1 . With few trees left to slow the wind in southern Madagascar, sand blows continuously. It settles across fields, villages, roads and in the eyes of hungry children waiting for food aid.

Madagascar, the fourth-largest island on Earth, contains one of the planet’s most diverse ecosystems. It has thousands of species of colorful plants and wild animals. But it is not all a natural, green paradise, especially in the south, where the environmental reality has changed.

Four years of extremely dry weather and forest clearing to make farmland have turned the once fertile area into a dusty red emptiness. “There’s nothing to harvest. That’s why we’re starving,” said Tarira, the mother of seven waiting at the World Food Program(WFP)center near Anjeky Beanatara to get Plumpy, a dense peanut-based food provided to starving children. Like many others in the area, Tarira and her family have sometimes eaten a local plant called raketa. “The plant grows in the wild but provides few valuable nutrients,” she said, adding that eating it could cause stomach pain. The UN agency said more than a million people in southern Madagascar currently needed help from the WFP and the food crisis here grew over several years. At the height of it, the WFP warned the island was at risk of seeing “the world’s first climate change famine.”

Theodore Mbainaissem who runs WFP operations in southern Madagascar says there are no usual weather patterns any longer and villagers can no longer predict the best time to plant or harvest. However, he adds the WFP has made joint efforts with other aid organizations to resolve the food crisis — children with severe malnutrition have dropped from about 30 percent a few months before to about 5 percent now. “When you look in the villages, you see children running left and right. That wasn’t the case before,” he says.

2 . Some of Hawaii’s most popular musical artists have appeared before an unlikely audience, who are from a small elementary school on Oahu’s coast.

They all come with a purpose: The headmaster dreamed up the virtual concerts, presenting artists like internationally famous ukulele player Jake Shimabukuro, as a way of bringing together a community struggling with the pandemic. “We have probably the best ukulele player — one of the best ukulele musicians in the entire world — come and play for you guys tonight,” said Headmaster Keoki Fraser as children and parents tuned in from home computers. Fraser is trying to organize concerts every several weeks as his school, like most public schools in Hawaii, continues to educate its students remotely.

Tabitha Persaud, mom of three students, remembers Fraser coming to the parent-teacher association with the idea of approaching big names. “Can we do that?” she wondered. “Will they do that for us?”

“They’re in the same situation as we are. So, I mean, they don’t have to go anywhere or leave their home. We just hit them up,” said Fraser, who graduated from the local high school. “We love to get people that are influential and the kids look up to.”

During a recent Friday concert, Fraser invited former student Dylan Kunz, now a seventh grader, to play ukulele as one of the student performers to open for Shimabukuro. Kunz, who likes Shimabukuro, was excited. “He’s the reason I started playing,” he said. “It keeps me motivated to keep playing.”

The concerts are open to all. For one performance, about 1,200 viewers tuned in. “I think it’s so much fun to see the smiling, happy faces of all the kids,” said Amy Kunz, Dylan’s mom. “I think Headmaster Fraser, in doing this, is really hitting home from social and emotional aspects. Even though we’re not in school, we can still make these connections and have fun.”

3 . Jane, a 40-year-old mental health professional from Ireland, never worried too much about how she looked. However, when her job went fully virtual, she found herself anxious about Microsoft Teams meetings. Her face looked rounder, her nose looked bigger, and her top lip looked thinner than she had ever noticed it while looking in the mirror.

As the COVID-19 forced a lot of people into video meetings throughout 2020, researchers noticed a phenomenon they called “Zoom dysmorphia”. After months of remote meetings and seeing their own faces on screen, more and more people became focused on their weaknesses on their faces. Shadi Kourosh, a Masachusetts doctor studying skin diseases, coined the name in the summer of 2020, when she noticed more and more people asking about how to improve facial appearance. It is clear that the age of video meetings has opened up a Pandora’s box of physical and mental insecurities (不安全).

Psychological studies have long connected time spent in front of the mirror with one’s increasing feelings of insecurity. However, Kourosh says that looking at yourself on a screen is not like looking into a real mirror. Front-facing cameras, with their close focus, can distort (使…失真/变形) people’s appearance, making eyes look smaller and noses seem bigger.

Doctors are familiar with how the phenomenon of “Zoom dysmorphia” has become increasingly worsened in recent years by beautified photos of film stars or by social media filters (滤镜). Most people are smart enough to know a social media filter is not real life. But as for Zoom dysmorphia, people simply were not aware that video calls could cause distortion. These types of insecurities also affect a much bigger part of society. Almost everybody who worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic used video meeting. The impact can be significant and lasting.

Jane has mixed feelings. Her job will be online for the coming future. Feeling less attractive on screen than in real life, she is considering cosmetic surgery (整容外科) to improve her confidence. “But it feels stupid as a 40-year-old woman to think too much about my appearance like a teenager. There are bigger problems in the world.”

4 . “You’re not listening!” “Let me finish!” “That’s not what I said!” After “I love you,” these are among the most common words in close relationships. During my two years researching a book on listening, I learned something unbelievable about interpersonal communication: The closer we feel toward someone, the less likely we are to listen carefully to them. It’s called the closeness-communication bias (偏见) and, over time, it can hurt, and even end relationships.

The more you know someone, the more likely you are to ignore him or her because you think you already know what he or she is going to say. It’s kind of like when you’ve traveled a certain route several times and no longer notice signposts and scenery.

Social science researchers have repeatedly proved the closeness-communication bias in the experiments where they paired subjects first with friends or spouses (配偶) and then with strangers. The researchers asked subjects to interpret what their partners were saying. While the subjects predicted they would more exactly understand those who they had close relationships with, they often understood them no better than strangers, and often worse.

The closeness-communication bias not only keeps us from listening to those we love, it can also keep us from allowing our loved ones to listen to us. It may explain why people in close relationships sometimes keep secrets from one another.

Another study shows that people often share their concerns with strangers rather than their spouses, family members or dear friends because they fear judgment.

So what can we do to avoid the closeness-communication bias? The British psychologist Robin Dunbar says the key is to talk with those closest to us every day. That means asking, “How are you?” and actually listening to the answer.