‘Kindness Can Tether Us when We’re Feeling adrift.’ Why I Helped a Stranger Buy Bread.

Watch Pete Buttigieg speak at the 2025 Texas Tribune Festival

The former U.S. secretary of transportation sits down with Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic at 9 a.m. Friday.

‘Kindness can tether us when we’re feeling adrift.’ Why I helped a stranger buy bread.

When he helps a lost stranger find her way, our essayist discovers a central tenet of giving: The giver often gains more than the receiver.

25 Times Kindness Became the Proof We’re Still Human

There’s a kind of silence people fall into after too many goodbyes — a silence that sounds like surrender. That’s usually where kindness finds them. Not with answers or speeches, but with a small gesture that doesn’t need to fix anything — it just says, I see you.Here are 25 stories shared by our readers and people across the internet — proof that kindness still travels quietly between strangers, finding its way into ordinary days.