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Good News is a newsletter written by Bryan Walsh, an editorial director at Vox. He oversees the Future Perfect, tech, climate, and world teams, all of which cover stories that are both important and overlooked.

Hey readers,

Happy Saturday and happy first weekend of March Madness, which finally breaks the post-Super Bowl sports drought! (No, I do not recognize regular season NBA or NHL as “sports.”) Read on for:

💦 The return of a very cute seal!

🌿 A herb that may help treat Alzheimer's!

💉 The benefits of giving blood!

But I first wanted to highlight a welcome reversal in one of the most devastating public health trends in America today.

Fewer Americans are dying from drug overdoses

Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

In 2013, the death rate from drug overdoses definitively passed the death rate from motor vehicle accidents, making drugs the leading cause of unintentional injury fatalities. In the years that followed, overdose deaths just kept climbing, jumping 58 percent from 2019 to 2022, as the isolation and disruption of the Covid pandemic accelerated the crisis. In 2022 nearly 108,000 people died from drug overdoses, the vast majority of them from synthetic opioids like fentanyl.

To put that number in perspective, it means that roughly the population of Bend, Oregon, or South Bend, Indiana, was dying from narcotics in a single year. More than a quarter of those deaths came among people younger than 35.

But we may finally have turned the corner on the opioid crisis. Provisional data from the Centers for Disease Control indicates that the US saw a nearly 24 percent drop in overdose deaths for the 12 months ending in September 2024.

Some of this may be due to a return to a pre-Covid normal, but there are also indications that opioid use has been declining for some time, meaning fewer people are putting themselves at risk of overdosing. Policies to make the overdose-reversing drug naloxone more widely available appear to have helped as well.

Even with the apparent sharp decline, 87,000 people are estimated to have died from drug overdoses in that 12-month period — a number that is still far, far too high. But we finally seem to be going in the right direction. That’s reason for hope.

The main thing: Building our way out of zero-sum politics

Sandy Huffaker/Bloomberg via Getty Images

If you’re anything like me — a policy dork who spends too much time on X — you’ve been unable to escape discussion of a new book called Abundance.

Written by the Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and the New York Times’s Ezra Klein (also a co-founder of Vox), Abundance is one of those policy books with one big idea that everyone has to have an opinion on — whether they’ve read it or not.

In Abundance, Thompson and Klein’s big idea is that American politics and life for the past 50-plus years has been warped by an “ideology of scarcity” that has artificially reduced the supply of vital goods like housing and energy through a growing thicket of government restrictions and regulations. They argue for embracing a politics of abundance that encourages building and innovation and unlocks American prosperity, aiming for a future of “more” rather than “less” for everyone.

Thompson and Klein are self-identified liberals, and their book is mainly meant to diagnose what they see has gone wrong with Democratic governance in recent decades, as progressives have consciously adopted policies that aim to put limits on growth. They point to the examples of Democratic cities like San Francisco or New York, where regulations have made it virtually impossible to build new living spaces, putting the cost of housing out of reach for more and more people.

Even on issues that Democrats care deeply about, like climate change, their policies have inadvertently had the effect of slowing progress by making it difficult to build out the vast amount of clean energy needed to reduce carbon emissions without hurting the economy.

The result was that even as technological progress continued, we stopped feeling it and we stopped appreciating it — a consistent theme of this newsletter. Instead, bit by bit, and often with the best intentions, we put countless invisible brakes on development, with the net result that we reduced the supply and raised the price of the goods that we needed for a good life. And once we lost the ability to build physically, we lost the ability to build a better future.

Abundance isn't just for Democrats

Person wearing a mask walking through an area with tons of white flags.

Ben McCanna/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images

Given how much of Abundance focuses on where Democrats went wrong, the book has ignited debate among progressives. If you want to read more about that but don’t want to get lost in endless post threads or three-hour-long podcasts, my Vox colleague Eric Levitz has a great piece on the arguments and why Democrats should heed the message of Abundance.

But it’s a mistake to think of Abundance as a book that has meaning only for readers who vote blue. At its heart is a message that matters for Americans of all political backgrounds: we don’t have to fight endlessly over who gets what piece of a shrinking pie. For far too long we’ve let ourselves be convinced that we have to treat American life as a zero-sum game, but we can change the rules.

We can embrace policies that actively grow that pie — policies that make housing more affordable in the places people want to live, that give us energy to power a high-tech economy without burning up the planet, that bring us better health care at lower costs.

