I'm never a fan of the sociopathic kind of reviewing, people who are sort of self-immolating and have social problems or whatever, and let it out in literary-criticism form. I just feel like book reviewing should be respectful and calm and not filled with bile.

Paper is a uniquely beautiful format, more so than the web, I think: you need to invest in the aesthetics.

I am a bike enthusiast; there's a certain amount of romance to bikes. They're both beautiful and utilitarian.

If you think I'm annoying and preachy now, you should have known me in grade school.

Having lost people when they were young, you feel intimately acquainted with mortality, I guess. Though I procrastinate worse than anybody.

I had grown up as a fan of Studs Terkel. In Chicago he sort of looms large and is mentioned often.

I think there's great value to the Associated Press and to Reuters, but if you wanted to generate original content, maybe written by local writers, it just takes a little bit of openness to open your pages up to a wider freelance writer pool, and then you might find new voices and a wider array of voices, and definitely more original content that can't be found anywhere else.