TIME

Disney CEO Bob Iger’s tenure as the leader of the world’s most lucrative dream factory has been one long CEO highlight reel. But 2019 was an apex year, when many of his carefully incubated eggs hatched. “This has been probably one of the most productive years we’ve had as a company in the 15 years that I’ve been in this job,” says Iger, TIME's Businessperson of the year. Read more at the link in bio. #TIMEPOY Photograph by @peterhapak for TIME

The U.S. Women's Soccer Team (@uswnt ) is TIME's 2019 Athlete of the Year. A trophy—even for the world’s most prestigious soccer tournament—rarely alters the life of someone who didn’t win it. Nor does a game played in summer tend to generate dinner-table discussions as fall gives way to winter, least of all about gender equity in the workplace. But if there was any question before the World Cup that the U.S. had sent over a team that transcended sports, writes @sgregory31 , it was emphatically clear upon their return from France. Thousands of supporters lined the streets of lower Manhattan to share the rapturous joy of 23 women whose unalloyed pride in their accomplishment, and determination to see it shared, seemed to mark a new era. “We’re in a movement, not a moment,” says @mrapinoe , the 2019 FIFA player of the year, recalling not only the heady days after the victory but also the conversations with grateful strangers for months afterward. The team was photographed in Columbus, Ohio, on Nov. 4 (not pictured: Alex Morgan and Tierna Davidson). Read more at the link in bio. #TIMEPOY Photograph by @caitoppermann for TIME

The Public Servants are TIME's 2019 Guardians of the Year. The idea that government can be dangerous is encoded in the DNA of America, and so is the remedy: a tradition of dissent that holds the powerful to account. Read more at the link in bio. #TIMEPOY Illustration by Jason Seiler (@seilerpaints ) for TIME

This was the year the climate crisis went from behind the curtain to center stage, from ambient political noise to squarely on the world's agenda, and no one did more to make that happen than @gretathunberg . Meaningful change rarely happens without the galvanizing force of influential individuals, writes editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal, and in 2019, the earth's existential crisis found one in Thunberg. For that reason, she is TIME's 2019 Person of the Year. Read more about the #TIMEPOY choice at the link in bio. Photograph by @evgenia_arbugaeva for TIME; Video by @maxim_arbugaev for TIME

A year is a long time in #politics. Long enough in the case of Volodymyr Zelensky, the comedian elected President of #Ukraine, to go from the set of his sitcom in #Kyiv to the biggest political drama in the world, the one in which an American President may wind up getting impeached. The Democrats have cast Zelensky as the victim of President #Trump’s abuse of power, even as Republicans treat him as the witness key to proving Trump’s innocence. Neither role is anywhere close to what Zelensky imagined for himself when he announced his run for the presidency on New Year’s Eve, although he knew the job would be tough if he won, and often very unpleasant. Ukraine has been at war with #Russia for the past five years, and his priority as President would be to stop that war from taking any more lives—a toll that is now more than 13,000 and counting. That task would mean confronting Vladimir #Putin. But Zelensky also wondered early on about Trump and the challenges of working with him. “What’s he like?” he asked TIME's Simon Shuster when they first met in March. “Normal guy?” The 41-year-old seemed confident, even cocky, in planning to win Trump over with little more than a wisecrack and a smile. “We’ll figure it out,” he told Shuster. “I’m sure we’ll get along.” Things have turned out rather differently. Read this week's full International cover story at the link in bio. Photograph by @paolopellegrin —@magnumphotos for TIME

In the weeks since @speakerpelosi ’s Sept. 24 decision to launch an impeachment inquiry against @realdonaldtrump for using the power of his presidency to press a foreign country—Ukraine—to investigate a political rival, the #Trump campaign hasn’t run from Pelosi’s impeachment push or settled into a defensive crouch. Campaign officials instead are leaning into the #impeachment threat, using it to mobilize supporters and try to extract a political price—and millions of dollars in fundraising—from the #Democrats’ move. One of the single most powerful weapons in the Trump campaign’s arsenal has been #Facebook, which—unlike many TV stations and newspapers—does not monitor candidates’ political ads for veracity. A TIME analysis of publicly available Facebook data, which included the cataloging of hundreds of distinct messages, shows how Trump is using #socialmedia to supercharge his pushback against impeachment and add to his considerable $150 million war chest. Read @bybrianbennett and Chris Wilson’s full cover story at the link in bio. TIME Photo-illustration. Trump: Win McNamee—@gettyimages ; animation by @brobeldesign

