2 . Why do farmers grow crops outside in fields when we can arrange them vertically (垂直地)? The idea of vertical farming was first proposed in 1999. It was seen as a way to save space, reduce air miles and transform old and abandoned buildings, like warehouses. In 2021, Fortune Business Insights valued the global vertical farming market at 3.47 billion dollars. Now, however, this industry is under threat, partly due to rising energy costs.

According to the magazine Science Focus, vertical farming gives ten times the yield (产量) of conventional outdoor farming. However, in order for crops to grow using this method, plants are placed in a controlled environment, grown not under the Sun, but under LED lights and watered with recycled water pumped on a closed-loop system (闭环系统).

Unfortunately, energy prices have risen across the globe. Therefore, this reliance on electricity has meant the last few years have not been easy for the industry. Cindy van Rijswick, from the Dutch research firm RaboResearch, has estimated that operational costs for a vertical farm are around 15% higher now compared to 18 months ago. Infarm, Europe’s largest vertical farming company, made around500 employees redundant (被裁员的) in November 2022 because they needed to downsize. They blamed higher operating costs due to energy increases as one reason for the layoffs.

Another issue related to the cost-of -living crisis and affecting vertical farming is the type of produce grown. This includes herbs such as basil, as well as salad leaves and leafy greens. Compared to traditionally farmed plants, like onions and carrots, these products tend to be more expensive, which could lead to reduced demand as consumers become more cautious about their spending.

So, it seems that a future with food grown under LED lights is looking less and less bright.

3 . Hawaii lawmakers are considering legislation (立法) that would require visitors to pay for a year-long license or pass to visit state parks. Josh Green is the state’s governor. He said, “We get between 9 and 10 million visitors a year, but we only have 1.4 million people living here.” He added, “Those 10 million travellers should be helping us sustain our environment.” Lawmakers still debating how much they would charge.

The governor campaigned in 2022 on the idea of having all tourists pay a $50 fee to enter the state. Legislators think this would violate US constitutional protections for free travel. They instead think visitors should pay to enter parks and trails. Either policy would be a first of its kind for any US state. Hawaii’s leaders are following the example of other popular tourist areas with similar fees or taxes. They include Venice, Italy, and Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands.

Hawaii State Representative Sean Quinlan is the leader of the House Tourism Committee. He said changes in the activities of travellers are part of Hawaii’s push. He said golf rounds per visitor per day have dropped 30 percent over the past 10 years while hiking has increased50 percent. People are also seeking out isolated places they have seen on social media. The state does not have the money to oversee and protect all these places, he said.

Most state parks and trails are currently free. Some of the most popular ones already charge, like Diamond Head State Monument. That trail leads hikers from the floor of a 300,000-year-old volcano up to the top. It gets 1 million visitors each year and costs $5for each traveller.

A bill currently before the legislature would require visitors over the age of 15to buy a yearly pass to visit forests, parks, trails or “other natural area on state land”. People who live in Hawaii would not need to pay.

4 . At some point, something will have to be done about the stuffed toys (毛绒玩具). I haven’t counted them because, truthfully, I’m not prepared to know how many there are. Lately, our neighborhood’s message boards are filled with posts about parents trying to make space, to clear out the things their kids no longer need. The tone of some of these posts can best be described as “emergency”. “Help!” they sometimes begin. “I have to get this out of my house.”

“The proliferation (激增) of children’s toys is the outcome of a long, gradual cultural change,”says Gary Cross, a professor at Pennsylvania State University. To understand how we got here — drowning (淹没于) in all those stuffed toys and bricks — it helps to look as far back as the late 19th century. “Parents were no longer passing their jobs on to the children,” Cross says. “Instead, they connect across generations through the gifting process. From the early 20th century on, goods became the things that define relationships between family members, and the way of marking success as a family.”

Then, how can parents deal with the proliferation of children’s toys at home? Naeemah Ford Goldson, a professional organizer, is also a mom of two. In her own home, Goldson likes to include her kids in the work of sorting out their toys. They know that the items they don’t need anymore will be given to people who can use them, to families who might not be as fortunate as theirs. “Doing so helps them build those habits of letting go,” she says, “so then they don’t become adults who are too dependent on material things instead of experiences, or people, and the memories we make with people.”

Her idea made sense. She told her 5-year-old they should pick some to give to kids in their community who came from another country and had to leave their toys behind. She immediately took a pink bear from the pile.

5 . The UK is experiencing a boom in book clubs, according to new data from event listing companies. Book club listings on the ticketing site Eventbrite increased by 350% between 2019 and 2023. Between 2022 and 2023 alone, book club listings on the site rose by 41%. Another event listing site, Meetup, reported a 14% increase in the number of RSVPs to book clubs between January 2023 and January 2024, compared with a 4% increase in RSVPs for all UK-based events.

