【推荐1】A young woman went to her grandmother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how to deal with the problems. It seemed that one problem was solved and a new one would come up. She was tired of life and wanted to give up.

Her grandmother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and put each on a fire, and soon the water boiled. She put carrots in the first pot, eggs in the second one and some coffee beans (豆子) in the last one. About twenty minutes later, she turned off the burners. She took the carrots and eggs out and put them in different bowls. Then she poured the coffee into another bowl. And then she asked her granddaughter what she saw.

“Carrots, eggs and coffee,” she replied. Her grandmother asked her to feel the carrots. She did and said that they were soft. The grandmother then asked her to break an egg. After taking off the shell, she found the hard boiled egg. Finally, the grandmother asked her to taste the coffee. The granddaughter smiled as she tasted it, and then she asked, “What does it mean, grandmother?”

Her grandmother explained that each thing had faced the same boiling water. Each reacted differently. The carrot had been strong and hard. However, after twenty minutes in the boiling water, it became soft and weak. The egg had been fragile (易碎的). But after sitting through the boiling water, its inside became hard. The coffee beans were special, however. After they were in the boiling water, they had changed the water.

“Which are you?” she asked her granddaughter.

【推荐2】I accidentally heard a father and daughter in their last moments together at an airport. They had announced her plane’s departure (离开). Standing near the door, he said to his daughter, “I love you. I wish you enough.” She said, “Daddy, our life together has been more than enough. Your love is all I ever needed. I wish you enough, too, Daddy.” They kissed good-bye and she left.

He walked over toward the window where I was seated. Standing there, I could see he wanted and needed to cry. I tried not to intrude (干涉) on his privacy, but he welcomed me in by asking, “Did you ever say good-bye to someone knowing it would be forever?” “Yes, I have,” I replied.

Saying that brought back memories of expressing my love and appreciation for all my dad had done for me. Recognizing that his days were limited, I took the time to tell him face to face how much he meant to me. So I knew what this man was experiencing. “Forgive me for asking, but why is this a forever good-bye?” I asked.

“I am old and she lives much too far away. I have challenges ahead and the reality is, her next trip back will be for my funeral,” he said.

“When you were saying good-bye, I heard you say, ‘I wish you enough.’ May I ask what that means?”

He began to smile. “That’s a wish that has been handed down from other generations. My parents used to say it to everyone.” He paused for a moment and looked up as if he were trying to remember it in detail. He smiled even more. “When we said ‘I wish you enough,’ we were wanting the other person to have a life filled with enough good things,” he continued and then turned toward me. He then shared the following as if he were reciting it from memory:

“I wish you enough sun to keep your attitude bright. I wish you enough rain to appreciate the sun more. I wish you enough happiness to keep your spirit alive... I wish you enough ‘Hellos’ to get you through the final ‘Good-bye’.”

He then began to sob and walked away.

【推荐2】A valuable sketch (素描画) from World War I has turned up in a garage sale in Perth. It’s a sketch of soldiers playing soccer with a tin can during an unofficial truce (停战期) between German and Allied soldiers (同盟国士兵) on the Western Front in 1914. The artwork was drawn by an unnamed German soldier during the war on the Western Front.

The artwork was given to Private Jack Shelley, a British soldier, when he was defending the town of Frelinghien, France. The sketch is an important historical document, as it provides evidence that the tales of both sides at war socializing together are true. But for Jack’s family it has even greater value, since it was his prized possession.

Jessie Shelley, Jack’s great-granddaughter, has fond memories of the old man sharing stories about his experiences in the war. The family lost track of the artwork after Jack’s possessions were moved during the sale of his house when he died in 1984. “Great-grandpa had a tobacco tin with a dozen or so buttons from the uniforms of men from both sides. He told us all the details of every one of those buttons. To great-grandpa they represented real people he had known, some of whom couldn’t come home from the war. He had at least two buttons from German uniforms that he told us were exchanged between the men involved in the truce.” Jessie Shelley said.

On the day of truce in 1914, the soldiers came out of their trenches into no-man’s-land and shared food, drinks and cigarettes. Some even exchanged small gifts. The men even played football games together. Later, this spirit of cooperation continued in unofficial agreements between the sides to stop shooting at mealtimes and even at times when soldiers were working in the open.

