People are traveling over an hour to visit a 9-year-old's free 'compliment stand'

😃 How far would you drive to hear something nice?

A lemonade stand for your self-esteem. No joke.

Ethan Wargo is the kindest kind of kid, a real Kindness King, a kooky keeper of kudos*. (Ahem). When this 9-year-old read a Dog Man book featuring a “Free Insults” stand, he declared: “Not on my watch.”

So he built the opposite. A Compliment Stand. And business is booming.

People have driven more than an hour just to have Ethan craft them a tailor-made compliment. These aren’t generic “nice shoes” throwaways either. Ethan studies each person and finds something uniquely worthy of a shout-out. It’s wholesome wizardry, and as Ryan Reed reports, it’s now landed him on CBS and in The Washington Post.

What does the young man earn for his heartfelt feel-good phrases? Not a cent! “I didn’t want people to pay to be happy. Paying for something like that is very silly.”

We love a GOOD kid!

* - Yes, I spent too long writing that, and no, I don’t regret it.

🎸 Rock, wreckage, and revenge: how one broken guitar struck a nerve

Emily Wolfe discovered every musician’s fear when she opened her guitar case.

As the rock concert winds its way to that final sustained chord, everyone knows what’s coming. Ears ringing, throats raw, sweat pouring down. It’s time to smash up the guitars. It’s how every guitar dreams of dying. Rock immortality! But in the belly of a Southwest commuter jet under Mr. Borington’s golf clubs? To quote Switch, “Not like this. Not like this.”

But such was the fate of one beautiful Epiphone guitar. The hard case and fragile stickers did nothing to spare the stunning instrument from its fate. And when the doomed six-string’s owner, rising rock star Emily Wolfe, reached out to the airline, they told her it wasn’t their problem.

In this story by Ryan Reed, the rock world rallies, and a musician gets the kind of encore we all root for.

↔️ In Spain, the Right thinks the Left is more righteous

Did I write that right?

Two Spanish psychology studies just dropped a plot twist in the political drama: both left- and right-wing participants said they felt a stronger moral obligation to defend progressive issues like climate action, gender equality, and poverty reduction than conservative ones like national security. As Erik Barnes reports, even conservatives themselves said leftists were more morally focused than their own group.

As Prof. Cristian Catena-Fernández told PsyPost: “We expected some differences, but the consistency of the asymmetry was striking.”

The caveat: these were mostly student samples in Spain, not a global snapshot. Still, the results suggest political battles might be less about policy clashes and more about competing moral narratives.

And what did we learn?

We’ll have the results of yesterday’s poll in Monday’s edition.

There’s still time to weigh in: What’s your go-to survival move in a heatwave?

💬 From the group text…

Behind every great viral kid video is a parent hustling themselves half to death! Bonus: his shadow makes a frantic appearance in the final product.