How to Watch the 2025 Met Gala

On Monday, May 5, celebrities and artists will showcase their designer outfits at the 2025 Met Gala. This year’s event focuses on “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style,” giving guests the opportunity to create their own interpretations of the theme.

Famously, those who do not attend the Met Gala cannot actually watch what takes place inside the event, but there is plenty of action to be seen beforehand.

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The Met Gala serves as a fundraiser for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and viewers eager to see the red carpet can tune in a couple of different ways.

First, they can follow along via Vogue’s livestream on their YouTube channel, which will be hosted by singer/actor Teyana Taylor, TV personality/actor La La Anthony, and Saturday Night Live’s Ego Nwodim. Internet personality Emma Chamberlain will also return as the red carpet correspondent for the night. Vogue’s livestream will start at 3 p.m. PST/6 p.m. ET, and viewers do not require a subscription to enjoy the event.

E! News is also hosting a livestream of the Met Gala, which will be hosted by journalists Zanna Roberts Rassi and Elaine Welteroth, sports host Maria Taylor, actor Yvonne Orji, and fashion designer Christian Siriano. The Live From E! Stream will be available on E! Online, Peacock, TODAY ALL DAY and All Fast partners, as well as on the YouTube channels for E! News, E! Insider, E! Entertainment, Today, and Access Hollywood.

source https://time.com/7282226/how-to-watch-the-2025-met-gala/

Miss Austen Turns the Jane Austen Marriage Plot on Its Head

No novelist in the English language is more closely associated with the marriage plot than Jane Austen. That literary trope turned rom-com convention gives structure to all six of her masterworks—which goes to show that the romance genre, far from mere escapism, can be an ideal lens through which to observe a society’s values. But another truth universally acknowledged about Austen complicates the happy weddings that conclude each book: The author never married. She spared her heroines the social and financial precarity she suffered.

The realities of single womanhood in Regency England, and for the Austen family in particular, are at the center of Miss Austen, a four-part BBC adaptation of Gill Hornby’s 2020 novel that will premiere stateside May 4 on PBS’s Masterpiece. Set more than a decade after Jane’s untimely death, this bit of historical fiction follows her beloved older (and only) sister, Cassandra, sensitively portrayed by executive producer Keeley Hawes, and imagines the circumstances that led her to destroy thousands of the author’s personal letters. Its primary characters are unmarried women. If you can get past the mannered stiffness typical of Masterpiece fare, it loosens up as it evolves into a perceptive and affectionate portrait of the kind of life Austen lived but barely wrote about.

Solitary in middle age, Hawes’ Cassandra—also never married—is roused from a cozy routine of talking to goats and reading in bed when a letter arrives informing her of a family friend’s imminent death. Against the advice of her correspondent, she hastens to Fulwar Fowle’s (Felix Scott) bedside. Cassandra has a history with the Fowles; she was betrothed to Fulwar’s brother Tom (played in flashbacks by Calam Lynch) before he died on an expedition to the West Indies. But it isn’t sentimentality, for the most part, that motivates her to make the trip. “There are certain items there of a personal nature that belong here,” she tells the servant seeing her off. Namely, the letters Jane wrote to Fulwar’s late wife, Eliza, a close friend of the Austen girls.

Of course she finds them, and the letters transport her back to the girls’ youth, with the young Cassandra played by Synnøve Karlsen and Jane by a wonderfully animated Patsy Ferran, reviving precious memories but also revealing the author’s unvarnished thoughts about her sister’s choices. There are perhaps too many costume-drama boilerplate shots of Hawes gazing tearily at yellowed sheets of stationary. But they’re worth it as a conduit to Cassandra’s and Jane’s 20s, a period when both women fielded suitors; the younger Austen grew into her voice as a writer, thanks in part to the encouragement of the elder; and each emerged as the most important person in the other’s life. What seems to wound the grown-up Cassandra most, in the letters, is Jane’s frustration at her sister’s rejection of a love match worthy of Pride and Prejudice. “She chose insecurity,” Jane writes to Eliza. “I did it for you, too,” Cassandra murmurs, half a lifetime later. Would we even know the name Jane Austen if she hadn’t taken such good care of the vivacious but also fragile, depressive writer in life and her work in death?

