【推荐1】There is something to be said for being a generalist, even if you are a specialist. Knowing a little about a lot of things that interest you can add to the richness of a whole, well-lived life.

Society pushes us to specialize, to become experts. This requires commitment to a particular occupation, branch of study or research. The drawback to being specialists is that we often come to know more and more about less and less. There is a great deal of pressure to master one's field. You may pursue training, degrees, or increasing levels of responsibility at work. Then you discover the pressure of having to keep up.

Some people seem willing to work around the clock in their narrow specialty. But such commitment can also weaken their sense of freedom. These specialists could work at the office until ten each night, then look back and realize they would have loved to have gone home and enjoyed the sweetness of their family and friends, or traveled to exciting places, meeting interesting people Mastering one thing to the exclusion of others can hold back your true spirit.

Generalists, on the other hand, know a lot about a wide range of subjects and view the whole with all its connections. They are people of ability, talent, and enthusiasm who can bring their broad perspective (视角) into specific fields of expertise (专长). The doctor who is also a poet and Philosopher, is a superior doctor, one who can give so much more to his patients than just good medical skills.

Things are connected. Let your expertise in one field fuel your passions in all related areas. Some of your interests may not appear to be connected but, once you explore their depths, you discover that they are. My editor Toni, who is also writer, has edited several history books. She has decided to study Chinese history. Fascinate by the structural beauty of the Forbidden City as a painter, she is equally interested to learn more about Chinese philosophy. “I don't know where it will lead, but I'm excited I'm on this pursuit.”

These expansions into new worlds help us by giving us new perspectives. We begin to see the interconnectedness of one thing to another in all aspects of our life, of ourselves and the universe. Develop broad, general knowledge and experience. The universe is all yours to explore and enjoy.

【推荐2】Imagine a plate holding two strawberries, similar in appearance. One came out of a supermarket box, meaning it was probably harvested before it is fully grown, immediately placed in a forced-air cooling unit, loaded onto a refrigerated truck and driven hundreds of miles. By the time it reached the plate two weeks may have passed. The other strawberry was picked from a garden minutes before being eaten.

The first one will probably not taste good as expected. The second is likely to be sweet; the flavor will remain in the mouth. Supermarket strawberries are not entirely without advantages: they are convenient and available even in winter. But the two berries differ from each other in the same way that hearing music in a concert hall differs from listening to an MP3. The home-grown fruit is an eatable case for planting a home garden.

Planting cool-weather greens can seem meaningless as well-stocked supermarket shelves are available all week. But the same could be said of cooking: cheap and good restaurants everywhere, so why bother to make your own meals?

That attitude fails to understand the basic appeal of gardening: it mistakes the product for the purpose. It is true that a garden can produce tomatoes and carrots that taste like themselves rather than the plastic they are usually packaged in. Finding some favorite vegetables in the shops can take some time, effort and expense; growing your own vegetables, rare or routine, ensures a reliable supply.

On the other hand, a garden, especially in the early years, can also produce frustration. Creative gardeners may plant the wrong crops for their soil. Little animals may have the habit of taking single bites of cucumbers, beans and tomatoes. And even expert gardeners can lose a season’s harvest to uncooperative weather.

No matter. The real joy of gardening is the time spent doing it. The deepest pleasure — as with cooking, writing, bringing up children or almost anything worthwhile —is in the work itself. A gardener’s memories center not around the food produced, but around long summer afternoons with hands in the dirt of a home garden, surrounded by family. To garden is to patiently and lovingly help life grow, in the ground and above it.

It is necessary to be reasonable and flexible enough to avoid conflicts as much as possible and live in peace with others.     1     If you have done all your best to avoid conflicts and you are still arguing, then read these effective tips on how to avoid conflicts.

● Don’t get in the center of the conflict.

Sometimes people can get in the center of conflicts due to their enthusiasm for offering help. Frankly speaking, it is very unwise, because it can make you the main figure of the conflict.     2     You should focus on your own life issues.

● Be kind.

    3     Life is full of conflicts and disagreements, that’s why you should find more conservative ways of dealing with them. For example, kindness can lessen the conflict.

● Try to be a peacekeeper.

