【推荐3】A new study suggests that turning away from compassion (同情) in the name of safety may not protect us as we hope. Shutting off our compassionate response may threaten our mental health, the research team found. “This research shows the harmful effect of controlling our natural ability to connect with others,” says Leah Weiss, a founding member of Stanford University’s compassion cultivation training program.

To explore how attitudes toward compassion were affecting people’s well-being, University of Coimbra psychologist Marcela Matos and her team employed over 4000 people from 21 countries. All of the participants completed an online survey in spring 2022 that asked them to describe what they think of compassion, how their psychological state is and how strong their social connections are.

When the team analyzed the survey responses, they found that participants who expressed a fear of showing compassion for themselves or others were likely to feel more depressed, anxious, and stressed out. People with a fear of compassion also reported feeling less connected to others.

Marcela’s findings are consistent with earlier research showing the damaging effects of isolation and withdrawal on mental health. “Social isolation is associated with not just loneliness, anxiety, and depression, but also an increased risk of high blood pressure and cognitive decline,” says Australian psychologist Hugh Mackay, author of The Kindness Revolution.

On the other side, people who choose compassion during stressful situations seem to have a more durable sense of well-being. Training programs that promote people’s compassionate response appear to reduce their fear of compassion, based on results from another of Marcela’s studies.

Once people realize that compassion can benefit them in tough times as much as it benefits others, they’d be motivated to pull out of an isolation situation. “We have natural desire for social connection, community, kindness and compassion, because those are the pathways to social harmony and cooperation,” Mackay says. “If you can find the resources to address the needs of other people, your own anxieties tend to melt away.” Thus, it’s better to show sympathy.

【推荐2】If you’ve scrolled through your Facebook feed recently, you may have noticed something surprising: lots and lots of short videos.

What makes this “Reels” feature strange is that it is hugely addictive, which I know quite well from my own personal experience. Last Friday, I took a break and hit on one short clip of someone making dinner and, well, the next time I looked up it was 20 minutes later and the blank document on my computer monitor was confirming to me that my work was still not done.

However, as silly as it seems, Reels-is actually super important, and is at the centre of a major battle between the world’s largest tech firms. The format (格式) was first pioneered by TikTok-the Chinese-owned video app that has taken the world by storm since it launched in 2016. Today, TikTok has around 23 million UK users every month-including basically every person you know under the age of 25. And that fact has made Facebook and its parent company, Meta, very nervous indeed. As TikTok has continued to boom, Facebook has actually fallen in popularity among “Gen Z”. The reason Tik Tok has proven such a powerful challenger to Facebook’s social media dominance is almost entirely down to these sorts of short-form videos.

The format is almost perfectly optimised to be as addictive as possible: Tik Tok’s app shows you a short-form video, and if you don’t like it, you can simply swipe it away and another one will start playing instantly. And because it is portrait, not landscape, videos look “right” when viewed on your phone. What’s also smart is that TikTok’s algorithm (算法) picks videos for you based on what you actually watch, and not what you say you want.

Facebook isn’t the only app trying to do what TikTok does so well. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook’s parent company Meta, has integrated Reels even more aggressively into its app. And even Google is nervous, launching its own TikTok-style video section of YouTube(which it owns)a couple of years ago. As things stand, though TikTok currently maintains a healthy lead in the category, both YouTube and Facebook have deep pockets-so expect to see even more Reels and Shorts popping up in your feed as this intense battle continues to rage. You won’t be able to take your eyes off them.

【推荐3】Between the last application season and the current one, Swarthmore College, a school nationally well-known for its academic strictness, changed the requirements for students for admission into its next freshman class. It made Alling out the proper forms easier.

Swarthmore is hardly alone in the desire to eliminate obstacles for a bounty of applicants. Over the last decade, many elite colleges have adjusted their applications in ways that remove disincentives（抑制因素）and maximize the likelihood that the number of students contesting to get in remains robust-or, even better, grows larger.

In one sense, that's a commendably egalitarian （平等主义的）approach and a sensible attempt to be sure that no qualified candidate is missed. But there's often a less pure motive in play. In our increasingly status-oriented society, a school's reputation is improved by a low acceptance rate, which can even influence how U.S. News World Report ranks it. And unless a school is shrinking the size of its student body, the only way to bring its acceptance rate down is to get its number of applicants up. So, many colleges methodically generate interest only to frustrate it. They woo applicants for the purpose of turning them down.

And there can be other justifications for what looks like a loosening of application demands. Smith College and several other similarly prominent colleges no longer require the SAT or ACT, and Kathleen McCarney, the president of Smith College, said that that's not a bid for more applicants. It's a recognition that top scores on those tests correlate with high family income and may say more about an applicant's economic advantages—including, say, private SAT tutoring—than about their academic potential.

Jim Bock, Swarthmore's dean of admissions, said that by lightening the essay load for its current applicants, the college was less concerned about increasing its overall number of applicants than about making sure candidates of great merit didn't miss out on Swarthmore and vice versa. He mentioned the hypothetical example of a high school student from a low-income family who works 10 or more hours a day and doesn't have sufficient time to do different essays for different schools.

But will Swarthmore's applicants this year give quite as much thought regarding whether it is suitable and the right home for them? I'm betting not.

When it's very easy for a student to apply to yet one more college and each school is simply another desirable box of cereal on top shelf that he or she is determined to reach, there's inadequate thought to a tailored fit, which is what the admissions process should strive for. It's what the measure of success should be.