Humanity

Local Artist Draws Homes Lost in LA Wildfires for Free

Two guitars hang on the avocado-hued wall of a living room, just above a white dresser holding up speakers and a record player. A comfy-looking chair sits to the right, adorned with a colorful, patterned pillow and two blankets. The vibe is cozy, warm, and eclectic.
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Today, that living room — and the rest of the house it’s attached to — is gone. It was one of at least 16,000 structures that were damaged or destroyed in the Los Angeles wildfires in January. But its memory is being kept alive by its former resident’s close friend, 27-year-old Maya Brattkus, who drew it as a gift for the homeowner and her partner to hang up wherever they live next.
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After completing that drawing, Brattkus took her talents a step further: She posted the image on Reddit, offering to draw more lost homes for free. She said she’d also draw houses that weren’t lost, in which case she’d charge a small sum and donate the proceeds to victims.
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“After being evacuated and watching our community go up in flames, I fell into a pretty dark place,” Brattkus, who grew up in LA and watched the temple where her Bat Mitzvah was held burn on TV, told Nice News, adding: “The process of drawing their home was cathartic for me and helped me begin to process the grief of what was going on in a small way.” Read our interview with the artist and see more of her work.​

Humanity

Brad Stulberg Breaks Down “Rugged Flexibility,” a Nuanced Way to Approach Change

Change is constant. We move; we get new jobs; we lose people we love. From birth, the fault lines of our lives are continuously under pressure, shaking us up just when we believe we’re standing on solid ground. You’d think with all this exposure, the way we handle change would be streamlined — that we’d always choose the healthiest approach. But do we?
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That’s a topic author Brad Stulberg was prompted to investigate after a pile-on of personal changes a few years back, a string of transitions that coincided with the COVID-19 pandemic. In an interview with Nice News published in March, Stulberg recounted how he was struck by the way the news cycle at the time seemed to be preoccupied with things returning to “normal.”
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He started considering how he’d reacted to the recent upheavals in his own life in the preceding five years — and how much time so many of us spend reaching for the way things were before we experienced a serious change.
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That thought process led him to develop a new model for approaching instability: rugged flexibility. Stulberg shares ways to put the mindset into practice, including thinking of your identity like a house and asking yourself guiding questions when faced with change.

Humanity

This Club Found the Sweet Spot to Help Older Men Socialize

ROMEO is helping men socialize in their later years. We’re not referring to the Shakespeare character, but rather a global program called “Retired Older Men Eating Out.” One recently established faction in Harpswell, Maine, gathers once a month over a free lunch to listen to different speakers share advice on everything from avoiding scams to taking a good cell phone picture, all the while building new friendships.
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The goal is to get men who lack social connections to mingle and support one another (that’s particularly needed in Maine, which has the oldest population in the country). However, this mission is not mentioned anywhere in the promotional materials, by design. “If we said it was a support group for men, they’re not gonna come,” Tom Mahoney, who helped bring the Harpswell program to life, told NPR. “Because that would indicate, or say to them, ‘I’m vulnerable, I need this.’ And we don’t want to be perceived as being vulnerable.”
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But whether or not someone admits to feeling alone, that doesn’t mean they aren’t seeking community, said Jess Maurer, the executive director of the Maine Council on Aging: “We kind of, as a stereotype, have this idea that men are OK and we don’t need to do programming or specific outreach to them. That’s a stereotype that’s wrong,” she said.
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The club’s steady growth speaks for itself. From September of 2024 to April of this year, attendance grew nearly fivefold, from about a dozen men to around 55. Among those men is Jim Hays, who was initially encouraged to attend the lunches by his wife, but now happily goes monthly. “We men, we have worked all our lives and it’s hard to get out of the chair and get involved with something,” he said. “You know, we lose our contacts with the outside world, and it takes something like this to pull us back in.” Find a ROMEO Club near you.​

Humanity

“Violin of Hope”: A Secret Note Was Found Tucked Inside an Instrument Made by Dachau Survivor

In April, people gathered at the site of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany to commemorate 80 years since the Nazi camp’s liberation. And in honor of that anniversary, we have a related story of resilience. A pair of art dealers discovered a note hidden in the F hole of a violin crafted by a Jewish instrument maker while he was imprisoned at Dachau.
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The note is short but impactful, reading: “Trial instrument, made under difficult conditions with no tools and materials. Dachau. Anno 1941, Franciszek Kempa.”
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​The violin and its hidden note went unnoticed for more than eight decades. Hungarian art dealers Tamás Tálosi and Szandra Katona found the instrument among a furniture set, and were perplexed by the combination of skilled craftsmanship and poor materials. They eventually sent the piece for repairs, at which point its moving history revealed itself at last.
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Although some instruments were brought into Dachau, this is the first known one built at the camp. And while it’s still a mystery how the violin ultimately made its way to Hungary, documents revealed that Kempa survived the war and returned home to Poland, where he continued making instruments before dying in 1953.
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“We named it the ‘violin of hope’ because if someone ends up in a difficult situation, having a task or a challenge helps them get through a lot of things,” Tálosi told the Associated Press. “You focus not on the problem, but on the task itself, and I think this helped the maker of this instrument to survive the concentration camp.” See the violin and note.

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Quote of the Day

“There’s no single answer that will solve all of our future problems. There’s no magic bullet. Instead there are thousands of answers — at least. You can be one of them if you choose to be.”

– OCTAVIA E. BUTLER