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Is She the Oldest Person in the Amazon?
The life of Varî Vãti Marubo shows how much life has changed for the rainforest’s Indigenous tribes — and how much has stayed the same.
By Jack Nicas and Victor Moriyama
The life of Varî Vãti Marubo shows how much life has changed for the rainforest’s Indigenous tribes — and how much has stayed the same.
By Jack Nicas and Victor Moriyama
“Revolution is the job of poets and artists,” says Ko Maung Saungkha, leader of a rebel militia fighting the Myanmar dictatorship. He is not the only poet commander in a country with a strong tradition of political verse.
By Hannah Beech and Daniel Berehulak
Boris Akunin, the creator of a hugely popular detective series, hopes that fomenting a vibrant Russian culture abroad might undermine President Vladimir V. Putin’s government at home.
By Neil MacFarquhar
Lina Boussaha joined a team in Saudi Arabia so she could wear her head scarf while playing the sport she calls “a part of my soul.”
By Sarah Hurtes and Iman Al-Dabbagh
Lee Saedol was one of the world’s top Go players, and his shocking loss to an A.I. opponent was a harbinger of a new, unsettling era. “It may not be a happy ending,” he says.
By Daisuke Wakabayashi and Jin Yu Young
Pabllo Vittar has become an A-list pop star and L.G.B.T.Q. activist in Brazil. Can she conquer the world?
By Jack Nicas and Victor Moriyama
Na Kyung Taek’s photos bore witness — and helped bring international attention — to the military junta’s brutal suppression of a pro-democracy uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, in 1980.
By Choe Sang-Hun
Azahriah, who has rapped about the joy of cannabis, has shot to fame in Hungary. That may explain why he has been applauded by the country’s conservative leader, Viktor Orban.
By Andrew Higgins
One Ukrainian researcher and podcaster is a leading voice in efforts to rethink Ukrainian-Russian relations through the prism of colonialism.
By Constant Méheut
Jim McCann was an I.R.A. member who, convicted of attempted murder, spent 18 years in jail. Now, he’s an educator, and his turn away from violence mirrors Northern Ireland’s embrace of peace.
By Megan Specia
Prof. John Curtice, a polling guru with a formidable intellect and an infectious smile, has contributed to Britain’s TV election coverage since 1979.
By Stephen Castle
With a focus on affordability, community, convenience and light, Liu Thai Ker replaced squalid slums with spacious high-rises. A recent spike in some sale prices, however, has saddened him.
By Sui-Lee Wee and Chang W. Lee
Kei Kobayashi, who earned three Michelin stars in France, has come home to build an empire.
By Motoko Rich and Kiuko Notoya
Memory Banda’s battle, which she has been waging since she was a teenager in a village in Malawi, started with a poignant question: “Why should this be happening to girls so young?”
By Rabson Kondowe
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Jonathan Yeo, about to unveil a major new painting of King Charles III, also counts Hollywood royalty (Nicole Kidman) and prime ministers (Tony Blair) as past subjects. But George W. Bush eluded him.
By Mark Landler
Jenny Erpenbeck became a writer when her childhood and her country, the German Democratic Republic, disappeared, swallowed by the materialist West.
By Steven Erlanger
Abshir Rageh had to sneak out from home to see bootleg Indian films and “Rambo” at a makeshift cinema. Now, he’s creating dramas that draw millions of online views in a country inching toward stability.
By Abdi Latif Dahir
Karim Bouamrane, the Socialist mayor of St.-Ouen, a Paris suburb that will host the athletes’ village for the 2024 Games, is leading a rapid transformation of the long-struggling city.
By Catherine Porter
Her movies try to explain why Japan is the way it is, showing both the upsides and downsides of the country’s commonplace practices. Her latest film focuses on an elementary school.
By Motoko Rich
Hank Silver, a timber framer based in Massachusetts, is one of a handful of foreigners who are helping to rebuild the Paris cathedral after the devastating fire in 2019.
By Aurelien Breeden
Born to a South Korean mother and a Black American soldier, she rose to a pioneering stardom in a country that has long discriminated against biracial children.
By Choe Sang-Hun
Chuck Searcy has spent decades of his life redressing a deadly legacy of America’s war in Vietnam: unexploded ordnance.
By Seth Mydans
Oksana Semenik’s social media campaign both educates the curious about overlooked Ukrainian artists — and pressures global museums to relabel art long described as Russian.
By Constant Méheut
In gritty tales from China’s northeast, Shuang Xuetao chronicles a traumatic chapter of Chinese history with fresh resonance today: the mass layoffs that afflicted the region in the 1990s.
By Vivian Wang
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The new prime minister wants to succeed President Macron. But first he must see off the far right and define himself before a restive public.
