News

One photo from the edge of the moon just gave a very tired internet something to feel

What 50 years without a lunar mission does to a person, apparently.

On Tuesday, Artemis II lifted off, and within hours, Commander Reid Wiseman took a picture that sent the internet completely sideways. The image, snapped through the Orion spacecraft's window and released almost immediately by NASA, shows Earth the way it almost never gets seen anymore, whole, quiet, and impossibly blue against the dark. It became one of the defining visuals of the mission before most people even knew the mission had launched.

It's been more than 50 years since humans traveled this far from home. For a lot of us, as Mark Wales reports, this is the first time space exploration has felt like something actually happening, right now, to all of us, instead of feeling like well-worn archival footage.

The Reddit thread that followed might be the real story. Alongside the inevitable (someone doing the finger-pinch-squish-the-planet thing), someone quoted Carl Sagan almost word for word: "That's here. That's home. That's us." Another called the thin silver line of Earth's atmosphere "literally a magic border in fantasy novels."

The crew won't splash down in the Pacific until April 10. There's still a lot of mission left. But something might have already been accomplished.

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And the title goes to…

Science revealed that dolphins may be terrible gossips in yesterday’s edition of the Daily GOOD. Since the topic was broached, I asked you, GOOD readers, who gets the title of “Best Creatures in the Sea?” and after a shocking number of votes, the title goes <drumroll> to the clever octopuses. 

• Dolphins: slick smart chaos agents (22.6%)

• Octopuses: quiet genius aliens (41.5%) 🏆

• Whales: massive majestic therapists (18.9%)

• Sea otters: weapons-grade cuteness critters (17.0%)

I have to confess, I’m shocked! I’d have guessed that otters would run away with it, but they came in last. Apparently, GOOD readers love an intelligent survivor. Reader Jonance points out that “The octopus survived the demise of dinosaurs,“ and reader Levi O’Morgan said for the majority, “I'm just so intrigued by these intelligent creatures.”

Well-being

What "for better or worse" actually looks like when the worse shows up

She told her husband he was allowed to leave. He had some thoughts about that.

When most people stand across from their person and repeat "for better or for worse," they're paying about as much attention as they do to the terms and conditions on a new streaming service. Sure, sure, where do I sign? Can we get to the dancing? It's a beautiful sentiment that, in the heady optimism of a new marriage, gets filed away under "things that will never actually apply to us."

That’s how it was for a 31-year-old mother of two until she suffered a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed from the waist down. Doctors said she wouldn't walk again. And somewhere in the fog of fear and grief, she became convinced that the right thing to do was to give her husband an out.

So she told him he should leave. That he deserved better than a life of caregiving. That she wouldn't blame him.

Since this is the Daily Good, you can probably guess that her husband didn't exactly start Googling divorce attorneys. But what he actually said, and what the two of them did next, is what this story by Mark Wales is really about.

Well-being

People chose to shock themselves rather than sit quietly

What the research actually says about what happens inside your head.

People hate being alone with their thoughts. That's why so many of us fall asleep to the TV. If you don't have Michael Scott up to his Office hijinks playing in the background, your brain will absolutely use the silence to replay that embarrassing thing you said to some kid in junior high 40 years ago. In a famous 2014 study, participants were asked to sit alone in a quiet room for 15 minutes with nothing to do. Many chose to press a button that gave them an electric shock rather than keep sitting there.

Psychological scientists Yuval Hadash and J. David Creswell study exactly this problem, and they want to correct something you've probably gotten wrong about mindfulness. It's not a relaxation technique. In one of their studies, people doing a 20-minute mindfulness meditation noticed six times more unpleasant experiences than pleasant ones. The goal isn't peace. It's something harder and more useful than that.

Their research points to a single ingredient that actually drives the benefits: acceptance. Not ignoring what's uncomfortable, not pushing through it, but sitting with it without judgment. There's a whole practice buried in here that most people never try because they assume they're doing it wrong when it feels hard. Well, research says they're not.

On April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper, an engineer at Motorola, strolled down Sixth Avenue in Manhattan holding what looked like a brick with an antenna and made the world's first handheld cell phone call. The recipient? His rival, Dr. Joel Engel at Bell Labs, who was working furiously on a competing project. Cooper's message was simple: "I'm calling you from a cellular phone, a real cellular phone, a handheld, portable, real cellular phone." Engel, reportedly, went very quiet.

What made that call possible was almost as audacious as the call itself. The signal bounced from Cooper's 2.5-pound prototype to a single base station Motorola had quietly installed on a midtown Manhattan rooftop, which then patched the call into the regular AT&T landline system. The entire "network" serving this glimpse of the future could handle exactly thirty subscribers. The world was changed that day by one gloriously petty phone call, one rooftop antenna, and a wire.

Cooper, who has credited the Star Trek communicator as an inspiration, wasn't just showing off a gadget, he was making an argument. Bell Labs was building phones tethered to cars. Cooper dismissed the idea: "We had been trapped in our homes and offices by copper wire for over 100 years, and now they were going to trap us in our cars!" 

The first commercial cell phone didn't arrive until 1983, priced at nearly $4,000 (nearly $12,000 today). But the idea was unstoppable. Today, 97% of American adults own a cell phone, and billions more worldwide carry one. The device that started as a corporate prank call is now how humanity navigates, connects, creates, and calls home. Not bad for a brick.

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💬 From the group text…

Elephants have a sense of humor and love to mess with people. I had no idea. I love learning new things!

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