Nine years ago, after Leo had died, people said to me. "I never knew he was your stepfather." You see, I never called him that. At first, he was no one special in my life. Then he became my friend. In time, I felt he was also my father.

    Leo married my mother when I was eleven. Two years later we moved into a house in a new suburban development, where we put down roots. At first our lawn was just a mud with wild grass, but Leo saw bright possibilities. "We'll plant trees there to give us shade as well as some flowers," he said. And just these little touches made our house different from all the others. More important, a real family was forming. Leo was becoming a full-time parent, and I was learning what it meant to have a father.

    Weekday mornings when the weather was bad, Leo often drove me to school. Having a father drop you off may have been something my classmates took for granted, but I always thought it was wonderful. Saturday mornings, we went to the hardware (计算机硬件) shop, then stepped into the five-and-ten, buying a sports magazine or something else. Some people might think that doing shopping together is nothing special, but I, who had ever before spent my childhood watching other families do their everyday activities, experienced them now with extreme delight. Looking back, I realized that Leo gave me what I needed most—the experience of doing ordinary things together as a family.

    Soon after we moved to the suburbs, one of our new neighbors introduced herself to me. She had already met my mother and Leo. "You know," she said, "you look just like your father." I knew she was just making a conversation--but even so... "Thank you", I said. Why tell her anything different?

    “I would say, no matter what people tell you, anything can happen.” That's the message Internet singer Austin Mahone says at We Day, an event for young people in Canada.

    When he was 14，Austin and a friend began uploading pop songs to musical websites.“I was just doing it because we had nothing to do, living in a small town.”

    “I'd check different websites for the hottest songs, and I'd record my own videos,” he explains. “That's how people began to find me online.”His videos got millions of hits and he signed with a record company. The result was the release of Austin's first album, Junior Year. While it seems like a sudden rise for the teenager, Austin admits the early days were not always fun. He says a lot of people thought badly of him for posting his videos online. Yet this didn't put him off.“I kept working hard. ”And the hits on his videos kept coming.

    Austin's achievement and spirit make him a perfect fit for the message of We Day. After all, Free the Children, the creator of the event, was founded to “enable youth to make changes.” Even Austin's unusual rise by way of the Internet fits with the way Free The children works and raises money.

    Because of Austin, his four million followers will learn about Free the Children. While Austin's presence certainly helps We Day, it's good for him, too. Austin gets to show himself as someone who volunteers his time and talent for a worthy cause and show that he cares about making the world a better place.

    It was my first day back home since starting college. A lot had changed in the last year. Not with my hometown but with me. I had left as a 17-year-old boy and had now returned as an 18-year-old man. In the city, I was living on my own, had a part-time job and was studying. Even the government recognized I was an adult: I had a driver's license. So here I was, on my summer vacation, walking down the main street with my father, desperate for him to acknowledge how mature I was. When his recognition failed to appear, I took matters into my own hands. “Dad,” I said casually, “I'm thirsty. Let's go for a beer.” It was the first time I'd ever mentioned beer in front of my father, let alone ask him to drink one with me.

    He turned to me with a curious expression on his face. “A beer? Well, 1 guess you're old enough now. Let's go to Sailors' Bar. It's where my cousin Tom, your uncle, used to drink. You remember him, right?”

    I had only some vague recollection of my uncle. He was the black sheep of the family. We didn't talk about him much. What ever happened to Uncle Tom, Dad? I haven't seen him in years,” I said as we continued towards the bar.

     “Neither have I, unfortunately. He was a good kid once. But things changed,” my father said mournfully. As a boy, he explained, there had been no better-behaved boy than Tom. But after leaving school, he moved to the city and fell in with bad company. He started going out every night, drinking in nightclubs and playing cards. Soon he lost everything and had to beg his mum to pay his debts. She agreed on condition that he returned home.

    My dad took a deep breath and continued his tale. "Things settled down for a while. He married a lovely woman, gave up his bad habits. But it didn't last. He was soon back to his old ways. He couldn't resist. He was at Sailors, Bar almost every night. His poor mother died of grief and shame. His wife followed her soon after.

     “What ruined him was alcohol He told me once, when a man begins drinking, he never knows where it'll end. ‘So', Tom warned me. ‘be cautious about your first drink!'

     “He went from bad to worse. Last year Tom sent me a letter saying he had been found guilty of stealing, and sent to prison for ten years.”

    Dad finished talking just as we reached the front door of Sailors' Bar. “Anyway, here we are. Let's go in,” he said. But understood. I put my arm around my father and said, “I'm not thirsty anymore, Dad. Let's go home.”

Young Adult Groups

    Around the World in 80 Books — 9,186 members.

