You have to live among rich liberals to understand what they're saying. You'll never believe what they mean by 'middle class.' They mean themselves.

What I wound up doing, which I think is really journalistically dubious, is changing the order of some of the things I did, so that the things I ended up struggling with the most wind up being two-thirds of the way in.

Early on, even in college, I figured out that it was just more interesting to me to create content than to write about other people. So that makes it more marketable.

I've definitely written people e-mails telling them I've loved their stories, but that seems more like a professional journalist thing to do.

You can get away with stuff in a one-page story that you can't get away with in a book.

I want to be heavily tied to a city that I write for every week, that knows my stuff and I can interact with.

When I get real big volumes of hate mail, it's usually because I wrote something poorly. But it's also because some group told people to e-mail me and those people didn't read the article, they read the post about what I wrote about. And they all e-mail me. And they all come around at the same time.