🎧 How 65 voices turned English into a global soundtrack

Dan Vineberg takes us on a tour of spoken English.

I adore the magic of the written word, but one critical thing is almost invariably lost when putting speech into prose: the accent of the speaker. I have yet to find a way to put down the lilt of a brogue or cadence of a Southern drawl or the warm bounce of Caribbean English, and so, to explore the rich musicality of accents, we must change medium.

Dan Vineberg, the travel vlogger behind The New Travel, did just that. He captured 65 people from around the world speaking English, each in their own unique way. The result? A joyful, eye-opening, occasionally goosebump-inducing video collage that reminds us language isn’t just about what we say, it’s how we say it.

As Neha B. writes in her story, there’s something healing about seeing so much difference in one shared language. One commenter summed it up best: “This made me happy for reasons I can’t explain.”

Image of the day

🔵 Why the color blue used to hide in plain sight

This one blue my mind. (Sorry)

When it comes to the interplay of color and perception, we appear to have a strange chicken-or-egg scenario at play. The ancient Greeks could describe ships, storms, and supernatural drama with poetic flair, but the color blue? Not so much. In The Odyssey, Homer skipped right past it and called the sea “wine dark,” which hits hard emotionally but tells you exactly nothing about hue.

This wasn’t just a Greek quirk. Across ancient languages, blue consistently shows up last. Psychologist Jules Davidoff studied Namibia’s Himba tribe, who still have no word for it, and found that when a color doesn’t have a name, it becomes surprisingly tricky to spot. Your eyes can register it, but your brain kind of shrugs.

So what came first, the color or the concept? As Leo Shvedsky reports for GOOD, the answer might say more about human perception than the rainbow.

And what did we learn?

On Friday, we mourned the passing of the penny after 232 years. One more thing lost to the pages of history. So I asked you, GOOD readers, what thing that we’re losing to progress do you miss most? Over 40% of you miss shopping in real stores.

• Landlines - free me from the plague of reachability (28.1%)

• Real stores - let me browse through real things with my hands (40.4%)

• Physical media - I miss putting in the DVD or flipping the LP (14.6%)

• Dropping in - remember just knocking on someone's door? (16.9%)

Reader WhatASweetDog2 said they miss landlines most. “I never had to look for the landline. It was in the wall in the hall with a chair and table. No walking around. You devoted 100% of your attention to that conversation and that person.”

🗣️ The racist history hiding in everyday language

For every harmless spill the beans, there is a phrase with a much heavier past

In every language, there are idioms people use without a second thought. Germans say Das ist mir Wurst to mean I don’t care, even though it literally means that is my sausage. We all toss around these colorful shortcuts without asking where they came from.

English is packed with harmless favorites like hit the nail on the head or break the ice. But mixed in are phrases with histories that get a lot heavier once you look back. In this story from the vault, we explore some everyday expressions that didn’t start as metaphors at all. They began as ways to mock or marginalize real communities.

Being sold down the river was once a literal reference to enslaved people forced onto boats bound for harsher plantations. Or a phrase like no can do, which originally spread as a way to mock Chinese immigrants. Once you know that, it hits differently.

Language evolves, but only if we help it along. A little awareness goes a long way.

England has had two Queen Elizabeths, separated by 394 years, Elizabeth I acceding in 1558 and Elizabeth II in 1952. Each left a distinct, era-defining imprint. On this day 467 years ago (Nov 17, 1558), the first Elizabeth was proclaimed queen, calming a fractured realm with her Religious Settlement, backing explorers who widened England’s horizons, and presiding over a cultural bloom from Shakespeare to sea power. Centuries later, Elizabeth II would modernize the monarchy for a global media age, steady, service-minded, and Commonwealth-spanning. Two queens, four centuries apart, each turning a page that changed what “England” (and then Britain) meant to the world.

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💬 From the group text…

Once, my son asked me how we domesticated cats. I gave him my personal opinion… we didn’t. They domesticated us.

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