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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss version="2.0" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" xmlns:georss="http://www.georss.org/georss" xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#" > <channel> <title>TIME</title> <atom:link href="https://time.com/feed/?limit=10" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /> <link>https://time.com</link> <description>Current & Breaking News | National & World Updates</description> <lastBuildDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 11:06:50 +0000</lastBuildDate> <language>en-US</language> <sy:updatePeriod> hourly </sy:updatePeriod> <sy:updateFrequency> 1 </sy:updateFrequency> <generator>https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.4</generator><site xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">228315549</site> <item> <title>George Miller Can’t Quit Mad Max</title> <link>https://time.com/6975716/george-miller-furiosa-interview/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975716/george-miller-furiosa-interview/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Eliana Dockterman]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[culturepod]]></category> <category><![CDATA[feature]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Magazine]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975716</guid> <description><![CDATA[As 'Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga' approaches, the filmmaker discusses his return to the wasteland, Anya Taylor-Joy, and what it will take to get the next movie made.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975716"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module" data-src="https://time.com/6975716/george-miller-furiosa-interview/" data-widget-id="SB_2" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/george-miller-furiosa-01.jpg" alt="George Miller in Cannes, France, on May 22, 2022."/> <p>George Miller has spent more than 40 years swerving in and out of the <a href="https://time.com/3850528/original-mad-max-review/" >post-apocalyptic world of <em>Mad Max</em></a><em>.</em> It’s an unpleasant place: dry, barren, and violent, but Miller can’t seem to stay away. And he had a compelling reason to return after <a href="https://time.com/3850323/mad-max-fury-road-eve-ensler-feminist/" >2015’s hugely successful <em>Mad Max: Fury Road</em></a><em>.</em> In preparing to bring that story to the big screen, Miller wrote not just one movie, but three.</p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>The first film was, of course, <em>Fury Road.</em> The film introduced a new protagonist, Furiosa, a one-armed road warrior played by <a href="https://time.com/4874478/charlize-theron-atomic-blonde/" >Charlize Theron</a>. She betrays the dictator she serves, a man obsessed with big muscles and bigger car engines, by smuggling his wives out of their prison. Furiosa ended up eclipsing the franchise’s titular hero, with <a href="https://time.com/4109858/tom-hardy-doubles-the-trouble-in-legend/" >Tom Hardy</a> in the role made famous by Mel Gibson.</p> <p>But in the nearly two-decade-long development process for <em>Fury Road,</em> Miller also sketched out two more films: an origin story for Furiosa and what happened to Max a year before <em>Fury Road.</em> Miller shared concept art for the Furiosa movie with Theron so she could better understand her character. “She said, ‘Oh, gosh, can we do the Furiosa story first?’” Miller remembers. But that train had left the station—or in the parlance of <em>Mad Max,</em> that war rig had left the Citadel.</p> <p><em>Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga</em> will finally debut on May 24, but with <a href="https://time.com/collection/time100-next-2021/5937738/anya-taylor-joy/" >Anya Taylor-Joy</a> replacing Theron as the solo lead—there’s no Max in this movie. The prequel chronicles 16 years of its hero’s life, from the moment she’s kidnapped as a child from her idyllic home by the henchmen of a crazed biker named Dementus, played by <a href="https://time.com/3586321/sexiest-men-history-photos/" >Chris Hemsworth</a> sporting a consciously comic prosthetic nose. (Miller’s character names, which include Rictus Erectus and Doof Warrior, are rarely subtle.) Furiosa spends the rest of the movie trying to return to her native land, though she’s occasionally distracted by fantasies of revenge.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/george-miller-furiosa-02.jpg?quality=85&w=1200" alt="FURIOSA"/> <p>Expectations for <em>Furiosa</em> are sky-high after <em>Fury Road </em><a href="https://time.com/4240519/oscars-2016-winners-list/" >won six Oscars</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy_and_influence_of_Mad_Max_in_popular_culture" target="_blank">became a cultural phenomenon</a>: its high-octane action scenes, shot largely without CGI, were so original and unrelenting that the movie left audiences dazed. <em>Fury Road’</em>s shoot was legendarily long and troubled—there’s an <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Chrome-Wild-Story/dp/0063084341" target="_blank">entire book</a> chronicling the on-set feuds and chaos at the studio. Despite all that, Miller is upping the ante with <em>Furiosa.</em> He employed 200 stunt performers, topping <em>Fury Road’</em>s 150. And the new movie boasts a 15-minute sequence that took nearly nine months to shoot. “You can’t anticipate how that effort will be apprehended,” Miller says over Zoom from his native Australia. “It’s in the hands of the audience now.”</p> <p><em>Fury Road</em> is essentially a 120-minute extended chase sequence with almost no dialogue. <em>Furiosa</em> is structured more like a traditional hero’s journey. The cars sometimes stop and park. The characters occasionally have conversations. Early reactions to the trailer <a href="https://screenrant.com/mad-max-furiosa-movie-cgi-backlash-criticisms/" target="_blank">critiqued</a> the film’s use of CGI. Some fans suggested Miller should have left his classic alone. But he couldn’t. The script was there. With red-tinted glasses that wouldn’t look out of place in the retrofuturistic world of <em>Mad Max </em>perched on his nose, Miller explains that he was determined to complete the story. </p> <p><strong>Read More:</strong> <a href="https://time.com/6549005/most-anticipated-movies-2024/" ><em>The 39 Most Anticipated Movies of 2024</em></a></p> <p>And that third film? The one that covers a year in Max’s life before the events of <em>Fury Road</em>? It’s tentatively titled <em>The Wasteland,</em> and Miller says it’s ready to go. “Depending on whether <em>Furiosa</em> gets traction or not, that movie is on the horizon,” he says. Will Hardy return to play Max? Miller smiles conspiratorially. “If the planets align.”</p> <hr/> <p>Furiosa has become an iconic action hero, up there with <a href="https://entertainment.time.com/2013/02/14/12-hours-watching-john-mcclane-the-diary-of-a-die-hard-marathoner/" >John McClane</a> and <a href="https://entertainment.time.com/2012/01/20/top-10-kickass-movie-women/" >Ellen Ripley</a>. It’s hard to imagine anyone besides Theron embodying her. “With Charlize, the Venn diagram of actor and character overlapped a lot,” says Miller. He briefly considered using technology to make Theron appear younger. “But the de-aging just wasn’t working, even in the hands of really masterful filmmakers like Martin Scorsese on <em>The Irishman</em> and Ang Lee with <em>Gemini Man,</em>” he says. </p> <p>Miller would have made the film sooner, but he spent years tied up in litigation with Warner Bros. over <em>Fury Road.</em> The director claimed the studio hadn’t paid his production company a promised bonus; the studio countersued because Miller delivered a 120-minute R-rated film instead of the 100-minute PG-13 movie he was contracted to make. (The suit went into arbitration, and Miller and WB are partnering again on <em>Furiosa.</em>) “By the time it came to it, we had to go with a younger actor,” Miller says.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/george-miller-furiosa-03.jpg?quality=85&w=1200" alt="still from FURIOSA"/> <p>Taylor-Joy is a slighter if equally mighty Furiosa. Miller asked the actor to send him an audition tape and let her choose from three monologues, including Peter Finch’s famous speech from <em>Network </em>in which he unravels on air. Taylor-Joy recorded the anchor’s ravings directly to camera. Though she would speak very few lines in <em>Furiosa,</em> she conjured the intensity needed to convey the mentality of a survivor living in a depraved world.</p> <p>It may seem bold that this franchise, defined by monster trucks and machismo, now has a female hero at its center. Fans spent years arguing about the message behind <em>Fury Road.</em> “There was a cohort of males who said, ‘Oh, you can’t have a female action hero,’” says Miller. “There was a cohort of feminists who said, ‘Why does she need Max at all?’”</p> <p><strong>Read More:</strong> <a href="https://time.com/5353143/sequels-better-than-original/" >39 Sequels That Are Better Than the Original Movie</a></p> <p>But for Miller, choosing to make Furiosa the hero of a <em>Mad Max</em> movie was a practical decision, not an ideological one. “When you tell a story, you don’t say the story is going to be about this particular theme,” he says. He conceived <em>Fury Road</em> during a dream on a transpacific flight. But he needed characters to put inside the cars.</p> <p>“In the case of <em>Fury Road,</em> I thought, ‘What if the MacGuffin, the thing everyone is chasing, were human?’ And that led to the wives being stolen from the warlord. And it couldn’t be a man taking the wives because that would be a different story. It would have to be a woman.” And so Furiosa was born. </p> <hr/> <p>Miller has always been a visual filmmaker. If Furiosa was conceived because Miller needed a hero to drive the war rig of his dreams, Max was born from grisly images Miller saw in real life. Before he became a filmmaker, Miller was an ER doctor who treated the victims of car accidents in rural Queensland where, in the 1970s, driving laws were lax and the consequences horrific. That gore inspired 1979’s <em>Mad Max.</em> Made on a shoestring budget, the production couldn’t afford a photocopy machine for the storyboard pictures. “I wrote out descriptions of every scene and every camera move for everyone working on the movie,” says Miller. “The screenplay was 274 pages long for a 90-minute movie.” </p> <p>The film became a sensation. The original <em>Mad Max </em>held the Guinness World Record for most profitable movie of all time. Miller completed a trilogy with <em><a href="https://entertainment.time.com/2012/05/18/rock-and-role-top-10-memorable-movie-performances-by-music-stars/slide/tina-turner-mad-max-beyond-thunderdome/" >Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome</a></em> in 1985. He took a detour into children’s films, including scripting the classic <em>Babe</em> and directing its sequel, <em>Babe: Pig in the City.</em></p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/george-miller-furiosa-04.jpg?quality=85&w=1200" alt=""/> <p>When he was ready to turn to <em>Fury Road,</em> a series of calamities delayed shooting, from 9/11—and Miller’s decision in its aftermath to pivot to the Oscar-winning animated film <em><a href="https://time.com/4609386/best-animated-films/" >Happy Feet</a></em>—to a rainstorm that turned the barren desert where Miller had planned to shoot into a flowering oasis. The cast and crew filmed for 138 grueling days in the desert. Theron and Hardy have both said it was a frustrating and stressful experience: <a href="https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/charlize-theron-mad-max-set-tension-trust-george-miller-1202231947/" target="_blank">Theron has said</a> they had no script, just pictures, and Miller responded to any direct questions about the plot with thesis-length answers. (During our interview he apologized multiple times for his lengthy, discursive responses.) </p> <p>Miller describes <em>Fury Road </em>as an “anthropological documentary.” The audience catches glimpses of specific behavior, like soldiers called War Boys spraying chrome paint into their mouths. “We get the sense that the spray paint has a meaning to the boys,” says Miller. “But you have to pick up on the run because we never stop to explain.” </p> <p><em>Furiosa</em> fills in the blanks of <em>Fury Road.</em> And <em>Fury Road,</em> a movie with famously few lines of dialogue, left a lot of blanks. How did Furiosa lose her arm? You’ll find out. How was her war rig built? Get ready for a montage.</p> <p>Part of what distinguished <em>Fury Road</em> from the other franchise films of its era was Miller’s refusal to weigh down the movie with lore. But Miller chafes at the notion that <em>Furiosa</em> could be accused of fan service. “In terms of choosing what to tell of her story, it wasn’t sitting down and making a shopping list,” he says. “It was character-driven.”</p> <p>For all the dirt that Miller’s tricked-out motorbikes kick up, his films are ultimately character studies—and Furiosa is an indelible one. </p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975716/george-miller-furiosa-interview/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975716</post-id> </item> <item> <title>How I Learned to Love My Granddaughter Without Fear</title> <link>https://time.com/6974687/becoming-grandmother-grief-essay/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6974687/becoming-grandmother-grief-essay/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Rebecca Gummere]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 11:30:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Family]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6974687</guid> <description><![CDATA["My emotions roiled with wonder and excitement, but all of it was overshadowed by a deep, resonating dread."]