I have no regrets about launching Salon. For the life of me, I can't imagine doing anything else.

I think there is a difference between Slate and Salon. I think we both serve important functions on the Internet. As more and more Websites disappear, I'm thankful Slate is still around because it makes things less lonely.

The entire American media apparatus bought into the drug war - which is an enormously damaging and costly undertaking for this country - and there wasn't enough critical reporting about it and that's why it's gotten out of hand.

I got kicked out of high school, so I couldn't get into very many colleges.

A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.

Most magazines have become wallpaper, they're all the same, all the same celebrities. It's really an abysmal time in American journalism right now. But occasionally one story or two will pop out.

The only school that let me in was U.C. Santa Cruz, which is where I went. They didn't have a journalism program, so I took sociology, which is the closest thing to journalism.