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.

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.

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.

I've always been interested in technology, but specifically how we can use machines to engage the imagination. I started using computers when I was young and was fascinated by creating rules and instructions that allow a computer to engage in a dialogue with humans. The stories found in the data all around us can do just that.

Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.

Thank God for the Internet. Thank God for these amazing portals that are there. For instance, Netflix and Amazon. The kind of content the audience has got to see has gone up drastically, and because of this, the quality of work will go up, too.

They are responsible for starting this relationship and wanting to help Africa. The United States is very well suited for this as they are a country that has the capacity, they have better access to technology and they are a successful country.