2 . The evidence shows that being lonely is bad for your physical and mental health. But with support from groups and specialists — and even the Internet — you needn't deal with it on your own.

Recognize the impact of loneliness

It is clear that loneliness has become such a pressing public health concern.     1     It is also associated with increased risk of heart disease, stroke and blood pressure, as well as dementia (痴呆).

Work out exactly why you are lonely

The Mental Health Charity Mind mentions two main factors that can cause loneliness: someone either not having enough basic social contact or, despite being surrounded by people, not feeling understood, listened to or cared for.     2     It could give you a better idea of how to work through your feelings of loneliness.

    3    

Talking to friends and family is an obvious and easy path to handling loneliness, but if you feel you lack it, joining a club or socializing through hobbies or interests is a good way to meet new people and increase social interactions.

Get online

Spending time online obviously cannot replace all your real-life interactions, but it can help. The NHS recommends time online to older people experiencing loneliness. This might not be the glorious panacea (灵丹妙药) it immediately seems, however, more than one study has found a link between loneliness and time spent online.    4    

Increase meaningful social contact

It's all very well joining Twitter or volunteering at your local charity shop.    5     One study in 2011 found that elderly people who spent time with family were less lonely than those attending social groups with strangers. It is the perfect excuse to call your mum.

3 . After 14 years, the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the Nertherlands, finally announced the recovery of two Vincent van Gogh paintings on Friday, thanks to a recent operation by Italian police. “The paintings have been found! That I would be able to ever pronounce these words is something I had no longer dared to hope for.”said Axel Ruger, director of the Van Gogh Museum, at a press conference in Naples, Italy, where Italian police announced the success of their operation.

Vincent Willem Van Gogh (30 March 1853 — 29 July 1890) was a Dutch Post-impressionist painter who is among the most famous and influential figures in the history of Western art. In just over a decade he created about 2100 artworks, including around 860 oil paintings, most of them in the last two years of his life. He sold only one painting during his lifetime and became famous after his suicide (自杀) at age 37, which followed years of poverty and mental illness. The two paintings are “Seascape at Scheveningen”, painted in 1882, and “Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen”, painted in 1884. Their authenticity (真实性) has been confirmed by experts of the museum.

According to Italian media reports, the paintings were discovered in a house belonging to an international drug dealer group based in Castellammare di Stabia, about 19 miles south-east of Naples

When the paintings were stolen in 2002, the lost was considered one of the “top 10” art crimes that year, according to British newspaper The Guardian. The paintings have no frames and show signs of some damage but remain “in fairly good condition,” the Van Gogh Museum said in a statement posted on its website. As further investigation and legal procedures on the local crime organization are underway, it's not clear when the paintings will be shipped to Amsterdam.

Ruger said he was hopeful and counted on the support of the Italian authorities

5 . Who doesn’t like to work with someone who makes them laugh? If you’re going to spend eight hours or more per day at work, you don't want it to feel like a prison. Telling a joke or sending a comedic reaction GIF is a great way to make friends at work and generally create a positive image for yourself.

    1     So, being the open, funny self that you are can help your team view you in a positive light.

If you’re feeling tense and anxious due to the day’s tasks, sending out some funny emojis or your favorite video can brighten the mood of the entire office!     2    

The positive atmosphere that humor brings into the office doesn’t only help your personal work performance.     3     If everyone in the office is having fun and feels like they are connecting with one another, work is more likely to be completed with passion and enthusiasm.

Humor is a great icebreaker and can cut through tension in certain situations. Since humor is key in creative thinking, and can help problem-solving skills in times of conflict, it can help you in business situations.     4     It may be risky, but if a meeting seems to be headed in a stressful direction, it may be time to crack a relevant joke or two!

Many people assume you can’t work and play at the same time, but that's far from the truth.     5     The research found that work teams who joked more and laughed together in situations also were more supportive of each other and offered more constructive suggestions to one another.

7 . “A novel, like a letter should be loose, cover much ground, run swiftly, take risk of morality and decay,” Saul Bellow once wrote. Like many novelists, in his spare time the author of The Adventures of Augie March was also an enthusiastic letter writer.

A selection of Bellow’s huge correspondence, reproduced in a recent issue of the New Yorker, provides a fascinating insight into the writer’s character. Witty, often brief and almost always entertaining, Bellow’s letters are a reminder of why writers’ letters often prove so popular with readers. At their best, literary letters have something for everyone: general readers get a glimpse of how authors write when freed from the expectation to produce a work of conventional literary worth, and scholars get enough scholarly writings.

