2025’s shocking excellent news: crime, overdoses, suicides, crashes fell

[ad_1] 2025 is nearly within the books, and the critiques are in: It sucked.

Over on the subreddit r/decadeology, you possibly can take a look at a long, long thread of redditors submitting explanation why 2025 was, within the phrases of the primary publish, “an extended, disappointing yr.” Warfare 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 Start the Fire ” and requested a large-language mannequin to replace the lyrics. I imply, the Economist’s word of the year 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's not the signal of 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 intense aspect. And amid all of the dispiriting slop, 2025 had greater than its share of genuinely optimistic tales and developments. Listed here are among 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) came up with a potential solution : 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 Modern 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 acquired an emergency authorization from the Meals and Drug Administration, KJ acquired his first infusion of the CRISPR remedy. By April he was displaying 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 one of the best of stories for KJ and his mother and father, however it goes far past them. Greater than 30 million folks within the US alone endure 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 exhibits it's turning into possible to quickly develop customized remedies with out going by years of high-priced testing. That’s an infinite reward for numerous sufferers too usually left behind by drug firms, and it exhibits how CRISPR means “we are able to lastly have some say in our genetic options,” within the words of the molecular biologist David Liu .

As for KJ, whereas he'll nonetheless require lifelong monitoring, he’s doing nice. He just took his first steps .

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For a yr that usually felt apocalyptic within the feeds, an odd phenomenon flew beneath the radar: Numerous the worst numbers in American life began transferring in the appropriate route.

Throughout 42 massive US cities, homicides fell about 17 percent within the first half of the yr in contrast with 2024, and most different critical violent crimes had been down too; many locations at the moment are hovering round or beneath their pre-pandemic murder ranges. Drug overdose deaths, which peaked at roughly 110,000 in 2023, dropped to about 80,000 in 2024 — practically a 27 % decline and the sharpest one-year fall the CDC has ever recorded. And after years of grinding upward, the US suicide price 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 show another 8 percent decline within the first half of the yr, whilst People drive extra miles.

So why doesn’t it really feel like the whole lot dangerous 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 the whole lot dangerous.

3) We’re dropping pounds and consuming much less

For those who wished to inform a narrative about America’s well being within the 2020s, you could possibly do lots worse than this: we’re drinking less and, for the primary time in a very long time, we’re a little less heavy .

On the booze aspect, Gallup now finds simply 54 % of People 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 Nineteen Eighties. Teen consuming has fallen even sooner: the share of 12th graders who say they drink has dropped from about 3 in 4 within the late ’90s to roughly 2 in 5 in the present day, with related 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 Effectively-Being Index shows self-reported grownup weight problems falling from about 40 % in 2022 to 37 % in 2025.

The perfect clarification isn’t a miracle food plan or a nationwide love affair with salads; it’s the speedy uptake of GLP-1 medicine like Ozempic and Wegovy, which calm starvation indicators within the mind and assist many sufferers lose 15 to 20 percent of their body 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 appropriate route.

4) We’re closing the ozone gap

For youths who grew up within the Nineteen 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 ambiance that protects life from dangerous UV rays. Not like most environmental threats, it was simply seen, a giant, black blob over Antarctica that appeared as if it could swallow the globe.

But 40 years after the world signed the Montreal Protocol to section out ozone-eating chemical compounds, 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, practically 99 % of banned ozone-depleting substances have already been phased out .

The long-term forecast is even brighter. If international locations maintain complying with the treaty, specialists expect 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 compounds has additionally avoided 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 relation to 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 of secret about Good Information. The surest method to really feel optimistic in regards to the state of the world is usually much less about how good the current is than how dangerous — how terribly, unimaginably dangerous — many of the previous was. And few years previously had been worse than 536 AD, the yr Science journal as soon as memorably called “the worst yr to be alive.”

What was so dangerous about it? Effectively, 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 grow 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 finally killed one-third to one-half of the inhabitants of the japanese Roman Empire.

Scientists now consider the speedy perpetrator 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 raise for a century.

So yeah, nonetheless dangerous you suppose 2025 was, I can inform you that 536 AD was approach, approach worse. However actually, that’s true of practically all of the years of the previous, when people had been poorer , less free , had been more subject to violence , died sooner , and customarily needed to endure lives that had been “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and quick,” in the words of Thomas Hobbes .

So elevate a (non-alcoholic, based mostly on developments) toast to 2025. It may have been a lot, a lot worse.

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