【推荐1】Supermarkets have long been suffering as one of the thinnest-margined businesses in existence and one of the least-looked-forward-to places to work or visit. For more than a decade, they have been under attack from e-commerce giants, blamed for making Americans fat, and accused of contributing to climate change.

Supermarkets can technically be defined as giants housing 15,000 to 60,000 different products. The revolutionary idea of a self-service grocery, where people could hunt and gather food from aisles rather than asking a clerk to fetch items from behind a counter, first came about in America. There is some debate about which was the very first, but over the years a consensus has built around King Kullen Supermarket, founded in New York in 1930.

For some 300 years, Americans had fed themselves from small stores and public markets. Shopping for food involved mud, noisy chickens, clouds of flies, nasty smells, bargaining, and getting short-changed. The supermarket imitated the Fordist factory, with its emphasis on efficiency and standardization, and reimagined it as a place to buy food. Supermarkets may not feel cutting-edge now, but they were a revolution in distribution at the time. They were such strange marvels that, on her first official state visit to the United States in 1957, Queen Elizabeth Ⅱ insisted on an impromptu (即兴的) tour of a suburban-Maryland Giant Food.

The typical supermarket layout has barely changed over the past 90 years. Most stores open with flowers, fruit and vegetables at the front as a breath of freshness to arouse our appetite. Meanwhile, they keep the milk, eggs, and other daily basics all the way back so you’ll travel through as much of the store as possible, and be tempted along the way.

In the early days, as the supermarket multiplied, so did our suspicion of it. We have long feared that this “revolution in distribution” uses corporate black magic on our appetite. The book The Hidden Persuaders, published in 1957, warned that supermarkets were putting women in a “hypnoidal trance (催眠恍惚状态),” causing them to wander aisles, bumping into boxes and “picking things off shelves at random.”

【推荐3】Fragile. Oversensitive. Glued to their phones. Is this what comes to mind when we think of the teens of this generation? While this may be true, there might be more to this generation of teens than what is generally perceived.

Never before have the lives of any generation of teens been as flooded with mobile technology and social media as the teens of this generation. The popularity of social media has led to a world in which teens have to participate in Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, or else cause the social anger of their friends, some of whom communicate primarily via those online platforms. As compared to their parents or grandparents who were likely less connected and more isolated, these teens are constantly exposed to the highlight reels (高光时刻) of many in their social circles and beyond. It is no wonder that the self-esteem and mental health of this generation’s teens have taken a hit.

Moreover, the teens today are more individualistic. This is in contrast to the kampong spirit of their parents’ and grandparents’ days. Gone is the friendship among neighbours who are friendly with one another and quick to offer a helping hand when they see another in need. In its place, we have teens who may not even have a clue as to who lives in the unit next to theirs, much less offer a friendly nod or wave when they happen to cross paths with a neighbour.

Yet, the effects of technology on this generation of teens are not all bad. Arguably, the very connectedness that social media brings about has led to being more progressive. Logging onto platforms where people of all walks of life gather means that one is exposed to those people and their distinctive ways of life. In comparison, the parents or grandparents of this generation of tens probably did not have the same opportunity to get to know people outside of their social circles at their age, and are thus more likely to have fixed, stereotypical (刻板的) opinions of people different from them. This generation of teens, on the other hand, has the chance to use this technology to understand the variety and diversity out there.

【推荐1】Stop those negative thoughts! When it comes to brain power, it appears your thoughts matter. That was the eye-opening conclusion of a study published in the journal Alzheimer’s and Dementia.

For this study, scientists carefully measured the cognitive(认知)function of 292 middle-aged to older people over a four-year period. The cognitive assessments included measures of memory, attention and language.

The study subjects(实验对象)had their thinking patterns regularly monitored by responding to a series of questions over two of the four years. The thought-pattem questionnaires were designed to identify repetitive negative thinking (RNT for short). RNT includes often thinking about negative past events as well as future sources of anxiety.

About a third of the study subjects had PET scans(正电子发射计算机断层扫描)of their brains tomeasure levels of the abnormal brain protcins, tau and amyloid. Tau and amyloid build up in people affected with Alzheimer’s disease.

The findings? Study subjects with greater RNT-these repetitive negative thought patterns-exhibited a clear decrease in cognitive function and memory over the four-year period. What’s more, they had more tau and amyloid built up in their brains. It is well-documented that our thoughts have powerful, direct effects on our bodies, so these results aren’t surprising.

Thankfully, studies show that we can change our thought patterns through mental-training practices, with meditation(冥想)documented to be one of the very best.

As someone who often got trapped in negative memories of the remote past, I can speak personally to the remarkable power of meditation to relieve this destructive thinking pattern, and I encourage everyone to explore this practice. I meditate every day and gratefully achieve that goal about 90% of the time.

Feel free to share this post with friends and loved ones because one of the greatest gifts we can give is the gift of better health. Enjoy!

【推荐3】Ada Palmer is a professor of European history at the University of Chicago. Her science-fiction series, Terra Ignota, was inspired by 18th-century philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot. “I wanted to write a story that Voltaire might have written if Voltaire had be enable to read the last 70 years’ worth of science fiction and have all of those tools available (可获得的) for his use,” Palmer says in a radio program called Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Palmer says that Voltaire could actually be considered the first sci-fic writer, thanks to a place he wrote in 1752. “Voltaire has a short story called Micromégas, in which an alien from Saturn and an alien from a star near Sirius come to Earth. They are extremely big in size. They explore Earth and have trouble finding life forms because to them a whale is the size of a flea (跳蚤)”, she says. They eventually realize that the tiny little spot of wood on the ground is a ship, and it’s full of living things, including humans, and they make contact. So it’s a first-contact story.

Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is often considered the first sci-fi novel. Voltaire was writing much earlier than Shelley, so should he have the title instead? It depends on your definition (定义) of science fiction. “Micromégas doesn’t involve technology,” Palmer says, “so if you define science fiction as depending upon technology—and being about, in the Frankenstein sense. Is man’s knowledge giving us access to powers beyond what we’ve had before? What does that mean?’—it isn’t asking that. But ‘aliens and first contact’ is a very significant science fictional element.”

So there’s no obvious answer to the question of who should be considered the first sci-fi writer. Palmer says it’s more important to ask the question than to arrive at any particular answer. “I don’t want to argue, ‘Yes, definitely, everybody’s histories of science fiction should start with Voltaire,” she says. “But I do want to argue that everybody’s histories of science fiction will be richer by discussing whether Voltaire is the beginning of science fiction, or whether it’s earlier or whether it’s later. Because that gets at the question of what science fiction is.”