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Long before Katy Perry sang the praises of fireworks, the Founding Fathers expressed their enthusiasm for the explosions in the sky now synonymous with Fourth of July celebrations. Retail giant Macys has been shooting off its world-famous New York City spectacular since 1976 (televised for those located outside the Big Apple). Lets take a look at the origins of Independence Day celebrations before getting into how to stream the Macy’s fireworks show live. John Adams’s hot take on Independence Day King George III may have dissed John Adams in the hit musical Hamiltoncalling him that little guy who spoke to me and claiming that America would eat him alivebut the real-life Adams still managed to accomplish a thing or two. Before the second president of the United States kept the country out of a costly war with France, he was instrumental in the fight for independence. This role entitled him to have strong opinions on how the country should celebrate once it won the Revolutionary War. In 1776, he wrote to his wife, Abigail, detailing his wish list for future gatherings. He actually wanted the holiday to be July 2, because that was the day that the Continental Congress voted to approve the Lee Resolution, declaring the colonies free from Great Britain. Instead, the country chose to honor July 4, because that’s the day the Declaration of Independence was formally adopted. You win some, you lose some. Adams did get almost everything else on his wish list. About the Macys 4th of July Fireworks One can only assume that modern-day Fourth of July fireworks would make Adams proud. Macys is happy to do its part. This year, there will be 80,000 total shells in 30 different colors. Stars such as Trisha Yearwood, Lenny Kravitz, Eric Church, and the Jonas Brothers are set to perform. Speaking of Hamilton, former cast member Ariana DeBose will serve as host. This year, the fireworks will be launched by the Brooklyn Bridge and East River to a custom score by Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson and James Poyser. There will be public viewing spots if you find yourself in the city, but Macys has not announced them yet. When and how can I watch the fireworks live? Those viewing from home can tune into NBC. The fireworks show will air on Friday, July 4, 2025, at 8 p.m. ET., with an encore screening immediately following at 10 p.m. ET. If you have an over-the-air antenna, NBC is free to watch. If you’re a cable TV subscriber, it’s easy to find. You can also watch online on NBC.com or via NBC’s mobile apps. Cable cord-cutters can stream the patriotic event on Peacock. You can also choose a live-TV streaming service that carries NBC as part of a bundle. Those include: Hulu + Live TV FuboTV YouTube TV NBC is available on these services in most markets, but make sure to double-check your region before signing up just in case.
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Work-related stress is on the rise. And to quote Gen Z, who loves some dramatic verbiage, the overwhelm has employees totally “crashing out.” Crashing out can look like having a full blown freak out (think: losing it at a coworker, crying at your desk, or screaming in your car) or simply feeling internally unhinged and saying quietly to yourself Im crashing out. Im crashing out so hard right now. On TikTok Gen Z is crashing out over the big and small. (Think their dog eating their new Nike kicks.) However, one of the most common trends is crashing out over work. And while the videos are very often all in good fun and usually hilarious, that doesn’t mean that work-related pressure isn’t a very real issue. According to a new report with data from 2,000 full-time employees, there are definitely good reasons to be crashing out. Research from Owl Lab’s 2024 State of Hybrid Work Report finds 43% of workers say their work stress has increased in just one year. Furthermore, 89% say there has been no improvement in their troublesome work-related stress from the previous year. What is everyone crashing out about? Unfair compensation For starters, a good chunk of workers (22%) don’t feel fairly compensated, per the report. Many employees are “polyworking,” or working an additional job. Over a fifth (22%) of employees have another job in addition to their full-time job. Shockingly, this number is higher for managers: almost a third (32%) have another job. Unsurprisingly, managers’ stress levels are 55% higher than nonmanagers. Not enough flexibility Employees are also over having to go to the office, mainly, because it doesnt feel necessary to them. Half of workers feel that when they are forced to go into work it is only to “fill a seat.” Likewise, most workers (84%) say working from home gives them the ability to eat healthier meals. They also have to spend less money on food and parking. Hybrid workers report spending an average of $61 when working from the office versus working from home. Flexibility is majorly important to workers: 41% say if they lost their hybrid work privileges, they’d look for a new job. Office politics One major reason why employees don’t want to come into the office, aside from getting to work from the comfort of home, is political differences. Nearly half (45%) of U.S. workers said their colleagues’ political views have them wanting to stay home. While older generations are less likely to air their grievances online, Gen Z leans in. Overall one in three workers (34%) has posted something negative about their job or employer. However, nearly half (48%) of Gen Z employees have. And with that, crashing out has entered the chat.
