The 2025 stories that prove people still run toward danger

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 of people who donate to others the money they “should” be saving for themselves, who give the time they “should” be spending, who risk the personal safety they “should” be prioritizing. The book’s implicit question hangs in the air: Why do some of us treat helping as a side hobby at best, while others treat it as a life’s work - even when it could cost them their own lives? The 2025 stories that prove people still run toward danger Five strangers who risked everything to save someone else. Bryan Walsh is a senior editorial director at Vox overseeing the climate teams and the Unexplainable and The Gray Area podcasts. He is also the editor of Vox’s Future Perfect section and writes the Good News newsletter. He worked at Time magazine for 15 years as a foreign correspondent in Asia, a climate writer, and an international editor, and he wrote a book on existential risk. The daily news cycle, with its bias toward negativity , seems to have its own implicit question: How bad can people be? It’s an easy story to tell, because outrage quickly spreads across the social media landscape. But, if you pay attention - really pay attention - another story keeps surfacing, stubbornly, in the margins: the stories of people who run toward danger. They don’t workshop it. They don’t calculate odds. They don’t ask if they’re the “right person” to do something. They just move, on instinct, because someone else’s life is suddenly in front of them. These stories deserve at least as much of our attention as the darker ones - not because they’re sentimental, or because they cancel out evil, but because they tell the other half of the truth about what it means to be human. So, I thought the best way to close out 2025 for Good News would be to highlight just a handful of the many extreme altruists who put their lives on the line to save others. Most of them are ordinary people, no different than you or I, who suddenly found themselves thrust into extraordinary circumstances. It’s impossible to read their stories without wondering, “Would I do the same thing in the same moment?” There’s no way to know, but each of us can make the decision, every day, to do what we can to make the lives of those around us a little better. That’s one intention I’ll take into the new year. 1) Ahmed al Ahmed When gunmen opened fire at the “Chanukah by the Sea” event at Bondi Beach on December 14, Ahmed al Ahmed didn’t look for escape; video shows him duck behind a parked car, then sprint at a shooter, wrestle the gun away,...

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