I think the real sort of decision moment for me was president Donald Trump election night and just realizing that there was something happening in the country and in the world that had a very deep relationship to the nature of the current media landscape and that this opportunity that was in front of me could be a place to try to work on that. To try to fix what was going wrong and, or at least make an attempt.

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.

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

I was educated in a deeply kind of un-politically-correct way. I went to St. John's College which is this kind of Great Books school which is equally popular with hardcore conservatives who want their kids to read the Great White Men canon and sort of free-thinking liberals like my parents.

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.

To me the sort of like, the ethos, if you will, of like tabloid is like Daily News in the 1970s. It's a news organization that thinks of its mission to speak directly to people who are kind of , the people who are sort of the foundation of the American workforce or were at one time. What I love about this conception of the tabloid is that actually everybody read it.

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.