Hey! Anyone Need Some Good News?

It's getting pretty depressing out there!

Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash

It’s been a pretty rough week, news-wise! Everything is bad and you are right to feel horrified. Don’t stop being horrified, because we’re going to need that energy for fighting — but it’s not going to kill us to see a few nice stories to remind us that there are still a few nice things happening in the world, especially for those of you who don’t even care that Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is back this week (even though it is actual high art).

Do some of these stories fall into the category of “Nice story that is also a damning critique of late capitalism or systemic discrimination”? Yes, because that is what most nice news stories are about. But let’s do it anyway?

Tim Walz is running for reelection and is also very happy about feeding hungry students!

So nice for an elected official to brag about something like that, instead of declaring war on half of the country. [Minnesota Reformer]

Have you seen this video of Illinois Sen. Karina Villa walking down the street yelling at ICE and telling people not to open their doors unless there’s a warrant? Well, now you can!

You love to see it! ICE has been terrorizing the Chicagoland area with arrests and violence for the last two weeks and honestly it’s great to see our elected officials getting in there and trying to do something about it.

“These masked individuals came upon people with the color of my skin and picked them up,” Villa told NBC 5. “One of them was in a van. There was about 13 people, including a minor. One was at a grocery store, an apartment complex, and someone simply walking on the side of the street. This is why we have gathered here today to talk about and show the strength of this community, this immigrant, beautiful community.” [NBC 5]

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Here is a nice story from NPR about a woman who was helped by an encampment of unhoused people when her car ran out of gas. I guess it’s good that Brian Kilmeade did not get to them first and kill them, huh? [NPR]

ICYMI: A few weeks ago, Patrick Braxton, the first Black mayor of a tiny Alabama town (Newbern, pop. 133) was re-elected 66-26 in the town’s first election since the 1960s, four years after the town’s white residents literally locked him out of the office. [New York Times]

Here is Ro Khanna accusing the Right of making comedy illegal and introducing a motion to subpoena FCC chair Brendan Carr! (The motion should be to impeach, obviously, but we’ll still take it.)

Remember how they kept telling us that we were murdering comedy because we didn’t like racial slurs and rape jokes? There’s a very big difference between that and the actual government coming down on people who tell jokes about the president. [Bluesky]

A report from the UN says the hole in the ozone layer is healing, and should fully disappear within a few decades. No one tell Republicans about this because they’ll decide they actually want the hole there, and end up standing around their backyards spraying the sky with aerosol hairspray in a matter of days. [France 24]

AI is gross, but it did help a Philadelphia woman fight Independence Blue Cross’s (IBX) refusal to continue covering the medication she needed. Specifically, Joani Reisen needed them to cover the ADHD drug Concerta, which has helped her function like a normal person since she was first prescribed it after finally being diagnosed in her 40s. Because, despite popular belief, women are actually underdiagnosed with ADHD (and, until recently, very little was known about how it affects us, because they only ever did studies on boys and men). Reisen said that the generic form of the drug put her and her son to sleep and she needs the brand-name version. IBX refused on the grounds that Concerta is “an experimental drug,” which seems like a weird way to describe a medication I was on in high school.

Reisen turned to AI for help … and it actually worked:

The company is called Counterforce Health. The AI platform generates customized appeal letters based on a patient's insurance, aggregated research and record of successful appeals related to the drug or treatment. It's a free service made possible through grants from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Pennsylvania, said co-founder and chairman Neal Shah.

Probably can’t get grants like those anymore!

Anyway, it would be super great if this were not a thing and people could just get the goddamned medication they need without having to turn to a robot for help. [CBS]

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A woman was rescued from a domestic violence situation by using a special hand signal that I did not know existed until this very moment. The woman did the gesture, created by the Canadian Women’s Foundation which “involves tucking the thumb into the palm and folding the fingers down to trap the thumb.” Someone at the store recognized the gesture and called 911, and the woman’s husband was arrested, as he had had an active warrant and was carrying a stun gun. [NBC]

Here is a cute story about some nuns on the run — from a retirement home back to their old convent, where they are now living despite initially being told to leave again. [BBC]

And that’s all the Nice Times we could find for you today. Hey, take what you can get, people!

OPEN THREAD!