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The 15-year-old whose midnight cooking woke up the whole internet

The kitchen light goes on around 11 p.m., and nobody is grounded.

I love this story, and I will absolutely be forwarding it to my 14-year-old, just in case it gives him ideas.

At 11:28 p.m. in Apple Valley, California, Morgan Graham woke up to a smell she could not place. Not smoke. Something good. She followed it downstairs and found her 15-year-old nephew, Amir Jackson, pulling a tray of cookies out of the oven like it was two in the afternoon.

Jackson is staying with his aunt for the summer, and somewhere along the way the kitchen became his after everyone else went to bed. Cornbread, tacos, whatever the pantry offers up after a day of studying recipes. As Erik Barnes reports, Graham has stopped expecting a quiet night. "In his world, he's having the time of his life. In my world, I just want to stop waking up close to midnight to the smell of food," she joked.

The clips have pulled millions of views, the commenters handed him a nickname, and Graham did something about it besides putting a lock on the pantry.

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Hello, GOOD readers! As I mentioned at the top of this issue, I’m off on vacation next week; you’ll be getting a series of great “Best Of GOOD” issues that I’ve already put together for you. But I won’t be around to report the results of our polls and quizzes, so those will be going on vacation as well.

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Michael J. Fox watched Harrison Ford act out Parkinson's and had to pick up the phone

Marty McFly saw something in Indiana Jones's eyes that nobody else caught

On Apple's Shrinking, Harrison Ford plays a therapist in the earliest chapters of living with Parkinson's disease. Ford has spent six decades saying exactly what he thinks, so nobody expected subtlety. What he delivered was quiet, specific, and unmistakable to anyone who has actually lived it.

Michael J. Fox was one of those people. In this story by Heather Wake, Fox was moved enough to call Bill Lawrence, his old Spin City boss and one of the show's co-creators, and ask a question blunt enough to need a few asterisks. It worked. He was on set soon after, in front of a camera for the first time since 2020.

The cast knew what they were watching. Two of the most recognizable faces of the last forty years, in a waiting room, acting opposite each other for the first time ever. Co-star Michael Urie said "everyone's hearts grew" the day Fox arrived. Fox came with a couple of lines about his own diagnosis that land somewhere between a punchline and a gut check, and then the scene got to him in a way he says he wasn't prepared for. Ford has done this to people before, off camera.

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His physicals were spotless. His nights weren't.

Two firefighters, one year married, one very fast decision.

Firefighter Maddie Geer heard that a fellow firefighter had just been diagnosed with stage five kidney failure, out of nowhere. She volunteered a kidney before she heard the rest of it. The firefighter was her husband.

Geer and Robert Coleman Jr. met training at different Arizona stations and married last year. He'd gone to a doctor about some fatigue. "What really threw us for a loop, though, is the fire department does very thorough physicals, and nothing was caught with my blood pressure," he said. Daytime, his numbers looked fine. At night they went out of control.

"Ever since he got diagnosed with it, I was like, 'If I'm a match, it's meant to be because I'm going to give you my kidney,'" Geer said. As Erik Barnes reports, she walked into testing with the kind of certainty that rarely survives a lab result, the same reflex that sends a 14-year-old into a river with a lasso. Neither of them is cleared for shift work yet, and healing doesn't pay hourly, so her sister started a fundraiser for the unglamorous part of getting better in America.

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On July 31, 1790, the United States government issued its very first patent, and it went to a Philadelphia Quaker named Samuel Hopkins for a better way to make soap ash. Specifically, potash and pearl ash, the alkaline stuff you get from burning hardwood. It sounds like nothing. It was one of early America's most valuable exports, used in soap, glass, gunpowder, fertilizer, and dyeing wool. Settlers clearing forests called it black gold.

There was no Patent Office yet. The entire system was three men in a room: the Secretary of State, the Secretary of War, and the Attorney General, who read applications and decided whether an invention was "sufficiently useful and important." Hopkins passed. His patent was signed by Thomas Jefferson, Attorney General Edmund Randolph, and President George Washington personally, and it opens with the salutation "To all to whom these Presents shall come, Greeting."

Three patents were issued that entire year. The other two covered candle-making and flour milling. Millions have followed since, and every one of them traces back to a man improving the way you burn a pile of ashes. 

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