Your Monday Briefing

2022’s top stories

This was a year where the news cycle sometimes seemed relentless, and the ping of yet another alert typically brought more shocking news.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine devolved into a long and desperate slog that is now estimated to have killed more than 40,000 civilians and displaced up to 30 million more. The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion in the U.S. In Pakistan, flooding devastated hundreds of villages, killing around 1,500 people and affecting more than 33 million. Iran is experiencing the deadliest protests in decades.

Economically, these were rough times. The British pound hit a historic low against the U.S. dollar, and central banks yanked hard on interest rates to curb inflation. As the year draws to a close, the cost of heating fuel is biting hard, and a global recession looms. China’s “zero Covid” approach to the pandemic hurt businesses and strangled growth.

In politics, people voted for change in Australia, Brazil, Italy and Sweden, and for familiar faces in France and Denmark. In Israel, Bibi is back. Elon Musk owns Twitter now. And in sports, February brought a deeply strange Olympics in Beijing, with an equally unusual World Cup in Qatar at the end of the year.

But it wasn’t all doom and gloom: On the lighter side, 2022 brought us Wordle, Abba’s digital residency in London, the inaugural Tour de France Femmes, even a new Beyoncé album. Next year has moments of levity and ingenuity already on the schedule, including potential changes to daylight saving in the U.S. and a remembrance of Pablo Picasso on the 50th anniversary of his death.

The year in images

Each year, our photo editors sift through months of images in an effort to pick the most startling, most moving, most memorable pictures of the year.

The war in Ukraine was not the year’s only story, but it was visually one of the most powerful. Photographers for The Times filed about 16,000 pictures, often in circumstances that endangered their lives.

Joseph Kahn, The Times’s executive editor, describes how those images captured the shifting dynamics on the ground, as Ukrainians went from terror and disbelief to grim resignation and resilience. “Moments of optimism and joy do arrive,” he writes. “We see what they have lost because of Vladimir Putin’s aggression against their country — but also what they refuse to lose.”

Memorable moments: A bullet-riddled notebook retrieved after a deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. The daughter of Ketanji Brown Jackson, gazing in admiration as her mother became the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. And the defiance of elegantly dressed Ukrainian teenagers dancing in Odesa.

Recapping the arts

Concert halls, theaters, galleries: After two years of closures and postponements, audiences this year gradually made a return to experiencing the arts in person.

Our film critics, even as they found themselves pondering the state of cinema, found much to love on the big screen. A.O. Scott’s favorite films of the year, he writes, “seem to question not only the aspects of human experience they represent, but also their own methods and assumptions.” Manohla Dargis found herself heartened by all of the good and great movies that are still being released. There was plenty to enjoy on television.

In the world of visual art, high points in New York City included an adult-feeling Whitney Biennial, contemporary Puerto Rican art and a fabulous Matisse exhibition. Shows in Paris celebrated works by Alice Neel and Ed Ruscha, and in Kassel, Germany, the mega-exhibition Documenta was “remarkable” or “catastrophic,” depending on whom you asked.

Our obituaries section celebrates, honors and revisits the lives of people who shaped the world. Read about the artists we lost in 2022, in their own words, and revisit five obituaries that stood out:

Great Reads

Catch up on four of the most-read stories in The Times this year:

BACK STORY

A year of writing the briefing

Your briefing zigzags across the world before it lands in your inbox.

It incorporates stories from our correspondents around the globe; is written by me, Natasha, in Melbourne, Australia; gets a first edit from an editor in New York; and then receives its final touches from an editor in our Seoul bureau.

Finally, just before 1 a.m. Eastern time, or 6 a.m. G.M.T., it wings its way to hundreds of thousands of readers from Ireland to Israel, along with more than a few night owls in the U.S.

Since August 2020, when I joined The Times, I’ve written this newsletter well over 500 times. It has sometimes felt like charting history as it happens: vaccines against the coronavirus; the invasion of Ukraine by Russia; a change in the U.S. presidency; three British prime ministers (and two monarchs); once-in-a-generation protests in Iran; the fight for abortion rights in the U.S.; and hundreds of other world-changing stories, besides.

Perhaps my favorite thing about the job is receiving notes from readers: what you liked, as well as what you didn’t. I often can’t help with quibbles over the Spelling Bee or the Crossword (even when I share your pain), but I love to hear about it when you’ve taken up one of our recommendations from Play, Watch, Eat, or when a story particularly resonated.

All this to say: Thank you all for reading, and also for writing in. Here’s to another year together.