The Rest of the World Report | Good News Sunday, May 17
The View From Everywhere Else
Five things that went right. Sourced, verified, and genuinely worth your Sunday morning.
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AMERICA’S ELECTRICITY TIPPED GREEN — AND NOBODY NOTICED
He called wind and solar “the scam of the century” and pledged to “drill, baby, drill.” Then, in March 2026, the math stopped cooperating. For the first time in American history, the combined output of wind, solar, hydropower, and biomass produced more US electricity than natural gas — 35 percent to 34 percent, according to analysis from energy research firm Ember. It is a one-month snapshot, not a permanent state. But a threshold crossed once can be crossed again, and again after that. The infrastructure that made it possible was built over years of investment that outlasted the politics attempting to undo it. The grid does not care who is in the White House. It runs on what is cheapest, and clean energy keeps getting cheaper.
Source: Positive News / Ember, May 2026
GRANDMA HAD LOVE WITH NOWHERE TO PUT IT
Mike Matthews’ grandmother lived alone in Seattle. She was not lonely in any obvious way — she had family, she had a home, she had her health. What she had too much of was love and not enough strangers to give it to. So her grandson built her a stand. Not a lemonade stand exactly, but close: a small table on the sidewalk with a sign inviting people to sit down and talk. She listened, to whoever came — their worries, their stories, their days. People came back. They brought friends. A grandmother with love and nowhere to put it turned a sidewalk in Seattle into the kind of place that used to exist on every block and mostly doesn’t anymore.
This is honestly my favorite story of the day.
Source: DailyGood, May 15, 2026
THE VACCINE CYCLISTS OF ZIMBABWE
In the rural districts of Kariba and Hurungwe in Zimbabwe, a girl’s chances of getting the HPV vaccine — which prevents the cancer that kills more women in sub-Saharan Africa than almost any other — used to depend almost entirely on where she happened to be born. Remote communities had low coverage, not because the vaccines didn’t exist, but because no one could reliably get them there. Community health workers changed that by getting on bicycles. They ride from home to home, door to door, delivering vaccinations to girls in the areas that clinics and campaigns have historically missed. The program has significantly increased HPV coverage in districts where it was disproportionately low. No breakthrough technology. No international summit. Just people on bicycles, going where the need is.
Source: Rest Less / Reuters, 2026
MEXICO JUST DECIDED EVERYONE DESERVES CARE
This week’s Special Report — Permission to Be Sick — documented what it costs Americans to navigate a healthcare system built around the transaction rather than the patient. On the other side of the border, something different is happening. Mexico’s government has pledged free, universal healthcare for all of its 120 million citizens, replacing a two-tier system widely criticized for leaving poorer Mexicans dependent on an underfunded public service while wealthier ones bought private insurance. Elderly citizens are already enrolling in the new system. The ambition is a unified, digital-first national health service — the kind of thing that exists in Canada, the UK, and across Europe, and that Americans are routinely told is impossible. Mexico is building it anyway.
Source: Positive News / AFP, May 2026
WE JUST REWROTE THE STORY OF WHERE WE CAME FROM
For decades, the popular image of human evolution was a clean march — ape hunches forward, becomes upright, becomes us. Scientists have long known it was more complicated than that. New fossil evidence from Ethiopia published this week gives them something specific to point to when explaining why. Early Homo — our direct ancestors — and a previously unknown species of Australopithecus lived alongside each other in the same region 2.6 to 2.8 million years ago. They were contemporaries, not predecessors. The “ape-to-human progression” that generations of textbooks illustrated as a single marching line is more accurately a tangled, overlapping, experimental web of life trying different things at the same time. We are not the product of a straight line. We are the result of an extraordinary mess of possibility, most of which didn’t make it. The fact that we did is, on reflection, something worth sitting with on a Sunday morning.
Source: ScienceDaily (confirmed this session); primary research: Nature, August 2025
“Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government.” — Thomas Jefferson, 1789
A much appreciated collection of happy, brilliant, surprising stories! Thank you, Rudy!