Salvador Dali (1904-1989) was one of the most popular modern artists. The Pompidou Centre in Paris is showing its respect and admiration for the artist and his powerful personality with an exhibition bringing together over 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings and more. Among the works and masterworks on exhibition the visitor will find the best pieces, most importantly The Persistence of Memory. There is also L'Enigme sans Fin from 1938, works on paper, objects, and projects for stage and screen and selected parts from television programmes reflecting the artist's showman qualities.

    The visitor will enter the World of Dali through an egg and is met with the beginning, the world of birth. The exhibition follows a path of time and subject with the visitor exiting through the brain.

    The exhibition shows how Dali draws the viewer between two infinities (无限). “From the infinity small to the infinity large, contraction and expansion coming in and out of focus: amazing Flemish accuracy and the showy Baroque of old painting that he used in his museum-theatre in Figueras,” explains the Pompidou Centre.

    The fine selection of the major works was done in close collaboration (合作) with the Museo Nacional Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain, and with contributions from other institutions like the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg.

    Food serves as a form of communication in two fundamental ways. Sharing bread or other foods is a common human tradition that can promote unity and trust. Food can also have a specific meaning, and play a significant role in a family or culture's celebrations or traditions. The foods we eat—and when and how we eat them—are often unique to a particular culture or may even differ between rural (农村的) and urban areas within one country.

    Sharing bread, whether during a special occasion (时刻) or at the family dinner table, is a common symbol of togetherness. Many cultures also celebrate birthdays and marriages with cakes that are cut and shared among the guests. Early forms of cake were simply a kind of bread, so this tradition hits its roots in the custom of sharing bread.

    Food also plays an important role in many New Year celebrations. In the southern United States, pieces of corn bread represent blocks of gold for prosperity (兴旺) in the New Year. In Greece, people share a special cake called vasilopita. A coin is put into the cake, which signifies (预示) success in the New Year for the person who receives it.

    Many cultures have ceremonies to celebrate the birth of a child, and food can play a significant role. In China, when a baby is one month old, families name and welcome their child in a celebration that includes giving red-colored eggs to guests. In many cultures, round foods such as grapes, bread, and moon cakes are eaten at welcome celebrations to represent family unity.

    Nutrition is necessary for life, so it is not surprising that food is such an important part of different cultures around the world.

    Several months ago, I attended the opening event for a new children's literacy (读写能力) campaign at the Burbank Library in California. The campaign is called Marvel Comics Close- Up, aimed at using comic books to encourage kids to read. Disney and Marvel donated 210,000 books to libraries and schools across the country.

    Stars from Disney XD participated. They read Spider-Man comic books to 70 kids from Boys & Girls Clubs in southern California. The stars included Drake Bell (Ultimate Spider-Man), Dylan Riley Snyder (Kickin' it), Olivia Holt (Kickin' It) and Coie Jenson (Crash & Bernstein).

    Drake Bell said that the Marvel reading campaign is aimed at kids who are bored with books, believing comic books are the answer for kids who say they'd rather play video games. “Comic books really get you into the story,” he told TFK(Time For Kids). “They are not just words or pictures on a page.”

    Dylan Riley Snyder knows from his experiences that comic books have the power to inspire kids' imagination. His mom was a teacher and she used comic books to interest students who thought they weren't interested in reading. Dylan attended these classes. He would read the comic books and draw the characters along with the students. “It was a great way for these kids to start to enjoy reading,” Dylan said. “That's how I got interested in reading too. Now I can share my love for comic books with others through the Marvel Comics Close-Up program.”

    David Levine is the Vice President of Disney XD Worldwide. He said great stories and great characters, like Spider-Man and The Avengers, were key to making reading fun. “Reading can encourage you to explore new things and take you to all sorts of exciting places,” he told TFK.

    There has long been a notion （观念） that money buys happiness. However, although "we really, really tried that for a couple of generations, it didn't work," said Francine Jay, author of The Joy of Less, A Minimalist Living Guide: How to Declutter, Organize, and Simplify Your Life.

    Thanks to a travel inspired revelation （启发）, Jay has been happily living a simpler life for 12 years. "I always packed as lightly as possible, and found it exciting to get by with just a small carry on bag," she told CNN. "I thought if it feels this great to travel lightly, how amazing would it be to live this way？ I wanted to have that same feeling of freedom in my everyday life."

