She put her dream on hold for 40 years. Then she became a doctor at 73

Happy Friday. The weekend is almost here, and today's issue is the kind that sends you into it feeling good about people.

Our lead story is about a woman named Dawn who carried a dream for decades, kept putting it aside for all the right reasons, and then one day decided she was done waiting. I'll let you read what happened next.

We've also got Iraq doing something quietly extraordinary with a 5,000-year-old monument, genuinely good news about the state of America's roads and waterways, and a Welsh valley that lost its industry and decided to become something beautiful instead.

Here's your good news. Enjoy the weekend.

—Stephanie S

Happy Friday. The weekend is almost here, and today's issue is the kind that sends you into it feeling good about people.

Our lead story is about a woman named Dawn who carried a dream for decades, kept putting it aside for all the right reasons, and then one day decided she was done waiting. I'll let you read what happened next.

We've also got Iraq doing something quietly extraordinary with a 5,000-year-old monument, genuinely good news about the state of America's roads and waterways, and a Welsh valley that lost its industry and decided to become something beautiful instead.

Here's your good news. Enjoy the weekend.

—Stephanie S

👉 P.S. Good News Break is available every single weekday, not just three days a week. For $5 a month you get stories like these delivered daily, plus exclusive paid content including our Science of Happiness and 60 Second Reset sections

Dawn Zuidgeest-Craft wanted to be a doctor from the earliest years of her life. Instead she became a nurse practitioner, got married, had children, got divorced, remarried, had two more children, and somewhere in all of that, the dream faded. Then her husband Carl suffered a brain hemorrhage. She told him she wanted to go to medical school. He thought she was crazy.

She dug into her retirement savings and enrolled at St. James School of Medicine in Anguilla, which waives the MCAT requirement for non-traditional students. She failed her first biochemistry exam. She kept going anyway, supported by Carl and by classmates who remembered her fondly from movie nights and yoga sessions on the beach.

Clinical rotations in Chicago, West Virginia, and South Texas followed. A mentor there saw her aptitude and encouraged her to pursue a residency. This month, not long before her 73rd birthday, Dawn graduated with her doctorate, the oldest graduate in her school's history, and will begin her residency at Trinity Health Medical Center in Michigan this year.

When asked why she kept going, she said she feels alive when she works in the medical field. That kind of clarity, arriving after a lifetime of detours, is something. Read the full story and see the graduation photo.

The Ziggurat of Ur is one of the oldest and most recognizable monuments on earth, a massive stepped temple built in ancient Mesopotamia around 2100 BCE as a place of worship for the moon god Nanna. It sits in what is now southern Iraq, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it is slowly losing the battle against wind, sand, and a changing climate. The Iraqi government has decided to do something about it.

The preservation project, budgeted at around $382,000, focuses on the most vulnerable sections of the original structure, particularly the northern face which has suffered severe erosion in recent decades. What makes the approach remarkable is the commitment to authenticity. Rather than using modern materials, conservationists sampled bricks directly from the ziggurat and reproduced them using the exact same chemical composition and physical properties as the originals. The clay was sourced from soil near the ancient city of Ur itself.

It's worth noting this isn't the ziggurat's first restoration. The Neo-Babylonian King Nabonidus restored it in the 6th century BCE, and Saddam Hussein carried out additional work in the 1980s. The current team is taking a more careful approach than either predecessor. See the photos and watch the short video of the restoration work.

A new report from Keep America Beautiful, the most extensive litter research in US history, found that litter across America has declined 34% since 2020. Every American's share of roadway and waterway litter has dropped from 152 pieces to 96, a number that is still too high but represents real, measurable progress driven by real human behavior change.

The breakdown is striking. Roadway litter fell 22%, from 23.7 billion to 18.4 billion pieces. Waterway litter fell even further, down 45%, from 25.9 billion to 14.2 billion pieces. The declines are being driven by education, local programs, enforcement, and increased public engagement from businesses, organizations, and individuals. Nearly 90% of Americans now say they feel personal responsibility to reduce litter.

The report also captures how litter mirrors the way we live. Cardboard litter is up 50% as online shopping reshapes habits. PPE litter from the pandemic is down 76%. E-cigarette litter has spiked. Overall plastic is declining. Coastal zones contain 8 to 13 times more litter per mile than inland environments, making them the next urgent frontier. Progress made, work still to do. Read the full report findings.

The Teifi Valley in west Wales was once an economic artery. The river powered wool mills, supported a fishing industry, and moved materials across the Welsh countryside. Almost all of that is gone now. What remains is quiet, largely undiscovered beauty, 850 years of history, and a community that decided to do something with it.

