Jenna Wortham

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.

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.

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.

The argument has been made that smart women on screen are already enough of a minority to make up for the lack of women of color. Nope. Not good enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

The first ghost story I ever heard was from my mother.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

For all its power as a protest medium, black Twitter serves a great many users as a virtual place to just hang out.

Twitter, it can be said, completely changed the way activism is done, who can participate, and even how we define it.

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.

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

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.

For many years, taking care of myself consisted of showering and showing up to work on time. Sleeping and eating were inconveniences at best.

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 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.

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

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.

I'm not ashamed to admit that for many years, most of my fitness information came from a VHS series by MTV called ''The Grind Workout.''

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 American understanding of China is filtered through years of politics; we rarely see the culture on its own terms.

Nonviolent, visual protests have a long history of forming images that can quickly go viral and set a powerful tone for a moment.

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

'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.

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.

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.

I came to 'RuPaul's Drag Race' late: I didn't get into the show until its fourth or fifth season.

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

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

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.

Matching tattoos don't ensure the longevity of a friendship, any more than any other mutual hardship.

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.