Elsewhere at the Fowles’ home, Kintbury, Mary Austen (Jessica Hynes), the haughty widow of Cassandra’s brother James, is bustling around with notions of commissioning a joint biography of Jane and her late husband—whose undistinguished poetry she prefers to Jane’s already-renowned prose. And in the wake of Fulwar’s death, his conscientious daughter Isabella (Rose Leslie) is preparing the residence for the arrival of a replacement vicar (Thomas Coombes’ lightly ridiculous Mr. Dundas), as she looks ahead to her own uncertain future. Cassandra has promised Fulwar that she’ll set her up with one of his other two daughters, but neither situation seems ideal. (One bizarre Fowle sister is a highlight of the show.) She also notices romantic tension between Isabella and the local doctor, Mr. Lidderdale (Alfred Enoch).

With its contrived conclusion, the latter storyline puts a somewhat ill-fitting bow on the series. What lingers after its giddiness dissipates are the experiences of so many single women, some widowed, others never married. Isabella’s unceremonious ejection from the home where she grew up. Mary’s fixation on commemorating James’ dubious talents. The genuine bond between Isabella and her servant, Dinah (Mirren Mack). The adversity Cassandra, Jane, and their mother face after the Austen patriarch’s death. Jane’s inability to accept a loveless marriage that would finance a high lifestyle but rob her of time to write. Cassandra’s lifelong protection of Jane—a devotion so fierce, in Hornby’s scenario, it drives her to destroy thousands of pages of writing by one of the greatest authors who ever walked the earth. Austen’s marriage plots reward her righteous heroines, granting them love and companionship they crave as well as wealth and respectability they need in a society that places too much value on superficial things. Particularly in chronicling the sacrifices Cassandra happily made for Jane, Miss Austen suggests that there was always more than one way for a woman to lead a fulfilling life.

source https://time.com/7281893/miss-austen-review-pbs/

The Four Seasons Reveals a Side of Tina Fey That’s Been Hiding in Plain Sight

Warm. Wistful. Tender. Empathetic. These are not words typically associated with Tina Fey, whose humor has a reputation for being brutal. But they all apply to The Four Seasons, a new Netflix dramedy series co-created by and starring Fey that follows three apparently settled middle-aged couples through a year of upheaval. Absent are the absurd characters, rapid-fire jokes, and dryly pessimistic social commentary with which Fey made her name on Saturday Night Live, and that have defined her career, from Mean Girls to 30 Rock. In their place is a moving depiction of marriage and friendship among Gen X empty nesters.

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A partial explanation for the shift in tone is that The Four Seasons wasn’t entirely conceived by Fey and her collaborators, Lang Fisher (Never Have I Ever) and Tracey Wigfield (Great News). It’s based on writer-director-star Alan Alda’s 1981 film of the same name—an urbane box-office hit that has since been overshadowed by quintessentially ’80s rom-coms like When Harry Met Sally. As in Alda’s version, the title refers to four seasonal group vacations (two half-hour episodes apiece in the series), each set to the appropriate Vivaldi concerto. Alongside a cast stacked with fellow A-listers Steve Carell and Colman Domingo, Fey plays Kate, a responsible, high-strung pragmatist married to a passive, philosophical man, Jack (SNL alum Will Forte); Carol Burnett and Alda originated the roles.

Fey is well aware that this all represents a left turn for her. In a recent appearance on her old friend and sometimes comedy partner Amy Poehler’s podcast, Good Hang, she described it as “a very, very gentle program” whose reception she’s curious to observe. So compassionate is her approach, in fact, that it casts the nearly three decades’ worth of work that preceded it in a new light. Beneath the veneer of misanthropy and the din of controversy her perspective has often incited lies a more generous sensibility that was always present but is only now coming to the fore.

