Abby Phillip prefers to lead a life of softness.
She bakes homemade sourdough bread and dreams of attending culinary school. Her favorite dish to prepare is beef short rib à la Martha Stewart. Phillip longs to play the piano again, a hobby she first took up at 5. Now 37, she spends any free time she can grasp away from the swarm of New York City’s bar-crawling social scene.
On one recent March morning, she compared her role managing a rotating panel of liberals and conservatives on her sometimes-combative CNN show to her off-air priorities: raising her 4-year-old daughter, Naomi.
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"One of the things that you learn pretty early on is that if you match their energy with your energy, things just spiral out of control," Phillip told USA TODAY from her New York abode last month. "So sometimes you have to just sort of get people's attention calmly."
