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Mashable | By Chris Taylor on December 15, 2021 | Good Things

Behind the scary headlines, the human race is making a tremendous amount of progress.

Here in the news kitchen, we hear your complaints: This isn’t the 2021 you ordered. This isn’t the 2021 any of us ordered. Personally, and I think I speak for a lot of patrons of this establishment, I would like to send it back and get one with no Delta variant. Oh, and hold the huge dose of vaccine hesitancy, thanks. I’m allergic to coups at the U.S. Capitol; that should have been listed more prominently on the menu. Who put that damp squib of an international climate change conference on top? Combined with the side dish — a California roll on fire — it leaves a pretty bitter taste.

Still, if you scrape those burned edges off the year’s news, a lot of the stuff underneath is actually really good. We don’t hear or don’t think about it, because nothing grabs the attention like a thing gone wrong. A positive story that continues quietly, year on year (the explosive growth of electric vehicles, say, or the collapse of the coal industry), can seem invisible. But trust us, good stuff is cooking, and we’re not just talking medical science miracles (like the first brain implant to make a blind person see or the first animal kidney successfully transplanted into a human). These are breadcrumbs compared to the big, hearty, global trends, ones that could make the 2020s a much more satisfying decade than the one-star reviews suggest.

So here it is, direct from the news kitchen, our scraped-off version of 2021. All the big stuff that we can be justifiably proud of this year, in 21 digestible bites. Starting with one that is right under our noses: