New top story from Time: Bad Bunny Is Spotify’s Most-Streamed Artist of 2020

NEW YORK — The year’s most played artist on Spotify? Globally speaking: Bad Bunny.

The Puerto Rican superstar is the music platform’s most-streamed artist of the year with 8.3 billion streams globally. The Latin Grammy winner and hitmaker , who released a new album last week, leads a top five list that also includes Drake, J Balvin, Juice WRLD and The Weeknd.

With more than 3.3 billion streams, Bad Bunny’s sophomore solo album “YHLQMDLG” tops Spotify’s list of most-streamed albums globally. The Weeknd’s “After Hours,” Post Malone’s “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” Harry Styles’ “Fine Line” and Dua Lipa’s “Future Nostalgia” round of the top five.

The Weeknd’s album is the only one in the top five to earn no Grammy nominations. The album’s single, “Blinding Lights,” is Spotify’s most-streamed song of the year with more than 1.6 billion streams globally.

“Dance Monkey” by Australian singer Tones and I is the second most-streamed song of the year, while Roddy Ricch’s “The Box,” SAINt JHN’s “Roses – Imanbek Remix” and Lipa’s “Don’t Start Now” came in third, fourth and fifth, respectively.

In the U.S., late rapper Juice WRLD was the most-streamed artist on Spotify. His album “Legends Never Die” was the platform’s most-streamed album in the U.S., while Ricch’s “The Box” was the country’s most-streamed song.

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Supreme Court Skeptical of Trump’s Plan to Not Count Unauthorized Immigrants in Redistricting

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A Gymnastics Coach Accused of Emotional Abuse Speaks Out

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Moderna Applies for Emergency F.D.A. Approval for Its Coronavirus Vaccine

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The Long Darkness Before Dawn

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Dear Joe, It’s Not About Iran’s Nukes Anymore

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Nike and Coca-Cola Lobby Against Xinjiang Forced Labor Bill

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What Facebook Fed the Baby Boomers

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New top story from Time: Biden Names a Liberal Economic Team With the Pandemic Threatening Workers

WILMINGTON, Del. — With unemployment still high and the pandemic threatening yet another economic slump, President-elect Joe Biden is assembling a team of liberal advisers who have long focused on the nation’s workers and government efforts to address economic inequality.

Janet Yellen, announced Monday as Biden’s nominee for treasury secretary, served as chair of the Federal Reserve from 2014 to 2018, when she placed a greater emphasis than previous Fed chairs on maximizing employment and less focus on price inflation. Biden also named Cecilia Rouse as chair of his Council of Economic Advisers, and Heather Boushey and Jared Bernstein as members of the council.

All are outspoken supporters of more government stimulus spending to boost growth, a major issue with the coronavirus pandemic cramping the U.S. economy.

Those choices “signal the desire of the Biden administration to take the CEA in a direction that really centers on working people and raising wages,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute and former Labor Department chief economist during the Obama administration.

Biden’s nominees are also a more personally diverse group than those of previous presidents.

Yellen, if confirmed by the Senate, would be the first woman to serve as treasury secretary, after breaking ground as the first woman to chair the Fed. Rouse would be the first Black woman to lead the CEA in its 74 years of existence. And Neera Tanden, Biden’s pick for director of the Office of Management and Budget, would be the first South Asian American in that job.

Biden also selected Wally Adeyemo to be Yellen’s deputy, which would make him the first Black deputy treasury secretary. Rouse, Tanden and Adeyemo will all require Senate confirmation, and Tanden in particular is already drawing heavy Republican criticism.

Along with its progressive cast, Biden’s team also has years of experience in government and policymaking. And that’s earning plaudits from some conservatives, who note that the nominees are not a far-left group bent on strangling the economy, as President Donald Trump repeatedly warned during the 2020 campaign.

“They are intellectual liberals, but not burn-it-all-down socialists,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an adviser to Sen. Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. “They’re fairly conventional liberal economists and experts.”

Still, the Biden administration’s ambitious goals will face solid opposition from Republicans in Congress. The GOP needs to win one of two Georgia Senate seats in a Jan. 5 special election to retain control of the Senate, and the Republicans made major inroads on Nov. 3 in the Democrats’ House majority.

“Most of the policies that Biden ran on will not survive a Republican Senate,” Riedl said. Those include proposals to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and significantly increase taxes on wealthy Americans.

Biden could secure another round of stimulus spending early next year, particularly if the recent spikes in confirmed virus cases push the economy into recession again. But such a package will likely have to come in under $1 trillion to get Senate Republican support, Riedl said, rather than the higher figure House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is seeking.

Tanden is the president and CEO of the liberal think tank Center for American Progress and was the director of domestic policy for the Obama-Biden presidential campaign. She first made her mark in the Clinton orbit, and served as policy director for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential race.

A spokesman for GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas tweeted that Tanden “stands zero chance of being confirmed” as budget director, citing “an an endless stream of disparaging comments about” Republican senators. And Josh Holmes, a political adviser to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, tweeted that her confirmation was likely doomed.

Brian Deese, a former senior economic adviser in the Obama administration and now the managing director and global head of sustainable investing at BlackRock, is expected to be named director of the White House National Economic Council, according to a person familiar with transition plans who was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.

Deese worked on the auto bailout and environmental issues in the Obama White House, where he held the title of deputy director of both the NEC and the OMB.

Deese and Adeyemo are both under fire from progressives for their connections to BlackRock, a giant Wall Street asset management firm. BlackRock has sought to avoid greater regulatory scrutiny by Treasury. And many activists assail the firm for owning huge stakes in oil and gas companies.

Rouse, a labor economist and head of Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs, served on the CEA from 2009 to 2011, and served on the NEC from 1998 to 1999 in the Clinton administration.

Notably, she organized a letter earlier this year signed by more than 100 economists calling for more government action to help Americans caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

“The planning for a fairer economy, grounded in facts and evidence, begins now,” Rouse tweeted Monday.

Alan Blinder, former vice chair of the Fed and a currently an economics professor at Princeton, praised Rouse’s management style and her expertise in the economics of education and workforce training. Biden has proposed making two years of community college tuition-free.

“That kind of stuff is right in her wheelhouse,” Blinder said.

Boushey, picked to be one of the three members of the CEA, is president and co-founder of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, a think tank focused on inequality. The center conducts its own research and also provides grants to mostly left-leaning academics to study aspects of inequality.

