2025 is nearly within the books, and the critiques are in: It sucked.
Over on the subreddit r/decadeology, you’ll be able to take a look at a lengthy, lengthy thread of redditors submitting the reason why 2025 was, within the phrases of the primary submit, “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 mildew. That isn’t 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 here are a number of the finest:
Final August, a child named KJ Muldoon was born with a extreme carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, an ultra-rare genetic dysfunction that forestalls the liver from clearing ammonia. The situation is the results of mutations in a single gene, and it’s successfully a dying 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 one incorrect DNA letter among the many 3 billion in his genome utilizing the gene-editing expertise CRISPR. Researchers at CHOP and College of California-Berkeley’s Progressive Genomics Institute, in addition to different establishments, developed in simply six months a personalised 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 workforce 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 personalised gene remedy.
This story is clearly the very best of reports for KJ and his dad and mom, nevertheless it goes far past them. Greater than 30 million folks within the US alone endure from considered one of 7,000 uncommon genetic ailments — ailments so uncommon that no firm would develop a gene remedy only for them. However KJ’s therapy reveals it’s changing into possible to quickly develop customized remedies with out going by means of years of pricey testing. That’s an infinite present for numerous sufferers too usually 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 usually felt apocalyptic within the feeds, an odd phenomenon flew underneath the radar: Quite a lot of the worst numbers in American life began transferring in the suitable path.
Throughout 42 massive US cities, homicides fell about 17 p.c within the first half of the yr in contrast with 2024, and most different critical violent crimes have been down too; many locations at the moment are 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 charge ticked down barely in 2024, to about 48,800 deaths.
On the roads, motor-vehicle deaths — which spiked throughout the pandemic — have now fallen for a number of years in a row: the federal government now estimates about 39,000 site 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, whilst Individuals drive extra miles.
So why doesn’t it really feel like every thing 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 every thing unhealthy.
3) We’re losing a few pounds and consuming much less
If you happen to wished to inform a narrative about America’s well being within the 2020s, you could possibly do quite a bit 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 because the query was first requested in 1939. Amongst those that do drink, frequency is down, and per-capita alcohol consumption has edged decrease because the Eighties. Teen consuming has fallen even quicker: 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 immediately, with comparable collapses for tenth and eighth graders.
On the similar time, considered one of America’s most cussed well being crises could lastly be bending. After years of regular will increase, Gallup’s Nationwide Well being and Nicely-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 plan or a nationwide love affair with salads; it’s the speedy uptake of GLP-1 medication like Ozempic and Wegovy, which calm starvation alerts 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 suitable path.
4) We’re closing the ozone gap
For teenagers who grew up within the Eighties like me, the large environmental concern 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. In contrast to most environmental threats, it was simply seen, a giant, black blob over Antarctica that appeared as if it will 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 hold complying with the treaty, specialists count on the ozone layer over many 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 averted an additional 0.5–1°C of world warming that might in any other case have been baked in.
The large story is so simple as it’s uncommon in the case of the surroundings: the world handed a binding treaty, caught with it, and really managed to repair the issue.
I’ll allow you to in on slightly secret about Good Information. The surest solution to really feel optimistic in regards to the state of the world is commonly much less about how good the current is than how unhealthy — how terribly, unimaginably unhealthy — many of the previous was. And few years previously have been worse than 536 AD, the yr Science journal as soon as memorably known as “the worst yr to be alive.”
What was so unhealthy about it? Nicely, a fog plunged Europe, the Center East, and even elements 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 instant 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 following 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 assume 2025 was, I can let you know that 536 AD was approach, approach 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 elevate 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 publication. Enroll right here!
