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In an adapted excerpt from her new book “South to America,” @imaniperry recounts what it was like searching for her answers about her enslaved ancestor. “Inexact borders aside, what holds is this: we came before America was America,” Perry wrote. “This woman who bore the name either of my favorite biblical queen or my favorite holiday was here, not as an accomplice to the settler colony, but as the victim of its displacement and captivity.” “She was a witness to the very exclusions that laid the foundation for the creation of a national identity. It is a remarkable status.” Read more about Perry’s experience at the link in our bio. Photo-Illustration by Billie Carter-Rankin (@billiecarter_) for TIME (Source Photo: Library of Congress)

February 08, 2022

Record-breaking real estate prices. Surging rents. Homelessness on the rise. Marcia Fudge is trying to decide which fire to put out first. In the year since Biden appointed Fudge Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the crises of homelessness and housing prices have grown worse. Nearly half of American workers no longer earn enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment in the city where they live. And more than half a million Americans, including more than 100,000 children, were homeless in 2020—the fourth consecutive year that number increased. As the chief of U.S. housing policy, it is, at least in theory, Fudge’s job to fix this mess, and she must do it with a depleted set of tools in her toolbox. She is nevertheless getting to work. The housing crisis, she likes to say, is about much more than housing. It’s about people no longer being able to live where the jobs are. It’s about companies no longer being able to hire people to fill open positions. And it’s about the damage done to America when buying a home becomes impossible for all but the already rich. “Home was everything,” she says, recalling her own childhood. “We didn’t have much. But we did have that.” Read more at the link in our bio. Photograph by @michellegustafson for TIME.

February 08, 2022

The dusty white cargo plane stood out among the gleaming corporate jets, as did its passengers: 48 barking dogs, newly arrived at the private air terminal. They had left Mississippi that morning with their health certificates taped to their kennels. On the tarmac, Danielle Bowes, a staff member at Second Chance Animal Services, checked her list. When she found Bravo, a 1-year-old collie and American blue heeler mix, she cooed into his cage, “Hi, Pretty, you’re going to go quick!” Back at Second Chance, the dogs will quarantine for 48 hours, per Massachusetts state law, before they go up for adoption. If past experience is any guide—and transports like this arrive nearly every week all over the country, by plane, truck, and van—they will be gone in a few days. There is not a dog shortage in America, but there are stark geographic differences in supply and demand. Massachusetts needs more dogs, and Mississippi has too many. To compensate, sophisticated dog–relocation networks have sprung up over the past decade, transporting dogs and cats from states with too many to states with too few. Mostly, it’s a tactical problem: “How do we connect those shelters that have too many animals and are at risk of euthanasia simply because they were born there, to those shelters where these animals are gonna fly off the shelves?” says Matt Bershadker, CEO of the ASPCA, the New York–based animal-welfare giant, which sponsored and organized the flight arriving at Hanscom. Read how the great dog run helped to save millions of dogs at the link in our bio. Photographs by @evan_angelastro for TIME

February 08, 2022

Kathy Johnston is so in love with chocolate, she lies awake at night thinking about it. “For as long as I can remember, I have been obsessed,” she says. Her love of all things chocolate goes all the way back to her childhood, when she’d build ladders out of kitchen chairs to get at her mother’s hidden chocolate stash. As chief chocolate officer of Dubai-based chocolatier Mirzam, that’s a healthy fixation to have. Mirzam is one of several ambitious startups developing homegrown alternatives—in its case, it’s making high-quality, bean-to-bar chocolate featuring ingredients sourced from a historic spice route that ran from the west coast of Japan across the Middle East to Europe. Read more at the link in our bio. Photograph by Natalie Naccache (@natnacphotos) for TIME

February 07, 2022

The pandemic has forced many Americans to reckon with their mortality in new ways. Since COVID-19 emerged in early 2020, organizations that support and train U.S. death doulas have seen significant spikes in membership. A death doula is an end-of-life coach who helps the terminally ill be at peace with dying. Besides a whole lot of compassion, not much is required to become a death doula. During a recent day’s work with a woman who had stopped treatments for breast cancer, death doula Tracy Yost helped her jot down stories to share with her children about her childhood visits to her family in Italy. When she noticed how animated the woman had become, Yost pulled up Google maps so they could virtually walk through the same mountain village where her grandparents lived. The woman cried as the memories came flooding back. “The gift of time is what makes doula work so special and meaningful,” says Angela Shook, president of the National End-of-Life Doula Alliance. Read more at the link in our bio. Photographs by September Dawn Bottoms (@septemberdawnbo) for TIME

February 06, 2022

“It’s okay to be uncomfortable. It’s okay to try new things, because you’ll learn so much. You’re scared for a reason, and that’s a good thing.” U.S. snowboarder @chloekim is ready to win gold at the Beijing Olympics—on her own terms. 🏅 Read the cover story by Sean Gregory (@sgregory31) at the link in our bio. Video by @ariahychen, @spencerbakalar, and @dianetsai_

