Film & TV

Harrison Ford had one sentence for the actor who lost her dad

A quiet moment in the holding room turned into something she'll keep forever.

Mimi Fletcher made the classic move, Midwest to Los Angeles, chasing the kind of career that starts with background work and builds toward recurring roles on television. In this story by Erik Barnes, she lands a part on Shrinking, the Apple TV show where Harrison Ford plays a senior therapist navigating Parkinson's. A dream gig, on paper. What made it unforgettable had nothing to do with the script.

Fletcher's father was a devoted Harrison Ford fan, and her biggest champion, backing her acting dream even through the choices he didn't love. He died in 2005, years before she'd booked anything she could show him. He never got to see her act professionally. With the anniversary of his death and Father's Day both falling in June, he's been close to mind.

Then came the holding room. Waiting to shoot alongside Ford and Jason Segel, Fletcher worked up the nerve to tell Ford about her dad, about being taken to see Witness as a little girl, about the pride she hoped he might still feel. The tears she'd been fighting won, and Ford pulled her into a hug. What he said while holding her is the kind of thing you hold onto for the rest of your life.

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Everyday Economics

The same cup that wakes you up can clean your whole house

One pot, a startling number of chores.

Making your own coffee at home can save you money and give you some energy. And if what you choose to do with that little bit of extra energy is clean your house, coffee can help again, and save you even more money. Is “I love coffee so much” a hot take? Because I do.

The grounds you'd normally scrape into the trash turn out to be a one-ingredient replacement for half the bottles under your sink. They scrub cookware, they pull odors out of the air, and they handle a couple of household problems you would never think to hand to a scoop of wet espresso. The only cost is the cup you were already going to drink.

As Erik Barnes explains, the same grounds work in the kitchen, the bathroom, the garden, and even on your own skin, and one of them does something to scratched wood that feels like a magic act. Call it the rare entry on our running list of life hacks that actually earns its keep, right alongside the science of the perfect morning cup and the gentler ways to keep pests out of the house.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared a story of how beavers are making their way back to England and how they’re getting right to work.

How do GOOD readers feel about employing beavers in the Public Works department? More than 60% of you are all for it, and who can argue? I was hoping my little rhyming option would get more votes, but hey, whadayado?

• Adorable now, but this is clearly phase one of their long-game revenge (10.8%)

• It's all fun and games until they dam up the Thames (9.0%)

• I, for one, welcome our new semi-aquatic infrastructure overlords (19.8%)

• Free, adorable expert labor (labour?) that gets the job done, what's not to love? (60.4%)

Nation

How a British fishing ban accidentally gave America its first navy

America’s first fighting fleet started with one borrowed schooner and a whole lot of spite.

Today, as we near our 250th birthday, it's a safe bet to call our navy the most powerful in the world. But back before that first birthday... woof.

George Washington was sure of one thing: without ships, the Revolution was doomed. With a navy, he wrote, everything "honorable and glorious" was within reach, and without one, nothing. There was just one snag. He didn't have a navy. No frigates, no warships, no money from Congress to build either.

The fix arrived, unintentionally, from the British themselves. To punish the colonies, Parliament banned New Englanders from fishing the Atlantic, and overnight thousands of skilled mariners who'd spent their lives hauling 100-pound cod out of freezing, storm-tossed water were out of work and absolutely livid. In this story by historian Christopher Magra, you'll meet the men who left their nets behind, picked up muskets, and marched on the siege of Boston. They weren't just unemployed. They were furious.

On June 4, 1937, an Oklahoma City grocer named Sylvan Goldman rolled out a contraption that would eventually outnumber the people who use it. It was the shopping cart, and it started its life as a wooden folding chair with wheels bolted on and two wire baskets stacked where the seat used to be. Goldman, who ran the Humpty Dumpty and Standard store chains, had a simple problem: customers stopped buying once their handheld baskets got heavy. Solve the weight, sell more groceries.

Brilliant. Except shoppers hated it. Men thought pushing a cart looked unmanly, and women said it reminded them too much of a baby stroller they had finally escaped. One reportedly told him she had pushed her last buggy, thank you very much.

So Goldman cheated, beautifully. He hired models of all ages to wheel carts around his stores looking perfectly content, plus greeters to explain the thing. Seeing "everyone" use it broke the spell, and within weeks the carts were everywhere. He died a multimillionaire, having patented the idea that quietly reshaped how the entire planet shops.

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