I don't eat or wear animals, but I never tell people not to - that's just my view
Vision is an important part of being a good editor, but so is teamwork and grace.
Broadly speaking, in the past few years, we've more than doubled the editorial staff [in Mother Jones], as part of ramping up daily operations that have resulted in huge gains in audience, a slew of awards, new multimedia endeavors, and of course scoops like the 47 percent.
We also had a beautiful feature where the writer used the story of two mentally ill relatives, one of whom killed his dad, to explore the history of how we deinstitutionalized the mentally ill, only to re-institutionalize them - but in jails and prisons. There's much more to come.
We made an amazing video about Newtown's struggle to figure out what to do with all the letters and art sent to the town.
We've investigated the gun lobby and its political donations and how it spread the Stand Your Ground laws from Florida.
We do a lot of "capital I" important stories, but one I'd highlight is the work we've done on guns, not only for the acclaim it's gotten but also because it showcases all the different kinds formats we use. So we compiled a database of all the variables of all the mass shootings in America - work the government doesn't do, thanks to the NRA - which allowed us to surface patterns and make data visualizations of it.
I got into Kiss before I got into anybody. The first thing I heard was Detroit Rock City. I heard it in the school library, where I lived.
Other nights. . . I visualize to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish the race.
You can't tell a millionaire's son from a billionaire's.
When you're kind of the ugly stepsister, you just go to the prom with whoever asks you.