【推荐1】From the outside, Taylor Swift — an 11-time Grammy Award winner with 55.5 million monthly online listeners — seems to be used to success.

But at New York University’s graduation ceremony in May of 2022, the 32-year-old country music singer-songwriter told her schoolmates that her achievements were really a result of something else: moments of rejection (否决). “The times I was told ‘no’ or wasn’t included, wasn’t chosen, didn’t win-looking back, it really feels like those moments were as important as. If not more significant than, the moments I was told ‘yes.’ ” Swift said.

Swift said those depressing moments made her feel “hopelessly lonely” growing up, starting at a very young age. As a kid, she said, she would be angry about not getting invited to sleepovers (在外过夜). She remembered connecting with music managers at age 13, and being told that “only 35-year-old housewives listen to country music.”

Her responses to those moments were impressive. Alone in her room, she’d write songs “that would get me a ticket somewhere else.” She posted songs online and connected with other teenage country fans online.

Working on her music and herself — instead of thinking about being told “no” — paid off. She signed a development deal at age 13, had a songwriting contract a year later and a recording contract by age 15, released her first album at age 16, and won four Grammys at age 20 in 2010.

Her advice to the class of 2022: Learn to live with those discouraging experiences. “My experience has been that my mistakes led to the best things in my life,” she said. “And being embarrassed when you mess up? It’s part of the human experience. Getting back up, dusting yourself off and seeing who still wants to hang out with you afterward and laugh about it, that’s a gift.”

【推荐2】Rudolph plays football for Florida State University. When he was visiting a middle school in Florida one Tuesday, he noticed sixth-grader Leo eating his lunch alone. Rudolph grabbed a couple pieces of pizza and joined Leo at his table.

Leo has autism, a condition that can make it hard to make friends and communicate with other people. His mother always worries about him. Two days later, she saw a picture of Rudolph and Leo eating together and it made her so happy that she cried. Then, she shared the picture on the Internet, along with a message about how thankful she was. The story became popular very quickly.

“We just had a great conversation. He started off telling me his name is Leo, telling me how much he loves Florida State. We went from there, ” said Rudolph. “It was really easy. He had a nice smile on his face. Just a really warm person.”

Leo’s mother said that middle school can be hard, and she worries about how other kids will treat her son. “Sometimes I’m thankful for his autism. That may sound like a terrible thing to say, but in some ways I think — I hope — it shields him, ” she said.

“He doesn’t seem to notice when people look at him when he flaps (拍打) his hands,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to notice that he doesn’t get invited to birthday parties. And he doesn’t seem to mind if he eats lunch alone.”

The mother said the photo of Rudolph and Leo’s lunch date helped teach people about autism. “The picture speaks more than a thousand words. You can see how far away the rest of the students are, but you can see how engaged Rudolph is with Leo,” she added.

“I just wanted to go say hi to the kid, because I saw him eating alone. I didn’t even know anybody took a photo of it.” Rudolph said he was glad that the story was helping others.

Leo is excited that Rudolph signed his lunch box, and is enjoying all of the attention. “It’s been awesome. Everyone was so proud of me,” Leo said.

Leo and his mother have been invited to dinner with the football team and possibly to a game.

【推荐2】In the 19th century, tuberculosis (肺结核) epidemics were spreading over Europe and the United States, killing an estimated one out of seven people. In ancient Greece, Hippocrates called it “the most considerable of the diseases.”

The fight against tuberculosis reached a turning point on March 24, 1882, in a small meeting room of the German Physiological Society at Berlin. A doctor named Robert Koch used more than 200 microscopic preparations to identify the bacterium that causes tuberculosis: tubercle bacillus.

In 1872, Koch took up the post of district physician in what is today Wolsztyn, Poland. His patients, many of them farmers, were dying from anthrax, an illness that destroyed their cows.

Koch set out to solve the anthrax riddle. First, Koch visited anthrax-stricken farms to observe the cows. He witnessed how a healthy animal would die in a matter of days as its blood turned black. People in close contact with sick cows and sheep also fell ill. Examining drops of black blood from dead cows under his microscope, Koch spotted structures shaped like thin grains of rice, which blood from healthy animals did not have. These germs were Bacillus anthracis.

To see if the bacteria were the cause of the illness, Koch designed his own testing methods. First, he soaked (浸泡) a wood splinter (碎片) with a sick animal’s blood; then he made a small cut at the base of each mouse’s tail and inserted (插入) the splinter into their bodies. The next morning, the mice were dead. When Koch checked their bodies, he found the same microscopic structures in their blood.

In 1880, Koch’s team perfected his plate technique (技术) for generating pure cultures of bacteria, which was crucial in identifying the cause of tuberculosis. In 1890, he announced he had found the cure for tuberculosis. He called the medicine tuberculin, a substance taken from tubercle bacilli. The news gave rise to enormous hope around the world, but tuberculin turned out to be a major disappointment. More than ineffective, it even contributed to the death of some patients. To this day, no completely effective vaccine for tuberculosis has been found, but tuberculin has become a crucial part of testing for the disease.

【推荐3】Mary Wallace Funk was born in New Mexico in 1939. “Wally”, as she was known to family and friends, built wood airplane models at age seven and took her first flying lesson when she was just nine years old. By the time she was 19, she had gotten a pilot’s license. At the age of 20, Funk became the first female flight instructor at a U.S. military base at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.

When she was just 22, Funk was selected as a female astronaut candidate (候选人) for the “Women in Space” program. Along with 12 other women, she received rigorous (严格的) physical and mental testing and training. Funk was the youngest woman in the program and ranked (排名) third of the 13 candidates.

Despite their high performance, the program was canceled. Wally continued seeking her dream of going to space, applying four times when NASA began training female astronauts in the late 1970s. Despite her impressive background, she was turned away for lack of an engineering degree or experience as a test pilot.

She later became the first female Air Safety Investigator, took part in many air races, and worked as a flight instructor and flight safety officer until she retired. Over the course of her career, she taught more than 3,000 pilots.

It may have taken time, but her dreams paid off when Jeff Bezos selected Funk to join him and two other passengers on the flight of his company Blue Origin’s spacecraft, the New Shepard rocket. At age 82, she became the oldest U. S. space traveler, overtaking John Glenn. He was 77 years old on his last mission (任务).

She was extremely happy with the experience even though she couldn’t see Earth as a whole through the spacecraft’s windows.

“I’ve been waiting a long time to finally get up there,” Funk said, “and I’ve done a lot of astronaut training, and I could always beat the guys on what they were doing because I was always stronger.”

It might not be her last trip to space, either. “I want to go again,” she said, “fast!”