Jay decided to get rid of all her excess （额外的） possessions and live with just the essentials （必需品）. "I wanted to spend my time and energy on experiences, rather than things."

    Jay is a follower of a movement called "minimalism （极简主义）". Growing numbers of people have been attracted to this lifestyle all over the world. They share the same feeling of disappointment with modern life and a desire to live more simply. Minimalists are typically progressive and concerned about the environment, Leah Watkins, a lead researcher at Ota go University in New Zealand, told Stuff magazine in March.

    But many simply experienced unhappiness caused by owning too many possessions. Depression with the materialism of our world isn't new. English romantic poet William Wordsworth summed up how dispiriting （令人消沉的） this was back in 1802, at the beginning of the industrial age, when he wrote: "Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers". His preference was to go back to nature. Closer to our own times, the hippies （嬉皮士） of the 1960s also sought to "drop out" of modern life.

    And for many minimalists, their key is to unload. Without objects, they "believe people are forced more and more into the present moment and that's where life happens," wrote Stuff.

But does simplicity ever feel like a sacrifice （牺牲）？

    "It's eliminating the excess﹣unused items, unnecessary purchases﹣from your life. Well, I may have fewer possessions, but I have more space …Minimalism is making room for what matters most," said Jay.

    And "the real questions", according to Duane Elgin, US social scientist, are "what do you care about？" and "What do you value?"

    He told CNN: "It's important for people to realize minimalism isn't simply the amount of stuff we consume. It's about our families, our work, our connection with the larger world, our spiritual dimension. It's about how we touch the whole world. It's a way of life."

    Time flies, but the tracks of time remain in books and museums. This is what made a recent tragedy in Brazil even more terrible.

    On Sept.2, a big fire ripped through the National Museum of Brazil.“ Two hundred years of work, research and knowledge were lost,” Brazilian President Michel Temer wrote on Twitter after the fire. “It's a sad day for all Brazilians.”

    Most of the 20 million pieces of history are believed to have been destroyed. Only as little as 10 percent of the collection may have survived, Time reported. Among all the items, there were Egyptian mummies, the bones of uniquely Brazilian creatures such as the long－necked dinosaur Maxakalisaurus, and an 11,500－year－old skull called Luzia, which was considered one of South America's oldest human fossils.

    Besides these, Brazil's indigenous(本土的，土著的) knowledge also suffered. The museum housed world－famous collections of indigenous objects, as well as many audio recordings of local languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken.

    “The tragedy this Sunday is a sort of national suicide, a crime against our past and future generations,” Bernard Mello Franco, one of Brazil's best－known columnists, wrote on the O Globo newspaper site.

    The cause of the fire is still unknown, as BBC News reported on Sept. 3. After the fire burned out, crowds protested outside the museum to show their anger at the loss of the irreplaceable items of historical value.

    According to Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida, museums are living, breathing stores of who we are and where we've come from, and the world around us.

    Just as underwater grass floats on the surface if it loses its roots, a nation is lost without its memories. The fire at the National Museum of Brazil teaches the world an important lesson: We should never neglect history.

Simply being quiet is a growing appeal. Lots of business have appeared to meet a rising demand for quiet time, from silent weekend getaways to silent dining, silent reading parties and even silent dating. Silence can mean different things to different people. We are usually silent only with those closest to us. So there is something almost radical(不同凡响的)about the recent trend towards enjoying silence with strangers.

Mariel started a regular silent reading party in Dundee just under a year ago. Readers bring their books and meet in a bar, where they read together in silence for an hour or sometimes two and then put their books away to chat and have a drink. "When the reading party starts, everything goes quiet," says Mariel," It's a little bit surreal (超现实的), especially in what is usually a noisy bar. However, there is something special about sharing the silence with others. It offers a chance to escape from reality; everyone is so busy with work and with technology being ever present. An event like this gives people the opportunity to escape these things for a while."

Honi Ryan is an artist based in Berlin who began hosting silent dinner back in 2006. The rules of the dinner are: no talking, no using your voice, no reading or writing, trying to make as little noise as possible, not connecting with technology, and staying for at least two hours. So far she has taken her silent dinner project to Mexico, the US, Australia and China. "It's evident that the age-old connections we make over food do not depend on the words around it. Silence creates the space for the people and places involved to fill with whatever is needed; it is quite different from our usual social behaviors."