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6974687"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module" data-src="https://time.com/6974687/becoming-grandmother-grief-essay/" data-widget-id="SB_2" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/rebecca-gummere-granddaughter.jpg" alt=""/> <p>The phone call from my daughter in North Carolina came at six o’clock in the morning, unusually early for her. “I’m pregnant,” Maggie announced, her voice bubbling with delight.</p> <p>From 1,600 miles away I put down my mug of smoky dark-roast coffee and gave a shout. Her news was the last thing I would have expected as I sat in my rented house in Albuquerque, watching roadrunners skitter over the xeriscaping in the front yard, stabbing at the dried mealworms I’d just put out for them. </p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>Maggie and her husband, Jimmy, together for 11 years and married for eight, had been on the fence about having children. Four years into their marriage, they decided to try for a baby. But after years passed, they both assumed and then accepted it wasn’t going to happen. </p> <p><strong>Read More: </strong><a href="https://time.com/6318466/family-loneliness-essay-taylor-harris/" ><em>What My Family Taught Me About Loneliness</em></a></p> <p>I’d looked on with a mixture of curiosity and a small bit of envy as friends welcomed one grandchild after another. My oldest son, Liam, in his early 40s, was at the time unattached. I’d resigned myself to the possibility of never knowing that particular brand of joy, although I also couldn’t imagine what it would be like to actually be someone’s grandmother.</p> <p>And yet, here I was, trying to wrap my head around the idea. I walked through the house, my brindle Boxer dogging my footsteps as I did a quick inventory of room after room. In the next couple of days, I began packing up my belongings and arranging for housing with dear friends back home. </p> <p>During one of our phone calls, my daughter had asked, “What do you want your grandmother name to be?”</p> <p>“I have absolutely no idea,” I confessed. </p> <p>Meanwhile, I worked to tamp down a rising anxiety. My second child, Cooper, had been born 40 years ago with a heart defect. When he was 4 days old, he had closed-heart surgery to repair a coarctation of the aorta. What we didn’t know — what no one could have known then, with limited ability to see inside an infant’s heart — was there were other, more deadly defects hidden within, two holes in the wall separating the atria. When he was 6 weeks old, he died quietly at home in my arms as I held and rocked him, unaware he was slipping away from me. </p> <p><strong>Read More: </strong><a href="https://time.com/6309019/maggie-smith-divorce-loss-family-essay/" ><em>I Got Divorced. But My Family Is Still Whole</em></a></p> <p>When Cooper died, Liam was 2 1/2. To say I became an overly anxious mother would be an understatement. I monitored every bump and bruise, each sniffle and fever. Nightmares of childhood cancer and other life-threatening illnesses pushed their way into everyday activities. After all, I now knew that the worst was possible. </p> <p>Then I became pregnant again. After Maggie was born, I slept with her on my stomach most nights, and when she finally transitioned to a crib, I’d go into her room in the morning, half-expecting to find she’d died.</p> <p>The grip on my heart gradually released, though, as my healthy children grew into their wonderful selves with nothing more than the usual list of childhood maladies and injuries. And now here was my baby having a baby. My emotions roiled with wonder and excitement, but all of it was overshadowed by a deep, resonating dread.</p> <p>My daughter sent me the first ultrasound photos of “Little Bean,” a nickname they’d given in the earliest days when a pregnancy app indicated the developing clump of cells was the size of a vanilla bean.</p> <p>I peered at the mottled, blurry image of my grandchild at 8 weeks gestation. “What am I seeing?” I asked.</p> <p>“Here,” she texted and sent a second photo, this one with a red arrow pointing to a small darkish blob with a hazy dot in it like a dandelion tuft. “The brighter spot is the heart,” she wrote. </p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/rebecca-gummere-sonogram-redarrow.jpg" alt=""/> <p>I peered at the picture, trying to imagine the fuzzy image as a beating heart. Something in me broke open, then just as quickly slammed shut. </p> <p>Some years before, during my tenure at the domestic-violence and rape crisis agency, a co-worker had asked if I’d mind holding her newborn while she attended a short meeting. I happily took her baby boy in my arms, cooing and grinning at him, and brought him into my office. Sinking into the chair, the first thing I did was check to make sure he was breathing, as easily as one might check to make sure his socks were still on. Hot tears of sorrow and anger spilled down my cheeks at my automatic reaction to holding an infant. </p> <p>This is how trauma lives in the body, tentacled through our sense memory. So much of the terrible night my son died remains a blur. What I have recalled all too well is the cold stillness, the weight of his tiny form, and the shock of him being so utterly gone.</p> <p>Little Bean turned out to be a girl and with the given name June. All ultrasounds and other tests revealed her to be developing as she should. But I couldn’t shake the sense of dread. </p> <p>“So much could go wrong,” I worried aloud to a friend.</p> <p>“And so much could go right,” was her loving response.</p> <p><strong>Read More: </strong><a href="https://time.com/6328912/stephanie-land-class-poverty-joy-essay/" ><em>We Didn’t Have Much Money. My Daughter Still Deserved Joy</em></a></p> <p>Maggie was induced early one morning, and labor progressed slowly over the course of the day. At 9:37 that night I witnessed the moment my daughter pushed her baby girl into the world, a 7 ½-lb. miracle with downy dark hair and an adorable button nose. My son-in-law said I should do the honors — the obstetrician handed me the scissors, and I cut the cord, severing June from the warm, liquid world of her mother’s womb, and officially welcoming her Earthside.</p> <p>But after her first breath, the newborn cry, that plaintive, sharp wail all parents wait for, didn’t come. The nurses took June from my daughter’s arms and continued to rub and stimulate her as she blinked in the glare of the bright room, but her blood oxygen levels remained concerningly low.</p> <p>“We’re going to take her to the nursery,” one of the nurses said. My son-in-law followed. My daughter, unable to leave the bed because of the epidural, looked at me from across the room.</p> <p>A chest X-ray confirmed a suspected pneumothorax, a condition in which air leaks into the space between the lung and the chest. Because we live in a small town with a small hospital, June would need to be transported to an NICU an hour and a half away. Watching my daughter and son-in-law say a tearful goodbye to their newborn was one of the most wrenching scenes I’ve ever witnessed. The next morning my daughter was discharged, and I drove her to see her baby girl at the hospital where my son-in-law already was.</p> <p>The neonatal specialist assured them that the small hole in her lung would likely heal on its own, and three days later they brought June home. “Just forget this happened,” the doctor said. All signs pointed to complete health.</p> <p>But I was in a tailspin that I couldn’t seem to pull out of. </p> <p>Those first weeks I’d come to their house on Friday, taking charge of June at midnight after my daughter nursed her, and giving her the 2 a.m. and 5 a.m. bottles, watching her mouth as she suckled, stroking her soft skin. Did I feel like her grandmother? I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to feel. Friends had described a dizzying happiness at being “in the best club ever.”</p> <p>What I felt too much of was terror, deathly afraid of the small bundle I held, continually monitoring her rosebud lips for signs of a bluish tint, watching to make sure her chest was rising and falling, panicking when it seemed too long between breaths. The urge to tumble helplessly in love with my granddaughter was in full battle with the freshly resurfaced memories of the night my son died. I kept my fears to myself, not wanting to foist my unease on my already traumatized daughter and son-in-law, who were struggling to return to the normalcy of welcoming this new baby into their lives after her scary start. </p> <p>One afternoon, talking on the phone with a friend while driving in town, I heard myself say, “The doctors assured them the hole in her heart would heal.” There was a stunned silence as I realized what I’d said. “I mean her lung,” I said and hung up, pulling into a grocery-store parking lot where I sat with my face in my hands, weeping. In that moment, I knew I had a choice — release the dark grief or risk missing one of the most light-filled times of my life. </p> <p>“That was that baby,” I told myself. “This baby doesn’t have any holes in her heart. This baby is fine.” I offered myself a mantra to try. “That was then, this is now.” Whenever the old trepidation would rise, I’d repeat the words, reminding myself of the distance in years and reality between the death of my son and the life of this sweet, healthy baby girl. Gradually, my heart unwound.</p> <p>One afternoon, while my daughter napped in the next room, I snuggled little June close and rocked her. I leaned down to listen to the sound of her quiet breathing, this time not from fear but wonder. She looked up at me with deep blue eyes rimmed with dark lashes and stared as if memorizing my face. Unable to look away, I let her hold me in the power of her wide-open gaze.</p> <p>“The brighter spot is the heart,” my daughter had written to me all those months ago, and now baby June and I sat basking in the light of a love big enough to hold it all — yesterday’s grief, today’s joy, and all the beautiful and uncertain tomorrows. </p> <p>Outside, a soft breeze blew, and a shard of sunlight shot through the trees. I kissed my granddaughter’s forehead and began to sing.</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6974687/becoming-grandmother-grief-essay/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6974687</post-id> </item> <item> <title>Transphobia Makes Chest Binding More Dangerous</title> <link>https://time.com/6975583/transphobia-chest-binding-dangerous-essay/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975583/transphobia-chest-binding-dangerous-essay/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Maia Kobabe and Dr. Sarah Peitzmeier]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[freelance]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975583</guid> <description><![CDATA[Chest binding is accessible. That's exactly why it's so dangerous, write Maia Kobabe and Dr. Sarah Peitzmeier.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975583"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module" data-src="https://time.com/6975583/transphobia-chest-binding-dangerous-essay/" data-widget-id="SB_2" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Maia-Kobabe-Binding-Illustration.jpg" alt=""/> <p>Chest binding, or wearing anything to flatten the chest in order to appear masculine or androgynous, is one of many ways that transmasculine and nonbinary people can affirm their gender identity and harmonize their physical presentation with their sense of self. Some people bind in order to “pass” as male at times when being visibly transgender could be dangerous. Others bind for the mental health benefits, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2024.2316691" target="_blank">documented</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/26895269.2024.2319792" target="_blank">across</a> <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13691058.2016.1191675?casa_token=NVR2m-AOxswAAAAA%3AZ8wVOsgC7AHv40li82CQNvFUUlfpY3tqH0p7I-_5O83wxFJcHQqAfHNH-KVP4PLp9NSPWz3fNk1ijg" target="_blank">multiple</a> <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1054139X20305826?casa_token=EhA38XrQ77kAAAAA:bmiOZlT-EQ14gLn8WDwxxScz0jPA0KGMup-_TdrUCnowIciE8DR4_ADTPfI5Ww7NfjK3NYC91w" target="_blank">studies</a>, of being able to move through the world feeling at home in an authentic identity. But despite these life-changing benefits, anti-trans activists focus on the risks of binding, such as shortness of breath, skin abrasions, or shoulder pain, and seek to restrict the practice.</p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>Binding scares anti-trans activists because of its accessibility. Unlike hormones, binding requires no prescription; unlike state-ID changes, it requires no paperwork. Binding is often one of the first ways that trans and nonbinary youth who are assigned female at birth can flexibly, reversibly—sometimes quietly under their clothes and unbeknownst to anyone else—“try on” a new gender identity to see how it feels. This accessibility makes binding terrifying to those who want to eradicate trans people from public life. Their usual tricks are powerless to stop binding: there is no teacher they can gag, no librarian they can defund, no doctor they can criminalize to stop people from binding. Unless anti-trans zealots are willing to ban sports bras, bandages, tape, shapewear, or even swimsuits and tight shirts, there is no way to render binding completely inaccessible.</p> <p>It is no surprise then that anti-trans activists hyperfocus on the health risks of binding, often misrepresenting studies on binding to inflate the physical risks of binding and ignoring the sometimes life-saving mental health benefits. We know because one of us (Sarah Peitzmeier) conducted most of those studies. Tired of seeing statistics from these research studies ripped out of context and weaponized against the very communities who participated in and supported the research, we began to discuss turning the findings from these studies into a book. <em>Breathe: Journeys To Healthy Binding</em>, is a resource for those who have questions and concerns about binding, and for those who already bind and want to do so in ways that maximize the mental health benefits and minimize the physical risk. We want to help people bind in ways that are affirming, yet gentle on the body.