2025 is nearly within the books, and the critiques are in: It sucked.
Over on the subreddit r/decadeology, you may take a look at a lengthy, lengthy thread of redditors submitting the explanation why 2025 was, within the phrases of the primary publish, “an extended, disappointing yr.” Struggle in Gaza, vibecessions, chaos within the White Home, rising AI fears, scientists slashed, anti-vaccination on the rise — it’s like somebody took Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Begin the Hearth” and requested a large-language mannequin to replace the lyrics. I imply, the Economist’s phrase of the yr for 2025 was “slop.” As in, the content material slop, a lot of it AI-generated, that has unfold throughout the web like black mould. That’s not the signal of a superb yr.
However right here at Good Information HQ — i.e., my child’s bed room in Brooklyn — we like to take a look at the brilliant aspect. And amid all of the dispiriting slop, 2025 had greater than its share of genuinely constructive tales and traits. Listed below are a few of the greatest:
Final August, a child named KJ Muldoon was born with a extreme carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, an ultra-rare genetic dysfunction that stops the liver from clearing ammonia. The situation is the results of mutations in a single gene, and it’s successfully a loss of life sentence: Half of all infants born with the dysfunction die in infancy.
However KJ’s medical doctors on the Kids’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) got here up with a possible resolution: repair the only incorrect DNA letter among the many 3 billion in his genome utilizing the gene-editing know-how CRISPR. Researchers at CHOP and College of California-Berkeley’s Modern Genomics Institute, in addition to different establishments, developed in simply six months a customized in vivo base-editing remedy that would go into KJ’s physique and proper that one, deadly genetic error.
In February of this yr, after the crew obtained an emergency authorization from the Meals and Drug Administration, KJ obtained his first infusion of the CRISPR remedy. By April he was exhibiting enchancment and by June, after 307 days within the hospital, he was discharged — the primary particular person ever healed with a customized gene remedy.
This story is clearly the most effective of stories for KJ and his mother and father, but it surely goes far past them. Greater than 30 million folks within the US alone undergo from considered one of 7,000 uncommon genetic illnesses — illnesses so uncommon that no firm would develop a gene remedy only for them. However KJ’s remedy reveals it’s changing into possible to quickly develop customized therapies with out going by years of pricey testing. That’s an unlimited reward for numerous sufferers too typically left behind by drug firms, and it reveals how CRISPR means “we will lastly have some say in our genetic options,” within the phrases of the molecular biologist David Liu.
As for KJ, whereas he’ll nonetheless require lifelong monitoring, he’s doing nice. He simply took his first steps.
2) The unhealthy traits are falling
For a yr that always felt apocalyptic within the feeds, a wierd phenomenon flew beneath the radar: Numerous the worst numbers in American life began transferring in the best path.
Throughout 42 huge US cities, homicides fell about 17 p.c within the first half of the yr in contrast with 2024, and most different severe violent crimes have been down too; many locations are actually hovering round or under their pre-pandemic murder ranges. Drug overdose deaths, which peaked at roughly 110,000 in 2023, dropped to about 80,000 in 2024 — almost a 27 p.c decline and the sharpest one-year fall the CDC has ever recorded. And after years of grinding upward, the US suicide fee ticked down barely in 2024, to about 48,800 deaths.
On the roads, motor-vehicle deaths — which spiked in the course of the pandemic — have now fallen for a number of years in a row: the federal government now estimates about 39,000 visitors deaths in 2024, down from roughly 41,000 in 2023; early 2025 projections present one other 8 p.c decline within the first half of the yr, at the same time as Individuals drive extra miles.
So why doesn’t it really feel like all the pieces unhealthy is falling? Partly as a result of we’re coming down from brutal pandemic-era highs — 80,000 overdose deaths and double-digit murder declines are “excellent news” solely in a really particular context. However the hopeful learn is that 2025 isn’t only a regression to the imply, however the starting of a long-term decline in all the pieces unhealthy.
3) We’re losing a few pounds and consuming much less
In case you needed to inform a narrative about America’s well being within the 2020s, you would do so much worse than this: we’re consuming much less and, for the primary time in a very long time, we’re rather less heavy.