Bernstein, also nominated for the CEA, was an adviser to then-Vice President Biden during the Obama administration before becoming a fellow at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a left-leaning think tank. Bernstein has also worked as a social worker and was an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a labor-supported think tank.

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Associated Press writers Alexandra Jaffe, Paul Wiseman and Michael Balsamo contributed to this report.

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Justice Barrett’s Vote Could Tilt the Supreme Court on Gun Rights

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New top story from Time: Laws Against ‘Love Jihad’ Are Yet Another Serious Attack on India’s Once Secular Democracy

Even Netflix wasn’t ready for this plot twist. The central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh last week registered a police case against two of the streaming company’s top India executives. Their supposed crime: a scene in the Netflix drama series A Suitable Boy. It had “hurt the feelings” of Hindus, the Madhya Pradesh government said, by its portrayal of a Muslim boy kissing a Hindu girl with a temple in the frame.

The police action was based on a complaint by a youth leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), who alleged Netflix was promoting “love jihad.” This oxymoron is an old Hindu supremacist trope of a supposed international Islamist conspiracy in which Muslim men seduce unsuspecting Hindu women into marriage, convert them to Islam and use them as child-producing factories, with the end game of numerically overtaking Hindus in India and turning it into an Islamic republic.

Popular with the Hindu nationalist party’s foot soldiers and the most ardent of votaries of majoritarian fundamentalism, “love jihad” used to be the stuff of the fringe. Not anymore. Since Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ascent to national power in 2014, anti-Muslim mobilization has been on the rise and hate speech and toxic tropes have colonized daily life in India, deepening the fault lines between its Hindu population (80 percent) and Muslim minority (14 percent).

Following Modi’s thumping re-election as prime minister last year, the BJP has been pushing its Hindu nationalist program with even more vigor as it interpreted the back-to-back victories as popular consent for its majoritarian project of remaking secular India as a de facto Hindu state. It dismembered India’s only Muslim-majority province, Jammu and Kashmir; enacted a new law that explicitly prevents Muslim refugees from applying for Indian citizenship, linking citizenship to religion in India’s secular democracy for the first time; and has raised the specter of a citizen verification drive that Muslims fear may disenfranchise them.

Read more: Why India’s Most Populous State Just Passed a Law Inspired by an Anti-Muslim Conspiracy Theory

A concerted campaign is under way to assert Hindu primacy and render Muslims invisible in a rewritten history, from renamed public spaces to political and other spheres of public life. The subtext of this new playbook is that Muslims must lie low in a new India where Hindus are more equal than others. “Love jihad” has consequently traveled from the fringes to mainstream legitimacy as part of a state-sponsored campaign to show the Muslim ‘other’ their place. A jewelry company last month had to withdraw its advertisement featuring the baby shower of an interfaith couple after it was set upon by the Hindu right-wing troll army, which is now hash-tagging to boycott Netflix.

Hindu vigilante groups have in the past used the ruse of “love jihad” to disrupt mixed weddings and harass and intimidate interfaith couples even though investigations by state agencies in the past have found no evidence of such a conspiracy theory. Relentless online misinformation campaigns—enabled by compliant social and legacy media platforms that do the ruling dispensation’s bidding—have now established the trope of lustful and criminal-minded Muslim man as a truism and “love jihad” as a clear and present danger. In a climate of hate, love is now a conspiracy.

In reality, mixed marriages are rare in India. Hindu endogamy rules mean marriages seldom cross caste boundaries, let alone religious lines. But “love jihad” is too good a dog whistle to pass up for the lack of evidence. Like everywhere else, laws to prevent interfaith or interracial marriages appeal to Indian conservatives because they help reinforce their desired social hierarchy. They are also a means of preserving the patriarchal order by exercising community control over women’s sexuality and turning their bodies into a political battleground bereft of any personal agency.

 

SAM PANTHAKY/AFP via Getty Images An Indian Hindu holds a placard as she takes part in a rally against ‘Love Jihad’, in Ahmedabad on July 22, 2018.

In the U.S., laws against “miscegenation” (a term coined by Abraham Lincoln’s opponents to describe interracial relationships) survived for more than 300 years. They not only helped enforce segregation and maintain a racial hierarchy with whites at the top, but were also handy tools to deny women property and inheritance rights. As India turns the clock back on its constitutional precepts of social equality, it comes as no surprise that it should be weighing similar legislation.

Laws prohibiting interracial marriages in the United States were declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1967, in a turbulent decade of quest for racial equality. That year, TIME celebrated a mixed wedding on its cover and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner surprised theater goers with its theme of a white woman bringing her black boyfriend to meet her parents.

As America’s democracy came of age, the U.S. Supreme Court’s verdict burying anti-miscegenation laws voided the bogey of racial amalgamation that fed post-Civil War white supremacist ideas of a color-coded racial hierarchy. Half a century on, and half a world away, supremacists of a different persuasion— and skin tone—are resurrecting similar laws and signal, this time, the demise of a democracy.

Read more: It Was Already Dangerous to Be a Muslim In India, Then Came the Coronavirus

Within days of filing a police case against Netflix, the Madhya Pradesh government announced that it was doubling the jail term for forced religious conversions for marriage from five years to 10 years in its draft bill against “love jihad”. It took the cue from Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where the cabinet cleared a vaguely worded “Unlawful Religious Conversion Prohibition Ordinance (2020)” the day before.

Also couched in the language of proselytization, the Uttar Pradesh ordinance states marriages will be declared null and void if the “sole intention” is to “change a girl’s religion,” with up to 10 years of imprisonment for forced conversions through marriage. It also requires interfaith couples to give officials a notice of two months before they marry—just enough time for local vigilantes to pull back the delinquents from the abyss of love. The BJP chief minister of the state, Yogi Adityanath, a saffron-robed cleric with a history of rioting and incitement against Muslims, mainstreamed the buzz over “love jihad” when he recently threatened death for “those who… play with the honor of our sisters and daughters.”

It didn’t matter that the High Court in his own state just weeks ago pronounced that the “right to live with a person of his/her choice, irrespective of religion professed by them, is intrinsic to right to life and personal liberty” while overturning an earlier ruling in a case filed against a Muslim man by the parents of his Hindu wife. Or that the Supreme Court had in 2018 similarly set aside an order annulling an interfaith wedding. Or that a special police team in Uttar Pradesh specifically appointed to investigate “love jihad” said it found no proof of a conspiracy. In a fast regressing India, such plot twists are now only to be expected.

