Welcome to the first edition of Good News, the weekly newsletter dedicated to covering the remarkable, optimistic things happening all around us.

Now, I know what you might be thinking: “Good news? In today’s environment? Has the author recently suffered a head injury?”

So let’s state this at the outset: While my brain is currently intact, there is a lot of bad stuff happening. There’s continued conflict in Ukraine, where the war has now lasted for more than 1,100 days, while the tenuous ceasefire in Gaza could be near collapse. Global democracy is apparently in worse shape now than at any time over the past two decades. Thousands of foreign aid projects have been effectively terminated, with catastrophic consequences for millions of the poorest people in the world.

The US just experienced its first measles death in years, as an outbreak spreads through scores of people in Texas amid a decline in vaccination. Jobless claims rose and consumer spending fell as worries about the economy continue to grow. Oh, and climate change is worsening even as clean energy policies are dismantled, while deforestation in the vital South American country of Colombia grew by 35 percent in 2024.

And that’s just a sampling of headlines from the past few days.

So why launch a newsletter dedicated to good news when the news seems worse than it’s ever been? Because even amid the blizzard of bad, good news is happening all around us — we just can’t see it. We’re so stuck in the present that we fail to understand just how much life has improved over the medium and long term.

Take the headlines above. Yes, there is war happening around us, and conflict really has worsened in recent years, as shown by Ukraine and other fronts. But international conflict used to be far more common and orders of magnitude more deadly than it is today. Stories of battles and casualties in one place can cause us to miss more hopeful stories elsewhere: Did you know a decades-old insurgency that has killed tens of thousands of people in Turkey may........

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