“Are you embedded in your social surroundings?” This is the “core” question, says Alex “Sandy” Pentland, head of the Human Dynamics group at MIT Media Lab.

For a long time, Helen Kingston had noticed that a lot of her patients seemed dejected. A general practitioner in Frome, a charming English village two-and-a-half hours southwest of London, she had plenty of patients who were understandably worn down by multiple illnesses, who came in up to 80 times a year and needed more than a doctor could offer in a 10-minute appointment.

British barbers try to prevent male suicide by talking with the men whose hair and beards they cut.

In 2015, Jennifer Nicolaisen was working in consulting and getting by some days on just two hours of sleep. She was a 27-year-old statistician in northern Virginia, basking in what she called “rising star energy”—the glow that came from approval from her boss, her clients, and her peers. It was a thrill, she says.

For Heidi Larson, the founder of the Vaccine Confidence Project, dispelling vaccine hesitancy means building trust — and avoiding the term “anti-vaxxer.”

Toad, a 20-year-old Danish woman living in Copenhagen, has been lonely her whole life. She is autistic, and as a child, did not have any friends. When she moved from the country to the city, not much changed. “They says it’s a phase, but a phase becomes a life,” she says, surrounded by six other young adults in a cozy apartment in Copenhagen—all of whom are working on becoming less lonely.

On a blustery March day five years ago, I locked arms with my mother and walked into a church in Maplewood, New Jersey to bury my brother. Bagpipes played “Amazing Grace.” I remember shivering and worrying: that my dad would slip, my mom would collapse, and that I would botch the eulogy.