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Five good things · Three minutes
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KINDNESS • Good News Network
Four hours stuck in mud, one word finally reached himHe only went outside because his team lost. Someone needed that.
Alastair Cass left his house in Chulmleigh, Devon, in a bad mood last week after watching Arsenal lose 3-0 to Brighton. Walking across his 150-acre property, he heard a noise from the valley behind his barns. He assumed it was nothing. He heard it again, drove down on his quad bike, and finally made out one word clearly. Help. A woman named Sallie had been stuck in mud up to her chest for four hours, shivering, unable to move. Cass tried to pull her free with rope and boards, but the suction was too strong and the sounds she made stopped him. He drove back for signal and called emergency services. Fire crews and a boat rescue team took two hours to free her. Sallie later sent him a thank-you card. "Thanks to Arsenal for being rubbish at football!" she wrote. Had the match gone differently, Cass said, he would have stayed inside for the post-match interviews.
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KINDNESS • Nice News
The first block party in 38 years. People cried.He was tired of waiting for the city. So he read the permit rules.
David Clarke started filming himself picking up litter near his apartment in Washington Heights last May. Five months later, the 24-year-old has raised over $55,000, built a volunteer network, and transformed a single Manhattan block through Trash Talk NYC, which he calls "New York City's cleanup club." His videos went viral within days. His real breakthrough came from a quieter realization: in New York, residents own nothing on the sidewalk except the tree pits. With a city permit that is not hard to obtain, anyone can build a guard around one. Clarke spent two months planting flowers and building wooden guards along the block, then handed out printed flyers inviting neighbors to paint them over lunch and music. It was the first block party there in 38 years. People cried. The flowers are perennials, which means they return. "But they only come back if we work together and make sure the dogs don't pee in the beds," Clarke said. Read the full story → | ||||||||||
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DELIGHT • NPR Stories
Dads sent each other potatoes by drone, just becauseA delivery list full of options. They all picked the potato.
A group of neighbors in a Houston suburb spent part of a recent week sending each other potatoes by drone, at a cost of roughly 82 cents a spud. It started when one dad added seven or eight others to a group chat with a tip: Walmart's drone partner, Wing, would drop items in your backyard in about 25 minutes, no delivery fee. Nathan Edwards, an editor at The Verge who lives in the neighborhood, wondered aloud whether a drone had to land in your own yard. One neighbor, Will, answered fast. "Nathan, I'm just letting you know there's a potato headed your way," he wrote. By coincidence, another dad had already sent a potato to Will. The list of eligible items is long. Both men looked at it and reached the same conclusion independently. "It's obviously potato," Edwards said. Wing allows deliveries to friends with permission, and asks users not to harass anyone. Edwards gave his kids one instruction. Stay out of the yard.
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DELIGHT • NPR Stories
He remixed nursery rhymes. 8,000 toddlers raved at Red Rocks.The sign warns against crowd surfing. Most of the crowd can't read yet.
Australian DJ Lenny Pearce sold out Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado this summer to a crowd of over 8,000, most of whom cannot yet read. His toddler raves are techno remixes of nursery rhymes, played for a dance floor where the house specialty is apple juice and the doors open at 5 p.m. The first stop on his latest tour, in Baltimore, sold more than 1,000 tickets. A sign by the entrance warns against moshing and crowd surfing, which went largely unread. Pearce started in a boy band that won "Australia's Got Talent," then quit when a No. 1 hit still would not pay the bills. The idea came during night feeds with his daughter Mila, when he remixed "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes" and posted it to TikTok. He keeps the volume at 90 decibels and plays no longer than an hour. "Kids are, their attention's very short," he said. He tours with his two youngest, both toddlers. "I'm doing bottles at nighttime and then playing bangers in the day."
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NATURE • Good News Network
Beach umbrellas helped these corals get their color backYou cannot cool the ocean. You can hand a coral a parasol.
Scientists in the Florida Keys tried shading corals with umbrellas last summer, and the corals got some of their color back. The study, published in Frontiers in Marine Science, tested parasol-like shades made of PVC pipe and nylon fabric, floated about a foot above vulnerable brain corals at Newfound Harbor. Each cut light by 60 percent. Lead author Dr. Karen Neely of Nova Southeastern University set up twenty shades over ten coral colonies, with twenty unshaded corals as controls, then sent divers out every two weeks to track color and take tissue samples. The idea came from the 2023 bleaching event, which Neely said "essentially wiped out branching corals" in Florida. Shading cannot cool the water. It blocks the UV damage that compounds the heat. Even in the second-highest thermal stress on record there, the shaded corals lost less color than expected. "Shaded corals even recovered some of their color, after the shades were installed," Neely said.
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THE HONEYMAP
Sweet news is everywhere, if you know where to look.
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With love, The Editor
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