Peacekeepers tend to cooperate with people without bad emotions which usually lead to arguments and even conflicts. “    4    ” This saying is the life motto of a natural-born peacekeeper. Don’t worry if you are not a natural-born peacekeeper; you can gain this skill during life.

● Walk off.

When the conflict is gathering pace and you can’t manage to control yourself, you should choose to handle the situation in another way. By all means, try to keep yourself away from stress.     5     You should get away from the situation for a while.

【推荐1】When he was a kid, Alex Vardakostas began working in the grill (烧烤店) alongside adult employees. He estimates he has cooked 50,000 burgers (汉堡包).

Now, Vardakostas co-owns a burger joint called Creator, in San Francisco, California. But he doesn’t stand over a grill flipping burgers, and neither do his employees. At Creator, burgers are cooked and assembled entirely by machine. And because it costs less to maintain the machine than to pay a kitchen’s worth of employees, burgers cost less.

Creator is just one example of a growing phenomenon: Automation is taking over more and more jobs. That means work is done by machines or computers instead of people.

According to a report from McKinsey Global Institute, about 800 million people could be forced out of their jobs by 2030, McKinsey predicts that as technology improves, some tasks will be done more quickly or cheaply by machine, so businesses will install robots or computer programs to perform them.

Some jobs are more likely to be automated than others. Machines can do jobs that have three characteristics: They are routine, repetitive, and predictable. Some of these jobs pay low wages and require little education. But others pay well and demand an advanced college degree. Taxi drivers, cashiers, lawyers, and doctors all perform some tasks that can be done by machines.

So what jobs are safe from automation? Answers include coming up with new ideas or work that involves interacting with other people and building relationships, Jobs in engineering, science, the arts,therapy, and nursing are examples.

At Creator, Vardakostas hired people to do just that kind of work. Instead of repetitive burger prepping, workers interact with customers and advise them on flavor pairings, like mushroom sauce with pickles and onion jam. “In our world at Creator, all the work is creative and social,” Vardakostas says. “And I think that is what we’re going to see more of the future.”

【推荐3】Just wanting a hamburger, Hembert Figueroa was surprised to learn the dollar bills in his pocket were no good at Dos Toros Taqueria in Manhattan.

Figueroa, an ironworker, had to stand to the side, holding his hamburger, until a cashier helped him find another customer willing to pay for his meal with a card in exchange for cash. “I had money but I couldn’t pay,” he said.

Cash-free stores are causing a backlash among some activists who say the practice looks down upon people like Figueroa, who either lack bank accounts or rely on cash for many transactions (交易).

Supporters for banning cashless stores worry that technology is moving too fast for the 6.5% of American households—8.4 million—that do not have a bank account.

Business owners who go cashless say they are following the lead of majority of customers who are abandoning cash payments. Retailers are under pressure to satisfy customers with higher expectations for fast and convenient service, driven by companies like Amazon and Uber.

Leo Kremer, co-worker of Dos Toros, said the amount of cash transactions at his stores fell from about 50% a decade ago to 15% last year. Cash transactions made handling cash especially troublesome. Before going cashless, Dos Toros locations were robbed twice.

Financial experts who work with low-income people caution against making assumptions about the shopping preferences or buying power of those who rely on cash. Justine Zinkin, CEO of Neighborhood Trust Financial Partners, said the greater urgency in the digital time is finding ways to better include low-income people in the banking system, such as urging banks to offer no-fee starter accounts and encouraging banks to open branches in underserved areas.

【推荐1】For the past 3000 years, when people thought of money, they thought of cash. From buying food   to settling bar bills, day-to-day dealings involved paper or clinking bits of metal. Over the past decade, however, digital payments have taken off — tapping your credit card on a terminal or using a smart phone has become normal. Now this revolution is about to turn cash into an endangered species in some rich economies. That will make the economy more efficient, but it also poses new problems that could make the change victim.

Countries are eliminating(消除) cash at varying speeds. But the direction of travel is clear, and in some cases the journey is nearly complete. In Sweden the number of retail cash transactions per person has fallen by 80% in the past ten years. Cash accounts for just 6% of purchases by value in Norway. Britain is probably four or six years behind the Nordic countries. America is perhaps a decade behind. Outside the rich world, cash is still king. But even there its dominance is being weakened. In China, digital payments rose from 4% of all payments in 2012 to 84% in 2020.

