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“Guardian angel” drives strangers in need; asks for nothing in return
An internet post that brought together strangers is reminding people of how much good there is in the world.
Lyn Story is a retiree in Fort Worth, Texas. The 64-year-old had a lot of free time on her hands until she met Apryl Goodwin, 46, who had been diagnosed with uterine cancer.
“I had no transportation and I didn’t know what to do,” Goodwin said. She found help on the community app Nextdoor.
“Someone spoke up and said, ‘I’ll take you to your appointments,’ and I kind of ignored it cause it’s a stranger. What do you do? So she messaged me again and said, ‘I’ll take you. I mean it. I’m honest. I, you know, I’m sincere.'”
That stranger was Story, and over the last year, she has taken Goodwin to more than 25 radiation appointments, six chemotherapy treatments and countless doctor visits.
“One time her car broke down and she goes and flags down somebody in the middle of traffic to get me to my chemo,” Goodwin said.
Story’s kindness doesn’t stop there. Months after meeting Goodwin, she was on the Nextdoor app again when she noticed a post from Kevin Horrigan, who is legally blind.
“Lyn’s like a little angel,” said Horrigan. “She really is, because I can’t drive.”
Hard times drove Horrigan out of retirement. Now Story lessens his burdens.
“Lyn drives me to work or she picks me up from work. It helps tremendously, very big help,” he said.
Story said she started thinking of herself as a “bad weather friend.”
“You know, fair weather friends are only there when everything’s good for you,” she said. “But a bad weather friend is there to help you in times of need.”
They were strangers just a year ago and have now developed a life-changing friendship.
“The best way for me to feel good is to help other people feel good, just to make it easier for them,” Story said.
For Story, it’s her history that helped shape who she is today: She was arrested for shoplifting 45 years ago.
“I learned to stop it, to be better. I went into therapy and kind of got a feel for why I felt the need to, for the high, for shoplifting and that helped. And then many years later I was finally diagnosed as bipolar. And that helped because I got on medication to make me even instead of the highs and the lows. And so that’s made a big difference,” she said.
Determined to be better, Story was 31 when she donated her healthy bone marrow to a critically ill patient she didn’t even know. So, it should come as no surprise that when she was recently asked to foster a dog named Sully who is disabled with three legs, she was eager to sign up.
Filled with love, Story’s own story is life changing for so many.
“She’s my guardian angel,” Goodwin said.
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Malcolm Gladwell on “Revenge of the Tipping Point”
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Malcolm Gladwell’s life has changed; he has not
On Tuesday, a new Malcolm Gladwell book comes out. And if history is any guide, it will be a bestseller. “They’re stories about ideas,” he said. “They have characters. They have plots. I’m usually trying to say something about the world.”
His first book, “The Tipping Point,” published in 2000, established the Gladwell recipe: he explores a theme through anecdotes and little-known scientific studies. “‘Tipping Point’ was about the epidemic as an incredibly useful way of understanding how ideas move through society,” Gladwell said. “And epidemics have rules. Let’s learn the rules, right?”
His seven New York Times bestsellers have sold 23 million copies in North America alone. His fee for corporate speeches is $350,000. His fans have downloaded a quarter-billion episodes of his podcast, “Revisionist History,” and he founded a company called Pushkin Industries to produce it.
In other words, Gladwell has come a long way from the small Canadian town where he grew up, son of a British father and a Jamaican mother, whom he describes as “subversive,” someone who would write notes to excuse her son from class with a blank space. “I would just fill out the date,” said the man who skipped a lot of school.
He attended the University of Toronto, but his best education was the ten years he worked for the Washington Post. “I knew nothing about newspapers,” he said. “I was so raw. I was 23, I think, or 24. Bob Woodward was two rows away from me. I learned at the feet of the greatest journalists of my generation.”
In 1996, Gladwell joined The New Yorker. He wrote about why, in the 1990s, New York’s crime rate plummeted in an article called, “The Tipping Point.” A book followed. It introduced a recurring Gladwellian theme: hidden patterns in the way the world works.
He’s a world-class contrarian, about college (“You should never go to the best institution you get into, never; go to your second or your third choice. Go to the place where you’re guaranteed to be in the top part of your class”); about working from home (“It’s not in your best interest to work at home. … If you’re just sitting in your pajamas in your bedroom, is that the work life you want to live, right? Don’t you want to feel part of something?”); about football (“I think the sport is a moral abomination”).
Gladwell says he enjoys being provocative: “Of course!” he said. “I like poking the bear. I mean, journalists should poke the bear.”
Gladwell’s fans love his storytelling, and the A-ha! moments they bring. His critics, on the other hand, have described his writing as “generalizations that are banal, obtuse, or flat wrong,” and “simple, vacuous truths [dressed] up with flowery language.” “I’m with the idea that not everyone’s gonna like my work,” Gladwell said. “100% of people don’t like anything.”
In a 2021 “Sunday Morning” interview, Gladwell said, “I would rather be interesting than correct.” He called that “an overly provocative way of saying things! No, I think what I meant was, if I turn out not to be right, I’m not devastated. I accept that as the price of doing business.”
Gladwell often turns his mistakes into new chapters or podcast episodes. In “The Tipping Point,” he explained that New York’s crime drop was the result of “broken windows policing.” As he described it, “Little crimes were tipping points for big crimes.” But that philosophy led to New York’s policy of “stop and frisk.”
“Doing 700,000 police stops a year of young Black and Hispanic men is deeply problematic,” Gladwell said. “We were wrong. I was part of that. I’m sorry.”
Which brings us to the new book, “Revenge of the Tipping Point.” “The original ‘Tipping Point’ is a very optimistic, rosy book about the possibilities for using the laws of epidemics to promote positive social change,” he said. “In the last 25 years, I spent a lot of time thinking about the other side of that problem, which is, what happens when people use the laws of epidemics in ways that are malicious or damaging or self-interested?”
The book’s stories range from topics as obscure as cheetah reproduction, to stories as big as the Holocaust. He writes that almost nobody talked about the Holocaust, or even called it that, until NBC aired a miniseries called “Holocaust” in 1978. “And what changed happened like [snaps fingers]. I mean, it was just there was a tipping point in our understanding of the Holocaust,” he said.
This book arrives at a tipping point in Gladwell’s own life. In a span of five years, he got engaged, had two children, turned 61, and moved from Manhattan to pastoral Hudson, New York. “It’s a lot to handle. There isn’t a single person who ever lived whose parents did not say, ‘This is a lot!'” he laughed. “I have become the person that, you know, I once despised, and nothing makes me happier.”
He also despises Ivy League colleges, accusing them of prioritizing their own reputations over focusing on their students.
Has parenthood affected his outlook on any of the things that he’s written about before? “Well, it’s prepared me for the possibility that I will be a massive hypocrite!” Gladwell laughed. “So, you know, it’s one thing to write about what you should do with your kids when you don’t have them.”
For all his success, Malcolm Gladwell maintains that nothing has changed in his approach, his work ethic, or his contrarianism. “It hasn’t changed what I do,” he said. “I don’t farm out my research; I still go on reporting trips. It hasn’t gotten old. In fact, my great regret is I don’t have time to do more.”
READ AN EXCERPT: “Revenge of the Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell
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Story produced by Wonbo Woo. Editor: Remington Korper.
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Coldplay on their record-breaking world tour
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