By Roger Cohen
Jefa Greenaway is a leading proponent of “Country-centered design,” which calls for collaboration with Indigenous communities and puts sustainability concerns at a project’s core.
By Will Higginbotham
Paolo Benanti advises the Roman Catholic Church and the Italian government on the tricky questions, moral and otherwise, raised by the rapidly advancing technology.
By Jason Horowitz
Bezwada Wilson, born into a caste tasked with manually removing dried human waste, has spent 40 years trying to eradicate the practice and retrain workers.
By Suhasini Raj
Mirza Ramic, a Bosnian who sought refuge in the United States, is bringing his electronic music to Ukraine, “to show my support in these hard times.”
By Carlotta Gall
Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades. At 90, she’s still going strong.
By Motoko Rich
From a Nobel Peace Prize winner, to a mayor hunted by the Russians, to a poet whose muses are cats, our profiles featured people shaping the world around them, often under the radar.
By Bryant Rousseau
Serving as the spiritual leader of 85 million Anglicans in an increasingly secular world is just one of the challenges for Justin Welby. He also had a king to crown and immigration policy to condemn.
By Mark Landler
Mozambique’s most influential contemporary choreographer uses bodies in motion to artfully — and clearly — trace the complex recent history of his country.
By Tavares Cebola and John Eligon
Thomas Mayo was the calm champion of the effort in Australia to give Indigenous people a voice in Parliament. After its failure, will he turn up the volume?
By Damien Cave and Adam Ferguson
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Witness to a tragedy on a boat to Spain, Moustapha Diouf has made it his mission to persuade young people not to emigrate from Senegal, but even he concedes that it’s getting harder to make his case.
By Monika Pronczuk and Carmen Abd Ali
Dan Carter was on the streets for 17 years. His experience informs his policy agenda as mayor of Oshawa, Ontario, a city of 175,000 struggling with overdoses and affordability.
By Ian Austen
Chuwit Kamolvisit has enthralled Thailand for decades with revelations of police and political corruption. But his own compromised past, including time as a “super pimp,” clouds his legacy.
By Sui-Lee Wee
Rokhaya Diagne, a 25-year-old A.I. entrepreneur in Senegal, is part of a subset of Africa’s enormous youth population that is confident technology can solve the continent’s biggest problems.
By Dionne Searcey
With a Ph.D. in chemistry and inspired by her daughter, Aude Livoreil-Djampou is trying to address the dearth of salon options in France for people with coiled or curly hair.
By Aida Alami
After cautioning about environmental damage on TV for decades, David Suzuki, 87, one of Canada’s most famous scientists, felt a sense of defeat as he watched forests burn and temperatures soar this summer.
By Norimitsu Onishi
Feargal Sharkey, best known as the lead singer of the Undertones, has become one of the loudest voices demanding that Britain’s private water companies clean up their act.
By Stephen Castle
Naci Gorur, a geologist, has become a household name in Turkey for imploring the country to prepare for quakes he has predicted. He has been disappointed by the response and is deeply worried about Istanbul.
By Ben Hubbard and Safak Timur
After 17 years in France, Tharshan Selvarajah has yet to apply for citizenship. But he has made bread for President Emmanuel Macron.
By Roger Cohen
Anand Malligavad turned to centuries-old knowledge to reclaim dozens of lakes in the high-tech capital of Bengaluru. Now, he is in demand across India, one of the world’s most water-stressed nations.
By Sameer Yasir
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Said Ismahilov fled Russians in eastern Ukraine and then fled the suburb of Bucha when the war began. Once the mufti of Ukraine, he is now a medic on the front line.
By Carlotta Gall
Lynn Lynn was a musical idol when he volunteered in 2015 to protect the life of Myanmar’s new civilian leader. Forced to flee after 2021’s coup, he has reinvented himself as a film director.
By Sui-Lee Wee
Clément Beaune, who had a double coming out as a gay man with Jewish roots, wants to be mayor of Paris, revive the center-left and build the united Europe he cherishes.
By Roger Cohen
Jair Candor combs the forest for Indigenous people who want no contact with outsiders. The goal: to prove they exist so their land can be legally protected.
By Manuela Andreoni and Jack Nicas
Using an ultralight aircraft, Johannes Fritz once taught endangered ibises a migration path over the Alps. Because of climate change, he is now showing them a much longer route to a winter’s refuge.
By Denise Hruby
Ksenia Sobchak, one of the best known media figures still in Russia, says her fatalistic stance just reflects a grim reality. Some liberals call her a Kremlin stooge, while hawks see her as disloyal.
By Anton Troianovski
A delivery room epiphany transformed a village headman into an unlikely and highly successful campaigner against prenatal sex testing, which often led to aborting female fetuses.
