When I was a baby, I entertained you and made you laugh. Whenever I was “bad”, you'd shake your finger at me and ask, “How could you?”--but then you'd give up, and roll me over for a belly scratch and I believed that life could not be any more perfect.

    My housetraining was a long process, because you were terribly busy, but we worked on that together. We went for long walks, runs in the park and car rides. We stopped for ice cream. I took long naps in the sun waiting for you to come home at the end of the day.

    Gradually, you began spending more time at work and on your career, and more time searching for a human mate. Eventually, you fell in love. She, now your wife, is not a dog person, but I still welcomed her into our home. I was happy because you were happy. Then the human babies came along and I shared your excitement, I was fascinated by their pinkness, how they smelled, and I wanted to mother them too. Your wife was afraid I would bite them. But nevertheless, as they began to grow, I became their friend.

    Now, you have a new job in another city and you and they will be moving to an apartment that does not allow pets. You've made the right decision for your “family”, but there was a time when I was your only family.

    I was excited about the car ride until we arrived at the dog pound. It smelled of dogs and cats, of fear, of hopelessness. You filled out the paperwork and said, “I know you will find a good home for her.” They shrugged and gave you a pained look. The children were in tears as they waved me goodbye. And “How could you?” were the only three words that swept over my mind.

    Is it better to live with hope or without hope? At first, whenever anyone passed my pen (围栏), I rushed to the front, hoping it was you, that you had changed your mind and that this was all a bad dream.

    My beloved master, I will think of you and wait for you forever. I hope you receive more faithfulness from your family than you showed to me.

    The year 2117 will be an eventful one for art. In May of that year in Berlin, the philosopher-artist Jonathon Keats' “century cameras”— cameras with a 100-year-long exposure (曝光)time—will be brought back from hiding places around the city to have their results developed and exhibited. Six months after that, the Future Library in Oslo, Norway, will open its doors for the first time, presenting 100 books printed on the wood of trees planted in the distant past of 2017.

    As Katie Paterson, the creator of the Future Library, puts it: “Future Library is an artwork for future generations.” These projects, more than a century in the making, are part of a new wave of slow art intended to push viewers and Participants to think beyond their own lifetimes. They aim to challenge today's short-term thinking and the brief attention spans of modern consumers, forcing people into considering works more deliberately. In their way, too, they are fighting against modern culture—not just regarding money, but also the way in which artistic worth is measured by attention.

    In a similar fashion, every April on Slow Art Day, visitors are encouraged to stare at five works of art for 10 minutes at a time—a tough task for the average museum visitor, who typically spends less than30seconds on each piece of art.

Like the Future Library, the century cameras are very much a project for cities, since it's in cities that time runs fastest and the pace of life is fastest. “Since I started living in a city, I've somehow been quite disconnected,” Anne Beate Hovind, the Future Library project manager, who described how working on the library drew her back to the Pace of life she knew when she was growing up on a farm in her youth, told The Atlantic magazine.

    According to new research from the University of Cambridge in England, sheep are able to recognize human faces from photographs.

    The farm animals, who are social and have large brains, were previously known to be able to recognize one another, as well as familiar humans. However, their ability to recognize human faces from photos alone is novel.

    The recent study, the results of which were published in the journal Royal Society showed that the woolly creatures could be trained to recognize still images of human faces, including those of former President Barack Obama and actress Emma Watson.

    Initially, the sheep were trained to approach certain images by being given food rewards. Later, they were able to recognize the image for which they had been rewarded. The sheep could even recognize images of faces shown at an angle, though their ability to do so declined by about 15 percent – the same rate at which a human's ability to perform the same task declines.

    “Anyone who has spent time working with sheep will know that they are intelligent, individual animals who are able to recognize their handlers,” said Professor Jenny Morton, who led the Cambridge study. “We've shown with our study that sheep have advanced face-recognition abilities, comparable with those of humans and monkeys.”

    Recognizing faces is one of the most important social skills for human being, and some disorders of the brain, including Huntington's disease, affect this ability.

    “Sheep are long-lived and have brains that are similar in size and complexity to those of some monkeys. That means they can be useful models to help us understand disorders of the brain, such as Huntington's disease, which develops over a long time and affects cognitive abilities. Our study gives us another way to monitor how these abilities change.” Morton said.

    If you want to get the most out of the study of a language, you must also read for pleasure: novels, plays, travel books, and so on. And in reading books of this kind the important thing is to get on with reading; to try to grasp what the writer is going to tell you in the book as a whole. This is impossible if you stop and think over the meaning of every single word which happens to be unfamiliar. You can not enjoy a story if you stop half a dozen times on every page in order to look up words in the dictionary. You may even prevent yourself from understanding the story as a whole by doing this.

    When you are reading books of this kind, therefore, you will usually have to rely mainly on the context to help you. If you meet an unfamiliar word, do not let it take too much of your attention from the main thread(主线) of the story. In all probability you will meet the same word again a few pages later on in a slightly different context, and each time you see it that your understanding of it will become more exact.

By now you've probably heard about the "you're not special" speech, when English teacher David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the Internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the uproar was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above average.

Such inflated self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger, suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and their very incapability prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.

In Dunning and Kruger's study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. What these individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of humor) was "metacognitive skill": the capacity to monitor how well they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox here, the authors note: "The skills that lead to competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain." In other words, to get better at judging how well we're doing at an activity, we have to get better at the activity itself.

There are a couple of ways out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent, accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note, success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.

If we adopt these strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need parents, or a commencement (毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get that way.

There is increasing evidence suggesting that ultra-processed food addiction is indeed a significant issue. These foods, which are carefully manufactured in industrial factories rather than in the familiar setting of grandma's kitchen, are filled with altered ingredients that are artfully combined to enhance fat, sugar, and salt levels. Moreover, they contain a lots of flavor and sensory enhancers, which render them irresistibly appealing. Examples of ultra-processed foods range from packaged snacks to fast food and mass-produced desserts. In fact, they account for nearly 60 percent of the calories consumed in the United States.

Studies have revealed that up to 20 percent of adults and 15 percent of kids and adolescents might exhibit signs of addiction to these foods, a phenomenon that has been recognized for decades as rat studies in the 1980s demonstrated that the brain's reward system is powerfully activated when rats consume certain foods, a reaction similar to that when they self-administer cocaine.

In recent years, as the obesity rate in America has soared to 42 percent, especially among Black and Hispanic populations, scientists have been devoting increased attention to the impact of ultra-processed food addiction. These foods not only activate the brain's reward system but also may involve the gut-microbiology. Symptoms of craving and withdrawal are clearly evident with ultra-processed foods. People will go to great lengths to obtain these foods, and when they are refused, they may experience a series of discomforts such as headaches, fatigue, and irritability(易怒的). A study in 2022 found that ultra-processed foods meet the same addiction criteria as tobacco products.

High consumption of ultra-processed foods is linked to numerous health problems, including heart disease, type 2 diabetes, obesity, depression, anxiety, and an increased risk of death. Thin people can also be addicted, perhaps burning off the extra calories through exercise or having a genetic predisposition(易患病体质) not to gain weight easily. Food companies argue against denying these foods, but experts advocate for clear nutritional labels and restrictions on marketing to children. Treating food addictions remains an open question, but there is hope that people will become more aware of the dangers, just as they did with smoking.