1 . One single night every January, volunteers all over America search parks, woodlands and pavements to count those without shelter. After seeing their own figures for homelessness increase by 20%between 2022 and early 2023. Jersey officials were shocked into action. Officials spent more on rental assistance for those at risk of becoming homeless. More services for people living rough have led to a rise in sheltered homelessness. The state also gathers real time data. In November New Jersey’s Office of Homelessness Prevention released its own figures , showing unsheltered homelessness falling across the state by 23% year on year.

Newark, New Jersey’s largest city and home to the state’s largest homeless population, recorded a 58% reduction in unsheltered homelessness since the start of the year due to the government’s financial support to reduce street homelessness, improve the shelter system and expand housing and prevention services.

Luis Ulerio, the director of Newark’s Office of Homeless Services, says “there’s just been a lot of hard work behind that number.” Mr. Baraka, the mayor (市长)，converted a local primary school into a 166-bed facility. He built temporary housing out of shipping containers. A second cluster (群) of containers with supportive services, called Hope Village II, will open soon. The containers have been altered to look like little cottages. A third cluster is in the works Mr.Baraka wants to create a pipeline from shelters to transitional housing and then to getting long-term homeless people into permanent housing.

More services for people living rough have led to a rise in sheltered homelessness. The city also provides money for overdue rent to prevent homelessness. Beth Shinn of Vanderbilt University points out that it’s cheaper to give $ 200 to help make due rent for the poor than to pay thousands later. The city also relies on data , updated daily by those working with Newark’s homeless people. Real-time data is crucial , he says , in order to carry out interventions in state policy all on the frontline.

2 . Nearly one-third of American adolescents and adults are affected by anxiety, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. In fact, over the last decade, anxiety has surpassed depression as the most common reason college students seek counseling (咨询) services, the New York Times reported. Sixty-two percent of undergraduates in survey reported “unbearable anxiety,” a significant increase from 50 percent in 2011.

Anxiety, along with depression, cuts across all demographics (人口统计数据), including both privileged and disadvantaged teenagers. But privileged teens are among the most emotionally upset youth in America, Arizona State University psychology professor Suniya Luthar told the New York Times.

“These kids are incredibly anxious and perfectionistic,” Suniya Luthar said, “there’s always one more activity, one more A. P. class, one more thing to do in order to get into a top college. Kids have a sense that they’re not measuring up. The pressure is never-ending and getting worse.” But helicopter parents aren’t always to blame. Many students internalize the anxiety and put the pressure on themselves, Madeline Levine, co-founder of Challenge Success, a nonprofit aimed at improving student well-being, told the Times.

Another expert, psychiatrist Stephanie Eken, said despite the cultural differences, there’s a lot of overlap among teens regarding what makes them anxious. Eken mentions factors range from school, family conflicts, what food to eat, diseases, how they’re perceived by friends and notably in the last few years, Eken told the Times, to a rising fear about terrorism. “They wonder about whether it’s safe to go to a movie theater,” she said.

A lack of close, meaningful relationships is also a major factor. Experts have long said mental and physical changes associated with puberty (青春期) may leave teens at higher risk for anxiety. And social media doesn’t help, Eken said, adding that teens are always comparing themselves with their friends, which leaves them miserable.

When Times reporter Benoit Denizet-Lewis visited Mountain Valley, a nonprofit that offers teens need-based assistance for $910 a day, a college student at the facility said, “I don’t think we realize how much it’s affecting our moods and personalities. Social media is a tool, but it’s become this thing that we can’t live without but that’s making us crazy.”

3 . Imagine living in an apartment in Manhattan. When Covid-19 hits, you have nowhere to escape. Instead, you go up to the rooftop, where, to your surprise, other renters have come, too. After some awkwardness, everyone starts meeting nightly, drinks in hand, to share stories about themselves. This is the background setting of Fourteen Days, a “collaborative novel” edited by Margaret Atwood and Douglas Preston. In addition to these two, 34 authors of varied backgrounds contributed to the book. It is one of a growing number of new works, which are written together in some way.

AI services, such as ChatGPT, have started to become co-authors, too. Such models are also conversational machines, which can suggest phrases, give feedback and answer questions. “Cyborg authorship” is what MrRettberg of University of Bergen calls this. He published a book with Cyborg authorship, in which ChatGPT is tasked with generating reviews of famous works in the style of well-known authors — think Jane Austen writing about William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch.

