NaN Jaune, designed by Jérémy Landes, flips the script with its closed apertures, short extenders, text for display, and display for text. NaN Jaune comes in three flavors: Maxi (swells at display sizes), Midi (sings at text sizes), and Mini (maintains legibility at small sizes). NaN Jaune is packed with diacritical swags. For Vietnamese, its acute, grave, and hook above stack to the right of its circumflex. NaN Jaune is also used for my Björk project.

Chiều thứ Bảy vừa quá, anh bạn rủ qua nhà nhậu lai rai. Tối đến rủ nhau hát karaoke. Trong đám có mấy đứa cháu hát tiếng Việt cũng thú vị. Nó hát ca khúc “Tình đơn phương” mà khiến mình cảm thấy thèm thuồng vì trong lời ca lại có chữ “xào lăn” trong khi mình nhìn lên TV thì thấy chữ “sầu lắng”.

Joshua Rothman writes for the New Yorker:

Today, the nature of reading has shifted. Plenty of people still enjoy traditional books and periodicals, and there are even readers for whom the networked age has enabled a kind of hyper-literacy; for them, a smartphone is a library in their pocket. For others, however, the old-fashioned, ideal sort of reading—intense, extended, beginning-to-end encounters with carefully crafted texts—has become almost anachronistic. These readers might start a book on an e-reader and then continue it on the go, via audio narration. Or they might forgo books entirely, spending evenings browsing Apple News and Substack before drifting down Reddit’s lazy river. There’s something both diffuse and concentrated about reading now; it involves a lot of random words flowing across a screen, while the lurking presence of YouTube, Fortnite, Netflix, and the like insures that, once we’ve begun to read, we must continually choose not to stop.

This shift has taken decades, and it’s been driven by technologies that have been disproportionately adopted by the young. Perhaps for these reasons, its momentousness has been obscured. In 2023, the National Endowment for the Arts reported that, over the preceding decade, the proportion of adults who read at least one book a year had fallen from fifty-five per cent to forty-eight per cent. That’s a striking change, but modest compared to what’s happened among teen-agers: the National Center for Education Statistics—which has recently been gutted by the Trump Administration—found that, over roughly the same period, the number of thirteen-year-olds who read for fun “almost every day” fell from twenty-seven per cent to fourteen per cent. Predictably, college professors have been complaining with more than usual urgency about phone-addled students who struggle to read anything of substantial length or complexity.

I must also confess. It is hard for me to read a long book these days.

Ocean Vương talks to Björk for Bomb magazine about his new novel:

I was really frustrated by people telling me I had to create drastic change at the end of my fiction, à la Aristotle. That payoff felt closer to commerce: the way you buy a washing machine and it promises to change your life. The boy gets the girl. They find the killer in the end. Rags to riches. When I looked at my life, my family, the people in my community, I realized nobody lives like that. My aunt has worked the same job and driven the same car and lived in the same house for twenty years … That’s not a bad life. That’s a decent life. People aren’t failures because they’re “stuck.” Most of American life is a kind of stuckness, and so much of our culture wants us to make all of that into a winsome, sanguine hope. Optimism for optimism’s sake. And yet the majority of history is filled with people who did not start revolutions, who didn’t break out of the abusive relationship, who got stuck fighting in wars that they didn’t believe in. Most of history consists of people who are trapped by what they are but who still try their best. I wanted to write about kindness without hope, where people know that kindness will make no significant change in their lives and yet they commit to it anyway. I knew that no character would get a better job or have a grand epiphany at the end of this book. They end exactly where they started, but they are transformed, internally, because of each other.

I told my editors that this is my slump book. (laughter) I don’t know if it’s going to do well. It doesn’t do any of the things that American fiction usually depends on to sell units. There’s no thing to grab at the end. When you buy a bag of potato chips, you at least know you’ll get sixteen ounces of potato chips, whereas I can’t promise that anybody will get anything from this book.

I am almost done with the book.

Dear Khandice & Henry,

Congratulations on your big day! From reading your story on your wedding website, we can tell that you two are madly in love with each other. The wedding is just the beginning. The journey ahead will fill with joy, but also challenges—take it from our 17 years of experience. What had helped us weathered the storm was two bars from a Vietnamese timeless ballad written by the great late Lê Uyên Phương:

Rồi mai đây đi trên đường đời
Đừng buông tay âm thầm tìm về cô đơn.

Later, on the journey through life,
Don’t let go of my hand to seek your quiet solitude.

When things get rough, just hold on and don’t let go of your hands.

Love,

Auntie HaiDung & Uncle Donny

Type and Graphic Designer Dương Trần mentioned Vietnamese Typography in his HyperTalks 3.0. Dương gave an informative presentation and shared his own experience on designing Vietnamese diacritics.

Of course he did and the Washington Post is on sell too. I stopped reading the Post after Bezos blocked the presidential endorsement in 2024.

After six years, I had to move on from my old MacBook Pro. The main issue was that some of the keys weren’t working anymore. Typing had become slow and annoying. I tried to wait it out because I dread starting fresh. Thanks to the cloud, I only spent about 4 hours getting everything back up and running without having to do the automatic migration, which my tech guys warned me not to do.

I got my mails and Adobe Clouds up and running pretty quickly. Transmit was a piece of cake to migrate thanks to its export tool. I got new license for Nova and spent a bit of time to get SASS running again. What I worried the most was setting up MAMP. Fortunately, that was also a breeze. I was also able to run MySQL server 8.0.40 in MAMP for WordPress, which I was not able to do on the old MacBook Pro.

I got a brand new black MacBook Pro this time and it is so damn slick. I am loving it. This laptop should last another 6 or 7 years, but I might cut it down to 3 or 4 years depending on the Law Library budget.

As the heat rises to 90 degrees, I miss the snow, especially snowboarding.

I enjoy creating YouTube Shorts because I love combining music with motion. For example, this short clip of my wife skiing is just so lovely. The music is intimate and emotional. She’s skiing alone on the slopes with the snow falling. I didn’t pay attention when I put the two together. When I rewatched it, my eyes were a bit watery. The tears of joy!