MsNguyễn:

I must have been a teenager then, still in high school and telling mom that I will stay up and accompany her late into the night while she was wrapping more bánh tét while I finishing my homework then later helping her with the rest of her work. We were watching one of those Paris By Night cassettes with blurry streaks due to multiple duplications of copying and talking through the night until both were tired and calling it a night.

Sometimes, it is nice to return and visit some of those wonderful memories, and they did come back in vivid details and colors to remind me how blessed I am to have a large family with whom I shared my childhood.

I love these kind of wonderful memories and I miss reading personal blog like these. In fact, MsNguyễn’s is the only personal blog that I still read these days. She still writes all these years when most bloggers had given up or moved to Facebook. I deactivated Facebook for almost a month. I have not missed it except for using Messenger to video chat with my family in Việt Nam. I will reactivate it around Lunar New Year to connect with family and friends in Việt Nam. Other than that I will focus only on this blog. I hope to see the return of the personal blog this year.

Instead of going to church, artist Byron Kim paints the sky almost every Sunday for the past seventeen years. He also writes a short comment on his work. Vinson Cunningham has written a nice piece about it.

Check out eight totally hilarious reasons from Chase Olivarius-McAllister.

Just read Le Guin’s excellent No Time to Spare last December and found out she passed way on Monday. RIP.

Max Fisher and Amanda Taub explain democracy in a short, well-executed video.

A short, insightful interview with Tonya Harding on “The Daily.” Worth listening on your commute.

Want to see some extremely fucked up stock photography? Follow @darkstockphotos.

I have been listening rigorously to NPR’s “How I Built This with Guy Raz.” Episodes I have binged through include LinkedIn, Kate Spade, Instagram, Chipotle, Teach For America, Starbucks, and Kickstarter. So many inspiring stories. Love this podcast.

Jia Tolentino:

Blogs are necessarily idiosyncratic, entirely about sensibility: they can only be run by workhorses who are creative enough to amuse themselves and distinct enough to hook an audience, and they tend to publish like-minded writers, who work more on the principle of personal obsession than pay. The result is editorial latitude to be obscure and silly and particular, but the finances are increasingly hard to sustain; media consumption is controlled these days by centralized tech platforms—Facebook, Twitter—whose algorithms favor what is viral, newsy, reactionary, easily decontextualized, and of general appeal.

Blog still provides freedom and fun for me. I am just not getting paid doing it and that’s OK with me. I don’t expect to get paid for freedom and fun.

Slate has a new logo, types, and design. Read Julia Turner’s “Slate’s New Look” and Jason Santa Maria’s “Redesigning the Way We Work.”

The Guardian has a new masthead. Read Brand New’s review.