India's notoriously difficult. It's visa routine is notoriously difficult to get a residency permit and all that stuff, so that threw up all kinds of complicated barriers for us. I remember once having to go meet with the foreign ministry official and say 'You know look I have a real problem here. Is this person really important to you?' And I just thought 'My God.' You know my wife and I have been together since college. You know it's 20 years.
Lydia PolgreenI think all of us in the pursuit of more perfect version of the truth and the story need to reckon with what we bring to the story, and I think that I'm confronting that in a very real way everyday. I'm extremely proud of who I am and it's nice to see it celebrated, but if someone were to ask me to list in order the biography, you know journalist comes first.
Lydia PolgreenI don't even know what being left wing means anymore. I feel that the left/right spectrum has been so fundamentally scrambled primarily by the politics around globalization - and you saw it in Brexit, you saw it in the French election, you see it in our election, it's happening everywhere.
Lydia PolgreenFor 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.
Lydia PolgreenTwo 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.
Lydia Polgreen