Finishing the week with a few more Good News stories

Following from my "good news" post yesterday, I wanted to wrap up this week with a few other stories along the same lines. 

First, this performance is just stunning and makes me look forward to the Olympics, just a month away now:

Ilia Malinin, an American skater lands the first routine with 7 quad jumps in it and set a world record score. This performance was on December 6, 2025, at the ISU Grand Prix Final in Nagoya, Japan. Note the impressive backflip: the ban was lifted by the ISU in 2024, allowing it in routines without penalty.

- Alexander Verbeek

Read on Substack

This story is stunning, too:

A young Hungarian scientist, her husband, and their two-year-old daughter board a plane to America. Hidden inside the child’s teddy bear is £900, everything they own, smuggled out of communist Hungary after selling their car on the black market. Her name is Katalin Karikó. She is thirty years old. She has a PhD in biochemistry. And she believes, almost alone, that messenger RNA could one day teach human cells how to fight disease. She has no idea that four decades of rejection lie ahead. Or that her work will eventually save millions of lives. Karikó takes a research position at Temple University in Philadelphia. Four years later, she clashes with her supervisor. According to later reporting, he reports her to immigration authorities, claiming she is in the country illegally. She has to hire a lawyer to avoid deportation. A job offer from Johns Hopkins is withdrawn. Her career nearly ends before it has properly begun. She finds another position at the University of Pennsylvania and continues working on mRNA. No one wants to fund it. Grant after grant is rejected. In academic science, grants are survival. Without them, you do not exist. Most researchers avoid RNA altogether. It degrades easily. Experiments fail. When Karikó argues that the problem is contamination, not the molecule, no one listens. By 1995, Penn gives her an ultimatum. Abandon mRNA or accept a demotion off the tenure track. At the same time, she is diagnosed with cancer. Her husband is stuck in Hungary because of visa problems. The future she worked toward is slipping away. She chooses the demotion. Her salary drops below that of her own technician. She is demoted again. And again. Four times in total. She begins to doubt herself, to wonder whether she simply is not good enough. She considers leaving science altogether. Then, in 1997, she meets Drew Weissman at a photocopier. They start talking. Weissman is trying to develop an HIV vaccine. Karikó tells him she can make any mRNA he needs. He listens. That alone sets him apart. For years, they work in near invisibility. No funding. No prestige. No interest from major journals. They keep going anyway. In 2005, they make the breakthrough. They discover how to modify mRNA so it does not trigger the immune system to destroy it. One small change. One decisive insight. Suddenly, mRNA becomes usable for vaccines. They submit the paper. Nature rejects it. Science rejects it. It is eventually published in Immunity and largely ignored. In 2013, Karikó is pushed out of Penn. She is fifty-eight years old. No American university wants her. She takes a job at a small German biotech company called BioNTech. For years, she commutes between countries, still running experiments herself, still believing. Then 2020 arrives. A novel coronavirus spreads across the world. Millions die. Governments panic. The world needs a vaccine faster than any vaccine has ever been made. And the technology everyone dismissed becomes the solution. The Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna COVID-19 vaccines are built on the mRNA platform Karikó spent her life refining. The first mRNA vaccines ever approved for human use. They save millions of lives. When she learns the trials worked, she celebrates alone by eating an entire box of chocolate-covered peanuts. On October 2, 2023, Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She is not a professor. She never climbed the ladder she was told mattered. She was demoted, dismissed, nearly deported, and repeatedly told her work was worthless. When asked how she endured it, her answer is simple. She did not crave recognition. She felt successful because she was doing the work she believed in. Rejection did not mean she was wrong. It meant she was early. She kept going not because she expected a Nobel Prize, but because the science mattered. And when the world needed it most, it was ready. She carried everything she owned in a teddy bear. She was told to stop. She did not. And the world survived because of it. —A Solo Traveller’s public post

- Kristen Kroll

Read on Substack

Next, I am wondering why I bother subscribing to daily news websites anymore when I can actually get more useful news from better-informed people on Substack. Like this piece on Mayor Zohran's first day, by Ken Klippenstein:

Media coverage of Zohran Mamdani’s first day in office glossed over his early exercise of mayoral power.
My favorite example of the shallowness of the coverage is CNN’s bombshell revelation that Mamdani was “distributing hot chocolate” at city hall, an image that trivializes him and the moment. The second-to-last sentence made passing reference to “the first action of his administration, signing a set of executive orders focused on housing.”
Curious about what exactly those orders are? Tough luck, the multi-billion dollar cable outlet’s story doesn’t say.
Though I’m a few billion short in resources, I was somehow able to track down Mamdani’s executive orders, and immediately realized there’s a lot more there than just “a set of executive orders focused on housing.” ....

Klippenstein then reviews all of Mamdani's orders and actions on his first day, and concludes:

Rejecting the staid, “reasonable” and the do-nothing process of old government, Mamdani seems to believe in action and is wasting no time in implementing his agenda. He emphasized throughout his inaugural address that bold policy would be a priority of his administration, vowing to “govern expansively and audaciously.”
His inaugural address’s most interesting theme to me was its unabashed scorn for political fear of failure. And readers of this newsletter know that the Temple of Fear is national security, which always seems to bat first in our society thanks to its masterful threat mongering
“We may not always succeed,” Mamdani said. “But never will we be accused of lacking the courage to try.”
We’ll see if the media decides to take notice of the actual policies of the most powerful mayor in the country, and his willingness to wield that power....

