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.

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.

We've traditionally thought of media on this traditional left/right spectrum and most media's kind of clustered in the center and I think people have traditionally thought of HuffPost as being this kind of liberal, progressive voice and that's, you know I think they're are good reasons for thinking that. I mean it started after George W. Bush was reelected and was an answer to the Drudge Report.

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.'

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

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.

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.