David Remnick profiles Buddy Guy in The New Yorker:

Three chords. The “one,” the “four,” and the “five.” Twelve bars, more or less. Guy’s devotion and sense of obligation to the blues form began long before the death of B. B. King. The story goes like this.

The son of sharecroppers, George (Buddy) Guy was born in 1936, in the town of Lettsworth, Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi River. On September 25, 1957, he boarded a train and arrived in Chicago, another addition to the Great Migration, the northward exodus of black Southerners that began four decades earlier. But Guy hadn’t come to Chicago to work in the slaughterhouses or the steel mills; he came to play guitar in the blues clubs on the South Side and the West Side. He was twenty-one.

Worth a read—or listen.

Andrew Jacobs reports in The New York Times:

Much like the fight over prescription drug prices, the “poop wars,” as one doctor described it, mirrors long-running tensions in American health care between pharmaceutical companies and patients.

Human feces, it turns out, are a potential gold mine, for both medical researchers and drug makers.

According to the analytical firm GlobalData, the market for drug-based treatments for C. diff is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2026, up from $630 million in 2016. The growth is tied to soaring rates of C. diff, which parallel the overuse of antibiotics, leaving patients more vulnerable to the infection.

Inspired by the success of fecal transplants for C. diff, scientists are racing to develop similar treatments for an array of ailments and disorders, among them obesity, autism, ulcerative colitis, and Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Investors, too, have taken note, and they are pouring tens of millions of dollars into start-ups chasing the next microbiota breakthrough.

Fascinating!

Oliver Schöndorfer writes:

Typekit was the place for web fonts – it made them accessible and affordable for many designers and customers. With Adobe Fonts it transformed into being a great tool for mostly designers but not necessarily a web font service anymore. And this makes me sad.

This made me sad as well. I missed Typekit and moved off Adobe Fonts.

My friend Linh gave her daughter advice on how to make her own mind:

I said: May, what I am telling you now are based on what I know, what I believe in, how I see the world. But you shouldn’t just rely on me, you need to read a lot, read a lot, and look around you, before you make up your mind. Don’t be lazy and let me think for you. Know that your parents will influence your view of the world, but times change, ideas change, so what I know now might not be as complete as when your time comes. Like my dad used to believe in one thing, and I thought so that’s how the world is, but then I found out that it isn’t, for me. That was when I got to college, I met a lot of people, learned a lot of new things, read a lot. So be like that, always learning, and before you choose to believe which side is the good guy and which side is the bad guy, try to ask yourself which side has more knowledge with them? Which side respects the rights of the weak and the helpless equally as of those who are strong and powerful. And then you go from there.

What a wonderful advice from a parent. I miss reading her blog. I wish she comes back to write more. I just went to her blog post on my phone and there were eight pieces of ads surrounding one post. What the fuck, WordPress.com?

Anahad O’Connor has an insightful guide on sleep apnea. Here are a few signs if you might suffer from sleep apnea:

• Are you a loud or regular snorer?
• Have you ever been observed to gasp or stop breathing during sleep?
• Do you feel tired or groggy when you wake up? Do you wake up with a headache?
• Are you often tired or fatigued during the day?
• Do you fall asleep while sitting, reading, watching television or driving?
• Do you often have problems concentrating or remembering things?

Oh shit, I think I have all of them.

Kevin Roose writes in The New York Times:

A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world — more colorful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards.

I still love that world, and probably always will. But now, the physical world excites me, too — the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking. I no longer feel phantom buzzes in my pocket or have dreams about checking my Twitter replies. I look people in the eye and listen when they talk. I ride the elevator empty-handed. And when I get sucked into my phone, I notice and self-correct.

I have been following Bethany Heck on Twitter for a while. I even tempted to apply for the opening positions at Medium she tweeted. It appears that she has been let go recently, which led her to update her portfolio website. It looks amazing, particularly the typographic showcase on the homepage, which has a similar concept to my portfolio site.

Elizabeth A. Harris writes in the New York Times:

For decades, lawyers for the disabled have used the Americans With Disabilities Act to force businesses to make their spaces more physically accessible, by adding ramps, widening doorways or lowering countertops.

But the steady migration of commerce and culture to the internet has given rise to a new flood of litigation, over the accessibility of websites to the visually impaired. The number of such lawsuits nationwide nearly tripled in 2018 over the year before.

Making your website accessible is a must.

Jane E. Brody writes in The New York Times:

Because manufacturers try to hit all bases, over-the-counter cough remedies most often contain combinations of three or four ingredients when a patient may need only one or two. Typical ingredients include a cough suppressant, an expectorant and an antihistamine, when better hydration or drinking hot tea with honey may be all someone really needs to quell a nagging cough.

I’ll try hot tea with honey next time.

If you have to pick one book for Black History Month, check out Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns. I am just starting and already loving her writing. Here is how she described one of the main characters who had been through the Great Migration:

She has an endearing gap in her teeth, which go just about any which way they please, and her hair is now as soft and white as the cotton she used to pick not particularly well back in Mississippi. She is the color of sand beach, which she had never heard of growing up but had never seen for herself until she arrived in Chicago half a lifetime ago. She has big searching eyes that see the good in people despite the evil she has seen, and she has a comforting kind of eternal beauty, her skin is like the folds of a velvet shawl.

So beautiful.