Slate is not a political magazine but a lot of what it does is politics.

I have blocks of time where I'm working intently on something.

My mother - both my mother and father had very successful careers. My mother's an English professor and my father is a scientist and physician. They worked at the same jobs for their entire life, 50 years each.

You're talking to investors - and investors, they look at you and they realize, you know, not every business they invest in are the founders or the people running it going to have every bit of skill - and I think they looked at me and realized, OK, this is a guy who's got a lot - I'm much older than the usual run of people they fund.

Slate is not a political magazine but a lot of what it does is politics.

The process of just being in front of people, having to stand up for your ideas, and ask - and then ask people for money, which is a very hard thing to do.

The Bible is forbidding when you start to read it. The language is odd. The stories start and stop herkily-jerkily. The characters behave in inexplicable ways. It takes a little bit of time to get into the rhythm of the book. I found reading the first 15 chapters of Genesis very very difficult. Once I got past there, I loved reading, and found it very easy. When you get used to the Bible, it becomes thrilling to read (like any great book - I just had exactly the same experience with the Odyssey).