Public Good

The grandmothers who out-engineered a heat wave

40 women, three hours a week, one growing canopy.

During a heat wave in the Spanish town of Alhaurín de la Torre, a group of grandmothers thought, you know what, this town needs a sweater. Heat stroke was, briefly, the leading diagnosis.

Six years later, they look like the only people in town who were thinking clearly. As Erik Barnes reports, the crocheted awning a retired woman named Eva Pacheco proposed in 2019 is now 13,000 square feet, drops the street temperature by ten degrees, and has become a tourist attraction in its own right. Every Wednesday, 40 women gather for three hours of crocheting, gossiping, and casual climate adaptation.

Other Spanish towns are copying the model. The original group has since started crocheting things we did not see coming. And the reasons the women keep showing up have very little to do with the weather.

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Everyday Economics

Which of the six farmers’ market shoppers are you?

A new field guide to the very different humans roaming America's 8,700 markets.

Eighty-one percent of American adults have set foot in a farmers’ market at least once in the past year. Which means roughly four in five of you are reading this with a vague memory of paying $8 for heirloom tomatoes and feeling somehow noble about it.

In a new study published in the British Food Journal, strategic communications scholar Bret R. Shaw and his colleagues surveyed 5,141 shoppers and discovered we don't just wander into these stalls at random. We arrive as six distinct tribes, ranging from the highly engaged regulars (tote bags, strong opinions about fennel) to a final group who mostly show up because someone they love dragged them.

But here's the part that surprised the researchers: across every tribe, from the radish evangelists to the people who'd rather be anywhere else, the number one reason shoppers skipped a given week wasn't price, parking, or weather. It was something far more relatable and considerably more embarrassing.

And what did we learn?

Both political parties agree strongly on one element of education: what makes a good teacher.

What, GOOD readers, made your favorite teacher your favorite teacher? The spread was shockingly even, but teachers who really get to know their students took the slight edge, and I agree. Hi, Mrs. Doramus!

• Knew me and actually cared (29.8%)

• Made the boring stuff suddenly click (28.1%)

• Treated us like we were already adults (21.1%)

• Demanded better, and we delivered (21.1%)

Health

Why the linguists are on team 'huuungry tummy'

The case for sing-song speech is stronger than the in-laws think.

For decades, parents have been told not to use baby talk. Speak properly. Use real words. Which, if you ask me, is roughly like saying: skip the training wheels and put the four-year-old behind the wheel on the freeway.

The science is not on the side of the boring talk-properly squad. In a piece drawing from her new book Beyond Words, linguist Karen Stollznow explains that what researchers actually mean by "parentese" isn't leaning in on the "goo goo ga ga" talk. It's real words, correct grammar, stretched vowels, and a sing-song pitch that babies, across every culture studied, find easier to process than regular adult speech.

And those "goed" and "pasketti" and "wabbit" moments parents love to tell stories about? Stollznow argues they're not slip-ups. They're tiny experiments. The toddler is running a linguistic hypothesis and watching what happens.

There's also a wrinkle involving Cookie Monster, and one surprising species that responds to parentese almost as eagerly as babies do.

Who’s a GOOD boy/girl?

Image of the Day has its own lane, but the pet pics keep arriving, and I am not made of stone. So every Friday, I’ll share one reader-submitted photo of a favorite pet. Want yours featured? Send it along.

On May 15, 1941, Joe DiMaggio stepped up to the plate at Yankee Stadium against the Chicago White Sox and lined a single into left-center field. One hit, one run batted in, one utterly ordinary moment in a game New York lost 13 to 1. The Yankees fell to 14 wins and 15 losses on the season, sitting in fourth place. Nobody wrote anything particularly interesting that night.

That single turned out to be the first domino in one of the most statistically improbable runs in the history of American sports. Over the next 56 consecutive games, DiMaggio hit safely every single time out, batting .408 with 15 home runs and 55 RBIs while striking out just five times. The Yankees, meanwhile, went from fourth place to first and never looked back, eventually winning the World Series that fall.

The streak ended July 16th, snapped by Cleveland. DiMaggio promptly started a new 16-game streak the very next day, meaning he got a hit in 72 out of 73 games that summer. Pete Rose made the closest run at the record in 1978, reaching 44 games before falling short. No one has come closer since.

Eighty-five years later, most baseball historians consider the 56-game streak untouchable.

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💬 From the group text…

Fact-checking is part of my job, so I fact-checked this, and yep… unless you count certain fungal growths (ewww), this is, in fact, the largest living thing on Earth.

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