Culture

The chaos one teacher filmed on a Tuesday is basically a nature documentary

Mr. Lindsay's day included, among other things, a negotiation no HR department is ready for.

Middle school has always operated by its own physics. The rules don't apply, the stakes feel enormous, and every 45-minute period contains roughly three full seasons of drama. Most teachers absorb this quietly. Mr. Lindsay decided to document it.

In a TikTok making the rounds, the special education teacher walks through a single day with the energy of someone who has processed everything and is only now ready to talk about it. As Mark Wales reports, the highlights include a fractions lesson that went somewhere no fractions lesson should go, a fart-related diplomatic incident, and a negotiation over money that Lindsay acknowledges he probably shouldn't have entered into.

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Health

Your drink order is doing something to your brain before you even take a sip

New research has some notes on your drink order.

Let's do an experiment right here in the newsletter. Imagine an evening out that starts with a tequila drink. Really try to picture it. Wild? A little unhinged? Fun? You might find yourself wishing you were there. Call it Pavlov's Paloma.

New research has found that just thinking about a type of alcohol, not drinking it, just thinking about it, activates distinct psychological mindsets. Researcher Logan Pant and his team kept booze out of the study entirely, which let them isolate what each drink means culturally, separate from what alcohol actually does to your body.

The moment you say, "I'll have a tequila," some part of your brain is already getting ready to be the fun one. Advertising, social ritual, pop culture, it's all been quietly building a Pavlovian response you didn't consent to. The full findings are worth a read before your next happy hour.

Previous Results

Yesterday, we acknowledged the unfortunate reality that some of the blame for the interruption might fall on the person being interrupted. But we also shared what to do about it!

Which conversation villain is the worst, according to GOOD readers? More than half of you dread the Me Monster, the person who can twist any conversation to be about themselves.

• The Interrupter - Jumping in at every opportunity (18.8%)

• The Me Monster - Always making it about themselves (54.5%)

• The One Upper - "You think that's bad..."(21.4%)

• The Derailer - Your topic bored them, time for another (5.4%)

Reader Cred King put their opinion of the Me Monster pretty succinctly. “The worst!”

Health

The organ Darwin wrote off has been quietly doing something this whole time

It's not useless. It's just... complicated.

A few years ago, I had a debilitating pain in my abdomen, and I think the litany of thoughts I had is pretty common. Is that my appendix? Do I still have an appendix? Where's the appendix? Maybe it’s just something I ate… Two days and one emergency surgery later, I knew a bit more. The appendix is, apparently, a cruel little time bomb made to torture and frighten us! Sorry… I digress.

Biologists Phil Starks and Lilia Goncharova went digging into the actual science and found something surprising: the appendix evolved independently at least 32 times across 361 mammalian species. Darwin called it a useless leftover. Turns out it may have been sheltering beneficial gut bacteria, supporting the immune system, and generally doing more than it gets credit for.

The catch? Most of what it was built for, our modern world has made obsolete. The rupturing, though? That part's still very much on the table.

On April 9, 1939, contralto Marian Anderson walked up to a makeshift stage on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and, before 75,000 people and a radio audience of millions, opened her mouth and changed America.

The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let Anderson, the most celebrated classical singer of her era, perform at their Washington, D.C. venue, Constitution Hall, because she was Black. The city's own school board piled on with a second refusal. So, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes secured federal grounds, and a concert hall without walls or a ceiling was born. Ickes introduced Anderson that Easter Sunday with the words: "Genius draws no color line."

Anderson sang seven songs. The NAACP doubled its membership in the years that followed. Historians now describe the concert as a blueprint for peaceful protest, a template that civil rights leaders would study and build upon for decades. When a young reverend named Martin Luther King Jr. stood on those same steps twenty-four years later to share his dream, he was standing on ground that Marian Anderson had consecrated with her voice.

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