Written by Alison Nastasi

Bless your heart, David Byrne, for creating a reprieve from the madness. The artist, Talking Heads musician, avid cyclist, and all-around nice guy’s new website Reasons to Be Cheerful is a news spot and “online observatory” that won’t want to make you hurl your laptop out a window and run away screaming. (And, hey, it’s also the name of an Ian Dury song.) From Byrne:

I imagine, like a lot of you who look back over the past year, it often seems as if the world is going straight to Hell. I wake up in the morning, I look at the paper, and I say to myself, “Oh no!” Often I’m depressed for half the day. It doesn’t matter how you voted—on Brexit, the French elections or the U.S. election more than a year ago—many of us of all persuasions and party affiliations feel remarkably similar. This feeling is not confined to one side of the political spectrum.

As a kind of remedy to this, and possibly as a kind of therapy, I started collecting news that reminded me, “Hey, there’s actually some positive stuff going on!”

I will share thoughts, images and audio relating to this initiative and I’ll welcome contributions from others.

Check out a lecture with Byrne at the New School about his cheery new project, and embrace some good vibes for a little while.