1 . Constant notifications(通知)on your phone. TV news specials in place of your favourite sports show. WhatsApp and Messenger full of COVID-19 articles your out-of-touch aunt just “had to share”.Sound familiar? If our daily news intake was counted in calories, many of us would have put on even more weight in recent months.

While audience numbers for network television news shows remain much higher than usual in many countries, ratings are, in some places, starting to decrease. In the UK, news shows have recorded their lowest audience figures since the country went into lockdown. The Nieman Journalism Lab, part of Harvard University, recently reported that “news traffic to news sites, both in the US and around the world, is pretty much back to pre-coronavirus levels”.

There are also many people who are finding themselves consumed by the news cycle mole than usual. Journalists,communications professionals, doctors, scientist and,most recently. disinfectant (消毒剂) producers are among those having to stay on top of daily comments and data in a way they've never previously experience. For many, this is happening while they are working from home and managing blurred(模糊的)boundaries between their work and private lives.

So how should we balance news fatigue and anxiety with the need to remain informed on the latest news during the crisis? John-Paul Davies. a London-based expert, argues that for most of us, checking the headlines once a day is a sensible goal. This could be reduced to once a week for those with high levels of anxiety. He says it is also important to select “a trusted news site' or radio station with a focus on “facts rather than guesses”.

For those whose work is connected to the coronavirus crisis, experts accept it may be much harder to reduce news consumption. But John-Paul Davies says it's still important to make an effort to “put boundaries” around how much information you watch or read. Liz Martin, a therapist based in London, recommends regular digital check-ins with workmates doing similar roles. “It's really important to be a support to one another,” she argues.

2 . When did you last write a letter? Properly write on—by hand? In a digital world, where sending a text or email is far more convenient than using snail mail, is the writing on the wall for traditional pen and paper? Well, some people claim that writing still has many benefits, so maybe it's not time to ditch your ballpoint(圆珠笔)or fountain pen(钢笔)yet.

These days, when people request things in writing, a typed, electronic document will be accepted. Doing this on a computer means it could be saved, edited, copied and sent via email. But crafting a handwriting document is unique: It requires planning and thought, and, as well as practising your handwriting, it helps you to remember spelling and punctuation.

Some experts believe your brain benefits from using old-fashioned pen and paper. This is particularly relevant for students,where typing notes into a laptop is thought to lack the "tactile feedback"(触觉反馈)to the brain that contact between pen and paper docs. BBC Worklife website quotes Hetty Roessingh from the University of Calgary,who says that "taking notes by hand involves cognitive(认知的)engagement in summarizing, adapting, organizing. concept and vocabulary mapping. Others agree that handwriting may boost fine motor skills in your hands and fingers.

There are everyday benefits to using pen and paper too. Scribbling(涂狗)notes，shopping lists or messages on the back of an envelope can still be useful, quick and portable. But putting pen to paper in a letter to a friend or loved one can probably have the most impact. Pen pal writer Katherine Moller told the BBC: "In a world where it is so easy to hop online to email or to send a fast text, it is so personal and so precious to know someone chose to turn off the virtual world to spend some time with you."

So, while digital skills remain important, don't write off your pens and pencils yet—especially if your smartphone, tablet or laptop runs out of power!

3 . London—A few hundred regular customers and pedestrians（行人）offered to help October Books of Southampton in England move books along the street last Friday. The shop had been struggling to afford the rising rent prices of the building that they had occupied since 1977 and decided to move to an old bank building down the block.

But how would they be able to move their books to the new location without having to pay for expensive moving services? October Books put out a call for volunteers to form a “human conveyor belt” between their old store and the new location 500 feet down the street.

They expected maybe a few dozen people to show up, but to their surprise, over 200 people lined up on the sidewalk to pass each of the store's 2,000 books to their new home. Amy Brown, one of the store's employees, said that she was astonished at so many people. “I was handing books to people without actually seeing the entire of it,” said Brown. “So it was only after about 20minutes that I actually went out into the road and saw the extent of the people.” When passing pedestrians asked what people were doing, they would join in to give a hand. Nearby restaurants even brought hot teas and coffees for the volunteers.

