Asia has some of the most suitable places in the world to retire. Retirement in Asia is sure to be full of exotic (非本地的) experiences and unexpected adventures.

George Town, Malaysia

George Town is one of Southeast Asia’s most livable destinations. Life here is both traditional and 21st century, and the city is exotic and comfortable. Low costs are a big part of the appeal. Delicious and inexpensive food is served everywhere, and there are at least a dozen museums and other venues for enjoying high culture.

Bali, Indonesia

Bali enjoys a well-deserved reputation as one of the most beautiful tropical islands in the world. The ocean, never far away, offers world class diving, surfing, parasailing and other water sports. On the southeast side of Bali is the small town of Sanur. Quiet and laid-back, Sanur feels far removed from the crowds of tourists who flock to Bali for vacations and honeymoons.

Da Nang, Vietnam

One of Vietnam’s biggest cities with a population of over 1 million, Da Nang manages to be forward-thinking and provincial at the same time. The roads and architecture are modern, but most of the businesses are still family run, with almost no big international brand names, fast food joints or coffee shop chains to be found.

Chiang Mai, Thailand

Since the 1800s, Chiang Mai has been attracting tourists from the west with great weather, rich history and distinct culture. The biggest advantage of retirement in Chiang Mai is the low cost of living and affordable health care. The biggest downside can be air pollution during the annual burning season, mid-February through mid-April, when local farmers burn their fields.

An unpublished novel by the late literary giant Gabriel Garcia Marquez will arrive on bookstore shelves next year. The novel called En Agosto Nos Vemos—roughly translated from Spanish as See You In August—will be published by Penguin Random House.

The Colombian author behind One Hundred Years of Solitude and Love in the Time of Cholera died in 2014, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript. At the time, Garcia Marquez’s family hadn’t decided whether to publish the novel posthumously. But now his two sons, Rodrigo and Gonzalo Garcia Barcha, have concluded that the book should be read by an eager public.

“En Agosto Nos Vemos was the fruit of a final effort to continue creating against all odds,” they said. “Reading it once again almost 10 years after his death, we discovered that the text had many and very enjoyable merits and nothing to prevent us from enjoying the outstanding aspects of Gabo’s work: his capacity for invention, the poetry of language, the captivating narrative, his understanding of the human being and his affection for his experiences and misfortunes, but most especially, the love, possibly the main theme of all his work,” they added, using a common nickname for Garcia Marquez.

According to the publishing industry trade publication The Bookseller, Viking will publish the novel in hardback, e-book and audio versions, and Penguin Random House Spain will publish it in all Spanish-speaking countries except Mexico.

Viking editorial director Isabel Wall told the website it was “exceptionally privileged to be bringing this re-discovered masterpiece into the world” 10 years after Garcia Marquez’s death.

Ask ChatGPT to write a five-paragraph essay on the symbolism of “The Great Gatsby” and it will produce a response within seconds. That’s not all. The ability of the artificial intelligence chatbot tool (聊天机器人) is vast.

ChatGPT is a “large language model,” which means it’s able to generate readable text on demand in a wide range of styles and for a variety of purposes. It can fix spelling and grammar errors, give feedback on writing, write poems and songs, create lesson plans for teachers and much more. It can perform those tasks with noticeably more accuracy and coherence (连贯) than previous models. Plus, ChatGPT is designed to be user-friendly, and it’s free. It quickly has the attention of school administrators, teachers, parents and students, and its presence has gained mixed responses.

Some say they’re excited about its potential to advance learning for some students and become a valuable tool in education. Those teachers are thinking about ways to adapt their teaching to incorporate it in their lessons. However, one of the main concerns that educators have is that students might explore ChatGPT’s potential use to cheat on assignments—using the app to produce research papers and essays instead of doing the work themselves. New York City Public Schools announced in early January 2023 that it was banning ChatGPT across all district devices and networks. Other big city districts like Seattle and Los Angeles have also blocked access to the app, and more may follow in the future, which means to receive general recognition, ChatGPT has a long way to go.

Edward Tian, a student at Princeton University, recently developed an app that he said “can quickly and efficiently detect whether an essay is ChatGPT or human written.” This can partially free a certain number of people from worries, who advocate a cautious use of this tool.

The will to live more sustainably is certainly growing in the UK, even if many are still unsure about how to put that into action.

Most have become well acquainted with recycling paper, cardboard, metal and glass, thanks in large part to council-provided recycling bins for each household. But when it comes to more difficult to recycle items, many households are all at sea. It is the case that the UK is rapidly becoming one of the worst offenders for e-waste in the world. Although it takes a little more conscious waste management, there are ways that you can recycle these more tricky household items and reduce your environmental impact.

E-waste like phones and laptops contains precious metals, like gold, nickel and copper, which leak toxins into the ground when they decompose (分解). Recycling the metals in electronics is vital then to lessen the tech industry’s environmental and social impact. For mobile phones, your retailer might already have a recycling initiative set up. O2 and Virgin Media offer customers money in exchange for their old devices, depending on their condition. As for old clothes, lots of shops, like M&, now offer clothes donation banks in-store, while councils are getting in on the act with on-street clothes recycling points. You can also sell your clothes or donate them to charity—second hand apps like Depop have already ensured that the resale market in Britain grew at an impressive speed. Mattresses (床垫) are especially difficult to get rid of when they reach their end of life, and many of us are resorting to landfill. Many of the materials in mattresses, such as box springs, are not biodegradable (可生物降解的), so it is better to save them from landfill by reusing them. Companies like Collect Your Old Bed pick up your old mattress and bed parts and take them to be dismantled and recycled.

Individual acts alone can’t fix social ills. But each of us can do our part to put more energy into the search for solutions.