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.

I think I did 97 pitch meetings, and even at the 97th meeting, there were questions I was getting that I hadn't had in the - you know, any of the 96 preceding ones.

I'm so grateful to Hugo Lindgren, Jon Kelly, and the people who gave me the opportunity to write a weekly column. It's an amazing thing to do, and when I started they both said, you know, the problem with columns is they just exist forever.

One problem with how we think about the Bible is that people tend to jam it into narrower categories, when in fact it is many things all at once.

Any suggestion that Mexicans are fundamentally different from Americans should be taken as racist on its face; America, after all, is a pluralistic society, and Mexico is hardly the alien civilization that some (really, just Samuel Huntington) would suggest.

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

I'm going to have a project-based life rather than a job-based life.