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.

To me, that's the foundational fact of my identity is that I'm a journalist and so it's hard to imagine putting anything else first.

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

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.

Ideology to me is fundamentally is an elite pursuit. I mean most people are just not all that interested in single payer vs. government pay ... they're very interested in you know, 'Wait, are there going to be death panels.' But that's all a creation of this like hothouse media and politics environment. So maybe if humanism is an ideology then it's ideological, but I don't see it as being on the traditional left/right spectrum.

Anything that I'm doing I think I always come at it from an outsider perspective. The first like real front page story that I had for the Times was about how after decades of battles over public restrooms in New York City, effectively chain stores had become the public restroom of choice for New Yorkers, it's sort of a silly little thing, but coming as an outsider, I was like 'Oh this is actually really interesting.'