Jenna Wortham

“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.”

“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.”

“I experimented with every kind of class possible - yoga, spin, Pilates, rowing - but it was all haphazard, cobbled together by trial and error.”

“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.”

“In many ways, Obama is America's first truly digital president. His 2008 campaign relied heavily on social media to lift him out of obscurity.”

“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.”

“Many of the short videos on Vine feel as though they belong to an ever-evolving, completely new genre of modern folk art.”

“Oceans of emotion can be transmitted through a text message, an emoji sequence, and a winking semicolon, but humans are hardwired to respond to visuals.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I like to dim the lights and talk about the ghosts I've known and invite other people to tell me their stories.”

“As digital culture becomes more tied to the success of the platforms where it flourishes, there is always a risk of it disappearing forever.”

“Artists have long urged cultural introspection by creating work that forces awareness of our current political and economic landscape.”

“The future will bring new possibilities and ideas - and new terms for them.”

“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.”

“'Drag Race' has taught me a lot about how to form community, to take myself less seriously and lose some ego.”

“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.”

“In person, RuPaul is warm, funny, personable - someone who thoroughly enjoys life.”

“Our phones don't just keep us in touch with the world; they're also diaries, confessional booths, repositories for our deepest secrets.”