12 Time December 27, 2021/January 3, 2022
FROM THE EDITOR
in her profile of our 2021 enTerTainer
of the Year Olivia Rodrigo, my colleague Lucy
Feldman made an observation that jumped
out at me. Rodrigo, the 18-year-old pop sensa-
tion whose music has won over audiences of
all ages, “has a gift for picking the best of the
past,” Lucy notes, “and finding just the right
way to situate it in the present.”
It’s a theme that resonates throughout this
issue. Simone Biles, the greatest gymnast of all
time and our Athlete of the Year, took sports
and the world forward in 2021 by using her
spotlight at the Tokyo
Olympics to stand up
for mental health, and
making sure athletes are
measured by more than
their wins and losses.
The miracle of fast and
effective vaccines that
saved millions of lives
from COVID-19 was the
work of so many scien-
tists over so many years
that we created a new
category to recognize
them, Heroes of the
Year. The mRNA vaccines available today are
built on the pioneering insights of the past—
and will become the breakthroughs of tomor-
row. Even Elon Musk’s spacefaring adventures
are a direct line from the very first Person of
the Year (then called Man of the Year), Charles
Lindbergh, whom the editors selected in 1927
to commemorate his historic first solo trans-
atlantic airplane flight over the Atlantic.For us at TIME, it has also been a year of
building on the past to forge the future. We de-
veloped, like so many of you, a new hybrid ap-
proach to work as many of us now ping back
and forth between our virtual and physical of-
fices. We continued to expand our TIME
franchise with TIME100 Companies and a new
series of TIME100 Talks. We returned to live
events with a gathering in Glasgow for COP
that brought together climate-change leaders
from around the globe. We created a special
project on racial justice, Visions of Equity, ledPHOTOGRAPH BY
MARK MAHANEY
FOR TIME
BehindThe Scenes