All this is well and good—except for one small problem: nobody writes letters anymore, at least not the kind of intellectual, humorous letters that distinguish great correspondence. As we are so often told, we live in the digital age. Like the rest of us, authors now largely correspond with their agents, friends, and occasionally, fans through email, not “snail mail”.   

As literary vehicles, emails are severely lacking. Digital messages tend to alternate between the deathly dull and formal and the casually daring complete with BTW, LOLs and unclear text—speak with little middle ground. Letters can be revealing, friendly, humorous; emails, even at their best, tend to exhibit only one of these characteristics of good writing.

Future literary archivists (档案管理员) will need to be digital experts, hacking through hard drives and email accounts, mobile phones, in their attempts to fully document the lives and thoughts of their subjects. But who among us has all their email correspondence from the past five years, let alone a lifetime? Hardware is disposed (废弃) of and forgotten about; mobile phones are replaced every few years. The idea that we can construct a complete record of a writer has always been unrealistic, but technological advances have made it physically impossible, too. With so much material digitalized, and often wiped, writers will no longer leave behind boxes suffered with letters, ripe for investigation and possible publication.

Back in 1898, the New York Times named the long-dead Lord Byron the greatest letter writer in the English language, celebrating his letters’ humor, the force and spirit of their substance, the grace and purity of their style. Saul Bellow’s letters might not be remembered quite so fondly 70 years from now, but chances are that, by then, the entire genre of collected writers’ letters will have disappeared completely—leaving readers significantly poorer for their loss.

8 . “Why do people enjoy saying that they are bad at math?” wonders Petra Bonfert, a professor of engineering at Dartmouth College. After seeing too many examples of adults “passing on mathematical anxiety like a virus,” Bonfert has an important message for math-phobic parents and educators: “We are passing on from generation to generation the fear for mathematics.”

Many people hold the view that math is inherently hard, and only people with an inborn mathematical ability can understand it. While well-meaning adults may think they’re encouraging kids by sharing their own math fears, research has shown the opposite. Research has found that the problem is particularly significant for girls, who “are especially affected when a teacher publicly announces math hatred before she picks up the chalk.” Moreover, a study published recently reported that female mathematical achievement was diminished in response to a female teacher’s mathematical anxiety. The effect was correlated: the higher a teacher’s anxiety, the lower the scores.”

Parents’ anxiety about math can have a similar effect on kids’ achievement and their attitude toward the subject. Children who received math homework help from mathematically fearful parents showed weaker math achievements than their peers, which in turn resulted in increased math anxiety for the children themselves. New research on math anxiety confirms that these parents unintentionally teach kids to expect that math will be beyond their capabilities.

Fortunately, Sian Beilock, a cognitive scientist of Barnard College, has found a surprisingly easy way for parents to stop passing on math anxiety and build their children’s math confidence. The most important finding is the importance of normalizing math at home in a way that’s relaxing and playful: from using math-themed books and stories, playing with math games and toys to cooking together. He argues that we need to teach kids that “working on mathematical skills is not unlike practicing a sport. Neither can be learned by watching others perform the activity and both require encouragement and effort. You do not need an inborn mathematical ability in order to solve mathematical problems. Rather, what is required is perseverance, a willingness to take risks and feeling safe to make mistakes.

10 . Like anyone else, I have social media personalities that I like to follow. I watch their Insta stories, YouTube videos and generally keep track of what they are up to by means of social media. These “celebrities (名人)” encourage me to pursue my dreams, and unlike my physical friends, are often more accessible — just a YouTube click away.

So when I found myself telling a story the other day to one of my friends at a cafe and then casually referring to one of these online personalities as “my friend”, I suddenly became aware of the blurred (模糊的) line between my physical and virtual social lives. I was retelling a YouTuber’ s story about how to practice appreciation as if it were my story to tell. The scary part is that it came so naturally that I had to pause and think twice about what had just come out of my mouth. How did I get to the point of referring to someone I had never actually spoken with as a “friend”?

Between trying to make a living and maintaining social relationships, it has become especially easy for millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 1990s) to turn to artificial social closeness to meet their basic human needs for social interactions. So how do we really know who our friends are in a world where the term “friend” seems so blurred? Is it right to call someone a friend who you’ ve never spoken with in real life?

Sometimes I worry that my online friendships are taking away the time I could be spending forming meaningful relationships in real life. In an article in Psychology Today, Alex Pattakos claims that our quest to create more and more friends through popular social media platforms has led to us feeling more disconnected in reality. His research states that we can only maintain around 150 real friendships and the desire to have more connections leads to emotional attachments to online celebrities, referred to as parasocial interactions, and consequently detachment (分离) from our real life connections.

Do you make a distinction between your online and offline “friends” ? If so, how?