【推荐1】Pop Culture Happy Hour

From the radio and podcasting giants at NPR, Pop Culture Happy Hour is a joyous celebration of popular culture that dives into movies and TV shows, Enthusiastically presented , it's full of thoughtful and intelligent criticism. Episodes are short and stand alone, each with a singular topic. This means you can dip in and out. Above all, it's fun while being informative.

Literary Friction

Running for five years, Literary Friction is a monthly podcast hosted by Carrie Pitt and Octavia Bright. The friends —one from the US, one from the UK interview authors about their lives, work and inspirations, as well as discussing wider literary topics and giving out book recommendations. Literary Friction is a thoughtful podcast, which calls for active listening and Plitt and Bright ask intelligent and profound questions. You will discover great things to read and feel smarter after you've listened to this.

Awaye!

Aboriginal culture is in the spotlight for this Australian podcast from ABC Radio National, which is presented by smooth-voiced broadcaster Daniel Browning. While it focuses on the experience of native Australians, Awaye! also has interviews with, and documentaries about native people and their arts and culture from around the world. A thoughtful podcast, Awaye!’s interviews successfully combine the critical arts interview with in-depth discussions about tradition and history.

Audio Poem of the Day

From the Poetry Foundation, this is a daily dose of poetry delivered by some of the best-placed people to do it. Each day, classic and contemporary poems are read aloud by actors or the poets themselves and delivered to wherever you listen to podcasts. Perfect for when you may need a quiet moment, or just a distraction from modern life. The poems are simply presented, with no background music- -just the voice and the words, Try listening to one or two before bed.

【推荐2】TV Programmes

A study of the ancient Egyptian pyramids（金字塔）and the area around the River Nile in Egypt. The filming of this programme is a work of art as it is so thoughtfully done. As well as the obvious camels (骆驼), there are also many other desert animals and plant life.

Some of the best summer holidays are on offer this year. Tonight’s programme shows a weekend in Disneyland in Paris, cheap sailing holidays in the Mediterranean and a shopping and sightseeing trip to New York.

One of the most popular programmes on TV at the moment, The Creative Mind has different artistic themes（主题）from exhibition reviews, information about major and smaller museums, and interviews with artists, writers, actors and musicians.

The fun cookery programme that offers lots of exciting ideas from children’s birthday parties to the candlelit（烛光的）dinner for the boss and his wife. It is easy to follow the instructions that show you how to make your dinner party a little bit special.

An interesting story of a young man with learning difficulties who overcame（克服）the problems in his life, through his great talent（天赋）for sports. This is a true story of how one person made the most of his life and also helped many other people with similar problems.

【推荐1】The spiders have long, scary legs. Some spiders even bite. But Spider-Man is another story. He might help people see spiders less negatively, a new study finds.

After Menachem Ben-Ezra, a proud fan of the Marvel films and also a psychologist, saw the movie Ant-Man and the Wasp(黄蜂), he walked out with a sudden scientific idea that he should measure people before they went into the theater, and afterwards to see if the fear of ants would be reduced or changed.

Ben-Ezra and his colleagues asked 424 people questions, about one-quarter of them about spiders, such as “Did you find them scary?” “Did seeing one make your hearts race and palms sweat?” A second group received similar questions, this time about ants. The last two groups got the same questions about other insects. Afterward, everyone watched videos. Group one got a Spider-Man movie. Group two saw Ant-Man and the Wasp. Groups three and four watched unrelated video---wheat waving peacefully in the breeze.

After viewing the movie, Ben-Ezra again asked the participants how they felt about spiders, ants or other insects in general---and found the ant and spider exposures seemed to make people insensitive and less afraid. Between 3.5 and 6.1 percent of people experience such a phobia(恐惧症) of spiders. Phobias can stop people from traveling, working and enjoying their lives.

Ben-Ezra hopes that their movie research might help people with phobias. But they caution that people with phobias shouldn’t just run out and watch movies and expect their fear to go away. “What we did is only the first step in a very long road,” Ben-Ezra says. “We didn’t say you’ll be cured. We don’t have evidence for that.” But eventually, presenting people’s fears in a positive context---such as a superhero movie---might help people surmount their fear or disgust. After all, if spiders produce Spider-Man, maybe they’re not so bad.

【推荐3】When I was young, a friend and I came up with a “big” plan to make reading easy. The idea was to boil down great books to a sentence each. “Moby-Dick” by American writer Herman Melville, for instance, was reduced to: “A whale of a tale about the one that got away.” As it turned out, the joke was on us. How could a single sentence convey the essence of a masterpiece with over five hundred pages?

Blinkist, a website and an app, now summarizes nonfiction titles in the form of quick takes labeled “blinks”. The end result is more than one sentence, but not by much. Sarah Bakewell’s “At the Existentialist Café” is broken into 11 screens of information; Michelle Obama’s “Becoming” fills 13.

Blinkist has been around since 2012. It calls its summaries “15-minute discoveries” to indicate how long it takes to read a Blinkist summary. “Almost none of us,” the editors assure us, “have the time to read everything we’d like to read.”

But I think a book is something we ought to live with, rather than speed through and categorize. It offers an experience as real as any other. The point of reading a book is not accumulating information, or at least not that alone. The most essential aspect is the communication between writer and reader. The idea behind Blinkist, however, is the opposite: Reading can be, should be, measured by the efficient uptake of key ideas.

No, no, no. What’s best about reading books is its inefficiency. When reading a book, we need to dive in, let it take over us, demand something of us, teach us what it can. Blinkist is instead a service that changes books for people who don’t, in fact, want to read. A 15-minute summary misses the point of reading; speed-reading with the app isn’t reading at all.