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New top story from Time: How Youth Climate Activists Are Empowering Campaigners From Countries Suffering Most From Global Warming

Gladys Habu knows first-hand the devastation climate change is already visiting on the world. The 25-year-old has vivid memories of Kale Island, a tiny islet in the Solomon Islands archipelago where she used to swim and barbecue on the white sand beaches. It’s also where her grandparents used to live, decades back.

But Kale Island no longer exists. It was declared lost in 2016 after it fully submerged beneath the water, a victim of rising sea levels. She worries more of her home in the South Pacific could share the same fate if global temperatures continue to rise at the same pace.

“In just decades, my country’s map has changed drastically,” she says.

Habu and others who have personally experienced the worst effects of climate change took center stage at a two-week summit for young climate activists. The virtual event was organized out of frustration at the postponement of the 2020 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also called COP26, meeting between nations. Called Mock COP26, the summit was attended by more than 350 delegates from 118 countries and included speeches from activists and stakeholders from around the world, including the U.K. government minister in charge of the original COP26. In a year dominated by pandemic-related disruptions, the Mock COP26 may be one of the largest international meetings focused on climate change—even if it lacked official status.

Read more: The Leaders of These Sinking Countries Are Fighting to Stop Climate Change. Here’s What the Rest of the World Can Learn

But another goal of the event was to elevate the voices of those most affected by climate change. It’s a conscious decision based on consensus among youth activists that people in the developing world and other marginalized voices are not being represented in the climate movement, which has largely focused on activists from developed nations — be they Greta Thunberg’s “Fridays for Future” or Extinction Rebellion, which was established in the U.K.

“The climate movement has been often inaccessible and is generally dominated by middle-class, white people in the global north,” says Aoife Mercedes Rodriguez-Uruchurtu, an activist from the UK Student Climate Network. “We can’t stand up to this challenge without listening to the people whose voices matter the most.”

In an attempt to be more inclusive, the virtual conference has granted more delegates to what organizers call Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA), including Kenya, the Philippines and Bangladesh. These countries, and others, were granted five delegates as opposed to three allowed from most developed nations, giving them more speaking time. More than 70% of the delegates represented at the summit were from developing countries. Having more delegates also gave these countries more representation and say in the wording of the final statement from Mock COP26.

Read more: World Remains Sharply Divided on Climate Change Targets Ahead of ‘Crucial 12 Months’

Many behind Mock COP26 see this as a first step toward changing the emphasis of the youth climate movement. Several studies have shown that a warming planet will disproportionately affect developing countries more than developed nations. However, mainstream climate movements have often faced criticism for not being inclusive of the most vulnerable nations.

Earlier this year, Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan climate activist, was cropped out of a photo in which she posed with four activists from Europe, including Greta Thunberg. “It felt like I had been robbed of my space,” Nakate told TIME in July. “If climate justice does not involve the most affected communities, then it is not justice at all.” The photo was later replaced by the new agency that published it.

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— Vanessa Nakate (@vanessa_vash) January 24, 2020

“When we include everyone, you realize how a lot of the problems are common across countries,” says Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a 22-year-old activist from the Philippines who has been volunteering at the summit and is one of the speakers representing her country. Tan has lived through extreme weather events in her native Manila, which has witnessed progressively more powerful typhoons with each passing year. She says activists like her, who have seen the life-altering damage climate change is already inflicting, can go beyond being “just sad stories and statistics” and take an active role in creating a global solution.

Read more: A Revolution’s Evolution: Inside Extinction Rebellion’s Attempt to Reform Its Climate Activism

There’s evidence this approach might result in more effective action, too. A 2019 report by the United Nations Development Programme found that vulnerable developing countries are leading the world by enacting ambitious pledges on emissions and climate resilience. “So the narrative necessarily isn’t ‘We are drowning, we need help,’” says Sameera Savarala, a climate change policy expert at the United Nations Development Programme. “But rather, ‘Look how we have seen the consequences and taken the destiny into our own hands.’

Habu, the activist from Solomon Islands, feels that amplifying stories like hers will help people understand that the climate crisis is already a reality for people in many parts of the world. “When people who don’t believe in climate change listen to our stories, they will hopefully empathize and engage,” she says.

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New top story from Time: Americans Face New COVID-19 Restrictions After Thanksgiving

Americans returning from Thanksgiving break faced strict new coronavirus measures around the country Monday as health officials brace for a disastrous worsening of the nationwide surge because of holiday gatherings over the long weekend.

Los Angeles County imposed a stay-at-home order for its 10 million residents, and Santa Clara County, in the heart of Silicon Valley, banned high school, college and professional sports and decreed a quarantine for those who have traveled more than 150 miles outside the county.

In Hawaii, the mayor of Hawaii County said trans-Pacific travelers arriving without a negative COVID-19 test must quarantine for 14 days, and even those who have tested virus-free may be randomly selected for another test upon arrival. New Jersey is suspending all youth sports.

“The red flags are flying in terms of the trajectory in our projections of growth,” said California Gov. Gavin Newsom. “If these trends continue, we’re going to have to take much more dramatic, arguably drastic, action.”

Health experts had pleaded with Americans to stay home over Thanksgiving and not gather with anyone who didn’t live with them. Nevertheless, almost 1.2 million people passed through U.S. airports Sunday, the most since the pandemic gripped the country in March, and others took to the highways to be with family and friends.

Now they’re being urged to watch for any signs of illness and get tested right away if they experience symptoms.

Some families are already seeing the fallout from Thanksgiving gatherings.

Jonathan Eshnaur lugged his 32-inch TV to a Thanksgiving Day family gathering at his sister’s home in Olathe, Kansas, so he could watch football outside. He wore a mask and only went into her house for the prayer and to use the bathroom.

His father began feeling terrible that day and tested positive the next. His mother now is showing symptoms, and six others were exposed.

“I think we all have a tendency to think it won’t happen to me,” said Eshnaur, a 34-year-old special education teacher. “But that is kind of the issue with these kinds of viruses is it does happen, especially when we have widespread community spread that is going on.”

Priya Patel, 24, is isolating at her parents’ home in San Antonio after visiting friends over the weekend and coming down with a sore throat.

