2025 is just about in the books, and the reviews are in: It sucked.

Over at the subreddit r/decadeology, you can check out a long, long thread of redditors submitting reasons why 2025 was, in the words of the first post, “a long, disappointing year.” War in Gaza, vibecessions, chaos in the White House, growing AI fears, scientists slashed, anti-vaccination on the rise — 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 “slop.” As in, the content slop, much of it AI-generated, that has spread across the internet like black mold. That is not the sign of a good year.

But here at Good News HQ — i.e., my kid’s bedroom in Brooklyn — we like to look at the bright side. And amid all the dispiriting slop, 2025 had more than its share of genuinely positive stories and trends. Here are some of the best:

1) The CRISPR baby

Last August, a baby named KJ Muldoon was born with a severe carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, an ultra-rare genetic disorder that prevents the liver from clearing ammonia. The condition is the result of mutations in a single gene, and it is effectively a death sentence: Half of all babies born with the disorder die in infancy.

But KJ’s doctors at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) came up with a potential solution: fix the single incorrect DNA letter among the 3 billion in his genome using the gene-editing technology CRISPR. Researchers at CHOP and University of California-Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute, as well as other institutions, developed in just six months a personalized in vivo base-editing therapy that could go into KJ’s body and correct that one, fatal genetic error.

In February of this year, after the team received an emergency authorization from the Food and Drug Administration, KJ received his first infusion of the CRISPR therapy. By April he was showing improvement and by June, after 307 days in the hospital, he was discharged — the first person ever healed with a personalized gene therapy.

This story is obviously the best of news for KJ and his parents, but it goes far beyond them. More than 30 million people in the US alone 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 it is becoming feasible to rapidly develop personalized treatments without going through years of expensive testing. That’s an enormous gift for countless patients too often left behind by........

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