1 . When 19-year-old Emily Bhatnagar from Maryland, USA, found out her father had stage four thyroid cancer, her response was a little different than you might expect. To honour her father, who she also describes as her best friend, she decided to start a book drive called For Love and Buttercup, collecting books for kids with cancer.

“It was very much an overnight idea,” she explains. “I posted a message on an app called Nextdoor asking my neighbours for used book donations. I was only expecting a few here and there, but the response was truly incredible and it was just the push I needed to co-exist with my grief rather than letting it consume me.”

“It was absolutely heartbreaking to watch my dad go through cancer and see him lose a little bit of himself each day, but the book drive allowed me to develop a newfound sense of purpose connected with sympathy to help others in any shape or form. I wanted to help kids. They’ve always held a soft spot in my heart.”

Using tips she earns from working at her parents’ bread shop, Emily has bought many books out of her own pocket. In addition, she receives donations through her Amazon wish list, which can be found in the bio of the book drive’s Instagram account, @forloveandbuttercup.

The project has seen a huge success, with For Love and Buttercup donating over l5,000 books and being recognized by The Washington Post, Forbes, The President’s Volunteer Service Award and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way Foundation.

2 . Are you an “I person” or an “E person”? These two personality labels in particular are widely discussed online. They are part of a popular personality test called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, or MBTI. All of the results have four letters, and there are 16 results in total, “I” and “E” refer to “introverted” and “extroverted”, respectively.

Even if someone is typically quiet, many online discussions suggest that an “I person” can still act outgoing at times. For example, when an introverted person is with a group of introverted friends, they might become more social like an “E person”. According to psychologists, this idea of temporarily switching personalities is called “masking”. That is hiding your true personality in specific situations.

“Human beings want to feel they belong, and they might become people-pleasers to do so,” wrote the MasterClass website.

Thinking on this, I may actually be the kind of person that these people are discussing. Most times, I just wish to make the atmosphere more interesting and exciting and show people that I’m easy to get along with. But deep down, I mostly enjoy being alone and quiet.

Using the MBTI result to identify and describe someone’s personality seems fun. However, I went too far at one time. My sister was excitedly making a day-to-day travel plan when I remembered from an article that “P people” don’t like to make or stick to plans, so I said to her, “You don’t seem like a ‘P person’?” “Why?” she asked back, “Since when do I need to follow what my personality test tells me to do?” It was then that I realized I’d taken the result too seriously.

The MBTI personality test may show something you don’t know about yourself and can even be a fun ice-breaker question when meeting new friends. And that’s all it is-for fun. Knowing someone’s MBTI result doesn’t mean you really know this person. And those four letters of yours don’t define who you are.

5 . McCormick Place in Chicago, the largest convention center (会议中心) in North America, is covered in glass that is enjoyable for humans but deadly for birds. On Oct. 5, over 1,000 migrating birds died from colliding with (相撞) its glass walls in a single day.

One key reason for the accident is the glass. During the day, birds fly toward glass as it reflects a perfect image of the sky and nearby trees. As night falls, the bright light from glass buildings attracts birds who fly according to the location of the moon and stars. The collision happened on the night of Oct. 5, when the lights in the building were on for an event.

After colliding with a building, many birds will die on the spot from a broken skull. Others may continue to fly for some distance, but they rarely survive for more than a few hours, as Brendon Samuels, who researches bird window collisions at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, told The Guardian.

Every year, nearly one billion birds collide with glass in the US, according to the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In China, bird collisions are not uncommon, either. In the autumn of 2022 and spring of 2023, the National Anti-bird Collisions Action Alliance reported a total of 190 cases of bird collisions, which included several types of birds listed as second-class protected wildlife.

These tragedies could have been avoided if appropriate measures had been taken. Many places around the world have already put forward bird-related guidelines on building design. These include reducing the use of glass in building walls and applying bird-friendly materials and visual markers to the buildings’ walls. Turning off lights at night during migration seasons can also significantly help reduce bird collisions. Alongside guidelines on bird-friendly building design, people can also do their bit to help birds by putting stickers on glass windows in their homes and closing the curtains at night.

7 . I fell in love with a minister’s son when I turned twenty. He was not Chinese. When I found out that my parents had ______ the minister’s family for Christmas Eve dinner, I cried. What would Robert think of our shabby Chinese Christmas? What would he think of our noisy Chinese relatives who lacked proper American ______? What terrible disappointment would he feel upon seeing not a ______ turkey but Chinese food? On Christmas Eve I saw that my mother had outdone herself in creating a (n) ______ menu. The kitchen was ______ with piles of raw and unusual food: a fish begging not to be thrown into a pan of hot oil, a bowl of soaking dried fungus (菌菇) back to life, a plate of squids (鱿鱼) whose backs ______ like bicycle tires.

And then they arrived—the minister’s family and all my relatives. Robert said hello, and I pretended he was not worthy of ______. Dinner ______ me deeper into despair. My relatives licked the ends of their chopsticks and ______ the table, dipping them into the plates of food ______ Robert and his family waited ______ for plates to be passed to them. My relatives ______ with pleasure when my mother brought out the whole steamed fish. Then my father pulled out the soft meat. “Amy, your favourite,” he said. I wanted to ______. I remained silent for long.

After everyone had gone, my mother said to me, “You want to be the same as American girls on the outside. But inside you must always be Chinese. You must be ______ you are different. Your only shame is to have shame.” It occurred to me that re-finding my Chinese ______ was always my cultural uniqueness.

9 . Growing up in a small village in Ghana, Osei Boateng watched many of his family members and neighbors struggle to access basic health care. In many regions of the country, it can take hours to get to the nearest hospital. “My grandmother was a very big part of my life,” said Boateng. “It was very hard when we lost her, and it was due to something that could have been easily prevented. That is the painful part of it.”

Feeling an urgent call to help, Boateng decided he would make it his life’s mission to bring health care to remote communities in Ghana. He started his nonprofit, OKB Hope Foundation, and in 2021, he converted a van into a mobile doctor’s office called the Hope Health Van and started bringing health care directly to those in need. A few times a week, the mobile clinic and medical team travel long distances to remote communities in Ghana and provide routine medical care for free. On each trip, Boateng’s team consists of a nurse, a physician’s assistant, a doctor, and an operation assistant. In the van, they can run basic labs like bloodwork and urinalysis as well as prescribe and provide medications.

Since its launch, Boateng says the Hope Health Van has served more than 4,000 Ghanaians across more than 45 rural communities who otherwise don’t have easily accessible medical care.

Boateng has big plans for the future. He hopes to expand to provide more consistent and high-quality medical care not only to those living in remote areas of Ghana but in other countries as well. He has gone all in on his OKB Hope Foundation, recently quitting his job to dedicate his time to bringing health care to his home country. But for him, the sacrifices are well worth the reward.