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.

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.

Ideology to me is fundamentally is an elite pursuit. I mean most people are just not all that interested in single payer vs. government pay ... they're very interested in you know, 'Wait, are there going to be death panels.' But that's all a creation of this like hothouse media and politics environment. So maybe if humanism is an ideology then it's ideological, but I don't see it as being on the traditional left/right spectrum.

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 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.

Ability to have that sort of feedback loop with your readers to me felt incredibly powerful.

I think I'm this sort of perpetual outsider, I grew up most of my life in countries that were neither where I was born nor where either of my parents were from. I was part of a weird religion that nobody had heard of.