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MOTIVATIONAL • Sunny Skyz
Their vocabulary book earned nothing for 40 years. Until now.A children's vocabulary book that earned its authors almost nothing for 40 years is suddenly a bestseller on Amazon, thanks to a single TikTok video. Weighty Words, co written by Colorado author Elissa Guralnick and Paul Levitt in 1985, was built to teach kids hard words through silly stories. It found a small following and not much else. "We really never made a dime," Guralnick said. Then author Eli McCann posted a nostalgic clip about discovering the book in eighth grade, and the response was immediate enough that the publisher ordered a new printing. The book's method has a certain logic to it. One lesson teaches "scintillate" through a firefly named Gloriana, who lights up the night so often that the other fireflies tease that she "sins till late." For Guralnick, the numbers matter less than the household reaction. "My kids are delighted, Paul's kids are delighted," she said.
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SCIENCE • Good News Network
An astronaut watched the Southern Lights dance below herNASA astronaut Jessica Meir watched the Aurora Australis ripple beneath her from a SpaceX Dragon capsule above Earth this month, calling it "ethereal and emotionally evocative." A recent solar event had sent charged particles into the planet's magnetosphere, lighting up the Southern Lights over Antarctica. "As opposed to the previous aurora I've seen, this one danced and snaked its way directly below us, putting on quite a show," Meir wrote on X, sharing a timelapse from the capsule. The view came under unusual circumstances. On June 5, Meir and fellow astronaut Chris Williams took shelter in the Dragon on NASA's orders while Roscosmos colleagues hunted down an air leak elsewhere on the International Space Station. "There is a lot going on right now," Meir noted the next day, "but fortunately, we are all safe." She arrived at the station in February for an eight-month mission studying human biology, including how to make IV fluid from scratch. The aurora was not on the schedule.
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
His simple question turns strangers into dance partners worldwide.Edouard Jacqmin, a Belgian former DJ who goes by Ed People online, has built a global following by walking up to strangers and asking a single question: "Can you show me your favorite dance moves?" He fell for salsa just before the pandemic, and when lockdowns lifted, the urge to dance with other people only grew. The whole project started when he spotted some folks doing the Charleston in a park and asked them to teach him. He filmed it for himself, posted it on TikTok at a friend's nudging, and woke up to 9,000 views. Most people he approaches say no, which he has made peace with. The yeses send him into nursing homes, onto public transit, and across parks worldwide. "Dance is a very powerful tool for everything, whether you're dealing with emotions of joy or emotions of sadness, grief or anger or whatever," he told NPR in 2025. He is not a trained dancer. He just learns the steps, carefully, from anyone willing.
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PROGRESS • Good Good Good
One of the world's rarest mammals had a babyA northern hairy-nosed wombat appeared on a trail camera in Queensland carrying a joey in her pouch, a sighting conservationists call a hopeful sign for one of the world's rarest mammals. Fewer than 400 of the animals survive, almost all of them in two protected sites. The species was once down to about 35 individuals in the 1980s, which is the kind of number that does not usually come back from anywhere. Staff monitoring the cameras described the moment plainly. They had turned to mush. Each joey matters when the entire population could fit into a small concert hall, and the footage confirmed the wombats are still breeding in the wild. The mother went about her business afterward, unbothered by the people quietly losing their composure on the other side of the lens.
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KINDNESS • Reasons to be Cheerful
104-year-old Nicole won second place at ScrabbleA French initiative called l'Heure Civique, or Civic Hour, has signed up more than 24,000 volunteers across roughly 250 municipalities by asking for something almost suspiciously small: one hour a month. No long commitment, no guilt, no roster. People tend a garden, deliver groceries or sit down for a board game at a care home, and that counts. Founder Atanase Perifan started the project after reading that an elderly woman in Paris had lain dead in her apartment for four months before anyone noticed. "We need to make a pretext for speaking with one another," he said. At Les Artistes nursing home in the Batignolles neighborhood, 104-year-old Nicole Riberolles spent one recent session glaring at a Scrabble rack of consonants, then quietly laid down "EWE" for a triple-word score and second place. "It's good to work the brain," she declared. Volunteering in France has fallen since 2016. Perifan wants a million volunteers, and believes everyone has an hour.
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With love, The Editor
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