Thompson and Klein recognize that Americans will never agree on everything, that there are issues where there are simply fundamental differences between the right and the left. But they’re right to argue that most Americans want a better life for themselves and their children, and that a politics focused on improving material progress in the areas that matter — housing, education, energy — is one that can appeal to almost everyone.

As Thompson wrote in the Atlantic this week, abundance can “combine the progressive virtue of care for the working class and a traditionally conservative celebration of national greatness.”

If we can do that, we might just be able to break the polarization that has gridlocked progress and turned American politics into a winner-takes-all death match.

I’m sure not everyone who reads Abundance will agree with every page. Diagnosing the mistakes that have held back progress is a lot easier than creating a political movement that can unlock it. But I do believe there is a hunger in this country for a vision of the future that isn’t inherently fearful, that recaptures something of the optimism that was once synonymous with America. That gives me hope at a moment when we desperately need it.

Picture of progress 📷

Getty Images

This cute guy is a Mediterranean monk seal, which, true to its name, is the only seal species found in the Mediterranean Sea. Because fishers have long seen them as competition for octopus, squid and other seafood sources, they have been hunted to near extinction, and just 800 of them are estimated to still survive. But thanks in part to efforts by the Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Monk Seal, which rescues and rehabilitates orphaned and injured seals, their numbers are on the rebound. They’ve been upgraded from critically endangered to vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List.

Good news, charted📈

Our World in Data

This might be the single most important chart you’ll see about our response to climate change. According to our progress-minded friends at the great site Our World in Data, it now takes the world on average just a single day to install a gigawatt of solar photovoltaic power capacity, down from about a year two decades ago. As I noted above, slowing climate change will require building clean energy much faster. Look how far we’ve come — and there’s no reason to stop now.

Difference makers🤩

Diego Mallo for Vox

Most people know John Green from either his young adult novels — like the “you absolutely will cry” The Fault in Our Stars — or from the popular YouTube channel he runs with his brother, Vlogbrothers. But Green is also passionately interested in raising awareness about a disease that kills more people than any other today, and yet is mostly unknown in the US: tuberculosis. This week he spoke to my Good News editor Dylan Scott about his new book Everything Is Tuberculosis, and what ordinary Americans can do to help the millions of people around the world who suffer from this disease. There’s a reason we named this guy to our 2024 Future Perfect 50 list.

The good number 💯

Alissa Everett/Getty Images

3.3 million

That’s a median estimate of the number of lives saved by US foreign aid per year, according to a recent piece by Charles Kenny and Justin Sandefur of the Center for Global Development. The Trump administration’s evisceration of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) has raised questions about just what the billions of dollars the US had been spending on foreign aid was accomplishing. Looking chiefly at health and food aid, Kenny and Sandefur find that millions of people are alive today because of American assistance. That's the good news. The bad news is we now need to find the political will to restore the most vital forms of aid.

Short hits 💥

Photo by Donna Ward/Getty Images

I usually focus on celebrating philanthropic efforts around health and poverty, because that’s where you get the biggest bang for your buck. But I also believe there’s a strong case for supporting non-commercial arts, which is why I was pleased to see a record-breaking $50 million gift from Lynne and Richard Pasculano to support contemporary dance at New York’s Lincoln Center. With cultural venues still struggling to recover from the effects of the pandemic, the gift couldn’t come at a better time.
Speaking of TB, while the disease has long been curable with the right mix of antibiotics, an effective vaccine could drastically reduce the death toll by preventing people infected with latent TB from developing full-blown cases. That’s why it’s such great news that a phase 3 trial of a new TB vaccine is running ahead of schedule. If it works, it could save as many as 8.5 million lives over 25 years.
Carnosic acid is a compound found in herbs like rosemary and sage, one with known anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. That makes it a promising option for medical applications, but it’s too unstable in its pure form. Scientists at the Scripps Institute in California have synthesized a stable derivative of the compound, and new research has shown promising results in mouse models of Alzheimer’s.
Donating blood is usually seen as a purely altruistic act (unless, I suppose, you just really like getting poked with needles). But a new study from researchers at the Francis Crick Institute in London indicates that frequent donations may result in genetic changes in blood stem cells that can prevent cancers like leukemia in the donor. Sometimes good deeds are rewarded.

📲 Did I miss any good news? Share story ideas and feedback to bryan.walsh@vox.com. For additional thoughts, follow me on X and don't forget to check out the latest from Future Perfect.

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