Ideas

No grandparents nearby? 14,000 strangers raised their hands.

The "it takes a village" idea has moved online.

For a lot of parents, "it takes a village" is a phrase they've only heard, never lived. Grandparents are three time zones away. Neighbors come and go. The casual, low-stakes help that families used to lean on without thinking? Mostly gone.

Mark Wales digs into a Facebook group called Surrogate Grandparents – USA, where more than 14,000 people are doing something almost old-fashioned: showing up for kids who aren't theirs, and families who aren't related to them. A parent posts. An older adult responds. They talk. They meet. Sometimes, a relationship takes root that neither side saw coming.

One woman, after connecting with a young family, said discovering the page brought light back into a part of her life that had gone dark. Another grandmother-in-spirit just wanted to get on the floor and play Legos again.

There's also a twist about what happened when Meta briefly pulled the plug.

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Did we get it right on Friday?

On Friday, we shared the three-question IQ-type quiz that only 17% of people get right. And I just had to try one of the questions on you, GOOD readers.

A bat and a ball cost $1.10 together. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. Quick: How much is the ball?

GOOD news, as a group, you outperformed the general population by almost 80%, with over 30% of you getting it right. Alas… 66% of you took the quick gut reaction and got it wrong.

• $0.05 (30.5%) ✅

• $0.15 (1.0%)

• $0.10 (66.2%)

• $0.20 (2.4%)

If, as most of you answered, the ball cost $0.10 of our $1.10, the bat would cost $1.00, which is only $0.90 more!

GOOD reader Fin Negany clocked the ‘real’ problem after getting it wrong. “Probably because of tax. How could I forget TAX?”

Society

Americans are quietly thinking 700 years ahead

Most Americans are forward-thinking and think their fellow Americans aren’t.

Pop quiz: how far into the future do you think the average American actually cares about? Like, cares cares. Pandemic prep, AI guardrails, climate stuff that won't pay off until your great-great-great-grandkids are arguing about something we can't even imagine yet.

Whatever number you just guessed, researchers Kyle Fiore Law and Stylianos Syropoulos would like a word. In two surveys totaling 1,000 U.S. adults, they found Americans extend moral concern an average of 28 generations into the future. That's roughly 700 years. The catch: we assume everyone else taps out about 175 years sooner.

So there's a gap. A big one. And gaps like this tend to do something specific to public life, something that helps explain why a quietly popular idea can sound, in any given news cycle, like a fringe one.

Society

When a Michigan school yanked the Chromebooks midyear, the teachers built a fort

Reading scores cratered, so one rural school pulled the plug on screens overnight.

In Lily Altavena's reporting, a rural Michigan elementary school decided it had seen enough. Last spring, only 18% of Jewett Elementary's third graders hit reading proficiency, half the state average and half what it was a decade ago. So the superintendent and principal had a quick conversation, asked themselves how much teachers were actually reading aloud to kids anymore, and went cold turkey on student devices by the end of the week. Printers worked overtime. Beanbag chairs got ordered.

Not everyone's sold. One USC professor calls the all-or-nothing approach "taking a hammer when you need a scalpel." Some teachers shrug. Some kids growl when you ask them about it. (Fortnite is reportedly safe at home.)

But Altavena's piece catches the school in the middle of the experiment, and there are moments that linger. A literacy aide watching a struggling reader bounce in her chair while reading a passage about soccer. A boy who used to rush through reading to unlock the game at the end now picking up books on his own. And one fifth-grade class, on the day the reporter visited, who built a blanket fort during class and climbed inside to read by flashlight.

On May 4, 1655, in the Republic of Venice, a baby named Bartolomeo Cristofori was born in Padua. The piano is one of those things so fundamental that you forget someone had to invent it. Like the wheel, or the fork. It's just there, in living rooms and concert halls and bar corners, waiting. But somebody had to dream it up. That somebody was Cristofori.

We know almost nothing about his early years. What we do know is that by his early thirties, he was building harpsichords skillfully enough for Prince Ferdinando de' Medici to summon him to Florence. Cristofori didn't want to go. The prince, in classic Medici fashion, made him an offer he couldn't refuse. Once installed at court, Cristofori spent years chewing on a problem nobody had cracked: the harpsichord could only play at one volume. Pluck a string with a quill and you got the same flat note whether you tapped the key or hammered it. Around 1700, he solved it, swapping quills for tiny leather-covered hammers and engineering a mechanism that let them strike and bounce back, free. The result was a keyboard that could finally whisper or shout depending on the player's touch.

He called it a gravicembalo col piano e forte. Italians shortened it to "pianoforte." English speakers shortened it further to "piano." Cristofori died in 1731; his invention was largely ignored in Italy, never knowing what he'd unleashed. Somewhere between Beethoven's symphonies, Scott Joplin's rags, Ray Charles's gospel chords, and the kid practicing scales next door, the world quietly agreed: this guy nailed it.

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💬 From the group text…

At the end of a Monday, you may need a smile. Allow me to offer one up in the form of firemen rescuing trapped ducklings and reuniting them with their mother. No need to thank me, it’s my job!

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