    If you love exploring the world through books, you have come to the right place! It all started as a challenge on TNBBC in 2009, and now we have our own group! Challenge participation is not a requirement of joining. Anyone who loves reading books is welcome.

    Website: http://www.worldinbooks.com

    Rules: Respect each other's opinions and have fun!

    Readers That Love Giveaways – 734 members

    This group is for readers that enjoy entering giveaways and finding freebies!

    Follow us for the newest bargain, discounted, and free e-books, as well as new releases and book recommendations.

    Website: http://www .fireandicebooktours.com

    Rules: Please share your items in the appropriate folders!

    Book Loving Kiwis – 706 members

    A group for New Zealand book lovers (and authors) and lovers of New Zealand books (and books in general). A place to share what we're reading, introduce books we have written, and discuss and recommend books. Please recommend us to your friends.

    Website: http://www.kiwisbook.com

    Rules: Enjoy reading! Respect all group members and their opinions.

    A Book and a Cappuccino – 77 members

    This group is for anyone who likes to read at their own pace. It does not matter how much or how little you read. It's just a friendly place to discuss what you're reading and to get ideas for your next read. You can participate as much or as little as you like.

Website: http://www.bookandcappuccino.com

    Rules: Be respectful to all. Everyone has a right to share opinions.

    From childhood, Moira loved to write. Throughout school she enjoyed writing, but pursuing it professionally was never a possibility. Her father was a doctor, her mother a nurse. “Medicine was a fairly safe choice,” Moira says, “and writing was a career where it wasn't a certainty that you'd have high income.”

    She became a doctor but still wanted to write something. However, being a doctor was so demanding that she didn't take up writing until her thirties. She produced a novel—a fictionalized version of her travel in China after university. She got excellent reviews. Moira sent it off to as many agents as she could find, and found one who wanted to represent her. Suddenly, it seemed she was on her way as an author.

    “I had one lengthy phone call with the agent where we went through all possible areas that she thought needed polishing. I worked on those and sent it back to her but didn't hear anything.” It wasn't long before Moira found another agent who was interested if she was willing to rewrite it from the first person to the third person. She did the hard work and sent it off again. “I got back a really brief letter: 'Thank you, I'm no longer interested.' It was really disappointing.”

    A decade went by, and Moira found herself eager to write again, this time purely for her own enjoyment. She set herself the challenge of creating a thriller and chose Western Australia as her setting.

    As she was writing just for herself, something surprising began to happen. “The characters took on a life of their own; they started doing things I hadn't thought about. It just flew.” One day, an agent called from Australia. Three weeks later, Moira had a publication deal. Her novel, Cicada, was published in March.

    “Even if it hadn't been published I still gained so much from the process,” says Moira.

    Studies show that older people tend to remember the positive things in life rather than the negative things, while younger people remember the positive and negative equally well. The dominant psychological theory to explain this is that older people are aware of their limited time left, so they prioritize positive emotional experiences. But about a decade ago, I worked with biologist Robert Trivers on his idea that there was an evolutionary basis for older people's increased positive outlook. Our research took us in the fascinating direction of exploring how the body uses its energy.

    When our ancestors needed more energy than usual, perhaps while being chased by a tiger, they had to get that energy from somewhere in the body. Could they borrow it from the brain? That organ uses 20 percent of our metabolic (新陈代谢) output, whether we are solving math problems or watching television reruns. Due to this constant energy requirement, borrowing energy from the brain when our need surpasses the available supply is not an option. Perhaps we could borrow energy from our muscles. Because we use far more muscle energy when we are active than when at rest, in principle, we could borrow energy when we are sitting. But the problem is that most of the energy-demanding emergencies of our ancestors required a muscular response. There was no way to borrow energy from our muscles during an emergency because relaxing when a tiger showed up was not an effective response. This brings us to our immune system, which, when strong, protects us from many illnesses and diseases. Like the brain, the immune system works at great metabolic cost, but largely in the service of keeping us healthy in the future. We have an enormous number of immune cells coursing through our body, a momentary break from production is fine. So, when our body needs extra energy, one of the places it goes is our immune function. When you're being chased by a tiger, you don't need to waste energy making immune cells to fight off tomorrow's cold. What you need is to shift all available energy resources to your legs, with the hope that you will live to experience another cough or sneeze.

    As a result, our immune system evolved to run in maximum amounts when we're happy, but to slow down dramatically when we're not. With this background in mind, Trivers supposed that older people evolved a strategy of turning this relationship on its head, becoming more focused on the positive things in life in an effort to enhance their immune functioning. This was helped along by their knowing much more about the world than younger adults, so they can deal with some of the unpleasant things in life more easily.