1 . In years past, many people would travel over New Year’s Eve and immerse (沉浸) themselves in a different culture. Countries around the world celebrate the new year with unique customs and traditions carried out at the celebration.

Japan: Eat toshikoshi soba

Shiwasu is the end-of-the-year period in Japan. To celebrate New Year’s Eve, people eat “year-crossing” soba, which can symbolize having a long and fortunate life along with a clean break from the year. However, when eaten at midnight, there’s a certain cross of the old and the new year, thus you cannot “break off” all of last year’s troubles properly but instead carry them over to the following year.

Russia: Burn, then drink your wishes

After a year of ruined dreams and canceled plans, set your sights on a fresh start with this Russian tradition. Before midnight, write down your wishes on a piece of paper, then light the paper on fire. Once it’s stopped burning, spread the wish-filled ashes into a glass of champagne and drink up shortly after the clock completes striking midnight.

Spain: Eat 12 grapes

Perhaps the easiest tradition to carry out is eating grapes for good luck. When the clock starts striking at midnight, eat one with each ringing sound. Better if you’re wearing special New Year’s Eve underwear while eating your grapes. A pair of red underwear can bring you a new year of love, while yellow may bring joy and fortune.

Greece: Hang some onions

If you’ve been cooking throughout the pandemic, maybe you have some onions around the house to spare for this tradition. In Greece, onions symbolize rebirth, so people hang them up on their doors on Dec. 31 to encourage a year of growth. Keep the Greek traditions going by baking a special cake on New Year’s Day. Hide a coin in the cake and share it with your loved ones-whoever finds the coin is said to have a year of good luck.

2 . I am the “Laundry Goddess”. Well, that’s what my kids call me anyway because I have the talent for finding the right ______ for any stain. From spaghetti sauce and grass marks to ballpoint ink stains, whatever my family ______ me, I seem to be able to find a way to make it look brand new again. It’s a skill I got from my mother. My mom wouldn’t admit it, but I think she ______ doing the laundry.

The laundry room was Mom’s territory. It was ______ , with only the shushing (沙沙声) of the washing machine or the hum of the dryer to interrupt her. She would ______ down early in the morning, often still in her housecoat, to put in the first ______ of the day. We would find her there, leaning on the freezer, happily having a coffee and reading the newspaper or her library book.

I don’t remember Mom teaching me the ways of the laundry room. I learned to ______ towels and small items as a youngster. I spent many hours ironing clean cotton handkerchiefs and pillowcases. But the ______ wasn’t part of my training. So when I left home and moved ______ the country, stain ______ required an expensive long-distance phone call home.

My washer and dryer seem to have more ______ than a jet plane, certainly many more than the machines used by my mom. I have made the ______ from laundry powder to liquid, and I have my own favorite stain ______ . But every time I step into the laundry room and think about how to deal with a particularly difficult stain, I ______ the Laundry Goddesses who came before me for her wisdom and perseverance. And each clean item of clothing is a ______ force in a chaotic world.

3 . Two very different movies were released on July 21 this summer in the West, bringing record numbers of people into cinemas as the “Barbenheimer (芭比海默)” trend took over social media.

Barbie and Oppenheimer have been huge hits around the world, with Barbie alone making over 1 billion US dollars just 17 days after release. This makes it Wamer Bros studio’s fastest movie to reach $1 billion and the film’s director, Greta Gerwig, the first-ever solo female filmmaker with a billion-dollar film.

Barbie and Oppenheimer are an interesting pair because of how different they are from one another. Barbie is about a famous toy coming to life and facing issues of sexism and finding her own identity. Meanwhile, Oppenheimer is a serious male-driven historical film about J. Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project and the development of the atomic bomb. The release of these two huge, wildly different movies on the same day led to the creation of countless memes (表情包) under the Barbenheimer hashtag. Filmgoers have even gone to see both movies one right after the other, with some dressing up in pink for Barbie going on to see Oppenheimer as well.

Meanwhile, people have found some of the “Barbenheimer” memes disturbing. Atomic bombs killed many people and they think the memes made light of a very dark time in history. But the films have brought a healthy boost to cinema ticket sales around the world, helping an industry that has faced many challenges in recent years. The increasing popularity of streaming services and the COVID-19 pandemic have kept people out of cinemas. Now, the strikes from writers and actors over concerns of pay and about the use of artificial intelligence by film studios are also having an impact. Add to that a public tired of yearly big movies about superheroes and fast cars, as declining ticket sales suggest.

Described as a historic moment for the movie industry. “‘Barbenheimer’ will go down as one of the biggest and unexpected milestones in the history of cinema,” Paul Dergarabedian at Comscore told CNN.

5 . A new study involving nearly 50,000 people from four continents offers new insights into identifying the quantity of daily walking steps that will best improve adults’ health and longevity(长寿), and whether the ideal number of steps differs across people of different ages. The study represents an effort to develop an evidence-based public health message about the benefits of physical activity. The often-repeated 10,000-step-a-day saying grew out of a decades-old marketing activity for a Japanese pedometer(计步器), with no science to back it up.

Led by physical activity professor Amanda Paluch, an international group of scientists conducted an experiment among adults aged 18 and older. They grouped the nearly 50,000 participants into four comparative groups according to average steps per day. The lowest step group averaged 3,500 steps; the second, 5,800; the third, 7,800; and the fourth, 10,900 steps per day. Among the three higher active groups, there was a 40—53% lower risk of death, compared to the lowest step group.

