The great pilosopher Vlaire once said “Reding makes people see and think clearly.” If you want to be a better self, try the following books.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice is kind of a literary Rosetta Stone, the inspiration, basis, and model for so many modern novels. For a book written in the early 19th century, its modernity is surprising only until you realize that this is the novel that in many ways defined what a modern novel is.

A Wild Child’s Guide to Endangered Animals

From New York Times bestselling author Millie Marotta comes this gorgeous celebration of the animal kingdom. Highlighting the difficulty of 43 endangered species from around the world, the book takes readers on a trip through freshwater, oceans, forests, mountains, deserts, grasslands and wetlands while learning about rare and well- known animals and their habitats.

Patriarchy and Capitalism

Chizuko Ueno, a leading Japanese sociologist, feminist (女权主义) critic and public intellectual, has been a pioneer in women’s studies and the author of many books, including Patriarchy and Capitalism, which discusses the status of Japanese women.

Know My Name

Chanel Miller’s breathtaking memoir is praised to be the Best Book of the Year in People magazine. In this book, she recalls all her whole life. It’s a story of trauma (创伤) and transcendence (超越), shining with the courage required to move through suffering and live a full and beautiful life.

Heavy clouds threaten rain, but this doesn’t seem to weaken the spirits of the gardeners who are cheerfully weeding in a community vegetable garden which lies deep inside Manguinhos, previously a rubbish dump.

The Manguinbos garden is part of the Hortas Cariocas project (Carioca Gardens). Launched in 2006 by Julio Cesar Barros, an agriculturist who works for the government, the project now includes 55 gardens that are located either in schools or in ‘vulnerable’ neighbourhoods, such as favelas (棚户区). The gardens produce organic food that is then supplied to feed low-income families around.

Barros explains that the expansion of the largest garden which will benefit five nearby favelas is under way. It will follow the same model as existing gardens. Each of the five favelas will provide a team of local gardeners. Half of the produce must be donated locally, but the team is then free to sell the other half, adding to the salary they receive,

Hortas Cariocas is run and funded by the government, but each garden is tended by a group of locals who receive a small salary for their work. The favela residents involved in the gardens are nevertheless enthusiastic about the project’s other benefits, such as education and bringing people happiness. “I always tell people, ‘Hortas Cariocas’ is the name of the project, but its surname is ‘Saving Lives’,” says Ezequiel Dias Areas, who manages the team of gardeners in Manguinhos. Dias Areas was unemployed for five years before getting involved in 2013. Without the garden “today I might be doing something illegal, I might be dead, I might be in prison”, he says.

Douglas dos Santos, a 30-year-old father-of-four, tells his story. “I feel valued,” he says, explaining how he learned about agriculture via the project. Despite his pride, dos Santos isn’t blind to the project’s shortcomings. He readily admits that juggling a pleasant relationship with the favela’s residents’ association is no easy task.

Microbiologists have designed a sustainable way to remove polluting microplastics from the environment by using bacteria. Initial design as it is, it paves the way for sustainably lowering plastic pollution levels and stop the “plastification”.

Bacteria naturally tend to group together and stick to surfaces, and this creates a sticky material called “biofilm”. Researchers at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) want to use this adhesive bacteria character and capture microplastics in polluted water to form an easily disposable and recyclable blob(团) .

Sylvia Lang Liu, microbiology researcher at PolyU and lead researcher on this project, together with his team, has engineered a bacterial biofilm, which can fix and absorb microplastics floating around in the water, and make them sink to the bottom of the water. Then the researchers can separate the microplastics from the bacteria traps and get them ready to recycle.

Microplastics are the plastic fragments, usually smaller than 5mm, which are accidentally released into the environment during production and breakdown of grocery bags or water bottles, or during everyday activities such as washing synthetic (合成的) clothes or using personal care products with scrubbing microbeads in them. Microplastics are visually tiny, making it challenging to develop effective solutions to trap, collect, and recycle them.

Microplastics are not easily biodegradable (生物降解的), so they stick around for long and absorb and accumulate poisonous chemicals. They spread into wastewater and into the oceans, endangering marine animals and eventually threatening human health, Microplastics had been found in more than 114 species living in the water and also salt, lettuce, apples, and more in 2018 according to the International Maritime Organization.

“This is an innovative application of biofilm engineering l0 address the plastio pollution crisis,” said Dr Joanna Sadler, researcher at University of Edinburgh, who was not involved in this study. “One of the biggest challenges in dealing with microplastics is capturing such small particles. Liu and co-workers have denmonstrated an elegant solution to this problem, which holds great potential to be further developed into a real-world wastewater treatment technology.”

Print newspapers dominated the early 1900s, but in November 1922, the dawn of radio news arrived when the BBC launched its first daily radio service. It marketed itself as news by and for social elites (精英), and broadcasters were required to use “received pronunciation”. News shifted to television broadcasting in the 1950s.

The creation of the WorldWideWeb in the 1990s changed things again. The internet has become a key site for sharing information, and news is more accessible than it has ever been before. Crises can be reported from on the ground by people who directly understand them. Stories can be shared with the click of a button which can be dangerous. In the time it takes for a story to move from a news site to Facebook to your WhatsApp group chat, context lost and facts go unchecked.

In 2016, we witnessed a BBC watershed moment for the news landscape. Negative coverage was the order of the day in the general election. Clinton was criticized for everything from her speaking style to her use of emails. As Clinton was being attacked in the press, Donald Trump was attacking the press, claiming that it is was trying to “influence” the election in her favor. The news is not about what’s ordinary or expected, but what’s new and different, better yet when filled with anger and conflict. Following the election troubled by dishonesty and misinformation spread largely on social media, Oxford Dictionaries announced “post-truth” as its international word of the year. Frequency of the word’s usage rose by 2,000 percent that year.

With so much information at our fingertips, the massive volume news can be ovenwhelming. Couple this with the increasing uncertainty about what is true and what is not, it is perhaps no wonder that recent years have seen the birth of the “slow journalism” movement. First coined in 2007 by Susan Greenberg, it invites us to slow down and really pay attention to what’s happening around us.