【推荐1】My name is Sara. When I was little, I played the drum. I also had a guitar. In fourth grade, I started playing the trombone(长号). I practised about four hours a week. All of this might not seem like a big deal for a lot of kids, but there's something about me that makes me a bit different from others. I was born without hands. Since I was about one year old,   I've worn prosthetics(假肢).

This year, I got an invitation to join the high school marching band(行进乐队). I told my mum I wanted to do it. But I had an instructor who thought I would not be able to march in the band—not because it was a high school band and I was only in seventh grade, but probably because my body was different. All I wanted was to show that I could do it, so I joined the band. And it paid off!

Music gives me energy. That happens sometimes. One time I was so down. I didn't even want to get out of bed. Then I hit my MP3 player by accident. A song came on, and I got up and started dancing. It helped me say to myself, “OK, I can get through today.”

Around my musician friends, we all share the same problems, like working out how many beats there are in a measure(小节). I have a hard time counting the beats, but so do a lot of the other kids. It's a normal problem that we musicians share. When I'm with the band, I don't feel as different as I do in other situations. It's just another way that music makes me want to go on, and not to just sit down by myself and not care about life.

【推荐2】Maria Sibylla Merian-drawing from life

In 17th-century Europe, it was unheard of for a woman to travel by herself, but that didn’t stop Maria Sibylla Merian. In 1699, she and her 2l-year-old daughter Dorothea sailed from Amsterdam to Suriname in South America. The three-month voyage was dangerous but she was determined to go. Besides, she was on a bold mission. She would be the first person to go to a foreign country to study and paint insects directly from nature.

When they arrived in Suriname, Maria and Dorothea started working. Day after day, they took their painting materials into the hot and humid rainforest to collect and draw insects and plants. Artists had never done such a thing before. Still life painters drew from dead specimens. But Maria had always been interested in painting living animals and plants, and her favourite subjects were insects.

In the rainforest, she climbed ladders to study and collect insects. She had trees cut down so she could see what lived at the top level of the forest more than a hundred feet overhead. Maria combined both art and science in her work. As a skilled observer, she kept detailed notes.

Maria planned to stay in Suriname for five years, painting and collecting insects and plants that Europeans had never seen. She learnt about the medicinal plants of the area and expanded her interest to spiders, birds, lizards and snakes. She planned to publish a book of her new work on her return to Amsterdam.

After two years, she had to leave Suriname. The heat was unbearable and she was ill with malaria. But she had more than enough material for a book. In June 1701, Maria and Dorothea sailed back to Amsterdam with many paintings and specimens—butterflies preserved in brandy, bottles with crocodiles and snakes, lizards’ eggs and boxes of pressed insects.

Four years later, in 1705, Maria published the book, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, for which she is best known. The paintings of insects and plants in their natural habitats revolutionized scientific illustration and advanced the scientific study of insects.

【推荐3】A story posted by The New York Post Monday tells the tale of Katrina Holte, a Hillsboro woman who quit her job to cosplay a 1950s housewife.

Let me start by expressing admiration to Holte for using her 2019 freedoms to follow her 1950s dreams. Everyone should be so lucky as to get to decide what they wear and how they spend their time. That’s the future our foremothers fought for.

But as much fun as I am sure she is having living a vintage (复古的) life, which literally includes watching shows like “I Love Lucy” and listening to vinyl recordings (刻录碟片) , I think it’s important to remember that being a 1950s housewife was actually totally awful, and something our grandmothers and mothers fought against.

For example, once I called my grandma and asked her for her recipe for Cloud Biscuits, these delicious biscuits she used to make that we would cover with butter and homemade raspberry jam on Thanksgiving.

“Why would you want that?” she said. “Go to the store. Go to the freezer section. Buy some pre-made biscuits and put them in the oven.”

She straight-up refused to give me the recipe, because it was hard and took a long time to make. In her mind, it was a waste of time.

Getting off the phone, it occurred to me that spending every day of your life serving a husband and five children wasn’t fun at all. And then there are the grandchildren who eventually come along demanding Cloud Biscuits, a whole new expanded set of people to feed.

She was basically a slave to those hungry mouths, cooking scratch meals three times a day

When she wasn’t trapped in the kitchen, she had to keep the house clean, make sure she looked good enough to be socially acceptable, and make sure her kids and husband looked good enough to be socially acceptable. And she had no days off.

I know my grandma loves her kids and her grandkids, her husband and the life she led, but man, it must have been a lot of thankless, mindless labor.

No wonder everyone went all-in on processed foods when they came around. Imagine the nice break something like a microwave dinner would give a woman working, unpaid, for her family every single day?

I also had another grandma. She was a scholar who helped found the Center for the Study of Women in Society at University of Oregon. She was a pioneering second-wave feminist who wrote books, gave lectures and traveled the world.

But, she did all of that after divorcing my grandpa, when most of her kids were out of the house. Back then, in the 1950s and the 1960s, there was no illusion about women “having it all”. How could that even possibly happen? If you were taking care of a family, waiting on your husband, you had no time to follow your dreams, unless you made that your dream

A lot of women took that approach. We call it Stockholm Syndrome now.

And of course, these women I am talking about are upper-middle-class white women. Romanticizing the 1950s is especially disgusting when you think about how women of color and poor women were treated back then, and the lack of education and choices available to them.

Because the women in this country demanded something approaching equality, Holte has the chance to live out her fantasy. Not every woman in America is so lucky.

We still don’t have pay equality and in many states, we still don’t have autonomy over our own bodies. Poor women and women of color still lack the opportunities of their wealthy and white peers.

And while it’s getting better, women are still expected to be responsible for the emotional labor of running a household and raising the children.

But at least we can get jobs. At least we don’t have to sew our own clothes, wear a full face of makeup every day and spend hours making Cloud Biscuits some ungrateful kid will wolf down, barely remembering to say thank you.

【推荐1】Life on the street is a constant struggle for homeless people. In times of extreme weather conditions, that struggle becomes even more difficult. Recently, homeless people across Chicago faced freezing to death if they couldn't find shelter for the night.

Thankfully, one local woman refused to let that happen. On January 30，2018, 34-year-old Candice Payne, a local managing broker, was lucky enough to have shelter from the dangerous conditions.

“It was - 20℃, and I knew they were going to be sleeping on ice and I had to do something,” said Payne. Payne started brainstorming different ways she could possibly help. Finally， she decided to see if there were any rooms available at local inns and hotels that she could get to help those stuck on the street.

For Payne, her mission was   personal. According to Payne, her husband, Carlos Callahan， had lived on the streets at one point in his life. Based on his experiences, Payne knew that the homeless people still out on the street desperately needed help and that if she didn't step up to help, no one likely would.

However, when Payne explained what she was trying to do，many of the local hotels refused to allow her to pay for the rooms as they didn't want homeless people to stay in their rooms. “No one wanted them, but one hotel, the Amber Inn, was nice enough to allow me to buy the rooms,” said Payne.

Payne's selfless act made news across the country. However, she insisted she had never done it for attention. “I am a regular person, ” said Payne, who spent thousands of dollars of her own money to help complete strangers.“It all sounded like a rich person did this, but I’m just a little black girl from the South Side. ”