2025’s surprising good news: crime, overdoses, suicides, crashes fell
The year 2025 is almost upon us and the reviews are in: It sucked.
Over on the subreddit r/decadeology you can check out a Long, long thread from Redditors Submitting reasons why 2025 was, as the first post put it, “a long, disappointing year.” War in Gaza, vibecessions, chaos in the White House, growing AI fears, scientist cuts, rising anti-vaxxers – it's as if someone had Billy Joel's “We didn't start the fire” and asked a large language version to update the text, I mean the Economist Word of the year for 2025 it was “slop”. For example, content junk, much of which is AI-generated, has spread like black mold on the Internet. This is not a sign of a good year.
But here at Good News headquarters—that is, my kid's bedroom in Brooklyn—we like to look on the bright side. And for all the discouraging mess, there were more than enough genuinely positive stories and trends in 2025. Here are some of the best:
A baby boy named KJ Muldoon was born last August was born with severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, an extremely rare genetic disorder that prevents the liver from excreting 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 in infancy.
But KJ's doctors at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) I found a possible solution: Correct the single incorrect DNA letter among the 3 billion in its genome using the gene editing technology CRISPR. In just six months, researchers at CHOP and the University of California-Berkeley's Innovative Genomics Institute and other institutions developed a personalized in vivo base-editing therapy that could enter KJ's body and correct that one fatal genetic error.
In February of this year, after the team received emergency use authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, KJ received his first infusion of CRISPR therapy. He showed improvement in April and was discharged in June after 307 days in hospital – the first person ever to be cured with personalized gene therapy.
This story is of course 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 shows that it is becoming possible to quickly develop personalized treatments without having to conduct years of expensive testing. This is a tremendous gift for countless patients who are all too often left behind by pharmaceutical companies, and it shows how CRISPR means “we finally have some say” about our genetic characteristics. Words by molecular biologist David Liu.
As for KJ, while he still will require He is doing great under lifelong monitoring. He has just taken his first steps.
2) The bad trends are declining
For a year that often seemed apocalyptic on feeds, a strange phenomenon remained under the radar: many of the worst numbers in American life began to trend in the right direction.
Murders occurred in 42 major US cities fell by about 17 percent in the first half of the year compared to 2024, and most other serious violent crimes also decreased; Many places are now floating near or below pre-pandemic homicide levels. Drug overdose deaths, which peaked at about 110,000 in 2023, dropped to around 80,000 in 2024 — a decline of nearly 27 percent and the largest single-year decline the CDC has ever recorded. And after years of steady increases, the suicide rate in the U.S. has risen checked off in 2024 slightly to around 48,800 deaths.
On the roads, motor vehicle deaths – which have risen sharply during the pandemic – have now fallen for several years in a row, the government says now estimates about 39,000 traffic deaths in 2024, up from about 41,000 in 2023; Forecasts for early 2025 show a further decline of 8 percent in the first half of the year, even as Americans drive more miles.
So why not? feel Like everything bad will fall? Partly because we are recovering from the brutal highs of the pandemic era — 80,000 overdose deaths and double-digit declines 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 start of a long-term decline in everything bad.
3) We lose weight and drink less
If you wanted to tell a story about America's health in the 2020s, you could do a lot worse: we drink less and for the first time in a long time we are a little less heavy.
As for alcohol, Gallup now finds Only 54 percent of Americans say they drink alcohol at all – the lowest proportion since the question was first asked in 1939. Among those who drink, the frequency has declined, and Alcohol consumption per capita has fallen slightly since the 1980s. Alcohol consumption among teenagers has fallen even faster: the Proportion of twelfth graders The number of people who say they drink alcohol has fallen from about three in four in the late 1990s to about two in five today, with similar declines among 10th and 8th grade students.
At the same time, one of America's most persistent health crises may finally be resolving. After years of steady increases, Gallup's National Health and Well-Being Index shows Self-reported obesity among adults drops from about 40 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2025.
The best explanation isn't a miracle diet or a national love affair with salads; It is the rapid absorption of GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic and Wegovy that calm hunger signals in the brain and help many patients lose 15 to 20 percent of their body weightwith subsequent benefits for diabetes and heart disease.
None of this eliminates obesity or alcohol damage overnight. But for once both curves point in the right direction.
4) We close the ozone hole
For children like me who grew up in the 1980s, the big environmental fear was not climate change, but the hole in the ozone layer. Largely thanks to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), humans have torn a hole in the layer of the atmosphere that protects life from harmful UV rays. Unlike most environmental threats, it was highly visible, a large black spot over Antarctica that looked as if it would swallow the globe.
But 40 years after the world signed the Montreal Protocol to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals, the ozone layer is measurably on the mend. According to European and US scientists, the Antarctic ozone hole in 2025 was the smallest since 2019 fifth smallest since 1992. Almost 99 percent of ozone-depleting substances are now banned have already been abolished.
The long-term prognosis is even better. Experts say whether the countries will continue to adhere to the treaty expect The ozone layer will return to 1980 levels in most parts of the world by around 2040, the Arctic will follow suit by around 2045, and even Antarctica's notoriously damaged ozone hole will heal by around 2066. The phase-out of these chemicals also contributed to this avoided an additional 0.5-1°C of global warming that would otherwise have been baked in.
The big story is as simple as it gets when it comes to the environment: the world adopted a binding treaty, stuck with it, and actually managed to solve the problem.
I'll let you in on a little secret about Good News. The surest way to be optimistic about the state of the world is often less about how good the present is than how bad—how terribly, unimaginably bad—most of the past was. And just a few years ago it was worse than in 536 AD, the year in which Science was once memorably published called “Worst year to live.”
What was so bad about 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 up to 2.5°C, beginning the coldest decade in the last 2,300 years. Crop failures occurred across 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 a third to half of the population of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Scientists now believe the immediate culprit was a huge volcanic eruption in Iceland in 536 that spread sun-blocking ash across the Northern Hemisphere. This outbreak was accompanied by two more over the next 11 years, truly turning the darkness into a dark age. The economic stagnation that followed did not abate for a century.
So yes, as bad as you think the year 2025 was, I can tell you that the year 536 AD was much, much worse. But basically this applies to almost all past years when there were humans poorer, less freewas more exposed to violence, died earlierand generally had to endure a life that was “lonely, poor, evil, brutal and short.” in the words of Thomas Hobbes.
So toast (non-alcoholic, based on trends) to 2025. It could have been much, much worse.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Register here!
