The SignalGate has proved that our government is run by a bunch of fucking morons:

• JD Vance, Vice President
• Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary
• John Ratcliffe, C.I.A. Director
• Marco Rubio, Secretary of State
• Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence
• Scott Bessent, Treasury Secretary
• Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff
• Susie Wiles, White House Chief of Staff
• Steve Witkoff, Special Envoy to the Middle East and Russia

Big props to Jeffrey Goldberg, Editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, for standing up to Trump and his idiotic loyalists. We need more fearless citizens like Goldberg to save our democracy.

May Zheng, a senior majoring in Digital Arts at La Salle University, reached out to me for an alumni interview.

Donny Truong graduated from La Salle University in 2001. In the 24 years since, he has been keeping busy as a designer, author, type consultant, and snowboard instructor.

Donny started at La Salle as a Communication major but then transferred to a different school to study Computer Science. When the new Digital Arts and Multimedia Design program at La Salle was announced, Donny returned to La Salle and completed the DART program with a minor Communication.

After graduation, Donny began searching for job opportunities using HigherEdJobs.com. He has been professionally designing and developing websites ever since. He is now a Director of Design and Web Services at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School, where he oversees the law school websites. This includes the main site and a network of 50 affiliated sites.

Donny maintains a freelance design practice and teaches part-time. He also advises type designers on Vietnamese diacritics, which means that he makes sure that Vietnamese words are rendered legibly and correctly positioned for native readers. He even wrote an e-book about this topic which can be read at vietnamesetypography.com.

Recently, Donny turned his snowboarding hobby into an instructing gig at Whitetail Resort.

See more of Donny’s work at visualgui.com and donnytruong.com.

Interview by May Zheng, ’25

“In the Middle of My Life,” Jennifer Change writes:

I once loved a man
who’d force the weight of his body
into a felt-tip pen, scoring torn

I am not really sure what she means. It takes me half way through the collection to read something I understand. “What Is Truth” is a heartbreaking poem, in which she reveals:

The woman in the bed next to mine
was also a wife, also a suicide, and refused
to take off her headscarf.
Both of us had been emptied,
stomachs pumped, hazy,
self-hazed in the bleak hours
before dawn. She had more to say
than I did, more right to her grief,
though our charts read the same,
neither of us content,
neither white. Without my glasses,
the room a yellow blur,
her coal-dark eyes startling
as a reflection caught
in passing. Alone with her,
far from my life, we were
a calm pair, propped up
on white sheets stiffened by daily
bleaching, every touch sterilized,
unfeeling. Like me, she had taken pills:
Vicodin, Percocet, poisoned anapests
choking our throats. She had not chosen
her own life and so endeavored
to leave it the indifferent husband, the children, pitiless, pulling at her sleeves,
her hands, pant legs, and hems,

She writes a lot about her father as well. I have to revisit the poems to understand their relationship.

Our democracy is collapsing in front of our eyes as Trump is turning the United States into authoritarianism. The majority of Americans had taken democracy for granted. They are so naive because they haven’t lived under an autocracy. They valued their pocketbooks more than our democracy.

I have been vocal about our democracy since 2016 when Trump first took office. As late as last year when I talked to some of my acquaintances, from healthy professionals to computer engineers to assembly workers to nail technicians, they didn’t worry about the future of democracy under Trump. I told them to keep an eye out as Trump returned to the White House. Now I can say to them, “I told you so.”

I hope Americans are waking the fuck up and fighting back. The U.S. citizens must defend our democracy. It doesn’t matter if you are Democrat or Republican, we must come together to save our country first. Without democracy, we will only have one authoritarian regime.

I came across Maname, designed by Pathum Egodawatta and Mooniak, has odd placements of Vietnamese diacritics. They need to be fixed. Get in touch and we’ll work them out.

When I started listening to jazz, I was amazed by the technicality of stride piano, particularly from legends such as James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, and Willie “The Lion” Smith. I hadn’t heard much modern stride piano until I came across Emmet Cohen’s Future Stride. In classic stride, the pianist orchestrates the entire piece. In “Future Stride,” Cohen plays with drums and bass. The result is fascinating. “Symphonic Raps” takes the classic stride, but added the rhythm section to it. Again, it is an exhilarating exercise. With “Dardanella,” the tempo switched from swing to slow to suave Cuban. The slow tunes are enjoyable as well.

Of course I loved this quote from Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

And of course, I misunderstood the quote as well until I read Jay Parini’s explanation in Robert Frost: Sixteen Poems to Learn by Heart. The more I read Parini’s commentaries, the more I need to learn about poetry. I don’t have a clue about the beat and the meter. Most of Frost’s poems are over my head. Though I could “Fire And Ice”:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Parini’s provides more fascinating insights of the poem. The poems, the commentaries, and the typesetting—Adobe Jenson, design by Robert Slimbach–are enjoyable to read.

when i was too young,
you saved me from the chaos
of see-through water

i sat on the grass
where you watched me kiss the girl
didn’t i look young?

on the red kayak,
i paddle into the bay
endlessly seasick

i taste the inside
of our big swollen city
learning how to walk

looking for my joy
i swallowed a gold penny
found in your shallows

broke a beer bottle
danced on the sweet amber glass
flew past my curfew

i try to find you
ask geese if you are lonely
they wink and say yes.

Leila Mottley

Mottley’s poems are poignant and provocative. In her opening poem, “a case for / against repetitions,” she writes:

play dead / play docile / play along
stare a beast in its mouth and dare it to bite this is the only way to know if
the country is still hungry

Mottley writes about blackness and about her great grandmother:

My great grandmother was the original Rosa Parks.
Except it was Virginia and she was so much meaner
than Rosa ever dared to be
My great granny was what you would call
A motherfucker. A bitch. A python
when it came to protecting her young

She calls out “all the best celebrities are perverted” and she spares no Miles Davis:

miles davis plays a mean trumpet and i must admit
i still listen to flamenco sketches when the going gets tough as his knuckles
scabbed over from his woman’s cheekbone
but a man that mean must got something
he needs to puff into that brass
so my daddy puts it on the stereo and
we all name our babies after him
hoping they might be born metallic

I don’t understand everything she writes, but I enjoy her works. The poems are set in Chaparral, designed by Carol Twombly, and they are a pleasure to read.

Let’s keep it real. Trump and his Department of Justice are fucking with the judicial branch. They are trying to defy the court orders to see how far Trump can push his power. They are bullying our federal judges. Fortunately, Judge James Boasberg is not backing down. We need more judges to stand up to Trump and his patrimonialism to save our democracy.