1 . A University of Michigan (U-M) study has found that older adults’ regular visits to eateries such as fast food restaurants and coffee shops may be as protective of cognitive (认知的) health as marriage.

Lead researcher Jessica Finlay and her team interviewed 125 older adults aged 55-92 in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and accompanied them on visits to their neighborhood places. Through analysis of her interviews, they found that older adults valued these types of eateries as places of familiarity and comfort, places that were physically and economically accessible, and places to socialize with family, friends, staff and customers.

“Traditionally, fast food has a negative relationship with cognition — we know that diets high in fat and salt are associated with increased risk of cognitive decline,” said Finlay. “But as a geographer, I’m interested in the places themselves and what those spaces mean for the everyday lives of older adults.”

There is one interviewee called Denise. “It was an expensive month with a wedding and two unexpected funerals (葬礼), and these events ate up her budget (预算),” the researchers wrote. “Though she could not afford restaurant meals regularly, Denise still enjoyed inexpensive coffee with her friends as a valued opportunity to socialize.”

Finlay’s research at U-M focuses on how neighborhoods may help reduce or increase risk for Alzheimer’s disease. She assumed that regular socialization and leisure activities that take place in these places might be linked to cognitive health.

Finlay and U-M researcher Michael Esposito tested this idea in a national cohort by drawing on the Reasons for Geographic and Racial Differences in Stroke, or REGARDS, study, which collects information by mail and telephone from more than 30,000 aging individuals. The participants were an average age of 64 in 2003-2007.

REGARDS respondents living in the most limited retail food (零售食品) environments had cognitive scores that were modestly lower — about 0.1 points — than residents living in the highest density (密度) environments. The difference in cognitive well-being between individuals living in high-density and low-density neighborhoods was about a year difference in age, which is strongly linked to age-related cognitive decline in older adults.

“My side of the project was translating what Finlay found in her qualitative results over to the national level, blowing it up to see if some of those associations she inferred from her study in Minnesota held for the nation at large — and they did,” said Esposito.

2 . There is a decades-long rise in Americans feeling socially isolated (孤独的). That may seem strange, in the light of all the ways we now have to connect electronically, from email and Facebook to Instagram and TikTok.

“Loneliness is strongly related to people’s health problems,” said psychologist Matt Johnson. And he pointed out: increasing loneliness also has a connection with the proliferation of social media platforms worldwide. “When this social need for interpersonal connections isn’t met in your organic social environment, the market converges on (趋同于) this,” said Johnson. “We see the rise of social media happening around the same time as this loneliness epidemic (流行病).” Johnson said that social media platforms can sometimes relieve loneliness — if you’re actually keeping in touch with others through them.

That’s the kind of social network that Deena Hindi has been trying to build for her 84-year-old mother. Hindi’s father passed away several years ago. Her mother was left living alone next door to Hindi, with few friends. Hindi figured, “There’s got to be a lot of lonely people. So that’s why I created a Meetup group, to see if I could get people together.” A group of older women found Hindi’s Meetup group online. They now go out regularly in person.

However, Johnson said, “More and more people, especially younger people, are engaging in the more follower-type of social media, where you’re engaging with people with massive followings, and you’re looking at their TikTok videos, their tweets and their Instagram content. You don’t know them personally; you’ll probably never meet them in real life: not really social connection.”

There are ways that employers can help fight the loneliness epidemic, according to Anne Bowers, who researches the workplace, mental health, and productivity. “Workers who have a good work-life balance, social companionship (友谊), and satisfying communications at work are 53% less likely to be lonely than other employees who don’t. Creating a healthy work-life balance for employees is very important — flexible work schedules can create better balance,” he said.

Recent studies show that the amount of time people spend looking at screens is rising. We live in an era where mass media is     1     (ready) accessible and at times, it can influence how we see the world around us. Many experts agree that too much     2     (expose) to mass media can have negative     3     (effect) on your psychological well-being. It can influence how you feel about yourself and life,     4     it impacts what messages others consider     5     (be) true about healthy living.

For example, advertisements often feature beautiful,     6     (wealth) individuals or groups that enjoy their lives by eating rich foods and     7     (spend) lots of money on flashy clothes and houses. Such images may appeal to someone who does not know any different leaders, parents, or peers who eat poorly and do not have much money. Advertisements create a sense of urgency,     8     can make you feel like you must have what everyone else has before you don’t consider     9     (you) part of the “in-group”. It is easy to fall into a habit of buying whatever new thing comes along, without thinking too hard about     10     it is worth it.

So be a critical mass media reader.

6 . Those who don’t live in cities often complain about or feel surprised at the fact that strangers don’t talk to each other in urban public places. They feel sorry about the way we seem to increasingly get lost in mobile devices, seemingly oblivious to what’s going on around us. But sociologists recognize that the space we give each other in the urban places serves an important social function.

Well-known sociologist Erving Goffman developed the concept of   “civil inattention” in his book Behavior in Public Places. Far from ignoring those around us, Goffman proved through years of studying people in public that what we’re actually doing is pretending to be unaware of what others are doing around us, therefore providing them a sense of privacy, as they do the same for us. Goffman proved in his research that civil inattention typically involves at first a mirror form of social interaction, like very brief eye contact, the exchange of head nods, or weak smiles. Following that, both parties then typically shin their eyes from the other party.

