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A Dose of Positive News with Cora Berke: Harvey Milk Day
Cora Berke Cora Berke contributes positive vibes weekly to help us keep our perspective. – Mark
News on the Positive Side- by Cora Berke
Harvey Milk Day“Hope will never be silent.”- Harvey Milk
In 1977, 47-year-old Harvey Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. He was the first openly gay person to win a public election in the State of California.
Born and raised in New York, Milk moved to the Castro neighborhood in San Francisco with his partner in 1972. The neighborhood was one of the first recognized gay neighborhoods in the country at that time.
Together with his partner Scott Smith, Milk opened a camera store which served as a gathering for his activism in gay rights. Before winning the election in 1977, he campaigned for equal LGBTQ+ rights in jobs, housing and healthcare and became a known activist. After being sworn in as a member of the Board of Supervisors, Milk sponsored an ordinance to prevent discrimination in employment and housing for the community and voted against a proposition banning gay teachers in the public schools.
Tragically, his career ended only eleven months later, when he was assassinated in his office along with then San Francisco mayor, George Moscone. Milk had a premonition he would be killed one day and left a taped message saying, “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.”
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Weekly Fun Fact: Your Garden Is Listening
Did you know …
Earthworms are gardening gold. A single acre of healthy soil can contain more than a million earthworms, each one aerating the ground and turning organic matter into nutrients as it moves.
Plants can hear themselves being eaten. Research has shown that plants respond to the sound of caterpillars chewing on their leaves by producing more defensive chemicals — even when the chewing sound is just a recording.
The oldest potted plant in the world is over 240 years old. A Eastern Cape cycad has been living in a pot at Kew Gardens in London since 1775.
Talking to your plants actually helps. The Royal Horticultural Society ran a study and found that plants grow faster when spoken to — and that women’s voices produced slightly better results than men’s. No one is entirely sure why.
Carrots were originally purple. The orange carrot we know today was developed by Dutch growers in the 17th century, reportedly as a tribute to the Dutch Royal House of Orange. Before that, carrots came in purple, white, and yellow.
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True Crime Tuesday – A Fearsome Fiction Feature: Kouri Richins and the Moscow Mule Murder
True Crime Tuesday – A Fearsome Fiction Feature: Kouri Richins and the Moscow Mule Murder
Narration provided by WondervoxShe killed her husband with a fentanyl-laced Moscow Mule — then wrote a children’s book about grief. On May 13, 2026, the same day that would have been Eric Richins’ 44th birthday, a Utah judge sentenced Kouri Richins to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
In this episode of True Crime Tuesdays, Mark McNease walks you through one of the most chilling cases in recent memory — a tale of debt, deception, a secret affair, and a calculated murder hiding in plain sight behind the cover of a children’s book. From the first failed attempt on Valentine’s Day to the fatal Moscow Mule, from the internet searches about lethal doses to the jury that deliberated less than three hours — this is a story that is almost too dark to be believed.
True Crime Tuesdays is a Fearsome Fiction feature. New episodes every Tuesday.
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New Your Write Path Promotional Video
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The Twist Podcast 328: Lincoln Memorial Kiddie Pool, Praise for Penzeys, and What Bugs Us This Week
On further reflection, this week Mark and Rick do cannonballs into Trump’s giant kiddie pool, sing the praises of Penzeys super-progressive spice empire, and sound off on what bugs us this week.
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Mark McNease’s Fearsome Fiction Special Edition: Short Story ‘Jawbone’ from 5 of a Kind
Today in this special feature of the Fearsome Fiction Podcast we’re offering another short story from Mark McNease’s collection, ‘Five of a Kind.’
Jawbone tells the story of young Richard who was eighteen years old when a head-on collision on a snowy Indiana road took the lower half of his face. He survived — and that, in many ways, was the cruelest part.
We Richard Krump across the decades after his accident: the surgeries that promised normalcy and delivered nothing, the friends who never showed up to his homecoming party, the little girl in a drugstore who gave him his name, and the slow, steady retreat of everyone he ever loved — until only his books, his silence, and finally his paintings remained.
A haunting, deeply human story about disfigurement, isolation, and the particular cruelty of surviving intact on the inside while the world refuses to see past the outside. Jawbone begins where a young man’s life as he knew it ends.
