He streamed for 9 days. He raised $67 million for kids with cancer

Happy Monday. I hope you had a good weekend. Today's issue is one of those that reminds you what people are capable of when they decide to show up for each other in a big way.

Our lead story is about a 23-year-old in Poland who sat down in front of a camera for nine straight days and changed the lives of dozens of children with cancer, with a little help from some very famous friends. It's the kind of story that makes you feel genuinely good about the internet, which doesn't happen every day.

We've also got a nonprofit that's been quietly doing something beautiful for sick kids across America for 15 years, three teenagers who solved a global water problem with an ingredient from their kitchen, and some news about museums and music that gives you a very good excuse to do something fun this week.

👉 P.S. Good News Break exists because we believe the world needs more of this. If you'd like to help us keep finding and sharing these stories every single day, you can support us for just $5 a month. It means everything to us.

—Stephanie S

Happy Monday. I hope you had a good weekend. Today's issue is one of those that reminds you what people are capable of when they decide to show up for each other in a big way.

Our lead story is about a 23-year-old in Poland who sat down in front of a camera for nine straight days and changed the lives of dozens of children with cancer, with a little help from some very famous friends. It's the kind of story that makes you feel genuinely good about the internet, which doesn't happen every day.

We've also got a nonprofit that's been quietly doing something beautiful for sick kids across America for 15 years, three teenagers who solved a global water problem with an ingredient from their kitchen, and some news about museums and music that gives you a very good excuse to do something fun this week.

Let’s go!

—Stephanie S

A 23-year-old Polish influencer known as Łatwogang sat in front of a camera in Warsaw and played a single rap song on repeat for nine days. The song was a diss track aimed not at a person but at cancer itself, featuring an 11-year-old patient named Maja, on her third relapse, singing that she was still here, laughing in cancer's face. By the time the stream ended, it had raised $67 million, more than 50 times the original goal.

The names who showed up were extraordinary. Robert Lewandowski donated $250,000 and sang along on video. Tennis star Iga Świątek donated cash and two Wimbledon tickets. Speed skater Vladimir Semirunniy, fresh off a Winter Olympic silver medal, donated his medal and shaved his head. Chris Martin recorded a piano track in Polish.

The money went straight to work. Within the first week, around $2 million had already been spent helping 84 children with therapy costs, medical equipment, and family bills. At the close of nine days, Łatwogang simply thanked the country for what it had done for the kids. It had moved an entire nation. Watch the rap song and read the full story.

Since 2011, a Boston-based nonprofit called Team IMPACT has matched more than 4,500 children facing serious illness or disability with college athletic teams across the US. The kids become official team members, attending practices, games, team dinners, and campus events, building real friendships with student-athletes who show up for them long after the final whistle.

The program now spans more than 850 colleges and universities across all 50 states, engaging over 112,500 student-athletes. One of those athletes is Blake Mesenberg, a hockey player at Miami University in Ohio, who was matched with Liam, a 16-year-old with a rare genetic disorder causing muscle weakness and developmental delays. Liam had never had a group of friends before joining the team. Blake made sure Liam's 16th birthday was one he'd never forget, and months later Liam still talks about that night.

"Liam knows that no matter what, he can always call Blake," his mom Melissa said. That sentence is the whole point of Team IMPACT. Watch their 15-year celebration video and see what belonging really looks like.

Vivaan Chhawchharia, Ariana Agarwal, and Avyana Mehta are all 16 years old and from India. After studying environmental science and visiting a rural community where drinking water is stored in shared containers without any filtration, they came home and started experimenting. What they found in their kitchen larder ended up being the solution: tamarind seed powder.

Their invention, called Plas-Stick, uses the powdered tamarind seed as a natural binding agent. Added to water and agitated briefly, it clumps invisible microplastic particles into visible masses that can then be pulled out with a handheld magnet. No electricity, no complex infrastructure, no chemicals. Just a crop that already grows widely across South Asia.

The trio won the Earth Prize for Asia 2026, which comes with $12,500 each to scale their invention. Their goal is to expand through decentralized production hubs across rural India, reaching communities where more than 2.2 billion people globally still lack access to safely managed drinking water. See the photos and read how Plas-Stick works.

