【推荐3】We all regard receiving presents as a pleasant experience and yet it can be one of the most awkward situations. It is often difficult to look pleased when you receive a gift which is entirely useless or the wrong size.    1     However, you have no right to change an article purchased just because it does not fit or is not to your taste. Worse still, the agreement on the sale is between the person who bought it and the shop.

So you will have to tell your favorite aunt that the T-shirt does not fit. But an exchange is not always that simple because there has to be a good reason for it.     2     For example, if the buyer was told that a switch was voice-operated and later found out it was not, then action could be taken. You would have the right to return it and get the money back.

But if you are returning something, no matter what the reason is, you will be expected to have proof of purchase. If the receipt cannot be found, then it is possible to use another proof of purchase such as a credit card receipt.     3    

Many big stores have a much more tolerant policy towards returns and see it as a gesture of goodwill to exchange goods without question. Stores including Marks & Spencer are well known for their “no argument” policy on returned goods.     4    

So if a shop refuses to exchange the goods or to offer a refund, the seller is likely to be within his legal rights unless there is something wrong with the goods. In that case, the boot is on the other foot. You have every right to demand a cash refund or a replacement, but only if you have returned it within a “reasonable” time.

    5     Some shops and stores expect things to be returned within a week of purchase, while others may permit a much longer time limit. In any case if you return a thing after what is considered a “reasonable” time, then all you are legally entitled to is the cost of repair.

【推荐2】Scroll through social media sites such as Instagram, Twitter or Facebook and you’ll be confronted with picture after picture of perfectly presented and delicious-looking meals. While the smell and taste of food can have an undeniably powerful effect on our appetite, are endless posts of steaming snacks more than just a feast for our eyes?

Our eating habits are influenced by what we see. “There is some evidence that, if you see pictures of food, that visual stimulation can prompt you to feel a desire to eat,” says Suzanne Higgs, a professor in the psycho biology of appetite. “If all your friends on social media are posting pictures or live streaming of themselves consuming fast food, it’s going to set a norm that eating fast food is what people do.” says Higgs.

Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned that food-related content on social media is making us think differently about food. Social media algorithms (社交媒体算法) promote content that users engage with more, so viewing more unhealthy food means seeing more of it on our social media feeds.

“It seems that healthier foods are often seen as boring in comparison,” says Tina Tessitore, associate professor of marketing. “In advertising, you see unhealthy food in social settings—people having a barbecue with friends, for example, while healthy food often focuses more on the nutritional value. If you saw friends eating salad together, it wouldn’t seem so credible,” she says.

But while studies have found that social media can make us think differently about food, and that we typically engage more with content featuring unhealthy food, it’s uncertain yet whether this actually translates to our changes in our behavior in daily life. “If I’m scrolling through Instagram, looking at photos of tasty food, whether I seek out the food depends on how hungry I am, and whether it’s appropriate in that moment,” says Higgs. “And when we do eat, we’re influenced by more than what we’ve seen online,” she adds.

【推荐3】“A novel, like a letter should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of morality and decay,” Saul Bellow once wrote. Like many novelists, in his spare time the author of The Adventures of Augie March was also an enthusiastic letter writer.

A selection of Bellow’s huge correspondence, reproduced in a recent issue of the New Yorker, provides a fascinating insight into the writer’s character. Witty, often brief and almost always entertaining, Bellow’s letters are a reminder of why writers’ letters often prove so popular with readers. At their best, literary letters have something for everyone: general readers get a glimpse of how authors write when freed from the expectation to produce a work of conventional literary worth, and scholars get enough scholarly writings.

All this is well and good—except for one small problem: nobody writes letters anymore, at least not the kind of intellectual, humorous letters that distinguish great correspondence. As we are so often told, we live in the digital age. Like the rest of us, authors now largely correspond with their agents, friends, and occasionally, fans through email, not “snail mail”.   

As literary vehicles, emails are severely lacking. Digital messages tend to alternate between the deathly dull and formal and the casually daring complete with BTW, LOLs and unclear text—speak with little middle ground. Letters can be revealing, friendly, humorous; emails, even at their best, tend to exhibit only one of these characteristics of good writing.

Future literary archivists (档案管理员) will need to be digital experts, hacking through hard drives and email accounts, mobile phones, in their attempts to fully document the lives and thoughts of their subjects. But who among us has all their email correspondence from the past five years, let alone a lifetime? Hardware is disposed (废弃) of and forgotten about; mobile phones are replaced every few years. The idea that we can construct a complete record of a writer has always been unrealistic, but technological advances have made it physically impossible, too. With so much material digitalized, and often wiped, writers will no longer leave behind boxes suffered with letters, ripe for investigation and possible publication.

Back in 1898, the New York Times named the long-dead Lord Byron the greatest letter writer in the English language, celebrating his letters’ humor, the force and spirit of their substance, the grace and purity of their style. Saul Bellow’s letters might not be remembered quite so fondly 70 years from now, but chances are that, by then, the entire genre of collected writers’ letters will have disappeared completely—leaving readers significantly poorer for their loss.

【推荐2】Dreams of world peace are as old as wars. But as the women of Wales were recovering from World War I, they demanded peace in droves.

Still sorrowing the husbands, sons, and loved ones who fought in the war, in 1923 the Welsh League of Nations United (WLNU) drafted a petition (请愿书) at Aberystwyth University calling for a warless world.

The petition was signed by roughly three quarters of all the women in Wales and was said to be seven miles long. The document was then packed in a large oak chest and sent across the Atlantic.

It was the WLNU’s hope that America would join in their mission for peace, and so they toured with the petition across the country before President Calvin Coolidge gave it to the Smithsonian for preservation.

As the centennial anniversary of World War I approached, a plaque was found in the archives at the Temple of Peace in Cardiff mentioning the petition, but nobody knew what it was, says Mererid Hopwood, chair of the Women’s Peace Petition Partnership.

So in 2017, an email was sent to the Smithsonian inquiring about the status and location of the chest and its petition.

Having arrived at the National Library of Wales on March 29 this year, Hopwood received it along with other members of the Peace Petition Partnership and described opening the chest and finally getting to see its contents (内容) as an emotional moment.

Hopwood is hoping more Welsh citizens will have similar experiences now that the petition has returned to its original home. The petition will be digitized, along with all signatures and addresses, so the public can view it online and see if their grandmothers or previous tenants of their homes signed 100 years ago.

Clearly the world has not yet achieved the petition’s great goals, but Hopwood said the signatures gave her hope.