1 . You’ve heard that plastic is polluting the oceans — between 4.8 and 12.7 million tonnes enter ocean ecosystems every year. But does one plastic straw or cup really make a difference? Artist Benjamin Von Wong wants you to know that it does. He builds massive sculptures out of plastic garbage, forcing viewers to re-examine their relationship to single-use plastic products.

At the beginning of the year, the artist built a piece called “Strawpocalypse,” a pair of 10-foot-tall plastic waves, frozen mid-crash. Made of 168,000 plastic straws collected from several volunteer beach cleanups, the sculpture made its first appearance at the Estella Place shopping center in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

Just 9% of global plastic waste is recycled. Plastic straws are by no means the biggest source (来源) of plastic pollution, but they’ve recently come under fire because most people don’t need them to drink with and, because of their small size and weight, they cannot be recycled. Every straw that’s part of Von Wong’s artwork likely came from a drink that someone used for only a few minutes. Once the drink is gone, the straw will take centuries to disappear.

In a piece from 2018, Von Wong wanted to illustrate (说明) a specific statistic: Every 60 seconds, a truckload’s worth of plastic enters the ocean. For this work, titled “Truckload of Plastic,” Von Wong and a group of volunteers collected more than 10,000 pieces of plastic, which were then tied together to look like they’d been dumped (倾倒) from a truck all at once.

Von Wong hopes that his work will also help pressure big companies to reduce their plastic footprint.

3 . Technology seems to discourage slow, immersive reading. Reading on a screen, particularly a phone screen, tires your eyes and makes it harder for you to keep your place. So online writing tends to be more skimmable and list-like than print. The cognitive neuroscientist Mary Walt argued recently that this “new norm” of skim reading is producing “an invisible, game-changing transformation” in how readers process words. The neuronal circuit that sustains the brain’s capacity to read now favors the rapid absorption of information, rather than skills developed by deeper reading, like critical analysis.

We shouldn’t overplay this danger. All readers skim. Skimming is the skill we acquire as children as we learn to read more skillfully. From about the age of nine, our eyes start to bounce around the page, reading only about a quarter of the words properly, and filling in the gaps by inference. Nor is there anything new in these fears about declining attention spans. So far, the anxieties have proved to be false alarms. “Quite a few critics have been worried about attention span lately and see very short stories as signs of cultural decline,” the American author Selvin Brown wrote. “No one ever said that poems were evidence of short attention spans.”

And yet the Internet has certainly changed the way we read. For a start, it means that there is more to read, because more people than ever are writing. If you time travelled just a few decades into the past, you would wonder at how little writing was happening outside a classroom. And digital writing is meant for rapid release and response. An online article starts forming a comment string underneath as soon as it is published. This mode of writing and reading can be interactive and fun. But often it treats other people’s words as something to be quickly harvested as fodder to say something else. Everyone talks over the top of everyone else, desperate to be heard.

Perhaps we should slow down. Reading is constantly promoted as a social good and source of personal achievement. But this advocacy often emphasizes “enthusiastic”, “passionate” or “eager” reading, none of which adjectives suggest slow, quiet absorption.

To a slow reader, a piece of writing can only be fully understood by immersing oneself in the words and their slow comprehension of a line of thought. The slow reader is like a swimmer who stops counting the number of pool laps he has done and just enjoys how his body feels and moves in water.

The human need for this kind of deep reading is too tenacious for any new technology to destroy. We often assume that technological change can’t be stopped and happens in one direction, so that older media like “dead-tree” books are kicked out by newer, more virtual forms. In practice, older technologies can coexist with new ones. The Kindle has not killed off the printed book any more than the car killed off the bicycle. We still want to enjoy slowly-formed ideas and carefully-chosen words. Even in a fast-moving age, there is time for slow reading.

4 . Schools in the US and elsewhere are announcing bans on the recently released AI — powered ChatGPT out of fear that students could use the technology to complete their assignments. However, bans may be practically impossible given how difficult it is to detect when text is composed by ChatGPT. Is it instead time to rethink how students are taught and evaluated?

Educators are starting to question what it means to assess student learning if an AI can write an essay or paper similar to, or even better than, a student would — and the teacher can’t tell the difference. Many teachers believe the time-honored learning tradition will be destroyed from the ground up by Chat GPT. The Los Angeles Unified School District in California first blocked the use of ChatGPT on networks and devices in December 2022.

