2025 is already in the books and the reviews are in: It sucked.
On the r/decadeology subreddit, you can check out a very long thread from redditors laying out reasons why 2025 was, in the words of the first post, “a long, disappointing year.” The war in Gaza, the vibes, the chaos in the White House, the growing fears of AI, the downsized scientists, the escalating anti-vaccine fight — it’s like someone took Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” and asked a large language model to update the lyrics. I mean, The Economist’s word of the year for 2025 was “drain.” That is to say, dumped content, largely generated by AI, has spread across the Internet like black mold. That’s not a sign of a good year.
But here at Good News HQ, aka my son’s bedroom in Brooklyn, we like to look on the bright side. And amid all this discouraging decline, 2025 had more than its share of genuinely positive stories and trends. Here are some of the best:
Last August, a baby named KJ Muldoon was born with severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, an ultra-rare genetic disorder that prevents the liver from removing ammonia. The condition is the result of mutations in a single gene and is effectively a death sentence: half of all babies born with the disorder die during infancy.
But KJ’s doctors at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) came up with a possible solution: correct the one incorrect DNA letter among the 3 billion in his genome using CRISPR gene-editing technology. Researchers at CHOP and the Innovative Genomics Institute at the University of California-Berkeley, as well as other institutions, developed in just six months a personalized in vivo base-editing therapy that could enter KJ’s body and correct that fatal genetic error.
In February of this year, after the team received emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, KJ received his first infusion of the CRISPR therapy. In April he showed improvement and in June, after 307 days in the hospital, he was discharged: he was the first person cured with personalized genetic therapy.
This story is obviously the best news for KJ and his parents, but it goes far beyond them. In the United States alone, more than 30 million people suffer from one of 7,000 rare genetic diseases, diseases so rare that no company would develop a gene therapy just for them. But KJ’s treatment demonstrates that it is increasingly feasible to quickly develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive testing. It’s a huge gift for countless patients often left behind by pharmaceutical companies, and shows how CRISPR means that “we can finally have a say in our genetic characteristics,” in the words of molecular biologist David Liu.
As for KJ, although he will continue to need lifelong monitoring, he is doing very well. He barely took his first steps.
2) Bad trends are falling
During a year that often seemed apocalyptic in the news, a strange phenomenon went unnoticed: Many of the worst numbers in American life began to move in the right direction.
In 42 large U.S. cities, homicides fell about 17 percent in the first half of the year compared to 2024, and most other serious violent crimes also declined; many places are now around or below their pre-pandemic homicide levels. Drug overdose deaths, which peaked at about 110,000 in 2023, dropped to about 80,000 in 2024, a decline of nearly 27 percent and the steepest one-year drop the CDC has ever recorded. And after years of rising, the U.S. suicide rate fell slightly in 2024, to about 48,800 deaths.
On the roads, traffic deaths, which increased during the pandemic, have decreased for several consecutive years: the government now estimates around 39,000 traffic deaths in 2024, down from about 41,000 in 2023; Projections for early 2025 show another 8 percent decline in the first half of the year, even as Americans drive more miles.
So why not feel Like everything bad is falling? In part because we are coming down from the brutal highs of the pandemic era: 80,000 overdose deaths and a double-digit decline in homicides are “good news” only in a very specific context. But the hopeful reading is that 2025 is not just a regression to the mean, but the beginning of a long-term decline in everything bad.
3) We are losing weight and drinking less
If you wanted to tell a story about America’s health in the 2020s, you could do a lot worse than this: We drink less and, for the first time in a long time, we weigh a little less.
As for alcohol, Gallup now finds that only 54 percent of Americans say they drink alcohol, the lowest share since the question was first asked in 1939. Among those who drink, frequency has declined and per capita alcohol consumption has declined since the 1980s. Alcohol consumption among teens has declined even faster: The share of 12th graders who say they drink has fallen from about 3 in 4 to late 90s to about 2 in 5 today, with similar declines for 10th and 8th graders.
At the same time, one of America’s most persistent health crises may finally be subsiding. After years of steady increases, Gallup’s National Health and Wellness Index shows self-reported adult obesity falling from about 40 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2025.
The best explanation is not a miracle diet or a national love affair with salads; is the rapid absorption of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy, which calm hunger signals in the brain and help many patients lose 15 to 20 percent of their body weight, with knock-on benefits for diabetes and heart disease.
None of this eliminates obesity or the harms of alcohol overnight. But both curves, for once, point in the right direction.
4) We are closing the ozone layer hole
For kids who grew up in the 1980s like me, the big environmental fear wasn’t climate change: it was the ozone hole. Thanks mainly to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), humans punched a hole in the layer of the atmosphere that protects life from harmful ultraviolet rays. Unlike most environmental threats, it was easily visible: a large black spot over Antarctica that looked as if it would swallow the globe.
However, 40 years after the world signed the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals, the ozone layer is recovering. In 2025, European and American scientists say, the ozone hole in Antarctica will be the smallest since 2019 and the fifth smallest since 1992. Meanwhile, almost 99 percent of banned ozone-depleting substances have already been eliminated.
The long-term outlook is equally brighter. If countries continue to comply with the treaty, experts expect the ozone layer in most of the world to return to 1980 levels around 2040, followed by the Arctic around 2045 and even the notoriously damaged Antarctic ozone hole to recover around 2066. The phase-out of these chemicals has also prevented an additional 0.5 to 1°C of global warming that would otherwise have occurred.
The big story is as simple as it is strange when it comes to the environment: the world passed a binding treaty, followed through, and actually managed to solve the problem.
I’ll tell you a little secret about the Good News. The surest way to feel optimistic about the state of the world is often less about how good the present is than about how bad—how terrible, unimaginably bad—most of the past was. And a few years ago they were worse than the year 536 AD. C., the year that Science magazine once memorably called “the worst year to be alive.”
What was wrong with it? Well, a fog plunged Europe, the Middle East and even parts of Asia into midday darkness for 18 months. Average summer temperatures fell by as much as 2.5 C, beginning what would become the coldest decade in the last 2,300 years. Crops failed in much of the world, leading to widespread famine. Oh, and the stage was set for the Plague of Justinian, an outbreak of bubonic plague that began in Egypt and ultimately killed between a third and half of the Eastern Roman Empire’s population.
Scientists now believe the immediate culprit was a massive volcanic eruption in Iceland in 536 that spread sun-blocking ash across the northern hemisphere. That eruption was accompanied by two more over the next 11 years, which really put the dark on the Middle Ages. The economic stagnation that followed did not disappear for a century.
So, yes, as bad as you think 2025 was, I can tell you that 536 AD was a hell of a lot worse. But in reality, that is true of almost every year in the past, when humans were poorer, less free, more subject to violence, died earlier, and generally had to endure lives that were “solitary, poor, unpleasant, brutish, and short,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes.
So let’s raise a (non-alcoholic, trendy) toast to 2025. It could have been much, much worse.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Register here!