</p> <p><em><strong>Read More: </strong><a href="https://time.com/6284143/elliot-page-memoir-pageboy-trans-identity/" >Elliot Page: Embracing My Trans Identity Saved Me</a></em></p> <p>Anti-trans activists who claim to be “protecting” people from the harms of binding by trying to restrict binding specifically and trans people more generally are in fact making binding more dangerous. In our research and lived experience, here are six ways we have seen transphobia make binding far more dangerous than it should be for trans and gender diverse people.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Legislative attacks on medically necessary healthcare</strong></h2> <p>Binding is the only option left to mitigate chest dysphoria in states where best-practice medical care has been banned. Anti-trans bills blocking medical or surgical affirming care for trans youth have been passed in <a href="https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/healthcare/youth_medical_care_bans" target="_blank">24 states</a>, with politicians inserting themselves between patients, families, and their doctors. Trans youth who go through puberty early without access to puberty blockers may have to manage severe chest dysphoria for a decade before they are even legally allowed to pursue top surgery, assuming they have the financial resources to access it. We know that receiving puberty blockers, compared to wanting puberty blockers but being unable to access them, is associated with <a href="https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2019-1725" target="_blank">70% lower lifetime odds</a> of suicidal ideation – so this is lifesaving care. It seems particularly cruel, then, for the same people who advocated for these laws denying healthcare to also attack binding. If anti-trans activists truly cared about the potential risks of binding for trans youth, they would not simultaneously advocate for bans on medically necessary care.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Marginalization in healthcare</strong></h2> <p>Trans patients who do experience injuries or health issues from binding often don’t have access to knowledgeable and compassionate treatment. Even trans-affirming providers generally receive <a href="https://journals.lww.com/academicmedicine/fulltext/2021/06000/a_call_for_lgbtq_content_in_graduate_medical.35.aspx" target="_blank">no training</a> in how to counsel patients to reduce their risk around binding, as medical and nursing schools typically see trans-specific topics like binding as “specialty” topics. At worst, providers may be actively prejudiced against trans people. Laws against providing gender-affirming care in <a href="https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/healthcare/youth_medical_care_bans" target="_blank">24 states</a> can be interpreted broadly and scare providers from offering any kind of care to trans adolescents or even adults. Binding-related medical issues are thus left to worsen without quality clinical care.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Binding can be necessary to navigate transphobic spaces</strong></h2> <p>Being visibly trans can expose people to discrimination, and binding is sometimes the only way to safely move through a hostile world. It is still legal to discriminate against trans people in <a href="https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/employment_non_discrimination_laws" target="_blank">employment</a> or <a href="https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/non_discrimination_laws/housing" target="_blank">housing</a> in 30 states, and trans people are banned from using the <a href="https://www.lgbtmap.org/equality-maps/nondiscrimination/bathroom_bans" target="_blank">restroom</a> that matches their gender in 10 states. Some trans people may present as otherwise masculine but for the appearance of their unbound chest, which would “out” them as transgender. Until we live in a world where people can safely express a range of gender presentations without living in fear of assault or discrimination, binding is essentially the only option for many transmasculine people who need to “pass” for their own safety. These people may also have to keep binding for safety reasons regardless of any symptoms they may develop.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Concealing binding due to stigma increases the risks</strong></h2> <p>The health risks from binding are increased by the need to conceal it. For instance, teens who are trying to conceal their binder from their parents often have trouble washing their binder regularly without their parents seeing it in the laundry. As a result, the dirt and sweat buildup on their unwashed binder predisposes them to skin complications. Without parental support, many teens cannot purchase a binder, which is typically ordered online with a credit card. Some of these teens resort to using ACE bandages, which are more readily available but far more dangerous because they are designed to compress inflammation. One <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1054139X20305826?casa_token=4ZbBi371NTQAAAAA:djexj2o0a8SJI3jCkIr1WMWZGeGQME8f6fpCNkRu-1JTmFhpL6x51r7QQX5piNN01EdzoRw" target="_blank">2020 study</a> by researchers and clinicians at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles found that teens with parents who opposed binding were almost twice as likely to have used ACE bandages to bind their chests. Teens with supportive parents had access to safer options.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Restricted access to information on safer binding that does exist</strong></h2> <p>Because discussing gender identity is banned or restricted in schools in 14 states, trans and nonbinary people often struggle to access information about trans-specific issues such as binding. We have a <a href="https://doi.org/10.1080/13691058.2016.1191675" target="_blank">growing</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-0728" target="_blank">evidence</a> <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jadohealth.2020.09.029" target="_blank">base</a> and <a href="https://us.jkp.com/products/healthy-chest-binding-for-trans-and-nonbinary-people" target="_blank">clinical expertise</a> around how to reduce risk associated with binding—including taking one day off from binding each week, avoiding use of ACE bandages, and stretching muscles and ligaments that may be constricted by binding—but in an era of book bans and gag rules, many trans people have no way to learn these important tips. Instead, they may assume that binding is inherently painful and this is just the price they have to pay, which is unequivocally not true. We now know there are so many ways to make binding safer.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading"><strong>Unmet need for gender affirmation</strong></h2> <p>When there is a gap between how people fundamentally see themselves and how the world sees them, they are more likely to engage in risky (but identity-affirming) behaviors to help close that gap. When trans people are chronically misgendered at work or school and are banned from medically affirming their gender, binding may be one of the only tools they have to affirm their gender. They will be more likely to ignore signs that their body is struggling with the side effects of binding, as they have nothing else to affirm them. Combine this with lack of information about how to bind more safely and lack of healthcare to address problems that emerge, and people can end up with serious binding-related symptoms.</p> <p><a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychres.2023.115339" target="_blank">Forty percent</a> of trans adults in the U.S. have attempted suicide at some point in their lives. Binding can help people imagine a future for themselves that feels worth living. As one of our research participants said, “Binding gave me the freedom to exist.”</p> <p>Many people successfully bind with minimal physical side effects even in today’s world. If every trans person who wanted to bind could do so with a properly fitting binder, while living day to day without fear violence for being visibly trans, all while having access to knowledgeable and affirming medical care (including puberty blockers or top surgery as desired and appropriate), binding could become safer for everyone.</p> <p>It’s on all of us to create that world. We call on everyone to fight back against anti-trans legislation, disrupt anti-trans hostility, and to support the trans youth and adults in our communities as they become their most authentic selves.</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975583/transphobia-chest-binding-dangerous-essay/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975583</post-id> </item> <item> <title>There’s a New Way for Moms in the U.S. to Recover After Childbirth. Most Can’t Afford It</title> <link>https://time.com/6974376/postnatal-retreats-postpartum-mothers-cost/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6974376/postnatal-retreats-postpartum-mothers-cost/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Eliana Dockterman]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 11:00:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Parenting]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false"></guid> <description><![CDATA[There's a new way for moms in the U.S. to recover after childbirth. Most can't afford it]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6974376"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module" data-src="https://time.com/6974376/postnatal-retreats-postpartum-mothers-cost/" data-widget-id="SB_2" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/postnatal-retreat-ahma.jpg" alt="Ahma & Co Retreat"/> <p>Mercedes Forrest first heard about postnatal retreats when one of her favorite <a href="https://time.com/6187968/peloton-instructors-money-famous/" >Peloton</a> instructors, Becs Gentry, posted on Instagram about her stay at Boram Postnatal Retreat, the first such center in the U.S. Forrest watched Gentry and her husband celebrate their newborn by checking into a luxury hotel, sipping champagne, and munching on protein-rich meals of salmon and seasonal salads. In the caption, Gentry wrote that during her stay she attended classes on infant CPR and met with a lactation consultant to check that her baby was properly latching. Forrest wasn’t even pregnant yet. “But I knew if I ever had a baby, that’s where I was going,” she says.</p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>Eventually, she did. After considering hiring a doula or night nurse who would help feed and care for the baby overnight, Forrest decided a stay at Boram would be akin to hiring a doula, lactation consultant, personal chef, and cleaning person in one space for a fraction of the price, albeit still a significant sum. And while she did indulge in daily foot baths during her five-night stay in August, what Forrest most appreciated was the ability to call a nurse anytime day or night to whisk away her baby to a nursery for a few hours and offer Forrest and her husband some much-needed sleep.</p> <p><strong>Read More:</strong> <a href="https://time.com/6972880/maternity-ward-closures-us/" ><em>Why Maternity Care Is Underpaid</em></a></p> <p>Postnatal retreats have been popular in Korea, where they are known as <em>sanhujoriwon</em>, since the 1990s; there, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/28/world/asia/south-korea-joriwon-postpartum-care.html" target="_blank">eight out of 10</a> new mothers check into one, though not all are quite as posh as Boram. In recent years, they’ve gained popularity across Asia and Europe and are just beginning to gain traction in the U.S., thanks in part to Instagram posts about how much support new moms receive abroad. “You have momfluencers from other countries, and you see how postpartum is for them,” says Forrest. “And you realize treatment of mothers in America is so underwhelming.”</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/postnatal-retreat-st-park.jpg" alt="Staff take care of newborns at St. Park, a postpartum care center, or joriwon, in Seoul, South Korea, Jan. 15, 2024. "/> <p>It’s the same understanding Boram co-founder and namesake Boram Nam came to more than a decade ago when she was pregnant with her first child and deciding whether she should have the baby in New York City or her native Korea. “I created an Excel chart with pros and cons because all my friends were checking themselves into these postpartum retreats in Korea,” she says. Ultimately, she and her husband decided they couldn’t afford to travel. “How is it possible we live in one of the most amazing cities in the world and have nothing like this?” she asks.</p> <p>In May 2022, the couple opened Boram, which translates from Korean to “fruit of one’s labor,” inside the Thompson Central Park Hotel in New York City. It has since served more than 700 families, who, on average, stay six nights, usually with a partner, though at least one guest stretched her visit to 42 days. The Village Postnatal Retreat Center opened at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco last July. A retreat called Sanu opened in McLean, Va., in December. The Ahma & Co. retreat debuted in Orange County in March. Retreats are also popping up in Washington, D.C., Seattle, and San Diego. “My feed is full of the luxe mom movement,” Forrest says. “The older generation would say, ‘Well, I did it by myself, and my husband worked all day.’ And I think now more moms are not ashamed. They’re like, ‘If I have the means to get help, I’m going to do it.’”