More specifically, for adults 60 and older, the risk of early death leveled off at about 6,000—8,000 steps per day, meaning that more steps than that provided no additional benefit for longevity, while for adults younger than 60, about 8, 000—10,000 steps per day.

“So, what we saw was this continuing reduction in risk as the number of steps increases, until it levels off. Interestingly, the study found no definitive association with walking speed.” Paluch says.

The new study supports and expands findings from another study led by Paluch before, which found that walking at least 7,000 steps a day reduced middle-aged people’s risk of early death. “There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that moving even a little more is beneficial, particularly for those who are doing very little activity.” Paluch says. “More steps per day are better for your health.”

8 . Imagine this: You walk into a place and the atmosphere is light and airy. The subtle scent of coffee beans fills the air and everyone that approaches you is friendly and welcoming. You’re comfortable and feel like you belong. As in most cities, it’s a place where people meet, discuss ideas, and conduct business. After taking a few sips of that Caramel Macchiato, you immediately get that feeling of energy and optimism. Perhaps it’s partly due to the caffeine and sugar rush, or maybe it’s that the presence of a Starbucks typically indicates a city on the rise.

In December of 2017, Trenton’s first Starbuck’s café was opened to the public at 102 Warren Street. Walking in, people living in Trenton scream at everything about this café, from the diverse but local stuff to the Trenton themed décor (室内装饰) and art. To make things better, this Starbucks also serves as an “opportunity café” which essentially means the young people in our communities are recruited and offered job training and employment. This program not only uplifts our youth, but also increases the amount of minority business in the city.

In the interviews with customers, a trend in responses arose. To many, the Starbucks was a “favorite place to stop in after work” and provided “a very relaxing environment.” The staff were often highly praised, noted as being friendly, helpful, and working in harmony. The interior décor of the café struck a lot of people’s attention, given the familiarity of the atmosphere. Painted on the walls, all around the store, are murals (壁画) with bright, colorful, graffiti-like designs very sui generis in Trenton, showcasing local monuments like the State House and the famous “Trenton Makes” bridge.

This new Starbucks brings a sense of modernity to Downtown Trenton and reminds us that our city is always developing. Open from 6 a. m. until 7 p.m. every day, the building is hardly ever empty. This space is made for everyone in Trenton, even the non-coffee lovers.

9 . Growing up on a mountain farm in Tyrol, Fritz enjoyed watching how cows and horses interacted with each other more freely, once they’d been led out of the barn and into pasture. It was what he observed in his boyhood that took root in his pursuit of becoming a biologist. After he finished his study at university. Fritz landed work at Austria’s Konrad Lorenz Research Center, raising raven chicks by hand and teaching graylag geese how to open boxes as he pursued his PhD. Working this closely with free-living animals was exactly what he’d dreamed of as a boy.

In 1997, a zoo gave the research center its first northern bald ibis chicks (隐鹮) Nowhere near as teachable as geese—and not even close to super intelligent ravens—the ibises frustrated most of the scientists. But Fritz was fascinated. He devoted himself to taking care of them. After the ibises were first released back into the wild more than 20 years ago, Fritz learned that spending generations in zoo hadn’t reduced their drive to migrate (迁徙), though it did leave them geographically uninformed. In their search for “south”, some ended up in Russia. What the ibises needed, Fritz thought, was a guide.

Fritz decided he would teach the birds a new, safer migration route by guiding them himself in a tiny aircraft. And he was confident he could succeed in this daring, unconventional plan—because he had done it before. “Around that time, the movie ‘Fly Away Home’ was a huge hit with us biologists,” Fritz says. When he announced that he’d do the same with the ibises, he was initially laughed at. But Fritz didn’t give up. He modified an ultralight aircraft so it would travel at speeds slow enough for his winged students to keep up. He had been his young pupils’ only provider of food, love and hugs since they were just a few days old, and the ibises eagerly followed their teacher, who just happened to pilot a fairly noisy machine.

In 2004, three years after some initially bumpy (颠簸的) experiments, Fritz led the first batch of birds from Austria to Italy, and has since led 15 such migrations. Over that time, he has rewilded 277 young ibises, many of which then started to pass the route on to their own young.

10 .

2023 Gotham Award Nominee for Breakthrough Figure(Raven Jackson)

One of the most visually striking, profoundly moving American moviemaking debuts(首次亮相) in years, Raven Jackson’s All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt is an eye-catching immersion into a young woman’s inner world, filmed and edited with an extraordinary attention to the tiniest detail. This impressionistic journey skips ahead and back through decades to tell the story of Mack, whose upbringing in rural Mississippi is touched by grace, dotted with heartbreak, and always carried high in the sky by the surrounding natural beauty. As she ages, she loses loved ones and gains others, while making decisions that change the course of her life, and that of her beloved sister. Relying on sounds and images to tell her story, and employing minimal dialogue, Jackson has created something breathtakingly quiet and ultimately transporting a spiritual respect to the moments, feelings, and connections that make a life. An A24 release.

November 7—November 15

12:15 PM            2:15 PM             4:15 PM        6:15 PM          8:15 PM

*Open caption screenings of the film will play on November 8—November 13

12:15 PM             6:15 PM

*Audio description available at all screenings.