Cash is dying out because of two forces. One is demand — younger consumers want payment systems that plug seamlessly(无缝地) into their digital lives. But equally important, suppliers such as banks and tech firms (in developed markets) and telecoms companies (in emerging ones) are developing fast, easy-to-use payment technologies from which they can pull data and pocket fees.

In general, the outlook of a cashless economy is excellent news. Cash is inefficient. In rich countries, minting, sorting, storing and distributing it is estimated to cost about 0.5% of GDP. But that does not begin to capture the gains. When payments disappear, people and shops are less   fragile to theft. Governments can keep a closer eye on fraud or illegal tax avoidance. Digitalization vastly expands the playground of small businesses and sole traders by enabling them to sell beyond their borders. It also creates a credit history, helping consumers borrow.

【推荐2】This is the opening of a short story in a town in the United States by Alison Randall …

When Frank and I stepped through the post office doors, there was a crowd gathered, looking at the new device on the wall with amazement like a crowd of wide-mouthed frogs. I had to get closer, and that was where being a girl that’s skinnier than a wire fence came in handy. Fortunately, Frank, my twin of eleven years, was just the same.

“Come on.” I said, grabbing his hand, and we slid through the cracks between people until we spilled out in front.

Finally I got a good look. It was fixed to the plaster (石灰板) next to the postmaster’s window, the place of honour usually reserved for the Wanted posters. Beady-eyed Zedekiah Smith, the bank robber, still hung there, but even he had been pushed aside for something more important.

A telephone. The first one in town.

“How’s it work?” Noah Crawford called out. Noah’s the best fix-it man around, and I could tell he was dying to get his fingers on those shiny buttons.

“Don’t rightly know,” answer the postmaster, and he pulled hard at his beard as if it might tell him. “I do know the sound of your voice moves along wires strung on poles. It’s sort of like the telegraph, only you hear words instead of dots and dashes.”

“Ah,” the crowd whispered, and I felt my own mouth move along.

I gazed at the shiny wood box and something happened inside me. Something — I can only guess — that might be like falling in love. The thought of talking into that box — of making my voice sail through wires in the sky — it took over my brain. I couldn’t get it out.

“Frank,” I whispered to my twin. “I have to use that telephone.”

Five minutes later, Frank dragged me to Main Street, toward home. “Liza -” he began, but I cut him off. We two thought so much alike, I had Frank’s questions answered before he even asked.

【推荐3】A teacher Saved Cafeteria of Students from an Active Shooter. Her students now compare her to Chuck Norris.

Angela McQueen has a routine job when she’s on lunch-monitoring duty. As a longtime maths teacher at Mattoon High School in Mattoon, Illinois, she keeps an eye on the hundreds of students in her charge by walking around the school cafeteria.

In September 2017, McQueen, then 40, had finished only one circle when 14-year-old freshman standing not far from her pulled out a gun. “Oh, crap!” she said to herself. “He’s going to start shooting.” School employees had been trained on how to handle active shooters: Attack their ability to aim. So with the shooter’s finger on the trigger(扳机), McQueen kicked at him. Grabbing at his arm, she forced the gun into the air, but not before he got off a couple of rounds, striking one student in the hand and chest and grazing(抓住) another. As students ran for the exits, McQueen controlled the shooter with help from a school resource officer, who disarmed (缴械) the shooter and took him into custody(看管室) until police arrived minutes later.

Afterwards, McQueen went outsides to hug and support her shaken students. “It’s the mama-bear instinct,” she told the local paper, the Pantagraph. “I don’t have kids of my own, but these are still ‘my’ kids. You’re not going to do this to my kids.”

And so, thanks to McQueen, a story that has played out sadly at far too many schools across the country had a relatively happy ending. “If it hadn’t been for her, the situation would have been a lot different,” Police Chief Jeff Branson said at a news conference. The most seriously wounded boy recovered from the hospital soon after the incident.

As one impressed student told CBS News, “Ms. McQueen is Chuck Norris, basically.”