【推荐1】Just like happiness and sadness, anxiety is part of everyone’s lived experience—but it’s not always tolerated as such. “People often spend too much time and effort trying to rid anxiety,” says Dr. Joel Minden, a clinical psychologist. “I encourage them to remember that anxiety is a normal emotional response.”

If you try to banish anxiety, all you’re doing is putting it more at the forefront of your mind. But if you accept anxiety as part of life, you can learn to relate to it with self-pity or even with humor. This is a cornerstone of acceptance and commitment therapy(ACT), which has been gaining clinical validation(验证), including by the American Psychological Association. ACT guides people to see their unpleasant emotions as just feelings and to accept that parts of life are hard. Sufferers are encouraged to begin a dialogue with anxious thoughts, examining their causes while also keeping in mind their personal goals and values.

This way of relating to anxiety has been a powerful strategy for John Bateman, the 52-year-old host of the podcast Our Anxiety Stories. When negative thoughts arise, he acknowledges them but doesn’t let them drive his decisions. Over the years, Bateman has noticed that if he submits to his thoughts, they don’t go away but dramatically increase. But if he recognizes them for what they are, just a passing thought and not a fact that needs to be acted on, they gradually go away.

Learning to live with anxiety is an individual process and one that requires trial and error to get just right. While acceptance is the first and most important step to take, some lifestyle changes have been proven to take the edge off, as well. Since tiredness, increased tension and stress leave us much easier to fall into anxiety, a well-balanced diet, sufficient rest and, especially, regular exercise can help us manage it better.

【推荐2】Let us suppose it is now about A.D. 2060. Let's make believe it is about 47 years from now. Of course, things have changed and life is very different.

Voyages to the moon are being made every day. It is as easy to take a holiday on the moon today as it was for the people in 1960 to take a holiday in Europe. At a number of scenic spots on the moon, many hotels have been built. In order that everyone can enjoy the beautiful scenery on the moon, every room has at least one picture window. Everything imaginable is provided for entertainment of young and old.

What are people eating now? People are still eating food. They haven't yet started to take on heir(继承) supply of energy directly as electrical current or as nuclear power. They may some day. But many foods now come in pill form, and the food that goes into the pill continues to come mainly from green plants.

Since there are several times as many people in the world today as there were a hundred years ago, most of our planet's surface has to be filled. The deserts are irrigated with water and crops are no longer destroyed by pests. The harvest is always good.

Farming, of course, is very highly developed. Very few people have to work on the farm. It is possible to run the farm by just pushing a few buttons now and then.

We are healthier both in our bodies and in our minds, and we know the causes and cure of disease and pain, and it is possible to get rid of diseases. No one has to be ill any more.

Such would be our life in 2060.

【推荐3】If you like to spend your time up to your elbows in dirt and have the ability to grow plants that don't wither and die, you may have been told you have a green thumb. This is not a medical emergency, but a slang term meant to show one's natural talent for gardening. But where did the phrase come from?

Both green thumb and green fingers have been common expressions in England and the United States for well over a century, with the Oxford English Dictionary citing use of green fingers as early as 1906 from the novel The Misses make-believe by Mary Stuart Boyd. Green thumb, meanwhile, was used first in 1937 Ironwood Daily Globe newspaper article, which described the phrase as gardening slang.

There are several stories about its origins. Some believe it is a result of growing potted plants, which can often have green algae（藻）on the underside that coat hands. Others point to a story about King Edward I and his love of green peas, which were shelled by subservient workers—one would be honoured for doing the most work and having the greenest thumb. There is also the fact that plants contain chorophyll (叶绿素) which can easily discolour your hands.

However the phrase was cultivated, we have a pretty good idea of how it caught on. In the 1940s, wartime Britain enjoyed a popular gardening radio show titled In Your Garden hosted by C.H. Middleton that made use of both green thumb and green fingers.

Why, then, is the phrase focused more on the thumb when all of your fingers are likely to get discoloured? It might have something to do with an old English proverb: "An honest miller (磨坊主) has a golden thumb." The quality of corn flour could be judged by rubbing it between the forefinger and thumb. Mixed together in the collective consciousness, these two expressions may have resulted in the green thumb we hear about today.

