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 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........

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