“Authenticity is dangerous and expensive,” Fey counseled Bowen Yang in a 2024 interview for Las Culturistas, the podcast that the current SNL star co-hosts. Yang had gotten too famous, she said, to keep broadcasting blunt opinions on people with whom he might someday have to work. “Are you having a problem with Saltburn?” Fey asked. “Keep it to yourself. Because what are you going to do when Emerald Fennell calls you about her next project, where you play Carey Mulligan’s co-worker in the bridal section of Harrods and then Act 3 takes a sexually violent turn and you have to pretend to be surprised by that turn?”

Both the substance of Fey’s playful excoriation—that when you’re a celebrity, anything you say can be used against you—and the fact that it went viral are telling. For most of her career, and certainly since her portrayal of the harried, unglamorous sketch-show head writer Liz Lemon in 30 Rock coincided with the rise of pop feminism in the late aughts, her every plot and utterance has been widely scrutinized. Tina Fey superfans may be legion, but she’s also absorbed more than her share of misogyny as well as criticism for her button-pushing approach to identity politics.

Plenty of the latter pushback has been not only justified, but necessary. Before the Black Lives Matter movement forced a reckoning in Hollywood, Fey made the poor decision to show white performers in blackface on 30 Rock. While the joke was always at the expense of an ignorant white character or a racist entertainment industry, context couldn’t outweigh the images’ hurtful impact. In 2020, she apologized and had those episodes pulled from streaming services.

Yet the hair-trigger sensitivities of audiences predisposed to judge Fey harshly have also fueled ridiculous backlashes. Following 2017’s white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the UVa alum caught flak for an SNL “Weekend Update” bit in which she jokingly urged viewers to drown their rage in cake instead of getting into fistfights with Nazis. No one watching in good faith could’ve mistaken her for excusing the marchers. (She even sneaked in unusually progressive opinions for broadcast TV: “It’s not our country. We stole it from the Native Americans. And when they have a peaceful protest, at Standing Rock, we shoot at them with rubber bullets. But we let you chinless turds march through the streets with semiautomatic weapons.”) Nor was it hard to see she was playing an exaggeratedly naive version of herself. Still, she was self-critical enough to judge the segment as a failure. “If I had a time machine,” she said on David Letterman’s Netflix show My Next Guest Needs No Introduction, “I would end the piece by saying… ‘Fight [the Nazis] in every way except the way that they want.’”

When Fey gets in trouble, whether for legitimate or specious reasons, it’s usually because her darkest humor is built atop a layer of cynicism about society—and Hollywood as a mirror of it—that isn’t always easy to unearth. Viewers got that her acclaimed SNL portrayal of an airheaded Sarah Palin reflected the then VP candidate’s pandering to a demographic that wanted women in politics to be “Caribou Barbie.” But they sometimes missed that the stars of 30 Rock’s show-within-a-show, Jenna Maroney and Tracy Jordan, embody certain awful stereotypes about white women and Black men not because Fey was saying they truly represented those groups but because showbiz rewards performers who reflect audiences’ prejudices.

It’s not hard to imagine why—at this point in her prolific career, but also at this toxic moment for the cultural conversation—Fey might want a break from satire. (She has long been rumored to be a top candidate to run SNL should her mentor Lorne Michaels ever retire, but her disinclination to keep wrestling the zeitgeist makes it seem doubtful she’d want the job.) Indeed, she appears to be making an effort to avoid stress in her professional life. Her current comedy tour with Poehler reportedly finds the duo bantering in pajamas. She spoke on Good Hang about making time, after years of overwork, to “just be a person in this world and maybe, like, watch a program.” In the same episode, Fey explained her approach to making The Four Seasons. “I worked hard to build it to be a really healthy set and really, like, humane hours,” she said. “I was also extremely purposeful about bringing together people who I believed were good people who would not make any trouble for me.”

