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Hey readers,

I recently had the chance to sit down with Vox’s great podcast Unexplainable to give my thoughts on all things good news in audio form. I’ll be honest — I have not fully listened to the entire episode, because I cannot stand the Lurch-like tone of my voice on tape. But I’ve been assured by those who have listened — including some people I’m not even related to — that it’s great.

Plus, it’s Unexplainable, the science mystery show that is one of the best podcasts in Vox’s growing audio stable. Give it a listen here, and please subscribe to Unexplainable!

As always, email me at bryan.walsh@vox.com for feedback, questions, and tips on how not to talk so fast. Read on for:

The fall of fur farming! 🦊

Miniature brains! 🧠

Really, really, really long lightning! ⚡️

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Let me introduce you to four of the most dangerous words in politics: “the good old days.”

Humans have a demonstrated tendency to remember the past as better than it actually was. It’s called “nostalgia bias,” and it can lead to us unfairly comparing the conditions of the present to some better imagined past. Memory, as the political scientist Lee Drutman wrote in a smart piece last year, is like a record store: it stocks both the hits and stinkers of the present, but only the hits of the past. “The old days were full of stinkers, too,” he wrote. “It’s just nobody replays the stinkers.”

Nostalgia bias has become a bigger and bigger part of our politics, thanks in part to President Donald Trump’s largely successful ability to leverage a collective longing for a supposedly better past. (After all, it’s called “Make America Great Again,” not “Make America Great.”) But it’s hardly the domain of one party: a 2023 survey from Pew found that nearly 6 in 10 respondents said that life in the US 50 years ago was better for people like them than it is today.

Fifty years ago was the 1970s, and it doesn’t take too much historical research to see how that decade doesn’t match up to our happy memories. (One word: disco.) But what about a more recent, seemingly actually better decade? One that’s suddenly surfing a wave of pop-culture nostalgia? A decade like… the 1990s?

One 2024 survey from CivicScience found that the 1990s were the single decade respondents felt most nostalgic for (while the most recent decade, the 2010s, finished dead last). Nor, to my surprise, is this just the product of aging Gen X-ers pining for their flannel-clad youth — another survey found that over a third of Gen Z-ers were nostalgic for the 1990s, despite the fact most of them had not yet been born then, while 61 percent of millennials felt the same way.

As collective memory goes, these were years of steady economic and productivity growth, of reduced existential threat thanks to the end of the Cold War, and of really, really good movies. Compare that to today’s fears of AI-driven economic disruption, the renewed threat of nuclear conflict, and the general death of the movies.

But look closely, and you’ll realize that our memories of the 1990s are fatally blurred by nostalgia. Here are four reasons why the 1990s weren’t as good as the present day.

I’ve written before about how Americans have this stubborn habit of believing the crime is getting worse even when it’s actually getting better. But holy cow, was America violent and murderous in the 1990s!

In 1991, the highest violent crime rate in US history was recorded, with 758.2 incidents per 100,000 people. And it didn’t get better for a while — 1992 holds the record for the most violent crimes in a single year, while 1993 had the highest number of murders nationally. Compare that to 2024, when the violent crime rate fell to 359.1, the lowest in 20 years and less than half the rate of 1991, while the homicide rate this year may well hit the lowest level ever. And while the 1990s as a decade saw a historic drop in crime, the violent crime rate in 1999 was 524.7 per 100,000 — still well above last year’s level.

At the start of the 1990s, nearly 40 percent of the entire world was in a state of extreme poverty, living on $2.15 or less a day. What that meant in reality was that for almost half the world, life was lived on the edge of grinding subsistence, much as it had been for centuries, with seemingly little chance for change. In China, for instance, some two-thirds of the population was in extreme poverty. The idea the world’s largest nation would ever become rich would have been laughable.

Today, as I’ve written before, that picture has utterly changed. Just 8.5 percent of the world’s now much larger population lives in extreme poverty, which translates to over a billion people escaping near-total destitution. While you might want to go back in time to the 1990s, I can almost guarantee that none of them would.

But it’s not just the world. The 1990s may be remembered by some as one long economic boom in the US, but real GDP produced per person has increased by 40 percent since the end of the ’90s, while real median income has increased by nearly 15 percent. Nostalgia doesn’t take into account compound growth.

