Journalist

If you take the fashion out of it, clothing has a lot of information - about how we feel about ourselves, how we'd like to feel about ourselves, and what we'd like to be: If you show up to an interview in sweatpants and a T-shirt, I'm going to deal with you in a really different way.

When I was young, I made all of my own clothes.

Having long hair has allowed me to enter orthodox or religiously conservative situations with slightly more ease.

I never thought I would go to Gaza. It's incredibly difficult to get into, and when you get there, it's a war zone. Then they have this beach, and there's this incredible, vibrant beach culture there, which is something that I grew up with in Southern California.

This idea of 'laicite' has been weaponized, in a way, to discriminate against people, and this idea of who gets to be French is really complicated and interesting.

Having long hair has allowed me to enter orthodox or religiously conservative situations with slightly more ease.

There are a lot of people who don't want things like fashion weeks to happen.

In China, because Chinese is a tonal language, it can be kind of hard to follow people's emotional tracks. There was one moment where a woman I was interviewing just sort of burst into tears, and I can usually sort of tell when things are coming on, and in that moment, it was very unexpected.

This idea of 'laicite' has been weaponized, in a way, to discriminate against people, and this idea of who gets to be French is really complicated and interesting.

It's wild, how many places of conflict that have fashion weeks. It's becoming some sort of marker for these countries that says, 'We are in conversation with the rest of the world.'

I ate better in Liberia than I did in Ohio.

We did a play of 'Frog and Toad' at my elementary school. And I'm not sure if this is part of the book or it was something that we made up on our own, but I auditioned to play the black hole, which somehow makes sense to me.