COVER STORY This issue:  The Kingmaker. Elon Musk’s partnership with the President-elect. hang on a minute. Whom did we just elect? The Republican ticket had two names at the top: Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. But parts of this delirious November created the impression that someone else has taken hold of our collective destiny. We already knew him in various roles…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Why you’re constantly baited by grifters—and more vulnerable than you think. Not long ago, Monica Cotelingham found herself stuffing cash into a Bitcoin machine at a gas station in suburban Maryland and weeping. Earlier that day, she had received a call from a phone number with the same area code as Cotelingham’s father in Louisiana. When she answered, someone identifying themselves as a U.S. customs officer said the government had found a package addressed to Cotelingham that contained stolen passports and driver’s licenses…

If you’re asked to share a few fun facts about yourself, you’re probably not going to rattle off your blood-pressure or cholesterol levels (even if your “good” cholestoral is, well, really good). But you should have a solid sense of what those numbers are, experts say. Why? “That old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure is absolutely correct,” says Dr. Josh Septimus, an internal-medicine physician with Houston Methodist Hospital…