Sam Dolnick writes about “The Man Who Knew Too Little”:

Donald Trump’s victory shook him. Badly. And so Mr. Hagerman developed his own eccentric experiment, one that was part silent protest, part coping mechanism, part extreme self-care plan.

He swore that he would avoid learning about anything that happened to America after Nov. 8, 2016.

When I lived in Poughkeepsie, New York and worked at Vassar College, I had no internet and no cable in my apartment. I spent most of my nights reading and watching movies. I knew so little about politics. I wish I could go back to those days now.

Ellen Barry:

Limited risks are increasingly cast by experts as an experience essential to childhood development, useful in building resilience and grit.

Outside the Princess Diana Playground in Kensington Gardens in London, which attracts more than a million visitors a year, a placard informs parents that risks have been “intentionally provided, so that your child can develop an appreciation of risk in a controlled play environment rather than taking similar risks in an uncontrolled and unregulated wider world.”

I am guilty as charged for being over-protective. I still watch every move my toddler does when he’s at the playground. My first boy fell down from the top of the slide. Thank goodness the ground was mulch not concrete. My second boy never seemed to learn his lesson and I don’t want to spend hours in the ER room afterward, which we did several times already. Call me a sucker and a typical parent all you want, but I rather be cautious than sorry.

David Remnick:

The next significant chapter in this stress test for liberal values will be the midterm elections of November, 2018. If the Democratic Party fails to win a majority in either the House of Representatives or the Senate, Trump will be further emboldened. His capacity for recklessness will multiply and go unrestrained. The Republican leadership, which has already proved shocking in its cowardice, will be even less inclined to challenge him.

The Republican leaders are beyond coward. They are a bunch of fucking sycophants.

A practical guide on typography that covers everything from classifications to principles. It is well-written with tons of visual examples. The text face in the book is set in Retina, by Tobias Frere-Jones. It’s a good choice. Unfortunately Poulin who designed the book himself ruined it with vertical lines. They are so distracting. In addition, the type designer profiles, which are written in a couple paragraphs, are set in bold font with vertical lines. It is so disappointing to see a book on typography is not so readable.

Pamela Druckerman:

Modern parents spend far more time with their children than parents did in the 1960s. Yes, a mother reading work emails at the playground has briefly stopped interacting with her child. But Kamenetz — a mother of two — says if she couldn’t do that, she’d need to be at the office.

We know it’s crucial to stimulate and speak to young children, and our generation of parents complies to a possibly unprecedented — and exhausting — degree. Kamenetz notes that we need occasional breaks from this. She bemoans “an ideological stance that judges mothers for not being fully available to their children at all times and that scapegoats working-class families in particular.”

What do Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Kellyanne Conway, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Sean Spicer, Stephen Miller, and Mitt Romney have in common? That’s right. They’re all Sucking Up to Trump. In this short, enlightening book, Deborah Parker and Mark Parker cover the history, art, and science of sycophancy. Other terms for sycophancy includes lickspittle, ass-kisser, bootlicker, and brownnoser. It’s an engaging and informing read; however, I wish the leading in the typesetting is a bit more generous. It feels tight.

As I was browsing the Google Fonts directory, the name Vernon Adams popped all the time. He has designed 51 font families for Google. Out of curiosity, I wanted to find out more about him. Unfortunately, Adams died two years ago after a motor scooter accident. His father-in-law has written a short blog post about him and his work as a type designer. His legacy lives on as his unfinished fonts are continued to be worked on from other designers. Thank you and rest in peace, Adams.

Kathryn Schulz describes these horrifying species:

Of the five-thousand-odd species of stinkbug in the world, the brown marmorated kind is the most destructive, the most annoying, and possibly the ugliest. It is roughly the size of a dime, although thicker, but its head is unusually small, even for an insect, which gives it an appropriately thuggish look. Its six legs prop its shield-shaped body up in the air, as if they were pallbearers at the funeral of a Knight Templar. Its antennae are striped with bands of dark and light, while its eyes, should you get close enough to gaze into them, are the vivid red of an alarm clock at night. The “marmorated” in its name means “marbled,” but “mottled” is closer to the truth. Entomologists, who have a color palette as elaborate as Benjamin Moore’s, describe the underside of its body as “distinctly pale luteous” and the topside as “generally brownish cinereous, but also greyish ochraceous, ochraceous, testaceous, or castaneous.” To everyone else, it looks as dull brown as its own frass, the technical term for insect excrement.

They could be anywhere in your house. Schulz writes:

One poor soul spooned up a stinkbug that had blended into her granola, putting her off fruit-and-nut cereals for life. Another discovered too late that a stinkbug had percolated in her coffeemaker, along with her morning brew. A third removed a turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving Day and discovered a cooked stinkbug at the bottom of the roasting pan. Other people have reported accidentally ingesting stinkbugs in, among other things, salads, berries, raisin bran, applesauce, and chili. By all accounts, the bugs release their stink upon being crunched, and taste pretty much the way they smell. (They are also occasionally eaten by household pets, though seldom twice. One of my cats recently ate two at once, and promptly vomited them up.)

Finally finished reading Rachel Aviv’s provoking, chilling piece on “What Does It Mean to Die?.” Aviv writes:

African-Americans are twice as likely as whites to ask that their lives be prolonged as much as possible, even in cases of irreversible coma—a preference that likely stems from fears of neglect. A large body of research has shown that black patients are less likely to get appropriate medications and surgeries than white ones are, regardless of their insurance or education level, and more likely to receive undesirable medical interventions, like amputations.

Tom Critchlow:

Small b blogging is learning to write and think with the network. Small b blogging is writing content designed for small deliberate audiences and showing it to them. Small b blogging is deliberately chasing interesting ideas over pageviews and scale. An attempt at genuine connection vs the gloss and polish and mass market of most “content marketing”.

Critchlow makes a challenge:

So I challenge you to think clearly about the many disparate networks you’re part of and think about the ideas you might want to offer those networks that you don’t want to get lost in the feed. Ideas you might want to return to. Think about how writing with and for the network might enable you to start blogging. Forget the big B blogging model. Forget Medium’s promise of page views and claps. Forget the guest post on Inc, Forbes and Entrepreneur. Forget Fast Company. Forget fast content.

This blog is written mostly for myself these days. I don’t care about page views and popularity. I am thinking of pulling the plug on Google Analytics since I have not checked it for almost a year or so. I write like no one is reading and that could get me in trouble.