Two things can be true at the same time

I started this newsletter in 2016 to document the world’s hidden stories of progress. The news that never makes headlines. The quiet victories in health and development, the steady expansion of human rights, the technological breakthroughs solving problems we thought were intractable.

I wanted to track what was working and find out who was making it work. I’m really proud of what we’ve achieved – Steven Pinker calls us “by an order of magnitude, the best source for positive news on the internet.”

However, almost a decade into this work, I’ve discovered something troubling: the better the world gets by most objective measures, the harder it becomes to see that progress. It’s as if we’re living in parallel universes; one where billions of lives are steadily improving, and another where everything is perpetually on fire. The machinery of fear has become more sophisticated, the algorithms more addictive, the rage more profitable.

Each day, we wake to news of some fresh new hell. Armed troops in the streets of peaceful cities (again), the latest perversion of justice, rampant grift, economic vandalism, feckless politicians, another venerated institution folding like a cheap tent in a storm. Gaza is a nightmare from which there is no relief, a permanent stain on the world’s conscience, Ukraine stands alone against an implacable invader, and once again, the lobbyists are hard at work sabotaging global efforts to fix the plastic crisis.

I’ve often wondered, like many journalists do, whether telling stories of progress in the midst of all this collapse is a dangerous distraction. But then I remember: realistic optimism isn’t naïve. It’s armour. It helps us face a challenging, sometimes frightening future with resilience.

Researching and writing these stories of progress gives me balance. It’s my own medicine. And over the years, that balance has spread to tens of thousands of you who tell us the same thing – that this newsletter has helped you stay sane, restored your faith in humanity, reminded you that we’re capable of more than just destruction.

Two things can be true at the same time. The same decade that’s given us a pandemic, populism and record temperatures has also produced the greatest ever expansion of global electricity access, record low murder rates in the United States, and the legalisation of same-sex marriage on every continent save one. We are winning the war on cancer, more than half the world’s children now get a high school education, and while climate disasters dominate headlines, renewable energy has grown so fast that global emissions may already have peaked.

Here’s another way of looking at it. In June 2025, while the United States was busy bombing Iran, French Polynesia created the world’s largest marine protected area, Bolivia advanced legislation to ban child marriage, the Global Vaccine Alliance secured enough funding to vaccinate 500 million kids by 2030, Indonesia announced that it had reduced childhood stunting by half, Ireland shut down its last coal plant, the European Union upheld a ban on bottom trawling (inspired by David Attenborough), and England and Wales decriminalised abortion. Guess which story dominated headlines?

When these kinds of victories remain unseen, they cannot reinforce policy, inspire replication, or steel movements for the long work ahead. That’s why Fix The News exists. It’s a rejection of fatalism, a manual for moving from despair and overwhelm to clarity and agency. It helps readers see past the distortion of the daily news cycle and replace reactive doomscrolling with a deeper, clearer sense of what’s working and why.