My friend BJ Gallagher told me a great story recently, about her own experience with resentment (愤恨). She once worked as the training manager for a large newspaper, where she found the corporate culture extremely frustrating. The company was a hundred years old and their past success ha d blinded them to the need for change. Finally, after butting heads with several senior executives (主管) many times, she left the company. But she found that she hadn't left her resentment, frustration, and anger behind when she resigned.

    “I finally decided to write about my experiences and my feelings at the newspaper. I wanted to be rid of that company and those people, once and for all. So I wrote and I wrote. It wasn't just a story that poured out; it was a whole book! We called it A peacock in the Land of Penguins. I was the peacock and those newspaper executives were the penguins.”

    “It took me several more years to finally get over my negative emotions. Through a lot of soul-searching and reflection, I finally was able to let go of my resentment. I came to see that there was nothing personal in the way they treated me, and they were good people doing what they thought best for the company. I was the one who had made it personal. I thought they were making my life miserable on purpose.”

    “Finally, the time came when I decided to make amends (弥补) for the sharp, angry things I had said about the company. I invited my former boss to dinner and made my apology. It was a great healing process for me. I finally felt free of the resentment that had been eating me up.”

    “What was the final outcome?” I asked her.

    “Gratitude,” she replied. “Not only wasn't I resentful any more, I was grateful to the company. If I hadn't had those painful experiences, I would never have written a book. And the book became hugely successful – now published in 21 languages; it transformed my business.”

    It's time to stop complaining. The economy might be melting down like butter in a hot pot, but for some people — you , maybe? — this could be a very good thing.

    Here's why. At no other time in recent history has it been easier or cheaper to start a new kind of company. Possibly a very profitable company. Let's call these start-ups LILOs, for “a little in, a lot out;” These are Web-based businesses that cost almost nothing to get off the ground yet can turn into great moneymakers.

    How do you get started? All that's required is a great idea for a product that will fill a need in the 21st century. These days you'd do best if your idea either makes people money or saves them money. And launching now will make your company stronger later — you'll learn to survive on fumes until the economy improves.

    That's what John Tayman is doing. He's an author who lives in San Francisco, where I met him; he wrote reviews for a business magazine I edited. Tayman knew little about technology and even less about business. And yet he dreamed of a website that would summarize car reviews from other sources and rank every model of new car. “It'll be like RottenTomatoes.com meets Kelley Blue Book,” he explained to me during lunch one day last June. Tayman said he intended to build the site on the side while continuing to write for a living. He'd work on his new company only at night and on weekends. Oh, yes, and he had only about $10,000. “Good luck with that!” I thought. Ideas are much easier to produce than they are to put into practice.

    Tayman went to work with nothing more than his PowerBook laptop. A very well-organized fellow, he quickly discovered a bunch of free stuff online — instructional manuals and sites that walk you through the process from start to finish. Within months, Tayman had a staff of 20 employees working for him in five different countries. MotorMouths.com went live in January. Tayman figures he has worked about 10 hours a week on it and hasn't spent a cent on marketing or advertising. Growth is modest but steady: nearly 10,000 people visit each week.

    Jessica Tandy probably is best known for winning an Academy Award in 1989 for the movie Driving Miss Daisy. She was the oldest person to have won the award. But for many years, she had received praise for her great performances.

    Jessica Tandy was born in London in 1909. After her father died, her mother taught and took other jobs at night to make extra money to raise her, three children. Jessica's older brothers showed an interest in the theater and often put on shows at home. Jessica said later that she was terrible in all of them. But she said taking part in those plays as a child created a desire in her to be someone else.

    Jessica loved going to the theater. This love led her to attend an acting school in 1924. She performed in her first play called The Manderson Girls at 18. But few people watched this play. In 1932, she married the famous actor Jack Hawkins. Their wedding pictures were on the front page of many British newspapers. In the same year, critics in London recognized her great acting skill in her performance in the play Children in Uniform.

    In 1940, Jessica ended her first marriage and moved to the USA. In New York, she met actor Hume Cronyn. Two years later, they married and moved to Hollywood.

    Her turning point came in 1947 when she played the lead part in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire. Tandy won the first of her four Tony awards for best actress in it. After that Hollywood producers began to choose her to be in the movie.

    Jessica Tandy said she hated seeing herself in the movies. She was surprised when she won the Academy Award for Driving Miss Daisy. She said that the wonderful part she had made up for her lack of experience in movies.

    Welcome to Adventureland!

    Everyone loves Adventureland! The Parks and Exhibitions were built for you to explore, enjoy, and admire their wonders. Every visit will be an unforgettable experience. You will go away enriched, longing to come back. What are you going to do this time?

