The Mona Lisa is finally getting her own room. It's about time

Happy Friday. We made it, and today's issue is the kind that sends you into the weekend feeling good about people and the world they're quietly building.

We have a genuinely exciting development for anyone who has ever been elbowed in the ribs trying to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa. A man in Washington State who did something with his retirement that most people only dream about. A window washer in Kansas City who figured out that a squeegee and a social media account could save a restaurant. And a woman in Massachusetts who gave one kid a free ice cream cone and accidentally started something wonderful.

That's your Friday. Enjoy every bit of it.

—Stephanie S

Happy Friday. We made it, and today's issue is the kind that sends you into the weekend feeling good about people and the world they're quietly building.

We have a genuinely exciting development for anyone who has ever been elbowed in the ribs trying to catch a glimpse of the Mona Lisa. A man in Washington State who did something with his retirement that most people only dream about. A window washer in Kansas City who figured out that a squeegee and a social media account could save a restaurant. And a woman in Massachusetts who gave one kid a free ice cream cone and accidentally started something wonderful.

That's your Friday. Enjoy every bit of it.

—Stephanie S

👉 P.S. There's a whole community of people who read Good News Break every single weekday morning. If you'd like to join them for just $5 a month, we'd love to have you in there every day.

If you have ever visited the Louvre and tried to see the Mona Lisa, you know the experience. You push through one of the world's largest museums, follow the signs, and finally arrive at the Salle des États to find roughly 20,000 other people who had the same idea. The painting itself is smaller than a laptop screen. The crowd is not. It is, by most accounts, one of the great disappointments in international tourism.

That is about to change. The Louvre has announced a $1 billion redesign of the museum's eastern facade, the Grande Colonnade, and the headline detail is this: the Mona Lisa will be moved to her own dedicated 33,000 square foot exhibition space. People who want to see the Gioconda can go directly there, skip the rest of the museum entirely, take their selfie, and leave. People who want to see the other 480,000 objects in the collection can do so without the crush.

The winning design comes from New York-based Selldorf Architects, selected from 100 firms globally, and includes two new underground entrances, expanded gallery space, separate dining areas and gift shops, and new green pathways connecting the museum to the rest of Paris. The redesign is expected to accommodate three million additional visitors per year.

For one of the most visited places on earth, it is a long overdue and genuinely smart solution. See the architectural renderings and read the full redesign plans.

Gary Verbrugge spent 30 years working for the Social Security Administration and always longed for the woodland his family had owned in Washington State. When he took early retirement to care for his aging parents, he went back, bought what he could, and found the forest he remembered had been mismanaged for timber profit by the forester his family had trusted. So he set about fixing it.

In 2007, he partnered with the Inland Northwest Land Conservancy to turn 605 acres he owned into a conservation easement. Last year, he bought another 280 acres from his nieces and nephews and added them to the package. He is 72 years old and lives alone on the land, which the Little Spokane River runs through, along with creeks home to bull trout. In a subdivided and developed area, his woodland is a haven for elk, deer, moose, wolves, cougar, bobcat, and eagles. He documents them all with trail cams.

Now he is donating the entire parcel to the Kalispel Indian Tribe, whose ancestors cared for this land long before his family arrived. The tribe accepted with, as they put it, profound gratitude. Verbrugge has no heirs. He simply wanted to make sure the land ended up with people who would love it the way he did. "To see the wildlife, where they're not aggressive, they're not scared, they're just at home," he said. "That is the reward." Read the full story and see his trail cam photos.

Davis Roethler co-owns Window Wolf, a window cleaning company in Kansas City. He also has a background in social media content and a pair of Meta smart glasses that record everything he sees. Put those things together and you get one of the more quietly ingenious ideas in small business support we've come across.

Roethler shows up at struggling, beloved, or simply overlooked local restaurants, offers a free window clean, and while he works, he tells their story. The owners, cooks, and families behind the food. The decades of effort, the near-closures, the passion that keeps someone running a restaurant when the numbers say they shouldn't. His longer-form video reviews regularly pull tens of thousands of views, and in at least one case may have saved a business from closing altogether.

Dunn Deal BBQ, Tasty African Food KC, Kolaches and Coffee, and Simply Grand Kitchen and Creamery have all been featured, with several now reporting lines around the block. Window Wolf has 8,700 Instagram followers and growing. Roethler puts it simply: there is so much opportunity in Kansas City to help out small businesses and make sure they're not part of that statistic of closing down. Watch his Dunn Deal BBQ review and see what he does.

