COVER STORY This issue: Each year, TIME highlights inventions that are making the world better, smarter and even a bit more fun. For 2020’s list, we solicited nominations both from our editors and correspondents around the world and through an online application process. We then evaluated them on factors including originality, effectiveness, ambition and impact. Our results: everything from a smarter beehive to a greener tube of toothpaste to the technology that could catalyze a COVID-19 vaccine…To understand the world we live in, read TIME.

Democracy is wilting in Hungary. Can Gergely Karacsony save it? On a recent autumnal night in Budapest, about 1,000 people jammed the narrow street outside the city’s prestigious University of Theatre and Film Arts, as speakers on a makeshift podium railed against Hungary’s far-right Prime Minister Viktor Orban. “We have had enough of this civil war!” bellowed the filmmaker Szabolcs Hajdu, just hours after the government effectively removed the school’s longtime leaders and replaced them with Orban’s political loyalists. “This is not just about the university,” Hajdu shouted. “It is about the whole country”…

Women are deciding not to have babies because of the pandemic, that’s bad for everyone. Helby Parker planned to get pregnant this year. The timing seemed right: She was working as a middle-school teacher in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, a job that provided benefits for her whole family. Her husband, who drives a truck for FedEx, had just gotten a promotion. Their 21-month-old daughter was nearly ready for preschool. Now Parker, 29, is contemplating not trying for a second child at all…