmakers
working in the early part of the century—Alice
Guy-Blaché, Dorothy Arzner, Ida Lupino—but
until the 1960s and 1970s, at least, the barriers to
entry were high. The same is true for filmmakers
of color, particularly in the U.S. Through much of
the 20th century, it was easier for Black artists to
make their mark in music, literature, and painting than in movies. There are exceptions: there
was a flowering of so-called race films in the
early part of the century, films made specifically
for Black American audiences. The novelist and
filmmaker Oscar Micheaux was an early, successful pioneer, but it would be decades before filmmakers like Charles Burnett, Melvin Van Peebles,
A U D I E N C E : W E E G E E — I C P/G E T T Y I M A G E S ; D R . C A L I G A R I , T H I E F O F B A G H D A D : E V E R E T T C O L L E C T I O N (2)
Read the full list at time.com/100movies
100 YEARS
IN FILM
s
1920
THE CABINET OF
DR. CALIGARI
1920
WITHIN OUR GATES
Oscar Micheaux
Robert Wiene
1921
and Julie Dash would find a footing. In that sense,
one component of the past 100 years of cinema is
a blank space filled with unrealized possibilities.
American history is filled with such blank spaces,
and they say a lot about us.
Another note about this list: it’s marked by
what some will see as glaring omissions, including many of those default classics. There’s no
Citizen Kane, no Casablanca, no Wizard of Oz, no
Goodfellas. It’s not that I dislike those films. But
sometimes the filmmakers behind those pictures
have made other movies I love more: I’m thinking of Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons,
or Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce, great movies
that deserve some space in the spotlight.
Because this list is broken down by decade,
certain patterns emerged, motifs that couldn’t
help influencing my choices. For example, any
list of great movies might contain a few films
each by Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock,
lumped in with all the rest. But scrutinizing each
decade also means recontextualizing the filmmakers with the longest careers: the same man
who made Scarface in the 1930s had something
totally different to say in the late 1950s, with
Rio Bravo. And some decades filled up astonishingly quickly: the 1950s, in particular, left many
favorites on the cutting-room floor. It’s almost
incomprehensible to me that All About Eve,
Tokyo Story, Sunset Boulevard, Gun Crazy, and
The Breaking Point are not on this list, but triage
was necessary. The days I had to cut films like
Alien, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Master and Commander:
The Far Side of the World, Cold War, and John
Guillermin’s 1976 King Kong (which I prefer to
the original) weren’t happy ones.
On the plus side, this list includes more comedes than most poll-derived lists do. Comedies are often the also-rans; everyone wants
to be taken seriously, and comedies—even the
greatest of them, by the likes of Hawks, Preston
Sturges, or Billy Wilder—are frequently treated
as a frivolity. But they often reveal even more of
a soul than so-called serious movies do—if movies can be said to have souls, and I think they
can. That’s why our love for them stretches so
wide and deep that no single list, whether made
by an individual or a group of experts, can contain it. Rather than appease some invisible god
of movie objectivity, I’m hoping this list will foster a sense of discovery, adventure, and imagination. Idiosyncrasies are a huge part of what
makes us fall in love with other human beings.
They’re the heart of movie love too—the wrong
taste that’s totally right.
1922
NANOOK OF THE NORTH
Robert J. Flaherty
Is this a 100% unstaged
and fully accurate picture
of how members of the
Inuit population lived in
the early 1920s? No. But
Flaherty’s groundbreaking
film strives to capture
some sense of their lives
for a greater audience.
Nanook is luminous,
haunting, and joyful—not
a documentary, but a
document of one man’s
attempts to see, and to
help others do so as well.
1924
THE THIEF OF BAGDAD
Raoul Walsh
TIME OFF
MOVIES
1934
L’ATALANTE
Jean Vigo
1932
I AM A FUGITIVE
FROM A CHAIN GANG
1935
1932
SCARFACE
1936
MY MAN GODFREY
Howard Hawks
Mervyn LeRoy
Gregory La Cava
1938
s
HOLIDAY
George Cukor
In one of the greatest romantic
comedies in a decade full of terrific
ones, Carole Lombard plays a ditzy
heiress who makes a down-onhis-luck “forgotten man” (William
Powell) an unwilling participant in
a party game. Then she falls in love
with him—because who wouldn’t?
Powell and Lombard had previously
been husband and wife, and
their chemistry here is proof that
friendship can outlive a marriage.
