Good People

A hot mic, a doorknob, and a confession Howie Mandel never planned to make

The comedian and TV host thought the mic was off. It wasn’t.

Howie Mandel, known for Deal or No Deal, America’s Got Talent, and decades of stand-up, built a career on being unflappable in public. Behind the scenes, he was working just as hard to hide something else.

As Mark Wales reports, the secret that escaped during a 1998 appearance on The Howard Stern Show was Mandel’s OCD. He thought the show had gone to a commercial. As he tried to leave the studio, a fear of touching a germ-covered doorknob took over. What followed was a tense, very human moment that went out live to millions.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder is often used casually to describe people who are neat or detail-oriented. In reality, OCD involves intrusive thoughts and compulsions that can trigger intense anxiety and panic when they are not acted on. Mandel had spent years making sure no one saw that side of him.

He left the studio certain he had just said too much. Outside, still shaken, a stranger approached him after hearing the broadcast. The interaction was brief, unexpected, and not at all what Mandel had been bracing for.

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Section

Taking a hobby to the next level could be good for your health

There’s a time and place for moderation, and this isn’t either.

If your significant other gives you a hard time for putting too much time and energy into a hobby, you might want to forward them this story. Or at least casually leave it open on your phone while you’re painting miniatures or rolling dice.

As Emily Messina reports, sociologists have a name for hobbies that cross the line from casual fun into something deeper. They call it “serious leisure,” and it shows up in places you might not expect. Think long-running D&D campaigns, obsessive yoga practice, rock climbing communities, or fans who have claimed the same tailgate spot for decades.

The idea is simple and slightly validating. When people stick with a pastime long enough, it stops being just a way to pass the time and starts building skills, identity, and social connections. In a moment when a lot of people feel lonelier than they let on, those shared rituals and inside jokes start to matter a lot.

So buy that next model train, schedule that next D&D campaign, or plan that next tailgate. According to the research, it’s not indulgent. It’s good for you.

What did we learn?

GLP-1s are changing the lives of millions, but what happens after you hit your goal weight? That’s what we discussed yesterday.

I asked you, GOOD readers, what do you think of these new medications? Nearly 40% of you want to give them a little more time before trying them yourselves.

• On them and staying on them. The results are worth it. (16.5%)

• Powerful tool, but only with real medical need and guardrails. (25.3%)

• Fixing food problems with drugs feels like a broken system loop. (20.3%)

• Ask me again in five years when we know the long-term effects. (38.0%)

I’m in the same camp. Any time something is too good to be true, I feel like you’re just signing up to join the class action lawsuit that will arrive in a few years.

science

Astronomers are watching a massive star change on a human time scale

Most of astronomy is about inference and math. This time, it’s about just watching it happen.

Astronomy is built on patience, measurement, and inference. Scientists collect light that left its source long before humans existed, test it against known physics, and model changes that typically unfold over timescales far longer than a lifetime. It can be a slow, exacting, and often patience-testing science.

Then there’s WOH G64.

This red supergiant, more than a thousand times larger than the Sun, has begun changing in ways astronomers can directly observe. Its brightness has shifted. Its temperature appears to be rising. Fresh dust has formed near the star, altering its appearance from Earth.

As Jacco Van Loon and Keiichi Ohnaka report, these changes are happening quickly enough that astronomers are not just validating old models. They are collecting new data in real time, observing a massive star evolve on a human timescale.

What that evolution leads to is still unclear. What’s rare is the chance to witness it at all.

On February 6, 1672, a twenty-nine-year-old Isaac Newton sent a paper on light and color to the Royal Society. It would radically reshape optics. It would also upend his life.

Newton had been obsessing over why telescopes fringed bright objects with rainbow halos, an effect known as chromatic aberration. His prism experiments led him to a simple, unsettling conclusion. The problem was not bad glass. White light itself was a mixture of colors, and refraction merely separated what was already there. The claim drew immediate, high-profile criticism, especially from Robert Hooke. Newton, stung and deeply conflict-averse, withdrew from public scientific debate for years.

Vindication came slowly. While his experiments were hard to dismiss, acceptance of his interpretation of color took decades, not years. In 1704, more than thirty years after that first paper, Newton finally published Opticks, a systematic account of his work that treated light as something to be tested experimentally rather than argued philosophically. By then, he had re-entered public life on his own terms, leaving Cambridge for London, serving as Warden and later Master of the Royal Mint, and becoming President of the Royal Society in 1703. He returned from isolation not as a young theorist defending a risky idea, but as the central authority of British science.

Newton did not invent the scientific method, but he helped lock in its modern shape. His prism experiments treated nature as something to be tested under controlled conditions rather than explained by inherited authority. That style of inquiry became the model for centuries to come. By showing that white light could be separated, measured, and recombined, he laid the conceptual groundwork for spectroscopy, precision optics, and modern color science. Those tools now let us read the chemical makeup of distant stars, design advanced lenses and sensors, and transmit information through fiber-optic cables. What began as a fix for a flawed telescope became a template for how science itself would move forward.

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