Johnson Smith
Founder and CEO
Johnson Review

    Have you ever run into a careless cell phone user on the street? Perhaps they were busy talking, texting or checking updates on WeChat without looking at what was going on around them. As the number of this new “species” of human has kept rising, they have been given a new name — phubbers（低头族）.

    Recently, a cartoon created by students from China Central Academy of Fine Arts put this group of people under the spotlight. In the short film, phubbers with various social identities bury themselves in their phones. A doctor plays with his cell phone while letting his patient die, a pretty woman takes selfie（自拍照）in front of a car accident site, and a father loses his child without knowing about it while using his mobile phone. A chain of similar events eventually leads to the destruction of the world.

    Although the ending sounds overstated, the damage phubbing can bring is real. Your health is the first to bear the effect and result of it. “Constantly bending your head to check your cell phone could damage your neck,” Guangming Daily quoted doctors as saying. “the neck is like a rope that breaks after long-term stretching.” Also, staring at cell phones for long periods of time will damage your eyesight gradually, according to the report.

    But that's not all. Being a phubber could also damage your social skills and drive you away from your friends and family. At reunions with family or friends, many people tend to stick to their cell phones while others are chatting happily with each other and this creates a strange atmosphere, Qilu Evening News reported.

    It can also cost you your life. There have been lots of reports on phubbers who fell to their death, suffered accidents, and were robbed of their cell phones in broad daylight.

    What is the most important day of your life? For many people the answer is your Wedding Day—the day when you marry another person and promise to live together as husband or wife for the rest of your lives.

    Wedding celebrations differ from country to country—in China the bride wears red while in India the wedding continues for three days. However, in Britain the bride wears white and wedding usually only lasts for one day.

    In the UK it is possible to get married in a religious or civil ceremony. A religious ceremony takes place in a church. A civil ceremony, on the other hand, can be held in an office, in a hotel, or even on a boat.

    On the day of the wedding the bride and groom are kept separate until the ceremony. It is said to be bad luck if the groom sees the bride in her dress before the wedding. The bride arrives at the ceremony accompanied by her father and bridesmaids. They officially give her away to her new husband. During the ceremony the happy couple exchange vows and give each other wedding rings which they will wear forever. At the end of the ceremony they kiss.

    Afterwards they go outside where friends and family throw rice or color papers over them and then they go on to the reception where there is a lot of food and drink. After the meal the father of the bride and the best man make speeches. Then the bride and groom take the first dance. It is a lot of fun. Finally, at the end of the party the newly-weds leave to go on honeymoon, usually to a very romantic destination.

    The values of artistic works, according to cultural relativism(相对主义), are simply reflections of local social 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 productions of Shakespearean plays in every major language of the world. It is never rare to find that Mozart packs Japanese concert halls, 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 taste 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 two thousand 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.

    Recently, as the British doctor Robert Winston took a train from London to Manchester, he found himself becoming steadily angry. A woman had picked up her phone and begun a loud conversation, which would last an unbelievable hour. Furious, Winston began to tweet about the woman. He took her picture and sent it to his more than 40,000 followers.

    When the train arrived at its destination, Winston rushed out. He'd had enough of the woman's rudeness. But the press were now waiting for her on the platform. And when they showed her Winston's messages, she used just one word to describe Winston's actions: rude.

    Winston's tale is something of a microcosm(缩影) of our age of increasing rudeness, fueled by social media. What can we do to fix this?

    Studies have shown that rudeness spreads quickly, almost like the common cold. Just witnessing rudeness makes it far more likely that we, in turn, will be rude later on. The only way to avoid it is to deal with it face to face. We must say, "Just stop." For Winston, that would have meant approaching the woman, telling her that her conversation was frustrating other passengers and politely asking her to speak more quietly or make the call at another time.

    The rage and injustice we feel at the rude behavior of a stranger can drive us to do odd things. In my own research, surveying 2,000 adults, I discovered that the acts of revenge people had taken ranged from the ridiculous to the disturbing. Winston did shine a spotlight on the woman's behavior — but from afar, in a way that shamed her.

    We must instead combat rudeness head on. When we see it occur in a store, we must step up and say something. If it happens to a colleague, we must point it out. We must defend strangers in the same way we'd defend our best friends. But we can do it with grace, by handling it without a trace of aggression and without being rude ourselves. Because once rude people can see their actions through the eyes of others, they are far more likely to end that strain themselves. As this tide of rudeness rises, civilization needs civility.

Coco Gauff used to visit the Grand Slam tournament (大满贯锦标赛) as a kid to see her idols Serena and Venus Williams. Now she is a champion there herself. On Sept 9, the 19-year-old from the US won her first major women's singles title at the 2023 US Open (美国网球公开赛).

After an average start, Gauff surged to a 2-6, 6-3, 6-2 victory over her bigger, stronger opponent, Aryna Sabalenka, from Belarus, who became the new world No.1 the day after the tournament ended.

Unlike the Williams sisters, who have obvious force and power, Gauff is small and slim. But she moves fast on the tennis court. Forbes magazine said, "She is the quickest and perhaps already the best returner of impossible shots in tennis history."

Even though Sabalenka is a very powerful hitter, it felt like she had to finish each point four or five times, as Gauff's defense was so perfect, noted The Telegraph. This ended up frustrating Sabalenka and caused her to make 46 unforced errors.

Gauff thus became the first American teenager to win the US Open since Serena Williams, then 17, in 

1999. When asked about "taking the torch" from the 23-time Grand Slam winner and the similarity between their tennis careers, Gauff told ESPN, "Serena is Serena. She's the greatest of all time... I'd hope to do half of what she did. But I'm not going to compare myself to her. She's some one that I look up to."

Now, Gauff's big win has left tennis fans wondering: When's her next Grand Slam? That's no easy task. Two of the past four US Open women's champions were teenagers at the time, Canada's Bianca Andreescu in 2019 and the UK's Emma Raducanu in 2021, and neither has come close to repeating their success yet. But one thing about Gauff is certain — that at just 19 years old, the sky's the limit.