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    Some of the world's most famous musicians recently gathered in Paris and New Orleans to celebrate the first annual International Jazz Day. UNESCO( United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) recently set April 30 as a day to raise awareness of jazz music, its significance, and its potential as a unifying(联合) voice across cultures.

    Despite the celebrations, though, in the U.S. the jazz audience continues to shrink and grow older, and the music has failed to connect with younger generations.

    It's Jason Moran's job to help change that. As the Kennedy Center's artistic adviser for jazz, Moran hopes to widen the audience for jazz, make the music more accessible, and preserve its history and culture.

    “Jazz seems like it's not really a part of the American appetite,” Moran tells National Public Radio's reporter Neal Conan. “What I'm hoping to accomplish is that my generation and younger start to reconsider and understand that jazz is not black and white anymore. It's actually color, and it's actually digital.”

    Moran says one of the problems with jazz today is that the entertainment aspect of the music has been lost. “The music can't be presented today the way it was in 1908 or 1958. It has to continue to move, because the way the world works is not the same,” says Moran.

    Last year, Moran worked on a project that arranged Fats Waller's music for a dance party, “Just to kind of put it back in the mind that Waller is dance music as much as it is concert music,” says Moran. “For me, it's the recontextualization. In music, where does the emotion(情感) lie? Are we, as humans，gaining any insight（感悟） on how to talk about ourselves and how something as abstract as a Charlie Parker record gets us into a dialogue about our emotions and our thoughts? Sometimes we lose sight that the music has a wider context,” says Moran, “So I want to continue those dialogue. Those are the things I want to foster.”

    A 17-year-old boy, caught sending text messages in class, was recently sent to the vice principal's office at Millwood High School in Halifax, Nova Scotia. The vice principal, Steve Gallagher, told the boy he needed to focus on the teacher, not his cellphone. The boy listened politely and nodded, and that's when Mr. Gallagher noticed the student's fingers moving on his lap. He was texting while being scolded for texting. “It was a subconscious act,” says Mr. Gallagher, who took the phone away. “Young people today are connected socially from the moment they open their eyes in the morning until they close their eyes at night. It's compulsive.”

    A study this year by psychology students at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Ga., found that the more time young people spend on Facebook, the more likely they are to have lower grades and weaker study habits. Heavy Facebook users show signs of being more sociable, but they are also more likely to be anxious, hostile or depressed. (Doctors, meanwhile, are now blaming addictions to 'night texting' for disturbing the sleep patterns of teens.)

    Almost a quarter of today's teens check Facebook more than 10 times a day, according to a 2009 survey by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit group that monitors media's impact on families. Will these young people get rid of this habit once they enter the work force, or will employers come to see texting and 'social-network checking' as accepted parts of the workday?

    Think back. When today's older workers were in their 20s, they might have taken a break on the job to call friends and make after-work plans. In those earlier eras, companies discouraged non-business-related calls, and someone who made personal calls all day risked being fired. It was impossible to imagine the constant back-and-forth texting that defines interactions among young people today.

    Educators are also being asked by parents, students and educational strategists to reconsider their rules. “In past generations, students got in trouble for passing notes in class. Now students are skilled at texting with their phones still in their pockets,” says 40-year-old Mr. Gallagher, the vice principal, “and they're able to communicate with someone one floor down and three rows over. Students are just fundamentally different today. They will take suspensions rather than give up their phones.”

    Sometimes when I'm flying from one speaking engagement to another, I find myself sitting next to someone who's quite talkative. This is often a pleasant experience for me because I'm a people-watcher. I learn so much by watching and listening to the people I meet and see every day. I've heard stories of sadness and others of delight, fear and joy, and others that would rival those on “Oprah” and "Geraldo”.

    Sad to say，there are times when I'm sitting next to someone who just wants to vent(发泄） his temper or inflict(强加）his political views on an audience for 600 miles. It was one of those days. I settled in, as my seatmate began his speech on the terrible state of the world with the time worn, “You know, kids today are...” He went on and on, sharing vague notions of the terrible state of teens and young adults, based on watching the six o'clock news rather selectively.

    When I gratefully got off that plane and finally made it to my hotel in Indianapolis, I bought the local paper and went to have dinner in the hotel. There, on an inside page, was an article I believe ought to have been the front-page headline news.

In a little Indiana town, there was a 15-year-old boy with a brain tumor. He was undergoing radiation and chemotherapy(化疗）treatments，As a result of those treatments, he had lost all of his hair. I don't know about you, but I remember how I would have felt about that at his age —I would have felt awkward and ashamed.

