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Five good things · Three minutes
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MOTIVATIONAL • NPR Stories
The stutter that terrified her became her livingShe brought a note to be excused. He offered something else.
Susan Greenstein Prescott was a high school senior with a mild stutter when her English teacher, Fred DeMayo, handed her a terrifying assignment: recite a poem in front of the whole class. "I'd be trying to get a word out that might begin with 'd' or a 'th,' and the word wouldn't come out, or I might say 'the' three times," she said. Her mother wrote a note asking her to be excused. DeMayo let her recite it to him alone. When she finished, he told her he liked listening to her voice. She had never heard anything like it. Years later she took a job as a corporate trainer, standing up and speaking for a living. "If I do stutter once in a while, big whoop." In 2023, she tracked DeMayo down. He wrote back to thank her. "He truly is an unsung hero," she said.
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DELIGHT • Good News Network
Tom answered a newspaper ad in 1976. Fifty years later, still there.He answered a newspaper ad in 1976. He never left.
Tom McKievick has worked at Fredericka Manor senior living community in Chula Vista, California, for 50 years, and in that time he has never taken a single sick day. He answered a newspaper ad in 1976 without any intention of starting a career. By the math of one week of vacation a year, he has clocked in roughly 12,650 times. McKievick is now head of security, and the community marked the anniversary with an award and a party in his honor. "When I started I wouldn't think in a million years I'd still be here but I enjoy the residents and the work, and it's entertaining and it's challenging, and never boring," he told Fox 5 San Diego. Fifty years is long enough to watch a career definition catch up with you. The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls this a "lifetime career." McKievick calls it not boring.
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SCIENCE • Upworthy
Barred from the ships, she mapped the ocean floor anywayCousteau went looking to prove her wrong. The valley was right there.
Marie Tharp mapped the bottom of the Atlantic without ever being allowed on the ships that gathered the data. Women were barred from the research cruises, so Tharp, a geologist and oceanographic cartographer, sat at a desk and translated thousands of sonar readings by hand. Her drawings revealed a seafloor full of canyons and ridges, evidence that the Earth's crust had moved. In 1957, she and colleague Bruce Heezen published the first map of the Atlantic. When her findings backed the once-heretical idea of continental drift, Heezen called it "girl talk." Then, in 1959, Jacques Cousteau lowered a camera into the ocean hoping to prove her wrong. He found the valley exactly where she said it would be. Tharp was credited as "merely a technician" and did not set foot on a research cruise until 1968. In 1997, the Library of Congress named her one of the greatest cartographers of the 20th century.
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PROGRESS • Good Good Good
A tiny squirrel bridge has stood since 1963Too many kept dying on the road. So one man built a bridge.
Longview, Washington built what it calls the world's first bridge for squirrels, and it has been standing since 1963. The Nutty Narrows Bridge is a 60-foot span made partly from repurposed fire hose, strung above a busy road so the town's squirrels could cross without meeting a car. A local builder named Amos Peters designed it after watching too many of them fail the same journey. The bridge worked. Squirrels used it, and still do, and the town grew fond enough of the crossing to keep it maintained for six decades. Longview now holds an annual Squirrel Fest in its honor, with vendors and a parade and people who genuinely enjoy talking about rodents. The city has since added more squirrel bridges. There is a bronze statue of Peters downtown, holding a small model of the one he made first.
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PROGRESS • Positive News
One buried fridge stores as much as a dozen family onesNo electricity. Just the ground doing what it always did.
A north London garden has installed the UK's first Ground Fridge, an underground larder that keeps food cool without mains electricity. Set into a flowerbed at OmVed Gardens off Highgate Hill, the fridge has a door as tall as a person and opens onto a small round room lined with shelves. A solar-powered ventilation system draws in cool night air to replace the warmer air of the day. Designed by Dutch inventor Floris Schoonderbeek, it borrows from the earth cellars people used long before artificial refrigeration. Fermentation specialist Josefine Marchandise, who runs the kitchen, says it holds between 8 and 15 degrees even during heatwaves. It costs around £12,000 plus VAT, but stores as much as a dozen family fridges and runs on almost nothing. Visiting schoolchildren tend to have one reaction. "They just ask: 'Why isn't this everywhere?'"
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With love, The Editor
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