James Cleveland Owens was the son of a farmer and grandson of black slaves. His family moved to Cleveland when he was 9. There a school teacher asked his name.

    “J.C.,” he replied. She thought he had said “Jesse”, so he had a new name.

    Owens ran his first race at age 13. After high school, he went to Ohio State University. He had to work part-time so as to pay for his education. As a second year student, in the Big Ten games in 1935, he set even more records than he would in the Olympic Games a year later.

    A week before the Big Ten meet, Ovens accidentally fell down a flight of stairs. His back hurt so much that he could not exercise all week, and he had to be helped in and out of the car that drove him to the meet. He refused to listen to the suggestions that he give up and said he would try, event by event. He did try, and the results are in the record book.

    The stage was set for Ovens victory at the Olympic Games in Berlin the next year, and his success would come to be regarded as not only athletic（体育运动的）but also political. Hitler did not congratulate any of the African American winners.

    “It was all right with me,” he said years later. “I didn't go to Berlin to shake hands with him, anyway.”

    Having returned from Berlin, he received no telephone call from the president of his own country, either. In fact, he was not honored（给予荣誉）by the United States until 1976, four year before his death.

    Ovens' Olympic victories made little difference to him. He earned his living by looking after a school playground, and accepted money to race against cars, trucks, motorcycles and dogs.

    “Sure, it bothered me,” he said later. “But at least it was an honest living. I had to eat.”

    In time, however, his gold medals changed his life. “They have kept me alive over the years,” he once said. “Time has stood still for me. That golden moment dies hard.”

    A fire broke out immediately after the quake.The fire started in a chemist's shop and spread quickly.Then the Fire Department in Napier came to help,but they were at a loss to control the fire as a result of losing their water supply.However,the water supply in Hastings,was still usable,allowing them to fight back against the fire.

    The force of the earthquake destroyed many of the city's famous landmarks（地标）.Chunks of the coastline were thrown into the sea.Napier's Bluff Hill,a popular tourist spot,was completely destroyed and thrown into the waters below.

    Most of the major buildings in the city were completely destroyed.Roads and communications across the whole area were cut.People were afraid to enter their homes for days and found shelters at the local Motor Camp or on the beach.There were about 150 aftershocks（余震）in the 24 hours after the main shock.Over the next 2 weeks,there would be 525 such aftershocks.

    It was a hot day, and my brother Walt and I had decided that the only way to survive it would be to go swimming in a deep swimming hole across Mr. Blickez's Pasture（牧场）and through some woods.

    The only problem with our plan was that this pasture was guarded by a huge, mean Hereford bull（公牛）. Mr. Blickez had told us that Elsie was the meanest bull in the town, maybe even in the county, and we believed him. But the hotter it got, the more we thought there was something fishy about his words. For one thing, we remembered Mr. Blickez liked telling tall tales; for another, Elsie seemed like a strange name for a bull.

    Finally, I talked Mom into asking permission for us to walk through the pasture, but then another problem surfaced. Mom said she would talk to Mr. Blickez if we would take our cousin Joanie along with us. Joanie was almost two years older than me and a head taller. If her teasing ever got around my grade school, it would be all over for me. In fact, I still had a headache from a quarrel with her that morning. “I'm not going swimming with that silly girl cousin,” I told my mom.

    “Either Joanie goes with, or you stay home alone,” Mom said in her serious tone（语气）. I gave in and we set out. On your way across the pasture, Walt yelled suddenly. Elsie had approached him quietly and was licking（舔）his back. Joanie and I dove under the wire fence, but while I was on the ground I looked up and saw that Elsie wasn't a big mean bull after all. She was going to keep licking my brother's back as long as he stood still.

    We had many good days growing up and visiting our secret swimming hole guarded by the so-called “big mean bull”. And as it turned out, for a girl cousin, Joanie hasn't been too bad. She's been one of my best friends over the years.

