Reasons to be Cheerful

Reasons to be Cheerful is a nonprofit magazine for readers who want relief from doomscrolling without swapping rigor for sugar. Its homepage funnels you into reported stories, topic shelves, themed collections, and a searchable archive, with optional newsletters and reader support.

What is Reasons to be Cheerful?

Recent work arrives with a topic, byline, date, and estimated reading time instead of tumbling into one amorphous positivity feed. Open a story and you get a full reported article, photo credits, outbound evidence links, an author note, and related reading. Ten broad beats run from civic engagement and climate to justice and science, while collections gather reporting around narrower ideas such as water, mental health, electrification, and cooling cities. The cheerfulness comes from responses being tried in the world, not from pretending the problems have wandered off.

What you can do there

• Read reported stories about responses to public problems
• Browse reporting by topic or themed collection
• Search the story archive

Why we picked it

It treats optimism as an editorial constraint instead of a mood board. The coral-reef feature available on the homepage lays out workforce, monitoring, funding, and scale limitations alongside the gains, producing the rare variety of good news that survives contact with details.

How to get the most from it

Start with the latest headline that catches your eye, then use its topic link and related stories to turn one article into a small trail. Collections work better when you want a sustained theme; search is handy for a specific place or issue. Allow five to ten minutes for a full feature.

Good to know

The featured article opened as full text without a membership gate. Optional membership starts at $1 per month, while a $7 tier adds event invitations and giveaways. Bookmarks depend on cookies and may disappear after clearing them or moving to another browser or device.

Who made it, and when?

David Byrne is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is 2019. A documented update was recorded August 18, 2026.