Last year I ruined my summer vacation by bringing along a modern convenience that was too convenient for my own good: the iPad. Instead of looking at nature, I checked my e-mail. Instead of paddling a small boat, I followed my Twitter feed (推特简讯). Instead of reading great novels, I stuck to reading four newspapers each morning. I was behaving as if I were still in the office. My body was on vacation, but my head wasn't.

So this year I made up my mind to try something different: withdrawal (退出) from the Internet. I knew it wouldn't be easy, since I'm bad at self-control. But I was determined. I started by giving the iPad to my wife.

    The cellphone signal at our house was worse than in the past, making my attempts at cheating an experience in frustration (沮丧). I was trapped, forced to go through with my plan. Largely cut off from e-mail, Twitter and my favorite newspaper websites, I had few ways to connect to the world except for the radio—and how much radio can one listen to, really? I had to do what I had planned to do all along: read books.

This experience has had a happy ending. With determination and the strong support of my wife, I won in my vacation struggle against the Internet, realizing finally that it was I, not the iPad, that was the problem. I knew I had won when we passed a Starbucks and my wife asked if I wanted to stop to use the Wi-Fi. “I don't need it,” I said.

However, as we return to post-vacation life, a harder test begins: Can I continue when I'm back at work?

There are times when the need to know what's being said right now is great. I have no intention of giving up my convenience completely. But I hope to resist the temptation (诱惑) to check my e-mail every five minutes, which leads to checking my Twitter feed and a website or two.

    I think a vacation is supposed to help you reset your brain to become more productive. Here I hope this one works.

    A team of researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago found that too many kids are eating too much pizza and too many calories are doing harm to children's health.

    "There are a lot of takeaways from the study. But the biggest thing is that parents are serving their kids too much pizza," said Dr. William Dietz, one of the study's authors and the director of the Sumner M. Redstone Global Center for Prevention and Wellness at the Milken Institute of Public Health at the George Washington University.

    The researchers used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, which tracked the diets of more than 11,000 children and teenagers. Researchers figured how many children eat pizza in the United States, how often they eat it, and how much they eat when they do.

    Pizza, pretty alarmingly, is the second leading source of calories in the diets of America's children, next only to grain desserts, such as cookies and other sweets. On any given day, roughly 20 percent of all children aged 2 to 11 and adolescents aged 12 to 19 eat pizza. And when they do, they eat a lot of it. When children eat pizza, they eat roughly 400 calories, according to the study. For teenagers, it's upwards of 600 calories.

    All that is pretty problematic, according to Dietz largely because kids don't tend to balance the pizza slices with salads, vegetables and other more nutritional(有营养的) foodstuffs. Days on which children and teenagers eat pizza are not only associated with considerably higher intakes of fat, but also, quite simply, with more food: on average, children consume 84 extra calories on the days they eat pizza, while adolescents consume an extra 230 calories.

    "When you eat extra calories and don't compensate(抵偿) for them at another point of the day or week, it can lead to weight gain and even obesity." Dietz said.

    There is a Silver lining. Pizza consumption is still too high by nutrition standards, but it's lower than it used to be. Consumption(消费) fell by roughly 25 percent between 2007 and 2016, according to the study. Much of that has come at dinner where it's fallen by 40 percent for children and about 33 percent for teenagers. It's unclear whether the decline has been in connection with a growing concern over obesity, especially among the country's youth.

    But the drop in pizza consumption, while significant hasn't been big enough "It's a positive trend," Dietz said. "But we're not quite them yet."

    It's easy to see the appeal of pizza. It's cheap. Parents can buy a lot of pizza for not a lot of money. Besides, they can buy pizza from a chain shop, a mom-and-pop store or a grocery freezer. And it's universally loved. The estimated 3 billion pizza eaten each year in the United States is a proof of the food's unmatched popularity. Given how much the country loves pizza, what's to be done? Dietz suggests pizza with smaller serving sizes and healthier toppings(配料). "We're not suggesting that kids avoid pizza altogether." said Dietz. "But when parents serve it, it's important that they understand it's extremely caloric. They should serve smaller pizza, or at least smaller slices."

    We have a strange obsession with the concept of perfection. “If I have the perfect parents and perfect grades, then I would be happy.” Under cultural influence, we seek what we can't have without remembering that we don't actually need to be perfect. Imperfection allows us to be human.

    Parents, teachers and other high-achieving peers will have us believe that we must be perfect if we wish to remain competitive. However, what job or school requires you to have a 2400 SAT, 4.0 GPA and develop a cure for some form of cancer by the age of 18? Although these would be great achievements, are they worth the cost of sleep? We feel like we need the perfect grades to get into the perfect college that will provide us with the perfect education necessary to obtain the perfect job. With this misconception, when writing our resumes(简历), we then seek out experiences that we think may help build a good name for ourselves. Feeding on our thirst for perfection, some college and career industries have been set up claiming to help us reach our goals.

