Health

The wait for a kidney was five years, he had nine months left

Wilma the pig saved his life. Now he's preaching her gospel.

Tim Andrews was sleeping between dialysis appointments, unable to walk the dog or keep food down. The waitlist for a human kidney was five years long. His heart had already given out once. Not to put too fine a point on it, but things weren’t looking good.

So when his doctors mentioned an experimental procedure, the kind that had only ever been tried on three people before him, Andrews didn't flinch.

Writer Erik Barnes follows what happened next: the surgery, the dog walks, the first pitch at Fenway, and a gene-edited pig named Wilma who became, in Andrews's words, "a major part of my soul as long as I live." Wilma's story doesn't end the way you might expect. Andrews' doesn't either.

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Health

You can forget about photographic memory

If it were a real thing, we wouldn’t have had to invent the camera.

Suits. Sherlock. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. We can all remember a moment where a character glances at a crime scene, a manuscript, or a lineup and later recalls every detail with surgical precision.

Memory researcher Gabrielle Principe has news. Photographic memory, the kind where the brain captures a perfect frame and files it away for future retrieval, has no scientific evidence behind it. None. (Well, none that she can remember!) The savants and memory champions doing wild feats with decks of cards? They've drilled techniques for thousands of hours. Outside their domain, their recall looks pretty much like yours.

What we actually do when we remember is closer to storytelling than scanning. We reconstruct, piecing the past together from whatever fragments are handy in the moment, shaped by mood, goals, and whatever we happen to know right now. Which means today's version of last Tuesday is slightly different from tomorrow's version of last Tuesday. And here's the part Principe wants you to remember: that's not a bug.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared research on being suspicious of research. 

So, how much of a story do GOOD readers read before feeling they’ve read what needed reading? The vast majority of you read until you get the idea.

• Every single word, every single time! (18.7%)

• I read until I get the idea. (69.8%)

• Headlines will do for me, thank you very much. (8.6%)

• I didn't even finish reading the question. (2.9%)

It honestly didn’t occur to me that you might think I was asking how much of MY articles you read, but some of the comments cleared that up. Very new GOOD reader Mesa Wolf says, “Your articles? Well, this is my first issue, and I like it so far. Articles in general? Depends on the subject, but yeah, sometimes I do just read enough to get the idea and then quit.“

Health

A doctor's verdict on this year's pollen apocalypse

The trees are showing off and your immune system is taking it personally.

If you've spent the last few weeks sneezing into your sleeve and quietly cursing every blooming thing in your zip code, you're not being dramatic. 2026 really is worse.

Allergist Dr. Levi Keller breaks down what's happening in the air, and why one record-warm spring is making the trees overshare. Growing seasons are stretching, pollen counts are climbing, and a lot of people who never had allergies before are suddenly Googling whether you can be allergic to wind.

The good news: there's a real playbook here, from when to actually open your windows to which medications are quietly underrated and which one might take three weeks to kick in (so, uh, start now).

On May 6, 1954, a 25-year-old medical student named Roger Bannister did something every doctor and physiologist in the world had spent decades insisting was impossible. He ran a mile in 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. Then he collapsed into his friends' arms, having politely demolished the most famous wall in sports.

The setting was hardly the stuff of myth. Iffley Road track in Oxford was a cinder oval. The crowd numbered around 1,100. Bannister had spent that morning on his hospital rounds in London, then caught a train up to Oxford while a gale battered the city. He almost called the whole thing off. But the wind dropped just before 6 p.m., his pacers Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway settled into formation, and Bannister did the rest in his last burst around the final bend. The race announcer was a young Norris McWhirter, who would soon co-found a little reference book called Guinness World Records.

Bannister's record lasted exactly 46 days before an Australian named John Landy broke it. Within three years, more than a dozen runners had run sub-four. Today, over 2,000 athletes have done it. The barrier, it turned out, was almost entirely in our heads, and one quiet doctor with a stopwatch was all it took to lift it for everybody.

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