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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
She knocked to eat lunch on a porch. Now they're friends.A stranger knocked. Most people would check the camera and go quiet.
Dara, who works at a Wendy's in Palm Beach County, Florida, rang the doorbell of a house she had never seen to ask if she could eat her lunch on the porch. She was overwhelmed during her shift and did not want to walk all the way home on her break. So she paced the sidewalk first, going home or staying, before working up the nerve to knock. Homeowner Abigail Mwaungulu answered through her Ring camera. "I thought Wendy's delivered," she said, then invited Dara to sit down. "I was trying not to cry when I was eating because I was so happy she said yes," Dara recalled. Mwaungulu posted the footage on TikTok, where millions watched, then went to the Wendy's to find her. Dara hid at first, claiming she was busy. The two clicked anyway and have shared dinners since. Mwaungulu also started a GoFundMe for a car after learning Dara walks to work. Strangers have donated nearly $8,000.
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
Their van died. A stranger saved their whole tour.Ten hours, 500 miles, a dead van. Then Ernie pulled over.
A Detroit metal band made it 500 miles to their next festival last week because a Wisconsin man named Ernie handed them the keys to his Ford Explorer. The Autumn Kings, a touring trio, had just played Rock Fest Wisconsin in the Chippewa Valley when their van died on a rural highway. Every mechanic they called needed two days to fix the engine. They had ten hours to reach the Upheaval Festival in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Ernie, who is in his sixties, pulled over to see if he could help, then lent his truck for several days so the band could finish the tour. They drove more than a thousand miles on it. When they returned the Explorer, they asked why he had done it. He had never met a live band before. "I just did it to help three strangers on the side of the road," he said. Guitarist Jake Diab called it the greatest show of their career.
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NATURE • Good News Network
Rescued from a war zone, the lynx reached her forever homeKept as a pet through a war. Now, grass.
A Eurasian lynx named Ursa stepped onto grass for the first time this week at the Big Cat Sanctuary near Ashford, Kent, then promptly rolled onto her back. She had been found seriously ill in January, illegally kept as a private pet in Kyiv, and moved to a rescue centre while bombs fell nearby. The sanctuary raised $180,000 to evacuate her, a mission staff called high risk, involving border crossings and an active war zone. She flew to Britain in February and waited in a temporary enclosure while a nature-filled one was built. "To see Ursa take her first steps here in Kent was an incredibly emotional moment for the whole team," said Cam Whitnall, managing director of the sanctuary. She now shares the space with other rescued cats, among them a bobcat called Blob. "She is finally in her forever home," Whitnall said.
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DELIGHT • NPR Stories
Mister Rogers arrives on YouTube, free and ad-freeA show built on slowness. A platform built for the opposite.
Fred Rogers Productions launched a YouTube channel this month for "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," a show built on slowness now living on a platform engineered for the opposite. The channel carries a rotating selection of 10 full episodes at a time, plus clips and a live stream. Classic episodes still air on local PBS stations, and the show remains on the PBS Kids app. It has been 25 years since the final episode was produced. Ellen Doherty, the nonprofit's chief creative officer, said the channel is not monetized. "We are a nonprofit organization and driven by mission and legacy," she told NPR's Ayesha Rascoe. The point is reach, not conversion. Rascoe noted that most children's YouTube is fast shorts her kid keeps flipping through. Doherty agreed this was the opposite. Rogers made 895 episodes over his career. Nobody greenlit the first one. He simply decided to, then went and learned how television worked.
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DELIGHT • NPR Stories
He posts marmot videos to fund six decades of researchFederal money dried up. So he went to OnlyFans.
Dan Blumstein, a UCLA professor who runs the Marmot Project at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Crested Butte, Colorado, has started an OnlyFans account to help fund his 64-year-old research on yellow-bellied marmots. He came up with the idea while sitting in a meadow, waiting for the cat-sized alpine rodents to do something. His wife and he had recently watched "Margo's Got Money Troubles," and it clicked. Marmot's got money troubles too. Someone in the lab shouted the name: OnlyMarms. The account posts almost exclusively videos, and there is a Fat Marmot Week contest running on Instagram. Blumstein was briefly rejected during sign-up because he does not look like a marmot, a problem he resolved by writing to explain himself. The account has made about $4,000. He needs $75,000 to $100,000 a year to keep graduate students in the field for the five-month season. A meme coin fans created, he says, is blowing up.
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With love, The Editor
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