I think I'm this sort of perpetual outsider, I grew up most of my life in countries that were neither where I was born nor where either of my parents were from. I was part of a weird religion that nobody had heard of.

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.

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.'

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.

I've always been a sort of curious and restless person. I've always wrestled with ambition.

To me we're living in this very profoundly non-idealogical time where the real divide is between people who have power and people who either don't have power or feel that they don't have power.

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.