A new study from University College London analyzed blood samples and survey data from over 3,500 UK adults and found that people who regularly engage in arts and cultural activities, listening to music, visiting museums, or reading, show measurable changes in their DNA consistent with slower biological aging. People who did an arts activity at least once a week aged 4% more slowly than those who rarely engaged, exactly the same benefit as exercising once a week.

The effects were strongest for people over 40, and held up even after controlling for factors like BMI, smoking, education, and income. In one of the biological age tests used, weekly arts engagement left people biologically about a year younger on average, which actually edged out exercise.

Lead author Professor Daisy Fancourt put it plainly: the study provides evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise, with each activity offering different ingredients, physical, cognitive, emotional, and social, that all contribute to better health. Consider this your permission slip to book that museum ticket. Read the full findings here.

🐘 Portugal: Europe's first large-scale elephant sanctuary is welcoming its first residents, with Portugal's last circus elephant Julie set to retire to a 400-hectare sanctuary in the Alentejo, marking the end of wild animals in Portuguese circuses entirely.

💍 Pakistan: Punjab's provincial assembly passed a landmark law setting the minimum marriage age at 18 for both boys and girls, protecting millions of children from forced early marriage by eliminating a previous system that allowed girls as young as 16 to wed.

🫛 Australia: A University of Sydney study found that just four weeks of dietary changes measurably reduced biological age in adults aged 65 to 75, with participants who cut back on fat or shifted toward plant protein showing the strongest improvements in key aging biomarkers.

🌌 Global: Astronomers have released the first ever direct image of a filament in the cosmic web, the vast hidden structure of gas and dark matter connecting galaxies across the universe, in what researchers called one of the most significant astronomical images ever taken.

👂🏼 UK: Scientists developed a brain-wave monitoring hearing system that can pick out a single voice in a noisy room by reading the listener's neural signals in real time to determine who they are trying to hear, with the potential to transform hearing aids for millions of people worldwide.

Tina Fey was born in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania and intended to be none of the things she became. She showed up at Saturday Night Live in 1997 as a writer, became the show's first female head writer, and then spent eight seasons in front of the camera becoming one of the most recognizable faces on American television. Her Sarah Palin impression alone is a piece of cultural history. But Fey was always most interesting behind the scenes, where she was building something.

30 Rock, the show she created, wrote, and starred in, ran for seven seasons and collected 103 Emmy nominations, the most in television history at the time. Her 2011 memoir Bossypants topped the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks. Then she turned Mean Girls, the cult classic film she had written, into a Broadway musical that earned 12 Tony nominations including Best Musical. She turns 56 today and she is still very much going. As a reminder that funny women with good ideas tend to quietly take over everything.

Other notable May 18 events:

1652: Rhode Island passed the first law in North America making slavery illegal, a remarkable act of conscience more than two centuries before the Civil War.

1899: The Hague Peace Conference opened with delegates from 26 countries participating in the first international arms control summit in history.

1933: President Franklin Roosevelt created the Tennessee Valley Authority during the Great Depression, bringing electricity, flood control, and economic development to one of the poorest regions in the country across seven states.

1953: Jackie Cochran became the first woman to break the sound barrier, flying an F-86 Sabre jet faster than the speed of sound over Rogers Dry Lake in California.

— John Bunyan

Every day brings amazing advances and uplifting moments that remind us just how wonderful the world can be. Here are five reasons why today is the best time ever to be alive:

🌍 Ending Hunger: The number of people going to bed hungry has fallen by more than half since 1990, even as the world population grew by 2 billion, a feat driven by advances in farming, food distribution, and international cooperation that has saved hundreds of millions of lives.

⚕️Cancer Survival Rates: The overall cancer death rate in the US has dropped by 33% since 1991, meaning 3.8 million lives have been saved that would otherwise have been lost, thanks to advances in early detection, immunotherapy, and targeted treatments.

🐳 Blue Whales Are Back: Blue whale populations in the Southern Ocean, once hunted nearly to extinction, have rebounded to around 2,300 animals, and scientists tracking them say the recovery is accelerating as international whaling protections take hold.

🗣️ Simultaneous Translation: Real-time AI translation now allows people speaking different languages to have fluid, natural conversations through an earpiece, quietly dissolving one of the oldest barriers between human beings.

🏥 Organ Transplants: Scientists have successfully transplanted genetically modified pig hearts, kidneys, and livers into human patients for the first time in history, opening the door to a future where the organ donor waitlist may one day not exist.

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