The disproportionate share of criticism Fey attracts is, in a way, a testament to how effectively she’s caricatured herself over the years—as a schoolmarmish killjoy, a mousy prude, a blithely self-righteous white feminist—for an audience prone to conflating comedy with reality. She’s copped to having been a “caustic” judge of her peers as a teen, but the characters she usually inhabits, onscreen and as a public persona, are, to borrow words Fey frequently uses herself, “square” and “obedient.” A recent talking point has been her Enneagram personality test type: the Achiever.

Fey’s character in The Four Seasons is a more grounded, sympathetic version of this uptight woman. Kate can micromanage her friend group and her marriage, but when she errs toward officiousness, it’s because that’s her way of caring for people. “You’ve gotta always be the good guy,” she complains to Jack. “And that only leaves one other part.” The series is similarly generous with other characters. The revelation that Carell’s Nick plans to leave his wife Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) after a gathering for their 25th anniversary drives the plot, throwing off both the other two couples and the overall group dynamic. But Nick comes off as less of a jerk than he is in Alda’s movie and more of a man struggling with his mortality. While Anne fades into the background of the film post-split, Fey goes to great, sometimes a bit clumsy lengths to honor the perspective of the jilted wife.

Where was she hiding this humanism, after years of depicting characters at their vain, stupid, oblivious worst? In plain sight, actually. There is no better indicator of a writer’s worldview than how they end their stories. In that regard, Fey has always been sneakily optimistic. Mean Girls is often likened to the pitch-black high school satire Heathers, but Heathers concludes, after multiple murders, with its villain’s suicide, while Mean Girls leaves us with a reformed queen bee and a utopian teenage social order. Whereas Seinfeld, another deadpan NBC sitcom about self-absorbed New Yorkers, notoriously condemned its characters to prison, 30 Rock let Liz finally have it all: the career, the baby, the hot husband. Fey’s next big project, the Netflix comedy Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, wrung humor out of an abused, traumatized kidnapping victim’s adventures in a cruel city plagued by economic inequality. But—and here the clue is right there in the title—Kimmy’s tenacity won out.

The Four Seasons is probably not destined to become a classic like 30 Rock and Mean Girls; it offers neither the many madcap highs nor the occasional tone-deaf lows of Fey’s best work. Still, it’s a thoroughly enjoyable watch, one that reflects the wisdom and patience of age rather than the merciless genius of youth. Best of all, it reveals a hidden, humanizing dimension of the most fascinating character Tina Fey ever created: Tina Fey.

source https://time.com/7281530/the-four-seasons-netflix-tina-fey/

TIME Unveils Special Report: “Five Years Later: America Looks for a Way Forward After George Floyd”

TIME to Host ‘TIME Impact Dinner: The Road to Justice’ in Washington, D.C. on May 20, in Partnership with the Center for Policing Equity

May 1, 2025—Today, TIME publishes “Five Years Later: America Looks for a Way Forward After George Floyd,” a special report released ahead of the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder. In the wake of Floyd’s death, millions of Americans took to the streets, launching the largest protests in U.S. history and marking a watershed moment that demanded safety, dignity, and an end to anti-Black racism. Produced in collaboration with the Center for Policing Equity, the special package features a collection of interviews and essays from scholars, activists, artists, and more, exploring why the pursuit of racial justice remains so challenging in America.

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–Read the special report: here

“Few periods have influenced the course of American history in the last century as the killing of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, and the worldwide protest movement that sprung from it the following summer,” said TIME Editor in Chief Sam Jacobs. “We are grateful to partner with the Center for Policing Equity to publish work from artists, photographers and writers, each reflecting on the impact of this moment and the work that remains undone.”

The new cover for the project is a painting, Holding On (Blue), by Tajh Rust for TIME. On the painting Rust writes: “I’ve been using this water motif to speak to a shared history and a collective memory across the Black diaspora. The water gives us a chance to reflect, but it can also be a flood. Our stories, challenges, and triumphs are connected by oceans. This family unit is inundated by the rising water, yet they stay above it. The hope may be found in the younger generation.” 