【推荐1】This is a big week for Maya Van Wagenen. Her very first book Popular, her 8th grade diary, hit shelves across the country. She’s in New York to appear on The Today Show, and does a million interviews that accompany the book’s publication while she says she is worried about keeping up with the lessons she is missing back at her high school in Georgia.

As a middle schooler in a Texas town, Maya once considered herself as an outsider. “I always struggled with making friends and finding confidence,” she says. “I felt bulled (欺负) and alone and it was really hard for me.” She said it was Betty Cornell’s Teen-Age Popularity Guide, a 1950s how-to book bought by her dad that greatly inspired her. She decided to follow the advice—devoting each month of her 8th grade year to different chapters like “Neat-looking” and “Be a Hostess”—and see if she could, in fact, become popular. Everyday, she’d taken notes on how people responded to her secret effort (nobody knew she was conducting this social experiment) and then she’d write detailed stories about her experience over the weekend.

After she finished the project, she sent the diary to her family. Her aunt passed it to a writer friend who in turn forwarded it to his agent. The agent wanted to sign Maya immediately. It was just the beginning: Penguin was the first publisher to bite and shortly after, Dreamworks got the movie right.

And while she’s riding the high of Popular for the time being, she has something else on her mind: her next book. Besides all that homework she has to do when she gets home, she is also writing a novel, for she has a two-book deal from Penguin.

“People always ask me, ‘Why don’t you just home-school so you have time to work?’” she says. “But it’s fun in school, and I want to be a young adult writer! This is my chance to experience high school, so it’s the most important.”

【推荐2】The 2021 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to the 73-year-old novelist Abdulrazak Gurnah, for his firm and passionate descriptions of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gap between cultures and continents.

Born in Zanzibar in 1948, Gurnah arrived in England as a refugee in the late 1960s. At the age of 21, he began to write in English. He worked as a professor of English and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Kent until his recent retirement this year.

Gurnah is the first black African author to have won the award since Wole Soyinka in 1986. He has published 10 novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s sufferings runs through his works. His 1994 novel Paradise, which told the story of a boy growing up in Tanzania in the early 20th century, won the Booker Prize and marked his breakthrough as a novelist. And his most recent work Afterlives picks up the narrative of Paradise and takes place during the German colonization of Africa. His novels open our eyes to a culturally diversified East Africa unfamiliar to many in other parts of the world.

Gurnah said his award would mean issues such as the refugee crisis and colonialism, which he had experienced, would be “discussed”. “These are things that are with us every day. People are dying; people are being hurt around the world. We must deal with these issues in the kindest way.” He said, “The world is much more violent than it was in the 1960s, so there is now greater pressure on the countries that are safe. They unavoidably draw more people.”

In an interview in 2016, when asked if he would call himself an “author of postcolonial and/or world literature”, Gurnah replied, “I would not use any of those words. I wouldn’t call myself a something writer of any kind. In fact, I am not sure that I would call myself anything apart from my name.”

【推荐3】Born in Detroit, Michigan, on January 10th,1928, Philip Levine was formally educated in the Detroit public school system. After graduation from university, Levine worked a number of industrial jobs, including the night work in factories, reading and writing poems in his off hours. In 1953, he studied at the University of Lowa. There, Levine met Robert Lowell and John Berryman, whom Levine called his “one great guide.”

About writing poems, Levine wrote: I believed even then that if I could change my experience into poems, I would give it the value and honor that it did not begin to have on its own. I thought too that if I could write about it, I could come to understand it; I believed that if I could understand my life - or at least the part my work played in it - I could write it with some degree of joy, something obviously missing from my life.

Levine published his first collection of poems, On the Edge in 1961, followed by Not This Pig in 1968. Throughout his life Levine published many books of poems, winning many prizes. A review said, “Levine writes poems about the bravery of men, physical labor, simple pleasures and strong feelings, often set in working-class Detroit or in central California, where he worked or lived.”

He taught for many years at California State University, Fresno and served as Distinguished Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing Program at New York University. After retiring from teaching, Levine divided his time between Brooklyn, New York, and Fresno, California, until his death on February 14th, 2015. His final poem collection, The Last Shift, as well as a collection of essays and other writings, My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry, were published in 2016.