When I was a child, I had to go to church and obey many other rules, though these rules at times caused resentment (怨恨). Perhaps the most extreme parenting decision my parents made for my four brothers and sisters and me was to create a home environment without a television.

    We hated this decision at that time, because there was seemingly no way to keep this embarrassing fact a secret at school. Naturally, simple pleasures like cartoons, football games, and movies became huge novelties (新奇事物). I would go over to friends' or relatives' houses for that access alone.

    When I reached high school, my parents bought a television, though it had no cable. However, I did spend most of my childhood in a home without a television. In fact not having a television did contribute a great deal to my skills, and it also forced me to develop other valuable interests. We grew up in a small town, so my brothers and sisters and I spent time exploring streets, fields and woods. And of course I read and wrote and studied, which pushed me toward a career path.

    So would I give a similar situation to my own children if I had them? I doubt it, at least not in the most extreme sense. I'm too much of a football fan, not to mention the TV serials (连续剧) like The Wire. But television or almost anything for that matter is unhealthy for kids. It can prevent them from living a full life. So maybe a reasonable answer is no cable or no video-game systems or simply setting the time limit, but I haven't exactly worked out how to confine it yet. Although some people are against my idea, we do need limits after all.

    Adults are happy to tell their children that crusts (面包皮) will give them curly hair, carrots will help them see in the dark, and spinach will make them strong. Even though adults know it's not totally true, they think it's good for their children's health, a study had found.

    In a study about 31 per cent of adults said they once told their children the curly hair tale, and 36 per cent said they'd been told the same thing by their mother or father. Among the over-50s, almost half said they'd been promised curly hair if they ate their crusts. A quarter of the 2,000 adults questioned in the study told their children carrots would help them see in the dark. This could be true to some extent because of the high levels of vitamin A and beta-carotene in root vegetables.

    Another favorite among parents is that milk will make one strong. A third surveyed said their parents told them this, and about 29 per cent said they told their children the same thing. But while there is plenty of evidence to suggest milk is good for people's health, there are also a lot of scientific papers saying it isn't.

    Thanks to Popeye, spinach is also fed to children, along with the idea that it will make them strong. While there is also some truth in this one, scientists now believe it is not the iron, but the inorganic nitrates (无机硝酸盐) that improve physical power.

    One in seven of the surveyed admitted telling their little ones that runner beans will make them run faster, which is nothing more than wordplay and has no basis in science. Almost one in five adults were subjected to the same tale in childhood.

    Just over one in 10 parents told their children green food would turn them into a superhero, and a quarter admitted hiding vegetables in meals.

    Lyndsay Jones, spokesman for Persil Washing Up Liquid, said, "It's clear that the most persuasive stories about food are passed on from generation to generation. Our research shows that the ideas continue, and we tell our kids the same things our parents told us, even if they're not always entirely true."

    Crusts may not make your hair curly, but there's plenty of research that says crusts contain more of the goodness than the rest of a loaf. Hopefully, as a result of our Cook with Kids promise, more parents will be encouraged to spend time with their children in the kitchen and teach them the truth about food.

    Soaping up your hands may do more than just get rid of germs. It may wash away the inner confusion you feel right after being forced to make a choice between two appealing choices, according to a new study. The study builds on past research into a phenomenon known as “the Macbeth effect”.

    It turns out that Shakespeare was really onto something when he imagined lady Macbeth trying to clean her conscience（良心）by rubbing invisible bloodstains from her hands. A few years ago, scientists asked people to describe a past wrong act. If people were then given a chance to clean their hands, they later expressed less guilt than people who hadn't cleaned.

    This finding fascinated W. S. Lee, a researcher. “Anything from the past, any kind of negative emotional experiences, might be washed away,” says Lee.

He decided to test hand washing's effect on one kind of bad feeling: the tension we feel after being forced to choose between two attractive choices, because picking one choice makes us feel that we've lose the other. People usually try to calm this inner conflict by later exaggerating（夸大）the positive aspects of their choice.

    He had students rank 10 different music CDs. Then be offered students one CD as a gift. Some students then use liquid soap. Others only looked at the soap or sniffed（噢）it. “Actually, you do not need water and soap,” says Lee.

    Later, the students again had to rank all the music. People who didn't wash their hands had the normal response — they scored their take-home CD higher. Suggesting that they now saw it as even more attractive than before. But this wasn't true for the hand washers. They ranked the music about the same. “they feel no need at all to justify the choice,” say Lee.

    But the implications of it just aren't clear. Schwarz says it's too soon to know whether people should head for a sink after making a tough choice. He says washing may help decision-makers by cleaning away mental disorder, but perhaps if they don't go through the usual post-decision process of justifying their choice, they might feel more sorrow in the long run.

