I really love last week’s episode of This American Life, in which they talked about libraries. My favorite segment is the library for unpublished manuscripts.

Emilie Le Beau Lucchesi writes in the New York Times:

The study, published in Current Psychology, found a substantial link between procrastination and clutter problems in all the age groups. Frustration with clutter tended to increase with age. Among older adults, clutter problems were also associated with life dissatisfaction.

I find clutter suffocating. Keeping the house tidy is quite challenging with for kids. The older I get the more irritate I become with cluttering. I need more time to reorganize and purge before it gets overwhelming.

Nicholas Bakalar writes in The New York Times:

Breast-feeding for longer than six months may lead to a smaller waist size for the mother, researchers report, and the effect persists for as long as a decade.

Now I understand how my wife has managed to keep her sexy waist without exercise.

Gabriel J.X. Dance, Michael LaForgia and Nicholas Confessore writes in the New York Times:

Facebook has never sold its user data, fearful of user backlash and wary of handing would-be competitors a way to duplicate its most prized asset. Instead, internal documents show, it did the next best thing: granting other companies access to parts of the social network in ways that advanced its own interests.

Facebook is still a convenient place to connect with family members and close friends; therefore, it is so hard to pull the plug. I am, however, deeply concern with all of these privacy issues, especially my kids’ photos. I am seriously considering leaving Facebook by the end of this year. Leaving Facebook is difficult but doable. Google, on the other hand, is much harder. From Gmail to photos to Pixel, Google has me locked in. I guess, I can’t keep anything private as long as I am on the web.

Photographer Hoài Nam released not one but two stunning calendars this year. His work is consistently beautiful. You should definitely get them to support orphanages in Việt Nam.

He also launched a new, responsive website. Disappointedly, the new design is templated by Squarespace, but it makes sense. Áo Trắng is a charitable project with limited resource.

I wish him all the best and thank him for all the work he has done to give back to his homeland.

Jacey Fortin writes in The New York Times about the issue of the classic “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”:

To some modern ears, the lyrics sound like a prelude to date rape. The woman keeps protesting. “I ought to say no, no, no, sir,” she sings, and he asks to move in closer. “My sister will be suspicious,” she sings. “Gosh, your lips look delicious,” he answers. She wonders aloud what is in her drink.

Oh, come on!

Last Friday evening, a friend sent an old photo of myself taken when I was a scrawny, eleven- or twelve-year-old immigrant. My friend got the photo from one of our ESL teachers. He also sent me a picture he took with the two ESL teachers and his old classmates. I am so glad to see both of the ESL teachers who are in their late sixties and early eighties are still looking great.

I wanted to meet with them and to thank them deeply from the bottom of my heart for what they had done for the immigrated kids like us. In addition to teaching us English, they welcomed us with open arms. Their love and kindness helped us get through the early days of our lives in a foreign country. When the school closed because of the snow, they called each of us to make sure we did not go out in the cold. When we had after school party for ESL students, they drove each of us home in their own car. The little things they did beyond their teaching responsibility made a long-lasting impact on me.

At time when privileged white men claimed that immigrants make America dirtier and the current administration wanted to deport immigrants, I thought of white people like my ESL teachers. They are the reason I still believe America is a nation in which love trumps hate.

Chris, my friend and former colleague at Vassar College, started a very simple blog. He shares:

So for the moment, I’ve dropped the systems. I’m back to HTML5 Boilerplate, a few basic PHP includes, and standard HTML/CSS. It’s clunky and limited: no search, no tags, no categories, no archives, no plugins, no widgets, no templates, no nothing. HTML pages linked with PHP—that’s it.

I have been a fan of Chris’ works and his thoughts. I am looking forward to reading his blog.

Daniel T. Willingham writes in The New York Times:

Print may be best for lingering over words or ideas, but audiobooks add literacy to moments where there would otherwise be none.

For books, I still prefer reading over listening.

Two notable typefaces released on the same day yesterday. Empirica, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones with Nina Stössinger, is not just an interpretation of Trajan. They reinvented the lowercase letters. Jaime Green writes:

In contemporary typefaces, the upper- and lowercase letters are usually designed in tandem. This allows them, despite their disparate origins, to develop in aesthetic compromise, in proportions and spacing and detail. Like siblings that grow up together, they learn how to coexist from the start.

But the Roman “capitalis monumentalis” never had to find a cooperation with a parallel set of letters. If it did, though, what would its lowercase look like? Stössinger said, “This is an enduring quest that runs through typeface design history—people trying to figure out what that lowercase is.” Not to design a complementary lowercase. But to figure out what the lowercase is. For centuries, typefounders searched for a fitting lowercase, one that would feel like it had been there all along. To mix our Greeks and Romans, a Platonic lowercase, if you will. They just needed to discover it.

Heldane, designed by Kris Sowersby and engineered by Noe Blanco, is simply breathtaking. Sowersby writes:

Heldane is a contemporary serif family inspired by the renaissance works of Hendrik van den Keere, Claude Garamont, Robert Granjon and Simon de Colines. Rather than emulating a specific font, Heldane amalgamates the best details from these sources into a cohesive whole. The classical typographic foundations of Heldane are refined with rigorous digital drawing.

I am not sure if Heldane families support Vietnamese. I would love to adopt them.