Being an editor it's a complicated job, but the last impression I'd want anybody to have is that it's onerous. It's a joy - a complicated joy, but a joy.

From a personal point of view, I'd like to interview my great-grandparents because I barely knew them, and I know next to nothing about my family beyond 100 years.

There are days when you might enjoy being an editor a little less, due to one crisis or another. It is absolutely vital, to me, in a period of technological evolution and sometimes financial stress that I and my colleagues not only put out a fantastic magazine and Web site and all the rest, but also that we are smart enough about what we are doing.

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.

My deep sense of alarm has to do with Donald Trump's seeming lack of fealty to constitutionalism.

If this day means anything, it means that you are now in the contingent of the responsible. You must be kind, yes, but you must also look beyond your own house. We're depending on you for your efforts and your vision. We are depending on your eye and your imagination to identify what wrongs exist and persist, and on your hands, your backs, your efforts, to right them.

There is no single field of activity, not a single institution, free of the most brutal sort of corruption. Russia has bred a world-class mafia.