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.

Here’s a colorful design for 2019. Each blog post is now separated by a vibrant color to spice up the layout. I wanted to move away from black text and red link on white background.

Of course the typography is completely changed. Body text is now set in Fern, by David Jonathan Ross. The big headlines are set in Dattilo, a stylish revival of the classic Italian slab by David Jonathan Ross with Roger Black. Dattilo is fresh off Font of the Month Club last night. Small text is set in Frequenz, by Sebastian Losch.

My personal goal is to give this blog at least one redesign a each. For 2018, however, I had gone through six different iterations. I am sure I will do the same for 2019.

As for WordPress, I am not sure how the release of version 5.0 and Gutenberg will change the way I have been theming this blog. I am still using the minimal requirements (index.php and style.css); therefore, the new editor, which allows users to create rich experience, does not fit my need. The minimal theming allows me to hone into the text and make the redesign quickly. I don’t have to comb through 100 files. My focus is still typography rather than image-driven design.

I hope you enjoy the new design.

Gần đây cơm lành canh ngọt nên không viết vớ vẩn nữa. Sống bình yên và bớt căng thẳng. Hạnh phúc là được dành thời gian cho con cái và đọc sách. Tôi không muốn suy nghĩ nhiều càng không muốn va chạm đến người khác. Càng yên tĩnh càng tốt.

Mùa Giáng Sinh cũng sắp tới nên cuộc sống cũng có chút nhộn nhịp hơn. Tôi không hứng thú gì với những ngày lễ cả chỉ muốn được nghỉ làm ở nhà với gia đình. Dĩ nhiên nếu có bạn đi ăn nhậu lai rai cũng vui nhưng không có cũng không sao.

Tôi quý cuộc sống bình thường. Không ồn ào không drama là quá đủ rồi. Có con cái nhỏ mà muốn được yên tĩnh cũng hơi khó. Biết làm sao bây giờ ngoài việc cố tự gắng kiềm chế cảm xúc của mình. Tôi rất muốn được tu tâm dưỡng tánh để được sống nhẹ nhàng. Chỉ thế thôi.

In the first chapter, Ms. Brown gives a remarkable account of her personal experience in finding her true belonging. For the rest of the book, she shares her research and advice on dealing with loneliness, connecting with people who have different political views, and kicking the bullshit. After the engaging beginning, the book drags on even though it has less than 200 pages. It’s a passable read.

Robert Draper writes about Nancy Pelosi in The New York Times Magazine:

Pelosi is something of a paradox in the world of politics. A Gallup poll five months ago found her favorability rating to be at a dismal 29 percent, and yet — unlike other unpopular political figures such as Trump and Hillary Clinton — her 31 years in public life have been free of scandal. She has been excoriated from the right as the quintessence of California limousine liberalism. But she is also a practicing Catholic whose first career was as a stay-at-home mother of five children, with little in common with — and at times little patience for — the new generation of activists in her party, to whom she sometimes refers as “the lefties.” Pelosi — who with her husband, the investor Paul Pelosi, owns a large house in San Francisco’s upper-crust Presidio Heights as well as a Napa Valley vineyard — is indeed rich. But 29 members of Congress, 18 of them Republicans, are richer.

What sets her apart from other legislators of her stature is her gender. Pelosi has been known to say: “No one gives you power. You have to take it from them.” The leitmotif of her three-decade ascent is that of a woman wresting power away from a male-dominated political machine, until one day the machine discovered she was its master.

Pelosi is tough, smart, and talented. The Democrat should be thankful for her leadership.

I am glad that the release of WordPress 5.0 has been pushed back. After testing out Gutenberg, the new, controversial editor, I can see why Matt Mullenweg is pushing hard to get it into core. Gutenberg will define WordPress as a powerful CMS and no longer just a blogging platform. It gives users more flexibility to create richer experience.

I can also see why it is alienating many designers and developers. For this blog, which I have intended to keep simple from the start, I won’t be using Gutenberg. I have no photos, no video, no audio, and no gallery. It is just simply text. I do put up large hero images once in a while, but they do not go into the database. I want the complete control of the text. My theme still just have 3 files. I don’t see the need to use Gutenberg, but I will see if I can develop a theme from scratch like I always had in the past decade just for this site.