1929
PANDORA’S BOX
Georg Wilhelm Pabst
1939
1928
1927
SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS
F.W. Murnau
s
1953
THE BAND WAGON
Vincente Minnelli
1954
s
1948
BICYCLE THIEVES
Vittorio De Sica
1947
OUT OF THE PAST
Jacques Tourneur
1955
PATHER PANCHALI
1947
BLACK NARCISSUS
Satyajit Ray
Michael Powell and
Emeric Pressburger
1957
NIGHTS OF CABIRIA
Federico Fellini
1958
VERTIGO
Alfred Hitchcock
1946
MILDRED PIERCE
Michael Curtiz
1942
THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS
Orson Welles
1941
THE LADY EVE
Preston Sturges
1940
HIS GIRL FRIDAY
Howard Hawks
It’s surely an act of cockeyed
optimism to love something
so flawed. But The Magnificent
Ambersons—adapted from Booth
Tarkington’s novel about the decline
of a wealthy Midwestern family—is
dappled with such elegiac beauty
that its problems hardly matter. The
picture was butchered by its studio,
RKO. But even in its mutilated state,
it glistens quietly, almost proudly, as
if merely waiting to someday once
again be made whole.
1959
1945
Young Apu (Subir Banerjee) lives
in the Bengali countryside with
his family, whose proud past has
given way to difficult times. Apu
is impish, often naughty. But his
parents, sister, and auntie adore
him, building a world of warmth
and care for him despite their
financial problems. A rapturous
meditation on the power of
memory, Pather Panchali—
followed by two equally glorious
sequels, Aparajito and Apur
Sansar—is one of the most
beautiful films ever made, in
any language.
TIME OFF
MOVIES
1968
s
1969
ARMY OF SHADOWS
Jean-Pierre Melville
1971
MCCABE &
MRS. MILLER
1967
BONNIE AND CLYDE
Arthur Penn
1972
LAST TANGO IN PARIS
Robert Altman
1966
Bernardo Bertolucci
BLACK GIRL
Ousmane Sembène
1963
THE LEOPARD
Luchino Visconti
1962
THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE
John Frankenheimer
1974
This adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi
di Lampedusa’s 1958 end-of-an-era
reverie, as mournful as a moonlit
dream, stars Burt Lancaster as a
Sicilian prince caught in the shifting
winds of Italian unification. Visconti
was at first unhappy with the idea
of putting Lancaster, then a huge
star, in the lead. But the two men
would become lifelong friends,
and Lancaster’s performance
remains the heart of this haunted
palace of a movie.
1962
CLEO FROM 5 TO 7
Agnès Varda
1960
s
1975
A self-absorbed Parisian pop
singer, played by Corinne
Marchand, awaits a possible
cancer diagnosis, trying to
do normal things to assuage
her worry. She dips into a
hat shop to browse, finding
some relief by enacting
a temporary reinvention
of the self. Varda’s gift for
layering intimate details
like these made her one of
the key filmmakers of the
French New Wave. And if
men might scoff at feminine
pursuits like shopping,
Varda knew their power.
1976
HARLAN COUNTY USA
Barbara Kopple
1976
TAXI DRIVER
Martin Scorsese
1987
1987
MOONSTRUCK
WINGS OF DESIRE
Norman Jewison
Wim Wenders
Moonstruck’s appearance in
the late 1980s, a dry period for
romantic comedies, was a small
miracle. Cher plays a 37-year-old
widow wooed by an embittered but
deeply romantic one-handed baker
(Nicolas Cage), who also happens
to be the estranged brother of her
fiancé (Danny Aiello). To watch
these characters figure out the best
path for themselves is a particular
kind of moonlit bliss.
1986
BLUE VELVET
David Lynch
1983
1983
SANS SOLEIL
THE RIGHT STUFF
Chris Marker
Philip Kaufman
1982
s
1981
BLOW OUT
Brian De Palma
De Palma broke through in the
New Hollywood of the 1970s, yet
his films haven’t always gotten the
acclaim they deserve. In this vision
of a highly untrustworthy America,
John Travolta plays a sound guy
striving to protect an escort (Nancy
Allen) who’s embroiled in a political
cover-up. The movie’s final scene
sends you off feeling that nothing is
right with the world, though it’s the
opposite of numbness; rather, it’s a
sense of being much too alive.
1992
1992
HARD BOILED
MALCOLM X
John Woo
Spike Lee
1993
CARLITO’S WAY
Brian De Palma
1994
1980
THE EMPIRE
STRIKES BACK
Irvin Kershner
s
CHUNGKING EXPRESS
Wong Kar-wai
1995
1995
BEFORE SUNRISE
DEAD MAN
Richard Linklater
Jim Jarmusch
1996
IRMA VEP
Olivier Assayas
1997
JACKIE BROWN
Quentin Tarantino
KILLER OF SHEEP
Charles Burnett
Burnett shot this movie, about a
slaughterhouse worker (Henry G.
