【推荐1】Tibetan New Year, also known as Losar, is the most important festival in Tibet and is celebrated for 15 days, typically falling in February or March.    1    The celebrations include a range of customs and traditions that reflect the unique culture and identity of the Tibetan people.

Before the arrival of the New Year, Tibetans engage in thorough cleaning of their homes and surroundings.    2    They also make offerings to the gods and ancestors to seek blessings for the upcoming year. Decorating homes and public places is a common custom during Losar. In addition, people also decorate their clothes with patterns, and their hair is styled in fashion.

    3    Traditional dishes such as momos, a type of steamed dumpling filled with meat or vegetables, and Tibetan butter tea, made from yak butter and tea leaves, are served. Sweet treats like Tibetan butter cookies and dried fruit are also enjoyed.

Tibetan people offer prayers and make offerings to the gods and deities during Losar. The offerings typically include food, incense and flowers.    4    

Music and dance are part of the Losar celebrations. Villagers gather in public spaces and dance around bonfires, singing and playing traditional instruments.

    5    People gather in public spaces and light incense and candles while offering food, drinks and other items to the gods. This is followed by the ceremony of throwing Tsampa, a roasted barley flour, into the air as a symbol of letting go of the past year and embracing new beginnings.

The customs of Tibetan New Year are deeply rooted in the culture and traditions of the Tibetan people.

【推荐2】When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me Chinese folk stories before bedtime. My mother is an immigrant. She told me those stories so that I wouldn’t forget the culture that she had left. Even though I hadn’t ever experienced that culture at firsthand, she wanted me to remember it.

Of all her stories, my favourites were about Sun Wukong, the monkey king who had many superpowers. Eventually, though, I moved on to other kinds of heroes. When I was in the fifth grade, I bought my first American comic book. Afterwards, Superman, Spider-man and Captain America replaced Sun Wukong in my heart.

I became crazy about comic books. I loved them so much that I went on to work towards a career in comics. Today I am a professional graphic novelist. My most well-known book is American Born Chinese, published in 2006. Monkey King is one of my main characters, but the book isn’t direct adaptation of my mother’s stories. Instead, I invited Monkey King into my story so that I could talk about the uneasiness of growing up as an Asian American. The character I knew from my childhood expressed his emotions without reservation. I needed him to emote on my pages.

For research, I tracked down an English translation of Journey to the West, the centuries-old Chinese classi that first told the monkey king’s story. As I read it, I realized that American superheroes hadn’t replaced Sun Wukong in my heart after all -they were simply Western expressions of everything I loved about the monkey king. The monkey king’s story has lasted for centuries and travelled across continents and cultures. Journey to the West is the very definition of “timeless”.

My mother now has Alzheimer’s. She’s forgotten all of the stories she used to tell me, but I remember. In many ways, I’ve built my whole career on those moments before bedtime. With every comic book I create, I am trying to relive the wonder I felt when my mother told me the stories of Sun Wukong.

【推荐3】Grizzly bears, which may grow to about 2.5 m long and weigh over 400 kg, occupy a conflicted corner of the American psyche — we revere (敬畏) them even as they give us frightening dreams. Ask the tourists from around the world that flood into Yellowstone National Park what they most hope to see, and their answer is often the same: a grizzly bear.

“Grizzly bears are re-occupying large areas of their former range,” says bear biologist Chris Servheen. As grizzly bears expand their range into places where they haven’t been seen in a century or more, they’re increasingly being sighted by humans.

The western half of the US was full of grizzlies when Europeans came, with a rough number of 50,000 or more living alongside Native Americans. By the early 1970s, after centuries of cruel and continuous hunting by settlers, 600 to 800 grizzlies remained on a mere 2 percent of their former range in the Northern Rockies. In 1975, grizzlies were listed under the Endangered Species Act.

Today, there are about 2,000 or more grizzly bears in the US. Their recovery has been so successful that the US Fish and Wildlife Service has twice attempted to delist grizzlies, which would loosen legal protections and allow them to be hunted. Both efforts were overturned due to lawsuits from conservation groups. For now, grizzlies remain listed.

Obviously, if precautions (预防) aren’t taken, grizzlies can become troublesome, sometimes killing farm animals or walking through yards in search of food. If people remove food and attractants from their yards and campsites, grizzlies will typically pass by without trouble. Putting electric fencing around chicken houses and other farm animal quarters is also highly effective at getting grizzlies away. “Our hope is to have a clean, attractant-free place where bears can pass through without learning bad habits,” says James Jonkel, longtime biologist who manages bears in and around Missoula.