I played with the new Twenty Nineteen. It looks impressive, but the theme has tons of files. I might be wasting my time developing a theme from scratch. I just have to roll with what already developed and just customize it for my needs. Once WordPress 5.0 is out and Twenty Nineteen is officially released, I’ll use it to develop a theme for Scalia Law School. It will be beneficial for the school sites than my own personal site.

Gutenberg isn’t solid yet, but it is definitely a step in the right direction. It is understandable that people don’t like new changes, but they will get around to it.

David Armstrong writes in The New Yorker:

Opposition to vaccination is almost as old as vaccination itself. But Web sites like [Joseph] Mercola’s have helped drive the modern anti-vaccination movement. Most scientists consider vaccination one of the greatest public-health advances of the twentieth century, helping to control or even eradicate diseases such as smallpox, polio, and measles in the U.S. Studies have found that vaccines can have side effects, but they are almost always minor, like redness and swelling.

Anti-vaxxers blame vaccines for an increase in the rate of autism diagnoses among American children. From 2000 to 2014, the number of children diagnosed with autism-spectrum disorder increased to one in fifty-nine from one in a hundred and fifty. [David] Ayoub and others have argued that vaccines are one reason for this increase, though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has concluded that “studies have shown that there is no link between receiving vaccines and developing ASD,” and the World Health Organization has issued a similar finding. Prominent anti-vaxxers include celebrities such as the actress Jenny McCarthy and the lawyer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Before becoming President, Donald Trump weighed in, tweeting in 2014 that a “healthy young child goes to doctor, gets pumped with massive shot of many vaccines, doesn’t feel good and changes – autism. Many such cases!”

A study published in September found that Russian trolls and sophisticated Twitter bots tried to foment confusion about vaccination and create a false equivalency between pro- and anti-vaccination arguments. The authors of the study, from George Washington University and other research institutions, warned, “Such strategies may undermine the public health: normalizing these debates may lead the public to question long-standing scientific consensus regarding vaccine efficacy.”

Please vaccinate your kids.

James Bridle discovers horrific videos targeting children for page views. He warns:

Children’s cartoons getting assaulted, getting killed, weird pranks that actually genuinely terrify children. What you have is software pulling in all of these different influences to automatically generate kids’ worst nightmares. And this stuff really, really does affect small children. Parents report their children being traumatized, becoming afraid of the dark, becoming afraid of their favorite cartoon characters. If you take one thing away from this, it’s that if you have small children, keep them the hell away from YouTube.

Yes, watch his TED talk and keep your kids the hell away from YouTube.

Ngày xưa mới qua Mỹ tôi nghe nhạc rap để học tiếng Anh. Giờ đây tôi cho mấy thằng nhỏ nghe rap Việt để nó học tiếng Việt. Mấy hôm nay nghe bài “They Said” của Bin Z có câu: “Nghe nói em đẹp tự nhiên không có sửa hả? / Nghe nói trai Sài Gòn không có cửa hả?”

Đán nói nó hiểu hai câu và dịch lại tiếng Anh như sau: “That means a beautiful girl has no milk and a boy has no door.”

Đán will turn seven on Thursday. We’re planning on taking him to his favorite sushi buffet to celebrate. Tonight he misbehaved; therefore, I told him that we will cancel the celebration if he doesn’t get his act together. He responded, “You hate me and you think I am fucked.” His words cut through me like a knife. I told him I was hurt and furious. I was holding Vương in my arms so I yelled at him and told him to get out of my room.

Đán’s behavior has changed drastically over the last year. At school, he failed to follow his teachers’ instructions. At home, he ignored our words. What irritated the heck out me was that he did what we asked him not to do. His misbehaves drove me nuts. I am extremely frustrated, but I can’t turn him away. I am working hard to bring out his charmness, selflessness, and hilariousness. He has those qualities in him, but he chose not to use them.

The failure is on me. I let my emotion takes over when I get furious and frustrated. Instead of spanking or yelling, I just shut myself down and out.