Health

Squeeze cheese, classical music, and how to outsmart firework panic

A vet breaks down why the booms hit so hard, and what actually calms a frightened dog.

For humans, the Fourth of July is hot dogs, lawn chairs, and a sky full of color, the kind of evening built for cookouts and lazy beach days. For a huge share of dogs, though, it's the night the world appears to be ending. The trembling, the pacing, the frantic dash under the bed: that's not your pup being dramatic. It's a nervous system doing precisely what evolution designed it to do.

As veterinarian Christine Calder explains, dogs are hardwired to fear sudden, loud noises, the same instinct that keeps a wild animal alive. The catch is that nobody told them the booms aren't an actual threat, so they hear the festivities and process them as a full-blown siege. Breed plays a part too: German shepherds tend to pace, while border collies are more likely to vanish completely.

Here's the hopeful part. Firework panic is treatable, and the remedies land somewhere between a spa day and a stakeout.

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Culture

A nation's history, stacked between two slices of bread

Immigration, class, gender, and one very strange thing happening in Fall River.

Hey. Eyes down here. I know that sandwich up top is distracting, and I won't pretend it didn't make writing this almost impossible. But stick with me, because the story behind it is even better.

It’s actually five stories, because five food historians each picked one sandwich and traced where it came from, and the lunch counter turned into a map of the whole country. They follow the tuna salad sandwich from a thrifty way to use up dinner scraps to a global industry that emptied the oceans. They walk the club sandwich out of stuffy gentlemen's clubs and onto every diner menu in America. And they reveal that the peanut butter and jelly sandwich was once upper-crust luncheon fare, not cafeteria currency. One 1901 recipe writer called the pairing “delicious, and so far as I know, original.”

We haven't even gotten to the chow mein sandwich out of Fall River, or what the Daughters of the Confederacy did with anchovy paste and raw eggs.

And what did we learn?

Wool bathing suits are threatening to make a comeback, apparently.

How do GOOD readers feel about the idea of sporting wool at the beach? Looks like more than half of you feel that it’s a pass. I don’t know, I love a cozy sweater, maybe cozy shorts could work? No. Yeah… no.

• It itches dry on land, I can't even imagine it wet and full of sand (54.9%)

• Maybe, if it dries faster than my beach-day patience (17.1%)

• Sold the second someone shows me one that's cute (20.7%)

• Already knitting mine, microplastics fear me (7.3%)

GOOD reader Rebjipsi speaks for the majority… maybe. “The style is kind of cute but with the heatwaves we’re getting right now I don’t believe any kind of wool will let anyone stay cool. I would rather skinny dip than die of heat stroke.“

Society

Who actually owns the sand under your beach towel?

America's most contested real estate is hiding at low tide.

Every summer, millions of Americans plant a towel on the sand and assume the spot is theirs for the afternoon. But the ground beneath that towel is some of the most fiercely contested real estate in the United States, and where exactly your rights end can come down to something as fickle as the tide.

On most U.S. shorelines, the public can walk the wet sand between high and low tide, a strip that's usually publicly owned, while a waterfront owner's control stops higher up the beach. The idea goes all the way back to ancient Rome, which held that the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea belong to everyone. The trouble is that the sea keeps moving the line.

As Thomas Ankersen, who directs the Conservation Clinic at the University of Florida, lays it out, rising seas are now slamming into a wall of seawalls in a slow-motion fight he calls "coastal squeeze."

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 June 26, 1974, at 8:01 in the morning, a cashier in Troy, Ohio, dragged a 10-pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum across a glowing glass plate, and the barcode officially joined the world of shopping. The place was Marsh Supermarket, the tool was a laser, and the gum was no random grab: Clyde Dawson, the store's head of research, picked it on purpose to prove the new Universal Product Code could fit on even the tiniest item.

The idea had been kicking around for 25 years. Back in 1949, inventor Joe Woodland sketched the first version in the sand on a Miami beach, borrowing from Morse code and stretching its dots and dashes into thick and thin lines. His original design was a bull's-eye of concentric circles, which (charmingly) kept smudging in the printer, until an IBM engineer named George Laurer squared it into the tidy rectangle we know today.

Not everyone was thrilled. Some shoppers squinted at the strange lines and saw the biblical "mark of the beast." Today those same little stripes get scanned more than six billion times a day, quietly running checkout lines, warehouses, and probably the phone in your pocket. 

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💬 From the group text…

In the midst of heat warnings, I didn’t know I needed to see Alpacas playing on a splash pad. I absolutely did! But that’s alpaca wool, won’t it shrink?!?

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