Good Week, Bad Week

Listen in as John Hockenberry and Celeste Headlee, hosts of Public Radio International's "The Takeaway," discuss the new installment of The Week's "Good Week, Bad Week"—and invite listeners to call in with opinions of their own. See more from "The Takeaway."

Good week for:

Getting divorced, after British department store chain Debenhams launched a gift registry for couples that are calling it quits, so that family and friends can help them “begin their new life.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Spreading yourself thin, after members of the Adventurers’ Club scattered the ashes of fellow Adventurer Ralph B. White over the mountains of Nepal, the Australian Outback, a Rwandan volcano, the temple of Thor in Iceland, Blue Nile Falls in Ethiopia, and the waters off Zanzibar, among other places.

Vigilantes, after Pete Malachowsky of Queens, N.Y., began posting pictures on Twitter of fellow subway riders picking their noses, gobbling down smelly food, and taking off their shoes. "Consider yourself safe if you’re a considerate person," he said.

Bad week for:

Edgar Allan Poe, after a mysterious fan who left roses and cognac on the writer’s grave site in Baltimore on Poe’s birthday every year failed to show up, breaking a 60-year tradition.

Driving while distracted, after an electronic billboard in downtown Moscow caused a midnight traffic pileup when it displayed a pornographic video instead of its regular advertising clips.

National security, after Mikey Hicks, an 8-year-old Cub Scout from New Jersey, was stopped and frisked by airport officials in Newark because his name matches that of a suspected terrorist. "While he may have terroristic tendencies at home," his mother said, "he does not have those on a plane."