</p> <p>It’s hardly surprising that there’s a market for these retreats in the U.S. The federal government has an abysmal track record when it comes to support for new mothers and infants. The U.S. is the only developed country without a federal policy of paid family leave and <a href="https://www.ajmc.com/view/us-has-highest-infant-maternal-mortality-rates-despite-the-most-health-care-spending" target="_blank">rates first in maternal and infant mortality among that same group</a>. <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK519070/#:~:text=Postpartum%20depression%20most%20commonly%20occurs,%25%20to%2020%25%20of%20women." target="_blank">Up to 20% of mothers in the</a> U.S. experience postpartum depression. And in the U.S. <a href="https://time.com/6967372/postpartum-care-america-essay/" >postpartum care</a> for mothers is often limited to a single checkup about six weeks after the baby’s delivery, <a href="https://www.marchofdimes.org/find-support/topics/postpartum/your-postpartum-checkups#:~:text=Research%20shows%20that%20almost%2040,to%20all%20your%20postpartum%20checkups." target="_blank">an appointment nearly 40% of new moms miss</a>.</p> <p>But while these retreats can be a haven for new parents, the experience comes at a cost: Depending on length of stay, Boram costs about $995 per night. And unlike some of their foreign counterparts—the Korean government offers <a href="https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20240213050546" target="_blank">subsidies</a> and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/16/south-korea-birth-rate-fertility/" target="_blank">discounts</a> on postpartum care—the American retreats are not subsidized by the government and few of their offerings are covered by even the most expensive insurance plans. This means this level of care is out of reach for the vast majority of people who give birth in the U.S., leading some women’s advocates to question whether they are solving a problem or simply offering cover to a government unwilling to tackle maternal and infant health issues.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/postnatal-retreat-the-village.jpg" alt=""/> <hr/> <p><strong>Jennifer Darwin, founder </strong>of The Village Postnatal Retreat Center, worked for 11 years as a labor-and-delivery and pediatric nurse and witnessed firsthand how little support mothers got after giving birth. “We had to discharge families because of insurance, but they weren’t ready,” she says. “The looks on their faces, they were shocked they had to go home with this human and didn’t know what to do.”</p> <p>The minimal coaching parents did receive was often short and contradictory. “I’d see nurses say, ‘This is how you’re supposed to breastfeed: Do 15 minutes on this side, then 15 minutes on this side.’ That nurse would clock out,” Darwin says. “And the next nurse comes in and says, ‘You’re doing it wrong. You only breastfeed on one side.’ Then I would show up for my shift, and people are almost in tears. Their anxiety is through the roof because they feel they’re doing everything wrong.” Darwin eventually left nursing to become a birth doula because she thought she could help more parents that way. But when she realized even then she couldn’t meet her clients’ needs—she’d require a whole team of nurses and doulas for that—she began thinking about starting a postnatal retreat.</p> <p>Sanu founder Julia Kim arrived at the same conclusion based on her experiences as a parent. “I took all the courses on how to change a diaper and what to do if they’re choking. I read all the books. I scoured the Internet. I was 110% ready,” she remembers. “Then I had my baby and was so lost. I couldn’t swaddle the baby. I just thought, we need to better prepare mothers, especially when it’s hard for them to walk or go to the bathroom as they’re leaving the hospital.”</p> <p>Many countries have figured out how to mitigate feelings of stress and isolation for new parents. In China, a postpartum parent rests for a month while a family member or “confinement nanny” attends to housework, older children, and other tasks. In many parts of Latin America, female relatives take on domestic duties for a 40-day period called <em>la cuarentena</em>. In Japan, new mothers often return to their own parents’ homes while still pregnant and stay after the birth to be cared for while they heal. In the Netherlands, the government sends a maternity nurse to new parents’ homes after they’re discharged from the hospital. In Sweden, nurses and midwives make home visits after delivery. In the U.S., meanwhile, <a href="https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-real-war-on-families" target="_blank">one in four women returns to work within two weeks of childbirth</a>.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/postnatal-retreat-boram.jpg" alt=""/> <p>Erin Erenberg, CEO of Chamber of Mothers, a national nonprofit that advocates for paid family leave and affordable childcare, agrees with the founders of these retreats that new mothers are in desperate need of medical attention and psychiatric support in the months after their baby is born. “We need to look at this as an emergency,” she says. But she and others who lobby for postpartum support to be enshrined in law worry about the impact of relying on private solutions amid a public crisis. “When you offer a private service, it further widens the gap between the haves and the have-nots in this country,” she says.</p> <p>Many of the people who can afford to book these retreats can also afford support of some kind. All the women who spoke to TIME about their stays at retreats said they had considered some combination of night nurses, lactation consultants, and postpartum doulas before booking a room. Erenberg argues that it’s the women who have no parental leave or access to affordable childcare who are in most desperate need of care. “In a country where women battling poverty say, ‘I don’t know that I can afford to have children,’ a private solution is a flawed one,” she says.</p> <p>The hefty fee for these retreats–typically between $700 and $1,400 per night–helps cover the salaries of lactation consultants, therapists who screen for postpartum depression, and other experts, in addition to equipment like bassinets and nursing pillows, but the founders acknowledge the price tag is prohibitively expensive for most people. “We’re trying to figure out how to do this without sacrificing the level of care,” says Kim of Sanu. Boram, meanwhile, has tried to make its services more accessible by launching an online subscription for $40 per month called “Boram Anywhere,” which includes recorded classes on everything from babywearing to bottle feeding. For an extra $200 parents can receive three one-on-one coaching sessions.</p> <p>The founders of these retreats speak of a future in which every mom can access at least some version of the support services. Esther Park, founder of Ahma & Co., argues they will be a “proof of concept” for insurance companies. “We’re starting with the market that can pay out of pocket because we want to establish the service as something that is needed,” she says. Boram has launched pilot programs with private companies that may be willing to offer postnatal retreats as a perk to lure and retain employees. The founders point to the culture shift around fertility treatment as a model: 46% of companies with more than 500 employees now provide some sort of coverage for IVF, <a href="https://www.mercer.com/en-us/insights/us-health-news/ivf-uncertainty-in-alabama-what-can-employers-do/" target="_blank">according to a survey from Mercer</a>. And New York passed a law in 2020 that mandates large group insurance plans to cover IVF. They’re convinced the benefits of postpartum support will eventually become apparent to lawmakers, who will in turn find ways to subsidize support, at least in some states. “The government says, ‘Wow this is actually much better for the general population,’” says Park.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/postnatal-retreat-boram-2.jpg" alt="Melina Hope, left, and Ariana Guilford, right, who are Boram Postnatal Retreat nursery staffers at the Langham Hotel in New York City on May 10, 2022. "/> <hr/> <p><strong>If you’ve followed the</strong> debates over family leave and childcare in recent years as legislation has stalled, it may be hard to imagine this vision becoming a reality anytime soon. Erenberg expresses skepticism at the notion that Congress will ever find the funds to support low-income mothers seeking to stay at postpartum retreats when it can’t even pass a bill on universal childcare. Instead, she thinks there’s a simple explanation for why postpartum retreats are gaining steam in the U.S. “Capitalism, honestly,” she says. “We see these models abroad, and it’s very American to say, ‘That’s a good business idea,’ instead of saying, ‘There is a serious systemic support gap for American mothers that needs to be addressed.’”</p> <p>In fact, even the private sector may not yet be sold on the idea of postnatal retreats. Several of the founders of these retreats say they had trouble convincing U.S. investors of the value of the business model. “There still isn’t an understanding of postpartum care as essential care here,” says Suk Park, Boram Nam’s husband and co-founder of Boram. “It was easier to present this idea to Korean venture capitalists than it was to American ones.”</p> <p>The majority of the first guests to sign up for Boram were Asian or Asian American couples already familiar with the concept, though that pattern has begun to change. Kim and Darwin observed something similar with their retreats, Sanu and The Village respectively, noting that their early guests hailed from cultural backgrounds where postpartum support is the norm.</p> <p>That was true for Linda Wen, who checked into The Village when her husband expressed concern that hiring a confinement nanny who would live in their home would afford them little privacy. “I’m Chinese, and in Chinese culture something like this or a confinement nanny is not unheard of. There’s a lot of emphasis in the culture on recovery of the mother,” she says. “I knew something like this existed. I just didn’t know how luxurious it could be.”</p> <p>Wen found that she valued the mental-health support as much as the physical support. She would wander out of her room to the mothers’ lounge where Darwin and other staffers would offer snacks and empathy. “Nobody tells you giving birth is trauma. Your whole body is in pain, not just <a href="https://time.com/6318265/vagina-whisperer-sara-reardon-pelvic-floor-therapy/" >your pelvic floor</a> but your breasts and your nipples,” says Wen. “Your hormones are fluctuating and you’re crying about everything. It was great to have the Village retreat women there be like, ‘Yeah that’s normal.’”</p> <p>Darwin says her ultimate goal is for postnatal retreats to become as mainstream as doulas. “The idea of having a doula, that really blew up in the last decade,” she says. “I want people to feel like this is also something they deserve. Fifteen years ago there was no such thing as a babymoon, but now people take that vacation. That’s what I want to do with postnatal retreats because it kickstarts your recovery.”</p> <p>For now, stays at these high-end retreats remain options for only a privileged few. But Forrest looks back at her time at Boram and refuses to feel guilty for seeking help. The way American mothers are asked to function at home after childbirth is unsustainable, she says. “You can’t get into a routine because you’re in survival mode of when to eat, when to shower, when to feed,” she says. “The retreat takes you out of survival mode.”</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6974376/postnatal-retreats-postpartum-mothers-cost/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6974376</post-id> </item> <item> <title>The Problem With TV’s New Holocaust Obsession</title> <link>https://time.com/6975718/holocaust-tv-shows-trend/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975718/holocaust-tv-shows-trend/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Judy Berman]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 10:00:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[culturepod]]></category> <category><![CDATA[longform]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Magazine]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975718</guid> <description><![CDATA[From 'The Tattooist of Auschwitz' to 'We Were the Lucky Ones' to 'The New Look,' Holocaust dramas are everywhere. But they rarely connect with the present.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975718"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module" data-src="https://time.com/6975718/holocaust-tv-shows-trend/" data-widget-id="SB_2" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Kume_Pather_Full_Page_RBG_07_05_2024_V4.jpg" alt=""/> <p></p> <p>When you think about <a href="https://time.com/6974378/holocaust-remembrance-education-essay/" >the Holocaust</a>, as we all do in a 21st century shaped by the cataclysms of the 20th, what images appear in your mind’s eye? I see Nazis marching into city squares. Jews crushed into airless cattle cars. An iron gate with the inscription “arbeit macht frei,” and beyond it, rows of spartan dormitories housing skeletal inmates in filthy striped uniforms, subjected to all manner of dehumanization. There are smokestacks, barbed wire, mass graves.</p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>These awful tableaux are the products of a lifelong immersion in Holocaust narratives, from factual accounts in textbooks to visits to museums to documentaries screened at Hebrew school. But because I grew up in the era of <a href="https://time.com/5470613/schindlers-list-true-story/" ><em>Schindler’s List</em></a><em> </em>and <a href="https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,989504,00.html" ><em>Life Is Beautiful</em></a>, my most indelible impressions of the genocide come from pop culture. When I envision a concentration camp, I am seeing a collage of movie stills. </p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/NUP_203362_00001.jpg" alt="The Tattooist of Auschwitz - Season 1"/> <p>The very same imagery suffuses <em>The Tattooist of Auschwitz</em>, Peacock’s new, six-part adaptation of Heather Morris’ internationally best-selling 2018 novel. Inspired by <a href="https://time.com/6973530/the-tattooist-of-auschwitz-true-story/" >the author’s conversations with Lali Sokolov</a>, a Slovakian Jew who spent the final years of World War II tattooing ID numbers on new arrivals at the notorious death camp, it is ultimately, as Harvey Keitel’s elderly Lali explains to Heather (<a href="https://time.com/4671736/melanie-lynskey-profile/" >Melanie Lynskey</a>), “a love story.” But that romance, between young Lali (Jonah Hauer-King) and another prisoner, Gita (Anna Próchniak), unfolds against what I can only describe as a familiar Holocaust backdrop. Viewers witness suffering that fits our broadest conceptions of the camps: sadistic Nazis; lines of naked bodies slouching towards death; Jews praying and singing to reassert their humanity.