Music

Beggin' for more teachers like this

Ten kids, one drumline, and a teacher whose enthusiasm should be studied.

There's a moment in this video where you stop watching the kids and just... stare at the teacher. Ten students, ages 5 to 10, arranged in a circle of drum kits, hammering out Måneskin's "Beggin'" in tight, almost alarming unison. It should be the main event. It's not.

As Mark Wales reports, Dubai-based drum instructor Patrick Abdo moves through the room like a man who has been waiting his entire life for this exact recital. He's air-drumming. He's conducting with his whole body.

What the video captures, underneath all the joy and noise, is something research keeps confirming: great mentors change outcomes. The kids are locked in because Abdo makes them feel like the performance actually matters. You can see it in their faces. You can definitely see it in the parents'.

The clip is making its rounds, and once you watch it, you'll understand why it's impossible to scroll past.

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Did we get it right?

Yesterday, we shared the well-intentional disconnect of generational manners. One topic of contention is texting, or the lack thereof.

Did GOOD readers know how many texts the average American sends and gets in any given day? According to CTIA, the U.S. wireless industry’s trade association, the answer is 17!

• Less than 6, about one every few hours. (25.4%)

• Roughly 12, give or take a group chat. (19.7%)

• About 17, and always when you're trying to work. (27.0%) ✅

• Over 30, several every waking hour. (27.9%)

Ideas

Namibia doubled its women in parliament overnight and, good news, some things didn’t change

A bit of visibility did what decades of debate couldn't.

There's a sort of gross common knowledge in politics that pushing too hard to make things the way they should have always been will result in pushback from the crowd that benefits from things the way they are. Push too many women into leadership positions too quickly, the thinking goes, and the men are going to push back, hard. Well, maybe not.

In 2013, Namibia's dominant political party quietly rewrote its internal rules to alternate men and women on its candidate list. No legal mandate, no national reckoning. One election later, women's share of parliamentary seats jumped from 21% to 41%. And according to research by political scientist Vladimir Chlouba, the men? They didn't get angrier. They didn't get more resistant. They just... didn't really react at all. The feared backlash never came.

What did move was women's attitudes. In communities where female MPs were suddenly visible and governing, women became measurably more likely to believe women deserved an equal shot at leadership. Representation changed minds. Quietly, and for the better.

Art

The "Last Judgment" is getting restored so a new generation can enjoy the shade

An aging Michelangelo hid his enemies in hell and his own corpse in the corner, but he didn’t hide anyone’s bits.

Five hundred years ago, Michelangelo painted 391 figures onto a single wall in the Sistine Chapel and somehow made it personal. Christ is rendered beardless and heroic, modeled after the pagan god Apollo. The Vatican official who publicly called the whole thing indecent? He's in hell, wearing donkey ears. Michelangelo himself is there too, not among the saved, but as a flayed corpse held up by a saint.

The original version of Christ was entirely nude. A senior Vatican official complained it looked more appropriate for "public baths and taverns," so after Michelangelo's death, a separate painter was brought in to add strategic drapery to the most offending figures. The donkey ears were presumably non-negotiable.

As art historian Virginia Raguin writes, the painting operates on about six levels at once: Christian theology, Greek mythology, Renaissance ego, and what might be the pettiest act of revenge in the history of Western art. For anyone who's ever stood in front of it and felt vaguely overwhelmed, this epic deep-dive is the decoder ring you’ve been waiting for.

On April 16, 1912, Harriet Quimby climbed into a borrowed Blériot monoplane at Dover, England, at 5:30 in the morning and pointed herself toward France. The sky was a wall of fog. Her instruments were a compass and a watch.

She had kept the whole plan secret, terrified another woman would beat her to it. The male pilot who helped her train was so convinced she would die that he offered to put on her signature purple satin flying suit and make the crossing himself. She turned him down. An hour and nine minutes after takeoff, she landed on a beach in northern France, becoming the first woman to fly solo across the English Channel.

The world barely noticed. The RMS Titanic had sunk the night before, and the headlines had no room for a 22-mile triumph over the fog. Quimby died just 76 days later, thrown from her plane over Boston Harbor during an air show. She was 37.

It took nearly 80 years for the United States to formally honor her. In 1991, the Postal Service issued a 50-cent airmail stamp with her face and her purple plane. Today, she is recognized as a foundational figure in women's aviation history and a direct ancestor of every pilot who ever had to fight just to be taken seriously in the cockpit.

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