Local

An overgrown yard nearly put a retired nurse behind bars

She thought no one would help. She was wrong.

Beverly Thomas spent her career as a nurse, caring for other people. At 79, with arthritis and tremors that make yard work nearly impossible, the retired Ohioan was summoned to court over the one thing her own body wouldn't let her keep up with: her overgrown lawn. A judge told her she could be put in jail over it. Living on a fixed income, with nothing left over for landscaping or a lawyer, she lay awake wondering what on earth she was supposed to do.

Then her predicament reached the local news. As Erik Barnes reports, the morning after the segment aired, Thomas opened her door to two complete strangers: a lawn care pro named Norburt Sanek and an attorney, who had arrived at the very same moment without ever having met. "We don't know each other, but we just showed up at the same time," the two of them told her. They were precisely the help she could never have afforded to hire.

Sanek didn't stop at the front yard. He rallied a crew of volunteers, some taking a day off work to clear years of overgrowth by hand, then launched a GoFundMe to cover her fines, her court costs, and the dangerous trees looming over her property. Donations began landing from strangers hundreds of miles away, and a local agency on aging caught wind and offered to match them. For a woman who'd been bracing for a jail cell, the numbers were starting to look very different.

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Culture

Everyone said film was dead, the screen generation disagrees

There's a reason it's happening, and it has surprisingly little to do with the photos.

The camera attached to the gizmo you're reading this on is a modern miracle. We've all completely acclimated to the idea of having a high-res, high-quality camera on us at all times. But ubiquity and convenience aren't satisfying a new generation, who are quietly reaching for the clunkiest, most limited medium they can find: film. In 2025, more than a third of the world's 42 million film photographers were between 18 and 30.

Rotem Rozental, a photography historian at USC, watched it happen from the front of her own classroom, where students suddenly wanted prints, albums, and handwritten postcards. She's adamant this isn't nostalgia. It reads more like a quiet mutiny by the same kids who grew up performing their lives for an algorithm and seem done with it.

And it isn't just art students. OG Anunoby shot the Knicks' championship rally on a disposable camera this month, while vinyl, VHS, and even flip phones stage comebacks of their own. Rozental traces all of it to something sociologists named decades ago, a kind of gathering place young people are quietly starving for. You can't find it on a screen. A roll of 24 frames might be one way back.

And what did we learn?

Last week, we explored American history through its sandwiches.

Which traditional “American” food is the most quintessentially American?

36.4% of you voted for apple pie, and I agree! I love it. Readers did point out that America’s classic national dish is, in fact, Dutch in origin, but isn’t that what’s so great about this melting pot of ours? Now, I need to get a pie.

• The hot dog, a sausage in denial (31.3%)

• Apple pie, as in "as American as..." (36.4%)

• BBQ that falls off the bone (20.2%)

• Ranch dressing is the obvious answer, right? (12.1%)

Culture

One hundred years of neon, nostalgia, and a few things the postcards left out

Route 66 is winding, so is its history.

When the Nat King Cole Trio cut "Get Your Kicks on Route 66" in 1946 and made the highway immortal, the band couldn't get their own kicks anywhere along it. Few businesses on the route would serve Black travelers, who carried a copy of the Green Book and a lot of nerve. As a historian of Route 66, Daniel Milowski writes that there have always been two Route 66s: the actual road and the mythic one we keep folding into the American story.

The deep dive turns on a cruel irony: just as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally opened those diners and motels to everyone, the new interstates were already strangling Route 66 to death, so the road became fully American right as it stopped mattering. That gap is worth sitting with the next time the warm, back-to-the-fifties nostalgia kicks in, because Milowski keeps wondering what it is, exactly, that's being celebrated.

On June 29, 1990, representatives from 92 countries gathered in London and agreed to strengthen the Montreal Protocol, committing to a complete phase-out of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the chemicals quietly shredding Earth's protective ozone layer. The original 1987 treaty had been a start, but the London Amendment raised the stakes considerably: CFCs had to go entirely, by 2000 in wealthy nations and 2010 in developing ones.

CFCs were everywhere in the 1980s, tucked inside your refrigerator, your air conditioner, your hairspray. They were also punching a seasonal hole in the stratosphere above Antarctica roughly the size of North America. Scientists raised the alarm. Remarkably, the world listened. Every United Nations member state eventually signed on, making it the first universally ratified environmental treaty in history.

Here is where it gets genuinely satisfying. It worked. The ozone hole in 2025 was the fifth smallest on record since 1992, emissions of ozone-depleting substances are 99 percent below their 1989 peak, and the layer is on track for a full recovery by mid-century. The fix was so thorough that some corners of the internet have decided the whole crisis must have been a hoax, because where did it go? It went away because we fixed it. Apparently, that is allowed to happen.

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