Sanders) struggling to support
his family, on weekends in the
community of Watts, where he’d
grown up. But if it’s in some ways
a story about strife, there’s also
tremendous joy in it. The texture of
life is all over Killer of Sheep like
a fingerprint, proof that the most
daring filmmaking can spring from
your own backyard.
1999
1978
s
2012
HOLY MOTORS
Leos Carax
2013
2006
2002
2002
FAR FROM HEAVEN
25TH HOUR
Todd Haynes
Spike Lee
Edward Norton is a New York
drug dealer about to start a
prison sentence, spending his
last night with his two oldest
friends (Barry Pepper and
Philip Seymour Hoffman) and
his girlfriend (Rosario Dawson),
who may have betrayed him.
In the years after 9/11, several
films attempted to scale
both the enormity and the
haunting details of the event.
25th Hour—a movie that isn’t
overtly about 9/11, yet holds
its dust like a reliquary—is the
subtlest and greatest of them.
2001
MULHOLLAND DR.
David Lynch
2014
2014
PHOENIX
SELMA
Christian Petzold
Ava DuVernay
In this rapturous film noir set in
post–World War II Berlin, Nina Hoss
plays a former cabaret singer who
has survived Auschwitz but whose
face has been badly disfigured.
She searches for the man she
loves (Ronald Zehrfeld), though
he’s also the one who betrayed her,
and when she finds him, he fails
to recognize her. Hoss, one of our
great actors, gives an incandescent
performance. Her character, in her
sadness, is ablaze.
2016
2000
2019
ONCE UPON A TIME
IN HOLLYWOOD
Quentin Tarantino
s
2019
LITTLE WOMEN
Greta Gerwig
6 QUESTIONS
Fran Drescher The president of the actors’ union on
joining the writers’ strike, the impact of streaming and AI,
and the Nanny memes burning up the net
PA U L M O R I G I — G E T T Y I M A G E S
It’s hard for some people to reconcile reports of A-list stars commanding tens of millions in salaries
with the news of an actors’ strike.
Why has a union representing such
an apparently lucrative profession
taken such a dramatic step? Those
big stars—they draw people into the
theaters and allow everybody below
them to make a living. But [most]
people in this 160,000-membersstrong union make not enough to
even be eligible for health benefits.
Most actors just want to pay rent, put
food on the table, and be respected.
Those are the people we must strike
for. When the opposition says that
if you’re a background person, we’ll
scan your image [with AI] and pay
you for one day, then own your likeness in perpetuity, where does that
leave that performer? [In a statement
released July 17, the Alliance of Motion
Picture and Television Producers said
its proposal requires a “performer’s
consent for the creation and use of
digital replicas.”]
How has the streaming economy
affected actors’ livelihoods? Well,
let’s look at The Nanny. That business model was predicated on the
longevity of a show that went from
network TV into syndication. There
was a long tail of revenue upon
which residuals were based. As long
as there were ad dollars, you would
do between 22 and 28 episodes a
season, between six and 10 seasons.
With streaming, there is no tail of
revenue, no transparency as to how
well the show does. The name of the
game is subscribers. That reduces
the episodes per season to between
six and 10, and the seasons to three
or four. You can’t live on that.
You called Disney CEO Bob Iger’s
characterization of SAG-AFTRA
and the WGA’s demands as unrealistic “repugnant and out of touch.”
Do you think AI
is purely a job
killer, or might
there be a fair
way for studios
to use it?
What do you make of an executive
who stands to make $31 million
this year shrugging off the plight
of journeyman actors? I have nothing against capitalism. But when you
become intoxicated by the money,
to the point where you stop feeling
compassion for people, it becomes
like a sickness. The CEOs—on private jets and billionaires’ camp and
yachts—they are doing bad things to
good people.
Since your speech launching the
strike on July 13, people on social media have been sharing a
still from an episode of The Nanny
where your character says, “Never,
ever, ever cross a picket line.”
What has it been like to see this
moment rediscovered? I’m proud.
I came up with that strike episode of
The Nanny. I’m enjoying the creativity of the people in support of this
righteous strike. We stand on the
front lines of a whole labor movement that stands behind us. But
everybody stands to benefit from
our success, because everybody is in
jeopardy of being replaced by AI, or
being undercut or underpaid.
Have labor issues have been at the
forefront of your mind throughout
your career? Without question, because I come from a humble beginning. We all get sick, laugh, cry, and
want the same things for our children. When people in powerful positions behave poorly—when I look at
those people across the negotiating
table—I’m thinking, How could you
do this? Your whole job is to screw us.
I guess that’s why we need unions
in the first place. Really! I mean,
Frederick Douglass said, “Power
concedes nothing without a demand.
It never did and it never will.” And
who knew better than him?
—JUDY BERMAN
T H E C L I M AT E A C T I O N P L AT F O R M
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