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E-Commerce
With burgers sizzling and classic rock thumping, many Americans revel in summer cookoutsat least until that wayward cousin asks for a pop in soda country, or even worse, a coke when they actually want a Sprite. Few American linguistic debates have bubbled quite as long and effervescently as the one over whether a generic soft drink should be called a soda, pop or coke. The word you use generally boils down to where youre from: Midwesterners enjoy a good pop, while soda is tops in the North and far West. Southerners, long the cultural mavericks, dont bat an eyelash asking for cokelowercasebefore homing in on exactly the type they want: Perhaps a root beer or a Coke, uppercase. As a linguist who studies American dialects, Im less interested in this regional divide and far more fascinated by the unexpected history behind how a fizzy health drink from the early 1800s spawned the modern soft drinks many names and iterations. Bubbles, anyone? Foods and drinks with wellness benefits might seem like a modern phenomenon, but the urge to create drinks with medicinal properties inspired what might be called a soda revolution in the 1800s. The process of carbonating water was first discovered in the late 1700s. By the early 1800s, this carbonated water had become popular as a health drink and was often referred to as soda water. The word soda likely came from sodium, since these drinks often contained salts, which were then believed to have healing properties. Given its alleged curative effects for health issues such as indigestion, pharmacists sold soda water at soda fountains, innovative devices that created carbonated water to be sold by the glass. A chemistry professor, Benjamin Stillman, set up the first such device in a drugstore in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1806. Its eventual success inspired a boom of soda fountains in drugstores and health spas. By the mid-1800s, pharmacists were creating unique root-, fruit- and herb-infused concoctions, such as sassafras-based root beer, at their soda fountains, often marketing them as cures for everything from fatigue to foul moods. These flavored, sweetened versions gave rise to the linking of the word soda with a sweetened carbonated beverage, as opposed to simple, carbonated water. Seltzertodays popular term for such sparkling waterwas around, too. But it was used only for the naturally carbonated mineral water from the German town Nieder-Selters. Unlike Perrier, sourced similarly from a specific spring in France, seltzer made the leap to becoming a generic term for fizzy water. Regional naming patterns So how did soda come to be called so many different things in different places? It all stems from a mix of economic enterprise and linguistic ingenuity. The popularity of soda in the Northeast likely reflects the soda fountains longer history in the region. Since a lot of Americans living in the Northeast migrated to California in the mid-to-late 1800s, the name likely traveled west with them. As for the Midwestern preference for popwell, the earliest American use of the term to refer to a sparkling beverage appeared in the 1840s in the name of a flavored version called ginger pop. Such ginger-flavored pop, though, was around in Britain by 1816, since a Newcastle songbook is where you can first see it used in text. The pop seems to be onomatopoeic for the noise made when the cork was released from the bottle before drinking. Linguists dont fully know why pop became so popular in the Midwest. But one theory links it to a Michigan bottling company, Feigenson Brothers Bottling Workstoday known as Faygo Beveragesthat used pop in the name of the sodas they marketed and sold. Another theory suggests that because bottles were more common in the region, soda drinkers were more likely to hear the pop sound than in the Northeast, where soda fountains reigned. As for using coke generically, the first Coca-Cola was served in 1886 by Dr. John Pemberton, a pharmacist at Jacobs Pharmacy in Atlanta and the founder of the company. In the 1900s, the Coca-Cola company tried to stamp out the use of Coke for Coca-Cola. But that ship had already sailed. Since Coca-Cola originated and was overwhelmingly popular in the South, its generic use grew out of the fact that people almost always asked for Coke. As with Jell-O, Kleenex, Band-Aids and seltzer, it became a generic term. Whats soft about it? Speaking of soft drinks, whats up with that term? It was originally used to distinguish all nonalcoholic drinks from hard drinks, or beverages containing spirits. Interestingly, the original Coca-Cola formula included wineresembling a type of alcoholic health drink popular overseas, Vin Mariani. But Pemberton went on to develop a soft version a few years later to be sold as a medicinal drink. Due to the growing popularity of soda water concoctions, eventually soft drink came to mean only such sweetened carbonated beverages, a linguistic testament to Americas enduring love affair with sugar and bubbles. With the average American guzzling almost 40 gallons per year, you can call it whatever you what. Just dont call it healthy. Valerie M. Fridland is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada, Reno. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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