【推荐2】Many people are taking to the skies this summer, planning fantastic vacations after two-plus years of being largely grounded (停飞) by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even if you’re not yet ready to brave crowded airports and long lines, you can still visit some of the world’s great cities from your armchair, with Mark Vanhoenacker as your tour guide.

Vanhoenacker, an airline pilot, wrote in his book, Skyfaring, about the joys of rising above the earth at the controls of a plane. His new book, Imagine a City, moves from the journey to the destination—the far-distant places Vanhoenacker once dreamed about and now gets to see up close when the plane lands. The book also records the author’s own journey from a lonely kid in western Massachusetts to a confident global traveler based in London.

Along the way, he takes us bicycling through Brasilia and birdwatching in Kuwait. Like traveling by air itself, the tour is sometimes confusing. You go to bed reading about Jeddah, Saudi Arabia and wake up to find yourself in Delhi, India. But Vanhoenacker is a sure-handed navigator (领航员), filling in the gaps with history, poems and lots of local color.

While he might be short of the kind of a local’s knowledge that comes from spending a lifetime in a city, Vanhoenacker has the benefit of making short but frequent visits to lots of places, with a pocketful of foreign money and a backpack filled with curiosity.

“When I was young and struggling with my speech disorder, and with whatever else seemed large then, it felt almost lifesaving to be able to travel to my imaginary city, or to imagine myself in a real one that was far enough to feel safe,” he writes.

The new book was written in part during the pandemic, when so much air travel was grounded for the moment.

【推荐2】When answering a question, your silence might say more than your words. A new psychology study has found pausing before replying, even for just a few seconds, can make you seem more insincere or dishonest. That perception (感知) of dishonesty might not be too inaccurate, either. Numerous studies suggest people are slower to respond when they are not being truthful, possibly because it takes more mental work to block a truthful response or fabricate (编造) an alternative.

What’s been less clear is how well our lies have been fooling people. Some studies suggest delayed answers come across as insincere to the listener. Others find no relationship between the two, and still more have found the opposite: A bit of hesitation increases our perception of sincerity. These findings are inconsistent and confusing. They are also mostly based on correlations. Even the few studies that have actually looked at causal relationships often didn’t consider confusing factors that could also give away a liar or an insincere speaker.

The new research seeks to improve some of those limitations by examining thousands of people under a variety of conditions. Together, it involves more than 7, 500 individuals in a total of 14 experiments. On the whole, the authors found an immediate response was perceived as more sincere, while a delayed response, even a delay as brief as two seconds, was seen as more insincere. “Evaluating other people’s sincerity is an important part of social interactions.” says consumer behaviour researcher Ignazio Ziano.

“It would be unfair for the responder, such as a crime suspect, if the response delay was misattributed to (错误地归因于) thought suppression (抑制) or answer fabrication when it was in fact caused by a different factor, such as simply being distracted or thoughtful.” explains Ziano.

【推荐3】Imagine having the opportunity to sing together with hundreds of other people while you are at home alone. You can do this in a virtual choir. Virtual choir members record themselves while they perform alone on video. These videos are uploaded onto the Internet, and then they are put together into one video that you can see online—a virtual choir. Anyone can take part in a virtual choir from anywhere—all you need is a video camera and an Internet connection. A virtual choir enables people to add their voices to those of other individuals and become part of the global community. It has proved to be a positive influence on the lives of many people.

The virtual choir was the idea of award-winning composer and conductor Eric Whitacre. He fell in love with Mozart’s classical music when he sang for the university choir. Moved by this music, he said, “It was like seeing color for the first time.“ Over ten years after his graduation, Whitacre’s original compositions began to become quite popular among choirs and singers. This led to the creation of the virtual choir.

In 2009,Whitacre received a video of a girl who was singing one of his works. Inspired, he asked his fans to make videos, which he then joined together into one performance. His first virtual choir, “Lux Aurumque”, had 198 singers from 12 different countries. It has received millions of views on the Internet. Since then, the virtual choir has become a worldwide phenomenon. Whitacre’s next effort was the virtual Youth Choir for UNICEF, which was first seen on stage on 23 July 2014 in the UK. Altogether, 2,292 young people from 80 countries joined in to sing Whitacre’s song “What If”.

The virtual choir is a wonderful way for people around the world to sing with one voice and thus make the world a better place.