【推荐1】Social workers’ roles in assisting individuals and communities have become necessary. Many disadvantaged individuals and communities need their support. They are highly valued. The following are some of them.

These social workers create strategies to help students’ academic performance and social development with teachers and parents. They assist, students with issues such as bullying (欺凌). School social workers also talk with families to solve absences from class or access to special education resources. While school social workers and guidance advisers share some similarities, they have some differences. School social workers focus more on a student’s personal life.

These social workers assist families safeguard children. They support families in finding housing and childcare services and assist in applying for benefits. When children are badly treated, they will bring them to a better living situation. Some work to reunite separated families or organize adoptions (收养).

These social workers help patients understand their diagnoses and adjust their lifestyles. They also help doctors understand how illnesses affect their patients’ mental and emotional health. Social work with seniors and the elderly, long-term pain management and medical social work are a few of the specialties of health care social workers.

These social workers assist patients who have mental illnesses or addictions. They educate the patients on how to deal with their condition. Typically, those specializing in mental health and substance abuse social work are licensed clinical social workers, allowing them to diagnose and provide treatment for their patients.

【推荐3】Of all the journalism specialties, science writing may well be the most challenging. Science writers cover fields undergoing some of the most rapid advances in history, from stunning advances in genetics and biotechnology to exotic discoveries in astrophysics. A science writer’s week may include coverage of new discoveries about viruses, the brain, evolution, artificial intelligence, planets around other suns, and global climate change and its environmental impact, to name only a few topics.

Writing anything that’s any good is hard work, but science writers labor tinder a particular, and rather peculiar, set of constraints. Science is new — only about 400 years old, as a going concern — and prodigious, having transformed our conception of the universe and of our place in it. But precisely because its impact has been so rapid and so monumental, science has not yet been absorbed into our common consciousness. Readers come to the printed page already knowing something about crime and punishment, love and loss, triumph and tragedy — but not, necessarily, about the roles played by theory and observation in identifying a virus or tracing the curvature of intergalactic space. Hence science writers have to keep explaining things, from the significance of scientific facts to the methods by which they are adduced, while simultaneously holding the readers’ attention and moving the story along. It’s as if business reporters had to constantly explain what is meant by “turning a profit”, or sportswriters by “scoring a touchdown”.

Unsurprisingly, we science writers are often misunderstood. People tend to assume that we write computer software manuals or those buckram-bound engineering textbooks assigned to students in technical studies. Fellow authors dismiss us as translators. Editors may think us narrow. A quarter-century ago, when I was struggling to move away from writing about politics and rock music in order to concentrate on astronomy, the editor of a major magazine pressed me to do an article, called “The Bionic Man”, on artificial body parts. When I declined, he became impatient.

“Well, what do you want to write about?” he asked, throwing up his hands, like a motorist cut off in traffic.

“Astronomy,” I replied.

“You’ve already written about astronomy!”

“Yes, but I like it. It was my original interest in life.”

“Aren’t you afraid of becoming some sort of Johnny One Note?”

“Well, not really. You know, what’s out there is something like ninety-nine, then a decimal point, then twenty-eight more nines per cent of everything. Covering nearly everything doesn’t seem all that limiting. And it leads to lots of other things.”

I’ve been on the wrong side of arguments with editors more often than it is comfortable to recall, but on this occasion I turned out to have been right. Astronomy did lead to everything else. It led me into other sciences of course — among them physics, chemistry, and biology — and also, by many winding paths, to poetry, literature, history, philosophy, art, music, and into conversation with some of the smartest and most creative people in the world.

【推荐3】“It’s like tasering an elderly person who’s already on a pacemaker,” says a British newspaper boss of the newsprint market, where prices have risen by over 50% in a matter of months.

When times were good, before ads went online, newspapers had a supportive partnership with paper mills. As ads went away and circulations fell, “paper mills had the worst of it for years as newspapers reduced pages, went wholly digital or shut forever.”

The papers were able to cut down the cost of newsprint from firms fighting for business as demand decreased. Price-taking paper mills suffered in silence, taking out newsprint capacity and adjusting machines to make packaging for e-commerce. The pandemic, with people working from home, meant even fewer newspaper sales, which depressed demand for newsprint again and increased the pain for paper suppliers. In the past 24 months European mills have responded by shutting almost a fifth of their newsprint capacity, says a buyer for a large British newspaper group.

Then reopening of economies and growing demand for newsprint, combined with much reduced capacity and coupled with up-going energy prices, has resulted in a price shock. Particularly controversial are additional energy charges that some paper suppliers are seeking to pass on.

Newspaper firms consider this amounts as breaking agreements. European newspapers will have to pay newsprint prices that are 50—70% higher in the first quarter of 2022 compared with the year before. As for their counterparts in Asia and Oceania, they are facing prices around 25% to 45% above their usual level. North American prices went up earlier, and more gradually; agreements are fixed monthly rather than half-yearly. But there, too, newsprint prices are 20—30% higher in 2021 than in 2020.

Germany’s print and media industry association has warned that mills are going to force newspapers to quit paper editions, hurting each other in the process. But more digital adrenaline is one possible response of newspapers to the paper mills’ tasers.