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.

Social media is incredible: it creates a community that I'm really proud to be a part of, but it also creates illusions and a false reality, and it's difficult to grow up with that.

Technology isn't the enemy, it is our ally, but only if we adopt a new model that puts people before profit. I realize that we seem far from that model, but I have seen it in action and it is a beautiful thing. So I'm not willing to give up yet. Hope is the last thing to die.

Film is a very young art that is still evolving. Soon, we shall reach a balance between content and technology.

There is a lot of volatility in the digital asset market broadly, and certainly that is true in the bitcoin market. It's been true for XRP, and I think that's because these markets are very nascent.