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This Week In TIME
Ever see one of these before, mister? Yes, you. I’m talking to you, ma’am. Ever work one of these Commodores or Timex Sinclairs or Osborne Is or TRS-80 IIIs? How do you like them Apples?
On Jan. 3, 1983, TIME named the computer its Machine of the Year. It’s the first time an object received the Man of the Year accolade. Read the story here.
In a 2006 photo essay published in TIME, readers caught a glimpse of Insha Afsar, a 7-year-old girl who lost a leg when her house collapsed on it during an earthquake in Kashmir. The stark photograph of a girl in a red coat struck a chord with TIME readers and staffers. In the Feb. 5, 2007 edition of TIME, managing editor Rick Stengel wrote about Asfar:
In April 2006, we ran a three-page photo essay by Yuri Kozyrev documenting the state of refugees in Kashmir after the catastrophic earthquake that took the lives of 75,000 people and displaced 3 million more. One of Yuri’s pictures was of a slight girl in a hooded orange parka who had lost her leg in the quake. Two days after the magazine appeared, TIME’s news-desk supervisor, Eileen Harkin, got a call from a member of the Shriners organization in Los Angeles. It wanted to help the girl. With clues from Yuri’s notebooks and the assistance of his contacts in several relief organizations, we located the girl, Insha Afsar, 7, in a camp in Kamsar, just north of Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. TIME news director Howard Chua-Eoan personally paid for her to travel to the U.S. with her father for treatment. The Shriners arranged for free medical care for her, while the Heal the Children Foundation found a family in Connecticut to put up Insha and her father. She has since been fitted with a special prosthesis, which will have to be adjusted as she grows.
Insha continues to learn and thrive. In a recent holiday visit to TIME’s offices in New York City, she told staffers about her love of skiing black diamond slopes and her wonder at the 3-D portions of the Radio City Christmas Spectacular show.
The latest issue of TIME, featuring our cover story, ‘What Choice?’, will hit newsstands Friday.
Read a preview of the story here.
(Cover: Jamie Chung for TIME)
This week’s Person of the Year special issue features stunning portraits photographed by Nadav Kander and exclusive behind-the-scenes images by photographer Callie Shell. In addition, we wanted to create a unique interactive experience for our iPad edition, which for the first time was released before the print version was even sent to the presses.
We turned to Georgia-based artist and sculptor Michael Murphy, whose work we have long admired. Michael spent several weeks and dozens of sleepless nights creating three amazing portraits of the President. Each piece offers a completely different perspective, depending on the vantage point of the viewer— an apt metaphor for the current political climate.
The first piece Michael created for us was a 3-D portrait made out of red, blue and gray wire. From the front it looks like a jumbled wire portrait of Obama, but from the side the wires jut out at varying lengths and he becomes virtually unrecognizable.
He also created a portrait out of cut suspended glass plates.
Michael, a tireless inventor and thinker, wanted to create one more piece for us, but we were running up against a close deadline. Undeterred, Michael spent four straight days meticulously crafting one final sculpture. The result (on deadline!), which we featured as our opening interactive illustration on the Person of the Year iPad app, consists of 66 hand-cut and -painted cardboard plates suspended from white braided fibers.
In Michael’s words:
“It was created considering the perception of the viewer. When viewed from different vantage points, the piece offers varied experiences. Straight on, the shapes are perfectly organized, creating a graphic portrait of Obama as a strong leader. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, seeing it and the point of view changes, the image of the President becomes distorted and the layers become their own separate pieces. In the distortion, viewers are encouraged to see the red and blue edges of the plates as indications of the electoral divides. From the side, the forward momentum of the piece, as it protrudes into space suggests growth, progress, movement and the partisan divide.”
To see the interactive 360-degree version of the piece, download TIME’s Person of the Year issue, available on iTunes now. To see more of Michael’s incredible work, visit www.mmike.com
—D.W. Pine and Skye Gurney
Pete Souza/The White House“The President works on his Newtown speech. Two days earlier, I photographed him when John Brennan first briefed him on the shootings. Throughout that day, he reacted as we all did, which people witnessed when he delivered his statement a few hours later. Before we headed to Newtown for the Sunday night vigil, he went to watch his daughter Sasha, 11, rehearse for her ballet performance in the Nutcracker. He was going to miss her performance that night because of the trip to Newtown. During breaks in the rehearsal, he worked on the speech. His expression in this photograph may be subtle to the viewer, but not to me. There is emotion and resolve etched on his face, and I know this was perhaps the toughest day of his Presidency.”
— Chief official White House photographer Pete Souza: Portrait of a Presidency
Person of the Year runner-up: Fabiola Gianotti, Higgs boson scientist
Finding the tiny Higgs Boson took the biggest machine in the arsenal of physics — and help from one woman obsessed with the nature of reality. Read more here.
(Photo: Levon Biss for TIME)
Person of the Year runner-up: Mohamed Morsi, Egypt’s President
Egypt’s new president won kudos abroad and curses at home. What he does next could determine the shape of the Middle East. Read more here.
(Illustration by Steve Wilson for TIME)
Callie Shell for TIME
President Barack Obama with TIME’s Director of Photography, Kira Pollack, during the photo shoot in the Diplomatic Room of the White House on Dec. 12, 2012.
Behind the cover: TIME’s Person of the Year 2012
Person of the Year runner-up: Tim Cook, Apple CEO
He inherited the most valuable company in the world from one of the greatest innovators in history. In 2012 he made Apple his own. Read more here.
(Photo: Marco Grob for TIME)
Person of the Year runner-up: Malala Yousafzai, the fighter
In trying to silence this Pakistani schoolgirl, the Taliban amplified her voice. She is now a symbol of the struggle for women’s rights all over the world. Read more here.
(Photo: Asim Hafeez)
