Headlines from Unnewscessary.
At Upworthy, we know a thing or two about the challenges that come with trying to spread good news in a world that tends to thrive on negativity. There are two main reasons why bad news makes the headlines, whereas the good stuff tends to be hidden on the back page.

First, people have evolved to pay attention to things that could be a potential threat. Hence, why crime, war,and political outrage are usually the top stories of the day. Second, good news sometimes doesn’t happen overnight.
“Obviously sudden, noteworthy, and rare events are the ones that make headlines, whereas long-term slow, steady, incremental progress is just not as interesting,” Chelsea Follett, Editor of Human Progress, another positivity site, told Upworthy.
An illustrator has created a wonderful Instagram page where he illustrates good news headlines so “so you won’t forget them,” he told Upworthy.

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Unnewscessary presents fun, dramatic visualizations of the day’s positive news headlines to show people what they may have missed and to make the stories “easy to remember.”
@Unnewscessary started the project in 2019, just before the pandemic hit. His original goal was doing 100 illustrations of news items that “cannot be photographed,” but the work soon became an addiction.
He’s proud to have posted dozens of positive news stories over the past two years, even though we’ve been living through a pandemic. “When you look over the whole gallery, given that most of them are good news, you can see what went well in the last two awful years,” he told Upworthy.
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The Instagram page has received a lot of positive responses, but @Unnewscessary’s favorite was when a scientist contacted him out of the blue. “I got an email from a scientist that told me he’s the one that made the discovery about waxworms that I illustrated. He was in awe!” he said.
@Unnewscessary believes that a lot of people are missing out on positive stories because they lack eye-catching share images.
“Some very interesting stories get lost in our feed because they have an ordinary cover picture, like a stock image that doesn’t say much,” he said. “That’s because some subjects are too abstract to be photographed, so editors are pairing them with something neutral and insipid.”
Here are 17 of the most memorable good news illustrations at Unnewscessary. Take a good look, you may have missed these headlines when they first came out.
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This article originally appeared on 04.11.19


For those in the military, sleep can mean the difference between life and death. But shut-eye can be very hard to come by, especially during active conflict.
According to Sharon Ackman, the U.S. Navy Pre-Flight School developed a scientific method to help its pilots fall asleep. Through this technique, 96% of the pilots were able to fall asleep in two minutes or less.
If pilots could fall asleep during war, you should be able to use it to knock out in the comfort of your bedroom.
Here’s how to do it:

via DVIDShub / Flickr
Given the space restraints of a typical plane, the pilots were taught to sleep in a seated position. They put their feet flat on the ground, while relaxing their hands in their laps.
Breathe slow, deep breaths while relaxing every muscle in your face and letting your forehead, cheeks, mouth, tongue, and jaw go limp.
Let your shoulders drop as low as you can. Allow the muscles in your neck go lifeless.
Starting with your dominant side, let your bicep feel like it’s falling off your body. Then move to your forearm, hand, and fingers. If a muscle isn’t relaxing, tense it first, then let it go loose.
Slowly exhale your tension.
Tell your right thigh muscle to sink, then move down your leg, saying the same thing to your calf, ankle, and foot. Your leg should feel like it has sunk into the ground. Then move on to your left leg.
The final step is to clear your mind for ten seconds. You can do this by paying attention to your breath as it moves through your nostrils or holding a static image in your mind.
Once your body is relaxed and your mind quiet, you should slip away into darkness.

For more information on this sleep technique, check out Ackman’s Medium blog.
A dog at a LGBTQ pride parade.
In one of the most ridiculous examples of homophobia clouding someone’s judgment, a dog owner surrendered his pooch to the Stanly County Animal Protective Services in North Carolina after claiming it is “gay.”

According to WCCB-TV, the owners saw Fezco humping another male dog so they surrendered him because of his sexuality.
Fezco is a brown and black dog resembling a Rottweiler who appears to be 4 to 5 years old and around 50 pounds. The shelter says he is friendly to people and other animals. It didn’t comment on his sexual orientation.
It’s bizarre that anyone would care about their dog’s sexual orientation unless they were a breeder. But if the dog was humping another dog it probably didn’t have much to do with sex anyway.
Younger dogs that have not been spayed or neutered may hump other dogs, objects or legs as a way to practice for when they research sexual maturity. In many cases, dogs of any age will hump another dog to show dominance or during play.
“You’ll often see one dog mount another, then a few minutes later they’ll switch off and the other dog will mount the first dog,” Gary Landsberg, DVM, a veterinary behaviorist in Ontario, Canada, told WebMD’s Fetch. “It’s a common play gesture.
“It’s a play behavior that dogs do because no one has told them it’s not acceptable,” Landsberg added. “It can become enjoyable or a normal part of the dog’s day, so it keeps doing it. It’s the same as jumping up or barking at the door.”
People shouldn’t worry about their dog’s humping behavior unless it becomes a habit.
“The topic draws giggles and laughs, but it’s a very real topic for some people,” David S. Spiegel, VMD said. “Some dogs can become very compulsive about the behavior.”
But if the dog had homosexual tendencies, it wouldn’t be unusual.
According to Scientific American, homosexuality is fairly common in the animal kingdom. In fact, same-sex sexual behavior, which includes mounting, courting and genital licking, has been reported in more than 1,500 animal species from primates to nematode worms.
At first glance, it seems that homosexuality would run counter to the basic tenets of evolution and natural selection. Why would nature favor a trait that would make a species less likely to reproduce?
Researchers at Scientific American postulate that some ancestral animal species may have mated without taking sex into consideration. They had yet to develop the necessary faculties to detect sexual differences so they engaged with whatever they could.
The shelter put out a call for people to adopt or foster Fezco and, according to TMZ, people have been lining up to give the dog a homophobic-free forever home. Upworthy reached out to the shelter for an update on Fezco’s status and has yet to hear back.
While it’s sad that Fezco has had to deal with the trauma of being abandoned by his owners, it may be for the best. Anyone who would ditch their dog because it displayed homosexual behaviors or because they misunderstood a basic behavior probably shouldn’t be trusted to take care of a pet anyway.
This article first appeared on 11.26.19.
We’ve all seen it while cruising for spots in a busy parking lot: A person parks their whip in a disabled spot, then they walk out of their car and look totally fine. It’s enough to make you want to vomit out of anger, especially because you’ve been driving around for what feels like a million years trying to find a parking spot.