    This young man's classmates willingly came to the rescue: all the boys in his grade asked their mothers if they could shave their heads so that Brian wouldn't be the only bald boy in the high school. There, on that page was a photograph of a mother shaving all of her sons' hair with the family looking on approvingly. And in the background, a group of similar bald young men.

    No, I don't despair about kids today.

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    Do you worry about entering senior high school? Everything, from study to environment, has changed. Can you adapt yourself to it?

    You're not alone. Remember that everybody else in your year is in the same boat. You may not notice it, but they're just as nervous as you are.

    Moving to senior high school is a chance, not a problem. Things are different, and all you need to do is to be polite and learn the new rules.

    The teachers will help. If you don't know what to do or are worried about something, then ask for help. Teachers are probably the best people to turn to, because they have experience in helping new students. Pay attention to what your teachers say.

    Everything changes. There are lots of differences between junior high school and senior high school. You will have your lessons with different teachers in different rooms. You will have homework for different subjects on different days, so make sure you get organized. Make sure you know which rooms your classes are in and which days you have your different subjects on.

Other points:

    If you've got an older brother or sister at the school, then ask them for advice.

    Be yourself! It sounds simple, but things will become better if you just act naturally.

    Having early nights makes a difference. You'll also find it easier to get up in the morning!

    One day a little boy, annoyed by his father's decision for him to become a grocer, decides that he will never grow up. Grocery is a dull job and staying a child is his protest against it. This strange little boy-man, never separated from a tin drum he is always banging, is our hero of the table. It covers three crucial decades of 20th century history. Little Oscar Matzerath will experience love, war and imprisonment in a story that paints an unforgettable picture of Central Europe between 1923 and 1954.

    This is an overview of the story of The Tin Drum, the most famous work by the German Nobel-winning author Günter Grass, who passed away on April 13 at the age of 87. The Tin Drum also established Grass as one of the leading authors of Germany. It also set a high bar of comparison for all of his following works. Just as his best-known fiction is both the story of an individual and of an age, so it is that Grass' life cannot be understood without referring to the history of Germany. He was called "Germany's conscience", because he reminded Germans of a past during the Second World War (1933-1945) that many would have rather forgotten.

    This sometimes made him unpopular. Many Germans did not agree in 1989 when he said that East Germany and West Germany should remain separate, as a united country would be too strong and threaten the world's peace. And Grass was called a hypocrite when he revealed in his memoir

    Peeling the Onion (2006) that he had been a teenage member of the Waffen-SS, the Nazi (纳粹) Party's fighting force. The man who had blamed the actions of others had a less-than-perfect record himself.

    Grass was a man of the pen and the page and also a man with a gift for speaking to the public.

    His writing was noisy and annoying, but one had to listen to it, a little like the sound of the drum banged by his most famous literary creation.

    A new study suggests climate conditions in the Sahara Desert, one of hottest, driest and most deserted areas in the world, have changed from wet to dry a about every 20,000 years.

    But previous evidence has suggested the Sahara did not always experience such extreme heat and dry conditions. At times, the Sahara Ranged to a very wet climate. This permitted plants and animals to develop and grow and led to the creation of human settlements. Now, they have discovered more evidence, which, the lead researcher David Mc Gee says, supports the idea that the Sahara's climate kept changing between wet and dry about every 20,000, years.

    McGee reported these climate changes were mainly driven by changes in the Earth's(地轴)as the planet travels round the sun .This process affects the amount of sunlight between seasons. Every 20,000 years the Earth receives more strong summer sunlight. When the Earth's axis changes again, the amount of sunlight is reduced. This season change happened continuously every 20,000 years. The other part of the season produced rainy conditions, resulting in a wetter, greener, plant-rich environment. When the rainy activity weakens, the climate becomes hot and dry, like the Sahara remains today.

    The scientists based their research on dust collected from ocean sediment(沉积物)in the Atlantic Ocean bottom off the coast of West Africa. The dust contained layers (层)of ancient sediment built up over millions of years. Each layer could contain traces of Saharan dust as well as the remains of life forms. This information was used to assess over what time period the dust had built up. This led to the overall finding that the Saharan changes from wet to dry climates happened every 20,000 years.

David McGee said that today we only see the Sahara Desert as an extremely deserted and "inhospitable" place. The new study suggests that the area's climate has changes between grasslands and a much wetter environment, and back to dry climates, even over the last quarter million years. McGee says he thinks the latest research can be valuable in studying the Sahara's history as it relates to human settlement.