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.

If you would like to buy me a gift, here’s my wish list:

• Font of the Month Club Membership for 2019 ($54)
• Heldane Text by Kris Sowersby (Web fonts with regular and italic for $75)
• Books

Zoë Heller writes in The New Yorker:

Science has long understood that rem sleep—the stages of sleep characterized by rapid eye movement, in which most dreaming takes place—plays a vital role in our mental health. The human need for REM is so uncompromising that, when it is inhibited over a long period by excessive alcohol use, the pent-up backlog will release itself in a form of waking psychosis, otherwise known as delirium tremens. For a long time, the scientific establishment suspected that dreams were a superfluous by-product of the REM state. But in recent decades, thanks in large part to the advent of brain-imaging machines, scientists have been able to establish that dreams themselves are essential to the benefits of REM sleep. First, dreams knit up the ravelled sleeve of care by allowing us to process unhappy or traumatic experiences. Typically, during the REM state, the flow of an anxiety-triggering brain chemical called noradrenaline is shut off, so that we are able to revisit distressing real-life events in a neurochemically calm environment. As a result, the intensity of emotion that we feel about these events in our waking lives is reduced to manageable levels. In “Why We Sleep,” Walker attributes the recurring nightmares of P.T.S.D. sufferers to the fact that their brains produce an abnormal amount of noradrenaline, preventing their dreams from having the normal curative effect. When the dreaming brain fails to diminish the emotion attached to a traumatic memory, it will keep trying to do so, by revisiting that memory night after night.

Dreams also help us to master new skills; practicing a task or a language in our sleep can be as helpful as doing so when we are awake. And they appear to be crucial in honing our capacity for decoding facial expression: the dream-starved tend to slip into default paranoia, interpreting the friendliest expressions as menacing. Perhaps most alluring, dreams help us to synthesize new pieces of information with preëxisting knowledge, and to make creative lateral connections. The long list of inventions and great works said to have been generated in dreams includes the periodic table, the sewing machine, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan,” Paul McCartney’s “Let It Be,” and Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.”

Erica L. Green and Katie Benner report in The New York Times:

T.M. Landry has become a viral Cinderella story, a small school run by Michael Landry, a teacher and former salesman, and his wife, Ms. Landry, a nurse, whose predominantly black, working-class students have escaped the rural South for the nation’s most elite colleges. A video of a 16-year-old student opening his Harvard acceptance letter last year has been viewed more than eight million times. Other Landry students went on to Yale, Brown, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell and Wesleyan.

But:

In reality, the school falsified transcripts, made up student accomplishments and mined the worst stereotypes of black America to manufacture up-from-hardship tales that it sold to Ivy League schools hungry for diversity. The Landrys also fostered a culture of fear with physical and emotional abuse, students and teachers said. Students were forced to kneel on rice, rocks and hot pavement, and were choked, yelled at and berated.

The Landrys’ deception has tainted nearly everyone the school has touched, including students, parents and college admissions officers convinced of a myth.