1 . The award-winning documentary “Feeding Tomorrow” explores the American food system’s shortcomings and the urgent need for change. Directed by Oliver and Simon English, the film dives deep into the complex web of issues surrounding food, climate change, and agriculture, leaving viewers with a clear realization of the challenges ahead.

At its core, “Feeding Tomorrow” raises fundamental questions about humanity’s relationship with the planet and the consequences of our consumption patterns. As the global population reaches up to 10 billion, the film shows the serious reality that our current methods of food production are unsustainable. With agriculture already occupying half of the habitable land and consuming 70% of freshwater resources, the harm on the environment is reaching critical levels.

The documentary reveals the interconnectedness of food, climate, and health, weaving together narratives from diverse voices in the fields of farming, health, and education. Through the stories of innovators like Mark Shepard, Clare Fox, and Lisa McDowell, “Feeding Tomorrow” highlights the urgent need for systemic change.

One of the central themes of the documentary is the importance of regenerative farming practices. By promoting biodiversity and topsoil growth, regenerative agriculture offers a promising path towards sustainability. The film emphasizes the need to transition from conventional, monoculture (单一) farming to more overall approaches.

Moreover, “Feeding Tomorrow” shows the significance of adopting plant-forward diets and reducing meat consumption. With animal agriculture being a significant contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and environmental degradation (恶化), the documentary advocates for a shift towards more sustainable dietary habits.

Ultimately, “Feeding Tomorrow” serves as a cry for collective action and social change. It challenges viewers to reevaluate their relationship with food and embrace sustainable practices that benefit both people and the planet. The documentary reminds us that the power to shape a better future lies in our hands. In the words of Mark Shepard, “What are you going to eat for dinner tonight? Start asking the questions.”

2 . How the economics profession should fix its gender problem

At the heart of economics is a belief in the virtues (好处) of open competition as a way of using the resources you have in the most efficient way you can. Thanks to the power of that insight, economists routinely tell politicians how to run public policy and business people how to run their firms. Yet when it comes to its own house, academic economics could have done more to observe the standards it applies to the rest of the world.

In particular, it recruits (招聘) too few women. Also, many of those who do work in the profession say they are treated unfairly and that their talents are not fully realised. As a result, economics has fewer good ideas than it should and suffers from a skewed (歪曲的) viewpoint. It is time for the dismal science to improve its dismal record on gender.

For decades relatively few women have participated in STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and maths. Economics belongs in this list. And a survey by the American Economics Association (AEA) this week shows that many women who do become academic economists are treated badly.

To deal with its gender shortfall (缺口), economics needs two tools that it often uses to analyse and solve problems elsewhere: its ability to crunch data and its capacity to experiment. Take data first. The AEA study is commendable, but only a fifth of its 45,000 present and past members replied to its poll. Better data are needed to capture how work by female economists is discriminated against. The more comprehensive (全面的) the picture that emerges, the sooner and more easily action can be taken to change recruitment and to reform professional life.

The other priority is for economists to experiment with new ideas, as the AEA is recommending. For a discipline that values dynamism, academic economics is often conservative, sticking with teaching methods, hiring procedures and social conventions that have been around for decades. The AEA survey reveals (显示) that 46% of women have not asked a question or presented an idea at conferences for fear of being treated unfairly, compared with 18% of men. Seminars could be organised to ensure that all speakers get a fair chance. The way that authors’ names are presented on papers could ensure that it is clear who has done the intellectual heavy lifting.

Instead of moving cautiously, the economics profession should do what it is best at: recognise there is a problem, measure it objectively and find solutions. If the result is more women in economics who are treated better, there will be more competition for ideas and a more efficient use of a scarce (稀缺的) resource. What economist could possibly object to that?

The brief outline takes us to the beginning of the twentieth century,     1     now we’ll have a closer look at Beijing’s housing conditions during that time.

At the beginning of the century, living conditions for the majority of working people in the East Beijing were very basic indeed. Houses were crowded closely together and usually very badly     2     (build), because there were no regulations. But the poor and       3     (need) were attracted by the possibility of work, and they had to       4     (house). It was the       5     (available) rather than the conditions of the housing that was the major concern.

Few houses had electricity at this time. So other sources of power were used, like coal for the fires       6     heated perhaps just one room. Of course, the smoke from these contributed a great deal       7     the air pollution for which Beijing used to be famous.     8     (luck), Beijing is not like what it used to be. It’s     9     cleaner than before and we can breathe safely.

A tiny, damp, unhealthy house like this might well be occupied by two full families, possibly including several children, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Can you imagine a big family     10     (live) in so little room like that?

4 . Health officials on Tuesday authorized the first electronic cigarettes in the U.S., saying the R.J. Reynolds vaping (电子烟) products can benefit adult smokers.