However, removing technology from the classroom can mean undesirable consequences, such as creating more obstacles for students with disabilities, says Trust. Additionally, restricting the use of ChatGPT on school networks and devices can’t stop students from using ChatGPT at home and in libraries.

It is also unclear if anti-cheating software can reliably detect AI-assisted writing. OpenAI is working to develop a digital watermark that can help teachers and academics spot students who are using ChatGPT to write essays. Open AI’s attempts to watermark AI text, however, hit limits.

Instead of worrying about how ChatGPT could enable cheating, educators should ask what motivates students to cheat in the first place and work on developing relationships of trust, says Jesse Stommel at the University of Denver in Colorado.

“Talk to students really frankly about what ChatGPT’s capable of, what it’s not,” says Stommel. “Have students use it to write an essay about Jane Austen and gender dynamics, and then have them read that essay and peer review it and think about what ChatGPT gets right and wrong.”

5 . “If you buy things you do not need, soon you will have to sell things you need.” This is a piece of wise advice from Warren Buffet, arguably one of the greatest financial minds of the 21th century.     1     This is true especially in the present economic climate.

While the idea of being frugal(节俭的) has long been a part of Eastern culture, the relatively recent growth of wealth in China as well as the ease of purchasing has led to increased consumerism for many across the country. Yet this increased consumption of goods has been pushing up the prices of certain bare essentials such as housing, transportation and food, which is forcing people to reevaluate their priorities while spending money.     2    

The internet is flooded with advice on where one can save money as well as good opinions about how they should spend their money. For example, clothes can be bought second-hand, but you should never skip a visit to the dentist.     3     In the meanwhile, you should limit those that are fancy but not entirely necessary. Of course, it is still fine to occasionally spend money on a nice vacation, but buying thirty pairs of shoes you will only wear a few times is neither responsible nor sustainable.

Hopefully, we all fully understand at this point that the resources on the earth are indeed limited.     4     As a result, the choice (forced or not) to be frugal is not only good for one’s wallet, but also beneficial to the planet in the long run. Have you ever chosen to starve yourself to get a pair of limited-edition sneakers?     5    

6 . Activities such as art classes could be recommended as an alternative to medication for patients in England as part of a major initiative to reduce the number of people becoming dependent on prescription drugs.

The Times newspaper quotes figures showing that in the past 12 months,8.4 million adults in England were taking antidepressants(抗抑郁药)，which is 8 percent higher than 2019,which has resulted in the new advice.Around 23 percent of women are on antidepressants, and 12 percent of men.

“Medicines offer a fantastic range of tools for NHS staff to provide care that can be positively life-changing,” said Tony Avery, the national clinical director for prescribing at NHS England. “However, we need to be alert to the risks of some medicines, and the framework we are publishing today empowers local services to work with people to ensure they are being effectively supported when a medicine is no longer providing overall benefit.”

The NHS report drew particular attention to projects carried out in the county of Glouc-ester shire. One service, called Art on Prescription, was described as “a form of social prescription and is a non-clinical intervention delivered by art practitioners for therapeutic benefit”. Another, a course called Artlift, begins with “a personalized ‘What Matters To You’ conversation prior to the start of the program and (we) agree a personalized support plan and goals with each participant”. They all reported improvement in participants’ mental well-being.

Actually, as long ago as September 2018, then health secretary Matt Hancock said, “The evidence increasingly shows that activities like social clubs, art, ballroom dancing, and gardening can be more effective than medicines for some people and I want to see an increase in that sort of social prescribing.”

7 . In the rich countries of the West, the electric vehicle revolution is well underway. Climate-conscious consumers drive Teslas or Polestars for reasons of morality and fashion. Poorer countries are also experiencing a wave of electrified trend. In Bangladesh, electric three-wheeler taxis, known as tuk-tuks, are rapidly replacing gas-powered ones on the streets. Such electric vehicles are climate friendly, cost effective, and help reduce air pollution.

