COVER STORY This issue: At 25, Manchester City’s Erling Haaland is outscoring some of soccer’s greatest stars.  Two of the most valuable feet on the planet are burning. It’s a stifling mid-June afternoon and Erling Haaland, the superstar Manchester City striker from Norway who looks like Thor but sometimes celebrates goals by meditating in the lotus pose, is walking on the piping hot sand in Boca Raton, Fla. The heat is so intense that I start skittering to the wet sand in desperate need of relief…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Once an auto underdog, China’s electric-vehicle boom now powers it tech rise. At Nio’s design workshop in surburban Shanghai, engineers spread billets of clay onto an aluminum frame of a basic car. A robotic arm with a mechanized drill bit then carves a series of grooves into the clay corresponding to a designer’s sketch. The rough surface is then painstakingly smoothed with palette knives before aluminum foil is pasted on top. Finally, the sleek looking metaliic model is rolled into a sunlit courtyard where every curve and camber is scrutinized…

The enhanced games aims to be the alternative Olympics—a multisport competition without the drug testing. When Kristian Gkolomeev woke up one morning in February, the last thing he expected to do was to break a world record in the pool. The Greek swimmer and four-time Olympian, who finished fifth in the 50-m freestyle in Paris and Tokyo, had gone to Greensboro, N.C., to take part in the preview of something called The Enhanced Games, a new start-up that plans to stage an Olympic-style competition…