【推荐1】Top Summer Music Festivals to Travel to

Summer is the best time of a year for music lovers, especially if you love the outdoor concert scene. The festival season is just kicking off, and there is a lot to look forward to in the upcoming months.

Primavera Sound

To kick off the summer, there's no better place than Barcelona. On the concert line-up, you'll find bands and singers like The Zombies, The Arcade Fire, and Bon Iver. Then spend some time tasting the local food and wine.

May 31—June 4; Barcelona, Spain

Music Type: Rock, hip hop

Price: $86—$323

Governors Ball

One of the great summer concerts in New York City is the Governors Ball Music Festival, which takes place in early June at Randall's Island Park. Some of the playing artists and bands include Tool, Phoenix, Lorde, Flume, and Wu-Tang Clan.

June 3—5; New York City, USA

Music Type: Rock, hip hop, pop

Price: $105—$405

Bonnaroo

Bonnaroo is another summer event that draws in crowds of around 60,000 each year. Some of the most well-known musicians and bands will be playing this year, including U2, Red Hot Chili Peppers, The Weeknd, and Chance The Rapper.

June 8—11; Manchester, Tennessee, USA

Music Type: Rock, hip hop

Price: $210—$554

Firefly Music Festival

Many people haven't thought of going to Delaware for a summer vacation, but mid-June is a great time to plan this trip if you love music. Headliners for this year's show are The Weeknd, Muse, Twenty One Pilots, Chance The Rapper, and Bob Dylan.

June 15—18; Dover, Delaware, USA

Music Type: Blues, rock

Price: $179—$499

【推荐3】Sara Kays, a 22-year-old girl, is a rising star on online video-sharing platforms. She not only uses TikTok(抖音)to promote her music but also posts songs to get feedback(反馈)from her followers.

“It’s been cool to engage with people that way”, said Kays, who has been using online platforms to realize her music dream. Now, she is famous on TikTok with about 1.3 million followers. She released(发行)her breakup song Remember That Night? in November 2020. The post blew up, getting almost three million views in a matter of days.

Kays has loved singing since she was young. At 11, she got a guitar from her mother and then started to sing while playing. Gradually, people started asking her to play at restaurants and she also started to post some live videos on YouTube, gaining her more and more followers. At 17, Kays turned to songwriting to help her deal with the confusion in life and serve as an outlet for her thoughts and feelings.

“I feel very lucky to have the opportunity to release songs and that all these people are listening to them online,” said Kays. “It’s been amazing.”

Different from other content creators who update their content frequently, Kays updates on a weekly basis and only posts videos about her songs and related stories, such as singing, playing the guitar or ukulele, shooting music videos. Her videos are always simple, and the recording process is pretty simple too: she edit the vocals and video in her room.

Now, Kays has signed with a music company. In Kays’ eyes, people like her songs and videos because she writes about life experiences and emotions of the youth. “I just sing and share my feelings about divorced parents, body image, loneliness and mental health,” said Kays. “I want more people to know they’re not alone with the struggles in their lives.”

【推荐1】From AI-made jokes to Harry Potter fashion videos, AI can be used to make funny stuff. But can it be as funny as a human? And if it can, does it present a danger to comedy writers in the future? That’s something performers have been looking at in this year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe, running from Aug 4 to 28.

Anyone can put on a show at the Fringe, and this year even robots were getting in on the act. One of Fringe’s big shows even used a small robot to come up with jokes from audience suggestions, which were then performed by humans. The results could be very funny, but sometimes they weren’t funny at all. That was part of the point, explained Piotr Mirowski, the show's co-maker.

“We do not use humans to show off AI; instead, we use AI to show its limitations, to showcase human creativity on the stage,” said Mirowski, according to the Guardian.

Comedian Pierre Novellie said that it will take a long time for AI to get good at creating comedy. “Comedy is the last thing that AI is going to get near,” Pierre told Sky News.

“Even normal human comedians struggle to tune their jokes for the right crowd at the right time, every time. But that’s what’s interesting about stand-up and fun.” But one performer at the Fringe said he’s using AI to make jokes for him because he’s out of ideas. Comedian Peter Bazely’s show has him playing a supporting role to “an entirely computer-generated comedian” called AI Jesus. The Fringe review website, Chortle, talked about today’s AI concerns: “In a world where artists are worried that AI could end up doing their jobs for them, Bazely is said to be praying this one will do exactly that.”

