The bad news just doesn’t seem to let up. The other day my publisher friend Mariia emailed from Kharkiv in Ukraine. When I visited Kharkiv two years ago, it was poor, corrupt, dominated by a humungous statue of Lenin, and yet green, charming and peaceful. At least wars were over in Europe’s historic bloodlands, I thought then. Now, writes Mariia, refugees and orphans are streaming in from Donetsk and Lugansk down the road. Maimed soldiers fill Kharkiv’s military hospital. Mariia says: “We will have a lost generation. The time of Hemingway and Remarque returns.” Other former Soviet republics watch in terror.

“The summer of hate,” Dutch commentator Bas Heijne calls it. The news is bad indeed. Yet humanity’s longer-term trends are hopeful. Life for the average human keeps getting better.

On the news, the Syrian and Iraqi civil wars are merging, and may soon intersect with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In west Africa, the worst outbreak of the Ebola virus has killed more than 2,400 people, mostly in Liberia. The man who co-discovered Ebola in 1976, Peter Piot, now director of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, told me: “This is getting out of hand. You have some doomsday scenarios.” Imagine what could happen, he says, if one of the many Indians in west Africa caught the virus and carried it to an unhygienic Indian public hospital.