–See the cover by painter Tajh Rust for TIME: here

The TIME Special Report “Five Years Later: America Looks for a Way Forward After George Floyd” 

 features perspectives from:  

• Former basketball player Carmelo Anthony and former basketball player and social justice advocate Maya Moore: How Sports Can Advance Racial Justice
• Scholar Imani Perry: Art Is a Powerful Tool to Fight Racial Injustice
• Civil rights advocate Kimberle Crenshaw: The Battle for Our Memory Is the Battle for Our Country
• Center for Policing Equity co-founder and CEO Dr. Phillip Atiba Solomon: Building a Moonshot for Racial Justice
• Philosopher and author Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò: Why Protests Should Be Promises
• African American studies scholar Brandon Terry: What the Reconstruction Era Can Teach Us About the Politics of Shame
• Historian and professor Dylan Penningroth: Police Power Affects All of Us
• Activist and #MeToo movement founder Tarana Burke: What Sustains Her Lifelong Fight for Racial Equity
• A photo essay, featuring Carrie Mae Weems, Mikael Owunna, and other artists, on processing police brutality and spotlighting humanity in the era of Black Lives Matter: The Artist as Witness in the Era of Black Lives Matter

As an extension of the special project, TIME will host the TIME Impact Dinner: The Road to Justice with presenting partner the Center for Policing Equity in Washington, D.C. on May 20. The evening will be dedicated to elevating the perspectives of the leaders featured in the “Five Years Later: America Looks for a Way Forward After George Floyd” special report and those who are striving to reshape public safety systems to drive equity and better support marginalized communities.

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source https://time.com/7281847/time-unveils-special-report-five-years-later-america-looks-for-a-way-forward-after-george-floyd/

Everything to Remember About All the Members of the Thunderbolts* Team

Thunderbolts*, out May 2, features Marvel’s B-team superheroes—sidekicks and antagonists who have existed largely on the sidelines of the MCU for the past decade and a half. Now they are finally getting their moment to shine. The ragtag group joins together under the watchful eye of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), a morally flexible private-sector spook who has been named the head of the CIA in the new film.

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Valentina, who was first introduced in the Disney+ series Falcon and the Winter Soldier and appeared in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever as the ex-wife of Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), has quietly been gathering together a group of assassins to work on covert operations and now dreams of her own very public superhuman—or superteam—that she can control.

But if you missed movies like Black Widow or Ant-Man and the Wasp or TV shows like Falcon and the Winter Soldier, you may be confused as to who these antiheroes who Valentina has collected are, what they’ve been up to for the last several years, and whether they’re good guys or bad.

Here is your spoiler-free guide to everything you need to know about the characters who make up the Thunderbolts team.

Read more: All the Future MCU Movies Announced in Marvel’s Major Revamp

Yelena Belova

Introduced in Black Widow as the little sister of Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johanson), Florence Pugh’s Yelena was raised from childhood to be an assassin in the Russian Red Room, just like Black Widow before her. Yelena and Natasha are not sisters by blood but by circumstance: When they were children they were sent as spies to America and lived with a fake family of other covert operatives. David Harbour’s Alexei Shostakov or Red Guardian (more on him later) and Rachel Weisz’s Melina Vostokoff acted as their parents until all four had to escape back to Russia.

The four reunite in Black Widow to eliminate the Red Room and save the women being brainwashed there. After the death of Natasha in Avengers: Endgame, Yelena became an assassin for hire working for Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, who in Thunderbolts* is trying to build (and control) her own superhuman.

Bucky Barnes / The Winter Soldier

Sebastian Stan has been playing Steve Rogers’ best bud, Bucky Barnes, since 2011’s Captain America: The First Avenger. A lot has happened to Bucky since he fought alongside Cap during World War II in that film. Bucky fell from a train in that movie, apparently dying, but his body was recovered by HYDRA, a science-minded organization within the Nazi party. Bucky was given supersoldier serum, brainwashed, and transformed into the Winter Soldier. He performed many dastardly deeds for HYDRA, including murdering Tony Stark’s parents.

