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KINDNESS • Good News Network
The pianist fell ill. An audience member finished the score.A live performance of the La La Land score at Sydney's Darling Harbour Theatre stalled at intermission last week when the concert pianist fell too ill to continue. The interval stretched from 20 minutes to 40, and the audience knew something was wrong. Backstage, calls went out for a replacement. None came. So Oscar-winning composer Justin Hurwitz walked out alone and asked the 2,500-seat hall whether any trained pianist could sight-read the score cold. "I figured nobody's as close as they say they are," Hurwitz told ABC Radio. With a nudge from his friend Scarlet, audience member Sterling Nasa raised his hand. Nasa, the bagpipes tutor at Scots College, had studied piano but never played this music. The hardest moment was a John Legend synth solo, which he chose to improvise rather than read. It worked. Backstage after the final bow, both men shook hands in disbelief. Hurwitz said his head was "spinning."
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
A roadside rescue turned into a forever home for Toby.A Wisconsin state trooper responding to a stopped motorist on a ramp to I-90 ended up leaving with a kitten. Trooper Brody Schmitz reached the driver's window and heard that she had watched someone throw kittens from a moving car. The vehicle was gone, but one kitten remained. Schmitz brought it to a nearby animal shelter so it could be cared for during his shift, then told staff he wanted to adopt it himself. He named the tuxedo kitten Toby and carried him home in his arms, possibly his hat. The Wisconsin State Patrol shared the story on Facebook, where commenters traded their own versions. "The cat distribution system works in mysterious ways," one wrote. Several others described pulling cats from car engines and ending up keeping them. Schmitz had set out to help one stranded driver. He came back with a roommate.
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SCIENCE • Upworthy
28 days of forest play boosted children's immune healthResearchers in Finland dug up segments of forest floor and moved them into urban daycare yards, then ran blood tests on the children playing there. The study, published in Science Advances and coordinated by the Natural Resources Institute Finland, tracked 75 children aged three to five across 10 daycare centers in Lahti and Tampere. Four yards traded concrete and gravel for forest undergrowth, planter boxes, and peat blocks for digging. Within 28 days, the kids in the greened yards showed more diverse skin microbiota and higher levels of regulatory T cells, the ones that keep the immune system from turning on the body. "Immune diseases are expensive," said Marja Roslund, the scientist whose thesis the study was part of. "Even a small reduction in the burden of these diseases is good for national health and the economy." Finland has since put roughly $966,000 toward rewilding 43 daycare centers. The mud, it turns out, was the point.
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
He taught himself 114 bird calls. His classmates cheered.Samuel Henderson, a 12-year-old in Oklahoma, performed bird calls at his middle school talent show, and more than 29 million people have now watched the video. He has mastered 114 of them, including a cardinal and a red-tailed hawk that sound nearly impossible coming from a human. Samuel started teaching himself the calls at age six, and his mother first realized something was unusual in parking lots. "He'd make the sound, and they'd be following us," she told Good Morning America. "They think he's another bird." Samuel, who has autism and Tourette's Syndrome, keeps a journal of every call he learns. To check his accuracy, he uses a bird sound identifier app from the Cornell University ornithology lab, which names the species when he gets it right. The part people kept rewatching was not the calls. It was the row of classmates in front, cheering like he had just won something.
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PROGRESS • Positive News
Part-time working parents and bikes raised the world's happiest kidsDutch children once again rank as the happiest in the developed world, according to Unicef's latest child wellbeing index, published this week. The Netherlands also placed fifth in the World Happiness Report, behind Finland and Denmark. For a country that is one of Europe's wettest and has the highest bicycle-to-person ratio on the planet, the cheerfulness is hard-won. Margreet de Looze, an assistant professor at Utrecht University, credits strong social ties and the fact that Dutch parents often work part-time. "For children, that's valuable, it brings you closer as a family," she says. Bikes help too. Anna Feiner, a mother in Rotterdam, said her son Tije has cycled to school alone since he was nine. "It was terrifying letting him go at first. But it's frowned upon if you don't let your children bike to school." The country recorded a slight dip this year, which de Looze blames on rising school stress. The children, for now, are still pedaling through the rain.
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Did today's letter lift you? Pass it to someone who'd want the same.
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With love, The Editor
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