Environment

These Moroccan women are pulling drinking water out of thin air

A mesh net, a mountain, and a decade of results

The Fog Collectors of Morocco sounds like a novel that would chart on the NYT best-sellers list, but they’re real people. In the village of Aït Baamrane, women once walked four hours to haul 50-gallon drums of water home. That was the baseline. Then came the drought, the desertification, and the quiet disappearance of what little water the land had left.

As Erik Barnes reports, the women-led NGO Dar Si Hmad didn't wait for a pipeline. They built the world's largest operational fog-harvesting system: giant mesh nets strung between posts, angled into the wind, catching cloud droplets and funneling them into storage tanks. Solar-powered. UV-filtered. No pipes from the outside world required. The system now delivers more than 6,300 liters of potable water a day to five villages and over 400 people.

The technique has since spread to Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Mexico, Spain, and Chile. MIT researchers are now chasing the same idea with salt-based hydrogels and sonic devices that "shake water out of the atmosphere." But for the women of Aït Baamrane, the future arrived a decade ago, one fog net at a time.

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News

Your phone, your couch, and eight other tiny happiness thieves

Small, sneaky, and entirely fixable.

Here's an uncomfortable stat: the 2025 World Happiness Report ranked the US 24th out of 147 countries, the lowest the country has ever placed. The reasons aren't all sweeping or political. Some of them are glowing in your hand right now.

In this story by Mark Wales, licensed therapist and TikTok creator Jeffrey Meltzer walks through 10 ordinary habits quietly eroding our mental well-being. The morning scroll. The all-day indoor marathon. The spiral through every news source you can find. Each one feels harmless on its own. Stacked together, they add up to a slow leak.

The relief is that Meltzer pairs every habit with a fix small enough to actually pull off, no punishing optimization routine required. To the reflexive people-pleasers, he gently insists that disappointing someone with a "no" won't be the end of the world. Whether you're eyeing a happier city to call home or just a happier Tuesday, the rest of the list might hit a little too close to home.

Yesterday’s results

Yesterday, I took advantage of the GOOD readership's collective wisdom to get some advice on dealing with my allergies, and you were kind enough to indulge me!

So, what is the GOOD way to deal with seasonal allergies? Zyrtec and tea it is, and let me tell you so far, working a treat!

• Zyrtec, tea, and a prayer (46.5%)

• Nasal spray, I will absolutely forget to use by Thursday (23.9%)

• Local honey, because a guy at the farmers market swore by it (16.9%)

• Simply staying indoors until October like a sad little gremlin (12.7%)

News

The Florida man who found $30K in a fanny pack and did the least Florida thing imaginable

Ah, the always fun impromptu test of one’s morality.

Luis Salazar was just trying to use the bathroom. What he found hanging on the safety railing of a Wawa gas station restroom in Riviera Beach, Florida, was a fanny pack. Inside was $30,023 in cash.

No ID. No owner in sight. Just Salazar, a small fortune, and his conscience. As Erik Barnes reports, Salazar spent days trying to track down the rightful owner while keeping every dollar secure. Meanwhile, the owner had already realized what he'd lost and called the police. Security footage connected them. Salazar showed up to the station with the fanny pack intact and handed it over, every dollar accounted for.

"It's not my money to take," he said. "I was not raised that way."

What makes this more than a feel-good fluke: research backs him up. A study of 17,000 "lost" wallets dropped across 40 countries found that the more cash inside, the more likely it was to be returned. Most people, apparently, are better than we give them credit for.

On May 21, 1904, representatives from seven European nations gathered in Paris and founded the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, better known as FIFA. Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland signed the founding statutes, and the whole affair was so modest that the organization's first president, Robert Guérin of France, ran things out of his home.

What those seven nations set in motion was, by any measure, the most-watched recurring event in human history. The FIFA World Cup now draws a global television audience that dwarfs the Olympics, the Super Bowl, and pretty much everything else humans have ever agreed to watch simultaneously.

Which makes this particular anniversary a little poetic. This summer, the World Cup lands in our backyard for the first time since 1994, spread across 16 cities in three countries (the USA, Canada, and Mexico) in what is, somehow, the first tri-nation co-hosting arrangement the tournament has ever attempted. Thirty-two years ago, one country was plenty. Apparently, we needed a committee.

The final goes on July 19 at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. Seven countries started this thing. Three are throwing the party.

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