Finally, it was almost three years ago that Ask A Manager ran a column about stories of people using their power for good.  I knew someday I would be able to share the best of these stories, and today is the day:

The raises

My husband almost doubled the salaries of his mostly female inside sales staff (salaried at around $40k, no commission even though they were pulling in huge contract renewals) after having a request for raises under pay equity turned down. He did it by eliminating their department on paper. This was a huge cost saving measure in Sales Support because of how budget lines were set up. He then hired them for the openings he created in Sales. Salaries in Sales were then way over budget but because he could justify it with the revenue numbers he already had from Support, he was covered.

This was 20 years ago and they all still talk about the career changing after effects.

The rug

Big Box Home Improvement Store: A near-daily customer was the first member of his family to immigrate to America. His family was coming for a visit, the first time he’d seen them in about a decade. He was making improvements to his home to impress his parents and siblings.

He had also fallen in love with American football, specifically the Miami Dolphins (we weren’t in Florida and our area’s team had its own rabid fan base). His crowning touch in his home was going to be a wall-to-wall, custom Dolphins rug for his Entertainment Room.

The rug manufacturer messed up and sent the wrong one. It was still the Miami Dolphins but it wasn’t the pattern he wanted. The best we could offer was a refund or re-order. His family was due in a couple days but the order turnaround time was long, like two months. He started to cry. The stress of getting everything “just right” had gotten to him and this was the proverbial straw. He chose to re-order and left the store, upset but not yelling at anyone. Just really, really heartbroken.

I had his phone number from the order and called him later that day. I told him that it had been decided that since we likely wouldn’t be able to sell the rug to anyone else, we’d just give it to him since he was a steady and loyal customer. And that way he’d have at least *something* in his Entertainment Room when his family arrived. He drove over immediately and I helped him load it into his vehicle. He was teary this time, too, but in a good way.

So, yeah, I stole an expensive rug from my store.

The contest

I was the manager at a fitness club that had facilities and a reputation for being friendly for elderly and disabled clients (connected with a physical therapy clinic). We had one elderly client who really enjoyed the heated pool for her arthritis, and the pool classes were one of her few social outlets. When her husband passed away, she let me know the end of the current month would be her last, as she was no longer going to be able to afford it. She was clearly upset, but I didn’t know what I could do.

As the manager, I was allowed to create various promotions and giveaways for the club, within reason. I made flyers for a new drawing where members could win a t-shirt, water bottle, sports drink, or the 1 in 100 chance – a year of membership!

I made a little bowl of tickets that were mostly sports drinks (so my boss wouldn’t kill me LOL) and let members draw a slip when they checked in. I made a second bowl of tickets that were ALL a year of free membership. Guess what, when she came to check in on Contest Day, she got to pick from the rigged bowl. After she “won,” I disposed of the rigged bowl and tickets, and she literally cried tears of joy and hugged me.

Look, everyone got a free sports drink they never would have received if I hadn’t made up this mostly harmless scheme, and I have no guilt!

The laptop

After 30 years at my company, I was job eliminated over the phone while on vacation. Part of this call was to inform me that I had bring to my six-year-old laptop to the office by the end of the week. I requested that the company send a shipping box (something that was done routinely) and they insisted I had to show up in person.

I brought the equipment to the head of Desktop IT, a professional and unfailingly honest man. He took my old laptop and asked me to sit down and wait. He took a brand new laptop out of its box and put it in a brand new computer bag. He then took my very old laptop, reformatted the disk and did a software reload while we chatted. When the software reload had completed, he put the old laptop in the box than belonged to the new laptop, and sealed the box. While handing me the new laptop in the new bag, he said, “The guy who fired you insisted that I order him a brand new laptop, so I did. I never said I’d give it to him. Now it’s yours.”

So I left with a brand new computer that had switched identities with a computer that was slated to go to the electronic burial ground. I’m told the new division head who did all of the firings never noticed that he was using a six-year-old laptop.

The vieille prune

This takes place in France 30 years ago. A lot of files were still paper only, and not much was on computers.

A friend of mine, let’s call him Thomas, was interning in a very important bank. Thomas was 23 or so and already very competent, kind of cutthroat. He was given some responsibilities and sent to go and see an elderly farmer, heavy in debt, somewhere in the mountains far from civilization. Thomas was supposed to tell the man that if he kept missing his loan payment, the bank would evict him and sell the farm.

The farmer, who did not have many visits, received him well, got out his older “vieille prune” bottle (plum liquor, it’s very strong) and offered Thomas a drink. They had a great time and spent all night drinking and talking, about the history of the farm, about the farmer’s family, etc.

Thomas’ internship was coming to an end a few days after. When he got back to the bank, he shredded all the paper files about the farmer, erased the only mention of his debt on the computer (no back up at the time of course), and went on his merry way.

Even if the bank did find out, a few years after, that there was something fishy, the time it would take such a huge, slow administrative structure to realize what happened and to recreate the farmer’s file, the man would have been long dead, hopefully in his beloved farm hidden in the mountains.