The 2025 stories that prove people still run toward danger

A man passes a mural by Jarrod Grech of Ahmed al Ahmed, the hero who was filmed tackling and disarming one of the attackers in the Bondi Beach mass shooting, in a Melbourne laneway on December 22, 2025. | William West/AFP via Getty Images

One of my favorite books is Larissa MacFarquhar’s Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help. The book is, in part, a study of people who take altruism so seriously it starts to look almost alien to the rest of us — the kind...