The Food and Drug Administration said data submitted by the company showed its Vuse e-cigarettes helped smokers either quit or significantly reduce their use of cigarettes, the leading preventable cause of death in the U.S.

Tuesday’s first-of-a-kind decision is part of a sweeping effort by the FDA to bring scientific scrutiny (审查) to the multibillion-dollar vaping industry after years of delays.

In September, the agency said it had rejected applications for more than a million e-cigarettes and related products, mainly due to their potential appeal to young children. But supervisors delayed making decisions on most of the major vaping companies. The FDA said it rejected 10 other requests from the company for other flavored products. The agency is still inspecting the company’s request to sell a menthol-flavored (薄荷味) nicotine formula (配方). “Today’s authorizations are an important step toward ensuring all new tobacco products healthy and legal after the FDA’s premarket evaluation,” said Mitch Zeller, director of the FDA’s tobacco center, in a statement, “The manufacturer’s data demonstrates its tobacco-flavored products could benefit addicted adult smokers who switch to these products — either completely or with a significant reduction in cigarette consumption.”

E-cigarettes first appeared in the U.S. more than a decade ago with the promise of providing smokers with a less harmful alternative to smoking traditional tobacco cigarettes. But there has been little tight study of whether the e-cigarettes truly help smokers quit. And efforts by the FDA to begin checking vaping products and their claims were repeatedly slowed by competing political interests.

In recent years, the vaping market grew to include hundreds of companies selling a good supply of devices and nicotine solutions in various flavors and strengths. But the vast majority of the market is controlled by a few companies including Juul Labs, which is partially owned by Altria, and Vuse. To stay on the market, companies must show that their products benefit public health. In practice, that means proving that adult smokers who use the products are likely to quit or reduce their smoking, while teens are unlikely to get hooked on them.

5 . During my daughter’s first year at school, her teacher dismissed our concerns about her shaky pencil hold by saying: “Don’t worry, handwriting is on its way out. By the time she’s in year 12, they’ll all be typing or voice-dictating their exams.”

Fast-forward 12 long school years and that now grown-up girl is in her final high-school exams. And of the many hours of articles and long and short answers, every single page, line, word and letter will be handwritten. Every single primary-school teacher undertook at the start of each year to fix her handwriting but it never changed.

My high school had company typing classes. It was so boring but I say that typing is the very best thing I learned at school. In all my work—as a health professional, a writer and an online teacher—being able to type efficiently, quickly and exactly has been invaluable. As a writer, I can type reasonably accurate notes during an interview, all while looking at the person I’m speaking with. As writing rates have been inactive or going backwards, I’d have a much harder time if I couldn’t type so well.

A group of friends who went to high school says that I’m fortunate to have had compulsory typing lessons, as some schools only offered it to girls, and some friends deliberately shunned the subject in order to avoid gender-based opinions that they wanted to become a secretary.

You might be thinking that none of this will be an issue for much longer, given how far voice recognition tech has come and how ChatGPT can produce writing within seconds. In fact, the increased availability of AI will perhaps mean that handwritten exams will be around for even longer, as seeing someone put pen to paper is one of the few ways we have of promising original work.

Efficient handwriting and fast and correct typing are skills that perhaps should be more highly valued by educators and employers. Learning to hand-write and type might be boring but I predict that they’ll still be important skills even when today’s little ones are in year 12.

It’s a harvest that’s almost magical: growing rice in saline (含盐的) soil and making a fortune at the same time.

Wu Zaizhou is     1     local farmer in Da’an, Jilin Province. He says his secret for success is following a     2     (science) recipe that really transforms the saline soil, a kind of soil even the scientists     3     (them) called “problematic”. But by     4     (pull) in opinions from some 1,400 scientists, a way was found to transform that unwanted soil. It’s a comprehensive     5     (solve) that involves treating and improving the soil itself, screening salt-tolerant crop varieties, and employing special planning techniques as well as caring for the overall environment.

“We call it Da’an Model,     6     improves the soil, the seed and the technique in agriculture. It’s proven cost-effective, easily repeatable, and     7     (wide) applicable and good for Jilin’s saline oil area,” said Wu.

Since 2021, lots of land (almost 5,000 square kilometers) in the province     8     (transform). That was previously almost impossible for agriculture, including Wu’s cropland.

Wu said he’s not only expanding his field, but his experience has convinced some of his     9     (neighbor) to join him. “In the new year, we will continue to work     10     (change) the saline land into fertile (肥沃的) land, and we may have a good harvest of rice from here,” he said.