Victoria Okafor, who co-runs the book club Between2Books, said the heightened interest in reading may be partly the result of a general “shift in hobbies”, as GenZ (the generation around 00s) turned to other ways to spend their free time. Besides, during the global health crisis period, many people were forced to slow down and pick up or reignite hobbies, and online book clubs provided a platform to connect with others.

Social media may be helping with the visibility of book clubs, too, said Okafor. “People may come across your page accidentally, but from there people have the knowledge to attend should they wish. I think this makes a big difference compared to just hearing things from word of mouth.”

Many of the book clubs listed on Eventbrite carry specific themes — Sheffield Feminist Book Club, Bring Your Baby Book Club, and Modern Chinese Literature Online Book Club.

Okafor’s club, Between2Books, focuses on books by writers traditionally excluded (排除) from the classics. She thought she began seeking out such stories “embarrassingly late”. “Reading authors of color brought back a joy to my reading that came from not only seeing elements of myself and culture reflected in novels but also reading stories that could be funny or empowering as opposed to the accounts of struggle that can often surround stories of people of color,” she said. “The variety of books makes reading and discussion so rich and I think that’s what attenders are drawn to.”

6 . In January, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook’s parent company Meta, appeared at a hearing to answer questions about how social media potentially harms children. Zuckerberg opened by saying: “The existing body of scientific work has not shown a causal link (关联) between using social media and young people having worse mental health.”

But many social scientists would disagree with that statement. In recent years, studies have started to show a causal link between teen social media use and reduced well-being. One of the most cited studies into this link focused on Facebook.

Researchers tried to discover whether the platform’s introduction across college campuses in the mid-2000s increased symptoms (症状) related to mental health problems. The answer was a clear yes, says Alexey Makarin, a coauthor of the study. “There is still a lot to be explored,” Makarin says, “but to say there is no causal evidence that social media causes mental health issues, and I definitely object to that.”

The concern and the studies come from data showing that social media use in teens aged 13 to 17 is now very common. Two-thirds of teens report using TikTok, and some 60 percent of teens report using Instagram or Snapchat, a 2022 survey found. Another survey showed that girls, on average, spend around 3. 4 hours per day on TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, compared with about 2.1 hours among boys. At the same time, more teens are showing signs of depression than ever, especially girls.

As more studies show a strong link between these phenomena, researchers are starting to move their attention to possible solutions. Why does social media use seem to bring about mental health problems? Why do those effects unevenly exist among different groups, such as girls or young adults? And can the good points of social media be teased out (梳理) from the bad points to provide more targeted guidance to teens, their caregivers and policymakers?

7 . Recently, after I gave a virtual presentation on my book Indistractable, a listener wrote something in the Zoom chat that drove me crazy, “This is great but wouldn’t work for me. I’m a Gemini (双子星座的人).”

Ironically, the Zoom listener is right. If she thinks she’s incapable, she’ll prove it correct — whether it has anything to do with the stars and moon or not. Her inflexible self-identification denies her the chance to improve her life. It’s incredibly self-limiting.

That’s why we should stop defining ourselves as fixed identities and nouns, and instead start describing ourselves using verbs.

Words are powerful. Linguistic research shows that language shapes people and culture; it can also give us insight into ourselves and our behavior. In a well-known study, researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobsen had all students in the same elementary school take a standard IQ test. Then they randomly selected a group of students, regardless of their test results, and told teachers the group would show “dramatic intellectual growth”. Eight months later, those students scored significantly higher on an IQ test. The study concluded that teachers’ positive perception of students correlated to those students’ high performance on intellectual and academic tests. The labels the children received became a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy (预言).

That’s because language shapes expectations, which shape our reality. If we have experiences that lead us to label ourselves with specific nouns during our life, then we are likely to stick with those labels and the behaviors that go with them.

Using verbs to identify ourselves is an effective method for releasing “trapped priors”—a term in psychology for a perception of reality that’s affected or trapped by past experiences. Verbs are action words well suited to describing short-lived behaviors that can and do change. They don’t lay claim to our entire identity, but they acknowledge that we are people first and foremost, not whatever a singular noun may say we are. So, instead of saying, “I am a procrastinator (拖拉者)”, you should say, “I am a person who often procrastinates.”

By focusing on our behaviors, not fixed characteristics, we can release harmful perceptions of ourselves that hold us back from trying methods that might improve our lives — like those that can help us achieve the critical skill of being indistractable.

8 . Aviation is a big polluter. Cutting the sector’s impact on global warming is high on the agenda. Although many governments are regulating emissions from cars and trucks, air transportation is technologically rooted in old patterns.

