Another Monday, and the headlines are piling up again: diesel at a record high, a failed execution in Tennessee, threats against the woman at the center of the Cornell case, and a midterm campaign that keeps getting uglier. So, as we do every Monday, we went looking for the people proving that things can still go right.

After all, who doesn’t need a win to start the week?

Here’s what we found.

Four women and women-led groups just won the “alternative Nobel Prize”

Four individuals and organizations challenging authoritarian rule, patriarchal violence, and unchecked AI development have won this year’s Right Livelihood Award, better known as the “alternative Nobel Prize,” and every one of them is a woman or a female-led organization, Positive News reported. The award honors those offering “resistance to systems that push people to the margins.”

Eritrean computer scientist Timnit Gebru, founder of the Distributed Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, was recognized “for challenging concentrated power in artificial intelligence, and pioneering digital technology rooted in justice, lived experience and human agency.” Pakistani lawyer Jalila Haider was honored for challenging “ethnic, state and patriarchal persecution” in her community, the Hazara, a Persian-speaking ethnic group. The two winning organizations were the Rural Women’s Assembly, which empowers women in Africa to defend their land, seed and bodily autonomy against corporate dispossession, and the Georgian Young Lawyers’ Association, which works to safeguard Georgian democracy “in the face of an autocratic crackdown.”

The winners, said Right Livelihood executive director Ole von Uexkull, are “rewriting the rules that autocrats, patriarchs and Silicon Valley’s most powerful men assumed were theirs to write alone.”

Global fossil-fuel emissions are set to fall this year, even with coal on the rise

Credit: Alamy Stock Photo.

The war that has pushed fuel prices to painful highs may also be cutting the world’s fossil-fuel use. Global fossil-fuel emissions are set to fall by around 0.5% in 2026, according to an analysis by Carbon Brief, as the U.S.-Iran war’s disruption of trade through the Strait of Hormuz keeps oil and gas prices high. Coal demand is expected to rise 1.2% this year, fueling media claims of a “return to coal,” but Carbon Brief found that the increase, much of it unrelated to Hormuz, is set to be more than offset by declines in oil and gas. By September, the International Energy Agency was forecasting that global oil demand would drop by 2.5 million barrels a day this year, a 2.4% decline from 2025, after predicting in January that it would grow.

As fuel prices surged, electric vehicles captured record shares of major car markets from Australia and China to Europe, Indonesia and Thailand, Carbon Brief noted, and in July, EV sales nearly doubled year over year in “new markets” outside China, Europe and North America, according to Sverre Alvik, a vice president at the consultancy DNV. “For every month the conflict lasts, the probability of permanent [oil] demand destruction increases,” Alvik wrote in a late-August analysis. Carbon Brief concluded that the crisis could lower fossil-fuel use not only in the short term but “on a more lasting basis.”

Dolly Parton’s Cup of Ambition coffee just hit shelves, and it helps kids learn to read

One of Dolly Parton’s last projects before she died in August was a coffee brand she called a “dream… more than 40 years in the making,” and as of last Tuesday, it’s finally on shelves. Dolly’s Cup of Ambition, made in partnership with Community Coffee, launched Sept. 29 in light, medium, and dark roasts at retailers including Amazon and Walmart, Rolling Stone reported, and a percentage of proceeds will support her Imagination Library and its mission to inspire early childhood literacy. The brand takes its name from the opening of her hit “9 to 5,” and Parton filmed three commercials for it in July. The first, set to that song, shows her strumming her guitar and fixing her makeup backstage.

Parton died on Aug. 25 after a brief battle with cancer, at 80. When she visited the Tennessee truck stop where the coffee first debuted in June, she said, “This is just one of those dreams that’s taken a little longer than I thought it might, but we’ve got it, and it’s working. I can’t wait for you to try it.”

The Broadway Flea Market raised nearly $1.5 million in the middle of a nor’easter

Credit: Michael Hull.

When a nor’easter hit on Sept. 27, the Broadway Flea Market & Grand Auction moved indoors to the Hammerstein Ballroom, and thousands of theater fans still showed up, raising $1,487,927 for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS, comparable to last year’s record $1.63 million, Playbill reported. The 40th edition of the fundraiser filled 63 tables with posters, stage-used props, costumes and vintage Playbills. The Lost Boys table brought in a record $104,376, and the live auction raised a record-breaking $562,300.

“The day was a reminder of what theatre people do best: show up for each other. That generosity stretches far beyond this one remarkable day. In the months ahead, it will translate into meals, medication, healthcare and hope for people who need them most,” Danny Whitman, the organization’s executive director, said in a statement. The event began in 1987, when cast members of the original A Chorus Line set up two tables outside their stage door in Shubert Alley, and its 40 editions have since raised more than $22 million.

Finally, Kansas City lined up for a coffee shop a TikTok review called “demonic”

In September, two girls posted a TikTok review of Oddly Correct Coffee Roasters in Kansas City, Missouri, that has since been deleted. “It was a little scary driving here,” one said. “It felt demonic in there. Everything about it just felt demonic.” The shop sits on Troost Avenue, which has long divided affluent, mostly white neighborhoods to the west from mostly Black, lower-income neighborhoods to the east, TODAY.com reported. “When someone says that Troost is scary, we have an idea of why they’re saying that,” co-owner Mike Schroeder said.

The love came from the other side, too. “Anytime somebody says that Troost Avenue is scary, it probably just means that they’re not used to seeing Black folks walking up and down the sidewalks, taking public transportation,” Kansas City influencer CJ The Alchemist said in a video defending the shop that went viral. Over the following weekend, the shop saw nearly 200% of its usual traffic, Schroeder said, and Jackie Nguyen, owner of the nearby Vietnamese restaurant Cafe Cà Phê, filmed a line stretching down the block. One of the girls has since reached out to apologize.

“We have a lot of people who do like spend their lives in this area and love it and felt a need to stand up and say, ‘This is where I live. This is my home, and it’s not scary,'” Schroeder said.

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