【推荐2】You may never know why. The email will arrive and reasons offered for your rejection might be the real ones—or not. Companies do not always like to admit that they have been scrolling through your information posted on your social media sites. Yet many, particularly the big ones, are doing just that. And in increasing numbers, they are acting on what they find when deciding whom to hire and whom to pass over.

Even before the pandemic, online checks on applicants were common. Research in 2017 found that 28% of large companies had turned down applicants after carrying out such checks. Reed Screening, a large agency doing this work, was asked to run over a third more social-media checks in December 2021 than a year earlier. And in 2022, the UK government gave the practice approval when the Department for Education said schools and colleges “should consider carrying out an online search (including social media) as part of their due diligence (尽职调查)”.

The way screening works is simple. Any “problematic” behaviour will be marked with a red flag. There are laws governing such online screening. David Erdos, Co-Director of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge, says that companies are supposed to warn candidates before screening their social media and tell them that they have the right to refuse consent (同意). Some companies follow these rules, but others may not. As for the right to refuse, it is hardly practicable. “Who on earth is going to be that person who says ‘Hang on a minute — I’m not happy about that’?” says Mr Erdos. “That itself is likely to be a red flag.”

All agree that the spread of online screening is alarming, as it is so unforgiving. People may be unable ever to be free of their online past, says Mr Erdos. Some footballers recently were punished for comments made almost a decade ago when they were but teenagers, as they have found to their cost.

Those within the industry think laws should be tightened, with punishment for illegal acts. In the meantime, caution (谨慎) is advisable. In talks with university students, Keith Rosser, director of Reed Screening warns them what companies will do to their social media when they apply for jobs. They are “universally terrified”, he says. And rightly.

【推荐3】①About 43.5 million Americans are taking care of aging relatives and friends, sacrificing(牺牲) time, money and sometimes their careers and personal health. They are doing the work of professional caregivers, who spend years training for the job. As baby boomers age, the demand for unpaid caregivers is rising. Meanwhile ,the number of them is dropping rapidly thanks to smaller family sizes, higher divorce rates and increasingly demanding jobs. This November, actor Rob Lowe offered to tell his story and send some encouragement to the millions struggling to care for a loved one.

②I had my first experience with unpaid care giving fairly early. My father, Charles, was diagnosed(诊断)with lymphoma at age 50.I was 26.Luckily,he was financially successful and had a loving wife, my stepmother. It was challenging, but she was there from taking care of my father.

③In my late 30s, my mother, Barbara Hepler, was diagnosed with stage 4 breast cancer. That was when I was introduced to the front lines of what so many millions are experiencing. She did not have a husband or a significant other, so it fell to me and my two brothers to handle everything from her initial diagnosis to doctor shopping, treatment options, driving her to appointments and, finally, the end of life-which was profoundly difficult, obviously.

④At the time, I was starring in and producing a network television show, The Lyon’s Den. It was fighting for its ratings life. If I took time off, the show would be canceled, I was responsible for 150 crew members ,so I had to find a way to do both.

⑤Besides. there is the negotiation of medical coverage, which requires phone calls, weeding through paperwork and talking to insurance companies and doctors. I remember thinking, Jesus Christ, if I were sick and had to do this on my own? I don’t think I could get out of bed in the morning.

⑥The people we are talking about-the friends and family members who are out there doing important work-are unpaid. Watching a loved one go through an illness, possibly ending in death, is stressful and depressing. Add economic and scheduling burdens, and the load for caregivers is heavy. To them I say, Don't forget about yourself. When you get on an airplane, the crew says, Secure your own mask first before helping others.”Why? Because without you taking care of yourself, you can’t take care of anybody else. That’s why I’ve partnered with EMD Serono andEmbracingCarers.com, where you’ll find invaluable information regarding everything you’ll be, or are, going through.

【推荐1】A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?

If you answered 10 cents, you’re not alone — most people give the same answer (the correct answer is 5 cents). It’s an example of how we often rely on intuitive responses — answers we feel are true. People give answers that pop into their mind, says cognitive scientist Steven Sloman. We don’t spend much time “reflecting and checking whether the answer is right or wrong.”

The bat and ball question helps explain why we often believe in fake news. It is part of human nature. But “the trick with fake news is to know to verify” — in other words, to stop and question what you know.

In one experiment, Sloman and a colleague invented a discovery called helium rain. They told a group of volunteers about it, but admitted they could not fully explain what it was. They then asked the volunteers to rate their own understanding of helium rain. Most volunteers rated themselves 1 out of 7, meaning they did not understand the concept.

