Internet

The church fathers had swag, and TikTok finally noticed

Sacred art meets bedroom-mirror confidence, one slow zoom at a time.

What if the awkward pose from that ancient painting of a church father wasn't awkward. What if it was just dripping in swag? That's the premise behind a TikTok trend where someone strikes a solemn pose, then dissolves into a haloed saint holding the exact same stance. The internet has decided the church fathers had drip, and the videos are pulling hundreds of thousands of views.

In this story by art historian Denva Gallant, who couldn't resist trying the trend herself, the joke lands because it isn't really one. That raised hand and severe gaze were engineered centuries ago to broadcast holiness and authority. Swap the robes for a hoodie, and "they had swag fr." The visual grammar of power translates cleanly from cathedral to camera roll. It's the same reason a bit of untranslatable Gen Z slang can feel loaded online, or why main character energy turns a walk to the mailbox into a cinematic event.

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And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we shared the fascinating (disturbing) research into what your cats are eating when they roam. If you have cats, that is. Because when I asked GOOD readers what’s on their cats’ menus, almost 50% of you reported not having cats at all.

• Nothing. I don't have cats. (48.3%)

• My cats eat anything I put in front of them. (25.8%)

• Only the fanciest (and priciest) for my feline snob. (20.0%)

• They feast outside and I don't even want to know on what. (5.8%)

I have two fuzzy cohabitants, and they won’t eat anything but a very specific variety of a very specific brand. It’s not that it’s expensive; it’s just that I can’t always find it, guys. The look they give me when it’s the wrong stuff! I’m doing my best here!

Local

When everyone froze at the pool, one sixth grader did not

Can an eleven-year-old be considered a ‘man’ of action?

Avory Woolery was at his Kentucky apartment complex pool when he noticed something at the bottom that nobody else seemed to register: a man, unconscious, motionless underwater. The adults around him did nothing. So the 11-year-old did the math a lot of grown-ups couldn't. "There was this man in the pool, like unconscious underwater, almost shaking, maybe, and my adrenaline kicked in," he told a local news station.

Asked why he dove for a total stranger, Avory didn't reach for anything heroic or rehearsed. "There was no way that I was going to let another man die today. He's a human being. He should be treated as such." A sixth grader delivered a sentence most adults couldn't. As Erik Barnes reports, Avory pulled the man up, a bystander started CPR, and someone finally called 911.

Environment

Meet the 18-donkey battalion that hasn't let a Spanish park burn in a decade

No fuel, no money, no fire.

Wildfires have doubled worldwide, and firefighters everywhere are hunting for a way to stop them before they start. One national park in southern Spain figured it out over a decade ago, and the solution has four legs and a bottomless appetite.

Since 2014, a battalion of 18 donkeys has kept Doñana National Park fire-free by doing one deceptively simple thing: eating the dry brush that sparks and feeds wildfires in the first place. As Erik Barnes reports, the herd grazes up to seven hours a day, clearing dried grass and scrub from ground that trucks can't even reach. Their reward for a full shift? About eight gallons of water and a nap. No fuel, no payroll, no smoke.

It works because donkeys are basically built for the job. Their stomachs handle the same rough, dry vegetation day after day, and unlike human crews, they dispose of the fire fuel by digesting it. The approach has caught on across Spain, from a 40-donkey outfit in Tivissa to a GPS-tracked team clearing a 1,000-hectare biosphere reserve, and California has been running the same play with goats. It's the kind of low-tech fix that sits alongside beavers slowing London's floods in the growing file of animals quietly out-engineering us. But… are the fundraising calendars any good?

On July 9, 1877, a modest little tennis tournament got underway at the All England Croquet and Lawn Tennis Club in a quiet suburb south of London. Twenty-two men paid a guinea each to enter, a couple hundred curious spectators wandered in, and nobody involved had the faintest idea they were launching the most prestigious tennis tournament on the planet. That was the very first Wimbledon.

The club was really a croquet club, and croquet was fading fast. What they urgently needed was cash to fix their heavy pony-drawn lawn roller, the machine that kept the grass tidy. So they cooked up a lawn tennis tournament as a fundraiser. A busted piece of gardening equipment is, in a very real sense, the reason Wimbledon exists.

The sport itself was practically brand new, its rules cobbled together only a few years earlier. Organizers had to invent details we now take for granted, like the rectangular court and the "first to six games" set. Twenty-seven-year-old Spencer Gore won that inaugural title in a tidy 48 minutes.

Nearly 150 years on, the grass, the guinea-era traditions, and the strawberries endure. Not bad for a pony-roller repair fund. 

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