Goffman theorized that what we achieve, socially speaking, with this kind of interaction, is mutual (相互的) recognition that the other present causes no threat to our security, and we both agree, tacitly (默契地), to let the other alone to do as they please. When we provide civil inattention to others, we effectively approve their behavior. Sometimes, we use civil inattention to save face when we’ve done something we feel embarrassed by, or to help manage the embarrassment that another might feel if we witness them trip, or drop something.

Civil inattention is thus not a problem, but an important part of maintaining social order in public. For this reason, problems arise when this norm (规范) is broken. Because we expect it from others and see it as normal behavior, we may feel threatened by someone who doesn’t give it to us. This is why women feel threatened by those who catcall (发嘘声)to them, and why for some men, simply being stared at by another is enough to cause a physical fight.

8 . The e-commerce boom has fueled demand for warehouses (仓库). And the increasing demand is mostly linked to online shopping, because Internet shoppers are always expected to provide a wider variety of goods. Vacancy rates (空仓率) have therefore decreased greatly, from 10% across America and Europe a decade ago to just 5% now. In some places, like Toronto and Tokyo, they are below 2%.

The value of existing assets of warehouses is ballooning as a result. This in turn is attracting more investment. However, people’s enthusiasm for building new warehouses is now starting to run up against obstacles. The first is lack of space, especially in densely populated cities. The problem has grown so acute in parts of Germany that delivery lorries operate from sites across the border in Poland and France. High costs, restrictive zoning rules and current rents make it difficult to convert existing properties, such as struggling shopping malls, into distribution centers.

Public hostility to new sites is also growing. Large warehouses are noisy and operate around the clock. Suburban homeowners across America and Europe worry about pollution from lorries. Even where developers promise thousands of jobs, politicians complain that these will be low-skilled, or soon replaced by robots. Five Conservative members have called on Britain’s government, run by their own party, to stop a huge warehouse from being built in south-east England.

Warehouse owners are getting more crentive. Amazon is changing former golf courses in America into distribution centers. The online giant is also converting an empty car park in central London into a delivery hub. Less creatively, developers are raising rents and it’s estimated that they will go up by 6% globally this year. That may upset e-merchants.

9 . Every year thousands of people are crowded in the city of Pamplona, in north eastern Spain, for the opportunity to run for their lives as six fighting bulls are released to charge through the town. There are dozens of injuries every year, and there have been at least 15 deaths recorded since 1910. Daniel Parisi, a physicist and computer scientist realized that the Pamplona bull-runs offered the perfect natural experiment to research the insight of the psychology of panicked crowds.

Dr. Parisi and his team went to two different rooftop locations in Pamplona in July 2019, and recorded footage (镜头) of the runners as the animals were released. A wave of people running at top speed raced past their cameras a few seconds ahead of the bulls. The researchers brought their recordings back to the lab to calculate the speed of the runners, the density (密度) of the crowd and the probability of a runner tripping and falling. They also examined the tracks of the bulls, the responses of individual runners as the bulls came near to them, and the relationship between runner-group density and speed.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the researchers found that runners picked up speed when the bulls drew near. Less expected was the finding that the speed of individual runners increased with the density of the crowd This finding is at odds with a long-held assumption in architectural and urban-design circles that people will slow their pace as group density goes up, in order to lower the risk of a collision, which could lead to a fall and, perhaps, injury or death as a runner is trampled by others.

It seems that, in the heat of the moment, people pay little attention to the danger of colliding with each other, and do not slow down. The duty falls upon urban designers to work out how best to plan the construction of future alleys, tunnels, bridges and other passages that restrict flow. The only option may well be to make them wider.

10 . Restaurants’ growth accelerated in the 20th century. Dining out became relatively more expensive. And yet three economic changes ensured that demand for restaurants grew despite rising prices.

The first was immigration. In the 50 years after the Second World War, the net flow of migrants into rich countries were more than four times as before. Starting a restaurant was a good career move for new arrivals：it neither required formal qualifications nor, at least for chefs, fluency in the local language. Migrants tended to improve the quality of an area’s restaurants. London’s became far better in the era of free movement with the European Union. The melting pot that is Singapore has some of the best food in the world Restaurants became more tempting, even as prices went up.

The second factor was the changing microeconomics of the family. Households’ choices about whether to make their own food or to buy it premade were shaped not only by the cost of ingredients, but also by the time spent on shopping and preparation. As more women entered the workforce during the 20th century, a working woman who cooked dinner would be sacrificing time which might otherwise be used to earn money. And so eating out made increasing economic sense, even as it became more expensive.

The third factor was changing working patterns. Historically, poor people tended to work longer hours than rich ones. But in the latter half of the 20th century the opposite became true. The rise of knowledge-intensive jobs, and globalization, made rich people’s work more financially rewarding and enjoyable. Working late into the night became a sign of status. The result was that the people with the most money to spend on dining out increasingly needed it most, since they had the least free time.

The long-term future of the restaurant is less clear. The pandemic has led to many people buying more takeout than before, while others have a newfound love of cooking.

Restaurants have little choice but to continue to adapt. Maybe apart from food, they can also double down on what they do best: offering those who need to eat a taste of romance, glamour and love.