Changing the way we talk is not political correctness run amok. It reflects an admirable willingness to acknowledge others who once were barely visible to the dominant culture, and to recognize that something that may seem innocent to you may be painful to others.
So while the name Redskins is only a bit offensive, it’s extremely tacky and dated—like an old aunt who still talks about ‘colored people’ or limps her wrist to suggest someone’s gay.
Any suggestion that Mexicans are fundamentally different from Americans should be taken as racist on its face; America, after all, is a pluralistic society, and Mexico is hardly the alien civilization that some (really, just Samuel Huntington) would suggest.
I feel like there's lot of people who know finance and economics better than I do. There are lots of people who are better storytellers than I am. But the space that I occupy of storytelling about finance and economics is - more people want it than can do it.
Slate is not a political magazine but a lot of what it does is politics.
That economics and finance are often covered as technical subjects, sort of boring subjects, and either you already know a lot about it and you follow it, or you don't know much about it and you don't want to know.
Writing a column, a weekly column for the New York Times, is really tough, and I wasn't prepared for the demands that that involved.
When you're writing for the New York Times someone reading it knows the topic better than you do and knows when you've messed up.
А weekly column is really tough.
Here was a period where I was particularly attacked, and in untrue ways, some people online said some things that were not true about me - but it was very hurtful. And there was like, a period of time that it was very panicky, I was very upset. And my son at the time was, I guess seven, eight months old, and I would wake up early with him and let my wife sleep.
I made one choice, for example, which is I'm just going to confine work to working hours. I'm not going to work on the weekend. I'm not going to be working while I'm with my son in the morning and in the evening.
I want to have enough space to, I don't know, think thoughts. I mean, I just - I don't know that I'm capable of having an exciting, profound thought every week that's worth a column.
I'm so grateful to Hugo Lindgren, Jon Kelly, and the people who gave me the opportunity to write a weekly column. It's an amazing thing to do, and when I started they both said, you know, the problem with columns is they just exist forever.
I sound like an evangelist or something.
People found it unusual to leave a job where you're the boss.
The process of just being in front of people, having to stand up for your ideas, and ask - and then ask people for money, which is a very hard thing to do.
It's much easier to hire really great people like that in New York and in Brooklyn in particular, than it is in Washington.
And my wife is - you know my wife, Hanna Rosin - it's hard, there's no doubt. We have three kids, and it's a pain. I'm away a lot and it's hard on her, but she's been very generous about it and my kids have been very good about it, too. It also allows me when I'm Washington to be more intent with them.
I have blocks of time where I'm working intently on something.
What is Atlas Obscura? So, it was a small digital media company. It's an atlas, it's literally like, an atlas of places, wonderful, unusual places.
The New York Times is the greatest media company around, arguably, and the people at the New York Times know a lot more about making a giant successful media company than I do.
I think I did 97 pitch meetings, and even at the 97th meeting, there were questions I was getting that I hadn't had in the - you know, any of the 96 preceding ones.
I should say, the one thing you run into is, if you're trying to raise a round you have to decide, well, how much money are you trying to raise? And then you have to justify that to your investors, because they want to know why you [are] raising that much? Why aren't you raising either twice as much or half as much?
People who tend to invest are either going to invest in something where you're raising $5 million or they're going to invest in something where you're raising $1 million, but if you're trying to raise $2.5 million it's kind of a weird amount.
My buddy Alex Blumberg learned - he was very public about his learning process, and I know for a fact because we sat next to each other for many years, that he knew nothing about venture capital or seed rounds or "A" rounds or whatever you call them, and he had to really learn, like, pitch by pitch. He just screwed pitches up.
