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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Upworthy
Living in a truck for a month, then a job and a homeThe blank field ends most applications. She filled hers with the truth.
Jovanda Taylor had filled out more than 20 job applications by the time she walked into Maison de Lafayette, a nursing and rehabilitation center in Louisiana. She and her boyfriend, Kevin Washington, had been living in their truck with their two dogs for over a month, rearranging the front seats each night to make room to sleep. Taylor, a certified nursing assistant from New Orleans, had lost her career on a technicality when her credential failed to transfer to Texas. During the interview, hiring manager Wendy King noticed the permanent address field was blank. Taylor answered it directly. "I pulled her to the side and said, 'I'm homeless, living in my truck, and I need help,'" she said. King sat down with her and called Terrance St. Julian, who runs a local nonprofit for unhoused residents. Between the two, the couple got a hotel for a month. Taylor got the job. She started that Monday.
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PROGRESS • Good News Network
Native students hit record graduation rates, from 51 to 88 percentIn 2015, half of them left. This year, eight schools graduated everyone.
Schools funded or managed by the Bureau of Indian Education recorded their highest average graduation rates ever, hitting the national average of 87 to 88 percent for the 2025/26 class. Eight high schools graduated every senior. Another 13 reached 90 percent or higher. That closes a gap that has shadowed Native American education for decades. In 2015, the graduation rate for Native students sat at 51 percent. The turnaround came from modernized data systems, real-time dashboards, and a correction to how the agency counted students. Officials had previously logged students who changed schools as dropouts, which was one way to make the numbers look worse than they were. Remote learning stayed on after the pandemic to help students who care for family or work. "Our students are showing the nation what Native excellence looks like," said BIE Director Tony Dearman. The kids who used to be counted as gone were there the whole time.
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NATURE • Upworthy
They called it fools and dreamers. Now it's a forest.Everyone wanted to kill the weed. He let it win.
A botanist named Hugh Wilson looked at 109 hectares of exhausted hill country on New Zealand's Banks Peninsula in 1987 and proposed doing almost nothing. Most of the old-growth forest had been cleared for grazing, and gorse, the spiny European shrub farmers had burned and sprayed for generations, had buried the rest. Wilson wanted to leave it. One local farmer wrote to the newspaper that the plan was "fools and dreamers stuff." The phrase became the title of a documentary. Wilson understood that gorse acts as a nurse crop. Its thorns keep grazing animals off native seedlings until the young trees grow up through it and shade it out. The gorse then dies, having built the forest that killed it. He removed the goats and possums, stopped the spraying, and waited. Hinewai Reserve is now roughly 1,500 hectares. Wilson is in his eighties, still cycling to work, still hand-writing the quarterly newsletter. He doesn't drive.
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DELIGHT • GreaterGood
A 2,000-pound sea lion moved in and won't leaveHe usually drops in for a day. This time he stayed a month.
A Steller sea lion estimated at 1,500 to 2,000 pounds hauled himself onto the floating docks at San Francisco's Pier 39 and, over the past month, refused to leave. Locals named him Chonkers. Fox News reports his Instagram debut drew a fan base within days. One visitor from Los Angeles, already running late, detoured just to see him. "He's like a Volkswagen! He's so huge!" she told KQED. Pier 39 has hosted sea lions since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but those are compact California sea lions, roughly half his size. NOAA lists the western Steller population as endangered, so an animal this large and healthy is genuinely significant. Harbor master Sheila Chandor, who has worked the pier since 1985, said the anchovy season keeps him close. Laura Gill of the Marine Mammal Center watched him try to snuggle with the smaller sea lions for warmth. "He's trying to fit in, but he sticks out like a sore thumb," she said.
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DELIGHT • Good News Network
He hosts a thousand telescopes for strangers worldwideYou ship him your telescope. He points it at the universe for you.
A 40-acre ranch near Rockwood, Texas, about 80 miles east of San Angelo, now houses nearly a thousand telescopes belonging to strangers. The site is run by Bray Falls, a young astrophotographer known for deep-sky imaging and for discovering new nebulae structures. Stargazers from around the world ship him their gear. He mounts each scope on a concrete pier, aligns it to the celestial pole, and hands control back to the owner, who can then aim it from a laptop thousands of miles away for between $99 and $149 a month. The land sits in a Bortle 1 zone, the darkest rating there is, free of light pollution. A dozen metal buildings called Starfront Observatories store the equipment, roofs closed during the day. At night the roofs roll back. Somewhere far off, a person who has never seen this field opens their computer and looks at a galaxy.
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With love, The Editor
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