Every year, @time highlights the Best Inventions that are making the world better, smarter and even a bit more fun. To assemble our 2019 list, we solicited nominations across a variety of categories from our editors and correspondents around the world, as well as through an online application process. Then @time evaluated each contender based on key factors, including originality, #creativity, #influence, #ambition and effectiveness. The result: 100 groundbreaking #inventions that are changing the way we live, work, play and think about what’s possible. See the full list—this week’s International cover—at the link in the bio.

America loves a capitalist reckoning the way the NFL loves Colin Kaepernick. But it is having one anyway, writes Anand Giridharadas (@anandwrites ), TIME editor at large and the author of 'Winners Take All.’ And if this year that reckoning seemed to reach new intensity, it was because the economic precariousness, stalled mobility, and gaping social divides that have for years fueled the backlash now had an improbable sidekick: plutocracy itself and the win-win ideology that has governed the last few decades. This year, America’s ultra-elites seemed to bend over backwards to lend support to the idea that maybe the system they superintend needs gut-renovating. As a political movement challenging their wealth and power bubbled up, the elite’s own misbehavior trickled down. And where the two met, ideas that once seemed unutterable started, to many, to sound like the future. Read more at the link in bio. Art by Delcan & Company for TIME, photographed by @jamiechungstudio ; animation by @brobeldesign

This week's International cover: The modern #MiddleEast was formed exactly 100 years ago when, in the wake of World War I, the victors began creating new countries. Among the populations deemed deserving of nationhood—along with Armenians and Azeris—were the Kurds. The #Kurds had lived for centuries in the mountains and high plains where Mesopotamia becomes Anatolia and, with their own language, culture and identity, met the criteria for a nation of their own. Instead, writes Karl Vick, the Kurds ended up within the borders of five other nations, a tapestry cut by a jigsaw. Now, that division is playing out in three of the countries: Kurds in #Iraq are giving refuge to Kurds from #Syria, who have come under attack by the army of #Turkey, the nation with the largest Kurdish minority of all. In this photograph: Nuhat Abdul Hamid, 9, from the Syrian Kurdish town of Darbasiyah, aboard a bus transporting #refugees to the Bardarash camp in Iraq on Nov. 1. Read more, and see more pictures, at the link in bio. Photograph by @moisessaman —@magnumphotos for TIME

“From reinventing the makeup counter to canonizing the #shelfie, @emilyweiss has helped a generation of consumers feel good about themselves—something the beauty industry has historically failed to do," writes @alexisohanian . See the full #TIME100Next list, featuring rising stars who are shaping the future of their fields, at the link in bio. Photograph by @scandebergs for TIME

“Costa Rica is a small country, but its President, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, has shown great ambition in tackling the climate crisis,” writes former U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon of @carlosalvq . “His actions serve to remind the world that even small nations can take the lead.” See the full #TIME100Next list, featuring rising stars who are shaping the future of their fields, at the link in bio. Photograph by @scandebergs for TIME

"Chanel Miller embodied courage long before writing her powerfully moving book, 'Know My Name,'" writes Christine Blasey Ford of @chanelmillerknowmyname . "As 'Emily Doe,' she courageously testified against the man who sexually assaulted her and read her victim-impact statement in court, looking right at him: 'You took away my worth, my privacy, my energy, my time, my safety, my intimacy, my confidence, my own voice, until today.' And when her statement went viral, she gave millions of survivors their own 'today.'" Read more about the author and advocate, and see the full #TIME100Next list, at the link in bio. Photograph by @scandebergs for TIME