Shakespeare's Sister

    Let us imagine, since facts are so hard to come by, what would have happened had Shakespeare had a wonderfully gifted sister, called Judith.

    Shakespeare himself went, very probably — his mother was an heiress — to the grammar school, where he may have learnt Latin — Ovid, Virgil and Horace — and the elements of grammar and logic. He was, it is well known, a wild boy who poached (偷猎) rabbits, perhaps shot a deer, and had, rather sooner than he should have done, to marry a woman in the neighborhood, who bore him a child rather quicker than was right. That escapade sent him to seek his fortune in London. He had, it seemed, a taste for the theatre; he began by holding horses at the stage door. Very soon he got work in the theatre, became a successful actor, and lived at the centre of the universe, meeting everybody, knowing everybody, practicing his art on the boards, exercising his wits in the streets, and even getting access to the palace of the queen.

    Meanwhile his extraordinarily gifted sister remained at home. She was as adventurous, as imaginative, as curious to see the world as he was. But she was not sent to school. She had no chance of learning grammar and logic, let alone of reading Horace and Virgil. She picked up a book now and then, one of her brother's perhaps, and read a few pages. But then her parents came in and told her to mend the stockings or mind the stew(炖锅) and not moon about with books and papers. They would have spoken sharply but kindly, for they were practical people who knew the conditions of life for a woman. Soon, however, before she was out of her teens, she was to be engaged to the son of a neighboring wool stapler(经销商). She cried out that marriage was hateful to her, and for that she was severely beaten by her father. Then he ceased to scold her. He begged her instead not to hurt him, not to shame him in this matter of her marriage. He would give her a chain of beads or fine dresses, he said; and there were tears in his eyes. How could she disobey him? How could she break his heart?

    The force of her own gift alone drove her to it. She made up a small parcel of her belongings, let herself down by a rope one summer's night and took the road to London. She was not seventeen. The birds that sang in the woods were not more musical than she was. She had the quickest fancy, a gift like her brother's, for the tune of words. Like him, she had a taste for the theatre. She stood at the stage door; she wanted to act, she said. Men laughed in her face. The manager — a fat, loose-lipped man — howled with laughter. He roared something about puppies dancing and women acting — no woman, he said, could possibly be an actress. She could get no training in her craft. Could she even seek her dinner in a bar or roam (游荡) the streets at midnight? Yet her genius was for fiction and lusted to feed abundantly upon the lives of men and women and the study of their ways. At last — for she was very young, oddly like Shakespeare the poet in her face, with the same grey eyes and rounded brows — at last Nick Greene the actor-manager took pity on her; she found herself with child by that gentleman and so — who shall measure the heat and violence of the poet's heart when caught and confined in a woman's body? — killed herself one winter's night and lies buried at some cross-roads where the omnibuses (公共汽车) now stop outside the Elephant and Castle.

    That, more or less, is how the story would run, if a woman in Shakespeare's day had had Shakespeare's genius.

    How many girls in this world fall behind? The answer is hard—too many to count. This is why the phrase “Go Get It Girl” popped up in my head one day. This would be my project. Thus begins the journey of my Cold Award project, the largest and most important step of Girl Scouts (女童子军).

    “Go Get It Girl” is a girl's self-empowerment (自我授权) project centered on a website called gogetitgirl.org. It focuses on areas including education, health, and financial literacy. The education section includes information on applying to college and, maintaining good grades. The health section contains information on basic health and self-respect. Lastly, the financial literacy section has all the information a girl needs to manage her money properly.

    As part of my project, I was able to work one-on-one with girls in elementary, middle, and high school. I gave a speech at a local high school's College Night. I spoke to Hispanic girls and their parents about applying to college. In addition, I worked with an organization called Cool Girls, Inc. Cool Girls is an organization focused on the advancement of girls in all aspects of their development. I worked at the afterschool program, Cool Girls Club. The girls I worked with were primarily minorities, and Cool Girls truly helps them to rise above any current difficulties in their lives.

    To provide inspiration for the girls who visit gogetitgirl.org, I interviewed successful women in my community, including a doctor and business owner.

The project has been a lot of work, arid it's not over yet. It will never be over, hopefully, because I will always look for ways to help girls.

    DINERS

    TONY SOPRANO'S LAST MEAL

    Between 1912 and the 1990s, New Jersey State was home to more than 20 diner manufacturers who made probably 95 percent of the diners in the U.S, says Katie Zavoski, who is helping hold a diner exhibit. What makes a diner a diner? (And not, say, a coffee shop?) Traditionally, a diner is built in a factory and then delivered to its own town or city rather than constructed on-site. Zavoski credits New Jersey's location as the key to its mastery of the form. “It was just the perfect place to manufacture the diners,” she says. “We would ship them wherever we needed to by sea.”