Patel, who works in public health in New York City, said she had been careful, wearing masks in public and staying out of restaurants and bars. But she spent time at a friend’s home in Texas over Thanksgiving.

“I’m an extremely extroverted person, and there is just so much time I can spend with my parents at home,” said Patel, who will stay away from her parents, both of whom have preexisting medical conditions, and wear a mask inside their home for the next 14 days.

Health officials are urging people to remain vigilant until a vaccine becomes widely available, which is not expected to happen for at least a few months.

On Monday, Moderna Inc. said it will ask U.S. and European regulators to allow emergency use of its COVID-19 vaccine as new study results confirm the shots offer strong protection. Pfizer is also seeking approval for its vaccine and hopes to begin administering shots in the U.S. in December.

The virus is blamed for over 267,000 deaths and more than 13.4 million confirmed infections in the U.S. The country on average is seeing more than 160,000 new cases per day and over 1,400 deaths — a toll on par with what the nation witnessed in mid-May, when New York City was the epicenter.

A record 90,000 people were in the hospital with the virus in the U.S. as of Sunday, pushing many medical institutions to the limit.

West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice said hospitals across the state will reduce elective surgeries to ensure there is room for coronavirus patients. The number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 jumped 29% in the past week. In Kansas City, Kansas, hospital and nursing officials said they fear there will not be enough nurses to staff new hospital beds in the metro area if COVID-19 cases continue unchecked. Health officials on Monday added 4,425 confirmed infections and 87 hospitalizations to the state’s pandemic tally since Friday.

Rhode Island’s hospitals reached their COVID-19 capacity on Monday, the same day the state’s two-week pause took effect. Under restrictions announced by Gov. Gina Raimondo, some businesses will be required to shut down, while others are restricted. Residents are also asked to limit their social circles to people in their household.

“This will not be easy, but I am pleading with you to take it seriously,” Raimondo said in a statement.

In suburban St. Louis, a hospital official warned that hospitalizations could double in two to three weeks if people don’t quarantine after Thanksgiving gatherings. SSM Health DePaul Hospital in Bridgeton, Missouri, last week brought in a morgue trailer to store the dead, canceled elective surgeries and doubled up patients in rooms.

“We will be absolutely overwhelmed,” said Shelly Cordum, vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer. “I can’t even imagine what we are going to be facing in three weeks if we stay on this path.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s foremost infectious-disease expert, warned on ABC over the weekend that the country could see a “surge upon surge” of infections tied to Thanksgiving. And White House corononavirus task force coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx told CBS that people who traveled should “assume that you were exposed and you became infected,” and get tested if they experience symptoms.

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Associated Press writers Daisy Nguyen in Oakland, California, Alan Clendenning in Phoenix; Jeff McMillan in New York City; John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia; Michelle Monroe in Los Angeles; Lauran Neergaard in Washington; William J. Kole in Warwick, Rhode Island; and Paul Davenport in Phoenix contributed to this report.

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Teaching in the Pandemic: ‘This Is Not Sustainable’

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New top story from Time: French Lawmakers Will Rewrite a Proposed Bill on Filming Police After Major Protests

PARIS (AP) — Lawmakers from French President Emmanuel Macron’s party will rewrite the most criticized article of a proposed security law, involving a measure aimed at banning the publication of images of police officers with intent to cause them harm.

The move comes after tens of thousands of protesters marched Saturday in Paris and across the country to reject the draft law.

In an apparent effort to quell criticism, the head of Macron’s party at the National Assembly, Christophe Castaner, said Monday “there is a need to clarify the measure.”

“We are going to propose a new, complete rewrite of the article 24,” he added.

Meanwhile, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin refused to simply withdraw the controversial Article 24, saying that events haven’t changed his position.

“I don’t have a fetish for numbers … but I do have a fetish for protecting police and gendarmes,” Darmanin said Monday before a parliamentary commission. Police on special operations “are not protected enough … We must absolutely keep it.”

For him, the controversial article isn’t a hindrance to the media.

“Protecting the police and protecting the press are not in competition,” said the interior minister, who is responsible for the measure. “There is no victory of one without the other.”

In its current version, the article of the proposed law criminalizes the publishing of images of police officers with the intent of harming their “physical or psychological integrity.” Anyone found guilty could be sentenced to up to a year in jail and fined 45,000 euros ($53,000).

The bill, championed by Macron’s party, was first voted on at the National Assembly last week. It is expected to be debated in the Senate early next year.

The government said the measure is needed to better protect police officers from online calls from violence.

Critics fear that if enacted, the law would impinge on freedom of information and media rights. They also say that it could restrict the public from filming police in cases that could be considered abuse or police brutality.

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New top story from Time: China Is Poised to Bring Home Moon Samples in its Most Ambitious Lunar Mission Yet

The moon’s Ocean of Storms was once a busy place. Back in 1967, the U.S. successfully landed its Surveyor 3 spacecraft in the vast plain in the northern lunar hemisphere; little more than two years later, the Apollo 12 crew returned, touching down within 200 meters (656 ft.) of the Surveyor and collecting more than 34 kg (75 lbs.) of lunar rock and soil to bring back to Earth. But things have been quiet in the Ocean of Storms since—until now.

Nearly 50 years after the U.S. abandoned its lunar dreams, China’s Chang’e 5 spacecraft is set for a Dec. 1 landing in NASA’s long-ago stomping grounds, attempting to become the first country to return any samples from the moon since the Soviet Union’s robotic Luna 24 spacecraft retrieved 170 grams (6 oz.) of lunar soil in 1976. If Beijing succeeds—and its lunar endeavors to date suggest it will—it could portend big things for a country that has fast become one of the world’s leading space powers.

It was at 4:30 a.m. local time on Nov. 24 that Chang’e 5 lifted off aboard a 20-story tall Long March 5 rocket—a launch that was broadcast live across China, “leaving many spectators…in awe and excitement as the gigantic booster thundered skyward,” the China National Space Administration’s official announcement read. That sort of success has been true of all of China’s recent lunar missions. In 2007 and 2010, Chang’e 1 and Chang’e 2 successfully executed lunar orbital missions. In 2013, Chang’e 3 landed on the moon and deployed a small rover. And in 2019 Chang’e 4 did the same, becoming the first spacecraft to touch down on the far side of the moon.

