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Today’s obituaries for Ruth Bader Ginsburg , who died on Sept. 18 at the age of 87 of complications from cancer, will inevitably and rightly describe her first and foremost as a Supreme Court Justice. Her distinguished legal career, however, began decades before her 1993 appointment to that bench. Accordingly, her first appearance in the pages of TIME came decades earlier, in 1975, when she made the point that confusion and lack of understanding were the enemies of the passage of an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) that would prohibit the denial of civil rights on the basis of gender. It was a point very much in keeping with her career up to that moment. After her 1959 graduation from law school, she quickly discovered that being a woman meant she could not get a job at a top New York City law firm. So, she decided to go another route, clerking for a district court judge and later teaching at Rutgers. From the beginning, defending equality — especially gender equality — pro

The tens of thousands of protesters who took to the National Mall Friday, marking the 57th anniversary of the March on Washington, showed the power of the movement against police brutality that has mobilized across America this summer. But the demonstration was tinged by concern that efforts to suppress and intimidate supporters will hamper their ability to turn protest now into votes in the fall. Many demonstrators said their concerns start at the top with President Donald Trump. Trump has threatened to send law enforcement to the polls , raising accusations of voter intimidation. His administration pursued cost-cutting measures at the postal service that experts said could slow the delivery of mail ballots . He’s pursued lawsuits in multiple states over the expansion of vote by mail and drop boxes . He’s argued without evidence that the election will be full of widespread fraud. And he’s previously refused to commit to accepting the results. In one recent survey by Dem

The ad has Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s names written in jagged, horror-movie script. Images of burning cars and protestors scroll behind their heads. “Don’t let them ruin America,” reads the title. As Republicans put the finishing touches on their convention slated to start Monday, the Trump campaign blitzed social media and streaming services with a nearly $10 million ad buy to counter the Democrat’s feel-good convention program , according to a campaign official, running video clips in front of millions of Americans who visited YouTube, watched Hulu, or browsed their Facebook feeds. The series of ads scrolled through clips showing Democrats as beholden to the “radical leftist mob,” questioning Biden’s mental acuity, his record on race, and accusing him of being unwilling to stand up to China. At the end of one, an older woman is shown dialing the police while someone dressed in all black breaks into her house. “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” an announcer

As LGBTQ activist Malgorzata Szutowicz, sits in solitary confinement for a fourth day in the city of Plock, central Poland, hundreds of people across the country are protesting in her name. On Friday, Margo, as she is more commonly known, was placed in pre-trial detention for two months, on charges of assaulting a driver of a truck that displayed an anti-LGBT banner. The same day, hundreds of people gathered in the capital, Warsaw, to defend her freedom. In doing so, they were risking their own: 48 protestors were detained and many more injured in what experts say was an unprecedented level of police aggression against an LGBTQ demonstration, particularly in a European Union member state. By Saturday, thousands had gathered in Warsaw to denounce Margo’s arrest and police aggression against LGBTQ people. And although Poland is experiencing a rise in new cases of COVID-19, at least 15 solidarity protests, both big and small, took place on Monday in towns and cities acr

(LAKE BUENA VISTA, Fla.) — Players and coaches from the New Orleans Pelicans and Utah Jazz knelt alongside one another before the first game of the NBA restart on Thursday night, an unprecedented image for the league in unprecedented times. The coaches — New Orleans’ Alvin Gentry and Utah’s Quin Snyder — were next to one another, their arms locked together. Some players raised a fist as the final notes of “The Star-Spangled Banner” were played, the first of what is expected to be many silent statements calling for racial justice and equality following the deaths of, among others, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd in recent months. Even the game referees took a knee during the pregame scene, which occurred with the teams lined up along the sideline nearest where “Black Lives Matter” was painted onto the court. The Los Angeles Lakers and Los Angeles Clippers were expected to also take some sort of action before the second game of the re-opening night doubleheader later Thursd

