Jenna Wortham

“Traditional guidebooks have never quite done it for me. Too often, they seem to be aimed at a certain type of comfortable, middle-class traveler.”

“Obama was the first American president to see technology as an engine to improve lives and accelerate society more quickly than any government body could.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Getting a tattoo is arguably one of the most insane decisions a sensible human can make.”

“As we now know, cyberspace did not liberate human society from pre-existing socioeconomic hierarchies and power structures.”

“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.”

“Learning to live with not meeting other people's expectations has been extremely freeing and is the only gift I wish to pass on to any future offspring.”

“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.”

“Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.”

“I'm partial to a Muji recycled-paper sketch book and a Sharpie ultrafine marker.”

“When I was a kid, 'Quantum Leap' was one of my favorite TV shows.”

“There's a lot of paranormal activity in my family. Whether it is more than most other families is hard to say, but we seem to have more than most.”

“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.”

“Familiarize yourself with the resources at hand to combat online bullying, and report offenders as often as you need to. Don't hesitate to report and block.”

“There is no picturesque version of what self-care looks like; it's different for every person who wants to practice it.”

“The types of ideas protected by intellectual-property law typically don't include a clever catchphrase on a Vine or a film idea in a tweet.”

“In theory, the maturation of the Internet should have killed off the desire for zines entirely.”

“'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.”

“Although drag has a long cultural history in America, it remained largely underground till the late 1980s.”