It’s hard not to feel cynical in 2024, as digital alerts about climate change and wars and migrants and mental illness all pump into our brains like water against an unstable dam. Amid this doom and gloom, we ought to acknowledge we do not live in the “the Darkest Timeline,” as joked about by the cult classic NBC sitcom Community.

Nuclear war is a real and present danger, according to Ira Helfand, recipient of the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize.  “This is the danger in which we allow ourselves to live with every day, that we allow...