COVER STORY This issue: The Coming Worlds. The Metaverse is still under construction, but it’s sure to change our lives. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission reports that in the first six months of 2022, the word metaverse appeared in regulatory filings more than 1,100 times. The entire previous year saw 260 mentions. The preceding two decades? Fewer than a dozen in total. It increasingly feels as though every corporate executive must mention the metaverse—and, of course, how it naturally fits the capabilities of their company better than those of their competitors. Few seem to explain what it is or exactly what they’ll build…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

First Lady Olena Zelenska takes on the Trauma of War. Olena Zelenska got to bed late on the eve of the Russian invasion. Her kids were long asleep in the presidential residence south of Kyiv, a vast mansion of yellow stone that the family had always found a bit too grand, bordering on ostentatious. They had moved there in 2020 because the gated grounds contain a separate building to house their security detail. For days, Zelenska had sensed the bodyguards were nervous. The talk of war, she says, “was everywhere, just kind of hanging in the air.”…

Bitcoin took a brutal fall in May, with the value of each unit dipping below $30,000 for the first time since July 2021. The world’s largest cryptocurrency is now worth less than half of what it was last autumn. Other cryptocurrencies, like Ether and BNB, have seen similar falls. Some experts are now warning of a “crypto winter,” in which the sector’s astonishing growth is replaced by an extended period of contraction. The current crypto slide is being caused by a combination of short-term and long-term inputs. To start off, Bitcoin rises and falls with the rest of the financial market. While crypto evangelists have long hoped that its independent nature would make it resistant to inflation and…