Internet

Italy's "human cheetah" is either the fastest man alive or the world's most patient editor

Ken Lee snatches lighters out of thin air on TikTok. The internet has theories.

You've got to be pretty quick to pull one over on me! And... Ken Lee is pretty fast. Shockingly fast. The kind of fast that pushes the boundaries of internet credulity and science.

The Italian content creator, who calls himself a "Superhero per Hobby," has built a 100-million-like TikTok fandom around videos in which he snatches lighters, clothespins, and the occasional flying object out of midair before the camera quite catches up. Half his viewers think it's sped-up footage. The other half think they're watching the fastest human alive.

So Mark Wales went looking for a tiebreaker in the science. A 2024 study found that the nervous system can fine-tune responses in real time, making practiced movements look almost automatic. Other research puts the elite human reaction-time ceiling at around 100 milliseconds, which is about the speed at which your brain registers that something has happened. Fast enough to be real. Fast enough to leave room for doubt.

Which is the fun of it. We can't quite prove Ken Lee is the fastest man alive. We also can't prove he isn't.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday was May 4th. May the fourth. May the Fourth Be With You! STAR WARS DAY! Did GOOD readers celebrate, or did my enigmatically nerdy poll confuse and confound? Well over half of you are apparently not practicing Star Wars fans. As Darth Vader would say, “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

• With a fresh glass of blue milk (14.1%)

• I have no idea what you’re talking about (56.3%)

• Real nerds celebrate April 5th 🖖🏻 (21.1%)

• By choosing hamburger over chicken (8.5%)

“Hey, Greg, what’s with the chicken option?” you may have asked. Well, May 4th is also International Respect For Chickens Day. I don’t know who decides these things. April 5th is for Star Trek fans, it’s First Contact Day, when humans first meet the Vulcans. Sometimes I wonder how I managed to get married.

Technology

The latest research says you should be suspicious of the latest research

You skimmed the headline. The reporter skimmed the study. The study barely proved anything.

Be honest. You've skimmed a science headline, absorbed a vague vibe ("eggs bad now?"), and kept it moving. No shame. The inbox is full, the toddler is loose, the meeting starts in four minutes.

Here's the gently humbling part. Even if you'd stopped and read the whole article, you might still be wrong, because the journalist who wrote it may not have fully understood the research either. And even if they did, the study they're describing is almost certainly not the last word on anything. It's one brick in a scientific edifice and even just one wall can take decades to finish.

Geographer Jeffrey A. Lee has spent his career doing science and teaching how it actually works, and he wrote a clear-eyed guide to the chain of small bets between a lab and your breakfast. Why peer review helps but doesn't save you. Why replication matters more than novelty. And the one question worth asking before you let your goofy-but-lovable cousin restructure your diet.

Science

The smallest patch of green in your city is doing more than you think

Tiny parks, big feelings (and also, lower blood pressure)

I've made Parks and Rec references in this newsletter before. They go pretty consistently unappreciated. But like Leslie Knope herself, I shall not give up. How can I? This story by Matt Simon is literally about tiny parks. Tiny parks reunited Ben and Leslie! OK, I digress.

The case for "pocket gardens," those engineered slivers of greenery wedged between sidewalks and buildings, is sneakily huge. (My grammar checker is giving ‘sneakily’ a pass. Love it!) Cooler air. Less flooding. Cleaner lungs. Quieter streets. One Barcelona study even clocked a measurable drop in noise once cars gave way to vegetation, and noise, it turns out, has been linked to hypertension and heart disease. So your neighborhood's smallest park might be doing more for you than your gym membership.

On May 5, 1921, Coco Chanel walked into her boutique on the Rue Cambon in Paris and put a small, square glass bottle on the shelf. The date was not an accident. Five was her lucky number, May was the fifth month, and the perfume itself was the fifth sample her perfumer, Ernest Beaux, had handed her to sniff. She picked it, named it after the digit, and called it a day. Chanel No. 5 was born.

What was inside the bottle was the actual revolution. Beaux had loaded the formula with aldehydes, a class of synthetic compounds that gave the scent an abstract, almost soapy-clean quality unlike anything on the market. Until then, perfumes had tried to smell like one thing: roses, violets, the suggestion of a meadow. Chanel wanted something that smelled like a woman, not a flower garden. The bottle itself was just as radical, ditching the era's ornate crystal flourishes for clean lines that looked more like a whiskey decanter than a vanity object.

A century later, a bottle of No. 5 sells somewhere in the world roughly every 30 seconds. Marilyn Monroe famously claimed it was all she wore to bed. Not bad for a fragrance Chanel reportedly priced sky-high so her wealthy friends would feel they had earned it.

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