Well-being

The hottest relationship move of 2026 is dating absolutely no one

Thriving solo just became a strategy, not a consolation prize.

The economy is squeezing everything, and apparently, that now includes your love life. The average night out has climbed to nearly $200, which is a steep tab for a 50/50 chance of being blown off by text a week later. So a growing number of Millennials and Gen Zers are running the numbers and quietly opting out of the dating scene altogether.

The trend has a name: solo-maxxing. As Erik Barnes reports, it's one of those "maxxing" self-improvement crazes, except instead of optimizing your sleep or your skincare, you're optimizing the entire experience of being unattached. Solo-maxxers are funneling the hours they'd spend on dates into cooking classes, martial arts, and skills they actually want. One survey of more than 14,000 young adults found that life felt more peaceful without a relationship in the mix.

Here's where it gets tricky. There's a thin line between genuinely flourishing on your own and slapping a trendy label on plain old loneliness, and the difference matters far more than the hashtag suggests. So how do you tell which one you're actually doing? It comes down to a single honest question worth asking yourself before you sign up for that pottery class.

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Environment

The animal England hunted to extinction is now its best flood defense

Nature's engineers are clocking back in after a 400-year layoff.

West London's Greenford Tube station had a soggy, recurring problem. Every heavy rain pushed a nearby creek over its banks and into the ticket office, the kind of climate change headache that usually ends with expensive concrete and an even more expensive invoice. In 2023, officials skipped the engineering firm and released a family of five beavers instead.

The beavers got straight to work. As Erik Barnes reports, these "nature's engineers" started rerouting water within weeks, and what they accomplished in a single year reads less like a pilot program and more like a one-rodent public works department. The strangest part might be where they chose to set up shop, roughly 100 meters behind a McDonald's.

Beavers were hunted out of England and Wales more than 400 years ago, so there's something quietly generous about them returning to bail out the descendants of the people who wiped them out. And much like the fog-harvesting women of Morocco or the dogs spreading wildflower seeds, the most effective climate fix keeps looking surprisingly low-tech. How many dams these five built, and how far the idea has already spread, is the genuinely jaw-dropping part.

And what did we learn? 🍪

Yesterday, we shared the story of Girl Scouts using clever tech and the money from their cookie sales to do an amazing act of good. 

I had to know if GOOD readers knew which Girl Scout cookies are the best. It was a poll, but really, I know the correct answer. Did GOOD readers know? NO! Thin Mints?!? 37% of you like Thin Mints best? You’re breaking my heart. It’s Tagalongs! With the peanut butter and the chocolate… Sorry… I digress.

• Thin Mints, obviously, and I will not be taking questions (37.0%)

• Samoas, because I contain caramel and chaos (31.9%)

• Tagalongs, the peanut butter dark horse (17.8%)

• Don't make me pick, I love them all equally (13.3%)

Other than learning that my taste in Girl Scout cookies makes me an outlier, GOOD reader Act621 taught me something else. “Did you know that there are different bakeries for Girl Scout cookies? ABC Bakery & Little Brownie Bakers are the 2 that make them but they don't offer the exact same cookies! Thin Mints are vastly different depending on the bakery and ABC Bakery has "Carmel DeLites" instead of Samoas.”

GOOD reader Stacey and I disagree on cookie flavors; she chose Samoas, but we agree 100% on the sentiment she shared. “We need more Girl Scouts, and more Girl Scout Cookies in this world.”

Smart Spending

What a former pro chef can do with $5 and a discount-store cart

The most useful cooking teacher on the internet is working with a budget smaller than your morning coffee run.

Feeding a family has quietly become a luxury, which is exactly why a Brooklyn chef known online as "Chef Moe" has people stopping mid-scroll. His whole pitch is deceptively simple: hand him $5 worth of groceries from a discount store, and he will walk you through a real, satisfying family dinner, naming the cost of every ingredient as he goes. No sad sacrifice, no sad food.

As Mark Wales reports, Maurice Levene built his following the hard way, putting his professional kitchen background toward cheap meals that don't taste cheap. What pushed him to start wasn't a content strategy. It was a widowed mother of three who couldn't stretch her budget far enough to cover seasonings. "I got so sad thinking that she couldn't even afford to buy seasonings," he recalled, and what he decided to do about it is the part worth watching.

The response says everything. Among the 771,000 followers and 7 million likes, the comments read less like recipe praise and more like relief, with viewers saying they now know exactly where to turn if money gets tight. He isn't just plating up frugal dinners; he's handing people the techniques to keep cooking long after the video ends, which matters more than ever given what it now costs to live comfortably. The $5 is the headline. Kitchen confidence is the real meal.

On June 3, 1889, at ten o'clock at night, someone in Oregon City threw a switch, and 14 miles away, the streets of Portland blinked to life. That was the debut of America's first long-distance electric transmission line, a set of lines carrying power from a hydroelectric plant at Willamette Falls to 55 arc lamps glowing at 4th and Main. Until then, electricity had been a strictly local affair, generated practically next door to whatever it lit up.

The outfit behind it was the Willamette Falls Electric Company, started a year earlier by two Portland businessmen with the slightly mad idea of harnessing a waterfall to light a city downstream. Their rig was charmingly modest: a single dynamo pushing direct current that leaked roughly a quarter of its voltage along the way. Nobody was entirely sure it would work until the lamps actually glowed.

It worked, and it quietly rewrote the rules. Once you could move power across distance, cities no longer had to huddle around their energy source. You could plant the generator out where the rivers run and ship the electrons to the people, which is the whole reason the grid behind your wall outlet exists today. That same waterfall, by the way, is still generating power, making it one of the oldest operating hydroelectric sites in the country.

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💬 From the group text…

Parenting is so universal! Summer Beak arrives… sorry, summer BREAK arrives, and you’ve got to figure out how to help them get all that unused energy out.

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