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November 4, 2026

Mike McQuade

I’ll be on vacation next week, so don’t be alarmed when The Good List doesn’t show up in your inbox on Wednesday. I considered trying to get next week’s list done before I left, or trying to write it on the plane, but my editors and I decided that the “Good List” thing to do would be to actually take the time off, without conditions. I’ll admit this feels a little uncomfortable, but I’m sitting with the discomfort! Enjoy this week’s list, and I’ll see you on Nov. 18, refreshed and replenished.

On this week’s list:

1. Honey, please

2. Why run?

3. Going local

4. Be free

5. Special cheese

6. Side of Bacon?

Romain Costaseca/Hans Lucas/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The sun will set at 4:48 p.m. today in New York, which means the urge to retreat inside and get cozy will be irresistible. I am not a heavy tea drinker, but I aspire to be, because it’s the consummate cozy behavior, and because I like the idea of warming up from the inside out.

If you are — or aspire to be — a tea drinker, my colleague Melissa Clark’s hack for getting the last of the honey out of a jar: Splash a little of your hot tea in the jar, swish it around, pour the whole thing back into the cup. What a satisfying little trick! It reminds me of my friend Claire’s suggestion that you use the dregs of your jam jars to make a cocktail. I like these tricks because not only are you getting every last drop, but you’re also using the original vessel, a tiny gesture of efficiency.

Lexi Parra/The New York Times

The New York City Marathon was Sunday, and I spent much of the day, as I do every year, considering what it must feel like to complete such a grueling feat. I began marathon training several years ago with the idea that once I’d completed the race, it would serve as a touchstone when facing challenges in the future. I imagined saying to myself: “I ran a marathon. Surely I can do this,” where “this” was whatever apparently impossible task was before me. I confess I felt mostly relief when I didn’t get a spot in the marathon lottery and decided that was a sign I should stop training. In retrospect, I didn’t have a ton of conviction; I didn’t have a good “why.”

In her new book “The Great Remembering,” June Cohen, a co-creator of TED Talks, writes about how humans have always undertaken physical challenges to help cope with emotional ones. Cohen spoke to a woman who undertook a 150-kilometer run around Mount Rainier to commemorate the 15th anniversary of her husband’s death. “Life gave me hard that I didn’t choose,” the woman said, adding, “When we choose hard and let that hard redefine what hard means in our lives — it gives us back our power.”

I’m trying to understand this: Choosing to do something hard as a way to reclaim agency. Hard things don’t always have to be unwelcome; sometimes we invite them in to reframe our understanding of suffering. If I could internalize this, I think I’d have a good reason for running a marathon.

A British man who walked 31,000 miles over 28 years returned home this week, and he said the thing that surprised him most was how kind strangers were — in every country he traversed, people offered him food, shelter, a hug. “The world is just a much better place than you will imagine,” he told The Times.

This is why many people love to run marathons: The magical feeling of the crowds cheering you on. “It doesn’t just come from training for months to test your body in a physical challenge. I could do that on my own,” Jen A. Miller wrote in The Times in 2018. “Marathons, especially city marathons, are a big party, and one that keeps going even when you don’t want to, when everything inside you screams to just stop, even though you need to get to the finish line somehow.”

This party, this collective effervescence, is available to all of us, even if we don’t run. Sometimes we’re the ones taking on a physical challenge, sometimes we’re the ones standing along the route cheering.

The Saugatuck River Bridge in Westport, Conn. in 1990. Robert Moore, via Library of Congress

If you’re considering your own walk across the world, you might start small and explore your own neighborhood with Local Wikipedia, which describes itself as “Wikipedia but only for things a half-hour walk from you.” The creator said he wanted to make the vast, unwieldy archive into something “wieldy,” something that “tells a story about a specific place.”

It’s strange and exciting to see what landmarks and locations, no matter how humble, make it onto your area’s entry. I put in the Connecticut town where I grew up and discovered that it’s home to the oldest surviving movable bridge in the state, built in 1884. Stephen Sondheim was an apprentice at the local playhouse! What might you find about your own hometown?

The stories we tell of the places we live are personal, particular to our experience. They seldom take into account the census districts or the historical bridges. It’s interesting to see what a dispassionate illustration of a place looks like, separate from all the things that have happened to us there.

I read David Whyte’s poem “Sweet Darkness” this week, and one line has stayed with me: “You must learn one thing. / The world was made to be free in.”

I’m not sure why this line in particular resonated, but I keep returning to it, and whenever I do, I unclench a little. It sort of resets my perspective. If the world is made to be free in, then there’s no good reason to allow myself to be confined. And then: How can I help others to be free in this world?

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times

My friend Minju told me recently about her favorite cheese, Rush Creek Reserve, which she serves only on Thanksgiving. Why only on Thanksgiving? If you love a cheese, might not you indulge more than one day each year? Turns out this cheese costs $37 for about 12 ounces, which is, for Minju and me and most everybody, not part of the everyday cheese budget. Plus, Rush Creek Reserve is produced only in the fall. That means it’s on sale for only a limited time — and scarcity like that automatically makes me want to get it while I can, like Mallomars.

I happened on the cheese in my local supermarket and couldn’t resist. I served it with fresh baguette and, as Minju insisted, apricot preserves. It was indeed a special cheese, not only because it was creamy and nutty and subtle, but also because I loved eating something that someone close to me loves.

Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

The old party game “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” where you can supposedly link anyone in Hollywood to Bacon via movies they’ve worked on in fewer than six steps, suggests that Bacon is the center of the entertainment universe, its most prolific star. Someone has crunched the numbers and — plot twist! — it turns out Bacon currently ranks 175th out of 169,000 actors. Find out who’s more connected, and which Gen Z star might be the “next” Kevin Bacon. Now, whenever someone references “Six Degrees,” you can be that smarty-pants who goes, “Well, actually. …” (I’m sorry.)

One more thing: Mary Beth Robinson, a reader from Heidelberg, Germany, has a clever way to deal with things that go awry when traveling:

My husband and I are accustomed to vacationing with large groups of friends, but we once courageously embarked on a two-week road trip through Europe with my elderly parents, the four of us packed tightly into a Honda Civic.

This could have easily gone pear-shaped were it not for the brainchild of my better half: Every morning, we (s)elected a scapegoat for anything that might go wrong that day, whether it was a forgotten item that we’d have to turn back for; long lines at tourist attractions; snippy wait staff; out-of-service elevators; even inclement weather or scarce parking or cold coffee. When serving as scapegoat of the day, one had to accept blame — but not responsibility — for any “negative” thing, no matter how grievous or insignificant. Reservation for the wrong time? Hey, scapegoat! Chewing gum on your shoe? Hey, scapegoat!

It quickly becomes so absurd that it turns everything into a joke, stopping hard feelings in their tracks. We still call on this convention whenever we travel, no matter how large or small the group.

Do you have any strategies for stopping hard feelings in their tracks? Share them in the comments, or send me an email. And you can check out past editions of The Good List anytime. — Melissa

The editor of The Good List is Jodi Rudoren. Eli Cohen handles the photos.

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