February 05, 2022

So many people are suffering from Long COVID that treatment centers can’t keep up, writes Jamie Ducharme. In many ways, that’s understandable: the diagnosis did not exist before 2020. As many Americans begin to wonder if there’s a light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, new clinics are continuing to open across the country, an acknowledgment that Long COVID symptoms won’t disappear even if the pandemic fades. Even though there has been progress, medical care has not kept pace with the overwhelming needs of patients, given how many people report months-long waits for care or can’t find it at all. With research about Long COVID and its treatment still in its early stages, there is no guarantee of recovery even for those lucky enough to get into a specialty clinic. Read more about the wait for treatment for Long COVID at the link in our bio. In this photo: Carol Cress, a Long COVID patient at the Benefis clinic in Montana, gets her breathing tested. Photograph by @rebeccastumpf for TIME

February 04, 2022

Omicron, like all villains, has an Achilles’ heel, writes Alice Park. For people who are vaccinated or who have been exposed to its predecessors, this variant does not seem to cause severe disease. While it can still be dangerous for people who are unvaccinated, or who have health conditions that make them more vulnerable to COVID-19’s effects, for the vaccinated, there was a glimmer of hope. Whether justified or not, that glimmer has been flamed into a blazing beacon by some people, who interpret Omicron’s relatively mild effect on health if you’re vaccinated—a sore throat, some flu- or cold-like symptoms, or no noticeable symptoms at all—as a sign that SARS-CoV-2 may be reaching the end of its onslaught. If Omicron isn’t as virulent, then SARS-CoV-2 must be weakening, the thinking goes. But there’s also the possibility of a darker timeline, in which the unpredictable nature of SARS-CoV-2 to date drives the next year and beyond. If that occurs, it could mean the sobering possibility that Omicron is not the beginning of the end, but just the beginning of a more transmissible, more virulent virus that could do even more harm than it has already. Read more about how Omicron may shift the virus to endemic status at the link in our bio. TIME illustration. Viral cell icon: Getty images; animation by @brobeldesign

February 04, 2022

In early December, as over 100,000 Russian troops stood at the border with Ukraine, President Joe Biden held a call with Vladimir Putin to defuse the tensions, writes Simon Shuster. It was a breakthrough for Putin to get a U.S. President to engage with him on the future of the NATO alliance, which Putin has long described as the main threat to Russian security. The response from Russian diplomats smacked of an old negotiating tactic: start high. They demanded a written guarantee from the U.S. that Ukraine would never join NATO. They also told the U.S. to withdraw its military forces from Eastern Europe, retreating to positions they held before Putin took power. As the lead Russian envoy put it ahead of talks in January, “NATO needs to pack up its stuff and get back to where it was in 1997.” Rather than defusing the standoff, Biden’s overture allowed Russia to air a long list of grievances against the West, unleashing what one Kremlin insider in Moscow described to me as “an enormous pile of pent-up tensions.” Read more at the link in our bio. Pictured here: A member of the Ukrainian army’s 25th Airborne Brigade at the front line in Avdiivka on Dec. 2. Photograph by Brendan Hoffman—The New York Times/REDUX (@hoffmanbrendan)

February 03, 2022

Great wars sometimes start over small offenses, writes Simon Shuster. A murdered duke. An angered pope. The belief of a lonely king that his rivals aren’t playing fair. When historians study why armies began gathering in Europe during the plague of 2021, their interest might turn to a teenage girl, the goddaughter of Moscow’s isolated sovereign. Read the untold story of the Ukraine crisis at the link in our bio. Photograph by Guillaume Binet (@guillaume_binet_myop)—MYOP (@agence_myop)

February 03, 2022

Every Sunday at 2 p.m, the narrow building in Manhattan’s Chinatown echoes to beating footsteps and 1950s Chinese oldies. In the large, mirrored dance studio on the second floor, Irene Ng knows how to get a party started. “I always tell seniors, don’t worry about your steps, just have fun,” says Ng, 57, owner of the Imperial Ballroom Dance Studio. As one of the longest-running ballroom dancing studios in Chinatown, the family-run business offers the 50,012 Chinese immigrants in Chinatown a space for socialization and a sense of home. In the run-up to the Chinese Lunar New Year, elderly Chinese immigrants clogged the studio’s tiny door to practice ballroom dancing for the studio’s planned Lunar New Year showcase party. On a recent Saturday, more than 80 seniors crammed the dance floor, twirling—and sometimes wobbling—in pairs. Except for their masks, the room resembled a nostalgic Wong Kar-wai film, writes Xintian Wang. The holiday is not the only reason this institution has proved vital in recent years. Amid a pandemic that has coincided with rising rates of anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S., social isolation has proved a deep problem for many elderly Chinese immigrants, particularly those with limited English proficiency. Read more at the link in our bio. In this photograph: Elderly Chinese immigrants practice social dancing at Imperial Ballroom Dance Studio in New York City, on Nov. 21, 2021. Photograph by Xintian Wang (@tina_wangxt)

February 02, 2022

Ahead of the Beijing Olympics, which start Feb. 4, @chloekim opened up about the aftermath of the 2018 PyeongChang Games. She won gold and was thrust into the spotlight. “Beneath the adulation, Kim was still a teenager living with her parents, struggling with the constraints of sudden celebrity and the post-Olympic depression common to elite athletes who spend their lives training for a moment that comes only once every four years,” writes Sean Gregory. Now, the snowboarder is ready to win again, but on her own terms. Read more at the link in our bio. Photograph by @bryanhuynh for TIME

February 01, 2022