EZRA KLEIN

When you're trying to come up with a good approach to reporting on the bleeding edge of where the conversation's moving, you're just leaving a lot of people who aren't on the bleeding edge of that conversation out.

My career wouldn't exist without blogs, electronic text, hyperlinks, and mass online audiences.

Every newspaper in the country covers stories that other newspapers cover. Every industry is filled with people who are competing to do the best job providing a particular service.

It's not a good idea to conceptualize a static relationship with long-standing policies, like health care.

People set newspapers on fire; they use them for wrapping fish. The Internet does not have that property. What I don't think we've gotten is that you can make things last longer than in print.

The thing to remember about being young is you eventually get old.

When I talk to people about 'KnowMore', it is as an experiment. The biggest thing I'll say there is that we've learned a lot from 'KnowMore'.

The idea of changing and fixing the problem of how news is presented on the Internet has been recognized for a long time.

I think it's weird that the news cedes so much ground to Wikipedia. That isn't true in other informational sectors.

If I'm sitting around exulting over traffic data, I'm an idiot.

When I first came to Washington, what I admired most was that people were just really, really smart with a tremendous amount of intellectual horsepower and the ability to look at an issue and say something fresh.

One of my big beliefs about Washington is that we highly overstate the power of individuals and highly underrate seeing Washington as a system, in general, but, in particular, we highly underrate the power of Congress.

My only advice is to try to get the job that's most like the job you want, rather than the one that's more prestigious. Always try to be the talent.

I don't always have the time I wish I had to understand something I don't understand. So I'm trying to do a little bit less of the quick pieces and a little bit more of the "here's how the Singaporean health care system works" kind of stuff, because to be good at my job, I have to keep learning. The thing that I fear the most is becoming one of those journalists who is still trying to apply the thinking of the decade in which they started three or four decades later.

Even more fundamental than housing to the global financial economy is the idea that the U.S. government is a safe asset.

We're actually just moving one type of deficit to another. But, the problem with this second type of deficit is that you drive on it and then it falls down.

The American political system is not good at trading sacrifice now to prevent crises later.

Maintaining news cycle is the job. It's always been the job. This is just more intense. You find out what the story is, you use the tools you have to get clear on it, you bring the knowledge that you've built up over the past however long. Part of the trick is just having people who know what they're doing. In terms of the pace, yeah, it's exhausting. I feel for all of us in the media, and in the White House and in the country. I mean, this is not a fun time.

Obamas finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They dont even really inspire. They elevate. . . . He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh . . . Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves.

Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that's unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn't 'too soon.' It's much too late.

Everyday sexual practices on college campuses need to be upended, and men need to feel a cold spike of fear when they begin a sexual encounter.

If it's cynical, risky politics that brings a lighted match and a can of gas near the Democratic coalition, it should be named as such, and its consequences understood, and it should become part of the complex calculus we're all building to help us understand these campaigns.

This is a very proud moment for journalism. I think The New York Times and The Washington Post are genuine champions in this moment. The role that they are playing in democracy is the role that you hear about journalism playing in civics classes. Other people are doing great work, but the Times and the Post have really been leaders. The public is watching, and they are hungry. They know something is wrong, there's a lot of anxiety out there. There's a real sense that the mission of journalism is very clear.

I do think that there is a very unclear level of conduct in the Trump administration. That's one reason you're seeing this among so many different secretaries. Again, Trump himself has been bending ethics rules left and right.

The news is challenging right now. One hard thing about it is that often things don't lend themselves to good explanations or we don't have enough information. So we are sometimes in pretty murky waters, as everyone is. But it's an era where people's anxiety about what's going on and need to understand what's happening around them has created a real demand for news coverage that's dedicated to filling that need.