Art and magic often go hand in hand. These four new releases explore the magic of the arts and art of magic.

Indigo’s mom used to be a celebrated artist. Finishing the painting series — Wolfwood, which shows four teenagers in a terrifying jungle, can make her famous and wealthy again, but she is unwilling to. Desperate, Indigo begins working on the paintings herself, but soon she realizes there’s a horrifying reason why her mother stopped painting Wolfwood.

Twins Chris and Clem’s family once ruled over the magic world in New Orleans until a horrible incident ended that forever, and since then the family has suffered and Chris has sworn off magic. Then they discover their mother is being slowly killed by a curse (诅咒). The twins begin to pick apart the secrets and lies, and realize the only way to make things right is to fight for justice.

Joan Sands has a special bond with metal. She uses her powers to help her goldsmith father in his workshop and to tend the stage weapons used by William Shakespeare’s acting company. When some evil powers flood London, Joan discovers she may be the only one to stop them and that she must decide how to protect the people she loves.

In a world where anger can grow into curses, you might end up turned into a frog. A boy named Kellen can unravel (解除) your curse, setting you free. With the mysterious power, he tries to right the wrongs with his companion Nettle, which in turn made himself cursed. So they must go into the unpredictable wilds to seek out the truth behind curses once and for all.

When he went outside during the break, John Buettner would dream of learning the monkey-bars. He uses a wheelchair, so they aren’t accessible to him — in fact, most of the playground at Glen Lake Elementary School isn’t. Betsy Julien would look out at the students in their wheelchairs, and thought, “Our playground is not set up for everybody in the school to play and have fun.”

Now, thanks to this teacher and her students, that dream is about to come true in a bigger way.

Last fall, Julien and a few of her colleagues applied for, and won, a grant for an accessible swing and merry-go-round. The grant fell $35,000 short of the amount the school needed, so Julien asked her class to help raise the rest.

Her students jumped at the idea, and took it a step further. “Why can’t we make the whole playground accessible?” said Hadley Mangan. They brainstormed ideas on how to raise money: door-knocking, partnering with restaurants, handing out flyers, and even cold-calling local businesses. They got to work and reached their goal in a matter of weeks. Now, they aim to raise $1 million so they can completely transform their playground.

Last week, Julien loaded the students for a field trip to see how the equipment is built and even got to color in a blueprint of the playground design. Buettner said he could hardly believe how quickly an idea turned into reality. “All of this equipment is big enough for my friends and I to play on. I just feel some sense of capability.”

Julien speaks through tears, too, when reflecting on the project and the transformation. “Anything we raise beyond our goal will go towards accessible equipment at neighboring schools. I hope that the world is accepting and inclusive for every child.”

“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Captain Ahab’s dying declaration of defiance (抗争) is among the most famous passages in Herman Melville’s novel.

In reality, such victories of the hunted over the hunter were a fantasy in the cruel world of industrial whaling. The biggest cetacean of them all, the blue whale, had all but disappeared from the Southern Ocean by the time a ban on hunting it was introduced in 1967.

Sightings of the largest mammal ever to live on the earth had been rare in the region since then. Not any more. A survey of coastal waters around the island of South Georgia in the sub-Antarctic has had remarkable results.

In just over three weeks, in the krill-rich waters of what was once their main feeding ground, the movements of 55 Antarctic blues were recorded by the British Antarctic Survey. The finding was described as “truly, truly amazing” by one cetacean specialist. It suggests that when a comprehensive audit (审计), due in 2021, is carried out, there is a good chance that the species will prove to be in full recovery mode, as are humpbacks and other whales in the southern hemisphere.

Three years ago, the Natural History Museum established a 25m skeleton (骨架) of a blue whale and named it Hope, intending to inspire new generations to build a sustainable future.

The return of the world’s most splendid ocean travellers to southern waters should serve as an example for wider possibilities of conservation. Ecological wrongs can be righted, or at least mitigated, with sufficient will and organisations.

The more general comeback of the whale - for which environmental campaigners should take a great deal of credit — can be an inspiration for victories yet to be won. It could also act as an added motivation to action on the climate emergency.

What do you want from life? Perhaps you want to spend more time with your family, or get a more secure job, or improve your health. But why do you want those things? Chances are that your answer will come down to one thing: Happiness.

Yet there is some evidence that too much pursuit of happiness is associated with a greater risk of depression. Modern conceptions of happiness are primarily practical, focusing on what we might call the techniques of happiness. The concern is not what happiness is, but instead on how to get it.

But maximizing pleasure isn’t the only option. Every human life, even the most fortunate, is filled with pain. Painful loss, painful disappointments, the physical pain of injury or sickness, and the mental pain of long-suffering boredom, loneliness, or sadness. Pain is an unavoidable consequence of being alive. All the good things in life involve suffering. Writing a novel, running a marathon, or giving birth all cause suffering in pursuit of the final, joyous result.

There are other factors as well. In the eyes of Aristotle, we get happiness by exercising our uniquely human capabilities to think and reason. But thinking and reasoning are as much social activities as they are individual. Happiness requires others; it is not an emotional state so much as it is the excellence of the relations we cultivate with other people.

But even that cannot guarantee happiness. Aristotle recognised that our happiness is hostage（人质）to fortune. Events beyond any individual’s control—war, poverty, and global pandemics—will often make happiness impossible. Happiness is not a mental state that can be permanently won, but instead it’s a practice which we hone（磨练）, imperfectly, in circumstances only partly of our making.

Recognizing this will not secure a good life, but it will avoid the illusory（虚幻的）hope of permanent contentment. No life worth living should meet the only standard. Instead, aim with Aristotle to embrace those faults and to flower in spite of them.