COVER STORY This issue: On the first Sunday night in April, drums are beating and horns are blaring in a boisterous Chase Stadium in Fort Lauderdale Fla., as Lionel Messi and his Inter Miami teammates make a humdrum regular-season American soccer game a happening.  Inter Miami and Toronto FC are tied 1-1 in the waning seconds of the contest when Messi drives a ball into the goal box, giving his team a golden chance to pull out the win…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…