Chang’e 5 will be a landing mission too—but an order of magnitude more difficult than its predecessors. The 8.2 metric ton spacecraft is actually a four-part ship: an orbiter, a lander, an ascent stage and a reentry capsule. On Nov. 28, after a four-day translunar journey, the entire assembly entered an eight-hour elliptical orbit around the moon. It later conducted an engine burn to lower itself into a circular 200 km (120 mile) orbit—about twice the altitude at which the Apollo spacecraft used to fly.

The lander and the ascent stage have since separated from the rest of the craft and the plan for Dec. 1 involves an extensive engine burn that will bring them to a soft touchdown touch down near Mons Rümker, a volcanic formation in the Ocean of Storms that features relatively young and pristine soil—with relatively the key word. The scarcity of craters on the formation suggest that the area is about 2 billion years old, less than half of the moon’s estimated 4.5 billion year-old age.

The lander will spend less than two weeks there, excavating as deep as two meters (about 6.5 ft.) below the surface, and collecting up to 2 kg (about 4.4 lbs.) of rock and soil. Those samples will then be packed into to the ascent vehicle, which will lift off and rendezvous with the orbital segment still circling the moon. The samples will then be transferred to the re-entry vehicle which will separate from the orbiter and peel off for Earth, aiming for a landing in Inner Mongolia sometime in mid-December.

In some ways the final stage of the mission—the reentry through Earth’s atmosphere—will be the most hair-raising. Spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth fly at about 28,200 km/h (17,500 mph) and can more or less ease back into the atmosphere by tapping the brakes and slowing their speed. Spacecraft returning from the moon slam into the atmosphere at a much faster 40,200 km/h and must fly in a sort of roller coaster trajectory as they descend, bleeding off speed and g-forces if they are going to survive the intense heat of reentry.

If Chang’e 5 indeed succeeds in that final step, it will open the door to robotic, sample-return mission from Mars—and, eventually, crewed missions to the moon. Pei Zhaoyu, deputy director of China’s Lunar Exploration and Space Engineering Center, sees the robotic lunar program continuing even after taikonauts—or China’s astronauts—reach the moon. “I think future exploration activities on the moon are most likely to be carried out in a human-machine combination,” he said in a press statement before the launch.

The exact nature of those future missions might be uncertain at the moment, but the likelihood that they will take place is much less so. China—like the U.S. in the 1960s—has made a commitment to the moon. And like the U.S. in the 1960s, it seems determined to make good on it.

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1918 Germany Has a Warning for America

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New top story from Time: Democrats Are Already Looking Ahead to 2022 Midterms

This article is part of the The DC Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox every weekday.

Only one big job remains up for grabs in Democrats’ House Leadership elections, and the contest to see who will helm their campaign arm for the next two years is as much about the two men seeking the position as it is about the message the party wants to send about its commitment to diversity.

The chairmanship of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is coming down to a two-man race. Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney of New York is raising an interracial family with his husband in a district that voted for President Donald Trump in 2016 and whose 2020 status was far closer than Democrats would have preferred. Rep. Tony Cárdenas is a leader and strong fundraiser in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and hails from a district that voted 4-to-1 Democratic in 2012 and 2016. Both men, first elected in 2012, have built impressive political operations and similarly pitched that the Democrats cannot afford another blindside like the one that hit them on Election Day when they nearly lost their House majority.

But as much as the contest may come down to the men’s not-all-that-different vision for the party’s campaign arm — namely, it must modernize, or President-elect Joe Biden will be facing a Republican-controlled House come 2023 — it also may come down to the symbolism of the gig. Maloney would be the first openly LGBTQ member of Congress to lead the campaign committee and the highest-profile gay man to have a seat in the current House Leadership. Cárdenas offers a nod to Latino voters’ power and to the fact Democrats underperformed with that bloc in 2020, while he argues that Democrats must reach out in culturally competent ways.

Don’t think Democrats care about these issues of representation? Look at President-elect Joe Biden’s senior communications team heading to the White House next year, which is entirely female — a first. Or listen to the very serious voices sounding off from inside Biden’s orbit, warning that diversity needs to be a priority as he builds out his Cabinet.

Maloney, the first openly gay man elected to federal office from New York, started his political career as a volunteer on Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign and rose to senior West Wing roles, at the time the highest-ranking openly-gay man in the White House. The son of a New Hampshire lumberjack later worked as a lawyer and software executive.

In a recent interview, Maloney dismissed the prospect of making history as a reason enough to go with him. “I have always felt it’s my job to be good at what I do and to succeed by being good at it. And if in the process I can show the millions of kids out there who might be wondering how they’re gonna’ fit in their own family, let alone in the career of their choice, that’s always been enormously gratifying as well,” Maloney told me by phone. “But this is D-Day. I mean, we are going to have to hit the beach in 2022 and execute perfectly. And so I don’t think this is the right time to be focused on merely my career or in notching some win for the LGBT community.”

(Should Maloney fail, there will still be LGBTQ representation in the closed-door Leadership meetings; Congressman-elect Mondaire Jones of New York is the freshman class’ representative at those meetings.)

Cárdenas, the son of a farm worker who earned an engineering degree, rose up in California politics, starting in a state Assembly district in the San Fernando Valley in 1996 before joining the Los Angeles City Council. Cárdenas told my colleague Lissandra Villa that the party cannot pretend it exists in a bubble. “Another thing that we can do better is make sure that the DCCC looks like America,” he says. “Right now, the DCCC has made some strides in increasing the diversity of women and people of color and people from all parts of the country. … We are going to take it to the next level.”

Both Maloney and Cárdenas are right. Democrats need to figure out how they misread the electorate so badly this year. In a post-Election Day phone call that stretched more than two hours, lawmakers literally shouted into their phones with dismay that so much of their strategy had backfired: they under-estimated the potency of Republicans’ smears, they misjudged how “defund the police” slogans would frighten some voters and push them toward Republicans, they misread who was in the electorate. The finger-pointing started before they had counted how many seats they had lost, and the incumbent Chairwoman of the DCCC, Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, decided to step aside days after the polls closed and let someone else sort out the mess. (She’s not completely off the stage, however; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tapped her to chair the House Democratic Steering Committee, an influential position that handles internal politics for the caucus.)

Maloney knows the terrain of a mess well. After the 2016 election, Maloney led what any political professional would call an autopsy. For five months, he went through district-by-district data with the team at the DCCC — and outside skeptics — to see how Democrats miscued their races back then. The findings informed the races they ran in 2018, when Democrats won back the majority by flipping Trump districts back to Democratic hands with candidates who ran on fiercely local messages.

