I try to see what that person is thinking or feeling about that particular day. I just get more of a sense of what that person's like and hopefully it's more interesting than a normal conversation.

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

I've gotten thicker skin mostly from being older. You just stop caring quite as much about everything.

I think the local food movement has been taken to idiotic extremes. And so I wrote about that and people got pissed.

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.

As journalism dies, I kind of feel like I want some skills besides writing. I'd like to be able to write movies or host TV shows or whatever. Things that I might actually not inherently like quite as much, but are interesting and fun things to do. A good backup plan.

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