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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
Strangers raised $180,000 for the limping airport veteranShe could have looked away. She filmed instead.
A TikTok video has raised more than $180,000 for James Blair, a 64-year-old Navy veteran who has worked at John Wayne Airport since 2006 despite two deteriorated knees that make walking difficult. A passenger named Thackery filmed him limping across the tarmac toward her flight out of Los Angeles and posted the clip asking if anyone knew who he was. A commenter eventually identified Blair, who has neither a smartphone nor social media. His boss volunteered to drive about 90 minutes to Blair's house to help set up a GoFundMe. More than 6,000 people donated. Blair, who keeps working because his income helps cover his mother's hospice care, said the response restored his faith. "I believed in God, but I didn't really believe in God. But now, with the angel sitting next to you, it's amazing," he told Thackery. He hasn't retired yet. He did buy a new bed.
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KINDNESS • Reasons to be Cheerful
He offered a stranger his kidney in a barTwo strangers, one bar. Then a chain neither of them could see.
Mark Scotch walked into a Louisiana bar in 2020 and walked out, eventually, with one fewer kidney. He tells it as a joke. It is close to the truth. Scotch, then 64, got talking to Hugh Smith, 56, who mentioned he spent 10 hours every night on dialysis. "It went from this enjoyable experience of meeting him to thinking, 'Oh my God, this guy's life is just horrible,'" Scotch recalls. He offered a kidney on the spot. Instead of giving directly to Smith, Scotch joined a voucher scheme: his kidney went to a stranger he still knows nothing about, which pushed Smith to the top of his local waitlist. Five months later, Smith got his transplant from another donor. More than 90,000 Americans are currently waiting for a kidney. Scotch's wife Lynn has since donated one too, and Mark, now 70, has cycled more than 12,000 miles telling people this option exists.
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DELIGHT • Nice News
At 28, she's Britain's youngest lighthouse keeperShe saw the job on Facebook. Her great-grandfather built one of the towers.
Jeri Cormack, 28, became the youngest retained lighthouse keeper for the Northern Lighthouse Board this January, and she found the job on Facebook. She now looks after three landmarks in the north of Scotland, including Duncansby Head, built in 1924 by a crew that included her great-grandfather. She is one of 17 retained keepers on the board's roster, only two of whom are women, and is believed to be the youngest keeper in Britain. On monthly eight-hour visits to Noss Head, she vacuums the 76-step spiral staircase, cleans the lantern windows, and checks for storm damage. When sheep force their way through a gate, she rounds them up too. The building does not stay quiet. "Whenever there's wind, it whistles through the building. It sounds like screeching," she told The Scotsman. Hail came in June. She said it sounded like thunder. Most keeping jobs vanished after Britain's lighthouses were fully automated in 1998.
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NATURE • Good News Network
Gone by mid-century, 200 anteaters now roam the wetlandsThey released 110. The rest showed up on their own.
Argentina now has around 200 wild giant anteaters living in the Iberá Wetlands, up from zero when a reintroduction effort began there in 2007. La Fundación Rewilding Argentina launched the project in Corrientes province, where the species, known locally as yurumí, had vanished by the mid-20th century after decades of poaching and habitat loss. Over the operational stage, 110 anteaters were rescued or rehabilitated and released, many of them orphans or animals that had wandered too close to town. What happened next was the whole point. The released animals had young, those young had young, and the population is now several generations of wild-born anteaters that never needed rescuing in the first place. The foundation said the methodology now serves as a template for returning key species to other ecosystems. It was the world's first attempt to bring the giant anteater back to a landscape it had disappeared from. Nineteen years on, the count keeps rising.
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
His dad plays guitar. Jack sings and builds LEGO.One hand on the mic. The other building LEGO.
A father-son cover of Dan Fogelberg's 1979 ballad "Longer" has passed 21 million views on Instagram, sung by Jack, a 16-year-old with level 2 autism, while his dad Eric plays guitar behind him. What sets the video apart is Jack's other hand. As he hits every high note, he is also building a Simpsons LEGO set he got for Christmas, flipping through the instruction manual without missing a lyric. Singing and LEGO are his two special interests, and he has taken voice lessons since he was eight. "Jack is in charge of all music that we learn," Eric told Upworthy. "We only do the songs that resonate with Jack." Learning one takes him about a week of constant listening. The comments filled with people who had the song at their weddings, some now widowed. One Canadian veteran wrote that Jack's voice steadied his breathing during a panic attack. His favorite LEGO set, for the record, is the Titanic.
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With love, The Editor
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