1 . “Farm to table” is the name of a movement that encourages people to eat locally grown food. The farm­to­table idea has become more popular in recent years. But there is also a movement that brings “table to farm”. Its purpose is to connect people to the land and to honor local farmers by creating a sort of restaurant without walls.

Its founder, Jim Denevan, got the idea for this kind of “culinary adventure (美食探险)”, as he called it, ten years ago. He recently prepared tables for more than a hundred people at Briars Farm in Virginia. He and his eight­member team arrived the night before. Chefs (厨师) from a local restaurant prepared the dinner.

Jim Denevan’s brother is a farmer and he himself is a chef. He thought that the idea of a meal served right on the farm made sense, though not everyone agreed.

“But I wanted to make the idea work, so I decided to cross the country,” said Denevan. “I went all the way across the United States and set the table on farms, ranches (大牧场) and beaches, and all the places where food came from.”

“This kind of event connects us with a lot of enthusiastic people, people that we can form relationships with,” said Matt Szechenyi, who operates Briars Farm.

The tour of the farm ends at the dinner table. The meats in the meal come from Matt Szechenyi’s farm. The vegetables come from nearby farms. Guests and local farmers sit together.

Annoica Ingram came with a friend. “The food is wonderful. I appreciate their hard work. I see everything they have to do to take care of the animals and make sure they are well­cared­for. Without them, I think, we’ll have big problems,” she said.

2 . Feeling overcome by your to-do list can make you unhappy, but a new study suggests that more free time might not be the magic elixir (灵丹妙药) most of us dream it could be.

The researchers analyzed data from 35,000 subjects about how Americans spend their free time. They found that people with more free time generally had higher levels of subjective happiness—but only up to a point. Compared to those with less time, people with up to two hours of free time a day generally felt better. However, people who had five or more hours of free time a day generally felt worse. So the free-time “sweet spot” might be two to three hours per day.

Part of finding this “sweet spot” is connected with how people spend their free time. In an online experiment, the subjects were asked to imagine having four to seven free hours per day and spending that time doing “productive” (富有成效的) or “unproductive” activities. Most of them believed their happiness would suffer if they had a lot of free time during the day—but only if they used it unproductively. Though that experiment was based on the previous assumptions (假设), which is one limitation, it agrees with other experiments showing that being in a state of flow can benefit people’s mental health.

Of course, for you, any activities that increase your happiness are “productive”. If watching soap opera in your free time makes you feel better, you should do that due to self-care. And some traditionally productive activities can be easy and fun. For example, walking and cooking can help burn stress and put people in a state of flow.

“In cases where people find themselves with large amounts of free time, such as retirement or unemployment,” Sharif said, “our results suggest they can benefit from spending their newfound time with purpose.”

3 . At the start of every working week, millions of people around the world get ready for something they do endlessly, joylessly and badly: a meeting.

The reason is simple, says Madeleine de Hauke, a meeting coach and teacher in an Antwerp Management School. “We spend our lives and huge amounts of money on meetings, but there’s very little work that helps people run them effectively.”

Madeleine is correct. Running a meeting well takes skill. People need to know ahead why they are meeting, what they are supposed to achieve, who really needs to be there and how they should contribute. That sounds obvious but it is not, as anyone who has been to a pointless meeting knows. Yet meeting leaders are expected to learn all this on the job. I cannot remember ever being taught how to organize a meeting, and I have rarely had a job requiring me to do it.

I also like Madeleine’s descriptions of what she calls the Meeting Monsters: people who destroy meetings with all sorts of annoying behaviors. There is the unkind off-topic speaker. The non-stop noise in the background. The confusing rambler whose speech is endless. The rude multi-tasker. The one who says nothing but emails later to say what was decided will never work.

The trouble is, we are all meeting monsters sometimes, says Madeleine. A good meeting leader knows how to stop this behavior, or make sure it never starts by making it clear what will and won’t be allowed.

A bad meeting is like a virus (病毒). By failing to produce good decisions it often requires another meeting to be held, then another and another. Luckily there is no need for a vaccine (疫苗), just a bit more care and preparation, and an understanding that there is no shame in being taught how to lead a meeting well.

