Public Good

A police officer spent $2,000 on 100 kids and asked for exactly one thing back

The popcorn and the memory were both included.

The end-of-summer field trip for Greenway Middle School's "After the Bell" program was already on the calendar when the funding for it quietly vanished. Roughly 100 Arizona middle schoolers, no trip. School Resource Officer Sean Reavie heard about it from the program director and did not spend much time weighing his options.

He rented the theater. Not a block of seats, all 144 of them, for a screening of Toy Story 5, snacks and sodas on his tab. As Erik Barnes reports, the bill came to nearly $2,000 out of his own pocket. "If they needed more, I would have given them more," he told 12 News. "You can't break a promise to a child."

Greenway is a Title I school where most of the families qualify for free breakfast and lunch, and for plenty of these kids, the movies had always been somebody else's luxury, the same way organized sports has quietly priced out low-income families across the country. Reavie has done this before, and he is not the only one covering a gap the budget left behind, as one Girl Scout troop and its cookie money can attest.

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And what did we learn?

Friday marked the anniversary of Apollo 11’s return from the moon.

The astronauts didn’t come back empty-handed, bringing home rocks and samples from the moon. Did GOOD readers know how much moon-stuff was brought back? Only 24% got the answer right. Neil and company returned home with just shy of 50 pounds of samples.

• About 5 pounds (18.3%)

• About 22 pounds (31.7%)

• About 48 pounds (24.0%) ✅

• About 110 pounds (26.0%)

Generations | Courtesy of Upworthy

A Gen X psychiatrist says you don't actually miss the '80s

The hair was never the point.

Jeff Knuppel was a teenager in the 1980s, and he'll tell you the decade was fine. Not magic. Fine. The psychiatrist, who runs the YouTube channel GenXistence, thinks the entire nostalgia industry has misdiagnosed its own patients: we're not homesick for a decade, we're homesick for a set of conditions. Six of them, specifically, and he named every one.

In this story by Evan Porter, first shared on our sister site Upworthy, Knuppel opens with the one nobody argues with: you used to be allowed to disappear. "Being unreachable has gone from the default state of a normal day to being something you have to actively create and defend," he says. The other five cut closer. One is about your hands. One is about your guard. One explains why no album will ever feel like an event again.

What keeps this from becoming another lecture about phones is where it lands. Knuppel isn't asking anyone to move back to 1985. He's making the case that a diagnosis is useful, because once you name what's missing you can start rebuilding it. Which, arguably, people already are. They're switching back to dumbphones, learning their neighbors' names on purpose, and starting the small talk they'd normally dodge. The parachute pants are gone for good. The rest of it might not be.

On July 27, 1940, Warner Bros. released a seven-minute cartoon called "A Wild Hare," in which a gray rabbit popped out of a hole, leaned on a carrot, and asked a hunter named Elmer Fudd, "What's up, Doc?" That rabbit was Bugs Bunny, and he arrived already finished.

Warner had spent two years trying to make a rabbit work. The earlier attempts were screechy and manic and nobody remembers them. What director Tex Avery figured out, with Mel Blanc supplying the voice, was that the funny thing is not a frantic rabbit but a relaxed one, a character who is never actually in danger because he has clearly read the script. The catchphrase reportedly came straight out of Avery's Texas school days, where apparently everybody called everybody "Doc."

The formula held. Bugs went on to headline more than 160 shorts, became the face of Looney Tunes, and eventually got promoted to the corporate mascot of the entire studio. Not bad for a bit player who was supposed to be Elmer's problem for one afternoon. Eighty-six years later, he is still working. 

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