You’re obviously not going to confront them about it because that’s all sorts of uncomfortable, so you think of a better, way less ballsy approach: leaving a passive aggressive note on their car’s windshield.
Satisfied, you walk back to your car feeling proud of yourself for telling that liar off and even more satisfied as you walk the additional 100 steps to get to the store from your lame parking spot all the way at the back of the lot. But did you ever stop and wonder if you told off the wrong person?
What if that person on the receiving end of the note had a perfectly good explanation for why they’re driving car with a disabled sticker and tag?
That’s exactly what happened to Emma Doherty, who was surprised to see someone pen such vitriolic words to her in this letter she found on her car.
The language in the note is pretty harsh:


“You lazy conning b-tch. You did not have a disabled person with you! These spaces are reserved for people who need them!!!”
I get that avoiding conflict is something that’s been trained into us, but maybe if whoever wrote this note decided to say something to Emma, this entire thing could’ve been cleared up entirely.
Instead, she had to take to Facebook to pick apart the anonymous grouch and explain her situation to the rest of us. And hopefully whoever wrote the note (if they see her post) understands why they were terribly wrong.
Emma is the mother of a terminally ill child, Bobby. Her ruthless and powerful message sheds light on the misconceptions associated with disabilities and helps to break the stigma that all impairments are visible, because they’re not.
“To the person who put this on my car, which I had put my disabled badge fully on, I’m not angry at your pure ignorance, I’m actually upset with it. How dare you ever accuse anyone of not needing a disabled badge without knowing. I wish you had the balls to say this to my face and I would have told you (even tho I don’t need to explain myself to the likes of you) but I’d have happily said why I have a badge.“

“I promise to get the stigma away from people with disabled badges who don’t “look disabled.” I hope this gets shared and back to you and you will see my son is terminally ill, he’s had over 15 operations, 3 open hearts, 2 stomach, lung and diaphragm and countless artery stenting operations and spent half his life on intensive care.”
SOURCE: FACEBOOK
In her post, she delineates the severity of Bobby’s illness, which has put the young man through multiple surgeries and procedures that are no walks in the park.
“He’s had 2 strokes and was paralyzed, brain damaged and has a spine and hip condition as well as a massive heart condition. The reason I didn’t get his wheelchair out was because I was running late because my son, who had a MRI scan, CTSCAN and a dye for heart function yesterday, only got discharged late and was back in this morning so carried him in.“

“But for your information not everyone who holds a blue badge needs to have a wheelchair! I’ve told … security and broke down, I’ve sat through things nobody should see but why did your note break me? Because it’s your pure ignorance towards others. I’m a single mom trying my best to hold it together for my son who’s in and out if hospital. NOT ALL DISABILITIES ARE VISIBLE and I hope you regret doing this and learn your lesson!”
Throughout her post, Emma simultaneously castigates the person and drives one important point home: Just because someone isn’t in a wheelchair or crutches, doesn’t mean they aren’t disabled or in need of physical care or assistance.
I knew something would be said one day as every day I get looks and stares and see people whispering to each other about me and Bobby walking from the car. Everyone needs to stop and think before acting. I hardly ever let anything upset me but this did. How aggressive as well, and as for conning my son’s disabled pass… [It] is not a con, he’s actually seriously ill. I’ve added a picture of him to prove not everyone looks ill or disabled but can be seriously ill.
The mother clarifies at the end of the message that she’s sure it wouldn’t be a hospital staff member who wrote the message, because those who work in healthcare are well aware of the various reasons someone would have a disabled tag on their vehicle.
“I’d like to point out this has nothing to do with the hospital itself. They were lovely with me when I was upset and they treat us with every respect, always have [in our] 3 long years with them. They’ve saved my son’s life many times. It [was] just somebody who was parked [there].”
Her post quickly went viral, with many people echoing her sentiments and thanking her for helping to clear up that tons of people suffer from different disabilities and that not all of them are so readily apparent.
SOURCE: FACEBOOK
And as it turns out, Emma isn’t the only parent who’s dealt with judgmental individuals who gave them flack for having a disabled sticker on their car. As if having to deal with a sick child isn’t enough, they also have to suffer through getting guff from randos on the street over a measly parking spot.
SOURCE: FACEBOOK
Bobby’s condition has left him without pulmonary artery function, which means that blood will not pump throughout his body. As you can imagine, walking long distances — or performing many physical tasks otherwise healthy individuals take for granted — are out of the question for the 3-year-old.
As a result of her son’s condition, Emma has to take him to the hospital for treatments throughout the week, and seeing the note on her car while having to deal with that ultimately set her off. Thankfully, she used her anger to send a positive message.
Floored by the positive response to her message, Emma went back online to thank people for being so receptive and helping to spread awareness that disabilities come in many forms.

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