Public Good

Oakland kids are hitting the library for the least nerdy reason ever

One shelf, zero books, and a very short waitlist for the good soccer ball.

When you picture a kid running to the library during the summer to check out something fun, admit it, you're picturing someone a little nerdy*. That's fair, but in one town it's also a little antiquated. At Oakland's Larry E. Reid Sports Center, the shelves are stocked with soccer balls, footballs, tennis equipment, and yoga mats, plus board games and a deck of UNO for anyone who wants to argue about old-school hobbies in the shade instead.

It's called the Park Play Lending Library, and it's free to anyone who walks in, no membership, no proof of income, no catch. Which is quietly a big deal, because the long summer stretch tends to outlast the family budget by about six weeks. In this story by Erik Barnes, recreation supervisor Maribel Lopez explains why she thinks of a tennis racket as a piece of social infrastructure. "We want kids to be able to speak each other's language and connect through sports," she said.

The reason a city has to do this at all is less charming. The cost of youth sports has climbed 46% in five years, with some families reporting more than $5,000 per kid, which is how you end up with adults quietly covering what the budget won't. Lawmakers in Congress have introduced a bill to fix it, and the target they picked isn't the leagues, the coaches, or the uniform vendors. It's an industry most parents had no idea was anywhere near their kid's Saturday morning.

* - I’m allowed to say “nerdy”; I was and proudly continue to be a giant nerd.

Previous Results

Yesterday we shared the amazing true story of how Stevie Nicks came up with one of her best songs by mishearing a southern accent.

Which, of course, had me curious which accent GOOD readers are most susceptible to.

• Southern drawl, sweet as pie and twice as dangerous (16.8%)

• Irish, could read a grocery list and I'd cry (35.7%)

• French, and I do not speak a word of French (11.2%)

• Scottish, assuming I can keep up (16.8%)

• None of these cliché answers (add your own below) (19.6%)

I did my best to offer good choices for this one, but I was not prepared for the volume of write-ins. Australian ran away with it as the accent we forgot to put on the ballot, with a proper British accent right behind it, plus late surges for Italian, Spanish, Welsh, and South African. Extra credit to reader PJ Graves, who voted Irish and then immediately wrote in, "Italian!! I don't speak it, but it sounds beautiful, no matter what is being said!"

World

Julie spent 40 years in a circus. She just got 400 hectares to herself

Somewhere in the Alentejo countryside, a very large retiree is settling in.

Julie was captured in Africa roughly four decades ago, and since 1988 she has been performing with the Victor Hugo Cardinali Circus. As of this month she is doing something no elephant in Portugal has ever done: nothing at all, on purpose. Julie is the first resident of the newly opened Pangea Elephant Sanctuary, 400 hectares of Alentejo built to eventually hold up to 30 elephants.

The paperwork behind her freedom started in 2018, when Portugal banned wild animals from performing in circuses. The law was fully implemented in 2024, and here is the part that surprises people: the circus cooperated. Cardinali's team kept caring for Julie the whole time Pangea was building her new home, which is a very different ending than the one this kind of story usually gets. As Erik Barnes reports, the handoff was less a rescue than a retirement party, and it tracks with a broader shift in how the industry is rethinking what a circus can even be.

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Conservation | Courtesy of Upworthy

Forty years ago they pulled the logs out. Now they're flying them back in

Helicopters are dumping 6,000 logs into Washington rivers on purpose.

For decades, river restoration in the Northwestern United States ran on one tidy rule: if you see a log in the water, get it out. Clean streams looked healthy. Fast water looked good. Crews spent years hauling wood off riverbeds to help the fish, and they were doing close to the opposite.

So now there are helicopters over central Washington, lowering tree trunks back into the water they were dragged out of. In this story by Heather Wake, first shared on our sister site Upworthy, more than 6,000 logs are going into 24 miles of rivers and streams across the Yakama Reservation and surrounding ceded lands, with each one dropped on a spot marked in pink and blue flagging tape. Yakama Nation habitat biologist Scott Nicolai spent the 1980s pulling that same wood out. "If we saw a big log jam, we thought, 'Oh, that's a barrier to fish,'" he said. What the logs actually do once they hit the water is the part nobody on those banks saw coming.

On July 29, 1836, after thirty years of construction, the Arc de Triomphe was finally inaugurated in Paris in front of a crowd of eleven people. Napoleon had commissioned it in 1806 to celebrate his victory at Austerlitz. He never saw it finished. His architect died in 1811 with the pillars barely up, the money ran out during the Russian campaign, and after the Empire fell, the site sat abandoned for nearly a decade.

King Louis-Philippe revived the project and rededicated it to the armies of the Revolution and the Empire. Then, on the day of the grand ceremony, he canceled the whole thing out of fear of assassination and stayed home. The prime minister showed up, along with the finance minister, six national guardsmen, the monument's caretaker, and two official visitors.

The city fixed it that night. Parisians gathered on their own, and the arch was lit by 700 gas lamps. Four years later, Napoleon's remains came home from Saint Helena and passed beneath the arch he had ordered and never laid eyes on. 

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