Nation

One terrible day in New York became 38 years of love

How a Rolling Stones concert gone wrong grew into a town's favorite place to fall in love

In 1972, Brian O'Reilly got his car stuck in a crowd waiting for a Rolling Stones concert in the Bronx. A riot broke out, and the only thing he had to defend himself with was a tape recorder. "I wasn't recording on purpose," he later explained. "I just had the microphone in my hand, and I had my arm up like this to defend myself." It was, by any measure, a rotten day.

So rotten that O'Reilly left the country over it, settling in Victoria, British Columbia, where he met a woman named Bonnie. As Erik Barnes reports, their friendship simmered for years before Brian finally made his move, and he did not do it halfway. "He said, 'I don't want to date you. I want to marry you,'" Bonnie recalled. They embraced under what is now known as the Kissing Tree, and that one miserable afternoon in New York turned into 38 years of marriage.

Brian has since passed away, but Bonnie kept their tree, whose branches have grown into a natural arch over the sidewalk, open to everyone. She strung lights beneath it to make the space cozier, and now couples get engaged there, children whisper wishes to its trunk, and new parents bring their babies for the quiet shade. She wants strangers to have their own aha moment under it. Victoria isn't the only place with a legendary kissing tree, either, and the reasons other towns earned theirs are their own kind of wonderful.

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And a’ five, six, seven, eight!

Dancing is good for you in far more ways than you might expect.

What relationship do GOOD readers have with dance? About 40% of you get your groove on when nobody’s looking, and that’s fine, so long as you do it!

• Terrible at it, do it constantly, won't change (14.0%)

• Only after the third drink at the wedding (14.7%)

• Kitchen soloist, witness protection level secrecy (39.7%)

• I have moves and I am not afraid to deploy them (31.6%)

The majority of you are secret dancers, but not all! GOOD reader Marg Patzer can’t sit still. “I love dancing and when I am home alone the music gets cranked up and I dance through housework“

Society

America's friendliest state has more cattle than people

A new ranking clocked exactly how much time each state spends being decent to strangers.

We tend to hand out "friendliest state" trophies based on vibes, a warm accent here, a wave from a pickup truck there. SmartAsset decided to skip the vibes and count the minutes instead, using federal time-use data to tally how long residents in each state spend socializing, volunteering, and helping people outside their own homes.

The winner is a place with more cattle than people. Montana took the top spot, with residents averaging a nation-leading 95 minutes a day on those three friendly pursuits, edging out Utah and Wyoming to give the Mountain West a clean sweep of the podium.

Where did your state land? Mine didn’t even make the list!

Ideas

The one relationship you can't seem to feel grateful for

A philosopher spent 14 years trying to figure out why he couldn't thank his mother-in-law.

Fourteen years ago, philosopher Mark Schroeder's mother-in-law uprooted her whole life, moving from South Dakota to California to help raise his newborn daughter. It was a sacrifice that transformed his family's life, and he still couldn't make himself feel grateful to her. If that sounds ungenerous, well, that's kind of the point. He knew he should feel it. He just didn't.

So he spent the next decade and change turning that discomfort into research. In this piece by Mark, he lands on a distinction most of us blur without noticing: there's a world of difference between being grateful that something happened and grateful to the person who did it. An atheist can feel grateful that the rain saved the tomatoes without thanking anyone for it. The hard part is the "to."

So, what do you actually do when the gratitude just won't come? Schroeder has an answer, and it's a gentler one than "fake it." It starts with a small swap, one preposition away from where you got stuck.

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Image of the Day has its own lane, but the pet pics keep arriving, and I am not made of stone. So every Friday, I’ll share one reader-submitted photo of a favorite pet. Want yours featured? Send it along.

On July 17, 1902, a 25-year-old engineer named Willis Carrier signed off on a set of drawings that would eventually make half the planet livable in summer. He wasn't trying to cool anyone down. He was trying to save a Brooklyn print shop from itself.

The Sackett-Wilhelms lithography plant had a soggy problem: humid air kept warping its paper and smearing its multicolor ink, ruining print jobs. Carrier, fresh out of Cornell and working for the Buffalo Forge Company, realized he could pass air over chilled coils to pull the moisture right out of it. His fix controlled humidity and temperature at the same time, which is the whole ballgame for air conditioning. The ink stayed crisp, and an entire industry quietly clicked into place.

That humidity tweak eventually made possible the things we now take completely for granted: summer movie theaters, Sun Belt skyscrapers, deep-South population booms, and the server farms humming behind every app on your phone.

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