    VISIT “Icons of American Culture: History of New Jersey Diners,” running through June 2017 at The Cornelius House/Middlesex County Museum in Piscataway, New Jersey

    GOOD FOOD, GOOD TUNES

    Suzanne Vega's 1987 song “Tom's Diner” is probably best known for its' frequently sampled “doo doo doo doo” melody rather than its diner-related lyrics. Technically, it's not even really about a diner — the setting is New York City's Tom's Restaurant, which Vega frequented when she was studying at Bamard. Vega used the word “diner” instead because it “sings better that way,” she told The New York Times. November 18 has since been called Tom's Diner Day, because on that day in 1981, the New York Post's front page was a story about the death of actor William Holden. In her song Vega sings: “I Open /Up the paper/There's a story /Of an actor /Who had died/While he was drinking.”

    LISTEN “Tom's Diner” by Suzanne Vega

    MEET THE DINER ANTHROPOLOGIST

    Richard J.S. Gutman has been called the “Jane Goodall of diners” (he even consulted on Barry Levinson's 1982 film, Diner).His book, American Diner: Then Now, traces the evolution of the “night lunch wagon,” set up by Walter Scott in 1872, to the early 1920s, when the diner got its name (adapted from “dining car”), and on through the 1980s.Gutman has his own diner facilities (floor plans, classic white mugs, a cashier booth); 250 of these items are part of an exhibit in Rhode Island.

    READ American Diner: Then & Now (John Hopkins University Press)

    VISIT “Diners: Still Cooking in the 21st Century,” currently running at the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island

Welcome to Inspire 21

    Our aim is to provide "Inspiring words for the 21^st century". So, here we offer a unique collection of inspiring short stories, motivational short stories, and humorous short stories for you to read and share.

    If you do care to share, click the "SHARE" button in the bottom left corner of each page. And thanks for telling others about Inspire 21.

    The inspiring stories that are labeled (标记) "TRUE" are done so to the best of our knowledge, but we do not have full proof in some cases. However, all of these stories and messages are provided because of their uplifting content, whether true or not. Many books we've read and movies we've watched were totally untrue, but we enjoyed the inspiration they gave us—especially if they had a happy ending.

    So, please read and share these stories at your own discretion (判断力). Thank you for your understanding!

    Also, many of the inspiring stories used here are used with permission from the author. However, we cannot grand (授予) permission to reuse any of these inspirational stories, as the majority of them are not ours.

    Lastly, many inspiring stories (emailed to us or we came across online) are listed as "Author Unknown". If you happen to know the author's name, to whom credit should be given, please contact us with that information so we can keep our inspiring story collection accurate. Thank you again!

    The values of artistic works, according to cultural relativism (相对主义), are simply reflections of local and economic conditions. Such a view, however, fails to explain the ability of some works of art to excite the human mind across cultures and through centuries.

    History has witnessed the endless production of Shakespearean plays in every major language of the world. It is never rare to find that Mozart packs Japanese concert hall, as Japanese painter Hiroshige does Paris galleries. Unique works of this kind are different from today's popular art, even if they began as works of popular art. They have set themselves apart in their timeless appeal and will probably be enjoyed for centuries into the future.

    In a 1757 essay, the philosopher David Hume argued that because “the general principles of tastes are uniform (不变的) in human nature,” the value of some works of art might be essentially permanent. He observed that Homer was still admired after 2000 years. Works of this type, he believed, spoke to deep and unvarying features of human nature and could continue to exist over centuries.

    Now researchers are applying scientific methods to the study of the universality of art. For example, evolutionary psychology is being used by literary scholars to explain the long-lasting themes and plot devices in fiction. The structures of musical pieces are now open to experimental analysis as never before. Research findings seem to indicate that the creation by a great artist is as permanent an achievement as the discovery by a great scientist.

A team in Europe are working with wood, but not in the usual ways. They are not carpenters（木匠）. Instead, they are scientists exploring how wood can lead to a greener electronic device, a transistor（晶体管）made from balsa wood, whose production releases less climate-warming gas into the air.

Transistors play an important role in computers and other devices. They act like tiny switches to control the flow of electricity. Engineers use them to process and store data. Today's laptops may host billions of them. So they must be tiny—only a little wider than a strand of DNA.

The new transistor being built by physicist Isak Engquist and his team at Sweden's Linköping University isn't as small as those. Big enough to see and hold, it can stand only an electric pressure that pushes electrons along. And it controls a current using charged particles（粒子）called ions.

This new technology shows a "proof of concept" that the idea can work, even if the new device is not yet ready to put into today's electronics. "While it seems large by today's standards, such a transistor still might prove useful for electronics that require low electric pressures," says Engquist.

"The new transistor suggests that future electronic devices might be made in living plants," Daniel Simon, a physicist in the team, says. "Imagine peeling away some bar k from a living tree," he says, "and stamping electronic circuits into the living wood."

In fact, Engquist says, "There are so many ways we can use wood and the components of wood that we would never have thought of." For instance, he can now imagine a wood-based sensor that could monitor crop health, measure pollution or survey a forest for fire risk.