A grassroots group has created the Teifi Valley Trail, an 83-mile, three-day hiking route that follows the river from the Cambrian Mountains through monastic ruins, market towns, ancient woodland, and river gorges, ending at the estuary at Poppit Sands. The trail passes the ruins of Strata Florida Abbey, once the second-largest abbey in Britain and known as the Welsh Westminster. There are two castles, antique stone bridges, waterfalls, and local legends going back to the days of King Henry I.

Trail organizer James Williams put the purpose plainly: get people with backpacks and boots into the valley to spend money, the same economic ripple effect that Wales's famous coastal paths have delivered for years. It's a smart, beautiful idea. See the photos and find the full trail itinerary here.

🌉 Finland: Helsinki opened the world's longest car-free bridge on April 18th, a 1,191-meter landmark designed exclusively for pedestrians, cyclists and trams, drawing over 50,000 visitors on opening weekend and becoming an instant icon of sustainable city design.

⚡️ India: A new Ember analysis found that solar power paired with battery storage could already meet 90% of India's electricity demand at a cost lower than what most states currently pay for power, using less than one-third of the country's total feasible solar potential.

🪻 France: After Marseille stopped dumping untreated wastewater into its bay in the 1980s, a 40-year study found that Neptune seagrass meadows have recovered at rates scientists called exceptional, with coverage in one area rising from just 6% to 81%, proving that removing pollution works better than replanting.

🐮 Austria: Scientists studying a pet cow named Veronika documented the first known case of tool use in cattle, watching her pick up brooms, rakes and sticks to scratch different parts of her body, using the bristle end for tough areas and the smooth handle for sensitive spots, a skill previously documented only in chimpanzees.

💉 Global: The UNICEF-led Big Catch-Up vaccination initiative delivered over 100 million doses to 18 million children across 36 countries over two years, protecting them from multiple preventable diseases, with more than 12 million of those children having never previously received any vaccine at all.

King Sejong the Great of Korea was born 629 years ago today, and the more you learn about him the more remarkable he becomes. He ruled the Joseon Dynasty in the 15th century with what can only be described as an insatiable appetite for making life better for his people, rich and poor alike. He commissioned one of the world's first rain gauges, created a new printing press, distributed medical and agricultural textbooks to ordinary citizens, wrote hundreds of musical compositions, and introduced 100 days of maternity leave and 30 days of paternity leave, in the 1400s.

His crowning achievement was Hangul, the Korean alphabet he created to solve a specific problem: the lower classes couldn't read or write because the Chinese characters in use required years of study most people never had access to. Sejong designed a phonetic alphabet of 28 letters specifically to promote literacy among ordinary people, and scholars have noted that while humans have created thousands of languages, truly original alphabets are so rare as to seem almost impossible. He also established the Hall of Worthies inside Gyeongbok Palace, a government-funded research institute that collected Korea's best young thinkers and gave them grants to pursue scientific knowledge. A king who believed in free inquiry, universal literacy, and parental leave. He turns 629 today.

Other notable May 15 events:

1869: Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York City, launching the campaign for a constitutional amendment to give women the right to vote.

1905: Las Vegas was officially founded when 110 acres were auctioned off, with the city growing rapidly as a railroad stop between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City before becoming one of the world's most visited destinations.

1941: Joe DiMaggio began his legendary 56-game hitting streak, a Major League Baseball record that still stands 85 years later and has been called a statistical near-impossibility.

2010: At just 16 years old, Australian Jessica Watson became the youngest person to sail solo, non-stop, and unassisted around the world, completing the journey in 210 days.

— George Eliot

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:

🧒 Child Mortality at an All-Time Low: The global child mortality rate has fallen by more than 60% since 1990, meaning millions of children who would not have survived a generation ago are alive today, thanks to vaccines, clean water, and better medical care.

🌏 More Democracy Than Ever: Despite what the headlines might suggest, the share of the world's population living under some form of democratic governance is higher today than at any point in human history, with more people having the right to vote than ever before.

🦁 Rewilding Is Working: From wolves in Yellowstone to lynx in the Scottish Highlands, rewilding programs across the world are restoring entire ecosystems, proving that when humans step back, nature finds its way back faster than almost anyone expected.

🔋 Clean Energy Now Cheaper Than Fossil Fuels: For the first time in history, building new solar and wind power is cheaper than running existing coal plants in most of the world, a tipping point that energy economists once said wouldn't happen for decades.

🧠 We Can Now Read the Brain: Advances in neuroimaging now allow scientists to watch individual neurons fire in real time, decode dreams, and reconstruct images from brain activity alone, opening a new era of understanding what it means to be human.

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