But this year, Democrats faced a constant volley of false charges coming from the President himself: that Democrats were at the ready to end funding for police, planning to come after guns, welcome unchecked immigrants into the country illegally, and scrap private health insurance plans. Democrats tried to ignore the noise, but the charges stuck, and at least 11 members of the Democratic caucus are going home come January even as Joe Biden is heading to the White House.

Maloney has talked with more than 200 of his colleagues already and knows they’re deeply frustrated, but he isn’t ready to offer any diagnosis. “Anybody who tells you [what went wrong], what they are doing is giving you an opinion and many of those opinions are worth listening to,” he says. “By listening to them all and then examining what the data and the evidence shows us, we will come to some conclusions that are informed and out of that knowledge, a strategy and a battle plan will arise. That’s what happened in 2018. I think the results speak for themselves.”

Cárdenas, for his part, has been running the 38-member Congressional Hispanic Caucus’ political arm, BOLD PAC, and for the three cycles he’s been at the helm has raised record sums of cash: $30 million. And despite its main mission, BOLD PAC has been savvy in doling out cash beyond just Hispanic candidates. Sure, the committee endorsed 61 Hispanic candidates during Cárdenas’ six-year tenure but the group also helped almost 170 non-Hispanic Democrats earn election.

He, too, would bring a welcome awareness about the electorate’s complexities to the mix. “One of the things that’s really important for people to understand is, America is very eclectic,” Cárdenas says. “If you just look at the Latino vote across America, California Latinos are not receiving information or appreciating information that same way that you would in New York and Florida.”

Whichever man wins the secret, app-based vote this week, the challenges of the job will be unrelenting from the start. The DCCC gig is one of the toughest in Washington. It requires a ton of time dialing for dollars, calming candidates from afar and quarterbacking dozens of races between the day-to-day grind of a day job as a lawmaker in Congress. On top of that, first-term Presidents typically lose seats in their first midterms, and Biden is coming to Washington with a narrow cushion in the House. There are few more familiar punching bags in town than the DCCC. Whether it’s Maloney or Cárdenas, either one is likely to take some hefty incoming over the next two years.

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New top story from Time: Does Climate Change Violate Children’s Human Rights? A European Court May Soon Decide

The summer of 2017 was hugely stressful for Sofia and André Oliveira, then aged 12 and 9. From their home in Lisbon, they watched a season of record wildfires and severe heat waves tear through Portugal, killing 120 people. For the children, it was already clear that the extreme heat –which scientists linked to climate change –would not be an isolated chapter in their lives. “We’ve always talked about climate change at home,” Sofia, now 15, says over video chat, sitting next to her brother at the family’s dining room table. “And we wanted to do something—something big.”

Three years later, after three more summers that broke heat records, the Oliveira children are on the cusp of a major breakthrough in their climate action. In September, aided by a still-ongoing crowdfunding effort, Sofia, André and four other young Portugeuse people filed the first ever climate-related case at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR), arguing that governments in 33 European countries have not done enough to prevent the impacts of climate change from violating their citizens’ human rights. In a landmark decision on Nov. 30, the court announced it would take the case to the next step— forwarding it to defendant countries and ordering them to respond to the case’s arguments—and granted it priority status.

Only around 15% of cases submitted to the ECHR made it to this stage in 2019, and even fewer were fast-tracked, according to Global Legal Action Network, which filed the case. In a further good sign for the plaintiffs, the court took the unusual step of extending the scope of the case, asking, in its letter to the parties, whether climate change may constitute a violation of Article 3 of the European Human Rights Act on “inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment”—a point not even raised in their lawyers’s submission.

The ECHR’s decisions are legally binding, and if it hears the case and finds in favour of the Portuguese youth, it could order national governments in Europe to step up their emissions reductions. “The communication of this case is a momentous event. It’s the first occasion when the court has had the opportunity to grapple with climate change and its impact on European citizens,” says Marc Willers QC, a barrister at Garden Court Chambers, one of the lawyers on the case. “It seems to have decided that it can’t avoid the issue.”

André, now 12, says he hasn’t been able to avoid the issue, either. “This year there were more fires and we were afraid to leave the house to visit the countryside during the summer. This shouldn’t be happening.”

Here’s what to know about the case before the ECHR.

What is a climate lawsuit?

The field of climate litigation has been growing quickly in recent years. More than 1,300 climate-related cases have been filed since 1990, mostly in the U.S. Individuals have filed lawsuits against countries and fossil fuel companies seeking to hold them accountable for failing to cut emissions quickly enough to prevent catastrophic climate impacts. Cities, counties and states have also filed lawsuits against fossil fuel companies for misleading the public over the harmful impacts of their products.

The underlying logic of climate litigation is that proving legal liability for climate impacts, plaintiffs can legally force governments and companies to do more to cut emissions – either by making them fulfil existing targets or by forcing them to set more ambitious ones. Few cases have so far achieved favourable rulings. In January, the U.S.’ ninth circuit court of appeals threw out the country’s most high profile climate lawsuit to date, in which 21 young Americans sued the United States government for violating their Constitutional rights by taking actions that exacerbated climate change, concluding “reluctantly” that it was not a matter for the courts. But proponents of climate litigation say they have succeeded in ramping up pressure by increasing the risk of failing to act.

The most successful climate lawsuit so far was brought by Urgenda, a small nonprofit, and a group of Dutch citizens, against the Netherlands. In 2019, the Dutch supreme court ruled that the government had to ramp up its emissions cuts to reach a 25% reduction from 1990 levels by the end of 2020. As a result, the Dutch government announced a raft of new emissions-curbing measures, including scaling back coal-fired power plants.

The case before the ECHR seeks “to build on, not just replicate, the Netherlands case”, says Gerry Liston, a legal officer at GLAN. “We want to see the same action forced across 33 countries, not just one. But we also argue that states have an obligation not just to address emissions that are released within their borders, also their contributions to emissions released overseas.”

What does the case argue?

