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.

Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature.

The biggest sources of opportunity are collaboration and partnership. And today, with digital communication, there is more of that everywhere. We need to expose ourselves to that as a matter of doing business.

In a modern and innovative society, where advancements are plentiful and communication is instantaneous, science and technology are a part of everyday life.

It'll take a while for all those strange old books that I love to show up on digital: books that aren't current bestsellers but aren't public-domain freebies, either.