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The best argument yet for telling your kids to go outside

There’s more to biking than just good health.

Look, I think we can all agree kids need to get off the couch and get out of the house more. We can all think of a dozen reasons. But I bet none of those reasons would be so they can rescue their neighbors. And yet, that's exactly what happened. Gunner Skidmore and Kohen Chick, both 13, were out on a perfectly ordinary bike ride through Fruitland, Iowa, when Kohen spotted something off in a yard they were passing.

What they found was an elderly woman lying on the ground who, as Erik Barnes reports, had fallen the night before after feeding her horse and couldn't get herself back up. No phone, no water, no food, just a long night outside spent slowly dragging herself toward the front yard, hoping someone would notice. By the time the boys rolled past, she'd been stranded for more than 16 hours. "She was like scared," Kohen said. "You could just tell because like her face, she was covered in all these bugs and stuff."

What the boys did next earned them an award from their county, and somewhere in Iowa there's a lasagna pan involved.

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Health

The cure for anxiety might be doing everything badly

A University of Cambridge study landed on coping skills that sound backward.

Anxiety has a knack for coming back. You think you've finally beaten it, then it returns with reinforcements, fraying your sleep, your focus, and your ability to sit through a meeting without spiraling. Olivia Remes, a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, walks through the coping skills her team's research surfaced. The catch is that the most effective ones sound completely backwards.

Take the first rule: do it badly. Remes borrows a line from writer GK Chesterton, who insisted that "anything worth doing is worth doing badly." The point is that perfectionism is a stall tactic dressed up as a virtue. Waiting for the perfect moment is how the thing never gets done, and how the worry compounds while you wait. Lower the bar, start the task, and the dread starts to lose its grip.

That's one of three. The other two get stranger and, arguably, more useful: a self-forgiveness method that asks you to literally schedule your worrying for later, and a purpose-driven reframe built on a haunting line from neurologist Viktor Frankl about what life still expects from you. They pair well with the kind of low-stakes routines we've covered in micro walks and the growing backlash against wellness as a second job. None of it requires a prescription, a monastery, or a single dollar.

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Yesterday, we talked about research showing that stickers can do wonders for mental health, whether as little bits of self-expression or as small rewards for jobs well done. Somewhere, a kindergarten teacher read that story and said, “Well, obviously!”

How do GOOD readers feel about stickers?

While 30% of you are like me, limiting your sticker interactions to election days, over half of you use them sparingly but intentionally. A little political thing here, a cute pick-me-up there…

• I wear one on election day, and that's literally it. (30.2%)

• I haven't touched a sticker since elementary school. (10.1%)

• My laptop and my car are both basically collages at this point. (6.7%)

• I have a few carefully chosen specimens, strategically placed. (53.0%)

Reader Ngongldy has an especially deep connection to her stickers. “Immediately after a serious neuro surgery that fixed 35 yrs of epilepsy, my husband set up a calendar w 3 colors of star stickers. Their building numbers & colors spured me on to fix a lunch, walk to the corner AND the first walk around the block. They were the big ones I still smile over 33 years later. Keep rewarding yourself through difficult transitions!”

Culture

Beautiful. Mei. Schön. The word isn't the only thing that changes from country to country

Designers around the world reshaped the same woman and the gap between their versions says a lot.

The word for "beautiful" changes at every border. So does the body behind it. Eighteen countries were asked to define the perfect female form, and not one of them agreed. In an experiment called Perceptions of Perfection, designers around the globe were each handed the same stock photo of a woman and told to retouch her until she fit their culture's beauty ideal. And this was before AI could do the dirty work, so every version is a human judgment call, rendered by hand, pixel by pixel. One country slimmed her toward a BMI that researchers flagged as near-anorexic. Another exaggerated her curves into an hourglass. Same woman, totally different verdicts.

Yes, asking the entire planet to redesign one woman's body is exactly as loaded as it sounds (for the record, they later ran the same experiment on a man). But that's the point. Side by side, the 18 images demolish the idea that there's any single "ideal" to chase. No wonder so many women are opting out of the optimization race altogether. The only thing left to do is look.

Beauty standards notwithstanding, I’m fascinated by the range of Photoshop skills!

On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972, and tucked inside was a single passage that would quietly detonate the world of athletics. It was called Title IX, and all 37 words of it did one thing: bar any school taking federal money from discriminating "on the basis of sex." Here is the fun part. The words "sports" and "athletics" appear nowhere in it.

The people behind it, Senator Birch Bayh and Representative Patsy Mink, were mostly worried about classrooms, not locker rooms. They were thinking about medical schools rejecting women, professors who would not hire them, and scholarships that quietly went to men. Athletics was almost an afterthought, a small corner of a law built for the lecture hall.

Then the afterthought swallowed the headline. American women had been winning Olympic medals since 1900, when Chicago golfer Margaret Abbott became the first, so Title IX did not invent the female champion. What it built was the pipeline. In 1972, only 84 women made the 400-person U.S. Olympic team. By the 2016 Rio Games, women on Team USA outnumbered the men and out-medaled them, too.

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