“It was really sort of surprising and positive, and just a really moving experience to see people joining in because they wanted to help. And they wanted to be part of something bigger,” Brown said. Now this small independent book store in England isn't just surviving—it is growing thanks to the city that adores its literary services.

After a full year of corona-virus pandemic stay-at-home life, all of it — face masks, social distancing, constant anxiety, Zoom calls, and COVID-19 itself as a     1     (potential) deadly disease — may finally be coming to     2     end thanks to vaccine (疫苗) programs growing across the country.

Some of my anti-medicine friends who     3    (be) initially nervous about being vaccinated have been watching the news, seeing that essential workers are good after     4    (have) their shots, with little to no side     5    (effect), and now even they feel more confident and willing to take their shot. Unlike Pfizer and Moderna, the Johnson & Johnson vaccine only requires one dose and doesn’t have to     6    (store) in freezers, which will make     7     easier to get folks in for a one and done shot.

This is a real turning point. Outside may be opening up soon. Generally, we are going to have to figure out     8    life after COVID should be like, and the small roles we can all play     9     making sure it never goes down like this again. So     10     the population becomes immune to the virus, it’s highly encouraged to keep wearing masks, practicing social distancing and washing your hands after getting vaccinated.

10 . When Stephen Dennis, a retired homebuilder in Bellevue was raising his two sons in the 1980s, he never heard the phrase “screen time”, nor did he worry much about the hours his kids spent with technology. When he bought an Apple II Plus computer, he considered it an investment in their future and encouraged them to use it as much as possible.

But things have changed with his grandkids and their Snapchat and Twitter.

“It almost seems like an addiction,” said Mr. Dennis, “In the old days you had a computer and you had a TV and you had a phone but none of them were linked to the outside world but the phone. You didn't have this omnipresence (无所不在) of technology.”

True, the anxieties these days seem particularly severe as, of course, they always have. Smartphones have a highly customized, 24/7 presence in our lives that feeds parental fears of antisocial behavior and stranger danger.

What hasn't changed, though, is a general parental fear of what kids are doing out of sight. In previous generations, this often meant kids wandering around on their own or slipping out at night to drink. These days, it might mean hiding in their bedroom, chatting with strangers online.

Less than a century ago, the radio set off similar fears, “The radio seems to find parents more helpless than did the funnies, the automobile, the movies and other earlier invaders of the home because it cannot be locked out or the children be locked in,” Sidonie Matsner Gruenberg, director of the Child Study Association of America, told The Washington Post in 1931. She added that the biggest worry radio gave parents was how it interfered with other interests — conversation, music practice, group games, and reading. In the early 1930s, a group of mothers from Scarsdale, N Y., pushed radio broadcasters to change programs they thought were too “overstimulating, frightening, and emotionally overpowering” for kids, said Margaret Cassidy, a media historian at Adelphi University in New York.

Then, television burst into the public consciousness with incomparable speed. By 1955, more than half of all U. S. homes had a black-and-white set, according to Mitchell Stephens, a media historian at New York University.

The hand-wringing started almost as quickly. A 1961 Stanford University study on 6,000 children, 2,000 parents, and 100 teachers found that more than half of the kids studied watched “adult” programs such as crime shows, and shows that featured “emotional problems”. Researchers were shocked at the TV violence present even in children’s programming.

By the end of that decade, Congress had authorized $1 million (about $7 million today) to study the effects of TV violence, moving “literally thousands of projects” in the following years, Professor Cassidy said. That eventually led the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) to adopt, in 1984, its first recommendation that parents limit their kids' exposure to technology. The medical association argued that television sent unrealistic messages around drugs and alcohol, could lead to overweight, and might fuel violence.

Video games presented a different challenge. Decades of study have failed to confirm the most widespread fear, that violent games encourage violent behavior. But from the moment the games appeared as a cultural force in the early 1980s, parents were anxious about the ways kid could lose themselves in games as simple and repetitive as a “Space Invaders.” Some cities sought to restrict the spread of arcades (游戏厅); Mesquite, Texas, for instance, insisted that the under-17 group needed parental monitoring.

Initially, the internet — known as an “information superhighway” that could connect kids to the world's knowledge — got a similar pass for helping with homework and research. Yet as the internet began linking people together, often in ways that connected previously lonely people, familiar concerns soon reappeared.