Writing with collaborators, be they human or artificial, will only become more common. But individual authors will still dominate creatively. That is because collectively written books rarely make for great literature. Many contributions to Fourteen Days are cleverly woven together. But the book does not work quite well. Then there is authorial ego (自我价值感). Getting all 36 authors of Fourteen Days to agree on the text was a challenge, with some writers taking issue with how their story ended up being framed and referred to by other contributors later. And AI is not yet fully accepted in literary circles. Recently KudanRie, the winner of Japan’s top prize for literature, admitted she used ChatGPT to write around 5% of her science-fiction novel Tokyo Sympathy Tower. Such honesty is rare because most would never admit using AI. A new sort of “ghost writing” may be having a moment, but many writers will never want to name ChatGPT as their co-author.

5 . New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka came of age alongside the internet. As a teen, he published his own blog and joined forum (论坛) for pop music. He discovered one of his favorite Jazz songs --- John Coltrane’s full version of “My Favorite Things” – driving around at night, listening to the local radio station.

Chayka misses the time ---and the ways, then, that personal discoveries like these were made. In his new book, Filterworld: How Algorithms (算法) Shaped Culture, Chayka says he never would have fallen in love with Coltrane’s songs if he’d heard it on Spodify. He says he doubts Spodify’s algorithm would even suggest it, because the song is so long. And that, even if it did, he wouldn’t have learned anything about Coltrane as an artist, because the Spodify interface doesn’t provide the same context that a radio DJ does, sharing details between songs. The person behind the song choice, he argues, made his emerging interest in Coltrane possible in a way modern recommendation system cannot.

This is one of many “back in my day” stories Chayka uses to illustrate his argument that algorithms have “shaped culture”. Thanks to recommendation generators like Tiktok’s top picks and Spodify’s autoplay suggestions, “the least troublesome and perhaps least meaningful pieces of culture are promoted,” Chayka argued. He admits that quality is subjective when judging these things, and instead argues that recommendation systems undermine personal taste. Taste, he writes, was once a combination of personal choices and popular influence --- but now algorithms rely more on choices of the masses. Developing taste requires effort and active engagement, but what we see now are algorithms turning taste into consumerism.

A central point of the book, in fact, is that people today are not only well aware of the power of algorithms, they can’t escape them. He interviews a young woman who wonders if “what I like is what I actually like,” worried that her taste is so shaped by algorithms that she can’t trust herself. The book may be most useful in these sections, where Chayka and his interviewees attempt to make sense of how internet algorithms have shaped their own lives and work.

6 . The saying “You need to walk a mile in their shoes” couldn’t be truer. It goes for a person in a wheelchair to attend an event. You can’t fully grasp what it would be like for your attendees who use a wheelchair to experience your event until you’ve sat in their seat.

With that in mind, Professional Convention Management Association (PCMA) offered participants an opportunity to attend the “Event Mobility & Accessible Design — An Immersive Tour” in a wheelchair. The event was led by accessibility advocate Rosemarie Rossetti, who has been in a wheelchair since an accident paralyzed (使瘫痪) her from the waist down 25 years ago. Rossetti took us for a test run of the wheelchair tour, which opened our eyes to the challenges those in a wheelchair face when attending events and gave us a better understanding of how to make those events more welcoming for them.

After we started pushing ourselves around, I was immediately reminded of a recent article on how San Diego Comic-Con attendees were disappointed except for those in a wheelchair. The exhibit hall of the event was not carpeted. The first thing you realize when pushing yourself in a wheelchair is that it’s far less physically taxing on cement (水泥) than on carpeting. You should know the truth that it takes more energy and time to navigate in a wheelchair.

I hope that my temporary experience in a wheelchair won’t fade from memory and that I will look at every event with fresh eyes. In the registration form, it’s not enough to ask whether the attendees need wheelchair access but what convenience they need.

What can be especially helpful to those in wheelchairs, Rossetti shared, was to feature an accessible navigation map in the app to highlight a wheelchair-only access route. Rossetti accompanied planners on their site visits to make sure the attendees would be fully accessible, but she also suggested proactive use of a wheelchair on the next site visit.

7 . Cordero is the farm manager at Ollin Farms, not far from Boulder, Colorado. The locally grown vegetables on the farm aren’t just pretty. “We play an important role in public health nutrition programs,” says Cordero’s dad, Mark Guttridge, who started this farm with his wife, Kena, 17 years ago.

