Mainly what I’d say to my friend is this: Imagine a world where there is a free beer tap on every corner. If you want to make a living selling beer, how can you succeed? One inescapable part of the answer, it seems to me, is that you end up giving away a LOT of beer.

Guest Blogger Jeff Andersen: “We work with students in local classrooms for an entire year teaching them how to write and perform their own plays. I see the students make the same connections I did. They realize that they can not only participate in the world around them but also, even better, help to shape it.”

Our modern civil rights movement needs as many people as possible to be themselves and for us to work together for change. But people “being themselves” also means that they are allowed to not talk about their private life for as long as they do not want to talk about it, maybe even forever.

Mastery means knowing in your bones what you donʼt know. It also means form is second nature—you didnʼt get up that mountain without learning how to hike. And it means youʼre free. When you come back down, youʼve been changed.

Art is not a eugenics program. We’re all mongrels with our own unique deformities, and that’s what continues to keep artists and the arts in general interesting.

I am inspired by artists who say “I’m going to write or paint this weekend” without regard to “what” they are going to write or paint. Sometimes we just have to put brush to canvas, without being attached to the result.

Iʼm pretty sure this is the freelancerʼs life. Unless youʼre truly gifted—I mean frighteningly, what-you-touch-turns-to-money gifted—youʼre probably throwing anything at the wall and praying it sticks.

I want to work on making things better, by voting, by talking about this stuff online and in person, by recognizing my white male privilege and not abusing it, by being a vegetarian, because “human privilege” exists too (and I know that the way we treat animals reflects how we treat each other).

Guest Blogger Meredith Graves shares: “I swim, because I would rather persist than drown, and because I know that since I am my own life raft, once in awhile, when the rapids abate, I can kick up my heels and float.”

Can’t get to the mic? Can’t make it out to shows? You still wanna be a comic? Well then, my friend, it’s time to pitch in and help out the comedy community.

Babar the elephant and Curious George are old friends. They were some of the first people we grew to know. They might not be real people, but they were some of our first ideas of people.

The song’s lyrics follow the long tradition of smack talkers and lyrical braggarts, touching on important issues like partying, hangovers, haters and stupid fans. Just some of the classics, really.

If you are getting a “very creepy vibe” off this guy, if other women are saying he makes them “very uncomfortable,” if you are “scared for” your aunt, then what the hell are you waiting for? The Rapture? I would suggest that you immediately intervene.

Guest Blogger Juli Hendren: “Artists are not insignificant trinkets that people can take or leave. Artists reflect the world. They tell our stories. They bring us together. They show us what we have done and what we can do. They empower us. They teach us.”

Keshet’s Carolyn Tobias asks: How do we water the seeds of failure to have that pain actually produce something valuable? Learning is a verb; an action; a continual process. Learning from failure is actively choosing to see each failure as the beginning, and not the end.

I was a bookish, literarily-devout writing major. The type who read prose poems and flash fiction anthologies in the corner at parties, that sort of thing. And though I wouldn’t have admitted it then, one of the reasons I didn’t own a smartphone was because I was afraid of it.