AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarTIME's Top 10 Photos of 2020TIMEAs a measure of time, a year can seem like an abstraction. We mark it out carefully in months and days, but by the time we reach Dec. 31, it’s sometimes hard to pinpoint what happened when. Our brains have their own way of rewriting time, of blurring events we’d rather not remember, or intensifying …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarTIME's Best Photojournalism of 2020TIMEIn news events chronicled by TIME photographers across the year, the invisible forces pushing us apart become visible: The plastic barriers built and the Tyvek worn to separate a pathogen from a human being. The truculence on the face of President Trump in the wee hours after Election Day, and the …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarTIME's Top 100 Photos of 2020TIMEIt was a long year made to feel longer by the shadows that lay across it, one atop the next, and experienced as a miasma visible as atmosphere in so many of the photographs that define it: The half-light of a temporary morgue. Of a city street obscured by tear gas. Of a wildfire’s traveling …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarTIME's Best Portraits of 2020TIMEIn 2020, showing your face to the world often meant keeping half of it covered. And yet—even partly obscured—our faces can’t help but tell the story of where we’ve been, and all we’ve been through, in the past year. The pandemic touched the lives of each of us. But as this gallery of portraits …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe 10 Best Movies of 2020TIME - Stephanie ZacharekThere’s no subtle way to put it: 2020 has been a truly strange year for movies, a mini-epoch that has forced us to reckon with what movies can be and mean. It’s not just that we watched movies, for the most part, on a small screen at home. We also watched them with anxiety roiling within us, and …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe 10 Best Albums of 2020TIME - Raisa BrunerDespite—or perhaps because of—everything, 2020 has been the ultimate year for albums. The one thing many of us were newly blessed with, amid all of the difficulties of this year, was stretches of time: to sit, to think, to listen. And artists delivered, with projects rich in subtext, excising …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe 10 Best Movie Performances of 2020TIME - Stephanie ZacharekIn an often-terrible world—and especially at the end of an especially challenging year—there’s one blessing we can count on: at least we have actors. For the bulk of 2020, most of us were prevented from seeing movies on the big screen, which meant the work of actors was beamed straight into our …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe 10 Best TV Shows of 2020TIME - Judy BermanThe saying “what a year this week has been” predates 2020, but the past 11 months seemed to give it new meaning. As COVID-19 confined tens of millions of Americans to our homes, many of us either fighting the virus ourselves or mourning those we’d lost, the news cycle—dominated by the pandemic, a …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe Best Toys of 2020TIMEThe best toys of 2020 perfectly encapsulate this year’s events—from Monopoly House Divided, a state-of-the-nation take on the classic board game, to Playmobil’s Large Hospital play set, which introduces kids to what goes on inside a hospital. Other top toys serve as an escape from the chaos of …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe 10 Best YA and Children's Books of 2020TIME - Annabel GuttermanThe events of this year—a global pandemic, a reckoning with racist violence and oppression, a tumultuous presidential election—have touched everyone’s lives, children and teenagers included. And there are few resources more powerful than books to impart lessons on how to make sense of a divided and …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe 10 Best Songs of 2020TIME - Raisa BrunerThe best songs of 2020 were created in studios from Seoul to Johannesburg, Puerto Rico to Nashville. They strut, commiserate, titillate and disarm. Some of them are collaborations that showcase premier talents pushing each other to new heights; others are deeply personal projects of introspection …
AvatarTIMEAvatarAvatarThe 100 Must-Read Books of 2020TIMEActress by Anne Enright The Address Book by Deirdre Mask African American Poetry by Kevin Young (Editor) Afterlife by Julia Alvarez Agency by William Gibson Begin Again by Eddie S. Glaude Jr. Big Friendship by Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman The Book of Eels by Patrik Svensson Breasts and Eggs by Mieko …