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.

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.

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 have this very kind of like heterodox idea of what an education is, what underpins identity. I don't think I'm very easily pigeon holed in any of those boxes, so I confront this. I have a staff full of young people who came up in a very different tradition and who feel very fired up about the big identity battles. I listen and I try to navigate them, but I don't find them mapping onto my life in a personal way which is, which is hard.

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 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.

When I first signed up for a Twitter account - I was to say it was in 2007, people are going to think it's some weird self promotional thing or it's going, but in time I was called upon to like try to persuade other foreign correspondents and journalists to get on Twitter and see the usefulness of it which is kind of ironic. I think the journalists who are leading the digital charge at the Times have, all have that background as a foreign correspondent, which I think is not accidental.