Each morning, I receive a “daily briefing” email from The Week magazine which contains 10 news stories from the previous day. This news is almost uniformly awful, but then, so is the world! However, The Week recently started “The Good News Newsletter”. Once a week, this email delivers five pieces of good news. The ratio here is troubling, but I suppose it beats the previous zero uplifting items I was receiving.
Examples of recently seen good news include a 97-year-old man finally getting a chance to be a firefighter and an Easter egg hunt organized for visually impaired children, using beeping eggs. They’re goofy stories, but they’re occasionally good for a chuckle, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with that.
However, last week’s edition contained the following headline:
Girl Scouts Start First-Ever Troop for Homeless Girls in New York City
It’s very nice that folks are arranging for homeless girls to participate in the Girl Scouts, but that is some truly goddamned dystopian “good” news. “Homeless crisis abates, as homes are found for all” — that would be good news. Alas, at present the best we can hope for is for homeless children to have access to an extracurricular activity.
If you’re interested in receiving the Daily Briefing, you can sign up here. If you only want to get the Good News Newsletter, well, I don’t blame you.
