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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • NPR Stories
A 12-year-old taught his robot an endangered Native languageA language with fewer than 10,000 speakers. A kid who wanted to help.
Holden Hoy, 12, spent this spring teaching a small robot to speak Anishinaabemowin, an endangered Native American language with fewer than 10,000 speakers in the U.S. The rising seventh grader from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, built his SkoBot with mentor Danielle Boyer, who founded a nonprofit at 18 to help Native children construct their own. The palm-sized robots mount on the shoulder and answer questions using prerecorded audio, so they never invent words. Hoy named his Sabe, meaning Bigfoot, who represents honesty in Ojibwe culture. He programmed it to introduce itself at his school science fair, where it also reassured the crowd: "I will not gain sentience and take over the world. Or will I?" Boyer's grandmother is one of the last fluent speakers of their dialect. "You lose your culture, you lose a way to describe who you are," she said. Hoy's mother, Jocelyn, said her son has started teaching her.
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PROGRESS • CBS Sunday Morning
A retired nurse drives long roads to reach isolated seniorsNo federal plan reaches this far. A neighbor does.
A North Dakota program is matching neighbors to isolated seniors across 12 rural counties, some so sparsely settled they are classified as "frontier," meaning six or fewer people per square mile. Aging in Community, directed by gerontology specialist Jane Strommen at North Dakota State University Extension, takes what is already there and organizes it. "People are good, and they want to help their fellow neighbor," Strommen said. "Sometimes that just takes a little bit of organizing." Kyla Sanders, a retired nurse and one of four regional coordinators, drives long rural roads fixing stopped wristwatches and filing tax returns. She recently brought 98-year-old Mae Buchli a calendar Buchli can hear rather than see. "Oh, is that ever neat!" Buchli said. The program has run five years, and clients report higher quality of life and more confidence at home. Buchli, for her part, is not moving. "We want to stay home," she said.
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
A one-star review became the museum's best-selling hoodieOne star, no live whales. They agreed and cashed in.
The New Bedford Whaling Museum in Massachusetts once received a one-star Google review calling it the "worst aquarium ever." The museum did not argue. It printed the line on hoodies, tees and tote bags instead. The reviewer had a point, technically. The institution holds artifacts from the region's whaling era, along with a giant whale skeleton, and no live marine animals whatsoever. "We do not have live whales here," said Annelise Conway, the museum's Chief Engagement Officer. "So we are actually the worst aquarium ever." The merchandise has sold out several times and reached local news. Last week a staffer wore the hoodie to a real aquarium, calling the situation awkward. Visitors online rushed to defend the place, noting the ship you can board indoors and the skeletons overhead. The city was once known as "the city that lit the world" for its whale oil. Now it lights up the merch table.
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
A squirrel she fed daily left her a cookieShe fed it every day. One morning it paid her back.
A security camera at a woman's front door caught the reveal in a home video that keeps circulating online. She climbs the steps with a package, stops to hunt for her keys, and notices a bright red cookie set carefully on the window sill beside the door. She looks around, puzzled, trying to work out how it got there. The footage rewinds the mystery. Minutes earlier, a brown squirrel had climbed the railing with the cookie in its mouth, hopped to the sill, and placed the treat where it could not be missed. Then it left without lingering. The woman had been feeding the same squirrel every day, until it became a regular. This was the return trip. Squirrels forget most of what they bury, one Reddit user noted, which makes the delivery of a single intact cookie a small feat of memory. It found her keys before she did.
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PROGRESS • Good News Network
A decade of cleaner air across 120 European citiesThe policies were quiet. The numbers were not.
Emissions of the major air pollutants across the European Union have fallen by roughly 3 to 5 percent per year over the past decade, according to the annual Assessment Report on European Air Quality 2025. The report was released by the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, an EU program that has tracked pollution levels for more than ten years. Industry and road transport saw the sharpest drops. Since 2015, industrial emissions of sulphur oxides have fallen by 59 percent, and nitrogen oxides from cars are down 40 percent. "The overall picture remains positive," the report said, crediting long-standing policies and cleaner industrial systems. The authors do note that weather still nudges numbers up and down year to year, which is the sort of caveat scientists include because they have to. Copernicus monitors 120 cities across Europe and says it will keep identifying not only where pollution happened but the factors behind it.
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With love, The Editor
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