【推荐2】Read Across America Day

Read Across America (RAA) is a day held annually on March 2nd that encourages children in every community to read and also encourages parents and teachers to celebrate the joy of reading. It’s a holiday that has been celebrated since 1998 and falls on the same day as children’s book author Dr. Seuss’ birthday.

This holiday dates back to May of 1997. This is when a small group of people at the National Education Association (NEA) came up with the idea to create a day of the year that celebrates reading among children. They reasoned that since many school football programs could get children engaged in the sport through pep rallies (鼓舞士气的集会), then why couldn’t the same thing be done for reading? So they decided to turn to a Read Across America program that was officially launched on March 2, 1998, and ever since it has continued to grow in size. Today, more than 50 national nonprofit and association sponsors (资助者) and more than 3. 3 million NEA members support the effort every year.

This holiday is celebrated in numerous ways. All over the country, libraries, schools and community centers hold special Read Across America events that promote reading in their communities. Teachers also develop special events on this day to encourage their students to read. The NEA also sponsors reading round tables and has an online store that allows people to buy everything they need for their RAA celebrations. This includes Dr. Seuss hats, RAA bookmarks, special RAA flash drives and even RAA mugs.

While recommended student reading lists vary from community to community, there are some books that always seem to pop up. Below is a partial(部分的) list of some of the books read by elementary, middle school and high school students.

【推荐3】Birds do it. People do it. Owls do it in the daytime. Even Caenorhabditis elegans, a primitive roundworm made up of a few thousand cells, does something that looks an awful lot like it. Sleep is an ancient, universal experience.

But partly because it is so commonplace, for a long time sleep was a subject that scientists had not woken up to. It is only in the past half-century or so that it has attracted the attention of dedicated researchers. A new book from Kenneth Miller, a science journalist, sets out to elaborate the field’s short but fascinating history. The book is organized around the life and hard work of a scientist named Nathaniel Kleitman who set up a pioneering sleep-research programme at the University of Chicago.

The early pages of the book, before there is much in the way of established science to describe, are the weakest. A good deal of time is spent on biographical details and pen portraits of the world through which Kleitman moved. But the story soon picks up. It ranges from the discovery of rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep and circadian rhythms — the biological clocks that govern humanity’s days — to the effects of sleep deprivation (which can be fatal, at least in lab animals). It also probes the purpose, if any, of dreams.

Underlying it all is a sense of psychology's slow maturing as a science. New technologies such as electroencephalographs, which monitor electrical activity in the brain, have offered practitioners the ability to study brains directly, rather than trying to infer what they are doing from the behaviour of their owners.

Discoveries often lead to new questions in turn. That is why neat, tidy endings are hard to achieve in science books; this one is no difference. Despite all the progress of the past 50 years, scientists are still unsure what sleep is for. For anyone curious about asking the right questions, however, Mr. Miller’s book is a good place to start.

【推荐1】Taylor Swift showed very early promise as a singer of country songs, performing from the age of nine. She learned the guitar and persuaded her family to move to Tennessee so she could further her career. She holds numerous records for achievements in music, has been named among the top 100 most influential people on more than one occasion and was named as Woman of the Decade and Artist of the Decade in the 2010s. Swift’s musical style has evolved from country to pop and her fans number in the millions.

Taylor Swift has a firm belief that we should all be ourselves. She tempers this by saying that we must be respectful of others, honest and strong-willed. Strength of purpose will carry a person through life and see them achieve great things. Do not, she says, be average. Stand out and be the best person that you can.

Her view of life is simple. We each have one life, and we must make sure we do not waste it. Life is there to be enjoyed and to be fulfilled. Only we can control what happens in our lives, and must not allow others to judge us or create false opinions of us.

To live a life that has meaning, we must be prepared to learn from mistakes and failures and deal with them without getting discouraged or distracted from our path. No one should tell you what you can’t do, and you must not let a mistake tell you that either. When someone tries to stop you from doing something, be eager to prove them wrong. Be keen, too, to show that your mistakes won’t hold you back.

Taylor Swift puts great store in happiness. Seeking happiness is a wonderful ambition, and everyone should see it as an aim. Success without happiness is a meaningless achievement. Aiming for happiness can go along with other goals too. Swift doesn’t rest when she has achieved one goal, but picks up another and pursues that with the same vigor and determination.

【推荐2】Szilajka Erzsebet is a Hungarian artist who turns ordinary pebbles into amazing works of art. The artist says she’s inspired by the pebbles’ shape, the richness of their patterns, and the beauty of nature. “I use all the pebbles in their original form shaped only by nature itself.” says Szilajka.

When Szilajka is creating her art, she lets her feelings shape the details. “This way the completed picture becomes dynamic in spite of the fact that the pebbles themselves play a static role in the work of art,” explains the artist. “It’s like a photo taken in the perfect time. It includes the movement, the feeling, the story which can be continued. This way there are not only pebbles in the pictures but invisible fingerprints and ‘soul-prints’ as well.”

When creating her art, Szilajka often relies on her customers’ ideas but uses her artistic freedom as well. “If I only listen to myself, I do think that the most essential elements in life stand on the simplest things,” says the artist. “For me, art is adding that little something extra to simple subject matters.”

The artist believes that the completed work of art is not only her own but a common creation of the artist and the receiver. “These two things together is pebble art,” explains Szilajka. “It only becomes a real work of art if it really means something to the receivers as they have the opportunity to add their own feelings and thoughts as well. Pebbles have no face, so anyone can enter and play a part in a pebble picture…”

【推荐3】This painting Spring Bouquet has a precise structure. The flowers spill over into the lower left-hand corner, with an imbalance as free and as wild as nature. But at once the artist responds to this unbalance. To the right of the vase, Renoir has developed a heavy shadow area, rich in purples and sharply contrasted with the light below it. The placing of the straight line in the lower right side is necessary. If the reader covers this line, he will see that the composition becomes unbalanced.

The Impressionist technique had not yet developed when Renoir painted this picture. Yet the painting with light and color indicates Impressionism is around the corner; there is something of that school in the feeling of the out-of-doors that Renoir has acquired. The texture (纹理) of the flowers is described. Above all, one can’t help saying the very nice smell of the flowers is there, too.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in 1841. He began working as a young painter of porcelain and textiles. At age 21, Renoir entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and went on to study under the instructions of painter Charles Gleyre’s. Even though his paintings had been initially rejected by the Academy and the public, with time he became one of the most admired artists of his generation.

Unfortunately, in 1899, he was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis (风湿性关节炎). It is a disease that causes a lot of pain. In addition, the person affected by it may also have deformities (畸形). Consequently, his movements became very limited and each movement was a big and certainly painful effort.

His son, Jean Renoir, writes in the book Renoir, My Father after his father passed away, the reaction of the people to the painting of the father, after seeing his hands:

Visitors who were unprepared for this could not take their eyes off his deformity. Though they did not dare to mention it, their reaction would be expressed by some such phrase as “It isn’t possible!” With hands like that, how can he paint those pictures? There’s some mystery somewhere.