Steve eventually helped Bucky recover his memories and break free of HYDRA, and the Wakandans gifted Bucky an indestructible arm. Bucky fought alongside the Avengers against Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and teamed up with Sam Wilson (The Falcon and, later, the new Captain America) in the Disney+ show, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier. Since then, apparently Bucky has become an elected official, representing Brooklyn in Congress. Whether his commitments to supersoldier-ing will interfere with his duties as an elected official remains unclear.

Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian

The USSR’s answer to Captain America, Harbour’s Red Guardian is a washed-up super soldier who dreams of his days of glory as a Russian emblem of strength. A surrogate father to Natasha and Yelena, he was living in an Eastern European prison when the two girls broke him out during the events of Black Widow.

John Walker

An antagonistic force in Falcon and the Winter Soldier, John Walker (Wyatt Russell) is a military vet who takes the supersoldier serum and, briefly, is dubbed by the U.S. government as the new Captain America. However, we learn that supersoldier serum has different effects on different people. In the scrawny but noble Steve Rogers, it brought out leadership qualities. For Walker, it enhanced his already-simmering rage and resentment. Though Walker isn’t a bad guy, per se—he is in pursuit of justice—he doesn’t have the moral compass of, say, Sam Wilson. Walker eventually kills an innocent man in front of a crowd in the streets, bloodying the sacred Captain America shield in the process.

Walker is stripped of his title after that incident. But Valentina Allegra de Fontaine recruits the shamed Walker to be part of her network of privately paid assassins.

Ghost

Another misunderstood villain, Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen) is one of the antagonists in Ant-Man and the Wasp. The daughter of a former colleague of Hank Pym, Ava Starr has an encounter with the Quantum Realm as a child that grants her “phasing powers”—she can disappear and walk through walls—but leaves her in chronic pain. She joins S.H.I.E.L.D. as an assassin in exchange for a suit that allows her to control her instability and the promise of a cure that never manifests. By the end of Ant-Man and the Wasp, Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer) uses the power of quantum physics to stabilize Ava.

Taskmaster

Though she does not play as large a role as the rest of the team in The Thunderbolts, Taskmaster does work for Valentina too. Antonia Dreykov (Olga Kurylenko) is the daughter of General Dreykov, the head of the Red Room. During an assassination attempt targeting General Dreykov, Natasha Romanoff almost kills Antonia. Antonia still carries the scars from the explosion. General Dreykov then trained Antonia to become Taskmaster and used a substance to control her mind. In Black Widow, Natasha and Yelena redeem Natasha’s near-murder of Antonia by freeing her from the Red Room to restart her life.

Bob

Bob (Lewis Pullman) is a new character in the Thunderbolts, a mysterious man who seemingly appears out of nowhere inside Valentina’s secret bunker. We won’t reveal more about Bob here to avoid spoiling the movie.

source https://time.com/7281053/thunderbolts-team-members-what-to-know/

The History of Why Raw Milk Regulation is Necessary

On April 21, The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it will be suspending its oversight of the labs that conduct safety and quality testing on the nation’s milk supply. The move comes as raw milk is ascendant in federal public health policy. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has called for the end of what he deems the “aggressive suppression” of raw dairy by public health authorities, meaning that more deregulation may be on the way.

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Today’s raw milk evangelists like Kennedy claim that it has more nutrients, benefits the immune system, and that kids are healthier when they consume raw milk rather than pasteurized dairy. Public health authorities have debunked these claims while highlighting thousands of illnesses linked to raw milk. Nevertheless, raw dairy is increasingly popular with American consumers. It fits nicely into the “tradwife” aesthetic, personified by Ballerina Farm influencer Hannah Neeleman, who feeds her children raw milk on Tiktok for millions of viewers. Yet, like the rest of the aesthetic, the mainstreaming of raw dairy relies on consumers forgetting our history—in this case, a history in which kids got sick from raw milk.

The history of children’s health in the U.S. reveals an important truth. The U.S. government adopted a robust apparatus for regulating and monitoring the milk supply after an epidemic killed thousands of kids at the turn of the 20th century. This history offers a grim warning about what a future without milk regulation could hold for America’s children.

