The Brown Bear

    My wife Laura and I were on the beach, with three of our children, taking pictures of shore birds near our home in Alaska when we spotted a bear. The bear was thin and small, moving aimlessly.

    Just a few minutes later, I heard my daughter shouting, “Dad! The bear is right behind us!” An aggressive bear will usually rush forward to frighten away its enemy but would suddenly stop at the last minute. This one was silent and its ears pinned back—the sign of an animal that is going in for the kill. And it was a cold April day. The bear behaved abnormally, probably because of hunger.

    I held my camera tripod (三脚架) in both hands to form a barrier as the bear rushed into me. Its huge head was level with my chest and shoulders, and the tripod stuck across its mouth. It bit down and I found myself supporting its weight. I knew I would not be able to hold it for long.

    Even so, this was a fight I had to win: I was all that stood between the bear and my family, who would stand little chance of running faster than a brown bear.

    The bear hit at the camera, cutting it off the tripod. I raised my left arm to protect my face; the beast held tightly on the tripod and pressed it into my side. My arm could not move, and I sensed that my bones were going to break.

    Drawing back my free hand, I struck the bear as hard as I could for five to six times. The bear opened its mouth and I grasped its fur, trying to push it away. I was actually wrestling (扭打) with the bear at this point. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the fight ended. The bear moved back toward the forest, before returning for another attack—The first time I felt panic.

    Apparently satisfied that we caused no further threat, the bear moved off, destroying a fence as it went. My arm was injured, but the outcome for us could hardly have been better. I'm proud that my family reminded clear-headed when panic could have led to a very different outcome.

Johnson Smith
Founder and CEO
Johnson Review

    When Iwas.in the third grade, we had a hunt at school. We gathered up chalk，pencils，stones, and so on, rapidly filling our checklists. It was a very close race. I was out of breath when I reached the clover (三叶草)patch in search of the last, most hard-to-find item: a four-leaf clover.

    I was pretty sure that I was going to win. 1 have always been able to find four-leaf clovers. I just see them.

    I spent my childhood collecting and pressing four-leaf clovers into books at my mother's house. I started with big cloth- and leather-bound books. When I ran out of romantically bound volumes, I began to put my treasures into anything I could find: fiction paperbacks, cookbooks. The same is true in my house today. Shake a book, and a papery treasure just might fall into your hand.

    A few years ago, in Nova Scotia, my husband and I pulled off the road for a picnic. The ground was thick with clover. Some shoots had four, five, even six leaves. I lined them up on the picnic table to admire as my husband, never yet having found one four-leaf clover, looked on with awe. To me, it was simple. The differences in their shapes popped out, breaking the pretty pattern of the conventional clovers with their three perfect leaves.

    Two summers back, while waiting for an airport shuttle in Munich, I found a tiny four-leaf clover in a traffic circle and put it into my passport. On the way home, my husband and I were upgraded to business class. Friends attributed our good luck to the clover. I think, it's more likely that we were upgraded because a kind customer service officer took pity on us.

    People disagree about whether the luck lies in the finding or in the possession of a clover. Some believe that the luck is lost if the four-leaf clover is even shown to somebody else, while others think the luck doubles if it is given away. I believe that positivity is increased by sharing. I feel lucky to find the clovers so often, but I don't think they influence my life any more than it does to share anything a little special—that momentary closeness between you and a friend or a stranger, as you all lean in to wonder at a rare find.

    AI(人工智能)makes our lives easier and better. Let's see the amazing AI.

    Do you know that junk food isn't healthy? Of course you do! Do you eat it anyway? Of course you do! But a new study shows teaching adolescents about the ways food companies fool them into thinking junk food is cool can encourage kids to fight back—by eating healthier.

    The pull of junk food can be super-strong. It's designed to tasty; which makes eating well one of the great health challenges of our time. Everyone from doctors to the government has been trying to handle it. Yet we keep eating junk food.

    Professor Christopher Bryan says, "Food companies want you to want junk food." They spend millions of dollars coming up with new ways to^ promote junk food consumption. They hire scientists to make new junk food almost irresistible. They might do this, for example, by adding more sugar. Rats fed junk food for six weeks will even walk across a floor that gives them electric shocks just to get more of such food.

    Food ads often make unhealthy junk food seem healthy by featuring professional athletes, fit-looking pop stars and smiling, active teens. "We thought when the students learned this, it would matter to them," Bryan says. He worked with 8th graders at a Texas school. Half of them got a lesson Bryan created. It focused on the ways junk food is advertised, or marketed. A second group received lessons that focused on health. These lessons informed students junk food is had, and that foods like apples or carrots are a better choice. The students learned a bad diet can lead to major weight gain, and that being overweight puts people at risk for serious diseases. They also learned how eating well now can keep you healthy when you're older.

    After the lessons, the kids in both groups were asked how they felt about junk food. Most didn't have positive feelings about these unhealthy foods.

    Stepinac has become one of the first high schools in the country to drop all textbooks and replace them with a "digital library". When students started classes on Monday, they were zipping to an app on their tablets or laptops and bad instant access to all 40 texts in the Stepinac curriculum (课程).

    Dennis Lauro, director of an information center which provides technical support to public schools in New York, said neither he nor his colleagues were aware of a similar digital effort in a public school setting. "This is the wave of the future." Lauro said. "I'm not surprised that a private school would beat the public schools to it. They have the ability to just do it. There is so much politics involved in public schools, when it comes to a move like that, needing approval from boards and committees."

    For Tom Collins, Stepinac's president, the commitment to digital source material was not so difficult a decision. In the past, students' families had to spend up to $ 700 a year on textbooks. This year — after the one-time purchase of a tablet or laptop — families only need to pay $ 150. Using the digital library is almost as easy as opening a new book. A student can instantly lap into a digital book and open a map of Egypt or a speech by President John F. Kennedy. A teacher can show a page from a digital book on a whiteboard at the front of the class or send students a link to a particular math problem with notes added in.

    The first few weeks may bring some challenges. Stepinac officials expect some parental discomfort over dropping concrete books. They recognize there may be technical faults at first. And they will have to encourage students to leave space-eating photos and music off their tablets — and to keep their tablets charged.