My father was very much a child of the counterculture movement and was drawn to the idea of alleviating poverty in the developing world, helping farmers diversify their crops and stuff like that.

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.

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.

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 have a perhaps naive point of view informed by my own kind of snowflake-in-the-unique-sense rather than the political sense, personal story. I mean I feel like my experiences are so hard to map onto any kind of generalized identity. For example, I'm a black person, but I come from a very particular black experience which is not unlike the experience of the Barack Obama. I have an African mother and a white father and I feel like I have a different experience of being a black person as a result of that identity than someone who is from the descendants of slaves.

I think everybody's talking about like facts and truth and you know like that 'We're here to fact check' and all of that, that's the base material of journalism. You cannot have journalism without facts and truth. But if facts and truth were what actually you know sort of moved people's lives and moved their decision-making like the election would have had a different outcome.