Culture

How to stay informed without subjecting yourself to traumatizing imagery

Avoiding unexpected trauma is not the same as tuning out of what matters.

The time when a horror in the world would find its way to you a week later, accompanied by a single grainy picture, is long since behind us. Today, we are often inundated with high-resolution videos of tragedy in real time, whether we’re prepared for them or not. When disturbing images hit without warning, they quietly drain the emotional energy we need to stay engaged.

An easy instinct is to disengage, but that isn’t healthy either. Pulling away can feel like relief, but it can also leave people feeling disconnected from moments they still care deeply about.

As Annie Margaret reports, there’s a third option that almost no one is taught. It involves changing how your feeds behave, not how much you care.

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What did we learn?

Did you catch last week’s story about the jobs that people love? It got me wondering, what keeps GOOD readers at their jobs? I’m happy to see that over a third of you find your work fulfilling.

• C'mon... it's the money. (25.0%)

• I love the people I work with! They're like a second family. (17.1%)

• The fulfillment. I do important work and love it! (38.2%)

• Being challenged. I can't get enough of solving problems. (15.8%)

Culture

Soothing sounds from a 10-year-old and her steel “UFO”

The algorithm is loud. This 10-year-old’s music is not.

Here’s something from the other end of the algorithm. Meet ten-year-old self-taught handpan virtuoso, Sprites. That is a real sentence.

You would be forgiven for not knowing what a handpan is. Imagine cutting out the inside of a steel drum and playing it from the other side. As Ryan Reed reports, the result is a set of deep, resonant tones that feel less like a song and more like a mood settling into place. Sprites taught herself to play, mostly improvising original pieces that seem designed for deep breathing and zoning out.

Her latest clip has people stopping mid-scroll and bookmarking it for later. Rainy days. Work loops. Meditation. Quiet moments when the feed feels like too much. “Every day we are amazed by how fast she is improving,” her mom says, still sounding a little surprised by the whole thing.

This is one of those rare algorithmic gifts that doesn’t ask for anything from you. It just shows up, sounds beautiful, and leaves you calmer than it found you.

A GOOD reminder: 19 days to Valentine’s Day, don’t let it sneak up on you.

Culture

Forgiving doesn’t mean going back

A counseling professor explains why letting go and making up are not the same thing.

Two in five Americans have fought with a family member over politics. One in five has become estranged because of it. According to research from the American Psychiatric Association, disagreements are now strong enough to fracture families, block relatives on social media, and keep people away from holidays altogether.

In moments like that, forgiveness often gets framed as a moral obligation. If you forgive someone, the thinking goes, you are supposed to restore the relationship and move on as if nothing happened. But that assumption can quietly keep people stuck.

As Richard Balkin explains in this piece, forgiveness and reconciliation are distinct processes, and conflating them can make healing harder. Forgiveness, he argues, is internal. It is about releasing ill will and emotional weight. Reconciliation is relational. It requires trust, safety, and real change, and sometimes it is simply not possible or wise.

Drawing on research, clinical experience, and his own work counseling people who have lived through serious harm, Balkin shows why forgiveness can feel heavier than revenge or karma, and why choosing not to reconcile does not make forgiveness any less real.

100 years ago today, the first true television transmission flickered to life in London, demonstrated by Scottish inventor John Logie Baird.

The image shown on January 26, 1926, was rough, to put it generously. About 30 lines by 70 dots. Grayscale. Updated roughly 12 times a second. Actual moving imagery, sent from one place to another. The picture was just recognizable, first a ventriloquist’s dummy known as “Stooky Bill,” then later, a human face.

The wild part is how mechanical it all was. Gears, spinning disks, light sensors. Earlier experiments, including those shown months earlier in the US, could only produce stark silhouettes. This was the moment the picture finally came into focus, even if barely.

10 years later, the BBC would begin broadcasting in “high definition,” which, in 1936, meant 405 lines, far less resolution than what we think of as standard definition today. For comparison, an Apple Watch display has 430 lines, while a 4K TV has 2160.

Today, about $300 will get you a 4K TV with HDR and a 60hz refresh rate. That’s roughly 80,000 times more visual information per second than Baird’s original system. Yes, Netflix, we’re still watching.

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