Austin Kleon on the need to gain a sense of ownership over our online lives: “Back [in 2013], the worst I felt social media did was waste your time. Now, the worst social media does is cripple democracy and ruin your soul.”

“Can we all agree that there is no such thing as a girl or a boy book?” Teacher and parent Pernille Ripp writes on the toxic effects of defining books by the gender of their supposed audience.

Librarian Deb Baker rejects a recent op-ed calling for Amazon to replace public libraries: “Libraries are often the only egalitarian spaces in American communities, radically welcoming of everyone who comes through their doors.”

“A simple question, posed at eight o’clock on a Saturday night. I got 5,000 comments back.” At the Village Voice, Mikel Jollett writes on music’s power to evoke memory and a sense of loss.

Medievalist Lucy Allen writes on the recent move among women in academia to add the title “Dr” to their Twitter name, which she views as “an act of faith, a promise to myself to keep my work from being erased.”

The creator of The Wire and Treme remembers his years of friendship and collaboration with the late Anthony Bourdain.

On vanlife in the San Francisco Bay Area: “A van might cost about $600 a month with a five year loan. There’s insurance, gas, maintenance, and a gym membership for showers and such. But compare that to the one bedroom apartment it’s parked in front of that’s renting for $5,400 — assuming you can…move in.”

Maria Popova, the founder of Brain Pickings, on how she loathes the term “content” when applied to cultural material: “One can’t ‘own’ any fragment of this complex interlacing of ideas and influences we call culture.”

Writer and political organizer Alex Press on fear: “It’s hard to imagine such a state of mind, writing from the present. Ours feels like a time of fear, defined by it much as I was then defined by its absence.”