Film & TV

The camera was the opponent nobody trained for

How a 23-page booklet is trying to fix women's sports broadcasts.

For women who compete at the highest level, the pressure is already relentless. They sacrifice their bodies and their sleep chasing peak condition, then walk out to face the best in the world. What they shouldn't have to plan around is a low-angle camera lingering somewhere it has no business being. As Erik Barnes reports, the European Broadcasting Union just published a fix: a 23-page guide called Raising the Bar, aimed squarely at the broadcast habits that turn athletes into targets.

The problem isn't abstract. Much of the online harassment women athletes face is stitched together from slow-motion footage that zooms in on the wrong thing entirely, the kind of clip that has nothing to do with the sport being played. British pole vaulter Holly Bradshaw, one of three Olympians backing the guide, put it plainly: "Athletes want to enjoy themselves doing the sport they love without feeling uncomfortable or anxious about the footage being shown live." She's spoken before about how objectification pulls a competitor's focus, the same way past Olympians have had to defend their bodies against strangers doing math badly.

The guide itself reads less like a scolding and more like a shot list. Avoid tight shots from behind. Skip the low angles from underneath. Frame above the pelvis, go wider, let the audience actually see the athleticism instead of hunting for a crop. The whole point is to put the sport back in the frame.

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Previous Results

Did your state make the list of the best places to catch a concert this year? There’s still time to find out! My state came in third, now I just need to find the time to catch a few.

How do GOOD readers feel about live music? All sorts of ways, apparently. Just over 30% of you used to love a live show, but now the ol’ back says no. But it didn’t win the poll by much.

• The bigger the crowd and higher the volume, the better (15.2%)

• Loved a big show once, now my back files complaints (30.5%)

• Give me a dim room and a jazz trio nobody's heard of (27.6%)

• Hard pass, I've got AirPods and no parking fees at home (26.7%)

The range of opinions were spelled out wonderfully by two readers.

Judith Hitt is a hard pass. “If I dislike the music, the AirPods and the musicians won't be offended when I turn it off. The artists are sincere about their work and deserve an appreciative audience. Also, at home, I control the volume and have no disruptive patrons to disturb my enjoyment.“

But K Goodwin feels just a little differently. “NOTHING like the collective energy and communal feel of 1000's of people moved by the same sound at once and the volume makes it physical, not just something you hear.“

Research

The frog gut bacteria that erased every tumor in one shot

A 45-strain screening turned up one very unexpected winner.

File this under sentences you never expected to read: the future of cancer treatment might be living inside a frog's intestines. Researchers at Japan's Advanced Institute of Science and Technology went looking for natural bacteria that could fight cancer, casting a wide net and collecting 45 bacterial strains from the guts of Japanese tree frogs, fire-bellied newts, and grass lizards. (Who thinks to do this stuff!?) Nine showed promise. One was in a league of its own.

As Erik Barnes reports, the standout strain, E. americana, didn't just chip away at colorectal tumors in mice. It recruited the animals' own immune systems for what the researchers describe as "comprehensive tumor destruction." In a single dose, mice with colorectal cancer hit a 100% response rate with every tumor eliminated, outperforming current standard therapies, including chemotherapy. No surgery. No repeated rounds. One treatment.

Beyond mild inflammation that cleared within 72 hours, the team found no chronic toxicity across 60 days of observation. And if this sounds like a fluke of nature, it isn't the first time animals have quietly rewritten medicine, from gila monster venom behind GLP-1 drugs to the deep-sea bacteria that makes cancer-killing sugar.

The next question is whether the frogs are done surprising us or just getting started.

Well-being

Eye rolls, sarcasm, and clapbacks feel good, but this works better

A therapist shares the three-step playbook for dealing with rude people without letting them hijack your whole day.

A rude person can ruin your day before you’ve finished your coffee. Some people have a talent for saying just the wrong thing with just the right infuriating tone and boom… It’s all you can think about.

Therapist Jeffrey Meltzer says the trick is not “be nicer.” It’s learning how not to hand over the keys to your nervous system in the first place. As Mark Wales reports, skip the passive-aggressive revenge tour and practice calm, assertive responses before you actually need them. It’s less about winning the interaction and more about refusing to let someone else’s bad behavior move into your brain rent-free.

On July 15, 1975, the United States and the Soviet Union did something unthinkable for two nations that had spent nearly two decades trying to out-rocket each other: they launched toward one another on purpose. The mission was the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, and it began with two crews leaving Earth just seven and a half hours apart. Cosmonauts Aleksei Leonov and Valeri Kubasov lifted off from Kazakhstan first, followed by astronauts Tom Stafford, Vance Brand, and Deke Slayton from Florida, all of them chasing the same rendezvous.

The point of all this was a handshake. Because Apollo and Soyuz were built by rival engineers who agreed on almost nothing, the two nations had to co-design a special docking module just so the ships could physically connect, essentially inventing a metal handshake before the human one could happen. Two days later, Stafford and Leonov clasped hands through the open hatch, live on television, drifting somewhere over France.

The ripples are still overhead right now. That awkward, hard-won cooperation became the template for the International Space Station, where American and Russian crews have kept working side by side even when relations on the ground have frozen over. 

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