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.

Nicholas Kristof and Jessica Ma:

That’s mostly because of malaria. Mosquitoes spread the blood-borne disease, killing about 445,000 people per year. That figure doesn’t even include deaths from dengue fever, yellow fever, Zika or West Nile viruses.

Check out the well-executed interactive piece on The New York Times.

Lauren Doyle Owens:

It’s been 10 years since the cancer. And those sad years that followed feel almost like another sickness I went through, a fever or drug interaction. I still have no idea why you stayed. Why you tolerated me. But I’m glad you did.

Nobody tells you how long marriage is. When you fall in love, when you have fun with somebody, when you enjoy the way they see the world, nobody ever says, “this person will change. And so you will be married to two, three, four, five or 10 people throughout the course of your life, as you live out your vows.” Nobody warns you. But you, my dear. There is something deep and hard and lasting inside of you. And I wish I had known, when I was searching again for my bedrock, that all I had to do was reach out my hand.

Beautifully written. Read the article at The New York Times.

Andrea Cheng writes “Why So Many Asian-American Women Are Bleaching Their Hair Blond” in The New York Times:

While it’s easy to write this off as a beauty trend, this growing community points to stirrings of change on a much larger scale, like the shaping of a new Asian-American identity.

I still prefer black natural hair.

Karin Jones writes about sleeping with married men in The New York Times:

Physical intimacy with other human beings is essential to our health and well-being. So how do we deny such a need to the one we care about most? If our primary relationship nourishes and stabilizes us but lacks intimacy, we shouldn’t have to destroy our marriage to get that intimacy somewhere else. Should we?

Good question.

Austin Frakt:

Many of us are busy at work, but even at home, there is a lot of work to do. Meal preparation, cleaning, yard work, home maintenance and child care consume considerable time for the typical American.

Much of it isn’t fun, contributing to friction in relationships and taking time away from more pleasant activities that increase happiness. Instead of bickering over who will do the vacuuming, would family life be better if we just outsourced the job?

One survey found that 25 percent of people who were divorced named “disagreements about housework” as the top reason for getting a divorce.

We argue over chores, but they won’t break us up. It’s something else and let’s not get into that. As for chores, I don’t mind paying for them. I just feel bad that other people have to do the shit that I don’t want to do myself.

Richard Brody:

Cecil Taylor died on Thursday, at the age of eighty-nine. Of all the jazz musicians who wrought definitive, revolutionary changes in music in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties, Taylor’s advances went further than anyone else’s to expand the very notion of musical form. His ideas built on the emotional and intellectual framework of modern jazz in order to extend them into seemingly new dimensions—ones that have remained utterly unassimilable by the mainstream and are still in the vanguard, rushing headlong into the future.