For us what we're trying to do is find the right balance of creating a space for emotion that leads to a sense of empathy and solidarity rather than a sense of division. In my most grandiose moments I think of HuffPost as a platform that makes solidarity possible, that really thinking about the emotional content of stories is a way to help people who think, or who have been manipulated to think, that they're interests are opposed to one another, that they actually are aligned in a fundamental way and they're actually in the same boat.

I think facts and truth are essential to journalism but you need to reckon with emotion. You have to deal with how people feel, otherwise you miss the story.

My parents were adherents of the Baha'i faith, which is sort of, I can't think of the best way to describe it, but it sort of has the same relationship to Islam that Christianity has to Judaism, and it's a kind of a universalist creed and missionaries aren't paid. You're essentially expected to go out and find a job and do your own thing, and in your spare time spread the faith, and so that was the driving force of us going overseas.

To me the tabloid sensibility, in the best sense of the word, and I think people as like tabloids have receded as a kind of force in media people have started to associate the word "tabloid" with like National Enquirer and stuff like that.

Two of the last four executive editors at the New York Times were Johannesburg bureau chiefs at some point, Bill Keller and Joe Lelyveld. This is a very prestigious post and I was like I don't know 28 years old, which at the Times is very young, I had the temerity to put my hand up for that job. I don't think I slept a single night of those six weeks that I spent in Johannesburg. It was an unbelievable experience, and I think I did okay.

Ability to have that sort of feedback loop with your readers to me felt incredibly powerful.

I think, I just always carry this kind of happy sense of being able to come into any situation and know that I don't exactly fit in, but I can make a place for myself.