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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Luckily, my only responsibility for 'Still Processing' is to show up and talk.

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

A governing ethos of the Internet has been that whatever flows through it - information, ideas - is up for grabs.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

The Internet is especially adept at compressing humanity and making it easy to forget there are people behind tweets, posts, and memes.

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.

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

I live in Brooklyn and work in Manhattan, two of the most liberal places in the country.

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.

Making space to deal with the psychological toll of racism is absolutely necessary.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Technology can be part of a solution, but it takes far more than software to usher in reform.

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.

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.

Someday, maybe we'll recognize that queer is actually the norm, and the notion of static sexual identities will be seen as austere and reductive.

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

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.

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

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

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

Most efforts to approximate normal human behavior in software tend to be creepy or annoying.

For all the advances in tech that let us try on various guises to play around with who we are, it seems that we just want new ways to be ourselves.