【推荐3】Vancouver has had a crazy property (房地产) market since it hosted the winter Olympics in 2010. The downtown area is forested with new apartment blocks. Prices have risen by nearly 60% in the past three years. But until recently developers have largely avoided Chinatown. It is an underdeveloped area. Many Chinatown residents are old and poor.

Developers now have Chinatown in their sights. Two years ago one built a 17-storey apartment building on its edge. This alarmed many residents, who had formed a group to stop the high-rise advance, now called SaveChinatownYVR. Ms. Melody Ma is its leader. Recently it has been successful.

The main theatre of battle is a car park known as 105 Keefer, where Beedie Living plans to build a nine-storey brick-and-glass apartment block. The developer promises 111 luxury flats, with rooftop landscaping and shops below.

105 Keefer is in an area rich with cultural associations. Just to the south is a monument to Chinese-Canadian builders of the Canadian Pacific Railway and veterans of the Second Word War. Across the street is the Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garden and the Chinese Cultural Centre Museum. “A lot of people were frightened” because of the building’s “closeness to sacred sites in the heart of Chinatown,” says Ms. Ma. Some residents also fear that it will push up rents.

Conservationists hope that the parking lot is where they can stop development, which they say has spoilt the charm of other Vancouver neighborhoods such as Mount Pleasant. The dispute (分歧) is part of a debate about the city’s identity, says Andy Yan, an urban planner. Vancouverites, he says, are asking themselves, “Who are we? And what are we building for?” The people who might want to buy the flats that do not yet exist are, of course, not being consulted.

【推荐1】US Army veteran (退伍老兵) Mazyck remembers when doctors told her she would never walk again. She’d been paralyzed from the waist down after a serious accident while parachuting in 2003.The doctors never said anything about floating, though. In 2021,she got to do just that.

Mazyck was one of 12 participants in a Zero G flight, organized by the group AstroAccess. This type of flight recreates the weightlessness that astronauts experience without going all the way to space. Flying over the Pacific Ocean off Southern California, the modified 747 jet airplane made 15 steep dives and climbs, allowing the flyers multiple periods of weightlessness.

The experience left Mazyck feeling joyful. “The flight was something that I would have never in my wildest dreams thought I would’ve experienced,” she says, “especially the floating, the weightlessness.”

Traditionally, strict physical requirements have prevented disabled people from becoming astronauts. AstroAccess is working to make space accessible to all. “Space removes the barriers between people; now is the time to remove the barriers to space itself,” says Mazyck, “It is sending a message to people who have historically been excluded from STEM that not only is there room for you in space, there is a need for you.”

During the flight, she says, the participants did experiments and made observations. They took note of things that people without certain disabilities might not realize are issues. For example, people who couldn’t grip with their legs needed another way to hold themselves still while weightless. The group also experimented with signaling lights for the deaf and with ways of using braille (盲文) for the blind.

These types of issues are easy enough to address. Now is the time to make space accessible — before space tourism or space settlements become commonplace. “I am so proud and elated about what’s happening here,” Mazyck adds. “We are paving the way for the future.”

【推荐2】Libraries are romantic places. The romance is that of reading, and the wealth of human imagining and learning that is contained in them. Access to the knowledge and literary art poetry, fiction, drama)in a library is precious — and particularly valuable to young minds and people of any age with an interest in education.

It would be hard to find anyone who actively disapproves of libraries. But when it comes to reality, Britain’s libraries are on less solid ground. The number of books borrowed in the year ending in March. 2021 was 72.9m, down 56%on the previous year. Physical visits also collapsed, from 214.6 m to 59.7 m.

Of course, this is the behaviour that one would expect during a pandemic. Many libraries were closed during this period, while people were discouraged from unnecessary mixing. Book sales climbed to their highest in a decade in 2021, which suggests that some former users of libraries may have bought books instead.

Private libraries at home, whether large collections or single bookshelves, appear to be developing well. But the hope must be that visits and loans at public libraries will soon return to their former level too. Like any other service, libraries need users. And while booksellers might in one sense be regarded as competitors, in fact the vast majority of those involved in the trade, from publishers to poets, are library lovers.

This has something to do with the romantic idea of the reader as explorer, with every book a door to a new store of feeling or understanding. But it also involves the recognition that if books are to form part of our life, there must be space in public for them. Books can be treasured possessions, but there is also something special about a copy that arrives in your hands having passed through those of others — and that will go on being passed between strangers who share your curiosity.

【推荐3】During an interview for one of my books, my interviewer said something I still think about often. Annoyed by the level of distraction（干扰）in his open office, he said, “That’s why I have a membership at the coworking space across the street — so I can focus”. His comment struck me as strange. After all, coworking spaces also typically use an open office layout（布局）. But I recently came across a study that shows why his approach works.

The researchers examined various levels of noise on participants as they completed tests of creative thinking. They were randomly divided into four groups and exposed to various noise levels in the background, from total silence to 50 decibels（分贝）, 70 decibels, and 85 decibels. The differences between most of the groups were statistically insignificant; however, the participants in the 70 decibels group — those exposed to a level of noise similar to background chatter in a coffee shop — significantly outperformed the other groups. Since the effects were small, this may suggest that our creative thinking does not differ that much in response to total silence and 85 decibels of background noise.

But since the results at 70 decibels were significant, the study also suggests that the right level of background noise — not too loud and not total silence — may actually improve one’s creative thinking ability. The right level of background noise may interrupt our normal patterns of thinking just enough to allow our imaginations to wander, without making it impossible to focus. This kind of “distracted focus” appears to be the best state for working on creative tasks.

So why do so many of us hate our open offices? The problem may be that, in our offices, we can’t stop ourselves from getting drawn into others’ conversations while we’re trying to focus. Indeed, the researchers found that face-to-face interactions and conversations affect the creative process, and yet a coworking space or a coffee shop provides a certain level of noise while also providing freedom from interruptions.