This letter is the introduction to the new issue of Vice magazine, v29n2: THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. To subscribe to four print issues each year, click here.

Yesterday, before I got out of bed, I had seen a gang of Irish teenagers dole out a vicious beating to a foreign-born Black man at a leisure center, a former television star—her beautiful girl-next-door looks lost to years of self-abuse and botched plastic surgery—in the throes of what looked like a nervous breakdown, and a dozen Australian children fall to their deaths from an airborne bouncy castle. It’s hard to rouse yourself from a breakfast like that; it lives with you like a grudge for the rest of the day even if you’re not consciously processing it.

There have always been reasons to feel down on the world. There hasn’t

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