Facing the reality that the sector will keep emitting a lot, ICAO has established an international carbon-trading plan—Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation, or CORSIA. This encourages wide use of offsets (抵消) : aviation companies can buy emissions credits or invest in sectors that store carbon, such as forestry, to allow them to carry on as normal. CORSIA aims to keep CO2 emissions at 2019 levels through such purchases for emissions over that year’s baseline. ICAO predicts that increasing demand might reach 1. 7 billion tons by 2035, potentially making aviation the largest offset market in the world.

Yet offsetting faces a fundamental challenge: the size of the offset requires estimating flows of warming pollution that would have occurred if the carbon-removal project hadn’t existed, and comparing them against flows with the project in place. The former — a baseline that is unobservable — is a hotbed for shady accounting.

The vast majority of offsets today and in the expected future come from forest-protection and regrowth projects. The track record of reliable accounting in these industries is poor, because they lack convincing baselines. Even with oversight, forest projects are often troubled by wild assumptions, for example that trees would disappear completely from these areas in the absence of those projects, even when there are other forest protections in place. Such assumptions drive up baselines and flood the market with huge volumes of offsets. They make it easier for accountants to claim a net reduction in emissions even though the atmosphere sees little or no benefit. These problems are essentially unfixable. Evidence is mounting that offsetting as a strategy for reaching net zero is a dead end.

In our view, this approach could prove dangerously narrow. Removing aviation’s impact on global warming means upending the industry. The longer that reality is overlooked, the harder it will be to find effective solutions.

9 . Earlier this month, an opinion study said about 75 percent of the French public want to ban bullfighting (斗牛). But a small group of supporters say it is a tradition that should continue.

Baptiste is a 16-year-old boy training to be a bullfighter who lives in Arles, a town in southern France. He says opponents do not understand bullfighting. “Bullfighting is a tradition, an art, a dance with the bull,” Baptiste said. He is one of 12 students in Arles learning how to fight bulls.

Opponents wonder how it can be called “an art” when an innocent animal is killed in the end. During a recent protest march, one sign read: “Bullfighting is not a fight; it’s the killing of a tortured (折磨) innocent.”

Aymeric Caron is a French lawmaker who sent a bill to Parliament that would ban bullfighting. It is currently being debated. He said some parts of France permit bullfighting as long as fewer than 1,000 bulls are killed each year. Just because it is a tradition, he said, does not “morally justify a practice”.

Other lawmakers in Caron’s party are not supporting his bill, so it is unlikely to pass. But the news of the anti-bullfighting proposal started a discussion throughout France.

Frederic Pastor oversees the bullfights in the city of Nimes. He said the bull is “glorified (给予荣耀)” during the fight although it is killed. Nimes is home to 14 bullfighting shows each year. They bring in over $60 million to the city.

Tiphanie Senmartin Laurent is one of the protesters. She said most people are against bullfighting. “Torture is not a show,” she said.

Spain is considered the place where bullfighting began. People there are also questioning the practice. Bullfighting was banned in the Spanish province of Catalonia in 2010 but later brought back. A major court in Spain called the practice a “cultural asset”. That means it is considered a tradition that has value. A new proposal on animal safety in Spain does not discuss bulls.

10 . The number of universities has grown very fast in recent decades. Higher-education institutions across the world now employ 15 million researchers, up from 4 million in 1980. Governments are also happy to spend on higher education because it is supposed to produce scientific breakthroughs that can be available to all. In theory, therefore, universities should be an excellent source of productivity growth.

In practice, however, the productivity has slowed down during the last decades. In the 1950s and 1960s, workers’ output per hour across the rich world rose by 4% a year. But in the last decade, 1% a year was the norm. Even with the wave of innovation in artificial intelligence (AI), productivity growth remains weak — less than 1% a year, which is bad news for economic growth.

A new paper by Ashish Arora and his team suggests that universities’ rapid growth and the rich world’s slowdown productivity could be two sides of the same coin. The paper suggests that scientific breakthroughs from public institutions “caused little or no response from businesses” over a number of years. A scientist in a university lab might publish brilliant paper after brilliant paper. Often, however, this has no impact on corporations’ own patents, with life sciences being the exception. And this, in turn, points to a small impact on the overall productivity.

Why do companies struggle to use ideas produced by universities?

The paper says that, free from the demands of the market, researchers in university labs focus more on satisfying their curiosity than finding breakthroughs that will change the world or make money. “To some degree, such kind of research is not a bad thing; some breakthrough technologies, such as penicillin, were discovered almost by accident,” it writes, “But if everyone is doing that, the economy suffers.”

Perhaps, with time, universities and the business world will work together more tightly. Tougher competition could force businesses to beef up their internal research. In fact, researchers in companies’ labs, rather than universities, are driving the current AI innovations. At some point, governments will need to ask themselves hard questions. In a world of weak economic growth, huge spending on universities may come to seem an unjustifiable luxury.