Some of the bathrooms at MIT have chalkboards in them. It plays into the fantasy of being an MIT student: the head-in-the-clouds genius who will come up with the answer to a seemingly unsolvable theorem while standing over a urinal. He just must jot it down! But it also combats more permanent bathroom graffiti. Given a place to scribble something scandelous, knowing it can easily be erased, people who wouldn’t otherwise write things on walls might leave something behind for the next person to ponder.

In Oklahoma City, residents still mourn the 1991 passing of the “graffiti bridge.” Since 1930 it was where rival schools would make threats, students painted murals, and a whole lot of memories were made like the time on kid spilled a bucket of paint on a brand new BMW (The rubble is now repurposed as jewelry by a local artist.)

Some people think of books as holy things that should never been handled too roughly or written in, but I read everything with a highlighter between my thumb and index finger and a pen or pencil between my index and middle finger. Highlight