Every Saturday morning, CNN sends out an email containing what it calls “5 Good Things.”
There's clearly a need for this when you consider some of the news it delivers during the week. For example, “CNN’s 5 Things PM” posted at 5:32 p.m. on last Wednesday, Aug. 13, contained enough dire news for a month and the five weren’t even the day’s lead stories.
Anyway, back to last Saturday morning, the 16th, when the CNN’s email had at the top of its list of 5 a really heartwarming, indeed irresistible story, particularly for an animal lover, which I am.
It was entitled, “A devoted dog saves the day.”
“The pup timidly approached Gary Thynes while he was playing with his own dog at a Pittsburgh park,” the story goes. “When Thynes tried to get close enough to grab its leash, though, the dog kept running, staying close enough to Thynes that he seemed to be telling the man, ‘Follow me.’
“So Thynes did, and the dog eventually led Thynes to his unconscious owners at a nearby encampment. Thynes called 911, and the dog’s owners were taken to the hospital. And to prevent the sweet pup from being separated from his owners, Thynes volunteered to look after the hero canine until his owners fully recover.”
The man himself is quoted saying, “It is an honor for me to take care of this guy until his humans are well enough to reunite with a dog that loves them very much.”
(I should point out that the “5 Good Things” version is more soft-focused than the original CNN story that it links to. For instance, while it does have an accompanying picture, it doesn’t identify the dog as a pit bull. The original does and it never refers to him as a pup, sweet or otherwise.)
CNN’s podcast version of its “5 things” concept says, “We bring you 5 stories that will get you up to speed and on with your day.” And it boasts updates at three-hourly intervals from 6 a.m. on and through to 6 p.m. I’ve been aware of the weekday AM and PM text editions, which have a combined 10 stories, though only vaguely (I get a lot of stuff, like most of us). But Wednesday evening’s batch certainly grabbed my attention.
Okay, Story 1 is “Satellites under fire,” which begins, “NASA is planning to decommission premier satellite missions that gather information on planet-warming pollution and other climate vital signs beginning as soon as October, sources inside and outside of the agency told CNN.
“The destruction of the satellites — which will be abandoned and allowed to eventually burn up in a fiery descent into Earth’s atmosphere — marks the latest step by the Trump administration to scale back federal climate science.”
One para deep in the piece says, “The purposeful abandonment or destruction of multimillion-dollar satellites and instruments is essentially unprecedented, scientists told CNN. They are particularly baffled by the decision to destroy OCO-2, given it already has enough fuel on it to last through 2040.”
It might be worth inserting a little context here from another source about why the government would want to destroy expensive space-traveling equipment that, as CNN stresses in its reporting, is already paid for. A Philadelphia Inquirer column by Will Bunch back on June 5 dealt with the political backdrop: its intro head was, “Trump got the Big Oil cash he wanted — so now he’s killing the planet,” while a second intro line went, “Even top climate experts are shocked at the speed with which Trump is undoing their work, after $450M in Big Oil donations.”
Story 2, “Controversial campaign,” which is summarized, “On social media, the Department of Homeland Security invokes nostalgia in an attempt to recruit new employees. But some historians and political experts see alarmingly nationalist undertones that appeal to a specifically White and Christian identity.”
So, let me give you the short version here — there are 10,000 new ICE jobs available and the Department wouldn’t mind terribly if some of those guys who screamed “Jews will not replace us” in Charlottesville in August 2017 were to apply.
Story 3 is “Godfather of AI” and it’s introduced thus, “Geoffrey Hinton fears that the technology he helped build could wipe out humanity and says ‘tech bros’ are taking the wrong approach to stop it.” Oh, dear! That doesn’t sound good.
The optimists, though, will point to the second line, “The Nobel Prize winner and former Google executive [Hinton] offered an intriguing solution”; the pessimists will counter that nobody important will ask him about it in time.
Story 4 is “Amazon expansion.” We’re told that, “Amazon is rolling out same-day delivery of fresh food to more than 1,000 cities, a sign that it’s finally finding success with its grocery business after years of shifting strategies.” Funny that – everyone in our city had their milk delivered for years without the need for shifting strategies. Perhaps if Guinness Brewery decided it wanted to get in on the milk action, it might have taken it years to get it right.
It continues, “In a move that Amazon describes in a press release as one of its ‘most significant grocery expansions,’ customers can now order perishable food items, including dairy, meat and seafood, alongside their typical Amazon orders and get them on the same day.”
Story 5 is “Phone snooping.” It says, “An age-old debate surrounding phone snooping has been revived by the July breakup between JaNa Craig and Kenny Rodriguez, stars of the 2024 season of the reality dating show ‘Love Island USA.’
“‘Discovering that someone you loved isn’t who you thought they were and that the relationship you thought you were building hasn’t been genuine since day one has been truly devastating,’ Craig wrote in an Instagram story post confirming the split. Craig’s friend then took to Instagram to advise other women in relationships to ‘go thru your mans phone TODAY.’”
However, one named expert suggests that “invading another person’s private space — whether it’s snooping on their phone, reading their personal journal, or invading their physical space” might be “unethical without their permission” and that snooping may even be illegal in some states or other jurisdictions, depending on their privacy laws.
The CNN piece asks, “But is such snooping even necessary anymore? With so much out in the public sphere online, do you really need to snoop? Why not replace snooping with sleuthing?”
Now, stories 4 and 5 are not, of course, about intrinsically wicked things; rapid technological change, though, always brings with it the potential for social good and bad. If you were writing a piece of dystopian fiction, you could well include a corporate behemoth that delivers food and drink to an apartment on the 15th floor, obviating any need for its residents to engage with their neighbors – many of them immigrants – who own, manage and work in the fish market, grocery store, supermarket, liquor store and so on. You could do the same with someone playing private detective on a significant other, before taking the executive decision about whether to deepen or ditch the relationship.
By way of contrast, we might consider our uplifting, feel-good stories from Saturday morning. Following up on our devoted dog, we have: 2. “A familiar drug could stave off memory loss” 3. “Getting married? DYOD — dig your own diamond!” 4. “These ancient tools are fit for a hobbit” and 5. “CNN Heroes hang out!” All are good reads and individually they might provide color for your creative writing. But it would be hard to link them together as key elements in a work of cutting-edge fiction.
Not so Wednesday’s 5: If you like to write dark and you’re worried about the world in which you’re raising your pit bull pup, you have some core ideas right there for your dystopian novel. Get cracking!
