👨‍👧 Dad crashes his daughters’ tearful goodbye with a three-word twist

Warning to girl-dads: this one’s a tearjerker.

Brittney Swanzer and her sister thought they were leaving their dad behind in Ohio when they moved to California. Instead, he walked out with a suitcase and whispered three unforgettable words: “You forgot me.”

There’s “kid moving out” sad, and then there’s “two kids moving out on the same day to a different time zone” sad. Their dad couldn’t handle just waving from the porch, so he joined their cross-country road trip.

As Adam Albright Hanna reports, the TikTok moment went viral, with fellow dads sharing their own tearful goodbyes and strangers wishing for a love like that.

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🧙‍♂️ Tolkien vs. the Third Reich

They wanted proof of Tolkien’s “racial purity,” but he gave them a masterclass in shade instead.

In 1938, a Berlin publishing house wanted to translate The Hobbit because, well, of course they did. But before they could, they sent J.R.R. Tolkien a little paperwork: could he please confirm he was of “Aryan descent”?

Tolkien, no fan of Nazi “race doctrine,” wasn’t having it. He had already fought Germans in WWI, so a racial background check from Berlin in 1938 must have felt like a sick joke. And while he swore The Lord of the Rings wasn’t an allegory for WWII, let’s just say the whole “dark lord raising an army to wipe out the world” thing hits a little differently when you know what he was living through.

So when he got their letter, he wrote back. In a letter that’s both surgically polite and quietly savage, he dismantled their pseudoscience, mourned his lack of Jewish ancestry, and predicted his German surname might soon become a source of shame.

As Tod Perry notes in this piece from the GOOD archive, this wasn’t just petty gatekeeping. It was a canary in the coal mine. When governments start filtering art by ancestry or ideology, worse things usually follow. Which is why Tolkien’s letter isn’t just a historical curiosity, it’s a reminder. The first edits to freedom often come dressed as paperwork.

🐶 Dogs might start FaceTiming you

Or at least that’s the plan out of Scotland.

Leaving your pup alone is rough*. But what if they could call you when they missed you? That’s what Dr. Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas at Glasgow University is testing with the DogPhone, a device that lets dogs trigger video calls by nudging a ball. Her Labrador, Zack, has already phoned her. Sometimes he calls. Sometimes he ghosts. (Which feels…very on brand for dogs.)

But as Erik Barnes reports, not everyone’s wagging their tail. Vets warn that screens might stress pets out more than soothe them. And the twist? This might be more about fixing our feelings than theirs.

Still, parrots are dialing up friends, and zoo animals are hooked on videos. The animal internet is real. Is it a good idea? That’s still up for debate.

* - I think I deserve some praise for not giving in to the urge to make puns in this issue. It was a struggle.

And what did we learn?

We’ll have results for all our weekend polls on Monday.

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💬 From the group text…

Irene's Entropy explains girl math in a way I’ve never heard, and I love it. It turns out that it has to do with the resonant frequency of mechanical systems. Brilliant.