The case submitted to the ECHR argues that the climate impacts seen in Portugal are violating the rights of the Oliveira children and the other four young plaintiffs that should be guaranteed under the European Human Rights Act. In particular, Willers, the barrister says, lawyers focused on the right to life, the right to a home and family life, and the right to enjoy their rights free of discrimination. The case argues the disparity in different generations’ experience of climate change constitutes discrimination in their enjoyment of human rights, since today’s young people will experience rising sea levels, extreme heat, storms and other extreme weather events, for far longer and with greater intensity than previous generations.

The court surprised the plaintiffs’ legal team, Liston says, by raising a new issue in the list of questions it sent for parties to consider as it moved the case to the next step. The court asked whether the anxiety and mental anguish inflicted on the young people as a result of climate change could amount to a violation of Article 3 of the act, which guarantees “Freedom from torture and inhuman or degrading treatment”. “It’s an indication of how much impact the evidence has had on the court that it’s taken the step of actually asking this question to others,” Liston says.

What are the next steps?

The ECHR has given the plaintiffs and defendants until Jan. 15 to try to reach a “friendly settlement.” For the Portuguese youth, their lawyers say, such a settlement would require the governments of the countries agreeing to make deep emissions cuts. If no settlement is reached, defendant countries would have until the end of February to send comments responding to the lawsuit. Then, the court will decide whether or not to hear the case. It’s too early to tell when that will be, but the priority given to the case has made the lawyers optimistic, says Willers. “My impression is that the court is likely to take this case all the way and decide one way or another whether or not the case we’ve put forward is right.”

GLAN hopes the timing of the decision will help to ramp up pressure on the E.U. as it finalizes its 2030 emissions targets in the next few weeks. GLAN is calling for a 65% reduction over 1990 levels by 2030 – up from the previous target of 40% , and the 55% target backed by the European Commission.

André says he hopes that having a case which focuses on the human rights of children will give adults in Europe a push “to do more and do better” to solve the climate crisis. He thinks it’s long overdue. “Adults who have caused these things don’t have the courage to stand up and say “It was us, sorry, we’re going to fix it.” No, they want to leave it for the next generation.” he says. “They need to step up.”

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New top story from Time: The Undoing‘s Fatal Flaw Was Its Disrespect for Its Audience

Warning: This post contains spoilers for The Undoing.

The human mind can be its own worst enemy. Prone to myopia, selfishness and confirmation bias, we fall into traps that we should’ve spotted from three states away. We might believe, for instance, that a man credibly accused of murder—one who has already admitted to cheating on his wife and fleeing several hours upstate after finding the victim dead—must be innocent just because he’s played by the charming Hugh Grant. This turned out to be the big revelation of The Undoing, the all-star HBO murder mystery from creator David E. Kelley and director Susanne Bier. Despite middling reviews, the show became a sleeper hit amid our bleak pandemic autumn. But, if the social-media reaction to Sunday’s finale was any indication, then the revelation that the lovable pediatric oncologist who looked pretty guilty from the beginning turned out to be extremely guilty in the end didn’t shock viewers so much as insult them. How gullible did Kelley and Bier think we were, anyway?

Like so many whodunits, The Undoing was littered with red herrings. Didn’t murder victim Elena Alves’ (Matilda De Angelis) husband (Ismael Cruz Córdova) seem weirdly emotional? What was the deal with the obscenely wealthy, fiercely protective father of protagonist Grace (Nicole Kidman), whose framing as a left-field suspect extended to the decision to cast the often-sinister Donald Sutherland in the role? And what did Grace think she was doing when she was caught on camera, strolling around Harlem at such an unlikely hour? The penultimate episode closed with a remarkably absurd cliffhanger: Grace’s discovery of the murder weapon hidden in her preteen son Henry’s (Noah Jupe) violin case. Could he have done this?

Read More: The Director of The Undoing Answers All Our Questions About That Surprisingly Unsurprising Finale

Of course not; Kelley dispatches with the theory about a minute into the finale. The bulk of the episode is spent in the courtroom, where Grant’s Jonathan performs beautifully as a witness in his own defense. Satisfied that an acquittal is within reach, his lawyer (Noma Dumezweni) is ready to close her case when Grace insists on testifying. Who better than his clinical-psychologist wife, with her doctorate from “Harvard… University” (I howled at this line reading) and 17 years’ worth of intimate knowledge of Jonathan, to confirm his fundamental goodness? Except that, in the show’s final not-so-surprising reversal, Grace’s defense of her husband turns out to be a gambit to allow for her cross-examination. Questioned about her recent chat with Jonathan’s estranged mother—a conversation prosecutors couldn’t have known about without an inside source—she is “forced” to discredit her own testimony by divulging what she learned about his narcissistic, possibly sociopathic past.

Photograph by Niko Tavernise/HBOHugh Grant in ‘The Undoing’ finale

With Grace’s betrayal apparent and a conviction imminent, Jonathan flees upstate with an increasingly terrified Henry. This is supposed to be the show’s emotional apex—the moment when viewers must finally set aside our pro-Grant bias and accept his character’s guilt. As the chase scene escalates (thank God Grace’s dad has helicopter money, right?), Bier replays Elena’s murder in a series of lurid flashbacks that seemed designed to devastate us. Yes, that’s Hugh Grant threatening a beautiful young woman. Here he is again, smacking her around. Finally, she flies at him with a hammer. We watch him grab it out of her hands and fatally strike her with it. Bier switches to the dead woman’s perspective as he gently closes her eyes, then beats her head to a bloody pulp. In a tonally dissonant horror-movie touch, the sound of her skull bones cracking is sickeningly loud.

It’s a conclusion that only works, on a psychological level, if you went into the finale convinced—or at least desperately hopeful—against all odds that Jonathan was innocent. (Did I mention The Undoing was adapted from a novel called You Should Have Known?) That isn’t to say you had to be certain; in a story that took so many unbelievable turns, I was open to the possibility that the conclusion would be similarly sloppy. But Kelley’s adaptation and Bier’s direction, of the murder sequence in particular, assume that viewers have an emotional attachment to the prospect of this family emerging from the trial intact. Didn’t we want to see beautiful, fragile Nicole Kidman and charismatic, self-deprecating Hugh Grant keep on living together in their multimillion-dollar Manhattan apartment with their adorable, precocious child, as they awaited the additional windfall of her future inheritance? Didn’t we want to believe that some other, less telegenic character committed this brutal slaughter?

