Going away for your mini break? Bring these long weekend essentials to make the most of the leave.

Whether you’re off on a city break or exploring beaches, chances are you’re getting your steps in this holiday, which will be hard going on your feet. These ECCO sandals are specially designed and most comfortable when hiking, with an EVA footbed and ECCOFLUIDFORM design offering extra cushioning (减震) and flexibility.

Every travelling bookworm’s best friend is now smaller and lighter, at just six inches screen width. With 16GB storage, you can download thousands of books to keep you busy on any long holiday journeys, and the battery life now lasts up to six weeks on one single charge, but may vary depending on use.

Portable chargers have gained popularity recently, but this one is genuinely pocket-sized without any loss of the charging power. The power bank itself can be fully charged within a speedy two hours, and delivers roughly two charges for an iPhone 15. At10.5cm length, and 99g weight, you can easily slip this into your bag without feeling weighed down.

Give yourself some extra pence of mind with this anti-theft crossbody bag, which helps you keep your valuables secure and within easy reach. The chest bag has an extreme slim design at less than half an inc h thick, which makes it lightweight and easy to fit under your clothes.

The latest bad but unsurprising news on education is that reading and writing scores on the SAT have once again declined. The language competence of our high schoolers fell steeply in the 1970s and has never recovered. This is very worrisome, because the best single measure of the overall quality of our primary and secondary schools is the average verbal(语言的) score of 17-year-olds. This score correlates with the ability to learn new things readily, to communicate with others and to secure a job. It also predicts future income.

The most credible analyses have shown that the chief causes are vast curricular changes, especially in the critical early grades. In the decades before the Great Verbal Decline, a content-rich elementary school experience evolved into a content-light, skills-based, test-centered approach. Cognitive psychologists agree that early childhood language learning (ages 2 to 10) is critical to later verbal competence, not just because of the remarkable linguistic plasticity of young minds, but also because of the so-called Matthew Effect.

The name comes from a passage in the Bible: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Those who are language-poor in early childhood get relatively poorer, and fall further behind, while the verbally rich get richer.

The origin of this cruel truth lies in the nature of word learning. The more words you already know, the faster you acquire new words. This sounds like an invitation to vocabulary study for babies, but that’s been tried and it’s not effective. Most of the word meanings we know are acquired indirectly, by intuitively(凭直觉的) guessing new meanings as we understand the main idea of what we are hearing or reading. The Matthew Effect in language can be restated this way: “To those who understand the main idea shall be given new word meanings, but to those who do not there shall follow boredom and frustration.”

Clearly the key is to make sure that from kindergarten on, every student, from the start, understands the main idea of what is heard or read. If preschoolers and kindergartners are offered substantial and coherent lessons concerning the human and natural worlds, then the results show up five years or so later in significantly improved verbal scores. By staying on a subject long enough to make all young children familiar with it (say, two weeks or so), the main idea becomes understood by all and word learning speeds up. This is especially important for low-income children, who come to school with smaller vocabularies and rely on school to pass on the knowledge base children from rich families take for granted.

Current reform strategies focus on testing, improving teacher quality, and other changes. Attention to these structural issues has led to improvements in the best public schools. But it is not enough.

In the autumn of 2020, while stargazing on his balcony in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Teju Cole was inspired to start taking photos of his kitchen counter. He compared the daily migrations of his pots, pans, spoons, and graters to the revolutions of celestial bodies (天体), and began to track them in a “counter history”. A year later, he published the results as Golden Apple of the Sun (2021), a book-length photo essay that expands his isolated domestic experiment until it seems to include the whole world. Cole writes about the hunger he suffered as a boarding-school student in Nigeria, Dutch Golden Age still-lifes, slavery and the sugary recipes in an ancient cookbook. “The later a photograph is in a given sequence, the heavier it is,” Cole explained. Somehow, from this kitchen sink of memoir (回忆录), art history, and observant boredom emerges a portrait of the pandemic’s collective solitude, “this year of feeling buried in the dark earth like bulbs.”

Cole’s work makes an art—and a necessary virtue—of close looking. Open City (2011), his first novel, won praise for its portrayal of post-9/11 New York, whose buried histories of violence and displacement resurface in the course of a medical student’s wanderings. In Cole’s essays, tranquil Vermeers reveal traces of empire in colonial times, and stormy Caravaggios picture beforehand the uncertain journeys of twenty-first-century migrants.

His great theme is the limits of vision, and the way that these limits can serve as the basis for a kind of second sight. “Among the human rights is the right to remain unseen and dark,” Cole writes in Black Paper (2021); a recent essay collection. In his own pictures, people seldom appear directly, but their presence is everywhere implied. Blind Spot (2017), an experimental photo book recording his travels, gathers images of hotel rooms, border fences, ships, and tombs. “Darkness is not empty,” Cole writes. “It is information at rest. Beauty, briefly, slips from the shadows.”