The researchers then told another group of volunteers about the discovery. This time, they said that scientists could fully explain how it works. When asked to rate their understanding, the volunteers gave an average answer of 2. The scientists’ confidence gave the volunteers an increased sense of their own understanding, Sloman says.

According to Sloman, knowledge spreads like a contagion (传染病). “If everyone around you is saying they understand why a politician is dishonest,” Sloman says, “then you’re going to start thinking that you understand, too.”

Another explanation for the spread of fake news is “motivated reasoning”. We are naturally more likely to believe things that confirm our existing opinions. If you already have a negative opinion about someone, you’re more likely to trust damaging stories about them.

So, in a world where misleading information is common, training people to care about fact-checking is important, especially in online communities. Think of the stories that are shared on social media every day. Probably these fit in with your own worldview — but perhaps not all of them are true.

“Develop a norm (行为标准) in your community that says, ‘We should check things and not just take them at face value,’” Sloman says “Verify before you believe.”

【推荐2】Cosmetic surgery (整容手术) is not something to be entered into lightly. Unfortunately, in this modern world, we have become confused by very narrow standards of beauty. Images of celebrities who never seem to age are seen everywhere these days. We forget the fact that most of these images are the result of super photo manipulation (处理), driven by the incredibly powerful beauty industry. We are all different — why should we all look the same? Isn’t there more to life than undergoing surgery in order to have the same boring face that everybody else wants to have?

—Dr Elisabeth McKenna, Psychologist

Yes, it’s fake! That’s what I told my friends when they started asking me about my nose job. I’d always been sensitive to my nose, but it took me a long time before I decided to go for cosmetic surgery. I took advice from several doctors and after careful consultation I finally decided to have it done. I had been saving money from my part-time job and my parents helped me out with the rest. It was quite expensive but I don’t regret a penny of it. In fact I wish I’d had it done a few years ago. I’ m sure I wouldn’t have been teased so much at school.

—Debbie Caron, Student

It makes me really angry to think of the millions of people who spend a fortune on cosmetic surgery. Surgery should be carried out for medical purposes, not vanity (虚荣心). I would rather all the money spent on cosmetic surgery was available to treat people around the world who are in need but can’t get proper medical treatment. Furthermore, there are thousands of under-qualified surgeons out there who only care about getting as rich as possible and as quickly as possible. They don’t care about the psychological and physical damage they do. The whole industry makes me sick. We should do something to ban it.

—Danny Glass, Student

【推荐2】On Wednesday, two things happened. In Syria, 80 people were killed by government airstrikes. Meanwhile, in Florida, Elon Musk’s SpaceX successfully launched and fired a sports car into space. Guess which story has dominated mainstream news sites?

The launch of Musk’s Falcon Heavy rocket, the most powerful ever launched by a private company, went off successfully. Musk sent his cherry-red Tesla roadster running toward Mars, launching “a new space age”. The event attracted phenomenal publicity and made the rocket launch a masterstroke of advertising for Tesla.

Meanwhile, in Syria, where hundreds of thousands of refugees may be forced to return to unsafe homes, a UN human rights coordinator for Syria said despondently(沮丧地) that he was no longer sure why he bothers to videotape the effects of bombing, since nobody ever pays attention. He wondered what level of violence it would take to make the world care.

There is, perhaps, no better way to appreciate the tragedy of 21st-century global inequality than by watching a billionaire spend $90m launching a $100,000 car into space.

Musk said he wanted to participate in a space race because “races are exciting” and that while strapping his car to a rocket may be “silly and fun … silly and fun things are important”. Thus, anyone who mentions the huge waste the project involves, or the various social uses to which these resources could be put, can be dismissed as a killjoy.

But one doesn’t have to hate fun to question the justification for pursuing a costly new space race at exactly this moment. If we examine the situation honestly, it becomes hard to defend a project like this.

A mission to Mars does indeed sound exciting, but it’s important to have our priorities straight. First, perhaps we could make it so that a child no longer dies of malaria every two minutes. Or we could try to address the level of poverty in Alabama which has become so extreme that the UN investigator did not believe it could occur in a first-world country. Perhaps when violence, poverty and disease are solved, then we can head for the stars.

Many might think that what Elon Musk chooses to do with his billions is Elon   Musk’s business alone. If he wanted to spend all his money on medicine for children, that would be nice, but if he’d like to spend it making big explosions and sending his convertible on a million-mile space voyage, that’s his right.

But Musk is only rich enough to afford these money-consuming projects because we have allowed social inequalities to arise in the first place. If wealth were actually distributed fairly in this country, nobody would be in a position to fund his own private space program.

Elon Musk is right: silly and fun things are important. But some of them are an indefensible waste of resources. While there are still humanitarian crises such as that in Syria, nobody can justify vast spending on rocketry experiments.