The AIDS Quilt on the Washington Mall in 1996

Joyce Naltchayan/AFP via Getty Images

There are countless ways in which health statistics globally have improved since the 1990s — the child mortality rate alone has fallen by 61 percent since 1990 —  but the most striking one to me is HIV.

At the dawn of the 1990s the HIV epidemic looked unbeatable: the US lost 31,196 people to AIDS in 1990, and by 1995 it was the leading killer of Americans aged 25-44. Global AIDS deaths were racing toward the 2-million-a-year mark, and even when the first truly effective multi-drug cocktail debuted in 1996, it reached only a tiny share of patients globally. I remember visiting the AIDS Quilt when it was spread out in full Washington, DC in the fall of 1996, and wondering how much bigger it would get.

Today the picture has flipped. About 30.7 million people — 77 percent of everyone with HIV — receive treatment, and global AIDS deaths have fallen to around 630,000. In 2022 there were fewer than 20,000 AIDS deaths in the US, and many cities are realistically aiming to zero out cases and deaths in the near future. There’s even real hope for an effective vaccine. 

Though it might not seem like it in our highly polarized present moment, a number of important social attitudes have flipped since the Clinton years. When Gallup first asked in 1996, just 27 percent of Americans backed legal same-sex marriage; support now sits at 71 percent, and it has been legal throughout the country since 2015. In 1991, fewer than half of adults approved of Black-white marriages, yet by 2021 that share had rocketed to 94 percent. Together these shifts mark a dramatic expansion of everyday acceptance for LGBTQ people, interracial families, and other forms of diversity.

Opportunity gaps, while far from closed, have narrowed. Women earn about 84 cents for every dollar a man does today, up from roughly 76 cents in 1998. College attainment has surged: Only about 20 percent of adults held a bachelor’s degree in 1990, versus nearly 39 percent of women and 36 percent of men in 2022.

As decades go, the 1990s did have a lot going for them, though as someone who was in their late teens and early twenties during much of them — precisely the ages we’re most nostalgic for — you can’t take my word for it. And our current moment has no shortage of problems, including some that 30 years ago we would have considered dead and buried. But don’t let your inaccurate memories of the past distort your ability to see how far we’ve come.

In fashion circles, fur has gone from status symbol to stigma — and now we have the data to prove it. My Future Perfect colleague Kenny Torrella recently plotted the collapse: in 2014 more than 140 million mink, foxes, chinchillas, and raccoon dogs were raised for their pelts; by 2024 that number had fallen to just 20.5 million, an 85 percent plunge in a single decade. 

Activist pressure forced luxury houses like Gucci and Prada to ditch fur, while 20-plus European nations banned farming outright. Covid-19 outbreaks in mink herds hastened the retreat, and even China’s once-vast industry is shrinking. With Switzerland banning fur imports this year and the EU weighing a bloc-wide prohibition on production, the line on Kenny’s chart will hopefully keep sliding toward zero, providing proof that public sentiment, policy, and markets can align to spare millions of animals.

$2.5 billion

That’s the huge sum the Gates Foundation has pledged through 2030 to jump-start research on women’s health. The money — roughly one-third more than the foundation spent on the field in the past five years — will back more than 40 projects tackling everything from preeclampsia to menopause and endometriosis.

Only about 1 percent of global biomedical R&D targets female-specific conditions beyond cancer, so this infusion is designed to “crowd in” governments and private capital. Five priority areas — obstetric care, maternal nutrition and immunization, gynecological and menstrual health, contraceptive innovation, and STI prevention — could together save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. 

Magnified cardiac cells in a heart suffering from cardiac amyloidosis

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Cardiac amyloidosis — the stealth heart-failure culprit once deemed all but untreatable — finally has a toolkit. New drugs that silence or stabilize the faulty proteins that build up in the heart and cause the condition reduced deaths by 25 to 35 percent in major trials. Two of these therapies have won FDA approval in the past year, turning what was a “get-on-the-transplant-list” diagnosis into a manageable chronic condition. Non-invasive scans now light up the amyloid plaques sometimes seen in the disease, letting doctors spot trouble early and start treatment sooner. 

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