【推荐2】Why you should still write and send postcards

Are postcards still relevant in the selfie (自拍)generation? Surprisingly, yes! Postcards are a thoughtful way of showing a person that you care even while far away.     1    . But here are a few reasons it is still considered good practice to send postcards.

Show your care

    2     It will take you only a few minutes to write a message and a second to send it. But postcards are different, show effort and thoughtfulness. You need to find the right one, as well as handwriting your message and then send it to the person you love by slow mail. Imagine the time and effort you have to put in simply means the recipient is someone you really care about.

Record your travels

You may use postcards as keepsakes of your travels. They can also double as your travel journal.     3    . You can create a scrapbook (剪贴簿)of all the postcards you have collected from your travels.

Get one back

A postcard is a pleasant surprise. It is a fun gesture that brings great joy to others.     4    .

If you and your friends agree to send each other postcards, you can build up a great collection of amazing memories.

Last a lifetime

Postcards are unique and one of a kind, so they are great for safekeeping. Digital photos can get lost.     5    . They are something you can look back to in the future and be able to share with others as well.

【推荐1】Acting as an art form has changed a great deal over the centuries. It’s no longer just about entertaining an audience in a stylised way to depict (刻画) characters and events that everyone is familiar with. Nowadays, acting has moved into a world of hyper realism. Audiences often expect to be challenged by a performance, and acting asks sometimes difficult questions about the world around us.

Given this change in emphasis, what kind of toll (损害) might acting take on somebody’s well-being? The idea that there is a psychological price to pay for good acting is nothing new, yet there is surprisingly little scientific research that examines the issue. Many scientists have been unwilling to examine the relationship in depth. This is changing, however, with academics now starting to investigate it further.

Actors often agree that performing can come with risks. Deborah Margolin, an award-winning actor, found the line between her stage self and her real personality started to blur (变模糊) the deeper into the character she went. She felt a real emotional impact especially when she played difficult or unpleasant roles. Margolin explains, “It was depressing...my character would cry, and I would cry.” She recalls the impact on her fellow actors: “Everybody backed away from me. These were lovely people—I loved them dearly—but my character was unattractive and somehow, so was I.”

These feelings are easy to understand, and would seem to be a natural outcome of acting styles such as “method acting”, which encourages actors to use their real-life experiences to fuel a role. There are some, however, who disagree. Actor Sanford Meisner felt that an actor’s most important tool is their imagination and that psychology has no place in performance. In fact, many performers mix these different methods and keep in touch with family to reconnect with the person beyond their character.

There’s no doubt that walking a tightrope between personalities can be a difficult task, however. As drama student Naomi Lorrain explains, “It can be hard. Offstage, you have to remember that it’s unreal and onstage you have to forget...”

【推荐2】What a comedian can teach you about managing stress

We often accept stress as part of the cost of modern life, but it really doesn’t have to be. We all know that laughter is the best medicine.     1     People who can laugh at their own misfortunes bounce back faster and stronger. Here is what a comedian says about coping with stress.

You can try to find a different perspective.     2     Once a friend of mine fell asleep in the middle of a class. His teacher decided to make fun of him by inviting students to applaud, wondering whether my friend would applaud along when he woke up. He did and the whole class burst outlaughing. After learning everything, he was both embarrassed and ashamed of course but after a while, my friend laughed. “If this had happened to someone else, it would have been amusing. So it’s no less funny, just because it happened to me. “

    3     There’s no doubt that we all experience great stress now and then. We’ve all been personally affected, in some way. You might not have felt like laughing at the time But now, looking back, you could consider all of the strange aspects of the experience and all of the things you did to keep active or simply stay sane (神志正常的) .

When you share stories with your friends, you can choose to share stories of trauma (创伤) and pain, or you can choose to lift their spirits with stories of hope and growth.     4     Take the exact same story and change the focus from “feel sorry for me” to “laugh with me”. Keep in mind that we’re all in this together, that we all share the same ridiculous experiences, and that we can laugh together at whatever life throws at us.     5    

【推荐3】Which is better for Earth: an electric or gas-powered vehicle? The answer to this question might seem blindingly obvious. Of course electric cars must be better for the environment, because they don’t give off greenhouse gases as people drive. However, electric vehicles (EVs) aren’t perfect, and they come with their own set of polluting problems. Their batteries require a large amount of energy to produce.

Battery production is just one part of an electric car’s life span. A study looked at the entire life cycle of an EV’s emissions(排放)，from mining the metals for the batteries to producing the electricity needed to power them, and then compared this with the average emissions of a gas-powered vehicle. The team found that when EVs are charged with coal-powered electricity, they’re actually worse for the environment than gas-powered cars.

“Only when connected to the clean energy do EVs have an advantage over the gas-powered cars on a greenhouse gas basis,” said Colin Sheppard, an expert in energy and transportation systems. That’s why more and more countries are decreasing the power supply from coal. In China, the national grid is improving with more efforts in renewable energy. For example, it has twice as much wind energy capacity as the U.S. and it builds more solar panels per year than any other countries.

Sheppard has modelled a future in which all cars are electric. “We want to understand what it might be like if all passenger vehicles were electrified.” The model suggests that if all vehicles in the U.S. were electric, greenhouse-gas emissions would be 46% less every year. This reduction could be increased even further if those vehicles were using a technique known as “smart charging” in which cars are recharged at chosen times (often at night) to reduce the cost of electricity.

In short, it’s far easier to argue for buying an EV than a gas-powered vehicle. But what about the cost? Aren’t electric vehicles too expensive for most people?