2 . The e-mail request came into the Ekiben restaurant in Baltimore late on a Thursday afternoon: their special broccoli dish. The man who sent the e-mail didn’t actually ______ the food itself. He explained that he was writing on behalf of his ______ in Vermont, who was in the final stages of lung cancer, and he was ______ to get the recipe to make it for her there.

Steve Chu, one of the restaurant’s co-owners, read the e-mail and quickly replied with an alternative ______.“We’d like to meet you in Vermont and make it fresh for you,” he wrote.

Brandon Jones, the son-in-law, was ______. For the past six years, every time Brandon’s mother-in-law visited Baltimore, the first place she wanted to go to was Ekiben, where she could ______ that dish.

“She had always told us, ‘When I’m on my deathbed, I want to have that broccoli,’” recalls Brandon’s wife, Rina Jones.

That Friday after work, a day after receiving Brandon’s ______, Chu headed for Vermont with his coworkers. As soon as Chu and his team arrived, they got to ______. They pulled down the gate of the pickup and started ______.

Rina says her mother also ______ Chu and his coworkers. “My mom kept saying, ‘You drove all the way up here to cook for me?’ She was so happy and ______ to have that broccoli. She couldn’t ______ it.”

The Joneses invited Chu and his coworkers to ______ them for dinner, but they needed to get back to Baltimore. Chu also ______ to accept any money from the family.

“It was an honor to help fulfill the family’s ______,” Chu says.

3 . Scanning an item at checkout is something we take for granted in this age of convenience. We can thank barcodes for that. It’s been 50 years since the beginning of this game-changing technology.

On March 31, 1971, a historic meeting took place in New York City and included executives from some of the top US companies at that time. The meeting agreed to create a system to uniquely identify every single product, calling it the Global Trade Item Number (GTIN), the core of barcodes, according to El Mundo, a Spanish newspaper.

What information does a barcode contain? Where the product comes from, where it has been, its price, expiration (过期时间)... you name it. The first two numbers indicate where that product has been identified (the place), then there is the number that corresponds to the manufacturing company and the rest of the numbers uniquely identify each unit that the manufacturer makes.

Barcodes don’t only identify the category of goods but also manage the number of goods. For example, if there are 10 cartons of milk and a customer takes one, it will be registered when it is scanned at the cash counter, so the store owner knows there are nine cartons left and manages stock accurately.

“Its creation allowed the first digitization in the control of the stock,” José María Bonmatí, general director of AECOC, a Spanish commercial association, told El Mundo. “The unique identification of products at a global level was the key that opened the door to retail as we know it today.”

In the past five decades, barcodes have provided many conveniences for commerce. The next generation of barcodes, such as QR codes, can hold vastly more information. “Their use, for example, can tell consumers if a product contains allergens (过敏原), if it is organic and information on its carbon footprint. Ultimately, this provides consumers with a greater level of trust and loyalty relating to the products they buy,” according to GS 1, the organization that develops and maintains the global barcodes standard.

6 . Follow these tips to start a book drive in your neighborhood or school.

Before your book drive

Identify your volunteers. Recruit a committee of volunteers to assist you with planning and pick-ups on collection day.

Determine where to hold the book drive. Good locations include: small retail businesses or local schools. You don’t have to choose just one. You can ask businesses all over your area to collect books for the drive.

Choose an appropriate time to hold the book drive. Join forces with an already-scheduled community event, or take advantage of a national celebration.

Determine what type of books you want to collect and what age group you are targeting. Your range can be as wide or narrow as you like.

Plan a kick-off event. Host a party, and ask each attendee to bring a book.

During your book drive

Motivate. Organize a competition to encourage friends, neighbors, other parents, club members to donate. Keep track of which location and which individual contributes the most books. Recognize the donors with certificates or awards.

Spread the word. The most successful way to gather books is to ask your personal network to contribute. Make these requests in person or by phone. To reach a larger audience: Hang flyers in grocery stores and schools (with permission).

After your book drive

Sort your books. Count the number of books you collected, and sort them by age range or where they will be donated.

Review. Get your committee together to consider what worked and what didn’t. Document changes to make your next book drive even better.

7 . On January 7, David Bennett went into the operating room at the University of Maryland Medical Center for a surgical procedure never performed before on a human. The 57-year-old Maryland resident had been hospitalized for months due to a life threatening disease. His heart was failing him and he needed a new one.

Bennett’s condition left him unresponsive to treatment and ineligible (不合格) for the transplant (移植) list or an artificial heart pump. The physician-scientists at the center, however, had another-also risky- option: transplant a heart from a genetically-modified pig.

“It was either die or do this transplant,” Bennett had told surgeons a day before the operation. “I want to live. I know it’s a shot in the dark, but it’s also my last choice.”

It took the medical team eight hours to finish the operation, and their efforts have not been in vain. “It’s working and it looks normal. We are thrilled, but we don’t know what tomorrow will bring us. This has never been done before,” Barkley Griffith, who led the transplant team, told the New York Times.

While it’s only been five days since the operation, the surgeons say that Bennett’s new pig heart was, so far，functioning as expected and his body wasn’t rejecting (排斥) the organ. They are still monitoring his condition closely.

“I think it’s extremely exciting,” says Robert Montgomery. The result of the procedure was also personally meaningful for Montgomery, who received a heart transplant in 2018 due to a genetic disease that may also affect members of his family in the future. “It’s still in the early days, but still the heart seems to be functioning. And that in and of itself is an extraordinary thing. Up to now most experimental heart transplant procedures have been done between pigs and other animals. This is the first time that surgeons have taken it into a living human.”

9 . The message is drummed into us from childhood: forgive people who’ve wronged you, because it’s the right thing to do. Forgiveness is a virtue, we’re told, the only way for us to truly move on and heal. But forgiving someone is not always what’s best for us. In fact, if someone has hurt you deeply and the relationship isn’t healthy, trying to “fix” things can do more harm than good.

Most of us would probably agree that forgiving a wrongdoer means letting go of negative feelings like anger towards them. Actually it pressures us to minimize our feelings and revise our boundaries — to say “it’s OK” when for us, it isn’t. And when someone doesn’t make us feel seen or safe, forgiving them can actually weaken our self-respect. A 2010 research paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called this “the doormat effect”. It found that people who forgave partners that didn’t make them feel valued had less respect for themselves, along with a weakened sense of self.

If you keep on forgiving someone who’s done wrong, it can encourage that person to keep hurting you. That’s what 2011 research by psychology professor James K McNulty argues. He looked at how 72 newlywed couples expressed forgiveness towards acts of aggression (攻击性), and whether this caused any changes in the wrongdoer’s behaviour. He found that when a partner was more likely to forgive those acts, the aggressor was more likely to keep committing them. This is because facing the consequences of their actions is what motivates people to change their ways, and being offered a clean sheet can allow them to avoid making changes. Forgiving frequent and major offenses (冒犯), like verbal or physical abuse, can do more harm than good.

What if, instead of looking to forgiveness like a magic medicine, we put our energies towards accepting a situation for what it is? This way, we can focus on recognizing what happened and coming to terms with it, however that looks for us and without any sense of obligation towards our offender. It’ll still be a process, sure, but it’s one centred around you and your needs.