She had no family left -- no husband, no children, no siblings. Her hospital file read simply: 'Unknown.' And yet, when she died in a government ward in India, she was not alone. Mental health volunteer Trupti Pandya was there, holding her hand, still warm. So was a superintendent, a...
In a former synagogue in Los Angeles, more than a hundred strangers gathered to spend an evening learning a choral arrangement of a Miley Cyrus song -- with no audience but themselves. What sounds like an oddly modern premise turns out to touch something very old: the hunger to belong, to resonate,...
For decades, Jon Zehr chased a bacterium he could detect only by its genetic fingerprint -- "a footprint without an animal" -- while Kyoko Hagino, working from the other side of the world with no salary and a daughter who thought beaches existed only for collecting seawater, spent years cultivating...
After his parents broke up, his father moved away, and his grandparents were out of state, 4-year-old Roman Butzlaff felt lonely. So, Roman took things into his own hands -- literally. He began waving at people passing by in front of his home. At first, his neighbor across the street came over,...
Statistics about depression, mental health, and screen time cause concern for young people along with older people’s judgment that “today’s generation doesn’t read or doesn’t care.” Sean Murphy spent six months reading hundreds of poems submitted by young writers age 10 to 21 mostly from the US but...
Writer Mandy Len Catron finally finished a book proposal she began in 2019. A publisher liked it, but was hesitant to proceed because of similar books on the market. Then someone asked, “Do you think this book needs to exist?” She realized it was “started by a person I used to be” before the...
Clarence Chua shows up to a bee rescue with nothing but a bandana and bare hands -- no suit, no gloves, just attention and respect. In six years, this 42-year-old in Singapore has relocated roughly 6 million bees, one nest at a time, moving entire colonies -- queen, workers, larvae and all -- to...
Dr. Cynthia Li had done everything right. She spent a decade rebuilding her health from the inside out after conventional medicine found nothing wrong with her -- no diagnosis, no treatment, just labs that read normal while her body fell apart. She documented every step, wrote the book, and then...
Alyssa Curtis drives through a town in Michigan, US, with a trunk full of diapers and microwaveable mac-and-cheese cups. She restocks the 20 little pantries her nonprofit has quietly planted across the region. The Shame Free Collective is exactly what its name promises: no forms, no judgment, no...
When fire swept through the Santana Indigenous Territory in 2018, the men went for help and the women watched the land burn. From that helplessness, something unexpected grew: a volunteer fire brigade where 25 of 45 trained firefighters are women -- grandmothers, teenagers, educators -- defending...