Madyson Silvagnoli runs Maddy's Ice Cream and More out of a truck on the streets of Gardner, Massachusetts. She says her truck is as much about spreading joy as turning a profit, which probably explains what happened when a tearful little boy explained he had no dollars for ice cream. She handed him a scoop with whipped cream and sprinkles anyway.

"We don't turn kids away when they don't have money," she said in a video that went viral with 9 million views. "You want an ice cream from Maddy, you get an ice cream from Maddy." The comment section lit up with people wanting to donate so other kids could have the same experience, and Maddy listened.

She set up a product on her website called the No More Tears Fund, launched a merchandise line with the tagline "kindness is always free," and the proceeds go directly toward free ice cream for any child who shows up without pocket money. The whole thing started with one scoop and one small boy. That is exactly how these things are supposed to start. Watch the video that started it all.

🦟 Africa: A landmark four-year study published in The Lancet confirmed that the RTS,S malaria vaccine prevented one in eight deaths among eligible young children in Ghana, Kenya, and Malawi, providing the clearest real-world evidence yet that malaria vaccination saves lives at scale.

💊 Global: A huge international review found that GLP-1 weight-loss drugs like Ozempic significantly reduce the risk of heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, and premature death over the long term, well beyond their known benefits for weight and blood sugar control.

⚗️ Canada: For the first time, scientists have measured natural hydrogen gas steadily building up in billion-year-old Canadian Shield rocks in Ontario, with a single mine site naturally discharging enough to power more than 400 households annually, pointing to a vast untapped source of clean fuel.

🎨 USA: George Lucas's long-awaited Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is opening in Los Angeles this fall, featuring thousands of works across adventure, childhood, love, and everyday life, and cementing the city as one of the world's great museum destinations.

🖼️ UK: The National Gallery's "Art on Your Doorstep" programme is bringing life-sized reproductions of Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Turner to town centres across Britain, with more stops planned for Torquay, Derry, and the Isle of Wight in 2026, making world-famous masterpieces freely available to communities who rarely have access to them2

On this day 28 years ago, both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland held simultaneous referendums on the Good Friday Agreement, the landmark peace deal signed six weeks earlier that had ended three decades of conflict known as the Troubles. The result was overwhelming. Ninety-four percent of voters in the Republic voted yes. Seventy-one percent in Northern Ireland did the same. It was the first time the island of Ireland had voted together on anything since 1918, and the turnout in Northern Ireland, at 81%, was extraordinary for a region so accustomed to division.

The Agreement created a power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland, a framework for cross-border cooperation, and a principle of consent that gave people the right to define themselves as British, Irish, or both. What it gave most profoundly to an entire generation was something harder to measure: the absence of war. Children who were born in 1998 have grown up in a place their parents would barely recognize. The peace has been imperfect and its institutions fragile at times, but on days like today it is worth remembering what was actually chosen and how many people chose it.

Other notable May 22 events:

1762: The Trevi Fountain was inaugurated in Rome, designed by Nicola Salvi and completed by Giuseppe Pannini, becoming one of the largest baroque fountains in the world and the most famous fountain on earth.

1906: Wilbur and Orville Wright were granted US Patent 821,393 for their flying machine, three years after making the first controlled powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

1930: Harvey Milk was born, the war veteran who became the first openly gay politician elected in California and who successfully passed a civil rights bill outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation.

1980: Pac-Man made its debut in a Tokyo arcade, designed by a 25-year-old who wanted to make arcades welcoming for women and couples, and went on to become the most successful arcade game of all time.

— Frank A. Clark

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:

🌱 Soil Is Alive Again: Regenerative farming practices are bringing depleted soils back to life across the world, with studies showing that farms using regenerative methods have 40% more biodiversity than conventional operations while sequestering significant carbon and maintaining strong yields.

🦅 Birds Are Returning: After decades of decline driven by pesticides and habitat loss, many bird species across North America and Europe are showing measurable signs of recovery, with habitat protections and reduced pesticide use driving population increases in species once considered at serious risk.

🌊 Tidal Energy Has Arrived: The world's most powerful tidal stream turbine is now generating electricity off the coast of Orkney in Scotland, harnessing the predictable movement of ocean tides around the clock regardless of weather or sunlight, opening a new chapter for renewable energy.

🧒 Teen Mental Health Tools Are Working: New digital mental health programs designed specifically for teenagers are showing results that match or exceed traditional therapy in several clinical studies, expanding access to support for young people in communities where therapists are scarce or unaffordable.

🔬 Fighting Blindness: Scientists have successfully used gene therapy to restore partial or full sight in patients with inherited forms of blindness previously considered untreatable, with several treatments now approved and dozens more in clinical trials around the world

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