Money

Americans never felt worse about the economy. They still broke a giving record.

A milestone year for generosity, with a surprising story about who's actually behind it.

Calling the United States complex is an obvious understatement, but 2025 served up another fascinating manifestation of it. Americans were as worried about the economy as they've ever been, with consumer sentiment sinking to new lows. And they were also out here setting a brand-new milestone, cracking $600 billion in charitable giving for the first time ever. The final tally landed at $617 billion.

As Jon Bergdoll, who has led this annual analysis for more than a decade, breaks it down, the giving categories favored by the wealthy pulled ahead while everyday donations lagged. Gifts left in wills grew fastest of all, and one of the single biggest donors of the year was a tech billionaire who died back in 2018.

So who's really fueling America's record year of generosity, and why are the rest of us, busy doing the math on what it costs to live comfortably and picking up a side hustle just to keep pace, falling behind? The answer says a lot about where the money in this country actually sits.

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Science

The most popular thing to do with a dead phone is nothing

There's a reason 39% of us can't let go.

There's a Palm Pilot in my drawer as I write this. And not one of the models from the end of the run, an early model. It has a stylus. It needed a stylus. And yet, I cannot bring myself to part with a gadget that last synced to a desktop running an operating system that no longer exists. I am, at least in this regard, deeply normal.

A survey of 4,000 Americans found that the single most common thing people do with a finished device is nothing at all: 39% just store it, while recycling and reselling each scrape barely 1 in 10. In this story by researchers Eric Williams, Payam Saeedi, and Stacey Watson, the reasons are more human than lazy. There's a quiet dread that letting go will spill our data, plus the plain fact that most of us don't actually know where to take the thing. The cruel part is that the drawer is the worst option of all. A stored gadget bleeds resale value while you sleep, and wiping it clean only gets harder the longer it lurks.

And the stakes are bigger than my nostalgia. The same small choices that keep trash out of our oceans and let a few beavers fix London's flooding for free tend to add up fast. The researchers are now testing gentle nudges to help people finally let go, and the first step toward an emptier drawer costs nothing but a little nerve. My Palm Pilot and I are going to have a talk.

Previous Results

Yesterday, we got into some findings that maybe embracing a little imperfection could ease your anxiety.

How perfectly perfectionistic are GOOD readers? I’m very happy to see that well over half of you keep a high standard, but can find peace with “pretty good.”

• If it's not perfect, I literally cannot move on. (11.1%)

• I aim high, then make peace with "pretty good." (56.3%)

• Done beats perfect, every single time. (28.9%)

• Whatever, man. Perfect is boring. (3.7%)

GOOD reader Levi O’Morgan (or maybe Levio Morgan?) states the thesis pretty perfectly. “And you know what? Since I've allowed myself to being imperfect, life is so much more manageable.”

Health

America's sunscreen aisle just got its first upgrade since 1999

One ingredient, two kinds of rays, and a much longer life on your skin.

You can safely infer from my last name that I have a personal relationship with sunscreen, so this one caught my full attention. On June 9, the FDA approved bemotrizinol, the first new over-the-counter sunscreen ingredient it's cleared for American shelves since 1999. For context, the last time our sunscreen aisle got fresh blood, people were still burning CDs and bracing for Y2K.

Bemotrizinol isn't actually new. Biomedical engineer Guy German, who studies the science of skin, walks through exactly how it works and points out that shoppers in Europe and Asia have been slathering it on for over two decades. If you've ever smuggled a bottle home from a trip abroad, you may already have some sitting in a drawer (with old phones, presumably).

It filters both UVA and UVB on its own, and it's stubbornly photostable, so it doesn't tap out after a couple of hours in the sun. German's breakdown gets into the physics, the melanin, and the one catch that explains why it took 27 years to reach us.

On June 24, 109 AD, Emperor Trajan staged the ancient world's version of a ribbon-cutting and switched on the Aqua Traiana, a 25-mile aqueduct that hauled fresh spring water from the hills around Lake Bracciano all the way into Rome. He was so pleased with himself that he minted a commemorative coin and quietly footed the entire bill personally, which is basically the Roman emperor equivalent of putting your own name on the new hospital wing.

The water did a lot more than fill baths and fountains. As it tumbled down the steep Janiculum Hill, it spun a row of flour mills, turning the aqueduct into a pre-industrial power plant that helped grind the grain for the city's daily bread. It also topped off Trajan's enormous mock-naval-battle pool, because nothing says "thriving empire" like staging fake sea fights in a landlocked neighborhood.

Here's the goosebump part: the thing basically refused to die. Goths cut it in 537 and centuries of neglect followed, but in the early 1600s Pope Paul V rebuilt the line, renamed it the Acqua Paola, and aimed it at a colossal marble fountain Romans still nickname "Il Fontanone," the Big Fountain. More than 1,900 years after Trajan flipped the switch, his water is still flowing. 

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