Media

The TikTok trend quietly turning your dullest errand into cinema

A coping tool disguised as an aesthetic, and the catch a psychologist wants you to notice.

Somewhere on TikTok right now, someone is grabbing coffee like it's the opening shot of an A24 film, and thousands of strangers are watching a person simply walk to work. Welcome to "main character energy," the trend where ordinary routines get a slow-motion cut, a swelling soundtrack, and the quiet suggestion that your Tuesday matters more than you think. It's the video version of building a confidence-boosting alter ego, except the superpower is just deciding to romanticize the bus stop.

As Mark Wales reports, one of these clips racked up over 15,000 comments from people recognizing their own quiet movie moments. "Me every time I walk home from Trader Joe's," wrote one. The appeal isn't pretending your life is extraordinary; it's noticing it's already kind of cinematic. It's the same gentle reframe that makes the small conversations we usually avoid suddenly feel worth having, or makes a cat sprawled across your laptop read as devotion instead of nuisance.

But one psychotherapist watching this trend isn't fully convinced, and her warning is about the exact moment self-discovery curdles into something made for the algorithm. There's a line between starring in your own life and performing it for everyone else's, and most of us cross it without noticing where it was.

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Culture

Your grandma's itchy wool swimsuit might be the future of the beach

Before Lycra ruled the sand, swimmers wore something far less plastic.

A century ago, a day at the beach meant squeezing into a knitted wool swimsuit, the kind that sagged like a wet sweater the second you stepped into the surf. Add the inevitable itch, and it sounds less like summer fun than a Victorian endurance test. So why are sustainability advocates suddenly campaigning to bring it back?

In this story by fashion historian Lorinda Cramer, the wool suit's old flaws have quietly been engineered out. New merino swimwear dries in under seven minutes, regulates body temperature, and biodegrades instead of haunting a landfill for centuries. Stack that against synthetic suits shedding microplastics into the ocean every wash, and the scratchy relic starts looking like a surprisingly smart climate play.

The catch is whether wool can win the one contest swimwear actually has to win: staying put while you swim. Cramer traces the answer from belted 1920s bathing gowns to the bikini that sent shockwaves across the sand in 1950, and the case for a comeback is stronger than your beach bag expects. So before you grab the same old Lycra for your next sunny outing, it's worth a second look.

And what did we learn?

Yesterday, we waded through those drawers full of old electronics and dug up some advice on what to do with the old gadgetry.

What do GOOD readers have in their most embarrassing drawer? I was not expecting it to be instruction manuals, but over 40% of you keep the little how-to books around. Now the real question is, do you read them, or just mash buttons until the gizmo works, like I do?

• Wires. So many wires. None of them go to anything I still own (33.8%)

• Takeout sauce packets. A truly upsetting volume of sauce packets (12.5%)

• Receipts. So, so many receipts I will never look at (12.5%)

• The instruction manual for every device I've ever owned (41.3%)

Health

Your spring sneezing fits are older than the dinosaurs

Itchy eyes, runny nose, and a grudge against flowers, finally explained.

I'm on the record as just hating this time of year. The air itself seems out to get me, and apparently, it's been this way for a while: fossilized pollen has been found predating the dinosaurs, and ancient Egyptians were already prescribing honey, dates, and beer for the cough. So if spring makes you feel like the outdoors filed a personal vendetta, you're in very old company.

The bad news, as allergist Kara Wada explains, is that pollen seasons are getting longer and counts are climbing, right alongside the stretch when you're finally breaking out the sunscreen. The good news is there's a clear, multifaceted plan that can pull you out of the symptom spiral, and Wada lays out exactly where to start and the one move most people skip.

On June 25, 1967, the largest television audience the world had ever assembled tuned in to "Our World," the first program ever beamed live around the planet by satellite. Four communications satellites stitched together a single signal that reached an estimated 400 million-plus viewers across roughly two dozen countries, everyone watching the same thing at the same moment for the very first time.

The two-hour show hopped from newborns in maternity wards to a Mexican singer on horseback to Leonard Bernstein at the piano. But the bit everyone remembers came last, from a psychedelically decorated London studio, where the Beatles closed things out with a song almost nobody had heard yet. John Lennon wrote "All You Need Is Love" to order, keeping the words deliberately simple so a viewer in Tokyo or Tunis could catch the message without a translator.

It nearly looked different. (Five Eastern Bloc countries pulled out four days before air, sending producers scrambling for a last-minute replacement.) The show went on anyway, the single shot to number one, and the tune became the unofficial anthem of the Summer of Love. That one evening basically invented the live global moment, the template later borrowed for the Moon landing, the Olympics, and Live Aid. Fittingly, fans have celebrated June 25 as Global Beatles Day since 2009, which makes today the anniversary of the day it all kicked off.

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