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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
The thumping upstairs was an 85-year-old who needed herShe thought the noise upstairs was rude. It was Carole.
Heidi Widmer moved from Buffalo to Los Angeles after a divorce, and her first night in her new apartment was interrupted by loud thumping from the unit above. She joked that it sounded like someone was bowling upstairs. The noise turned out to be Carole, an 85-year-old woman with Parkinson's disease, living alone and trying to get through her day. They met a few weeks later, when Carole dropped her recycling outside Widmer's door and it spilled everywhere because her hands were shaking. Widmer stepped in to help, then kept helping. She started taking Carole's trash out twice a week, cooking meals, and untangling the paperwork Carole needed. "I asked her two days ago, 'My girl, what would have happened if I didn't find you?'" Widmer said. "She just looked me straight in the eye and said, 'I would've struggled until somebody did.'" A fundraiser for Carole has since raised more than $60,000. Carole calls Widmer her granddaughter.
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PROGRESS • Positive News
One old bus reached thousands of children with storiesThey couldn't reach the library. So the library drove to them.
A brightly painted bus is delivering books, puppet shows and art supplies to children across rural Syria, part of a Mobile Cultural Bus project launched by Syria's Ministry of Culture with volunteers. It began as an old bus donated by a supporter, cleaned and repaired before being repainted and loaded with novels, drawing equipment and a small puppet theatre. "We realised that many children had never stepped foot inside a library," says project director Mohammad Murad. "If they cannot go to culture, we must bring culture to them." A visit lasts several hours, usually ending with a puppet show. So far the project has reached thousands of children across 39 areas near Damascus, with Homs among recent stops. Walid al-Samahi, 12, loves science fiction but can't afford books. After holding one, he hugged it and smiled. He wants to become a teacher, so other children don't feel as lonely as he did.
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PROGRESS • Reasons to be Cheerful
70,000 workers own their companies and split the profitsProfits go somewhere. Here they go to the people who made them.
The Mondragón Corporation, the world's largest federation of worker-owned cooperatives, reported net profits of €618 million in 2025 across its 92 businesses in Spain's Basque Country. It employs more than 70,000 people, and the workers own the companies and split the profits. The rules are unusual. Each cooperative caps the pay gap between its highest and lowest earners at six to one. Spain's national average is about 110 to one. Everyone gets one vote at the annual assembly, from floor engineers to executives. Iker Aranburu, who joined in 2006, remembers when workers voted down a big international expansion the governing council wanted. The council was forced to resign. "We have the choice to decide," he said, wrench in hand. When appliance-maker Igor Herrate and his wife lost their jobs to a bankruptcy in 2013, both were working again within two months. "You feel protected for life here," he said. By late 2027, one cooperative plans to start building humanoid robots. Read the full story → | |||
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
Four months, one sheep, and her first sweater everThe wool cost $48. Everything after that cost time.
Content creator Macy Gilliam spent four months and $736 turning raw wool into a single fleece sweater, a project she called "Sheep to Sweater." It began in May, when she visited a New York sheep farm and collected four pounds of fleece from a Merino named Frannie. The raw wool cost her $48. Everything after that cost her time. She scoured the fleece in hot water and lanolin, learning the hard way that lanolin poured down a drain clogs it immediately. She picked, carded and spun by hand, then dyed the yarn with crushed beetles. Getting through her first bag alone took two hours. Then, having never knit before, she learned on the job, only to discover she did not have enough yarn and had to start again. "This is my way of reconnecting with the way things are made," Gilliam said. The most expensive part of a sweater, she found, was never the wool. It was the labor.
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DELIGHT • Upworthy
A newspaper joke in 1839 became the world's favorite wordOne editor thought it was funny. The joke outlived the language it mocked.
The most widely used expression in the English language started as a joke in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839. Editor Charles Gordon Greene was writing a satirical piece about the Providence Journal when he tossed in an abbreviation at the end of a throwaway paragraph. It was "o.k.," short for "oll korrect," a deliberate misspelling of "all correct." Educated young men in Boston were deep in an abbreviation craze at the time, and they thought this was hilarious. Their other efforts, like "KY" for "know yuse," died almost immediately. OK should have too. Then Martin Van Buren's supporters formed the "O.K. Club" in 1840, playing off his nickname Old Kinderhook. Van Buren lost the election. OK won everything else. Nobody knew where it came from until the 1960s, when Columbia University linguist Allen Walker Read spent years tracing it back to Greene's joke. He was correct.
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With love, The Editor
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