7 . Chocolate makers are expected to raise prices this year because of higher costs of cocoa from exporters like Ivory Coast. The West African country is the world’s largest cocoa producer. Hershey is the largest producer of chocolate products in the United States. It said last month it plans to raise prices on all of its products because of the rising cost of ingredients. Ingredients are the things used to make a food or product.

Demand for chocolate in America increased during the COVID-19 pandemic, and cocoa producers in places like Ivory Coast are struggling to keep up with that demand. Experts say one reason for that is climate change.

Harvard University researchers estimate that by 2030 parts of West Africa will be too hot and dry to produce much cocoa. The West African countries of Ghana and Ivory Coast together produce 70 percent of worldwide cocoa supply.

Cocoa farmer Raphael Konan Kouassi recently took VOA to his farm. Huge green and yellow cocoa pods hung from trees. He said his trees are producing less because of rising temperatures and less rainfall than usual.

“Almost all of the young plants die in the high season. If you have not been able to get water to them, you have no cocoa,” Kouassi said.

Kouassi receives government assistance in the form of cocoa trees. But he said the government gives out trees at the wrong time of year. Because of this, the young trees have a difficult time surviving.

Christian Bunn is with the Consortium of International Agricultural Research Centers, a worldwide scientific organization. Bunn said information about how the climate is changing can inform farmers about how to better care for their crops.

“What we’re seeing is that the onset of both dry and wet season can change. It’s less reliable. During the season, there may be breaks in terms of rain during the dry season, or there’s a dry spell during the wet season,” Bunn said.

The data show it may be better for farmers to stop producing cocoa and instead grow a variety of different crops, he said.

But the chief of one Ivorian company that supplies The Hershey Company said higher prices for cocoa could be welcomed by farmers. Olga Yenou said, “My opinion is that these farmers should have better prices, should earn more, because they work hard. Most are poor,” Yenou said.

Her wish appears to be coming true. As climate change continues to have effects on production, prices continue to rise.

8 . When consuming information, we try to acquire more signals and less noise. We feel like the more information we consume the more signals we receive. While this is probably true on an absolute basis, Nassim Taleb argues in the book Antifragile that it is not true on a relative basis. As you consume more data and the ratio (比率) of noise to signals increases, you know less about what’s going on and you are likely to cause more unintentional trouble.

The supply of information to which we are exposed under modernity is transforming humans from a calm person to a neurotic (神经质的) one. For the purpose of our discussion, the first person only reacts to real information, and the second largely to noise. The difference between the two will show us the difference between noise and signals. Noise is what you are supposed to ignore; signals are what you need to heed.

In science, noise is a generalization beyond the actual sound to describe random information that is totally useless for any purpose, and that you need to clean up to make sense of what you are listening to. You can use and take advantage of noise and randomness, but noise and randomness can also use and take advantage of you, particularly with the data you get on the Internet or through other media. The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are likely to get, and the higher the noise-to-signal ratio is.

Say you look at information on a yearly basis—the changes you see will all be large ones. The ratio of signals to noise is about one to one—this means that about half the changes are real improvements or degradations, and the other half come from randomness. But if you look at the very same data on a daily basis, the composition would change to 95 percent noise and 5 percent signals, and the changes you see daily will certainly be small.

9 . For the past decade, one of the most linguistically (语言学地), diverse places in the world, square mile after square mile, has been my home: Queens, New York.

The soundtrack outside my door is extraordinary: On any given block, passing voices speak varieties of Polish, Ukrainian, Egyptian Arabic, Mexican Spanish, Puerto Rican Spanish, Dominican Spanish, and all the forms of New York City English they give rise to.

As a person who studies languages: I can usually distinguish them from one another, but understand only a part of what people are saying.

Users of Seke, a language from five villages in Nepal with 700 speakers, live a subway ride away. In certain stores, Albanians, Bosnians, Serbs, and Montenegrins all reunite, using the languages of the former Yugoslavia as if the country still existed. No group has a majority, or even 15. percent of the neighborhood, and most are at just 5 or 10 percent. English acts, for the most part, as a vital lingua franca (通用语). This’ last point is crucial, because a city can be a haven (避难所) for diversity but also an end point.

My neighborhood has its signature sound, but there are several dozen others that are just as diverse, each in a different way.

These are the places where the Endangered Language Alliance, the nonprofit I co-direct, has recorded New Yorkers speaking more than 100 languages that the survey and other data sets say don’t officially exist, and more than 700 in total.

That linguistic portrait makes clear that early-21st-century New York City is a last haven for endangered languages—ones that are being hounded out of existence elsewhere. And this deep linguistic diversity is among the least explored but possibly most important factors in New York’s history and makeup. New York’s soul can be found in the existence of these many, many languages, explaining New York’s particular capacity for tolerance and its ability to “make room” for others.