On the booze aspect, Gallup now finds simply 54 p.c of Individuals say they drink alcohol in any respect — the bottom share for the reason that query was first requested in 1939. Amongst those that do drink, frequency is down, and per-capita alcohol consumption has edged decrease for the reason that Eighties. Teen consuming has fallen even sooner: the share of twelfth graders who say they drink has dropped from about 3 in 4 within the late ’90s to roughly 2 in 5 at the moment, with related collapses for tenth and eighth graders.
On the similar time, considered one of America’s most cussed well being crises might lastly be bending. After years of regular will increase, Gallup’s Nationwide Well being and Properly-Being Index reveals self-reported grownup weight problems falling from about 40 p.c in 2022 to 37 p.c in 2025.
One of the best rationalization isn’t a miracle weight loss program or a nationwide love affair with salads; it’s the fast uptake of GLP-1 medication like Ozempic and Wegovy, which calm starvation indicators within the mind and assist many sufferers lose 15 to twenty p.c of their physique weight, with knock-on advantages for diabetes and coronary heart illness.
None of this eliminates weight problems or alcohol harms in a single day. However each curves, for as soon as, are pointing in the best path.
4) We’re closing the ozone gap
For youths who grew up within the Eighties like me, the large environmental worry wasn’t local weather change — it was the ozone gap. Thanks primarily to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), people tore a gap within the layer of the environment that protects life from dangerous UV rays. Not like most environmental threats, it was simply seen, an enormous, black blob over Antarctica that appeared as if it might swallow the globe.
But 40 years after the world signed the Montreal Protocol to section out ozone-eating chemical substances, the ozone layer is measurably on the mend. In 2025, European and US scientists say, the Antarctic ozone gap was the smallest since 2019 and the fifth smallest since 1992. In the meantime, almost 99 p.c of banned ozone-depleting substances have already been phased out.
The long-term forecast is even brighter. If nations preserve complying with the treaty, specialists anticipate the ozone layer over a lot of the world to return to 1980 ranges by round 2040, with the Arctic following by about 2045 and even the notoriously broken Antarctic ozone gap therapeutic by roughly 2066. Phasing out these chemical substances has additionally prevented an additional 0.5–1°C of world warming that may in any other case have been baked in.
The massive story is so simple as it’s uncommon in terms of the atmosphere: the world handed a binding treaty, caught with it, and truly managed to repair the issue.
I’ll allow you to in on a bit secret about Good Information. The surest solution to really feel optimistic concerning the state of the world is usually much less about how good the current is than how unhealthy — how terribly, unimaginably unhealthy — a lot of the previous was. And few years previously have been worse than 536 AD, the yr Science journal as soon as memorably referred to as “the worst yr to be alive.”
What was so unhealthy about it? Properly, a fog plunged Europe, the Center East, and even components of Asia right into a noontime darkness for 18 months. Common temperatures in the summertime fell by as a lot as 2.5 C, starting what would turn out to be the coldest decade of the previous 2,300 years. Harvests failed throughout a lot of the world, resulting in widespread hunger. Oh, and the scene was set for the Plague of Justinian, an outbreak of bubonic plague that started in Egypt and in the end killed one-third to one-half of the inhabitants of the jap Roman Empire.
Scientists now imagine the fast wrongdoer was an enormous volcanic eruption in Iceland in 536 that unfold sun-blocking ash throughout the Northern Hemisphere. That eruption was accompanied by two extra over the subsequent 11 years, which actually put the darkish in Darkish Ages. The financial stagnation that adopted didn’t elevate for a century.
So yeah, nevertheless unhealthy you suppose 2025 was, I can let you know that 536 AD was means, means worse. However actually, that’s true of almost all of the years of the previous, when people have been poorer, much less free, have been extra topic to violence, died sooner, and customarily needed to endure lives that have been “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and brief,” within the phrases of Thomas Hobbes.
So increase a (non-alcoholic, based mostly on traits) toast to 2025. It might have been a lot, a lot worse.
A model of this story initially appeared within the Good Information e-newsletter. Join right here!