A Chinese legend—A pretty maiden is trapped by a dragon. A prince must slay（杀死）the dragon to save her. Then, magically, they fall in love and live happily ever after. Traditional stories tend to emphasize the fantastic, magical side of love. Fate plays matchmaker. Strangers see each other from across a room and instantly know that they are destined to be together.

    It isn't difficult to imagine two strangers coming together and falling in love despite their differences. It suggests that love is challenging, uncertain, and incomprehensible.

    But with more people using online dating services, a very different kind of love has emerged: one that is scientific, convenient, and self-directed. It minimizes risk and provides a choice, like on a menu. There is anonymity（匿名）and the avoidance of immediate rejection. Meeting terms are negotiated online.

    Online dating also allows the setting of preconditions. Computer algorithms（推算） exclude undesirable traits such as the wrong hair color, race, or age. But they also exclude randomness. They reduce the chances of meeting someone different, or someone who could challenge one's romantic ideals. Instead, they find the partner we think we want and exclude everyone else. As a result, we could be missing the opportunity of a lifetime, to meet someone we would never have expected to fall in love with.

    Perhaps this new way represents a more efficient form of romance. Traditional ideas of love may be enchanting - but are they useful? Loneliness and boredom are less exciting than chance encounters, but they represent the more realistic side of love. All too often people have suffered through bad dates and humiliations. If they could just choose what they wanted, wouldn't it save time and reduce suffering? However, by choosing partners based on our preconceived ideas, we may be indulging in our illusions. Instead of letting ourselves grow with someone, love becomes more about looking for ourselves in the other. What if we don't know ourselves as well as we think? Perhaps love isn't about knowing what we want. Perhaps it's about being open to unimagined possibilities.

    The man who walked into Dave Cutlip's tattoo parlor（纹身店）in Brooklyn Park. Maryland, in January was tough to miss. His face bore a gang（帮派）tattoo. The man sought Cutlip's help in covering up his violent past. He was determined to turn over a new leaf. "I could see the hurt in his eyes," Cutlip, 49, told The Washington Post.

    Cutlip couldn't help the man—the tattoo were too close to the eyes. But it got him thinking. Many young people get tattoos that hey come to regret. A few can mark them for the rest of their days. Then they're" always going to be a victim." said Cutlip." If I can help, that's my ultimate（最终的）goal."

    Inking over a tattoo costs hundreds of dollars, and getting one removed by laser（激光）is even pricier. So Cutlip decided he would help by hiding racist or gang-related tattoos for free. He put the word out via Facebook:" Sometimes people make bad choices and sometimes people change. We believe there is enough hate in this world, and we want to make a difference."

    One man, Casey Schaffer, showed up with the word "white" on one forearm and "power" on the other. He'd served a year in prison on drug charges, he told The Washington Post, and had joined a white group there because they" took care of me. I thought of it as paying them back." But employers would take one look at the tattoos and turn him down. So he had Cutlip obscure（使不分明）one of the words with a heat and roses and tattoo an eagle over the other.

    Cutlip has done nine such jobs, each of which took several hours. He told People that a client（顾客）let him know that he quickly found a job once his tattoo was obscured. Such victories inspired Cutlip to found the Random Acts of Tattoo project with three like-minded（志同道合的）tattoo studios from around the country, and now hundreds of clients are on a wait list. As he told National Public Radio." If we can just erase hate, then we're doing something."

    I became a magician by accident. When I was nine years old, I learned how to make a coin disappear. I'd read The Lord of the Rings and risked coming into the adult section of the library to search for a book of spells (魔法) — nine being that curious age at which you're old enough to work through more than 1, 200 pages of mysterious fantasy literature but young enough to still hold out hope that you might find a book of real, actual magic in the library. The book I found instead taught basic sleight-of-hand (戏法) technique, and I devoted the next months to practice.

    Initially, the magic wasn't any good. At first it wasn't even magic; it was just a trick — a bad trick. I spent hours each day in the bathroom running through the secret moves in front of the mirror. I dropped the coin over and over, a thousand times in a day, and after two weeks of this my mom got a carpet sample from the store and placed it under the mirror to eradicate the sound of the coin falling again and again.

    I had heard my dad work through passages of new music on the piano, so I knew how to practice — slowly, deliberately, going for precision rather than speed. And then I tried the illusion (错觉) in the mirror and an unbelievable scene took place. It did not look like a magic trick. It looked like a miracle. I knew that I had got what I wanted.

    One day I made the performance on the playground. We had been playing football and were standing by the backstop in the field behind the school. A dozen people were watching. I showed the coin to everyone. Then it disappeared. The kids screamed. They yelled, laughed, scrambled away. Everyone went crazy. This was brilliant.