This fascinating image of peace and humanity during the war has continued through the years. The sketch is a symbol of the potential for humanity, hope and kindness to exist in even the most violent circumstances.

【推荐1】If you want to disturb the car industry, you’d better have a few billion dollars: Mom-and-pop carmakers are unlikely to beat the biggest car companies. But in agriculture, small farmers can get the best of the major players. By connecting directly with customers, and by responding quickly to changes in the markets as well as in the ecosystems, small farmers can keep one step ahead of the big guys. As the co-founder of the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC, 美国青年农会) and a family farmer myself, I have a front-row seat to the innovations among small farmers that are transforming the industry.

For example, the Quick Cut Greens Harvester is a tool developed just a couple of years ago by a young farmer, Jonathan Dysinger, in Tennessee, with a small loan from a local Slow Money group. It enables small-scale farmers to harvest 175 pounds of green vegetables per hour — a huge improvement over harvesting just a few dozen pounds by hand — suddenly making it possible for the little guys to compete with large farms of California. Before the tool came out, small farmers couldn’t touch the price per pound offered by California farms. But now, with the combination of a better price and a generally fresher product, they can stay in business.

The sustainable success of small farmers, though, won’t happen without fundamental changes to the industry. One crucial factor is secure access to land. Competition from investors, developers, and established large farmers makes owning one’s own land unattainable for many new farmers. From 2004 to 2013, agricultural land values doubled, and they continue to rise in many regions. Another challenge for more than a million of the most qualified farm workers and managers is a non-existent path to citizenship — the great barrier to building a farm of their own.

There are solutions that could light a path toward a more sustainable and fair farm economy, but farmers can’t awkwardly put them together before us. We at the NYFC need broad support as we urge Congress to increase farmland conservation, as we push for immigration reform, and as we seek policies that will ensure the success of a diverse and ambitious next generation of farmer from all backgrounds. With a new farm bill to be debated in Congress, consumers must take a stand with young farmers.

【推荐3】That easterners and westerners think in different ways is not mere prejudice. Many psychological studies conducted over the past two decades suggest Westerners have a more individualistic, analytic and abstract mental life than do East Asians. Several hypotheses (假设) have been put forward to explain this.

One, that modernization promotes individualism, falls at the first hurdle: Japan, an ultra-modem country whose people have retained a collective outlook. A second, that a higher rate of infectious disease in a place makes contact with strangers more dangerous, and causes groups to turn inward, is hardly better. Europe has had its share of plagues; probably more than either Japan or Korea.

That led Thomas Talheim of the University of Virginia and his colleagues to look into a third suggestion: that the crucial difference is agricultural. The basic West crop is wheat; the East's rice. Before the mechanization of agriculture a farmer who grew rice had to spend twice as many hours doing so as one who grew wheat. To organize labour efficiently, especially at times of planting and harvesting, rice-growing societies as far apart as India, Malaysia and Japan all develop co-operative labour exchanges which let neighbors stagger their farms' schedules in order to assist each other during these crucial periods. Since, until recently almost everyone alive was a farmer, it is a reasonable hypothesis that such a collective outlook would dominate a society's culture and behaviour, and might prove so deep-rooted that even now, when most people earn their living in other ways, it helps to define their lives.

Mr. Talheim realized that this idea is testable. Large areas of Asia, particularly in the north, depend not on rice, but on wheat. That, as he explains in a paper in Science, let him and his team put some flesh on this theory's bones. The team gathered almost 1,200 volunteers from all over Asia and asked them questions to assess their individualism or collectivism. The answers bore little relation to the wealth of a volunteer's place of origin. There was a striking correlation, though, with whether it was a rice-growing or a wheat-growing area. This difference was marked even between people from neighbouring counties with different agricultural traditions.

Undoubtedly, Talheim's hypothesis has pointed to a direction worth further exploration. Viewing the message from modernized countries such as Japan, Korea and Singapore, which still hold on to collectivism, perhaps we can say: Asian values-with their principles of mutual support and collective action-are only "Asian" because back in ancient times, farmers in many parts of that continent found rice a more suitable crop to grow than wheat.