By Sameer Yasir
“I don’t want people to struggle like me,” said Shinjiro Atae, making an announcement that is extremely unusual in conservative Japan.
By Motoko Rich and Hikari Hida
Fleeing the strictures of modern life in a hypercompetitive South Korea, a young woman found a calmer way of life in Mexico — and millions of social media followers.
By Elda Cantú and Marian Carrasquero
The rap producer known as Pone, who has A.L.S., speaks through a computer that makes him sound robotic. He asked a comic impersonator to try to recapture his distinctive sound.
By Aurelien Breeden and Dmitry Kostyukov
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Nomcebo Zikode, the South African singer of the pandemic hit “Jerusalema” that inspired a global dance challenge, wrote the chorus while battling her own depression.
By Lynsey Chutel
Josephine Komara has redefined a cultural expression that was intricate and lovely but so locked in tradition it bordered on staid. “Tradition is the way we are,” she says. “Modern is the way we think.”
By Hannah Beech
Hamza Taouzzale became the first Muslim and youngest ever Lord Mayor of Westminster, a ceremonial post that outranks many of the capital’s most powerful and privileged.
By Saskia Solomon
Thanasis Pagoulatos led the family business, Khartoum’s oldest inn, through decades of tumult. Sudan’s latest breakdown proved too much.
By Matina Stevis-Gridneff
For an architect trying to renovate his beloved but crumbling Palace of Justice in Brussels, once the largest building in the world, the design challenges pale compared with the political ones.
By Sarah Hurtes
Fighting for change has cost Narges Mohammadi her career, separated her from family and deprived her of liberty. But a jail cell has not succeeded in silencing her.
By Farnaz Fassihi
Leyner Palacios’s push for dialogue, forgiveness and reconciliation has made him the face of peace in Colombia — and subjected him to death threats.
By Silvana Paternostro
The South Korean writer Hwang In-suk feeds stray cats on late-night walks through Seoul. The routine informs her poems about loneliness and impermanence.
By Mike Ives
A music idol in his early 20s and then an engineer, Balen, 33, next won an upset victory as mayor of Nepal’s capital, inspiring a wave of young politicians. Now, he’s tearing down parts of the city.
By Emily Schmall and Bhadra Sharma
Years ago, Aharon Barak helped shape Israel’s judicial system. Now the government wants to unravel his legacy, thrusting the retiree back into the spotlight.
By Patrick Kingsley
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He faced off with North Korean troops, helped prepare for the Trump-Kim summit and witnessed some of the most hair-raising — and bizarre — moments on the world’s most heavily armed border.
By Choe Sang-Hun
A social media star with regular appearances on German television, Judge Andreas Müller is unabashed in backing legal marijuana, whether he’s sitting on the bench or playing himself in a music video.
By Christopher F. Schuetze
The songs of Ishay Ribo, who was raised in a settlement on the West Bank, are a staple of Israeli radio. He is part of a wave of singers from religious backgrounds who are also gaining a wider audience.
By Patrick Kingsley
After filming her part in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever,” María Mercedes Coroy returned to her “normal” life of farming and trading in a Guatemalan town at the base of a volcano.
By Julia Lieblich
Waheed Arian fled the war in Afghanistan when he was a teenager. Now an emergency room doctor in Britain, he has made it his mission to bring hope and healing to others.
By Megan Specia
For 20 years, Marina Ovsyannikova worked for Russian state TV. What compelled her, shortly after Ukraine was invaded, to storm a live broadcast and tell viewers they were being lied to?
By Constant Méheut
Sentenced as a teenager to 15 years for “unlawful assembly,” Abdelrahman ElGendy started recording the abuses of prison life. The idea of someday publishing his memoir gave him a reason to live.
By Aida Alami
Moha Alshawamreh is among the few Palestinians who work in Israel’s tech industry. His commute shows both the inequities of life in the West Bank and an exception to them.
By Patrick Kingsley
Daughter of Italian and Jewish American parents, Elly Schlein wants to remake the center-left opposition to Giorgia Meloni, if only her party can survive it.
By Jason Horowitz
Jean-Baptiste Reddé has hoisted his giant, colorful signs in nearly every street protest for over a decade, embodying France’s enduring passion for demonstrations.
By Constant Méheut
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Lisa LaFlamme was dismissed after a decades-long TV career, not long after she stopped dyeing her hair, setting off debates across Canada about sexism, ageism and going gray.
By Norimitsu Onishi
Being the leader of Kherson may feel more like a curse than an honor. But one woman isn’t giving up, even though the Russians are sitting just across the river and shelling her city nearly every hour.
