What is happening to us and our precious world? This is the open-ended, but urgent question that many have been asking themselves in 2024, a year of multiple crises, ranging from extinction and climate disasters to continued poverty, inequality, and brutal wars.

In the face of these predicaments we urge all authors to write about people, because people are always thinking and talking about people, and if we still believe in democracy, in the age of mass communication, only people can help us out of the current impasse? Strong community belonging separating “us” from “them” remains a fact and an obstacle, as demonstrated in the US elections of 2024.  Can humans in the next decade be intertwined in this historic aim of coming together? Through kindness? Revolution? Or will a yet-unknown form of solidarity provide a new basis for democracy?