    The Travel Pavilion

    Explore places you have never been to before, and experience different ways of life. Visit the Amazon jungle village, the Turkish market, the Tai floating market, the Berber mountain house and others. Talk to the people there who will tell you about their lives, and things they make. You can try making a carpet, making nets, fishing…

    The Future Tower

    This exhibition shows how progress will touch our lives. It allows us to look into the future and explore the cities of the next century and the way we'll be living then. Spend some time in our space station and climb into our simulator (模拟装置) for the Journey to Mars!

    The Nature Park

    This is not really one park but several. In the Safari Park you can drive among African animals in one of our Range Cruisers: see lions, giraffes, elephants in the wild. Move on to the Ocean Park to watch the dolphins and whales. And then there is still the Aviary to see…

    The Pyramid

    This is the center of Adventureland. Run out of film, need some postcards and stamps? For all these things and many more, visit our underground shopping center. Come here for information and ideas too.

    "IF ALIENS are so likely, why have we never seen any？" That is the Fermi Paradox（悖论） named after Enrico Fermi, a physicist who posed it in 1950.

    Fermi's argument ran as follows. The laws of nature supported the appearance of intelligent life on Earth. Those laws are the same throughout the universe. The universe contains zillions of stars and planets. So, even if life is unlikely to arise on any particular astronomical body, the sheer abundance of creation suggests the night sky should be full of alien civilizations. Fermi wondered why aliens had never visited the earth. Today, the paradox is more usually cast in light of the inability of radio﹣telescope searches to detect the equivalent（相等的） of the radio waves that leak from Earth into the universe, and have done for the past century.

    Thinking up answers to this apparent contradiction has become something of a scientific parlour（客厅）game. Perhaps life is really very unlikely. Perhaps the priests are right: human beings were put on Earth by some creator God for His own unknown purposes, and the rest of the universe is merely background scenery. Perhaps there are plenty of aliens, but they have decided that discretion is a safer bet than gathering together. Or perhaps galactic（银河的） society avoids communicating with Earth specifically. One frightening idea is that technological civilizations destroy themselves before they can make their presence known. They might blow themselves up after inventing nuclear weapons （an invention that, on Earth, Fermi had been part of）, or cook themselves to death by over﹣burning fossil fuels.

    In a paper published last month on arXiv, an online repository（文献库） , a group of three astronomers at Pennsylvania State University have analyzed the history of alien hunting and come to a different conclusion. In effect, they reject one of the paradox's main theory. Astronomers have seen no sign of aliens, argue Jason Wright and his colleagues, because they have not been looking hard enough.

    We talk continuously about how to make children more "resilient (有恢复力的)"，but whatever we're doing, it's not working. Rates of anxiety disorders and depression are rising rapidly among teenagers. What are we doing wrong?

    Nassim Taleb invented the word "antifragile" and used it to describe a small but very important class of systems that gain from shocks, challenges, and disorder. The immune (免疫的) system is one of them: it requires exposure to certain kinds of bacteria and potential allergens (过敏原) in childhood in order to develop to its full ability.

    Children's social and emotional abilities are as antifragile as their immune systems. If we overprotect kids and keep them "safe" from unpleasant social situations and negative emotions, we deprive (剥夺) them of the challenges and opportunities for self-building they need to grow strong. Such children are likely to suffer more when exposed later to other unpleasant but ordinary life events, such as teasing and social rejection.

    It's not the kids' fault. In the UK, as in the US, parents became much more fearful in the1980s and 1990s as cable TV and later the Internet exposed everyone, more and more, to those rare occurrences of crimes and accidents that now occur less and less. Outdoor play and independent mobility went down; screen time and adult-monitored activities went up.

    Yet free play in which kids work out their own rules of engagement, take small risks, and learn to master small dangers turns out to be vital for the development of adult social and even physical competence. Depriving them of free play prevents their social-emotional growth. Norwegian play researchers Ellen Sandseter and Leif Kennair warned: "We may observe an increased anxiety or mental disorders in society if children are forbidden from participating in age adequate risky play."

    They wrote those words in 2011. Over the following few years, their prediction came true. Kids born after 1994 are suffering from much higher rates of anxiety disorders and depression than did the previous generation. Besides, there is also a rise in the rate at which teenage girls are admitted to hospital for deliberately harming themselves.

    What can we do to change these trends? How can we raise kids strong enough to handle the ordinary and extraordinary challenges of life? We can't guarantee that giving primary school children more independence today will bring down the rate of teenage suicide tomorrow. The links between childhood overprotection and teenage mental illness are suggestive but not clear-cut. Yet there are good reasons to suspect that by depriving our naturally antifragile kids of the wide range of experiences they need to become strong, we are systematically preventing their growth. We should let go­and let them grow.