    Last month, voters in the second Congressional District in New Orleans, Louisiana, made a historic choice. They elected Anh "Joseph" Cao a Vietnamese-American Republican party member, as their representative. It is the first time in over one hundred years that voters in this area of New Orleans elected a non-democratic Party lawmaker. And, Anh Cao is the first Vietnamese-American to be elected to the United States Congress(议会).

    Anh Cao went through difficult times to get to where he is now. He was born in Saigon in nineteen sixty-seven during the war in Vietnam. In nineteen seventy-five, North Vietnamese troops took control of Saigon. He was separated from his family for many years. Anh Cao lived with his uncle in Indian, then later moved to Houston, Texas.

    He decided to work for social justice in a non-religious way. So, he worked as a lawyer in New Orleans.

    He joined the Republican Party and became active on local and state political committees. He decided to compete against his local representative in Congress, William Jefferson, who had been in office since nineteen ninety-one. Minister Jefferson's reelection campaign was not helped by federal corruption charges against him.

    Mister Cao won the election. That night he said that never in his life did he think he could be a congressman. He said the American dream is alive and well.

    Bad news sells. If it bleeds, it leads. No news is good news, and good news is no news. Those are the classic rules for the evening broadcasts and the morning papers. But now that information is being spread and monitored in different ways, researchers are discovering new rules. By tracking people's e-mails and online posts, scientists have found that good news can spread faster and farther than disasters and sob stories.

    "The 'if it bleeds' rule works for mass media," says Jonah Berger, a scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. They want your eyeballs and don't care how you're feeling. But when you share a story with your friends, you care a lot more how they react. You don't want them to think of you as a Debbie Downer."

    Researchers analyzing word-of-mouth communication—e-mails, Web posts and reviews, face-to-face conversations—found that it tended to be more positive than negative, but that didn't necessarily mean people preferred positive news. Was positive news shared more often simply because people experienced more good things than bad things? To test for that possibility, Dr. Berger looked at how people spread a particular set of news stories: thousands of articles on The New York Times' website. He and a Penn colleague analyzed the "most e-mailed" list for six months. One of his first findings was that articles in the science section were much more likely to make the list than non-science articles. He found that science amazed tines' readers and made them want to share this positive feeling with others.

    Readers also tended to share articles that were exciting or funny, or that inspired negative feelings like anger or anxiety, but not articles that left them merely sad. They needed to be aroused one way or the other, and they preferred good news to bad. The more positive an article, the more likely it was to be shared, as Dr. Berger explains in his new book, "Contagious: Why Things Catch on."

    In the space of just two years, the app Douyin, created by Beijing-based company ByteDance, has gathered more than half a billion users—around 40%of them outside China—who share short videos of themselves lip-syncing (假唱), cooking, dancing or just being silly. What sets ByteDance apart is its success in the social media category, which is controlled by Facebook, Twitter and Snap—all Western companies.

    ByteDance calls itself an artificial intelligence company. It uses machine learning and algorithms (算法) to figure out what people like most and give them more of what they want to see. On Douyin, people can edit and beautify 15-second videos before posting them online. The app has even made a phrase to describe people glued to their customized feeds: "shua Douyin" or "scrolling through Douyin". Last year, the company released TikTok, the overseas version of Douyin. ByteDance's growing video empire has made it the world's fifth biggest app maker. ByteDance says TikTok and Douyin together have more than 500 million monthly active users.

    Investors like ByteDance because its hundreds of millions of users attract a lot of advertising money. The video apps are lucrative because they attract a lot of users in their teens and 20s, who are more generous with the money. ByteDance also makes money through income sharing deals. People on TikTok, for example, can buy digital coins to give to other people on the app—like throwing money in a performer's tip jar. ByteDance takes a cut of those earnings.

    ByteDance's founder and CEO is Zhang Yiming, a 35-year-old former Microsoft employee. People who have worked with Zhang describe him as someone who thinks deeply about technology and spends much of his free time writing code.

    Like Facebook and Twitter, ByteDance is also battling fake news and inappropriate content. ByteDance promises to add thousands more employees to review content on Douyin.