Yet a glance under the hood (引擎盖) of these vehicles reveals a poisonous secret: each tuk-tuk runs on five massive lead-acid batteries, containing almost 300 pounds of lead in total. Every year and a half or so, when those batteries need to be replaced and recycled, about 60 pounds of lead leak into the environment. Battery recycling, often at small-scale unregulated factories, is a highly profitable but deadly business.

Lead is dangerous, and any exposure to it is harmful to human health. Lead that has entered the environment hurts people on an extraordinary scale. The numerous ways lead enters air, water, soil, and homes across the developing world — and the enormous damage it does to human health, wealth, and welfare — causes one of the biggest environmental crises in the world yet receives little attention.

The World Bank estimates that lead kills 5. 5 million people per year, which would make it a bigger global killer than AIDS, malaria, diabetes, and road traffic deaths combined. On top of the shocking deaths, the social burden of lead poisoning is extraordinary, as is its contribution to global inequality — our research on the cognitive effects of lead poisoning suggests that it may explain about one-fifth of the educational achievement gap between rich and poor countries.

But unlike many challenges faced by developing countries, lead poisoning is a problem that is fixable with some attention and a relatively modest financial investment. Better monitoring, research, and rules can help protect children all over the world from the dreadful effects of lead poisoning and reduce the massive global costs it brings.

9 . Billionaire Sir Christopher Hohn expects the greatest “demand disruption (中断)” for oil since the 1970s shock to cause an increase in renewable energy investment.

He said high oil prices are “a positive thing” for the climate as the energy crisis results in a “dramatic speed-up” in decarbonisation (碳减排). “The whole world should now be focused on seeking alternatives, whether they’re renewables or hydrogen fuels. All of these things are far more economic.”

He pointed to the recent boost of EU (欧盟) for renewable energy funding, as part of a plan to reduce imports of gas. Even as oil and gas companies obtain record profits from the high prices at present, Hohn said climate-focused investors will ultimately benefit from the energy price shock.

“The oil price increase leads to plans for accelerated decarbonisation,” said Hohn. “I personally believe that we’ll have demand disruption as we had in the 70s, and that there will be a dramatic acceleration in decarbonisation. I actually view it as a positive thing.”

Hohn has pressured companies to give shareholders a vote on their climate plans. Spanish airport operator Aena and aircraft manufacturer Airbus improved their emissions (排放) tar-gets as a result. Hohn has also pushed for stricter regulation on corporate climate promises. “Corporate decarbonisation isn’t going to happen through voluntary methods,” Hohn said.

Hohn is also backing a new rating agency that will grade company emissions strategies, through his charity, the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation. The Climate Action-plan Rating Centre (Climate-Arc) will analyse public company data and publish climate plan ratings.

Investors often struggle to analyse corporate climate plans. “Because though some organizations declare their commitment to environmental protection, they actually do the opposite,” Hohn said, “I expect a large proportion of companies will get graded F if they’re not doing enough. Even companies with net zero emissions targets have failed to set out plans about how to reach those goals. The impact is going to be a bit like, ‘the emperor has no clothes’.”

10 . Family vlogging — the frequent recording and uploading of personal videos of the family, usually on video sharing website — has become big business nowadays, especially among parents of young children. The more viewers such videos can get, the more money the family can make. At first thought, it does seem like an easy way to make money. However, are we doing right by putting their lives up for public attention?

For one thing, as the children grow up, they increasingly become aware that what they do needs to be admirable enough for the public to enjoy — Being young children, they also would want to do whatever it takes to please others. They then feel the pressure to be perfect, and as that is something not always possible, they become anxious and stressed. Comments from viewers and the expectations of sponsors (赞助者) can also affect the parents’ reactions towards their children.

Another problem is the lack of privacy in the children’s lives. As the children reach adolescence, there is a greaser need for personal space. At 12 or 13, very few children would appreciate being filmed while eating or having a conversation with their friends. Teenhood is a time of significant change in an individual, both physically and emotionally, and is a time when parents need to protect their children and guide them, instead of exposing them to the eyes of the public.

Family vlogging can be irresistible, given how it allows parents to bring greater fun to their family lives. There is also the easy money and the fame to look forward to. Indeed, all would probably go well, but only as long as parents keep in mind that, if not managed well, making their children live their lives in the unforgiving eyes of the public could prove to be a big mistake.