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KINDNESS • Good Good Good
Off the clock, this firefighter puts on a capeHe fights fires by day. Then he clocks out and keeps going.
A firefighter in Roanoke, Virginia spends his off-duty hours dressed as a masked superhero called The Roanoke Raven, helping neighbors around the city. The costume is not a stunt. It is how he does the second shift, the one nobody pays him for. He already runs into burning buildings for a living, which is the kind of job that might excuse a person from doing anything else after clocking out. He does the extra work anyway, cape and all. There is a particular sincerity to a grown man choosing a name like The Roanoke Raven and then simply meaning it. The people he helps do not seem to mind the mask. Roanoke has a firefighter who saves people during the day and keeps showing up for them at night, wearing a costume he made the choice to wear.
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NATURE • Good Good Good
A family gave up their 136-year-old farm for mountain lionsFive generations worked the land. They gave it to the cats.
A family in California sold their 136-year-old farm this year to make room for a wildlife crossing, giving up land that five generations had worked. The property sits along a route that mountain lions use to move between habitats, corridors that fragmenting development has been steadily cutting off. Conservationists have called the crossing a lifeline for the region's big cats, whose small, isolated populations face genetic decline when they cannot roam. Selling a farm held since the 1880s is not a casual decision. It is the kind of choice that involves a lot of paperwork and, presumably, a lot of quiet standing in fields. The family chose it anyway. The land will now be given back to the animals that were crossing it long before anyone planted a single crop.
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NATURE • Good News Network
The dams came down. 20 million herring came back.Illegal to catch in 2012. Now 20 million run the rivers.
Maine counted 20 million river herring running up its rivers in 2025, a species that was illegal to harvest as recently as 2012. The recovery followed decades of dam removals, including two on the Penobscot River that opened miles of spawning water. Alewives had been declining since the 18th century, and by 1994 annual inland catches had dropped from a 3 million pound average to just 150,000 pounds. An undamming effort began in 1999 and finished in 2016. When the run is strong, a quiet brook turns into a torrent of silver as the fish push upstream to spawn. For years, alewife festivals were somber, and some locals would scoop stranded fish into buckets and carry them past the smaller dams by hand. "We've gone from losing the fish completely in a lot of river systems," said Rustin Taylor of the Alewife Harvesters of Maine, "and now we have some of the largest populations in the globe." The Passamaquoddy name for the fish translates to "the fish that feeds all."
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MOTIVATIONAL • Upworthy
She left $22 million to women she never metShe never got a raise. So she taught herself.
Anne Scheiber retired from the Internal Revenue Service in 1944 with $5,000 in savings and no promotions after 23 years of work. By the time she died in January 1995 at age 101, she had turned that money into $22 million. Scheiber, born in Brooklyn in 1893, taught herself the stock market and never stopped. "She did nothing but study the market," said Ben Clark, her lawyer. She bought into more than 100 companies, including Coca-Cola, and lived by a plain rule: reinvest your dividends and rarely sell. Through all of it she stayed in a rent-stabilized studio on West 56th Street, walking everywhere in the same black coat and matronly hat. Her broker, William Fay, said she was never looking for a quick buck. She left the entire fortune to Yeshiva University for a scholarship supporting Jewish women. It is still handing out money to people she never met.
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
A CEO thanked his employee for taking mental health daysShe braced for a stomach-drop. Her boss said thank you.
Madalyn Parker, an accessibility engineer from Michigan, emailed her team in June 2017 to say she was taking two days off. She did not say she had the flu or a beach booked. She told them plainly she was focusing on her mental health. Parker lives with depression, and she wrote that she hoped to be back the next week refreshed. Her CEO at the time, Ben Congleton of Olark, wrote back within hours. "I just wanted to personally thank you for sending emails like this," he said. "You are an example to us all, and help cut through the stigma so we can all bring our whole selves to work." Parker posted the exchange to Twitter, where it gathered more than 45,000 likes before she made her account private. Congleton later wrote his own reply on Medium. "When an athlete is injured, they sit on the bench and recover," he said. "Let's get rid of the idea that somehow the brain is different."
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With love, The Editor
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