    The truth is, you only need to be good enough. Don't worry about anything secondary to your passions. You won't become an expert at anything if you spend your time trying to succeed in everything you do. You only become an expert when you devote your time to the one or two projects that truly bring you joy.

    As members of this society, we have a responsibility to be excellent in what we do, not perfect. Although perfection can be a goal, it should not be the only goal. We only have 24 hours in a day. Thus, we need to prioritize(优先选择)what we want to do and cut out the activities we cannot do. If you enjoy debating, take a law class and see how it suits you. If you enjoy cooking, experiment in the kitchen and see what you can make!

    Try as hard as you can and let your future worry about itself. Worry about your task at hand and you will be successful in achieving your dreams. Above all, remember that you are going to be okay.

    When we do the same movements with our bodies over and over again, we overuse some muscles. And that overuse can lead to strain(紧张)and injury. Sometimes those problems can come from doing sports. But exercise experts say they are now seeing another cause for muscle problems: hand-held technology devices(设备).

    Staring down at your phone or tablet for long periods of time puts great tension on your neck and spine(脊椎). Many people who use tech devices also bend their shoulders forward. Experts say this posture(姿势)puts strain on the entire upper body. Muscle strain linked to hand-held technology has become such a common condition that it now has a name: tech neck.

    Kimberly Fielding, an exercise teacher in New York City, explains that constantly looking down at our devices creates an unnatural bend in our spine. This can cause nerve pain and other problems. “A lot of the curves of the neck can change, so instead of the neck spine going inward, the curve can be a little bit different and it causes nerve pain and disc herniation(椎间盘突出)and different muscle tension headaches — different things that really can reduce quality of life.”

    Fielding created a class to directly solve the problem of tech neck. The class uses different exercises to release tension in the upper body and strengthen back and neck muscles. Fielding says these exercises may feel uncomfortable in the beginning because the neck muscles may have become weak.

    However, you don't need to take a class like Fielding's. You can take simple steps to improve tech neck. For a quick fix, hold your phone at eye level. At the same time, take breaks from using your technology by standing up and stretching your legs often. Also, give your eyes a break by closing them throughout the day.

    Candace Payne's life changed forever in May 2017 when she posted a video of herself laughing crazily and wearing a mask. The video spread widely and "Mask Mom "became a household name.

    During the two years since that, Candace has published several books, starred in a TLC. web series and went on tour with Mandisa. She made appearances on late night talk shows, met J. J. Abrams and was able to fulfill a dream of taking her family to Disney World. It was a busy but joyful time.

    Her latest book is Consider It Joy. "I feel like people need a tool in their hands to actually get the joy they are fighting for, "Candace says, "The book can help you keep track of how much space and time you are devoting to things that aren't worth it in comparison to the joy that I know I could have."

    Getting joy is something that has always been important to Candace. "What the opportunity offered me was not a forced open door," Candace says, "Many people are trying desperately to push things open when they have to be obedient(顺从的) to the little things."

    Trusting herself has required being confident in saying no. She uses a simple tool to evaluate whether an opportunity is right to her. Candace says, "I have a balance beam (平衡木)where I'm asked to walk every single day as a mom, a wife, a speaker and an author. There are so many things I need to balance at a time. I have to realize what belongs there and what doesn't. The most important factor is joy."

    That's the heart behind the book Consider It Joy. "I really wanted to give people more than just advice about joy, Candace says, "I wanted to give them the ability to actually own it in their everyday life."

What made it particularly terrifying was its similarity to the mandrake, a plant that thought to have come from Hell. What earned the plant its awful reputation was its roots which looked like a dried-up human body occupied by evil spirits. Though the tomato and the mandrake were quite different except that both had bright red or yellow fruit, the general population considered them one and the same, too terrible to touch.

Cautious Europeans long ignored the tomato, and until the early 1700s most of the Western people continued to drag their feet. In the 1880s, the daughter of a well-known plant expert wrote that the most interesting part of an afternoon tea at her father's house had been the" introduction of this wonderful new fruit - or is it a vegetable?" As late as the twentieth century some writers still classed tomatoes with mandrakes as an "evil fruit".

But in the end tomatoes carried the day. The hero of the tomato was an American named Robert Johnson, and when he was publicly going to eat the tomato in 1820, people journeyed for hundreds of miles to watch him drop dead. "What are you afraid of?" he shouted. "I'll show you fools that these things are good to eat!" Then he bit into the tomato. Some people fainted. But he survived and, according to a local story set up a tomato-canning factory.