On Saturday morning, a line of cars will form at Gate 5 of Nissan’s Smyrna plant, trunks loaded with dead TVs, bald tires, and mattresses nobody wants hauled to the curb. It looks like a logistics problem. Look again, and it’s also Boys & Girls Clubs of Rutherford County and a dog rescue getting a cut of what people decide not to throw away. This week also gave us an actor fighting his way back onto a set he had no business being on, and a university study that found the fix for an argument isn’t a better fact — it’s a better question.
One Saturday, Four Good Causes
On Saturday, Nov. 14, from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m., Nissan and the Tennessee Environmental Council are hosting a free Recycling Roundup at the Smyrna Vehicle Assembly Plant, 983 Nissan Drive, enter through Gate 5. It’s part of America Recycles Day, and it’s built to take the stuff regular curbside pickup won’t: electronics, tires, scrap metal, glass, Styrofoam, mattresses, plastics.
But the event does more than keep junk out of a landfill. The Smyrna Police Department will be on hand to collect unused prescription medications. There’s secure paper shredding for anyone worried about identity theft. Blankets donated on-site go to Blanket Nashville. And separate donation lanes benefit Read to Succeed, Boys & Girls Clubs of Rutherford County, and Big Fluffy Dog Rescue — with volunteer slots open for students who need service hours.
It’s an easy thing to overlook: a drive-through recycling event. But somebody in Rutherford County will sleep warmer this winter because a neighbor’s spare blanket went to Blanket Nashville instead of a closet. A shelter dog’s care gets funded because someone’s old mattress had to go somewhere anyway. Nobody has to choose between cleaning out a garage and doing some good. For one Saturday, it’s the same errand.
Read the full story at Rutherford Source.
Marty McFly and Indiana Jones Learn From Each Other
Michael J. Fox has Parkinson’s disease in real life. He hadn’t acted since 2020. Then he watched Harrison Ford play a therapist with Parkinson’s on the Apple series Shrinking — and he was stunned by how closely it matched his own experience of the disease. So he called Bill Lawrence, his old Spin City boss and Shrinking‘s co-creator, and more or less demanded a part on the show.
He got one. In the Season 3 premiere, Fox’s character meets Ford’s in a doctor’s waiting room, and the two trade the kind of dark, quick jokes two men who actually live with a thing can afford to make about it. Castmates said the set itself went quiet with the weight of watching two generations of icons work together for the first time.
What stayed with Fox wasn’t the joke-trading, though. Watching Ford’s performance back, he said, “I recognized Parkinson’s in his eyes.” He told Vanity Fair he was brought to tears by it — moved not by sentiment, but by recognition, by a fellow actor rendering a disease Fox lives with so precisely that it felt like being seen. Ford, for his part, called Fox “an extraordinarily powerful person.” Two men who’d never worked together found, through a shared diagnosis neither chose, something like understanding.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
The Question That Changes Minds
Stanford researchers ran two studies on what actually happens when people disagree. The common instinct — pile on facts, sharpen the logic — mostly fails. What worked instead was simpler: asking the other person to say more. Questions like “Could you tell me more about that?” or “Why do you think that?” made people view their debate opponent more favorably, behave more open-mindedly, and even think better of others who shared that opponent’s views.
Stranger still, the effect ran both ways. The person asking the question came away more open to the view they’d been pushing back against — just from asking about it in good faith. Researchers at the University of Haifa found something similar: people who felt genuinely listened to became less defensive and less certain that their own position was the only correct one.
Dartmouth cognitive scientist Thalia Wheatley put it plainly: curiosity “creates common ground across brains,” just by having the humility to ask what someone else thinks and being willing to actually change your mind in response. It isn’t a cure-all — the researchers are careful to say some views are too far gone for a question to bridge. But for most of the disagreements people actually have, with neighbors, family, coworkers, the fix on offer isn’t a sharper argument. It’s one honest question.
Read the full story at Upworthy.
A recycling drive that quietly funds four different causes. An actor who saw himself in another actor’s performance and wept. A study that says the way through a disagreement is to ask instead of argue. None of it is loud, and none of it asked to be. If something’s going right in your corner of the Boro — a neighbor, a classroom, a small fix that mattered — tell us about it. We’re listening.