Actually, I did not. And judging by the collective “ugh” that greeted the show’s final chapter, neither did many other viewers. The Undoing simply underestimated its audience. We were sophisticated enough, in the end, to untangle our fondness for certain famous actors from our interpretations of the characters they portray—especially when, despite strong performances by the two leads, those characters are so flimsily, impersonally written. If that wasn’t always the case, then the popularity of shows like Succession and Billions—not to mention the inescapable political narrative of the past several years—should have signaled that the public might not be so convinced of the moral superiority of the rich. A silver-fox cancer doctor with an impeccable bedside manner smashes in his secret mistress’ head? Sure, I’ll believe it.

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New top story from Time: The Director of The Undoing Answers All of Our Questions About That Surprisingly Unsurprising Finale

Warning: this post contains spoilers for The Undoing.

It turns out that HBO’s murder mystery The Undoing is much more murder than mystery. From the beginning, charming pediatric oncologist Jonathan Fraser (Hugh Grant) was the main suspect in the horrific killing of a young mother from his son Henry’s prestigious private school. Throughout the series, Jonathan’s wife Grace (Nicole Kidman), a clinical psychologist, learned that he’d been hiding just about everything from her: he was fired from his job, had affairs, borrowed money from her father and had a sister who died under his care.

All signs pointed to Jonathan being the perfect candidate for murder—so much so that he seemed too obvious a choice for a crime thriller. But in the last installment of the six-part series, the big twist was that there was no twist at all, when it was revealed that Jonathan did indeed smash a young woman’s face in with a hammer. He was the person he claimed he never could have been. TIME spoke to Susanne Bier, the director of The Undoing and the filmmaker behind Bird Box and The Night Manager, about the big reveal, the choice to cast Hugh Grant, the show’s popularity and more.

Photograph by Niko Tavernise/HBO

TIME: Jonathan was the obvious suspect from the first episode. How did you hope viewers would react to the reveal that he did, in fact, murder Elena?

Susanne Bier: In a way, the whole conceit was to do this hand-holding with Grace. What Jonathan was doing with the audience is pretty much what Jonathan is doing with Grace. He’d admitted that he’d been unfaithful. He’d admitted that he was not quite the man she thought he was. Then he very consciously and diligently rebuilt her trust in him until she couldn’t trust him any longer. Grace suffered from what she told one of her clients in the beginning of the series: Are you seeing what is really there? Or are you seeing what you want to see? It’s very deep in human nature that we see what we want to see. You can see the series philosophically is about that. It’s about our own inability to deal with reality and our constant desire to twist our perception into a reality we find more promising, convenient and likable. That’s what the series was about. There was never any question that it could be anyone else.

Part of the reason it’s hard to believe that Jonathan could really have done it is that Hugh Grant is such a charming actor. Could you have pictured anyone else in this role?

Part of the reason why Hugh Grant wanted to do it and part of the reason we wanted him to do it is because he’s such a charming actor with a lot of depth underneath. We love Hugh Grant and we want to love him, as does Grace. The first thing I said when I started on my very first meeting with [creator] David E. Kelley and Nicole Kidman was that I think we should get Hugh Grant to play it because of the charm and also the kind of sadness he has, which is also incredibly endearing and likable.

It’s unusual for a crime thriller to have the murderer be the person viewers suspected it might be all the way through. What were the challenges of pulling that conclusion off in a compelling way?

It was very challenging. Part of what we set out to do was to seduce audiences that maybe it wasn’t him and then to have the suspicion go in all sorts of directions, and then have it come back like a boomerang. Episode six was massaged in many ways before the final version.

The Undoing is based loosely off of a novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz. How faithful did you want to be to the source material? How much freedom did you feel you had to play with it?

David E. Kelley, in our first conversation, told me that he was going to use the book for the first two episodes. The book is called You Should Have Known. The fundamental theme of the book is that it doesn’t really matter how brilliant or insightful you are, you can still be fooled. You can still let yourself be fooled into thinking that things are different. And that whole thing of “you should have known” is the core of the series as well as the core of the book.

In an earlier episode, we learn that Grace walked by Elena’s studio the night of the murder and doesn’t remember it. What are we supposed to make of that given what we know now?

What she does is tell the truth. We do see her walk a lot. She walks all of the time. She just happened to walk past.

Henry is around the same age that Jonathan was when his sister was killed. Was that an intentional statement about the legacy of childhood trauma?

It was certainly suggested in terms of childhood trauma, but also, I think for Grace there was this concern: is it really possible that my son is a sociopath? Or is Jonathan using that potential because Grace now knows? And the latter is the right explanation.

The show was the best first season launch ever for HBO in your native Denmark, and very popular in Europe in general. What do you think accounts for its popularity there?

Very fortunately, it’s been incredibly popular everywhere. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant are an interesting and sexy couple. I think we were very lucky this time and made a show which people are really excited about.

A lot of people compared this show, at least before watching it, to Big Little Lies, given the combination of David E. Kelley, Nicole Kidman and HBO. Did you ever feel like you were expected to fill a Big Little Lies-shaped void for viewers?

I didn’t. Of course I knew there would be conversation, but I feel it is a very different show. I felt that Big Little Lies is a show more about female friendship than anything else. I feel this show is very much about a couple, about who you can trust, in a different way, and a lot about men and women.

This is a miniseries, but we have seen several successful miniseries that were intended to end come back for a second season. Is there any more material here you’d want to explore in another installment of this series?

I’d love for David E. Kelley to write a season two, but at this point in time it’s only wishful thinking. There are no plans. I’ve got no idea whether David would be remotely interested. There hasn’t been a conversation about it.

There has been a lot of chatter on the Internet about the coats Nicole Kidman wears, and even the helicopters that were used in the finale. What appealed to you about the underbelly of this very ritzy New York City world?

I feel like it’s been a character in the show on its own. New York City is on one hand so monumental, and there’s something sort of very clear and kind of architecturally strict about it. Like, the grid. And then, it’s so, in another way, out of control. I like that complexity and I liked that mixed thing. I felt that Grace’s walking at night and walking in the city emphasizes that.

There’s one last thing that’s been looming over the series. Do you think Henry can finally get his dog now?

It’s really funny—at some point, in the ending, we had Grace going in and buying a dog. Then it kind of became too many endings on top of endings on top of endings. But yes, I think Henry will get his dog.

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Party With Nearly 400 People Is Shut Down in Manhattan

By Mihir Zaveri from NYT New York https://ift.tt/3fPa9w2
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