Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I'm a white girl and not a white girl, identified by other people as black and not black for as long as I can remember - which, in mixed-people speak, means biracial.
It took me years to find a program that kept me in shape: Gyms felt intimidating, and women's magazines seemed tailored for toning the bodies of already trim white women.
The more films and TV shows I spoil for myself, the more I am convinced that truly interesting stories can't be ruined - the plot thickens with the viewing like a rich sauce.
TV shows and movies are a rare form of atemporality, and in an ever-changing, always-on world, spoilers feel irrefutable - sheer access to them gives the illusion of control.
Wellness, I came to realize, will not happen by accident. It must be a daily practice, especially for those of us who are more susceptible to the oppressiveness of the world.
When people talk about how the Internet has changed the way we travel, they typically lament the way our compulsion to document removes us, somehow, from the actual experience.
People in tech love to see their work as embodying the 'hacker ethos': a desire to break systems down in order to change them. But this pride can often be conveyed rather clumsily.
The speed with which modern society has adapted to accommodate the world's vast spectrum of gender and sexual identities may be the most important cultural metamorphosis of our time.
It's becoming much more common to see yoga studios offer classes aimed exclusively at people of color who are searching for ways to cope with racism and fears around police brutality.
The radical power of 'queer' always came from its inclusivity. But that inclusivity offers a false promise of equality that does not translate to the lived reality of most queer people.
Perhaps all of us have come to rely too deeply on machinery and software to be our allies without wondering about the cost: the way technology doesn't fix problems without creating new ones.
If anything, Twitter helps me read about perspectives outside of mainstream media and learn about new authors, artists, and ideas that I don't always get exposed to in my regular media diet.
Obama routinely pushed policy that pleased the tech-savvy, including his successful effort to keep broadband suppliers from giving preferential treatment to bigger web companies over individuals.
As a lonely teenager growing up in Virginia, I fed off any pop culture that could show me different ways of being from what I saw on 'The Cosby Show' reruns or read about in an Ann M. Martin book.
Generally speaking, the business of music streaming is treacherous at best: Consumers don't seem to want to pay big money for access to digital music services, so companies must keep the fees low.
Best-friend tattoos require so much prep work, which adds to their legitimacy. First, a friendship must be deep enough to warrant the rite; then the perfect symbol must be found to forge the bond.
When I visited my family in Virginia, I tracked down my seventh-grade best friend and sat in TGI Fridays near a mall for hours, laughing while her daughter took insane-looking selfies on my phone.
For many of us, our smartphones have become extensions of our brains - we outsource essential cognitive functions, like memory, to them, which means they soak up much more information than we realize.
The ancients often believed a celestial event like an eclipse to be a bad omen, that the sun or the moon vanishing from the sky was a harbinger of disaster, a sign of devastation or destruction to come.
We may have a tacit understanding of how our solar system works, but watching the sun disappear behind the moon reminds us of the vastness of space and the enduring mysteries of the universe we inhabit.
The rise of the social web promised a new era of personalization for globe-trotting. But like many things born online, as popularity of the new tools increased, efficiency and usefulness began to decrease.
Drag has been featured in popular culture for decades. Movies like 'Kinky Boots,' 'Tootsie,' 'The Birdcage' - even 'Mrs. Doubtfire' - have showcased men, some gay, some not, who dress and perform as women.
In America, mixed-race identity tends to invite both curiosity and suspicion, largely because few have found a way to interrogate it without centering whiteness as the scale by which to evaluate blackness.
The video-sharing app Vine was the first place I got a glimpse of cultures beyond my own, including those of the Middle East. I was able to see how some women there wanted us to see them: prospering, aware.
Artists' obsessions with technology are not new, but in the late aughts, the work tended to focus on the possibility of the medium, treating technology like a new tool rather than a sociopolitical framework.
As Twitter allows you to curate who shows up in your stream - you only see the people you follow or seek out, and those they interact with - users can create whatever world of people they want to be a part of.
Our contemporary analogues to the personal notebook now live on the web - communal, crowdsourced, and shared online in real time. Some of the most interesting and vital work I come across exists only in pixels.
