8 a.m. In the ballroom for sound check. My liaison, who is super pregnant, tells me about how she’s getting 18 months of maternity leave while her cousins back in Florida get like four weeks. I cry a little inside as I check the mic and flip through all my slides.

8:30 a.m. I go back to my room, order an omelet and do a self-guided workout on the floor while I wait: a set of stretches, planks, squats, things you don’t need equipment for. My pre-talk ritual includes some stretches, some vocal warm-ups, and some level of immersion in the community I’m about to talk to — this time, that means internet research on racism in Canada.

I also decide to draw a bath, like a Victorian.

11:20 a.m. Head downstairs to speak to 800 elementary schoolteachers. My talk, a version of my TED Talk, involves taking headlines of white people calling the cops on black people; I make them into a language game that highlights the structural racism involved with the choice to invoke armed law enforcement to the scene of a non-crime. I throw in a few Canadian examples. The audience is really engaged — diagraming sentences in front of teachers hits a magic spot, I guess — and I get a standing ovation.

There was a point when I thought that once I gave a TED Talk, I couldn’t perform it anymore. But that’s not the case at all. It’s more like a greatest hit from a band. People want to hear it live.

1:10 p.m. My flight home means more reading, emailing and content-consuming. Part of my job is just to be a sponge for stuff that’s happening in the world, especially at the intersection of technology and race and society. I watch the Aziz Ansari special; it’s part appreciation and part study — I’m interested in how to package ideas in a way that people will hear them. I also watch “Oprah Winfrey Presents: When They See Us Now,” Oprah’s interview with Ava DuVernay and the men once known as the Central Park Five. That one’s mandatory. The author of “How to Be Black” can’t not watch “When They See Us Now” — it would be blackness malpractice.

8:45 p.m. I get home, bring in the garbage bins from the street and hug my woman.

Thursday

7:30 a.m. I wake up, do my meditation, go for a one-mile walk, make myself a bowl of cereal with some blueberries and a cup of tea and head to the home office for a series of calls.

9 a.m. Talk with my producer at iHeartMedia, where I do a podcast with 23andMe called “Spit,” telling stories related to DNA. We’re plotting the episode we’re recording next week, about Parkinson’s. We’ll have four guests, so it’s a lot of wrangling.