Not all Tories are atrocious heartless fiends, I concede. But those who wield hunger as a weapon while claiming their own meals on expenses, are beyond satire.

Food poverty comes in two strands. The first is not having enough money to buy food for yourself and your family. The second is poverty of education.

Food is such a basic need, a fundamental right, and such a simple pleasure.

We have an odd culinary relationship with tinned food. In higher society, rare and supposedly exquisite goods such as tinned baby octopus, foie gras and caviar come in beautifully crafted, artistically designed tins.

Food is a weapon in austerity Britain. Hunger, the threat of and the reality of, is used to coerce and control.

Actually if you were to buy a bag of dried lentils it would cost you a couple of quid. Some people don't have that to spend in the first place. And not everyone wants to eat lentils.

I only got interested in radio once I talked my way into an internship at NPR's headquarters in Washington, D.C. in 1978, never having heard the network on the air.

The TiVo is really an amazing machine. Like everyone who has one, I totally recommend it. Just as everyone who's married will tell you to get married, and everyone who has a baby tells you to have a baby, everyone who owns a TiVo will tell you to get a TiVo, and they'll say things like 'Your life will be completely different.' It's true.

I don't know how to read. I get all my news from Jon Stewart every day.

I didn't have any particular talent for fiction. I took a class in college.

Not owning a car anymore, I feel like I'm barely an American. I miss it. And I barely ever get to listen to the radio in the car, which is the best place for radio.

In general in New York, we all eat like kings. Insane quality, mind-blowing variety, at all price ranges.

I eat the same breakfast and lunch every day, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.

I was a temp secretary for a long time, and I went at it with a passion, and I tried to do a nice job in all my jobs.

Honestly, like, I'm a superfan of the 'New York Times,' but I know nothing about how they put it together, and I really don't care.

I read the newspaper, but I live in my own little bubble.

I'm not a go-in-for-the-kill kind of interviewer. It's a great thing to me, that kind of interviewer, but I'm not it. It doesn't play to my strengths at all. I like to interview people who are interested in telling their story and tell it as truthfully as they can.

When I was in college, I was a semiotics major, which is this hopelessly pretentious body of French literary theory.

I don't go looking for stories with the idea of wrongness in my head, no. But the fact is, a lot of great stories hinge on people being wrong.

It's rare for me to read any fiction. I almost only read nonfiction. I don't believe in guilty pleasures, I only believe in pleasures. People who call reading detective fiction or eating dessert a guilty pleasure make me want to puke.

I didn't watch T.V. from the time I was 18 'til my mid-30s. And then I got a T.V. to watch 'The Sopranos.' I realized, 'Oh, T.V. is really interesting.'

Semiotics is really interested in the questions like, what keeps you watching something, what keeps you - you know, what keeps you listening to a story on the radio? Like, what keeps you turning the pages in a book? What's the pleasure of it that's moving you forward, that's pulling you in and grabbing you and pulling you forward?

I think one of the reasons that I got so good at it, as somebody making radio stories, is that on the radio I can actually - I can understand what's happening in the interview and can make a connection in a way that makes sense.

I just have a harder time, I think, feeling close to people without self consciousness.