【推荐3】Having lived in California until 1970, my family has felt a number of earthquakes. We have been fortunate, however, to have suffered no bodily harm or property (财产) damage.

There is a website that lists all California earthquakes recorded from 1769 to the present. The site lists the dates and times as well as the magnitude (震级) and the exact location of any quake that measured more than 6.0. There are only a few quakes that stand out in my memory and, luckily, none is shown in the website. So, my personal experience with earthquakes might be considered insignificant (微不足道).

There are three earthquakes that are difficult to forget. The first one was in 1955 and our oldest daughter was walking with me in our backyard in Redwood City in California. As the shaking became stronger I held her to me with one arm as I held on to one of our fruit trees with the other.   All three of us (my daughter, I and the tree) shook for two or three minutes that to us felt like hours.

The second one was in 1963. Our entire family was visiting Disneyland in Southern California. The earth started to shake just as we were beginning to walk from our hotel toward the famous landmark.

My third experience with an earthquake was a lonely one in California. It was in my sixties and I was alone in an old church. As the building started to shake, I quickly headed for the door to go outside. I remember I said a little prayer-something like, “Help me get out of here in time, Dear Heavenly Father”．Minutes later, I was safe outside.

【推荐1】As more and more people speak the global languages of English, Chinese, Spanish, and French, other languages are rapidly disappearing. In fact, half of the 6,000-7,000 languages spoken around the world today will likely die out by the next century, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

In an effort to prevent language loss, scholars (学者) from a number of organizations—UNESCO and National Geographic among them—have for many years been documenting (记录) dying languages and the cultures they reflect. Mark Turin, a scientist at the Macmillan Centre Yale University, who specializes in the languages and oral traditions of the Himalayas, is following that tradition. His recently published a book, A Grammar of Thangmi with an Ethnolinguistic Introduction to the Speakers and Their Culture, which grows out of his experience living, working, and raising a family in a village in Nepal.

Documenting the Thangmi language and culture is just a starting point for Turin, who seeks to include other languages and oral traditions across the Himalayan reaches of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China. But he is not satisfied to simply record these voices before they disappear without record. At the University of Cambridge Turin discovered a wealth of important materials, including photographs, films, tape recordings, and field notes, which had remained unstudied and were badly in need of care and protection. Now, through the two organizations that he has founded, the Digital Himalaya Project and the World Oral Literature Project, Turin has started a campaign to make such documents, for the world available not just to scholars but to the younger generations of communities from whom the materials were originally collected. Thanks to digital technology and the widely available Internet, Turin notes, the endangered languages can be saved and reconnected with speech communities.

【推荐2】It’s generally acknowledged that raising a child has geographic features. A recent survey, for example, looked at the personalities parents wanted their children to have in different countries. The finding was fascinating: Dutch parents focused on rest, cleanliness and routine; Italian parents preferred their children to be even-tempered, well-balanced and likeable; American parents, meanwhile, were more likely to want their kids to be intelligent or cognitively advanced.

The US preference represents the shift in the way American parents raise their children, a transition from the so-called latchkey kids of the 1980s to the helicoptered children of today. With more parents adopting the kind of intensive parenting style common in the US, parenting in European nations, traditionally more relaxed, is changing.

Intensive parenting is a type of parenting that requires a significant amount of time and money, including scheduling children for additional activities, as well as advocating for their needs and talents in communications with schools. It’s not limited to a small circle of parents but the dominant cultural model of parenting in the US.

The increasing fear of inequality makes parents feel the need to help drive their children’s education. The inequality, in their opinions, is making it critical for the kids not to be left behind. And so they will assume a parenting style that is more intense and more success-oriented. Thus the intensive parenting approach has become a parenting style influencing the overall parenting culture in Europe.

The intensification of parenting has consequences for nations, parents and children. One of the problems is that it increases economic inequality. In the 1960s, for example, when there was less emphasis on developing children’s talents and interests, parents across social classes spent similar amounts of time and money on their kids.

Experts also point to the large volume of parenting books, blog posts and articles now available to those raising families. Even if parents are skeptical of expert advice, they are still influenced by it. Turning kids into well-rounded and successful personalities is naturally becoming their life-long pursuit.