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Mel Robbins shares six words that could help you dodge incoming anxiety

They may help you escape the spiral before it spins out.

Let’s clear this up right out of the gate: if you suffer from severe anxiety, a six-word mantra isn’t going to do much to help you. According to Dr. Trisha Wolfe, a trauma specialist, “Anxiety is not purely cognitive or behavioral; it is part of a person’s neurobiological experience.”

So, of course, there’s chronic, neurobiological anxiety, but as Mark Wales reports, there’s also the sort that just creeps up now and then just from being human. Call it ‘low-grade’ anxiety. Mel Robbins, host of an eponymous podcast and author of five-themed books like The 5 Second Rule and The High 5 Habit, has found a simple set of six words that can head off anxiety before its claws get too deep: “What if it all works out?” Dismissible and trite, perhaps, but there’s research that says it has real power to reshape the path your mind takes when things start to go sideways.

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Did we learn to forgive?

Yesterday we did a deep dive into what forvivess entails, and more importantly, what it doesn’t.

How do GOOD readers react when they’ve been wronged? Over 40% put a little distance and silence between themselves and their wrongdoers.

• Forgive and forget. Life is too short to carry a grudge. (22.4%)

• Revenge, ideally served cold. You know who you are! (6.5%)

• Distance and silence. They know where to find me for their apology. (42.1%)

• Karma will set things right. I simply have to wait. (29.0%)

JR Pafine summed it up nicely. “Remove yourself from a harmful relationship or situation. The other person knows what they did and should initiate a conversation.”

Health

New wearable translates speech for stroke survivors

This tiny neck device leverages AI to turn silent effort into real speech and emotion.

Old speech devices helped stroke survivors talk, technically. They were slow, exhausting, and made every sentence sound like a robot's voicemail message. As Erik Barnes reports in this story, a new AI-powered neck wearable is quietly changing that equation.

Instead of forcing users to pause between words, the device picks up subtle throat movements and pulse signals as people mouth phrases. The AI fills in the rest, turning fragments into fluid speech with tone and emotion intact. In early tests, it decoded nearly 96 percent of words and left users far more satisfied than previous systems.

It’s not just clearer. It’s faster, easier, and finally sounds human. Researchers say this could be the difference between being understood and actually being heard.

Health

Researchers open up multiple fronts in the long war with malaria

After decades of playing defense, malaria researchers are finally readying a series of offensives.

Every year, malaria kills more than 600,000 people, most of them children under 5. For decades, progress has felt painfully slow. Bed nets help. Drugs help. Then the parasite adapts and the cycle starts again.

As Kwesi Akonu Adom Mensah Forson explains in this story, that pattern may finally be breaking. For the first time, researchers are seeing real advances stack on top of each other instead of arriving one at a time: vaccines for babies, precision antibodies that catch the parasite mid-invasion, and genetic tools that can spot drug resistance before it explodes. It is less whack-a-mole, more chess.

None of this means malaria is solved. But for researchers who have lived with the disease personally and professionally, this is the first time “a malaria-free childhood” feels like a goal you can sketch on a calendar instead of a dream you whisper.

On January 27, 1302, Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence. A civic leader and member of the White Guelphs, Dante was away on a political mission when the rival Black Guelphs, aligned with the pope, seized power. He was tried and convicted in absentia on corruption charges, fined, had his property seized, and was banished. His wife was not exiled and chose to stay behind, a small but brutal extra twist. A later decree made it even clearer. If Dante returned, he would be executed.

Exile changed everything. Cut off from home, Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, a guided tour through Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, led first by Virgil and ultimately by Beatrice. Written in everyday Tuscan rather than Latin, the work's popularity elevated Tuscan and began its transition into what would become the Italian language we know today.

The Divine Comedy fused biting political commentary, Dante names names, with unforgettable moral imagery. When people joke about a “special place in hell” for someone, they are directly referencing ideas from Dante’s imagination, seven centuries later.

Florence eventually offered him a conditional amnesty, but only if he publicly confessed guilt. Dante refused, choosing exile over humiliation. He spent the rest of his life moving between patrons, died in Ravenna in 1321, and was celebrated there. Florence would not fully claim him again until long after he was gone.

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