At a meeting with about a dozen local farmers, two state representatives, and the Colorado officials of agriculture, Guttridge explains how Boulder county has made creative investments in his farm that could be spread to the state or even national level. Before the meeting, Guttridge shows them one of those investments.

A dozen sheep, which Guttridge raises for wool, feed on root vegetables like radishes that have been leftover for them. “So these guys are out fertilizing the vegetable field,” Guttridge laughs. “They’ll be out here a couple more weeks, and then we’ll get our next summer vegetables planted right there.” Around the field is a special moveable type of fencing that Ollin Farms bought using financial aid from the Boulder County Sustainability Office. It allows them to move the sheep from one field to another, fertilizing as they go. The goal of these investments is “really building up our soil health,” he explains. “That relates directly to the nutrient quality of the food-healthy soil grows healthy food.”

The county also makes an effort to get that healthy food out to different communities to boost public health. That’s where the Boulder County Public Health department comes in. It created a coupon program to give discounts to people buying fruits and vegetables from Ollin Farms. Nutrition incentive programs, like those public health fruit and vegetable coupons, are spreading all over the country, and most are funded through the federal farm bill. Amy Yaroch, executive director at the Gretchen Swanson Center for Nutrition, says “It’s a trip le win. It’s basically good for the consumers who live in that particular community because they’re getting the healthy food, it’s good for the farmer, and then it’s good for the economy.”

9 . Think what the places you go to for nature was like in your parents’ or grandparents’ time. In many cases, the natural places of today are more developed or surrounded by more development, than they were decades ago. But to you, they still feel like nature.

That’s what psychology professor Peter Kahn calls “environmental generational amnesia (失忆症)”. What each generation comes to think of as “nature” is relative, based on what they’re exposed to.

In early research, Kahn studied children’s concepts of the environment in Houston, one of the largest and most polluted cities in the country. He found that, when children were asked about air pollution, most could explain it and point out other cities that were polluted — but not their own. “Each generation tends to see that degraded condition as the nondegraded condition, as the common experience,” Kahn wrote.

Interacting with nature makes a difference in how people view and move in the world, Kahn said. He turned to a preschool in Seattle and observed children developing skills in nature there. “The skills are not given,” Kahn said. “We have an entire generation that spends so much time in front of screens that, when they do go out into nature, they don’t know how to interact with it, or handle themselves.”

Meaningful interactions with nature not only can teach, but also help people revive, reflect and recognize the importance of the outdoors. Developing a “nature language” — meeting the environment in ways large and small that result in positive feelings — can begin to overturn environmental generational amnesia.

Here in Seattle, the city’s largest park can serve as a laboratory for how people interact with nature. “A park of that size allows for interactions with nature that are almost impossible to have in the city. It’s not enough, but it’s better than not having it.” Kahn said. “A bigger park is better than a smaller park, and a smaller park is better than no park. You can’t take nature for granted anywhere.”

10 . We grow up with a mixed message: making mistakes is a necessary learning tool, but we should avoid them. And that’s a real shame. Because when we tell kids that learning is all about the results, we teach them that mistakes are something to be feared and avoided. We stifle (压制) their interest in experimenting because experimenting means you’re going to make a mess and fail. And that’s too big a risk.

Here’s a fascinating experiment that shows how children absorb what we say about effort vs. results. One of professor Carol Dweck’s experiments asked 400 5th graders in New York City schools to take an easy short test, on which almost all performed well. Half the children were praised for “being really smart”. The other half were complimented for “having worked really hard”. Then the students were asked to take a second test and given the option of either choosing one that was pretty simple and that they would do well on, or one that was more challenging, but on which they might make mistakes. Of those students praised for effort, 90 percent chose the harder test. Of those praised for being smart, the majority chose the easy test. Professor Dweck told me: “One thing I’ve learned is that kids are exquisitely (敏锐地) familiar to the real message, and the real message is ‘Be smart’. It’s not ‘We love it when you struggle or when you learn and make mistakes.’”

One way we can fix this is by understanding the concepts of “fixed mindsets” and “growth mindsets”. Those with fixed mindsets believe either we’re good at something — whether it’s math or music or baseball — or we’re not. When we have this fixed mindset, mistakes serve no purpose but to highlight failure. Those with growth mindsets are much more likely to be able to accept mistakes because they know that they’re part of learning. And it’s been shown that when students are taught about growth mindsets, their motivation to learn improves.