</p> <p><em>The Tattooist</em> is solidly made historical fiction, built on benign intentions and open-hearted performances. It’s also the latest—and, in that quotidian concentration-camp hell dominates the plot, the most generic—example of a dubious TV trend: the Holocaust drama. While the genre dates back decades, and isn’t limited to the small screen, the past year has seen an explosion of such shows about Nazis and their prey, from <a href="https://time.com/6959289/we-were-the-lucky-ones-review-hulu/" ><em>We Were the Lucky Ones</em></a><em> </em>to <a href="https://time.com/6693287/the-new-look-review-apple/" ><em>The New Look</em></a><em> </em>to <a href="https://time.com/6268258/transatlantic-review/" ><em>Transatlantic</em></a>; <a href="https://time.com/6276004/a-small-light-review/" ><em>A Small Light</em></a><em> </em>to <a href="https://time.com/6330434/all-the-light-we-cannot-see-review-netflix/" ><em>All the Light We Cannot See</em></a>.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Transatlantic_Unit_©AnikaMolnar_Netflix_035.jpg" alt="Hanno Koffler as Hans Fittko, Deleila Piasko as Lisa Fittko, Cory Michael Smith as Varian Fry and Amit Rahav as Thomas Lovegrove in Transatlantic, Courtesy of Netflix © 2023"/> <p>Each of these series has its own angle. What unites most of them, however, is unwittingly exploitative imagery that long ago lost its power to shock and an adherence to tropes of individual suffering and perseverance, heroism and villainy, that abstract the Holocaust from any but the most anodyne political context: Nazis evil, Jews brave. This is a tumultuous moment for Jewish identity. <a href="https://time.com/6309354/calling-out-antisemitism-essay/" >Antisemitism</a> and <a href="https://time.com/6049600/sebastian-junger-father-fascism-spain/" >fascist ideology</a> are surging—and that trend is driving Hollywood’s demand for Holocaust scripts—as <a href="https://time.com/6969875/pro-palestinian-encampments-take-over-college-campuses-across-america/" >Jews weigh the morality</a> of <a href="https://time.com/6974994/israel-warns-palestinians-leave-rafah-gaza-attack/" >Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza</a>. Yet the stories TV keeps telling about the most painful years in modern Jewish history too often cling to sentiment and cliché. What we need from these narratives—political insight, introspection—remains elusive.</p> <hr/> <p>In high school, I took two classes that happened to screen French New Wave filmmaker <a href="https://time.com/13802/alain-resnais/" >Alain Resnais</a>’ documentary <em>Night and Fog</em> just weeks apart. Released in 1956, the half-hour film exposed an international audience to photographic evidence of the multifarious horrors of the camps. The first viewing was as enlightening as it was harrowing. But the second felt obscene. I was staring at those same distressing images—slow pans across gas chambers disguised as showers, mounds of emaciated corpses—without learning anything new. I had to excuse myself after a few minutes.</p> <p><a href="https://time.com/5584111/met-gala-2019-camp-history/" >Susan Sontag</a> recounted a similar experience in her 1977 book <em>On Photography</em>. The cultural critic wrote that when she first encountered photos from the camps, at 12, “something broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feeling started to tighten; something went dead; something is still crying.” But as the photos proliferated, she grew inured—evidence of a familiarity with atrocity that was alarming in itself: “At the time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images. After 30 years, a saturation point may have been reached. In these last decades, ‘concerned’ photography has done at least as much to deaden conscience as to arouse it.”</p> <p>A half-century later, <em>The New Look </em>on Apple TV+, <em>Lucky Ones </em>on Hulu, and <em>The Tattooist</em>—all based on true stories, cast with recognizable stars, and released in the past three months—cement a new era of Holocaust-fiction supersaturation. <em>The New Look </em>is an <a href="https://time.com/6694793/the-new-look-apple-tv-true-story/" >origin story for Christian Dior</a> (Ben Mendelsohn), whose struggle to free a sister (<a href="https://time.com/4773758/game-of-thrones-maisie-williams-arya-stark/" >Maisie Williams</a>) condemned to the camps for her role in the French Resistance is contrasted with the brazen Nazi collaboration of his rival Coco Chanel (<a href="https://time.com/6195091/both-sides-of-the-blade-review/" >Juliette Binoche</a>). In <em>Lucky Ones</em>, a <a href="https://time.com/6961284/we-were-the-lucky-ones-true-story-hulu/" >family of Polish Jews fleeing the Nazis</a> endures years of separation and hardship. <em>The Tattooist </em>is the most conventional concentration-camp narrative of the three, framed by Lali’s conversations, in the early aughts, with the woman who would transform his reminiscences into a biographical novel.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/wwlo_102_vc_00221rf.jpg" alt="LVOV"/> <p> Although their plots diverge, the shows have strikingly similar emotional arcs and moral agendas. Each one drags the viewer through endless human suffering, whether behind the gates of <a href="https://time.com/5577552/holocaust-remembrance-auschwitz/" >Auschwitz</a> or in a Soviet work camp or even in a Paris atelier where Dior is all but forced to design gowns for the wives of the Nazi officers whose minions are holding his sister, Catherine, captive. At long last, the finales bring catharsis. Families and lovers reunite. Inspired by Catherine, Dior reinvents French fashion for an exuberant postwar era. Careful to temper happy endings with somber tributes to the millions who died while these heroes lived, albeit scarred by their experiences, the creators of these series nonetheless leave us to exult in the triumph of the human spirit over the swastika-draped forces of evil.</p> <p>The morality that underlies these dramas tends to be simplistic. No one seriously disputes that the Nazis are the bad guys. (When Netflix’s <em>All the Light We Cannot See</em>, which focuses on French resisters rather than Jewish captives,<em> </em>attempts to inject nuance into the depiction of Nazis, through the thought-experiment character of a brilliant orphan conscripted to fight for a cause he finds repugnant, the result is unintentionally funny.) But that doesn’t mean the Reich must always be represented by one or two conniving, mid-level psychopath characters, plus dozens of faceless foot soldiers. The implication of such depictions is that Germany during the Second World War was populated by millions of extraordinarily deranged individuals, rather than overtaken by a regime that normalized, euphemized, and incentivized genocidal hatred to such an extent that only Europeans of remarkable courage resisted. </p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/The_New_Look_Photo_010108.jpg" alt=""/> <hr/> <p>The impression that the Holocaust was an anomaly, perpetrated by avatars of rootless evil, isn’t just a comforting misapprehension. With fascist ideology gaining traction in the U.S. and abroad, it’s a dangerous one, blind to the systemic workings of authoritarian populism. As the historian Dan Stone argues in <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-holocaust-dan-stone?variant=41055726895138" target="_blank"><em>The Holocaust: An Unfinished History</em></a>: “The Holocaust is not a lesson about the dangers of bullying, nor even a tale of the dangers of hatred. It is a warning that states, when elites become desperate to hold on to power, can do terrible, traumatic things, and that the deep psychology of modernity produces monsters the likes of which even the sleep of reason would struggle to generate.”</p> <p>The best recent representation of this phenomenon is <a href="https://time.com/6281554/the-zone-of-interest-review/" ><em>The Zone of Interest</em></a>, <a href="https://time.com/6899602/jonathan-glazer-oscars-speech-gaza/" >Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning film</a> about the family of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel). Instead of reproducing the now-commonplace sights of the Holocaust, Glazer confines himself to this upwardly mobile home that shares a wall with Auschwitz, gazing with disdain upon the perfect flowers Rudolf’s wife Hedwig (Sandra Hüller) cultivates in her garden. That the Hösses are not remarkably evil—that they celebrate birthdays and reminisce about vacations—is the point. Like so many of their peers, they are beneficiaries of a system whose hateful leaders mobilized the manpower to implement their Final Solution, in part, by fulfilling the frustrated ambitions of an entitled, Christian working class.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/https___cdn.sanity.io_images_xq1bjtf4_production_8cd0982c7c45b7508050f53e1de32f68b3ecd47c-1920x1080-2.jpg" alt="Zone of Interest"/> <p>Television has not been entirely bereft of politically aware histories of the Holocaust. Viewed by <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47042244" target="_blank">120 million people in the U.S.</a> and exported around the world, NBC’s 1978 NBC miniseries <em>Holocaust </em>is like <em>Lucky Ones </em>if the family at its center wasn’t so lucky. When it isn’t mawkish, it’s stiff. Yet the presence of the gentile Erik Dorf (Michael Moriarty), a desperate, out-of-work lawyer with leftist sympathies, who nonetheless rises through the ranks of the SS to become a legal architect of the genocide, speaks to an understanding of the Holocaust as the product of a broken society seduced into fascism.</p> <p>Last year, two TV series, Netflix’s <em>Transatlantic </em>and Nat Geo’s <em>A Small Light</em>, illuminated the other side of the epochal struggle between Nazism and humanism, dramatizing the stories of real people who fought to save the lives of Jews and other targets of the Reich. Set amid the brave souls who led the Emergency Rescue Committee, in Marseille, helping artists and intellectuals escape German-occupied Europe, <em>Transatlantic </em>was disappointingly shallow. Much more perceptive, <em>A Small Light</em> follows <a href="https://time.com/5793509/the-resisters-100-women-of-the-year/" >Miep Gies</a> (Bel Powley), the heroic young woman who hid <a href="https://time.com/4803406/anne-frank-diary-anniversary/" >Anne Frank</a>’s family from the Nazis in Amsterdam. Through her bond with the Franks, she discovers an ethical obligation to join the Dutch resistance. While she risks her own life on a daily basis, the acquiescence of her friends to the Nazis’ assault on their Jewish and queer neighbors horrifies Miep.<em> </em>It’s the one TV Holocaust drama from the past several years whose profound insight justifies reimmersing viewers in one of humanity’s lowest moments.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/ASmallLight_Ep101_Sc151_Day06_0062_R.jpg" alt="92147"/> <hr/> <p><em>This really happened</em> continues to be the take-home message of most Holocaust series in 2024, as though <em>Holocaust </em>and <em>Schindler’s List </em>(not to mention crucial works of nonfiction like <em>Night and Fog</em>, Hannah Arendt’s <em>Eichmann in Jerusalem</em>, Primo Levi’s memoir <em>If This Is a Man</em>, and Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary <em>Shoah</em>) haven’t been part of Western pop culture for decades. The only subtext that sneaks through is: <em>We can never let it happen again</em>.</p> <p>It’s an obvious conclusion, though it can be depressingly divisive once you start breaking it down—which is probably why most Holocaust TV declines to do so. Who, for one thing, is <em>we</em>? Is it individuals or governments? Citizens of the afflicted nation or the world at large? And what is <em>it</em>—the mass slaughter of Jews in particular or the attempted annihilation of any group of people based on their shared identity?</p> <p>For contemporary art about the Holocaust to matter, it must engage with these questions, which are more central to Jewish identity in the present than ever before. On <a href="https://time.com/6970137/pro-palestinian-encampments-universities/" >college campuses</a> and <a href="https://time.com/6331688/protest-marches-us-gaza-war-ceasefire/" >in the streets</a>, Jews in the U.S. and beyond are finding themselves on opposite sides of a conflict rooted in divergent interpretations of the Nazi genocide. Is the lesson of the Holocaust that Israel, a sanctuary state for the world’s vulnerable Jewish minority, must be protected at all costs? Or is it that the global community must stop the violence of powerful states against disempowered communities like the one in Gaza?</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/ATL_103_Unit_04069RC.jpg" alt="All the Light We Cannot See. (L to R) Lars Eidinger as Sergeant Major Reinhold von Rumpel, Andrea Deck as Sandrina in episode 103 of All the Light We Cannot See. Cr. Atsushi Nishijima/Netflix © 2023"/> <p>Levi meditated on the universal political implications of the Holocaust in <em>If This Is a Man</em>, observing that “it is in the normal order of things that the privileged oppress the unprivileged: the social structure of the camp is based on this human law.” But despite its obsession with Nazis and death camps, television has yet to forge a thoughtful connection between this history and the matter that consumes the consciences of Jews in the present. With the exception of an empathetic season of <em>Transparent </em>that sent the central Jewish family to Israel and the West Bank, and a smattering of American and Israeli thrillers that too often stereotype Arabs as terrorists, the medium has, likely in its reticence to offend, barely touched the politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.