Only three days apart, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain, two successful individuals, took their own lives.

Patrick Radden Keefe recalls:

Looking back over my notebooks this morning, I recognized dark threads running through our conversations. Bourdain freely acknowledged that part of the reason he continued to work at such a frantic pace might have been a fear about where his mind might go if he ever sat still.

Daphne Merkin writes about depression:

I didn’t know Kate Spade, who hanged herself with a red scarf in her bedroom on Tuesday at the age of 55, other than through the prism of her insistently cheerful and whimsical accessories. But everything about Ms. Spade and her designs suggested a sunny temperament, from her candy-colored aesthetic to the perky image she projected. We have a hard time squaring a seemingly successful woman — one with a highflying career, a family and heaps of money — with a despondency so insinuating that it led her to end it all. All this helps explain why Fern Mallis, the former director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America and a friend of Ms. Spade’s, called her death “so out of character.” In fact, it turned out that the bubbly girl from Kansas City “suffered from depression and anxiety for many years,” as her husband, Andy, said.

Mental health is serious and depression is deadly.

Amos Barshad writes in The New Yorker

In the nineteen-forties, a Brooklyn anatomist named James Hamilton studied prisoners in Oklahoma who, having been convicted of sexual assault, were castrated. Hamilton identified testosterone as the root of hair loss, and showed that men castrated before or during puberty did not go bald. He then injected groups of castrated adult men with testosterone and—duly, cruelly—watched their hair fall out.

In the following decades, researchers learned that testosterone does not work alone. An enzyme converts testosterone into a substance called dihydrotestosterone, or DHT, which causes hair follicles to shrink. DHT attacks the dermal papilla, the “brain” of the hair follicle, and is the main cause of male-pattern baldness, which affects more than fifty million men in the United States and also—largely unremarked upon, but true—more than thirty million women.

Barshad has a funny paragraph about Trump:

I’d come to think that the simplest answer was the right one: this was regular male-pattern baldness, elaborately covered up. But the Air Force One incident only deepened the mystery. What kind of hair afflicted by male-pattern baldness rises in the back? I suddenly had no idea which parts of his head contained which hairs. Watching the flaps on the back of his head shoot up again and again, I became unmoored in my beliefs.

When I was young and full of hair, I never thought that I would loose my hair. Now I am bald as fuck. Comparing to all the flaws on my appearance, being bald is not the worst. Other then shaving my head every two or three weeks, I wake up every morning and do nothing to my hair. I don’t even need to go a barbershop. I just don’t care about hair.

Haven’t blogged in the last several days because I have been focusing on the second edition of Vietnamese Typography. I have thought about this project for a while. Should I leave the book as it or revise it? Doing a major update will require a chunk of my time to devote to the project. I tempted to leave the website as it, but I know I can make it better. I have lots of ideas on how to improve it. I love to be able to just work on it, but I have a family with three young boys and another one coming soon. As a result, my time is limited.

I love this project even though it does not make me any money. It brought me some consultant gigs, but they aren’t much either. My real joy is seeing new typefaces with Vietnamese. From my interaction with designers and what I have found online, this book has been useful. I came across several mentions of the book.

James Puckett writes for I Love Typography:

I also added support for Vietnamese, using Donny Trương’s book Vietnamese Typography as my guide. Vietnamese uses stacked diacritical marks on some vowels, so I had to carefully balance the weight of each mark to work in single mark letters and Vietnamese…. Designing the Vietnamese marks improved my skills designing marks, making this the best collection of diacritical marks I’ve ever produced.

Florian Hardwig writes for Font In Use:

For those interested in proper Vietnamese typography, Donny Trương provides a good introduction, including an overview of the letters with diacritics that are actually used for marking tonal distinctions in this language.

TypeTogether writes about the extension of Adelle Sans:

A good starting point to better understand the history and the typographic challenges of Vietnamese is Donny Trương’s online book Vietnamese Typography.

Tyrus tweets:

I stumbled into this really interesting and informative site about Vietnamese typography while researching localization and character support for a project. So well done, I wish there was a guide like this for all languages and character sets.

If you find this book is useful, please consider supporting my efforts to make it an even better resource for the type community. You can contribute $10, $5, or $1. Any amount will help.

To comply with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), I removed tracking scripts on all of my websites: visualgui.com, donnytruong.com, Vietnamese Typography, Professional Web Typography, and Simplexpression.

On April 14, 2018, I gutted Google Analytics on all of my websites. On May 16, 2018, I deleted all data and properties in my Google Analytics account. None of my sites sets any cookies in your browser, nor does it track you.

I do not collect, use, or share any personal data. I do not know your internet activity. I respect your privacy.

Jia Tolentino:

In the past few years, a subset of straight men calling themselves “incels” have constructed a violent political ideology around the injustice of young, beautiful women refusing to have sex with them. These men often subscribe to notions of white supremacy. They are, by their own judgment, mostly unattractive and socially inept. (They frequently call themselves “subhuman.”) They’re also diabolically misogynistic. “Society has become a place for worship of females and it’s so fucking wrong, they’re not Gods they are just a fucking cum-dumpster,” a typical rant on an incel message board reads. The idea that this misogyny is the real root of their failures with women does not appear to have occurred to them.

What do they want? Tolentino writes:

What incels want is extremely limited and specific: they want unattractive, uncouth, and unpleasant misogynists to be able to have sex on demand with young, beautiful women. They believe that this is a natural right.

Read the entire essay at The New Yorker.

In an interview with A Book Apart, Jeremy Keith responds:

I find it hard to imagine life without my website. Even though it’s a not tangible, physical thing, I think it might be my most prized possession (well, either my website or my bouzouki). I use it every day. Sometimes I just post little notes, sometimes I link to something interesting, sometimes I write something a bit longer. But every little piece I put on my site feels like another little pebble added to an ever-growing structure.

I share this sentiment with Jeremy. I have poured my heart and soul into this intangible place of mine. It has become part of my life. I can’t imagine not having it.

Jia Tolentino:

Cigarette smoking is still the No. 1 cause of preventable death in this country, killing nearly five hundred thousand people each year. (According to some studies, more than half of longtime smokers will die from smoking-related complications.) It’s incredibly hard to stop smoking; people spend lifetimes trying. Around seventy per cent of American smokers say that they want to quit, and for many of them e-cigarettes have been a godsend. But, according to a 2017 study by the C.D.C., about fifty per cent more high schoolers and middle schoolers vape than smoke. Young people have taken a technology that was supposed to help grownups stop smoking and invented a new kind of bad habit, one that they have molded in their own image. The potential public-health benefit of the e-cigarette is being eclipsed by the unsettling prospect of a generation of children who may really love to vape.

Read the entire informative article at The New Yorker.

In his recent talk for Webstock ’18, Jeremy Keith demonstrates his approach of POSSE, which means Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. The technologies behind his method are simple yet impressive. They allow him to put his content on his own website as well as Medium and social media networks.

For me, I simply post on my website and that’s it. I am not syndicating my content to other platforms. I don’t have much to give away anyway.

George Mason University is ranked 54th among 500 top midsize companies with between 1,000 and 5,000 employees, according to Forbes. The law school has been one of the best places I have worked so far. Despite its conservative leaning, I find myself thriving and fitting in. I just do my job and leave my politics on this blog. I hope to continue to work here many more years to come.

Asian folks, just lightened the fuck up. A high school girl was just wearing a traditional Chinese dress to make her stood out from the rest. She looked stunning. She did not slant her eyes. She did not make any racist comment. We dyed our hair and wore hip-hop clothes all the time and nobody accused us of cultural appropriation.