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.
Jenna Wortham
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.
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.
We live in a time of astounding technological advancements. There are deep-sea drones and live-streaming virtual reality.
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.
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.
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.
Ultimately, what the tech industry really cares about is ushering in the future, but it conflates technological progress with societal progress.
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.
The future will bring new possibilities and ideas - and new terms for them.
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.
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.
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.
Social media seemed to promise a way to better connect with people; instead, it seems to have made it easier to tune out the people we don't agree with.
Many of the short videos on Vine feel as though they belong to an ever-evolving, completely new genre of modern folk art.
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.
I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, two of the most liberal places in the country.
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.
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.
Social media is my portal into the rest of the world - my periscope into the communities next to my community, into how the rest of the world thinks and feels.
The first ghost story I ever heard was from my mother.
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.
'Drag Race' has taught me a lot about how to form community, to take myself less seriously and lose some ego.
I came to 'RuPaul's Drag Race' late: I didn't get into the show until its fourth or fifth season.
Matching tattoos don't ensure the longevity of a friendship, any more than any other mutual hardship.
Although drag has a long cultural history in America, it remained largely underground till the late 1980s.
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.
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.
When I was a kid, 'Quantum Leap' was one of my favorite TV shows.
There is no picturesque version of what self-care looks like; it's different for every person who wants to practice it.
High school is already an academic and social pressure cooker, and the forces that make it stressful are amplified for queer students.
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.
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.
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.
'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.
The Internet is pushing us - in good ways and in bad - to realize that the official version of events shouldn't always be trusted or accepted without question.
The American understanding of China is filtered through years of politics; we rarely see the culture on its own terms.
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.
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.
Producing zines can offer an unexpected respite from the scrutiny on the Internet, which can be as oppressive as it is liberating.
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.
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.
For all its power as a protest medium, black Twitter serves a great many users as a virtual place to just hang out.
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.
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.
I like to dim the lights and talk about the ghosts I've known and invite other people to tell me their stories.
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.
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.
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.