For all teenagers, the Internet offers a periscope to the outside world, but it's particularly important for students who are unable to find themselves represented and understood in their immediate surroundings.
SoundCloud took a community-first approach to building its business, prioritizing finding artists to post on its service over making deals with music labels to license their music, the approach taken by Spotify.
'Drag Race' has become a staple of modern television for the way it skewers expectations and attitudes about gender, much as a show like 'black-ish' works to challenge stereotypes about black families in America.
I've long been interested in how technology mediates desire and the way that our phones, an extension of ourselves, foster intimate interactions that feel so personal and deep, despite being relayed through a machine.
When 'Drag Race' first began, it seemed like a fun window into an underground culture, but over the nine years it has aired, the show has evolved to reflect America's changing relationship to queer rights and acceptance.
Spotify, Tidal, and even YouTube, to a degree, are vast and rich troves of music, but they primarily function as search engines organized by algorithms. You typically have to know what you're looking for in order to find it.
Most times, at the movies, my stress levels are ratcheted up so high that I can barely sit through the full production without excusing myself, clutching people next to me or crawling out of my seat, incapacitated by the unknown.
Online, there is an irresistible social currency to being a user who has thousands of followers, who starts memes, who comes up with an idea that is turned into a movie. But I wonder how comfortable we should be with this arrangement.
Established technology companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have expanded their reach and influence throughout the world. And while many countries have pushed back against that spread, our government has essentially left them alone.
The Internet has become the go-to place to toss out ideas in the hope that they could lead to a job, but it has also become the place where people go to find the best ideas, creating a lopsided dynamic that tends to benefit people in power.
There is much about the shared terrain of being a black person in the United States that is not seen on small or silver screens or in museums or best-selling books, and much of what gets ignored in the mainstream thrives, and is celebrated, on Twitter.
Thinking about Amazon's restraints - the company has never tried to introduce a social network or an email service, for example - you can understand something about the future Amazon seems to envision: A time when no screen is needed at all, just your voice.
Falling head over heels in love with women was a habit I thought I'd thoroughly grown out of in middle school, when a group of about five girls and I color-coordinated our outfits and spent weekends and even some weeknights sprawled out in each others bedrooms.
The most moving parts of 'Real American' come when Lythcott-Haims stares unflinchingly at her own self-loathing, writing about the racist encounters of her childhood that convinced her from a young age that there was something inherently wrong with being black.
I've endured humiliating experiences trying to get a cab in the various cities I've visited and lived in. Available taxis - as indicated by their roof lights - locked their doors with embarrassingly loud clicks as I approached. Or they've just ignored my hail altogether.
We are being conditioned, as a population, to never wait, to never delay our gratification, to accept thoughtless, constant consumption as the new norm. But how we think about consumption and willpower carry enormous implications for the environment and the culture of society as a whole.
The web's earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the Internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it.
The fact that I live in New York, a city that thrives on accessibility, might explain why I was slow to grasp the appeal of Alexa. Here we have bodegas on every corner, most open 24 hours, in case you need to pick up a roll of toilet paper or a bottle of hot sauce in the middle of the night.
Over the years, I've come to realize that sometimes a ghost isn't always a ghost. Sometimes, telling a ghost story is a way to talk about something else present in the air, taking up space beside you. It can also be a manifestation of intuition, or something you've known in your bones but haven't yet been able to accept.
Once, at Thanksgiving, a neighbor wandered in while my cousin Lisa worked on a turkey, shearing meat off its frame and sliding the steaming slices onto a big flowered plate. 'Hey, that's the man's job,' she yelped, in between slurps of her Big Gulp. No one even paused to acknowledge the comment; everyone just laughed and laughed.
It wasn't always easy - getting dumped by my female friends for their newfound boyfriends, husbands, girlfriends stung; I felt like a jilted lover, heartbroken and wondering what I'd done wrong. But it was also easier to forgive them, to accept what time and energy they were willing to offer, even if it was less than what I wanted.
The celebrated film critic Pauline Kael once wrote that movies function as escape pods, portals to parallel universes that can be radically different from emotional norms and societal conditioning of our own. What she meant was they parceled out freedom, allowing viewers to lose their selves in an effort to find greater connection to the self.