Nineteenth-century Americans recognized the dangers of an unregulated dairy industry. In 1843, the domestic writer Catharine Beecher warned parents that “diseased” milk was “the cause of extensive mortality among young children.” Yet, even after the French microbiologist Louis Pasteur patented the technology of pasteurization, or heating liquids to kill microorganisms, in 1865, Americans largely continued to consume raw milk for several more decades.

Read More: Public Health Experts Alarmed at Trump’s Pick of RFK Jr. to Lead HHS

They did so despite increasing fears about the dairy industry, driven by the way young children were consuming an increasingly dairy-centric diet. As America urbanized in the late 19th century, many mothers moved away from families who could have supported them in breastfeeding, while also working at Gilded Age jobs like textile factories without labor protections. The technologies of pumping and refrigeration, so essential to balancing work and breastfeeding today, were not yet widely available. This combination of barriers to breastfeeding proved insurmountable for many mothers.

Bad advice from their pediatricians compounded the situation. At the time, pediatrics was a new specialty trying to prove its worth, and practitioners mistakenly believed in sticking to a strict schedule for breastfeeding, which actually limited breastmilk supply. Hampered by this erroneous guidance, health authorities and the American public began to believe that women were physically incapable of producing enough breastmilk. 

The result of both inadequate support for new mothers and poor medical advice was that more and more mothers bottle-fed their babies cow’s milk. Young children drank lots of milk, too. Medical authorities like the pediatrician Luther Emmett Holt, whose 1894 The Care and Feeding of Children would become the most popular parenting manual of the early 20th century, advised parents to feed their toddlers milk at every meal.

But for kids at the turn of the century, milk came with dire risks. Amid the unbridled capitalism of the Gilded Age, the milk supply was a nightmare of corruption and contamination. On the farm, poor sanitation enabled cows and dairy workers to introduce tuberculosis, typhoid, and other pathogens into milk. Farmers or middlemen also frequently adulterated milk, watering it down to stretch supplies—with impure water likely to introduce further pathogens—or adding toxic substances, like formaldehyde or chalk, meant to conceal spoilage or make milk appear whiter. The milk was then shipped in open, unrefrigerated containers no matter the weather, vulnerable to even more contamination and spoilage. 

This poisoned milk threatened America’s most vulnerable consumers: young children. Infant mortality skyrocketed in the second half of the 19th century, up to 20% nationally and closer to 30% in urban centers. Tens of thousands of babies died every year of gastroenteritis known as “the summer complaint,” an epidemic of diarrhea that worsened in the warmer months. Gastrointestinal infections were the third leading cause of death across all ages, but particularly impacted small children’s fragile immune systems.

Read More: Is Raw Milk Safe? Here’s What to Know

Parents, many mourning dead children, pushed for lawmakers to clean up the milk supply. They joined a movement of Americans calling for government regulation of the food industry. Progressive Era reformers chronicled the lax food safety and labor conditions that put Americans at risk. In 1902, a Department of Agriculture chemist named Harvey Wiley launched a brilliant but dangerous public relations campaign dubbed “The Poison Squad” dosing human test subjects with food additives like formaldehyde and chronicling their alarming effects on the body. In his famous 1905 novel The Jungle, the journalist Upton Sinclair exposed the horrors of meatpacking plants and the threat they posed to Americans.

This activism prodded state and federal authorities to enact a flurry of public health legislation. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, leading to the creation of the FDA. In 1910, New York State mandated the pasteurization of all milk sold for human consumption. As an extra layer of oversight, public health authorities began testing cows for diseases like tuberculosis, to ensure that milk remained safe for American consumers.

Public health historians credit the cleanup of the milk supply as one of the major drivers of the dramatic decrease in child mortality over the course of the 20th century. Within two generations of the pasteurization mandates, “the summer complaint” had become a memory, so much so that Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician whose parenting advice defined childcare in mid-20th-century America, had to explain its history to the parents of Baby Boomers. In the 1964 edition of his bestseller Baby and Child Care, Spock described the terror of early 20th century doctors and parents who watched infants suffer “serious intestinal infections that afflicted tens of thousands of babies yearly.” Spock confidently asserted that pasteurization had made such suffering a thing of the past.

