Health

Started a new workout? Treat yo self!

Timing is crucial to forming a new habit.

It’s a strange human quirk that what’s obvious in other people suddenly feels unreasonable when we apply it to ourselves. You wouldn’t reward a child for a job well done a month after the fact, they’d never clock the cause and effect, but in ourselves? We do it all the time. What’s the cost of a new, grueling gym routine? Rushed showers, tighter schedules, sore muscles? And the reward? That shows up later. Maybe much later.

So what do you do? As Donna and Tom would say, treat yo self!

Habit expert Charles Duhigg* explains that rewards actually do work when building routines, but only if they’re immediate and if you give yourself time to enjoy them. Otherwise, your brain clocks exercise as punishment, not progress.

As Erik Barnes reports, the treats aren’t there for keeps. Following every workout with a donut isn’t going to lead where you want it to. But as training wheels, while that habit gets up its own two wheels? Treat yo self!

* - The “That’s a real job?” file is getting thick!

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GOOD readers on what we owe mothers

Denmark, as we covered yesterday, has eliminated a huge portion of the “motherhood penalty.”

I asked you, dear GOOD readers, what you think the government owes to mothers. Well over half of you think we owe new moms at least the basics.

• Everything! You can't govern people if you don't have them. (6.0%)

• Very little. Parenting is a personal choice, not a public obligation. (8.3%)

• The basics. Time to recover, affordable care, and protection at work. (54.8%)

• Support, not control. Help without strings or micromanaging families. (31.0%)

Reader Evander agreed with the majority and made a great point. “Unhealthy mothers - physically, mentally, emotionally - makes for unhealthy children with more to overcome in order to become value-adding members of society. The government owes society healthy expansion.“

History

Maps and women have had a complex relationship that continues to evolve

Women once shaped maps with their bodies, now they are shaping the data that directs the world.

We take maps at face value. At this point, the world feels fully discovered, borders fixed, coastlines agreed upon. Hasn’t everything sort of been discovered? That assumption has never been true. Maps are not neutral objects. Someone always decides what goes at the top, what gets labeled, what gets tracked, and what gets left out entirely.

As Melinda Laituri reports, women and maps go way back. From having their bodies literally used to shape early maps, to handcrafting, coloring, engraving, and calculating them for centuries, women have always been part of how the world gets represented. Their contributions were essential, and often invisible.

Maps are no longer just drawings of places, they are layered systems packed with data that governments and institutions use to guide disaster response, urban planning, healthcare access, and public safety.

Around the world, women are reclaiming mapmaking, using modern tools to document realities once considered unworthy of mapping. Once you see maps as choices rather than facts, it becomes clear how much of the world is still being drawn.

Culture

Is banning phones from school cruel, necessary, or brilliant?

Ohio instituted a strict phone ban for all public schools and learned a surprising lesson.

When I was a kid, teachers told us we could not use calculators because we would not always have them. We needed to know how to do things ourselves. We all know how that turned out.

Now, schools are making the same argument about phones.

In this story by Corinne Brion, Ohio schools that locked phones away for the whole day reported changes that surprised even administrators. Hallways got louder. Cafeterias felt human again. For principals, it looked like a win.

But when you talk to students, a different tension emerges. Many described anxiety, a sense of lost safety, and the feeling of having something essential taken away. The reaction sounded less like annoyance and more like withdrawal. I need it. I need it.

If a phone-saturated life is inevitable, is denying kids access a necessary reset, or a kind of cruelty that delays learning how to live in the world that’s waiting for them? The benefits seem real. Whether the cost is worth it is still up for debate.

On February 4, 960 CE, Zhao Kuangyin was proclaimed Emperor Taizu, launching the Song Dynasty just two days after the Chen Bridge mutiny put him in power. The dynasty would last 319 years, ruling first from Kaifeng and later from Lin’an, today’s Hangzhou, and in that time, it quietly rewired how a large, complex society could function.

Across those centuries, the Song built what historians often describe as an economic revolution. They issued government-backed paper money as early as 1024, expanded printing for books and exam preparation using movable type pioneered by Bi Sheng in the mid 11th century, and professionalized government through a rigorous civil service exam system. Scholars like Shen Kuo documented the magnetic compass in 1088, and by the early 12th century, it was being used for true maritime navigation. Cities swelled, markets hummed, iron production expanded, and canals, especially the Grand Canal, tied the entire system together.

Much of this was unfolding before comparable developments took root in Europe, where power was still centered on feudal courts, castles, and church institutions.

Many of those choices still echo today. The cultural weight of high-stakes exams, the reputations of craft centers like Hangzhou and Jingdezhen, which became famous for refined porcelains, and a model of state capacity grounded in educated administrators all trace back to the Song. Beyond China, the spread of printing, paper currency practices, and navigational tools helped shape global trade and information flows. The Song Dynasty did not just govern an empire. It helped sketch the operating system the modern world still runs on.

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