If there’s one thing we know about Taylor Swift, it’s that she works hard. In her documentary released earlier this year, Miss Americana , the intense pace of Swift’s life — and the similarly intense pressures of the scrutiny she finds herself under — was laid bare for all to analyze . But then the coronavirus pandemic swept in and, presumably, cleared her pop star slate. Swift was left with her privacy, as lockdowns shuttered us all into our homes. On social media, she was neither cryptically silent nor strategically active: she seemed, for the first time in a long time, like she was just living her life and drinking wine on her couch like many of us, big plans on hold. But even in her downtime, curtains drawn on her celebrity, Swift was creating. The July 23 release of Folklore , her 16-track eighth album , came as a surprise even to devout followers: only 11 months after Lover , it was the first time she’d put out a project on less than a two-year schedule. Swift

(SPRINGFIELD, Va.) — Virginia’s largest school system is removing the name of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee from one of its high schools in favor of the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The Fairfax County School Board approved the change during a meeting Thursday. A news release posted on the school district’s website says the new name will be effective for the 2020-21 school year. The board had already voted unanimously last month to remove Lee’s name. It adopted John R. Lewis as the new name Thursday one day after numerous people spoke in favor of the change at a public hearing. Other names under consideration included Barack Obama, Cesar Chavez, Mildred Loving, Central Springfield and Legacy. The change comes nearly three years after the school system removed the name of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart from another high school, renaming it Justice High. School boards throughout the Virginia and across the South have been removing Confederate names from schools in the wake of p

With medical grade masks still in short supply and badly needed at hospitals and other care centers, many Americans have turned to a variety of other options to help slow the spread of COVID-19, from hand-sewn facial coverings to bandanas and everything in between. B ut it turns out that when it comes to preventing viral transmission, not all masks are created equal, according to a new study. In the study, published Thursday in the journal Thorax , researchers pitted three kinds of facial coverings against one another: a single-layer “no sew” mask, a two-layer variety made to specifications from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and a three-layer surgical mask. Using LED lights, a high-speed camera and a healthy volunteer willing to have their nose repeatedly ticked with a tissue, each variety of facial covering was tested to see which best contained droplets generated from speaking, coughing and sneezing, with the idea that better containment sugges

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Tuesday offered sympathetic words to Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who stands accused of facilitating the abuse of girls by the now-deceased sex offender. “I just wish her well, frankly,” Trump said when asked about Maxwell during a news conference. Maxwell, 58, was denied bail last week and is to remain behind bars as she awaits trial on charges she recruited girls for the financier to sexually abuse more than two decades ago. The British socialite was a romantic partner of Epstein, who killed himself in prison several weeks after being charged with sex trafficking. An indictment alleged that Maxwell groomed the victims to endure sexual abuse and was sometimes there when Epstein abused them. It also alleged she lied during a 2016 deposition in a civil case. Epstein associated over the years with many high-profile figures in politics and business, including Trump, former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andr

As protests against racial injustice spread across the country after Floyd’s death on May 25, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has positioned himself as the candidate who could root out systemic racism in America. But Alicia Garza, co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement and the principal of Black Future Labs, says Biden is still “far away” from the change that Democratic voters want to see. “ Frankly, I think [the Biden campaign is] well aware that they are pretty far from the concerns that this movement has put forward—and that is not acceptable,” Garza said during a TIME100 Talks discussion. “We need to push him to be a better candidate if he’s going to be the presumptive nominee.” Garza co-founded the Black Lives Matter movement in 2013 in response to the unjust killing of Trayvon Martin. Since then, the Black Lives Matter movement has swelled, becoming a rallying cry for racial justice, particularly during the pandemic. This year, Geor

In a study published July 14 in the New England Journal of Medicine , researchers report on the results of the first COVID-19 vaccine to be tested in people. The trial, which involved 45 healthy volunteers, was designed to test the safety of the vaccine, but results offer early hints of its effectiveness. Moderna Therapeutics, the Mass.-based biotech firm that developed the vaccine along with researchers from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, first reported the results in a press release on May 18. The NEJM paper formally describes those results. The 45 participants, aged 18 to 55 years, were enrolled at either the Kaiser Permanente Washington Health Research Institute in Seattle or at Emory University in Atlanta; the first volunteer was vaccinated on March 16, just two months after the genetic sequence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus was published. All of the volunteers received one of three levels of doses of the vaccine, which were given in two inject