Soccer is a game that forces you to forget about the past even just five seconds ago. You need to remain focus. The team that loses its concentration will lose. We witnessed that when Argentina lost its first goal to Croatia. The Argentina’s players were disoriented. As a result, Argentina lost two more goals. In contrast, Germany stayed focus even one of its player received a red card. Playing 10 against Sweden’s 11 players, Germany managed to score another goal at the last minute of the game. Soccer is about forgetting the past mistakes and looking for the future opportunities. This is why I love watching the World Cup.

My buddy and former colleague Tim Brown has written a book titled Flexible Typesetting for A Book Apart. I learned so much about typography from Tim when we worked together at Vassar and I can’t wait to get my hands on his new book. If you want to learn about web typography, you must pick up this book as well. Preorder today and A Book Apart will donate 25% of all profits to RAICES to help reunite detained immigrant parents and children.

Om Malik:

What people don’t realize about blogs is that they are never a complete story. They are incomplete and by nature more mysterious, more episodic, and thus more interesting. Blogs are meant not to leave you with everything. The whole idea is to think to deliberate, and to come back again and again, to finish what was started a long time ago. But there is no end, just a pause, for a voice to start, talking again. I think somewhere along the line I forgot what it is to blog.

Brent Simmons:

Here’s a provisional thought (all thoughts on a blog are provisional) — to read a good blog is to watch a writer get a little bit better, day after day, at writing the truth.

Jan Hoffman

The numbers of teenagers reporting “feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” suicidal thoughts, and days absent from school out of fear of violence or bullying have all risen since 2007. The increases were particularly pointed among lesbian, gay and bisexual high school students.

Nationally, 1 in 5 students reported being bullied at school; 1 in 10 female students and 1 in 28 male students reported having been physically forced to have sex.

Read more about the disturbing rise of depression and suicidal thoughts from teenagers.

Anemona Hartocollis:

Harvard consistently rated Asian-American applicants lower than others on traits like “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected,” according to an analysis of more than 160,000 student records filed Friday by a group representing Asian-American students in a lawsuit against the university.

Asian-Americans scored higher than applicants of any other racial or ethnic group on admissions measures like test scores, grades and extracurricular activities, according to the analysis commissioned by a group that opposes all race-based admissions criteria. But the students’ personal ratings significantly dragged down their chances of being admitted, the analysis found.

If this discrimination toward Asian is true, our kids have no chance of going Harvard. Oh well, there are plenty of schools to choose from.

Gretchen Reynolds:

Over all, the results suggest that exercise and standing up have distinct effects on the body, says Bernard Duvivier, a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University, who led the new study.

Moderate exercise seems to hone endothelial and cardiac health, he says, probably in large part by increasing the flow of blood through blood vessels.

Standing up, on the other hand, may have a more pronounced and positive impact on metabolism, he says, perhaps by increasing the number of muscular contractions that occur throughout the day. Busy muscles burn blood sugar for fuel, which helps to keep insulin levels steady, and release chemicals that can reduce bad cholesterol.

Read the article at The New York Times.

Jack Turban:

It’s common for gay, bisexual or questioning minors to go online to meet other gay people. It’s normal for these kids to want to explore intimacy. But most online social networks for gay men are geared toward adults and focused on sex. They have failed to protect minors, who simply have to subtract a few years from their birth date to create a profile.

Read the article at The New York Times.

David Sedaris:

Guests usually take the train from London, and before we pick them up at the station, I remind Hugh that for the duration of their visit, he and I will be playing the role of a perfect couple. This means no bickering and no contradicting each other. If I am seated at the kitchen table and he is standing behind me, he is to place a hand on my shoulder right on the spot where a parrot would perch if I were a pirate instead of the ideal boyfriend. When I tell a story he has heard so often he could lip sync it, he is to pretend to be hearing it for the first time and to be appreciating it as much or more than our guests are. I’m to do the same and to feign delight when he serves something I hate, like fish with little bones in it. I really blew this a few years back when his friend Sue (ph) came for the night, and he poached what might as well have been a hairbrush.

It is humiliating when a couple bickers around other people. It just shows how bad a relationship is. I guess at some point we don’t need to hide anymore. Just start yelling and throwing things around. No relationship is perfect.

Jane E. Brody writes in The New York Times:

In general, if your waist measures 35 or more inches for women or 40 or more inches for men, chances are you’re harboring a potentially dangerous amount of abdominal fat.

Subcutaneous fat that lurks beneath the skin as “love handles” or padding on the thighs, buttocks or upper arms may be cosmetically challenging, but it is otherwise harmless. However, the deeper belly fat — the visceral fat that accumulates around abdominal organs — is metabolically active and has been strongly linked to a host of serious disease risks, including heart disease, cancer and dementia.

I measured my belly right after dinner and it is at 37 inches. Last week, I went to bed with a stomach ache almost every night from eating too much. I am now cutting back my portion and getting back to walking and jogging. Last week, I also stayed up late to revise my book. I need to get at least seven hours of sleep again.

Louis Menand:

As we are learning, the danger of data collection by online companies is not that they will use it to try to sell you stuff. The danger is that that information can so easily fall into the hands of parties whose motives are much less benign. A government, for example. A typical reaction to worries about the police listening to your phone conversations is the one Gary Hart had when it was suggested that reporters might tail him to see if he was having affairs: “You’d be bored.” They were not, as it turned out. We all may underestimate our susceptibility to persecution. “We were just talking about hardwood floors!” we say. But authorities who feel emboldened by the promise of a Presidential pardon or by a Justice Department that looks the other way may feel less inhibited about invading the spaces of people who belong to groups that the government has singled out as unpatriotic or undesirable. And we now have a government that does that.

Read the article at The New Yorker.