</p> <p>Maybe there are bold TV creators who are, right now, synthesizing the devastations of <a href="https://time.com/6328616/israeli-medic-witness-oct-7/" >Oct. 7</a> and <a href="https://time.com/6328616/israeli-medic-witness-oct-7/" >Israel’s assault on Gaza</a> into art that will help us think through this polarizing conflict. If so, then the Holocaust will surely play a part in that story—just as it is already informing a handful of stories that speak to our increasingly authoritarian moment. Whether for political or moral reasons, or simply in order to tell cathartic tales of resilience, we can’t keep cordoning off history from a present to which it’s so urgently relevant.</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975718/holocaust-tv-shows-trend/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975718</post-id> </item> <item> <title>Football Star Travis Kelce Jumps Into Acting, Joining Cast of New Ryan Murphy Horror Series</title> <link>https://time.com/6975864/travis-kelce-ryan-murphy-acting-grotesquerie/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975864/travis-kelce-ryan-murphy-acting-grotesquerie/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Koh Ewe]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 09:40:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[News Desk]]></category> <category><![CDATA[overnight]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975864</guid> <description><![CDATA[This fall, Super Bowl champion Travis Kelce will be seen playing a character on Ryan Murphy’s latest horror series.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975864"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module video-2" data-src="https://time.com/6975864/travis-kelce-ryan-murphy-acting-grotesquerie/" data-widget-id="SB_4" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Travis-Kelce-Grotesquerie.jpg" alt="Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce walks the red carpet at Union Station for the Super Bowl LVII championship ring ceremony in June 2023."/> <p>Travis Kelce won’t just be seen playing football this fall. He’ll also be seen playing a character on <em>Grotesquerie</em>, producer Ryan Murphy’s latest horror series, in the NFL star’s first major foray into acting.</p> [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>In an <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6r8gmPvC2h/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=9bdbfa43-07fb-433e-95f6-616abed0c72d" target="_blank">Instagram post</a> Tuesday, actor Niecy Nash-Betts shared a peek of the <em>Grotesquerie </em>set, along with a reveal of its surprise cast member. “Guys, guess who I am working with on <em>Grotesquerie</em>?” she said as she panned the camera to Kelce, who replied, “jumping into new territory.”</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-instagram wp-block-embed-instagram"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"><blockquote class="instagram-media" data-instgrm-captioned data-instgrm-permalink="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6r8gmPvC2h/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" data-instgrm-version="14" style=" background:#FFF; border:0; border-radius:3px; 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font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:550; line-height:18px;">View this post on Instagram</div></div><div style="padding: 12.5% 0;"></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: row; margin-bottom: 14px; align-items: center;"><div> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(0px) translateY(7px);"></div> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; height: 12.5px; transform: rotate(-45deg) translateX(3px) translateY(1px); width: 12.5px; flex-grow: 0; margin-right: 14px; margin-left: 2px;"></div> <div style="background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; height: 12.5px; width: 12.5px; transform: translateX(9px) translateY(-18px);"></div></div><div style="margin-left: 8px;"> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 50%; flex-grow: 0; height: 20px; width: 20px;"></div> <div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 2px solid transparent; border-left: 6px solid #f4f4f4; border-bottom: 2px solid transparent; transform: translateX(16px) translateY(-4px) rotate(30deg)"></div></div><div style="margin-left: auto;"> <div style=" width: 0px; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-right: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(16px);"></div> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; flex-grow: 0; height: 12px; width: 16px; transform: translateY(-4px);"></div> <div style=" width: 0; height: 0; border-top: 8px solid #F4F4F4; border-left: 8px solid transparent; transform: translateY(-4px) translateX(8px);"></div></div></div> <div style="display: flex; flex-direction: column; flex-grow: 1; justify-content: center; margin-bottom: 24px;"> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; margin-bottom: 6px; width: 224px;"></div> <div style=" background-color: #F4F4F4; border-radius: 4px; flex-grow: 0; height: 14px; width: 144px;"></div></div></a><p style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; line-height:17px; margin-bottom:0; margin-top:8px; overflow:hidden; padding:8px 0 7px; text-align:center; text-overflow:ellipsis; white-space:nowrap;"><a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C6r8gmPvC2h/?utm_source=ig_embed&utm_campaign=loading" style=" color:#c9c8cd; font-family:Arial,sans-serif; font-size:14px; font-style:normal; font-weight:normal; line-height:17px; text-decoration:none;" target="_blank" target="_blank">A post shared by Niecy Nash (@niecynash1)</a></p></div></blockquote><script async src="//platform.instagram.com/en_US/embeds.js"></script></div></figure> <p>The series, expected to premiere on FX later this year, has just started production,<em> </em><a href="https://deadline.com/2024/05/travis-kelce-cast-grotesquerie-ryan-murphy-fx-1235908246/" target="_blank">Deadline</a> reported on Tuesday along with confirmation of Kelce’s participation. </p> <p>The 34-year-old tight end, who just <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C6W9lUFPGdc/" target="_blank">renewed</a> his contract with the <a href="https://time.com/6693826/patrick-mahomes-super-bowl-chiefs-49ers-mvp-drive/" >Super Bowl-winning</a> Kansas City Chiefs last week, has recently seen his popularity soar to meteoric heights, transcending sports fandom amid his public relationship with singer and TIME Person of the Year <a href="https://time.com/6342806/person-of-the-year-2023-taylor-swift/" >Taylor Swift</a>. </p> <p>“This is what happens when WINNERS link up,” Nash-Betts, who was recently awarded a best supporting actress <a href="https://time.com/6555525/emmy-awards-guide-winners-nominees-host/" >Emmy</a> for her role in Netflix’s <a href="https://time.com/6218411/jeffrey-dahmer-netflix-controvesy/" ><em>Dahmer</em></a> (also created by Murhpy), wrote in the caption of her Instagram post with Kelce.</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">What do we know about <em>Grotesquerie</em>?</h2> <p>Like many of Murphy’s other creations—which include <a href="https://time.com/4547319/american-horror-story-is-frightfully-good-with-secrets/" ><em>American Horror Story</em></a>, <a href="https://time.com/4193893/review-the-people-v-o-j-simpson-american-crime/" ><em>American Crime Story</em></a><em>, and </em><a href="https://time.com/6590540/feud-capote-vs-the-swans-true-story/" ><em>Feud</em></a>—details about the upcoming series have been shrouded in secrecy. </p> <p><strong>Read More: </strong><a href="https://time.com/5667752/ryan-murphy-netflix/" ><em>How Ryan Murphy Became King of the Streaming Boom</em></a></p> <p>Murphy’s production company released a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C3spIn4Rb1W/?utm_source=ig_embed&ig_rid=2799d3d3-8e03-4e58-9d09-c72d22d03897" target="_blank">teaser</a> of the horror drama in February, revealing only the casting of Nash-Betts, Courtney B. Vance, and Lesley Manville, displayed over an audio clip of a <a href="https://www.vulture.com/article/ryan-murphy-new-horror-series-grotesquerie-cast-release-date-details.html" target="_blank">monologue</a> by Nash-Betts’ character: “What I saw today…” she said, “they sent shrinks for everyone who worked this crime scene.”</p> <h2 class="wp-block-heading">Kelce’s expansion into entertainment</h2> <p>Kelce has been rapidly expanding his footprint in the entertainment scene. Last month, Amazon <a href="https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/travis-kelce-are-you-smarter-than-a-celebrity-prime-video" target="_blank">announced</a> that he will be the host of all 20 episodes of Prime Video’s<em> Are You Smarter Than a Celebrity?</em>—an upcoming spinoff of the game show <em>Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?</em> </p> <p>“I grew up loving game shows,” Kelce said at the time. “I’m just happy to be on the hosting side of the equation here and excited to see how these famous faces keep up.”</p> <p>Earlier this year, Kelce <a href="https://time.com/6694738/travis-kelce-producer-credit-movie-super-bowl-champion/" >made his executive producing debut</a> with <em>My Dead Friend Zoe</em>, a film that premiered at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, in March. He’s also <a href="https://variety.com/2024/film/news/travis-kelce-my-dead-friend-zoe-financed-energy-tax-credits-1235908057/" target="_blank">helping to finance</a> <em>King Pleasure</em>, a documentary about artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.</p> <p>Kelce made his acting debut in a <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/moonbase-8-showtime-travis-kelce-cameo-1545940" target="_blank">brief appearance</a> as a fictional version of himself in Showtime’s space comedy <em>Moonbase 8</em> in 2020. He <a href="https://ew.com/tv/recaps/snl-recap-season-48-episode-14/" target="_blank">hosted</a> <em>Saturday Night Live</em> in March 2023 and reappeared on the sketch comedy show last October in a <a href="https://variety.com/2023/tv/news/snl-taylor-swift-travis-kelce-how-it-happened-saturday-night-live-1235757966/" target="_blank">cameo</a> alongside Swift. He previously starred in an eponymous reality TV dating series, <em><a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/10/travis-kelce-reality-dating-show-he-doesnt-want-you-to-see-catching-kelce" target="_blank">Catching Kelce</a></em>, in 2016, and he has co-hosted football podcast <em><a href="https://www.youtube.com/@newheightshow" target="_blank">New Heights</a></em> with his brother, recently retired Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, since 2022. </p> <p>Kelce reshared Nash-Betts’ Instagram video on his own <a href="https://www.instagram.com/killatrav/" target="_blank">account</a> on Tuesday, seemingly embracing this next dramatic phase of his multifaceted career, with a caption that said: “Steppin into a new world with one of the legends!”</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975864/travis-kelce-ryan-murphy-acting-grotesquerie/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975864</post-id> </item> <item> <title>April Was the 11th Consecutive Month of Record-Breaking Heat</title> <link>https://time.com/6975854/april-record-heat-consecutive-months/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975854/april-record-heat-consecutive-months/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Eamon Akil Farhat / Bloomberg]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 08:30:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[News Desk]]></category> <category><![CDATA[overnight]]></category> <category><![CDATA[wire]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975854</guid> <description><![CDATA[April 2024 was the hottest April on record. It was also the Earth’s 11th consecutive month of record-breaking heat.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module ad-300-250"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975854"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module video-2" data-src="https://time.com/6975854/april-record-heat-consecutive-months/" data-widget-id="SB_4" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ice-pool-bulacan-philippines.jpg" alt="Workers dump blocks of ice at a pool amid extreme heat at the Hidden Sanctuary Resort on May 4, 2024 in Marilao, Bulacan province, Philippines. "/> <p>April was the Earth’s 11th <a href="https://time.com/6965086/march-record-heat-high-temperature/" >consecutive month</a> of record-breaking heat, with warmer weather already sweeping across Asia and a hotter-than-usual summer expected in Europe.</p> <p>The European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month’s temperatures globally were 1.58°C (2.8°F) above historical averages and marked the hottest April on record. The past 12 months have been 1.61°C higher than pre-industrial temperatures, exceeding the 1.5°C threshold that policymakers and scientists say could threaten life on the planet. </p> <p>“Whilst temperature variations associated with natural cycles like El Niño come and go, the extra energy trapped into the ocean and the atmosphere by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases will keep pushing the global temperature towards new records,” Copernicus Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement.</p> <p>Temperatures across Europe are expected to climb into the weekend with the U.K.’s Met Office forecasting highs of 26°C in parts of England. The Nordics are also warming up, with Oslo forecast to reach a high of 23°C on May 14, hotter than Madrid, according to Weather Services International.