🟪 Good news sources

'Darkness cannot drive out darkness,' MLK Jr. told us

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“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

— Martin Luther King Jr.

Good news sources

Martin Luther King Jr.’s defining commitment to pursuing change through non-violence was profoundly optimistic.

If you read an account of his later years, watch a film like Selma or binge-watch the classic PBS series Eyes on the Prize, it’s hard to understand why he remained so optimistic.

In the last months of his life, Dr. King faced political backlash for speaking out against the Vietnam War, fierce criticism from a younger generation of more militant civil rights activists, constant harassment from the FBI, a disastrous march in Memphis that dissolved into violence and looting, and constant premonitions of death.  

And yet, he never lost faith that things would work out: “I may not get there with you,” he declared just one day before his assassination. “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!” 

History has shown that he was right to be optimistic — we may not be all the way to the promised land just yet, but by any reasonable measure, the world is a far better place in the 2020s than it was in the 1960s.   

If it doesn’t always feel that way to you, it’s probably because you follow the news.

Bad news happens fast, grabbing our attention, and good news happens slowly, often imperceptively so — but the arc of history bends toward the good.

So, to really know what’s going on, I think you have to go a little out of your way and seek out sources of good news.

Here are a few of my favorites:

Not Boring: Sign up for Packy McCormick’s Weekly Dose of Optimism and you’ll be among the first to know about thermodynamic semiconductors, asteroid mining and robots that fold laundry — plus some wacky stuff like antigravity research and telepathy.

Humanprogress.org: Dedicated to documenting the “dramatic improvements in human well-being throughout much of the world,” recent Humanprogress headlines include “The North Sea is Bouncing Back” and “Endangered Bonobo Population in Congo Stable” — lots of things that should make mainstream headlines, but won’t.

The Roots of Progress: Start with their techno-humanist manifesto — “material progress leads to human progress” — and then subscribe to follow along as they “establish a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century” and “build a culture of progress.”

The Perplexity app on my phone. Maybe it’s just because it knows what I like, but Perplexity is always pushing interesting and often optimistic stories from technology and science that I wouldn’t otherwise come across, like the discovery of new antimatter particles at CERN or the revelation that plants communicate with each other via bioelectricity (to name just two from last week).

The Pessimists Archive: The best way to worry less about the future might be to see just how unnecessarily people have always worried about the future. If even Albert Einstein was wrongly worried about automation taking all the 1920s, maybe we shouldn’t be so worried about AI taking all the jobs in the 2020s?

Good good good: This website reads like a bizarro newspaper that prints all the news that’s fit to print — but only if it’s good. One headline from last week even managed to pluck a sliver of hope out of the devastation in California: “Los Angeles teen creates website for wildfire victims seeking food, shelter, supplies.” That is the kind of clickbait I need more of.

Reasonable minds can disagree on how much closer we’ve gotten to the promised land since 1968, but we’re definitely further along than the news industry would have you think — and there’s reason to be optimistic that we’re still going in the right direction.

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” Reverend King told us. “Only light can do that.”

Paying more attention to the good news all around us is a way to let the light in.

— Byron Gilliam

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