Local

Sometimes survival comes down to a detour nobody planned to take

After eight years, they chose to take the road not taken.

In Minnesota, 68-year-old Kathryn Woessner stepped out of her van and into what looked like an ordinary puddle. It wasn't. The mud was deep enough to swallow her almost whole, like quicksand with no bottom, and for three days she lay there, nearly submerged, with no way out and no one close enough to hear her.

Adam Sandbeck and Mike Gravalin were out riding their ATVs when they made one small choice that would matter enormously. There was a flooded trail they'd driven past for eight years and never once explored. On a whim, they turned down it. In this story by Erik Barnes, the two friends describe what they spotted in the clearing, and the two faint words that proved they were not too late.

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Environment

A robot boat is eating LA's river trash before the Olympics show up

Turns out the fastest way to fix a waterway is to schedule a swim meet in it.

I love the Olympics (Fingers crossed I get those badminton tickets I'm in the drawing for!) but why does it take the threat of an international spotlight to get cities to clean up their rivers? Who knows, but it does, and one company is using the deadline for good. Ahead of 2028, LA is rolling out solar-powered Interceptor boats that skim floating trash, sort it, and hold up to 20,000 pounds of it at a time before any of it reaches the Pacific.

The smart part, as Erik Barnes explains, is that these barges don't bother chasing plastic across the open sea. They park at the mouths of rivers and creeks, where most of the trash sneaks in to begin with. “We have to turn the faucet off before we can scoop the ocean,” one operations manager put it. It's the same weirdly elegant logic behind beavers hired to fix city flooding and fog nets that pull drinking water out of thin air. One creek-side Interceptor alone has kept a number you'll want to read twice out of the ocean since 2025.

Can we fix it?

In Monday’s Daily GOOD, we introduced you to Repair Cafés. Or we meant to, but it turns out some of you were already familiar with the concept!

What is the comfort level of GOOD readers when it comes to repairing things?

• First glitch and it's replaced, no hesitation (5.4%)

• There's nothing a YouTube video and pure grit can't fix (63.1%)

• I'll let it limp along for years before I admit defeat (23.1%)

• Half my house is more duct tape than original product (8.5%)

GOOD Reader Gam Berster is one of the people who already knew about this fantastic trend. “I have helped out at many Repair Cafes locally. It's a wonderful thing.”

Local

She thought the free yard work was the gift. It was only the opening act.

It started with one phone call from a stranger who couldn't bring himself to drive past her again.

Spencer B. runs a lawn care company in Kansas, but his real specialty is showing up for people who can no longer keep up with their own yards. He mows for free, mostly for veterans and the elderly, and films the before-and-afters for an audience of millions. So when an Uber driver named Zach mentioned a Wichita woman who was quietly drowning, Spencer loaded up his gear and went.

Her name is Debbie. As Erik Barnes reports, she had spent years as the full-time caregiver for her husband before he died of stage four pancreatic cancer, and grief has a way of letting everything else slide. She was also being quietly preyed on: a contractor who took her deposit and vanished, a neighbor who wrecked her car and never paid for it, rent stacking up, and days when she and her dogs simply went without food.

So Spencer did more than just clean up her overgrown yard. He paid three months of her back rent, bought out her entire yard sale to put cash in her hands, and then set something else in motion without breathing a word of it to her. When he finally sat Debbie down to show her what the kindness of strangers had built in just three days, she could barely get the words out. She genuinely believed the free lawn mowing had been the whole gift. It is a reminder of what can happen when we actually start checking in on a neighbor.

A Correction

On June 16, 1911, a financier named Charles Flint stitched together a handful of unglamorous companies that made meat slicers, grocery scales, and punch-clock time recorders, and christened the result the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. It was, in plainer terms, the awkward teenager that would grow up to be IBM. Nobody in that room was dreaming about computers. They were thinking about delis and factory floors.

The real seed was hiding inside one of the merged firms. Herman Hollerith had built punch-card machines to tally the U.S. Census, and those clattering card readers were among the earliest large-scale data processors anywhere. When a relentless salesman named Thomas Watson took the helm in 1914, he bet the whole business on that tabulating line, leasing machines to companies desperate to crunch their numbers faster.

The slicers and scales eventually fell away, but the data habit never did. Renamed IBM in 1924, the company went on to help run Social Security, the Apollo missions, and the modern mainframe. Not bad for an outfit that started out weighing cold cuts.

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