The media does not give you an accurate picture of the world. This isn’t to say that we’re not reporting the truth or that we’re making facts up. Rather, our profession has a natural tendency to accentuate the negative because the negative is usually what we mean when we think of the news.
Reports of a strange new “disease X” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is “news”; the fact that about 2.2 billion cases and 12.7 million deaths from malaria have been averted since 2000 isn’t. Estimates that 2024 will be the warmest year on record get a lot of attention; the chart-busting increase in renewable energy, less so. One-off violent crimes make the news; longer-term trends showing declines in violent crime overall, not so much.
2024 was far from perfect. There was continued war in Gaza and Sudan, new war in Lebanon, just more war, period. Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office brings with it uncertainty and real danger, not least to public health through his nominated health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his vaccine-questioning beliefs — just in time for a possible bird flu pandemic. And it may just be possible that humanity is knocking on the door of artificial general intelligence — which could be very good or very, very bad.
But there was genuine progress throughout the year, often beneath the headlines, in everything from animal welfare to technology to climate policy to geopolitics. Here are nine optimistic stories from 2024 that we hope will lay the groundwork for a better 2025.
Our World in Data’s Saloni Dattani is one of my favorite writers — which is why we put her on the Future Perfect 50 list in 2022. Few experts are better able to use data to help readers understand when progress in medicine and public health is actually being made, over both the long term and the short.
For an end-of-year post on her Substack, Dattani picked five notable medical breakthroughs in 2024. The one that stood out to me was the approval of Xanomeline-trospium, or Cobenfy, the first new schizophrenia drug to hit the market in decades.
Schizophrenia is a horrifying mental disease that afflicts more than 3.5 million Americans. While drugs do exist and the condition can be managed with treatment and support, disproportionate rates of people with schizophrenia experience homelessness and fall victim to suicide. They die 15 to 20 years earlier on average than the rest of the population. And despite decades of research, we’ve largely failed to find better, more effective treatments.
Cobenfy offers hope, however. It targets different receptors in the brain than existing treatments, and it seems to effectively attack symptoms while reducing debilitating side effects. That can make the difference between life and death.
It’s been nearly two decades since then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested that drivers going into Manhattan — home to some of the most congested streets in all of America — should pay a charge. That plan was finally set to go into action this summer, when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pulled a sudden about-face. The stated reason was that the $15 charge for most cars would hurt Manhattan’s economic recovery and put an undue burden on suburban and outer-borough drivers. The real reason was that Democrats feared that suburban voters would punish them in November.
Well … that still did kind of happen. But a little more than a week after the election, Hochul announced that she would bring back congestion pricing, albeit with a 40 percent cut in the toll, charging most passenger cars $9 to cross into the most crowded parts of Manhattan.
That was disappointing to many transit and environmental advocates, and the money won’t be enough to fix the New York subway’s massive fiscal deficit. So why am I counting this as a good thing for 2024? Because despite all the political shenanigans, congestion charging, a crucial policy for the climate, is (almost certainly) finally here, for the first time in the US. That was not an easy political lift, and my hope is that when we all realize the benefits of congestion pricing, maybe it will open the door to do it elsewhere.
Americans eat a lot of protein, considerably more than they need (for most people) and often more than dietary guidelines recommend. That’s largely because we eat a lot of animal meat. All that chicken and beef and turkey and pork has real health consequences, but it also contributes to America’s environmentally destructive and inhumane factory farming system.
Of course, protein is very important, especially for those actively building strength and for the elderly. If only there were a way to get protein without consuming animals. Hmm …
Oh right, there is. It’s called beans and legumes. As former Future Perfect fellow Julieta Cardenas wrote last year, “[B]eans are high in protein, efficient to grow, and can even improve soil health.” They’re cheap and they’re tasty if you know how to cook them, and if you’re the kind of person worried about processed foods, they’re largely unprocessed. How can we get protein without breaking the bank or hurting the environment or animals? Beans is how.
So I’m counting the news that beans and legumes got a starring role in the report of the 2025 US Dietary Advisory Committee, which advises the creation of the federal dietary guidelines, as a major piece of good news. Eat more beans. Please.
As my colleague Kelsey Piper wrote recently, it’s been a wild year for AI. From corporate shenanigans to models that can reason to ongoing copyright disputes, 2024 felt like the year when AI got real. Which, given how transformative and disruptive AI is proving to be, is enough to make me more than a little worried. Will AI steal our jobs? Our votes? Our lives? It’s all potentially on the table.
