They're going to keep focusing on which books to ban, and I'm focused on which bridges to build. - Pete Buttigieg

For purpose-driven people, this is the conundrum of client-service work: to perform at your best, you must learn how to care about something because you are hired to do so. For some, this is not a problem at all. A great lawyer or consultant can identify so closely with the client, or so strongly desire to be good at the job, or be so well compensated, that her purposes and interests and those of the client become one. But for others, work can only be meaningful if its fundamental purpose is in things that would matter even if no one would pay you to care about them.

Military service used to be something that we had in common. It’s where people like a young John F Kennedy would meet farm kids and would work side by side with African Americans, maybe for the first time in their lives. At the time [in 2009] it felt like the reverse. It felt like it reinforced the divides.

It now feels like an odd assurance to have had to make, since the attack happened hundreds of miles away, but that day it seemed as if we all had to check on each other for injury, as if anyone we cared about might have been harmed that morning just by being in the same world where this had happened.