Yet as Kennedy’s attacks on dairy regulation illustrate, the memory of the infant mortality crisis has receded too far into the past. Unlike their turn-of-the-20th century forebears, most 21st century parents will never know the agony of losing a child, as infant mortality rates have fallen below 1%. Many Americans are unaware that government regulation of industry helped bring us these precious gains in children’s health, by keeping tuberculosis, E.coli, and yes, bird flu out of the milk people drink. If this important regulatory work is undone, Kennedy’s calls to “Make America Healthy Again” could bring back an infant mortality crisis previous generations of Americans thought they had overcome.

Carla Cevasco is associate professor of American studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is writing a book on the history of feeding children in the U.S.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.

source https://time.com/7280534/why-raw-milk-regulation-is-necessary/

How TIME and Statista Determined the World’s Top EdTech Companies of 2025

For the second time, TIME is awarding the World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025, in partnership with Statista, a leading international provider of market and consumer data and rankings. The result of this quantitative study: 350 companies dedicated to the development and provision of educational technologies, encompassing both products and services. Here’s how the winners were selected.

Methodology

The research project “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025” is a comprehensive analysis conducted to identify the top performing EdTech companies in the United States. First, companies had to primarily focus on developing and providing educational technologies, products, or services. The 350 companies with the highest score were awarded as “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025.”

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The ranking is built on two pillars: financial strength and industry impact. Statista gathered and scrutinized data from over 7,000 companies through desk research, online application forms, and collaborations with other data and market intelligence companies. A company received scores in each of these dimensions, which were then combined into an overall score.

For the first dimension, financial strength, Statista analyzed revenue, employee, and funding data, obtained from publicly available sources like annual reports, company websites, through media monitoring, and via databases. Additionally, company disclosures submitted via an online application form, which was freely accessible via the TIME website, were considered.

For the evaluation of the industry impact, Statista cooperated with HolonIQ and LexisNexis® Intellectual Property Solutions to assess companies in different impact dimensions, encompassing factors such as:

• quality and impact of their product/service portfolio
• quantity and value of a company’s IP (intellectual property) portfolio

In addition, Statista researched various metrics around web traffic, to assess the relevance of the products and services to the respective target groups.

The evaluation process involved assessing all relevant companies within the global EdTech sector that exhibited above-average performance on financial metrics in their geographical region. Subsequently, the selection was narrowed down to include only those companies that not only excelled financially but also demonstrated significant industry impact within their specific categories. This selection process allowed us to establish our final ranking of the World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025. Once the data was collected and evaluated, it was consolidated and weighted within a scoring model. The final score was calculated as follows: 70% x financial strength score + 30% x impact score. The companies with the highest score were awarded as “World’s Top EdTech Companies 2025” by TIME and Statista.

Alongside the list of 350 top EdTech companies, Statista and TIME are also publishing a “Rising Stars Ranking” highlighting the companies with the highest revenue growth rates over the past three years out of those who submitted company data via the online application process.

Applied criteria:

• company age 10 years and younger
• minimum revenue of 1 million U.S. dollars in 2022
• revenue growth rate of more than 20% over the last three years
  

Disclaimer
The selection of the companies and the definition of the evaluation criteria were based on independent journalistic criteria of TIME and Statista. The evaluation was carried out by the statistics and market research company Statista. TIME and Statista make no claim to the completeness of the companies examined.

The ranking only includes companies that qualify according to the criteria described in this document. A position in the ranking is a positive recognition based on research of publicly available data sources at the time and information received via an application process and through collaboration partners.

In addition, events after March 14, 2025, were not considered in the analysis. As such, the results of this list should not be used as the sole source of information for future deliberations. The information provided through this ranking should rather be considered in conjunction with other available information about a company.

The quality of companies that are not included in the ranking is not disputed.

source https://time.com/7280705/worlds-top-edtech-companies-2025-methodology/