GW Law hits with layoffs to combat the school’s financial challenges even with the cost of attendance of $115,000 a year for each JD student. That’s crazy!

In retrospect, when I applied for GW School of Business, the first thing I learned was that it was one of the most expensive schools in the world. I thought I would never get laid off. Today its Global MBA program costs $134,000 a year. Damn!

For posterity, here are some projects I worked on for GW School of Business from January 2008 – October 2011.

I am getting tired of paying for books I had returned to the libraries. The staff didn’t check them back in, but I was held accountable. A few times, I had to check the books on the shelves again. They were re-shelved without checking back in. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything when the books weren’t found. I didn’t mind paying for a book or two once in a while, but the errors kept repeating in more frequents. I am not sure how to prevent the issue. I brought the issue to the staff, but they just shrugged it off. From now on, I am going to take a photo of all the books before returning them as evidence. Even then, I am not sure if they would believe me if I told them I had returned them. Better yet, I’ll request the staff to check them back in instead of dropping them in the return box.

Although the website for Le Mekong Vietnamese Cuisine is no longer active, I made some updates to keep the archive fresh.

What I love about the New Yorker is that you never know what kind of stories you will read. For example, only the New Yorker writes about something as mundane as self-storage facilities, and yet still manages to make the subject fascinating. David Owen writes:

According to the co-founder and C.E.O. of Neighbor, an industry marketplace that works like Airbnb, there are more self-storage facilities in the U.S. than there are Starbucks, McDonald’s, Walmart, Home Depot, Domino’s, Dunkin’, and Costco locations combined. Annual revenues are estimated to be more than forty billion dollars.

People who work in self-storage often say that their market is driven by “the four D’s”: death, displacement, divorce, and downsizing, all life events that entail sudden collisions between stuff accumulation and reality.…

There’s probably a fifth D: the delusion that your children will want the items you’re planning to bequeath to them, especially the kind of furniture that used to be called antiques but that young people for some time have referred to derisively as “brown.”

We’re not to the point where we need to rent a self-storage space, but we do own more shits than we can store in our home.

I am excited to announce that I have accepted an offer from Vail Resorts to return as a part-time snowboard and ski instructor at Whitetail for the 2026/2027 winter season. I am looking forward to creating the Experience of a Lifetime for our guests.

Joshua Rothman, writing for the New Yorker, asks, “Have We Destroyed Childhood?”

If you let your children play at the park by themselves, you could be reported by your neighbors and led away in handcuffs: it’s no wonder that many of today’s parents keep their kids on a short leash. [Peter] Gray, meanwhile, describes how, at age four, he was sent to the corner store by himself to buy cigarettes, crossing the street along the way. A few years later, he joined the scrum of kids who spent their after-school time playing around the neighborhood almost entirely unsupervised. Decade by decade, he writes, the childhood he enjoyed has been replaced by a new way of growing up. And the result, he argues, has been an ongoing decline in the happiness and mental health of young people. “The ultimate goal of childhood is to break away from dependence on parents and establish oneself as one’s own person,” Gray asserts. But adults, increasingly, are building a world in which this is impossible.

Yes, I agree. As parents, our job is to become obsolete.

Everybody go through stuff / Life is a gift, love, blade it up.

Wake up in the morning and I remind myself.
Life is still worth loving. Go for a ride by myself.

Ruby Cramer writes for the New Yorker:

This year, vaccination rates among kindergartners decreased across immunizations for measles, mumps, rubella, polio, diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis. New parents are also increasingly declining a Vitamin K injection for their infants. The shot has been standard for newborns since 1961. A so-called black-box warning associated with the shot mentions adverse reactions and has become a major topic among crunchy-parenting groups online. But the warning refers primarily to allergic reactions in adults; only one case of an allergic reaction has ever been recorded in a newborn. There is virtually no downside to the injection apart from the transient pain of the needle, and the upside is tremendous. Babies are born with low amounts of Vitamin K, which is required to form blood clots. Without the shot, an otherwise healthy newborn can bleed to death internally, usually in the brain.

I highly recommend reading the entire piece.

Emily Witt takes us through the horrific scene of Operation Metro Surge, a campaign of mass detention and deportation in Minneapolis. It’s a brutal read.