Social media has created a digital latticework, but it has also, for some, created abusive commenters, silos, and validation rather than curiosity.
I've often wondered if the trade-off for growing up in the relative newness and freshness of the West Coast was befuddlement when it comes to historical preservation. We don't have many old things, and we don't really know what to do with the few that are around when our default response is to compost or field burn.
Because sports are a religion, it's difficult to imagine a world without the Olympics, and to be sure, they have given us many glorious moments.
Money can be a reflection of our perceptions of power, self-esteem, personal history, fears, and happiness.
At the turn of the twentieth century, board games were becoming increasingly commonplace in middle-class homes. In addition, more and more inventors were discovering that the games were not just a pastime but also a means of communication.
Women's marathoning was not added as an Olympic medal event until 1984 due to unfounded and bizarre concerns among Olympic organizers about women's ability to run longer distances. It was finally added after much campaigning.
As a producer, it's not unusual to find yourself on the field, backstage, often with a camera crew and living with constant anxiety of accidentally ending up in the shot.
As it turns out, just hanging out around athletes doesn't actually make one more fit.
The more I think about the Olympics, even from afar, its mere concept stuns me. I can't think of any other line of work where, every four years, people gather to be ranked one, two, and three, then are more or less told to evaporate until the next go-around.
I'm a realist about who really reads books and who acts like they read books.
It's still thrilling, even if my work is something that people even pretend they're interested in on a first date or at a cocktail party.
Much like film, authors spend a fair amount of time alone in the creative process, tossing their work out into what can feel like an abyss, void of real people.
No one in my family was a journalist, and it didn't seem like a real job. Part of me still doesn't think it is.
I was a fly on the wall at Gawker Media during the heyday of this thing called blogging.
Sports fandom transcends gender, race, language, political preference, socioeconomic status, or any other way you can think of slicing this planet.
Banning sports is a ludicrous proposition.
In the modern road-running era, digital photography has intersected with weekend-warrior culture, creating a golden age of social-media humblebragging. For some, the marathon course is sacred ground. For others, it's a personal movie set.
There are good reasons for not wanting to host the Olympics. The Games can be costly and, in spite of their patriotic overtones, can unintentionally expose a nation's weaknesses to the world.
Virtual reality has an exciting future and oodles of room to grow.
VR could, in theory, connect sports fans in different geographical locations so they could watch a game together. Instead of a group text or Twitter stream of commentary playing out across time zones when a team is playing, our avatars could inhabit virtual stands, side by side with the rest of our digital tribe.