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Ivor Prickett
Stanislas Eskenazi volunteered with Brussels’ legal aid service, typically helping petty criminals. But now he is representing Belgium’s most-wanted man.
By Monika Pronczuk
MC Millaray, 16, an emerging music star in Chile, uses her fierce lyrics to convey five centuries of struggles by the country’s largest Indigenous group against European colonizers.
By John Bartlett and Tomás Munita
Mariam Ouédraogo is the first female African journalist to win the world’s top prize for war correspondents, but covering the sexual violence in Burkina Faso has given her PTSD.
By Clair MacDougall
Eugenia Kargbo remembers when Sierra Leone’s capital was greener and cooler, and is now trying to help the city combat rising temperatures.
By Elian Peltier
When Mani Soleymanlou began acting, he was offered roles as stereotypical outsiders. That he now stars as a cop named Coco is indicative of broader shifts in a changing Quebec.
By Norimitsu Onishi and Renaud Philippe
Thomas Haldenwang runs Germany’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution. His mission is to fight the enemies of German democracy — from far-right coup plotters to Russian hackers.
By Katrin Bennhold
An 84-year-old artist, defying Moscow’s crackdown on dissent, wants his country to acknowledge misdeeds both past and present.
By Valerie Hopkins
Sandrine Rousseau is using her talent for grabbing headlines with provocative ideas to shift the focus of the national debate from the themes favored by the far-right to climate change and #MeToo.
By Catherine Porter
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Miguel Tomasín, one of the few professional musicians with Down syndrome, has brought attention to the artistic visions of people with developmental disabilities, with his band releasing over 100 albums.
By Anatoly Kurmanaev and Anita Pouchard Serra
In 2012, the song took over the internet, and it helped pave the way for the global success of Korean pop. But Psy, the artist behind it, spent years trying and failing to replicate the phenomenon.
By Jin Yu Young and Victoria Kim
Anton Filatov, a Ukrainian film critic, was pulled into a theater he never expected to enter: the front lines of war, where he now writes of the scene in the trenches instead of what’s onscreen.
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Oleksandra Mykolyshyn
Over 100,000 people are missing in Mexico, but even amid this national agony, one mother’s story stands out both for the scope of her suffering and for her work trying to end the nation’s nightmare.
By Oscar Lopez
Maxine Angel Opoku has found a new audience for her music with songs opposing a proposed law that would make it illegal to identify as gay, transgender or queer.
By Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu
Wang Xiaodong, once called the standard-bearer of Chinese nationalism, now fends off criticisms of being too moderate, even a traitor. “They’ve forgotten,” he said, “I created them.”
By Vivian Wang
Marlene Engelhorn, 30, heir to a fortune, isn’t interested in philanthropy, believing it only perpetuates existing power dynamics. She’s calling for structural change to how the ultrarich are taxed.
By Emma Bubola
For 50 years, the Rev. Joseph Maier has lived in one of the poorest parts of the Thai capital, ministering to Catholics, Buddhists and Muslims alike, and never finding favor with the church hierarchy.
By Seth Mydans
Paul Siguqa grew up hating wineries because his mother toiled in their fields. But last year he opened the only fully Black-owned vineyard in Franschhoek, one of South Africa’s most prestigious wine towns.
By John Eligon
With Paris locked down over Passover, a rabbi started holding weekly talks over Zoom about Jewish texts. Thousands have tuned in to hear her reflections on death. “She is my rabbi,” said an atheist.
By Julia Lieblich
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Two imitators of the King of Pop in Buenos Aires offer a study in contrasts, reflective of Argentina’s deep economic divide. One man financed 13 surgeries, while the other draws on his sideburns.
By Jack Nicas and Anita Pouchard Serra
While on a rescue mission in Ukraine, Sergiy Ivanchuk was shot in the lungs, apparently ending his chance at opera stardom. His recovery is a marvel of medicine, chance and his own spirit.
By Erika Solomon
Tulsi Gowind Gowda has spent most of her more than 80 years planting and nurturing trees in southern India. “I like them more than anything else in my life,” she said.
By Sameer Yasir
Nuseir Yassin, a Palestinian citizen of Israel with nearly 60 million followers, has taken advantage of new diplomatic ties to move to the United Arab Emirates — angering many Palestinians.
By Patrick Kingsley
The Kremlin armed a generation of freedom fighters in Africa, like Joana Gomes, who helped Guinea-Bissau win liberation. So her decision to take Moscow’s side in its war with Ukraine was never in doubt.
By Ricci Shryock
Yes, this Communist politician in Graz, Austria, wants to redistribute wealth, but a focus on housing, her own modest lifestyle and a hard childhood have helped her popularity.
By Denise Hruby
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