The reasons for companies wanting to use AI are certainly understandable, but the dangers they present to many people’s jobs are becoming more and more real, and that’s not very funny.

Back in March of this year, a letter calling for a six-month stop on advanced AI development was signed by over 1000 people working with AI technologies including Elon Musk and other well-known tech leaders, reported The New York Times. Then, in May, leaders in the AI industry signed a document from the Center for AI Safety warning that AI could present an exhibition-level danger and “should be a global priority alongside pandemics and nuclear war.”

【推荐2】THE BRONTE FAMILY

Yorkshire in England was the setting for two great novels of the 19th century.These were Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights.The youngest sister,Anne,was also a gifted novelist,and her books have the same extraordinary quality as her sisters’．

Their father was Patrick Bronte，born in Ireland.He moved with his wife，Maria Bronte，and their six small children to Haworth in Yorkshire in 1820. Soon after,Mrs Bronte and the two eldest children died, leaving the father to care for the remaining three girls and a boy.

Charlotte was born in 1816.Emily was born in 1818 and Anne in 1820.Their brother Branwell was born in 1817.Left to themselves,the children wrote and told stories and walked over the hills.They grew up largely self­educated.Branwell showed a great interest in drawing.The girls were determined to earn money for his art education.They took positions as teachers or taught children in their homes.

As children they had all written many stories.Charlotte,as a young girl, alone wrote 22 books,each with 60 to 100 pages of small handwriting.Therefore, they turned to writing for income.By 1847,Charlotte had written The Professor; Emily had written Wuthering Heights;and Anne had written Agnes Grey.After much difficulty Anne and Emily found a publisher,but there was no interest shown in Charlotte’s book.(It was not published until 1859.) However,one publisher expressed an interest in seeing more of her work.Jane Eyre was already started,and she hurriedly finished it.It was accepted at once;thus each of the sisters had a book published in 1847.

Jane Eyre was immediately successful;the other two,however,did not do so well.People did not like Wuthering Heights.They said it was too wild,too animal­like.But gradually it came to be considered one of the finest novels in the English language.Emily lived only a short while after the publication of the book and Anne died in 1849.

Charlotte published Shirley in 1849,and Villette in 1853.In 1854 she married Arthur Bell Nicholls.But only a year later,she died of tuberculosis(肺结核) as her sisters had.

【推荐3】We usually think of archaeology as lots of painstaking work by brave explorers. But today, long-hidden cities are being revealed (显露) from the air, where modern archaeologists use laser pulses (激光脉冲) to discover the sign of ancient life buried below thick surface.   

Lidar, short for “light detection and ranging”, needs directing rapid laser pulses at the ground from an airplane. Software catches the time and wavelength of the pulses reflected from the surface and connects it with GPS and other data to produce a precise 3D map of the landscape below.

In recent years, lidar exposed an ancient city in western Mexico called Angamuco. The discovery of this long-lost Mexican metropolis (大都) is especially meaningful.

“To think that this large city existed in the heartland of Mexico for all this time and nobody knew it was there is kind of amazing,” says Chris Fisher, an archaeologist at Colorado State University who led the expedition.

The city extended over ten square miles. “That is a huge area with a lot of people,” says Fisher. “You are talking about 40. 000 building foundations, which is about the same number of building foundations that are on the island of Manhattan.” Archaeologists were surprised when they saw Angamuco’s city plan. The monuments (纪念碑) were largely concentrated in eight zones around the edges rather than being located in one large center.

Archacologists discovered signs of the buried city in 2007 and attempted to explore it using a traditional way. But the team soon realized that it would take at least ten years to outline the whole metropolis. In 2011, they began using lidar to map nearly 14 square miles. Researchers now believe that more than 100. 000 people lived in Angamuco from about AD 1000 to AD 1350. That makes it the biggest city in western Mexico at the time or at least the biggest city we know about so far.

“Everywhere you point the lidar instrument, you find something new.” says Fisher. “Right now. every textbook has to be rewritten. and two years from now. they’re going to have to be rewritten again.”