4 . Children’s lives have changed greatly over the last 50 years. But do they have a happier childhood than you or I did?

It’s difficult to look back on one’s own childhood without feeling nostalgic(怀旧的). I have four brothers and sisters, and my memories are all about being with them, playing board games on the living room floor, or spending days in the street with the other neighbourhood children, or racing up and down on our bikes. My parents hardly appear in these memories, except as providers of meals.

These days, in the UK at least, the nature of childhood has changed greatly. Firstly, families are smaller, and there are far more only children. It is common for both parents to work outside the home and there is the feeling that there just isn’t time to bring up a large family, or that no one could possibly afford to have more than one child. As a result, today’s boys and girls spend much of their time alone. Another major change is that youngsters today prefer to spend most of their free time at home, inside. More than anything this is because of the fact that parents worry far more than they used to about real or imagined dangers, so they wouldn’t dream of letting their children play outside by themselves.

Finally, the kind of toys children have and the way they play is totally different. Computer and video games have replaced(取代) the board games and more active pastimes of my childhood. The irony(讽刺) is that so many of these games are called “interactive(互动的)”. The fact that you can play computer games on your own further increases the sense of loneliness felt by many young people today.

Do these changes mean that children today have a less pleasant childhood than I had? I personally believe that they do, but perhaps every generation(一代人) feels exactly the same.

That night, Nick Bostic could only see a weak orange light as he drove down the streets of Lafayette. It was not until he drove his car further that he finally figured out what he was seeing. Oh my god, he thought, that house was on fire!

It was an ordinary night for Bostic, who was still figuring out how to make his way through a life that hadn’t always been easy.

That night, he was on the road back to his apartment just after midnight when he saw the house on fire. Fires were climbing up, and his phone was dead, with no other vehicles around coming to the rescue (救援). He ran around to the back door, not realizing that it was open. Without pausing to think about the danger, he ran into the burning building.

In the building were the Barrett families, and before the fire broke out, the Barrett couple had left home for a party, leaving their four children at home. Seionna, their 18-year-old daughter, was in charge. She was sleeping when she heard what sounded like an explosion (爆炸), followed by the heat and smell of smoke. Immediately she woke up the other kids, but then a horrible realization hit Seionna. The 6-year-old Kaylani wasn’t there, who would like to sleep in the living room. And the living room was on fire.

At the same time, Bostic peered (盯) into each room of the burning house, searching to see if anyone was home. He had just started climbing the staircase when he looked up and saw three faces from a room at the top of the stairs and peer down at him, their eyes wide.

“Your house is on fire. You need to go!” Bostic shouted.

He ran forward and threw himself out of the window, with Kaylani landing on his shoulder after the fall.

8 . “Snowplow (扫雪机) parenting” is the newest parenting style that can include parents booking their adult children haircuts, calling their college kids to wake them up so that they don’t sleep through a test, and even calling their kids’ employers.

“‘Helicopter (直升机) parenting’ means monitoring their kids’ every activity, which is out of date.” Claire Cain Miller and Jonah Engel Bromwich wrote in The New York Times. “Some rich mothers and fathers now are more like snowplows: clearing any problems in their children’s path to success so that they don’t have to meet failure or lose opportunities.”

There is a mother who started a charity (慈善机构) in her son’s name to try to raise his chances of being accepted to the college. Another parents spent years helping their daughter avoid foods with sauce, which she didn’t like. Once she got to college, she had problems with the food in her school because it was all covered in sauce.

A survey says that three-quarters of parents of children between the ages of 18 and 28 ask for doctor visits or haircuts for their children, and 11% say they would call their kids’ bosses whether their children are having an issue at work.

As reported, wealthy parents try to get their children into top colleges by giving a large amount of money to a school, such as paying for a building. This parenting has become the most popular way to raise children, whatever the income, education, or race is.

Julie, a teacher at Stanford, told the Times that “snowplow parenting” is not a reasonable approach. “The parents should prepare the kid for the road, instead of preparing the road for the kid,” she said.