</p> <figure class="wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper"><div class="time-embed time-embed__twitter" data-provider="twitter" data-url="https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/1787837350120190058?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" ><blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">High pressure will dominate for many this week, bringing more settled weather than of late 🌥️<br><br>Temperatures will also rise, and by Saturday we could see a high of around 26 °C in the southeast, with several places reaching around 21 degrees further north too 🌡️📈 <a href="https://t.co/DvXdA23Qwj" target="_blank">pic.twitter.com/DvXdA23Qwj</a></p>— Met Office (@metoffice) <a href="https://twitter.com/metoffice/status/1787837350120190058?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw" target="_blank">May 7, 2024</a></blockquote></div></div></figure> <p>The Copernicus program—the world’s biggest provider of climate data—uses billions of measurements from satellites, ships, aircraft and weather stations around the world for its monthly and seasonal forecasts.</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975854/april-record-heat-consecutive-months/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975854</post-id> </item> <item> <title>In Europe, China’s Xi Jinping Underscores Bilateral Benefits Over Collective Blues</title> <link>https://time.com/6975850/xi-jinping-europe-bilateral-collective-diplomacy-france-eu/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975850/xi-jinping-europe-bilateral-collective-diplomacy-france-eu/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Time]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 08:15:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[News desk edits]]></category> <category><![CDATA[overnight]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975850</guid> <description><![CDATA[During his visit to Europe, China’s top communist made clear his preference for dealing with the individual—whether Hungary or France—over the collective, such as NATO and the E.U.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975850"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module" data-src="https://time.com/6975850/xi-jinping-europe-bilateral-collective-diplomacy-france-eu/" data-widget-id="SB_2" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/xi-macron-europe.jpg" alt="FRANCE-CHINA-DIPLOMACY"/> <p>It’s been a three-nation European tour with a two-part message. On Monday, Chinese President Xi Jinping arrived in Paris, where he met with French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President <a href="https://time.com/6185490/ursula-von-der-leyen-interview/" >Ursula von der Leyen</a> to argue the point that engagement with China is a net good.</p> <p>Then, on Tuesday, came the postscript: Xi traveled to Serbia to mark the anniversary of the bombing of Belgrade’s Chinese Embassy in 1999 by five stray NATO rockets amid its occupation of Kosovo. The implication that meddling by NATO—and by extension, its chief sponsor, the U.S.—is detrimental to local interests was clear even before Xi spelt it out in a <a href="https://www.politika.rs/sr/clanak/612986/Kineski-predsednik-Si-Dinping-danas-pocinje-zvanicnu-posetu-Srbiji" target="_blank">letter</a> published by the Serbian newspaper <em>Politika</em>.</p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>“Twenty-five years ago today, NATO flagrantly bombed the Chinese Embassy in Yugoslavia, killing three Chinese journalists,” Xi wrote. “This we should never forget. The Chinese people cherish peace, but we will never allow such tragic history to repeat itself.”</p> <p>Of course, the preference of China’s top communist for the individual over the collective isn’t just reserved for NATO. Even before Xi touched down in Belgrade, the message in Paris was that China was willing to build ties with European nations even as the European Union becomes increasingly problematic. In 2019, the E.U. labeled China a “systemic rival” and has criticized Beijing over human-rights abuses, its support for Russia’s war in Ukraine, spreading disinformation, rampant espionage, economic retaliation against small nations like Lithuania, and unfair trade practices.</p> <p>Little wonder Xi hasn’t time for that bloc either. On Wednesday, on his final stop, Xi touched down in Hungary, the most mutinous of E.U. members, whose avowedly “illiberal” Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is a vocal backer of both Xi and Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Hungary has played a very important role by <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/hungary-blocks-eu-statement-criticising-china-over-hong-kong-diplomats-say-2021-04-16/" target="_blank">vetoing</a> E.U. sanctions on China on Xinjiang, Hong Kong, and Taiwan issues,” says Wang Yiwei, a professor of international affairs at Beijing’s Renmin University. “China appreciates Hungarian behavior and will invest in this close cooperation.”</p> <p>Tellingly, Hungary received $11.5 billion in Chinese investment in 2023 alone. It is home to the largest foreign logistics and manufacturing base of China’s controversial telecoms firm Huawei and will soon also host the first European factory of Shenzhen-based EV giant BYD. Chinese investment in Serbia, meanwhile, has reached <a href="https://biznis.telegraf.rs/info-biz/3882684-vesic-zajednicki-projekti-srbije-i-kine-vredni-20-milijardi-dolara" target="_blank">almost $20 billion</a> over the past decade, according to government figures, with Beijing and Belgrade signing a free trade agreement last year. China is also building an—albeit stalled—high-speed railway connecting Belgrade and Bucharest as part of Xi’s signature Belt and Road Initiative. Xi’s wooing of arguably the region’s two most Europe-skeptic nations is a tried and tested playbook to champion bilateral ties over multi-party fora.</p> <p>It’s not just nations on the fringes of the E.U. that are susceptible to inducement from the world’s second biggest economy. In Paris, von der Leyen pressed Xi on trade “imbalances,” calling Chinese state subsidies that lead to low-cost exports “a matter of great concern” that threaten European jobs. (Xi refused to admit that China had an overcapacity issue.) The E.U.’s 27 members ran a $314.72 billion goods trade deficit with China in 2023, according to Eurostat data, which, although down from the previous year, is still the second highest on record. “Europe will not waver from making tough decisions needed to protect its economy and security,” von der Leyen said.</p> <p>That was perhaps wishful thinking. In September, Von der Leyen announced an <a href="https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_23_4752" target="_blank">investigation</a> into subsidies assisting Chinese EV production, prompting Beijing to <a href="https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/chinese-tariffs-could-leave-cognac-makers-with-too-much-brandy-2024-05-06/" target="_blank">float</a> tariffs against French brandy as possible retaliation. That’s naturally a bigger issue for Macron, who was only too happy to turn on the charm with Xi, delving into his own playbook of building personal rapport with <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-macron-flies-moscow-high-risk-diplomatic-mission-2022-02-06/#:~:text=MOSCOW%2C%20Feb%207%20(Reuters),the%20Kremlin%20plans%20an%20invasion." target="_blank">even antagonistic</a> world leaders. After pomp and pageantry at the Elysée Palace in Paris, the French President thanked Xi for “openness regarding the provisional measures on French Cognac and his wish not to see them applied,” before presenting him with a couple of prized bottles: a Hennessy X.O. and a Remy Martin Louis XIII.</p> <p>Macron then whisked Xi and both their wives to southwestern France’s mountainous Pyrenees, where they were entertained in driving rain by a traditional shepherd’s dance, before settling down to a lunch of local ham, lamb, cheese, and blueberry pie. Macron presented Xi with a blanket made from Pyrenees wool, a Tour de France cycling jersey, and, tellingly, yet more brandy: an Armagnac.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/xi-macron-europe-france.jpg" alt="FRANCE-CHINA-DIPLOMACY"/> <p>Macron is not the only European leader to waver from the E.U. line when confronted by national interests. When German Chancellor Olaf Scholz visited Beijing accompanied by a bevy of business leaders last month, he pressed Xi on Ukraine and unfair trade practices while avoiding combative language that might imperil some of the 5,000 German companies active in the Chinese market, a fact that makes Germany—whose economy shrunk last year—a prime loser of any Chinese sanctions against the E.U. “The European Union plays the bad cop and member states like France and Germany are the good cops who understand that China is still an opportunity,” says Wang.</p> <p>Still, when the E.U.’s two biggest economies struggle to hold the line, it doesn’t exactly project solidarity to the bloc’s smaller members. And individual thinking in Europe is especially important for Xi as the continent has bonded with Washington over shared outrage regarding Russia’s war in Ukraine. </p> <p>“Xi is trying to encourage a Europe that’s more independent from the United States, which fits into his vision of a multipolar world and provides more space for the [People’s Republic] to operate in,” says Chong Ja Ian, an expert on China’s diplomacy and professor at the National University of Singapore.</p> <p>Moreover, the possible return of a Trump presidency and a rekindling of trans-Atlantic trade frictions makes it prudent for Xi to ramp up engagement now. At the very least, Xi’s red-carpet treatment in Europe will be grist for China’s domestic propaganda mill, presenting China’s leader as someone Western counterparts fawn over and beg to solve all their problems. “What did Macron or von der Leyen get out of it? Very little at this point,” says Nis Grünberg, lead analyst for politics and society at the Berlin-based Mercator Institute for China Studies. “The status quo is probably the best we can hope for.”</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975850/xi-jinping-europe-bilateral-collective-diplomacy-france-eu/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975850</post-id> </item> <item> <title>An Australian Art Museum Is Installing a Toilet to Keep Its ‘Ladies Lounge’ Off Limits to Men</title> <link>https://time.com/6975843/ladies-lounge-exhibit-mona-australia-toilet-kaechele-discrimination/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975843/ladies-lounge-exhibit-mona-australia-toilet-kaechele-discrimination/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Chad de Guzman]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 08:00:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[News Desk]]></category> <category><![CDATA[overnight]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975843</guid> <description><![CDATA[Kirsha Kaechele says she will install a toilet to keep men out of her exhibit at the Museum of Old and New Art, pending appeal of an anti-discrimination ruling.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975843"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module video-2" data-src="https://time.com/6975843/ladies-lounge-exhibit-mona-australia-toilet-kaechele-discrimination/" data-widget-id="SB_4" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/kirsha-kaechele-mona.jpg" alt="Kirsha Kaechele, an American artist in Tasmania, seeks to challenge a tribunal ruling that orders her women-only art exhibition in the Museum of Old and New Art to allow the entry of men."/> <p>An Australian modern art museum featured a lavish, green velvet-ordained room—for women’s use only—to make a statement about discrimination. Then it got accused of being discriminatory.</p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>After a male ticket-payer last year <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-04-09/mona-loses-bid-to-exclude-men-from-ladies-lounge/103687390" target="_blank">complained</a> of being denied entry to <a href="https://mona.net.au/stuff-to-do/experiences/ladies-lounge" target="_blank">the Ladies Lounge</a>, which opened in 2020, a local tribunal last month <a href="http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/tas/TASCAT/2024/58.html" target="_blank">ordered</a> the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania to make the space accessible to all.</p> <p>But the exhibit artist and curator, Kirsha Kaechele, who is married to MONA’s founder and owner, has vowed to fight the order, which she calls the “<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C5pvlc9IC_b/" target="_blank">verdick</a>,” saying she plans to challenge the ruling before the state supreme court and, in the interim, pursue a workaround to ensure the Ladies Lounge remains off limits for men—except for male butlers who serve guests refreshments.</p> <p>“Men need to be discriminated against,” Kaechele said in a <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/C6p_NIEL0-7/" target="_blank">post on Instagram</a> on Tuesday, adding that she believes, with a few tweaks, the Ladies Lounge could qualify for various exemptions to Tasmania’s <a href="https://www.legislation.tas.gov.au/view/html/inforce/current/act-1998-046" target="_blank">Anti-Discrimination Act</a>. “The Ladies Lounge will become a toilet, a church and a school,” she told local newspaper <a href="https://www.themercury.com.au/truecrimeaustralia/police-courts-tasmania/mona-devises-strategy-to-keep-ladies-lounge-alive-after-shock-tribunal-ruling-to-allow-men/news-story/2aeab8a85f2db088fc57df05117fb866" target="_blank"><em>the Mercury</em></a>.