Amid the existential fear, we shouldn’t lose sight of the tremendous good that AI, properly harnessed, can bring about. This year, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went in part to Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper for their work in creating AlphaFold 2, a machine-learning protein-structure predictor.
Proteins are the literal building blocks of nature, and being able to predict their three-dimensional structure is incredibly important to using them to design drugs or other materials. Before AlphaFold came around, it could take months or even years of lab experiments to identify the structure of a protein from its string of amino acids. AlphaFold 2 cut that time considerably, which promises to speed up the process of developing new medicines.
As I once wrote, AlphaFold might be the best example of AI for good. We can only hope we’ll see more such examples in the future.
The first piece I wrote this year was about how 2024 would be a record-breaking year of global elections. More than 60 countries representing roughly half the world’s population were set to go to the polls in 2024, more than any year in the past. India, Indonesia, the UK, Taiwan, and, of course, the US all held major elections. As many people put it, democracy was on the ballot in 2024.
Beyond concerns about how the elections themselves would play out and whether the forces of far-right populism would continue to seize power, there were more existential questions about the elections themselves. Above all else: At a moment when AI increasingly had the ability to turbocharge deepfakes and other forms of trust-eroding propaganda, could these elections actually be fought fairly?
For the most part, the answer was yes. While there were examples of mis- and disinformation, some of it aided by AI, on the whole elections avoided the worst fears of AI deepfakes. As one piece put it, it was the “apocalypse that wasn’t.”
How you feel about 2024’s elections will largely depend on how you feel about the results. But for the most part, even with the growth of AI tools, those results could be trusted. Which might be the best we can hope for now.
Malaria has been killing human beings for thousands of years, if not far longer. Its most famous victims are believed to include figures like Alexander the Great, Oliver Cromwell, and the poet Dante Alighieri. Today, though, we know the names of very few malaria victims. That’s not because the disease has been eradicated — nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023 alone — but because its victims are now almost entirely very poor people living in some of the very poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
But 2024 brought us several steps closer to doing in those poor countries what the rich world has already managed: ending malaria’s death toll. In January, Cameroon became the first country to start routine vaccinations against malaria, the first fruits of a multi-decade effort to create effective vaccines against the mass killer. In May, the Central African Republic became the first country to receive doses of an even more effective vaccine called R21. Altogether, vaccines reached children in 17 countries where the disease is endemic in 2024, with more to come.
This might be the single best piece of news all year. And if you’d like to play a part, you can even volunteer in a challenge trial for new malaria vaccines and treatments. If Future Perfect’s Dylan Matthews can do it, you can too.
It sounds like an honest-to-goodness miracle: children born with hereditary deafness, given the ability to hear. But that’s what happened to five children this year. Part of a study at Mass Eye and Ear, a specialty hospital in Boston, the children were born deaf because of mutations in the OTOF gene, which fails to produce a protein necessary for the transmission of sound signals from the ear to the brain. Fix the mutation, and perhaps hearing could be restored.
That’s precisely what researchers at the hospital did. In a study, a restored version of the OTOF gene was introduced to the children via an inactive virus, a process known as gene therapy. For five out of the six children in the study, hearing was restored to the point where they were able to engage in oral conversation. It was the first such example of using gene therapy to treat this form of deafness, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.
Indonesia often gets overlooked, but it shouldn’t. With 277 million people, it’s the fourth most populous country, and its islands, forests, and coral reefs make it one of the most important biodiversity hot spots in the world. It is also, quietly, one of the brightest stories in global development. Thirty years ago, it was in the grip of the dictator Suharto, and 25 years ago, it was struggling under the toll of the Asian financial crisis. Twenty years ago, 170,000 Indonesians died in the 2004 tsunami. Yet today it is vibrant and democratic — for the most part.
This summer marked another step forward for what is also the world’s largest Muslim country. Poverty fell to a record low of 9.5 percent. It’s the kind of fact that goes largely unreported in the global news — I had to search to find it. But for the people in Indonesia who experienced this change, very little could be more important.
Now, I’ll admit, this might only appear to be a “good thing” for a very specific part of the country that happens to root for a very specific team, so I suppose this qualifies more as an actually good thing for me. What can I say? Editorial prerogative and all that. But unless you’re a New York Giants fan, there can only be joy found in watching Barkley do things like this while aiming to set the single-season rushing record:
When your running back appears to operate according to the physics of the Matrix movies, you know it’s a good year. Here’s to a happy 2025.