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/mona-ladies-lounge.jpg" alt="The Ladies Lounge in the Museum of Old and New Art in Hobart, Tasmania, Australia"/> <p>One loophole Kaechele says she’s planning to exploit is installing a toilet in the gallery, which holds some of the museum’s most high-profile artworks, including a Picasso. “It would be the Ladies Room, in fact, under this new designation,” Kaechele said in a <a href="https://mona.net.au/blog/2024/05/interview-with-kirsha-kaechele-about-the-ladies-lounge" target="_blank">blog post</a> this week on the museum’s website. She explained that the toilet could be, while technically functional, a piece of art, such as <a href="https://www.centrepompidou.fr/en/ressources/oeuvre/VgrNkuT" target="_blank"><em>Fontaine</em> by Marcel Duchamp</a>, a urinal that she says she’s in talks to potentially borrow from the Centre Pompidou.</p> <p>“Bringing this iconic art object from Paris for display in the Ladies Lounge would reignite the debate: what is art? The inevitable controversy would serve as an excellent art history lesson for a new generation, introducing one of the most important moments in twentieth-century culture—the origins of conceptual art—to a wider, non-art audience. In this sense, the Ladies Lounge would effectively become an educational institution,” Kaechele explains, adding that doing so would then satisfy another exemption.</p> <p>(Kaechele told <em>the Mercury</em> on Tuesday that a toilet is on the way, to be installed within 45 days, but MONA tells TIME that it is not <em>Fontaine</em>. While the Ladies Lounge was closed this week until further notice, Kaechele told the Mercury that its key artworks will be temporarily moved to the women’s restroom to ensure uninterrupted viewing.)</p> <p>Lastly, Kaechele says she could transform the Ladies Lounge into a religious institution, to satisfy another exemption. “The Lounge would be a safe space for women to come together and learn about the Bible and ask questions,” she said in the blog post, noting that she’s not Christian and likes to “poke fun” at Christianity.</p> <p>Overall, Kaechele insists the legal challenge has only enhanced the exhibit, which was meant to evoke “in men the lived experience of women forbidden from entering certain spaces throughout history,” the museum said in a press release on Tuesday.</p> <p>“Thanks to the ruling, we have no choice but to open ourselves to a whole range of enriching experiences—spiritual, educational …” Kaechele said in MONA’s blog. “To discover fascinating new possibilities, and to become better.”</p> <p>“Ladies love the Lounge—a space away from men—and given what we have been through for the last several millennia, we need it!” she added in the press release. “We deserve both equal rights and reparations, in the form of unequal rights, or chivalry—for at least 300 years.”</p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975843/ladies-lounge-exhibit-mona-australia-toilet-kaechele-discrimination/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975843</post-id> </item> <item> <title>The Circle Season 6 Gave The Traitors a Run for Its Money</title> <link>https://time.com/6975711/the-circle-season-6-finale-recap/</link> <comments>https://time.com/6975711/the-circle-season-6-finale-recap/#respond</comments> <dc:creator><![CDATA[Judy Berman]]></dc:creator> <pubDate>Wed, 08 May 2024 07:01:00 +0000</pubDate> <category><![CDATA[Uncategorized]]></category> <category><![CDATA[culturepod]]></category> <category><![CDATA[review]]></category> <category><![CDATA[Second click]]></category> <guid isPermaLink="false">https://time.com/?p=6975711</guid> <description><![CDATA['The Traitors' may be TV's biggest social strategy game, but Netflix's 'The Circle' got there first—and just keeps getting better.]]></description> <content:encoded><![CDATA[<aside class="right-rail__container right-rail__container--ad"><div class="right-rail__ad__wrapper right-rail__module"><div class="right-rail__ad" id="right-rail__ad-6975711"></div></div><div class="OUTBRAIN right-rail__outbrain right-rail__module" data-src="https://time.com/6975711/the-circle-season-6-finale-recap/" data-widget-id="SB_2" data-ob-template="timemag"></div></aside> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-featured-media" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The_Circle_n_S6_E7_00_50_3301_R.jpgThe_Circle_n_S6_E7_00_50_3301_R.jpg" alt="6"/> <p>Social strategy games are having a moment. Among those competitions, which challenge contestants to outwit and out-charm one another in hopes of winning a grand prize, international franchise <a href="https://time.com/6553586/the-traitors-season-2-review/" ><em>The Traitors</em></a><em> </em>(whose stateside version streams on Peacock) has become reality TV’s biggest success story of the past few years, in the <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/the-traitors-streaming-viewership-season-2-peacock/" target="_blank">U.S.</a> and <a href="https://deadline.com/2024/02/the-traitors-final-rating-8m-bbc-1235816055/" target="_blank">abroad</a>. Netflix is fully in the fray with <a href="https://time.com/6565157/the-trust-season-finale-recap-netflix/" ><em>The Trust</em></a>, <em>Surviving Paradise</em>,<em> </em>and its revival of ABC’s <em>The Mole</em>. Recent dating shows, from <a href="https://time.com/6255129/perfect-match-cast-netflix/" ><em>Perfect Match</em></a><em> </em>to <a href="https://time.com/6082118/fboy-island-sexy-beasts-review/" ><em>FBoy Island</em></a>,<em> </em>have social strategy elements; players use their savvy to manipulate rivals, suss out their love interests’ true intentions, and win a small fortune. Even decades-old incarnations of the format (<a href="https://deadline.com/2023/12/survivor-season-45-ratings-cbs-1235678298/" target="_blank"><em>Survivor</em></a>, <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/big-brother-premiere-cbs-ratings-viewership/" target="_blank"><em>Big Brother</em></a>) are seeing their ratings spike.</p>[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] <p>But, with apologies to the great <a href="https://time.com/6564065/the-traitors-season-2-casting-deena-katz-interview/" ><em>Traitors </em>U.S.</a> host <a href="https://time.com/6107693/alan-cumming-baggage/" >Alan Cumming</a>, it was <a href="https://time.com/5764730/the-circle-shubham-interview/" ><em>The Circle</em></a><em> </em>that reignited the social-strategy fire, back in the pre-pandemic winter of 2020. Billed as a reality competition for the age of social media, the consistently popular series moves approximately eight players into the same building… and isolates each one in their own separate apartment, where they vie to become the most well-liked poster in what amounts to a cast-wide Slack channel. <em>The Circle</em>’s sixth season, which dropped an extremely satisfying finale on Wednesday, might be its best yet. Fans who’ve worked their way through all the imported versions of <em>Traitors</em> on Peacock would do well to give it a try. (If you’ve yet to watch <em>The Circle </em>Season 6, beware: spoilers lie ahead.) </p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The_Circle_n_S6_E4_00_36_0627_R.jpgThe_Circle_n_S6_E4_00_36_0627_R.jpg" alt="6"/> <p>Many great reality shows have taken a while to perfect, and in the case of <em>The Circle</em>, that meant a few early, freewheeling seasons of experimentation. Producers cast a wide net, catching catfish who posted fake photos and bios in their profiles as well as extroverted contestants playing as themselves. There was a young guy secretly getting help from his mom, a 58-year-old writer portraying an idealized 24-year-old version of himself, the obligatory flirtatious bisexual woman who was too enticing to be real. Lisa Del Campo, the girl Friday to Lance Bass of NSYNC, impersonated her boss (with his blessing). The gimmickry peaked in Season 4, when <a href="https://time.com/4382880/spice-girls-20th-anniversary-wannabe/" >Spice Girls</a> Mel B. and Emma Bunton posed as a random 20-something dude. </p> <p>Early casts mostly took the connections they forged at face value. For genuinely single (and mostly heterosexual) players, the exchange of eggplant and peach emojis signified the possibility of an actual romance outside <em>The Circle</em>. And each season’s amateur detectives expended a lot of energy trying to unmask catfish, as though inventing a persona automatically made a castmate a weaker ally. Never mind that many shades of gray separated “real” profiles from “fake” ones; some contestants pretended to be single to make themselves more approachable, while others were posting authentically behind borrowed photos. With the exception of a handful of calculated “gamers,” no one seemed to realize that an ally’s true identity was less important than the trustworthiness they proved in challenges and eliminations.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The_Circle_n_S6_E10_00_15_4407_R.jpgThe_Circle_n_S6_E10_00_15_4407_R.jpg" alt="6"/> <p>By Season 6, however, the series was attracting a more competitive class of player. For the most part, this cast seemed to have studied previous seasons and deduced, correctly, that it was more important to build solid alliances that would keep them safe from the so-called “blockings” that take players out of the running for the cash prize than it was to catch catfish. Consistency, strategy, discretion, and skillful navigation of the show’s many socially oriented challenges thus became more important than authentic love connections and pseudo-familial bonds. (I can’t be the only viewer who cringes when middle-aged women—or people playing as them—on the show get shunted into the role of everyone’s mom or buddies who’ve been exchanging messages for less than 24 hours declare themselves <em>Circle </em>siblings.)</p> <p>There must be some sadistic <em>Circle </em>fans who tune in for the awkwardness of certain encounters between strangers who aren’t the people they say they are. For them, Season 6 did offer an uncomfortably steamy exchange of scantily clad photos between Kyle, a married pro basketball player competing as a single basketball trainer, and Olivia, the beautiful female avatar of a self-conscious gay man named Brandon. (Kyle apologized, hilariously, to a photo of his wife, who’d approved his charade, before every interaction.) But for <em>Traitors </em>devotees and other fans of social strategy games for whom <em>strategy </em>is the operative word, Season 6 really delivered.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The_Circle_n_S6_E6_00_15_3129_R.jpgThe_Circle_n_S6_E6_00_15_3129_R.jpg" alt="6"/> <p>Sure, the producers couldn’t resist the timely gimmick of throwing an AI contestant into the mix—one that wasn’t entirely believable as such, in light of everything we know about the many deceptions of reality TV. Thankfully, if also anticlimactically, the algorithm known as Max was abandoned early in the season, after easily flying under its opponents’ radar. Yet <em>The Circle </em>also made several great, subtle changes. This season featured fewer blockings than its predecessors, which allowed relationships and strategies to develop over longer timelines. That also meant fewer late additions to the cast, whose lack of established connections and knowledge of what transpired before their arrival have historically made them weaker contenders. Meanwhile, a twist that split players into secret “ride-or-die” duos with linked fates shook up existing alliances, forcing them to square their commitment to those organically cultivated loyalties with the possibility that an unpopular ride-or-die could mean elimination.</p> <p>By the finale—and, again, you should really stop reading now if you’ve yet to watch it—six very different, mostly compelling contenders remained. Faux couple Kyle and Olivia/Brandon were still in the game, propelled by their relative sincerity as well as Kyle’s longstanding #TresFuego alliance and Olivia’s popularity among castmates outside that trio. One of the latter was Lauren, the least game-oriented finalist, who seemed to have lasted as long as she did mainly because she posed a minimal threat. The perennially high-rated<em> Circle </em>superfan and #TresFuego co-conspirator Quori-Tyler, by contrast, was the season’s most powerful competitor. Latecomer Jordan, who quasi-catfished as a cuddly, pre-weight loss version of himself in a bid to appear unthreatening, connived his way into the finale after leading a risky rebellion against the manipulative third member of #TresFuego, AI engineer and self-described f-ckboy Myles.</p> <img decoding="async" class="wp-block-gutenberg-custom-blocks-inline-image" src="https://api.time.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/The_Circle_n_S6_E6_00_05_5317_R.jpgThe_Circle_n_S6_E6_00_05_5317_R.jpg" alt="6"/> <p>In a big twist at the beginning of the episode, Brandon was secretly given the power to unilaterally block someone. Swayed by Jordan’s campaign, he picked Myles, who had been Olivia’s ride-or-die earlier in the season and with whom she’d previously had a pretty good relationship. It was a brilliant—and, because the blocking was anonymous, consequence-free—decision that broke up #TresFuego and led to Brandon’s ultimate victory. </p> <p>It couldn’t be more appropriate that the fishiest of catfishes is the winner of <em>The Circle</em>’s most strategic season to date. But the finale should satisfy fans’ hearts as well as their minds. Brandon is a kind, sensitive, underpaid nurse who struggles, relatably, with confidence and body image; the real Olivia is his work friend. Even Kyle—who was shocked at his pseudo-paramour’s reveal but soon recovered upon learning that Brandon had been telling the truth about himself when they bonded over having lost their fathers—couldn’t help but be happy for him. My favorite round of <em>The Circle</em> might’ve been cutthroat to the core, but it ended with well-deserved tears of joy. Here’s hoping the producers use it as a model for seasons to come. </p>]]></content:encoded> <wfw:commentRss>https://api.time.com/6975711/the-circle-season-6-finale-recap/feed/</wfw:commentRss> <slash:comments>0</slash:comments> <post-id xmlns="com-wordpress:feed-additions:1">6975711</post-id> </item> </channel></rss> If you would like to create a banner that links to this page (i.e. this validation result), do the following:
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