For many parents, raising a teenager is like fighting a long war, but years go by without any clear winner. Like a border conflict between neighboring countries, the parent-teen war is about boundaries: Where is the line between what I control and what you do?

    Both sides want peace, but neither feels it has any power to stop the conflict. In part, this is because neither is willing to admit any responsibility for starting it. From the parents “point of view, the only cause of their fight is their adolescents” complete unreasonableness. And of course, the teens see it in exactly the same way, except oppositely. Both feel trapped.

    In this article, I'll describe three no-win situations that commonly arise between teens and parents and then suggest some ways out of the trap. The first no-win situation is quarrels over unimportant things. Examples include the color of the teen's hair, the cleanliness of the bedroom, the preferred style of clothing, the child's failure to eat a good breakfast before school, or his tendency to sleep until noon on the weekends. Second, blaming. The goal of a blaming battle is to make the other admit that his bad attitude is the reason why everything goes wrong. Third, needing to be right. It doesn't matter what the topic is - politics, the laws of physics, or the proper way to break an egg - the point of these arguments is to prove that you are right and other person is wrong, for both wish to be considered an authority - someone who actually knows something - and therefore to command respect. Unfortunately, as long as parents and teens continue to assume that they know more than the other, they'll continue to fight these battles forever and never make any real progress.

    DINERS

    TONY SOPRANO'S LAST MEAL

    Between 1912 and the 1990s, New Jersey State was home to more than 20 diner manufacturers who made probably 95 percent of the diners in the U.S, says Katie Zavoski, who is helping hold a diner exhibit. What makes a diner a diner? (And not, say, a coffee shop?) Traditionally, a diner is built in a factory and then delivered to its own town or city rather than constructed on-site. Zavoski credits New Jersey's location as the key to its mastery of the form. “It was just the perfect place to manufacture the diners,” she says. “We would ship them wherever we needed to by sea.”

    VISIT “Icons of American Culture: History of New Jersey Diners,” running through June 2017 at The Cornelius House/Middlesex County Museum in Piscataway, New Jersey

    GOOD FOOD, GOOD TUNES

    Suzanne Vega's 1987 song “Tom's Diner” is probably best known for its' frequently sampled “doo doo doo doo” melody rather than its diner-related lyrics. Technically, it's not even really about a diner — the setting is New York City's Tom's Restaurant, which Vega frequented when she was studying at Bamard. Vega used the word “diner” instead because it “sings better that way,” she told The New York Times. November 18 has since been called Tom's Diner Day, because on that day in 1981, the New York Post's front page was a story about the death of actor William Holden. In her song Vega sings: “I Open /Up the paper/There's a story /Of an actor /Who had died/While he was drinking.”

    LISTEN “Tom's Diner” by Suzanne Vega

    MEET THE DINER ANTHROPOLOGIST

    Richard J.S. Gutman has been called the “Jane Goodall of diners” (he even consulted on Barry Levinson's 1982 film, Diner).His book, American Diner: Then Now, traces the evolution of the “night lunch wagon,” set up by Walter Scott in 1872, to the early 1920s, when the diner got its name (adapted from “dining car”), and on through the 1980s.Gutman has his own diner facilities (floor plans, classic white mugs, a cashier booth); 250 of these items are part of an exhibit in Rhode Island.

    READ American Diner: Then & Now (John Hopkins University Press)

    VISIT “Diners: Still Cooking in the 21st Century,” currently running at the Culinary Arts Museum at Johnson & Wales University in Providence, Rhode Island

    A farmer had a cow, and he took very good care of the cow. One day when the cow was ill, he was very worried. He telephoned the vet.

    "What's the problem?" the vet asked the farmer when he arrived.

    "My cow's ill," the farmer said. "I don't know what's the matter with her. She's just lying down and doesn't eat anything. She's making a strange noise."

    The vet examined the cow and said, "She's certainly ill, and she needs to take some very strong medicine."

    He took a bottle out of his box, put two pills into the farmer's hand and said, "The pills should make her feel better."

    "How can she take these pills?" the farmer asked.

    The vet gave him a tube(管子) and said, "Put this tube in her mouth, and then put the pills in the tube and blow(吹气) into the cow's mouth. That will make it."

    The next day the vet came to the farm again. The farmer was sitting outside his house and looked more worried.

    "How is your cow?" the vet asked.

    "Not better," the farmer said, "and I'm feeling very strange myself."

    "Oh?" the vet asked. "Why?"

    "I did what you said," the farmer answered. "I put the tube in the cow's mouth and then put the two pills in the tube."

    "And?" the vet asked.

    "The cow blew first," the farmer said.

    To err is human. To blame the other guy is even more human. Common sense is not all that common. Why tell the truth when you can come up with a good excuse?

    These three popular misquotes (戏谑的引语) are meant to be jokes, and yet they tell us a lot about human nature. To err, or to make mistakes, is indeed a part of being human, but it seems that most people don't want to accept the responsibility for the problem. Perhaps it is the natural thing to do. The original quote about human nature went like this: "To err is human, to forgive, divine (神圣的)." This saying mirrors a deal people should be forgiving of others' mistakes. Instead, we tend to do the opposite-find someone else to pass the blame on to.

    However, taking responsibility for something that went wrong is a making of great maturity.

    Common sense is what we call clear thought. Having common sense means having a good general plan that will make things work well, and it also means staying with the plan. Common sense tells you that you take an umbrella out into a rainstorm, but you leave the umbrella home when you hear a weather forecast for sunshine. Common sense does not seem to be common for large organizations, because there are so many things going on that one person cannot be in charge of everything. People say that in a large company," the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing."

    And what is wrong with a society that thinks that making up a good excuse is like creating a work of art? One of the common problems with making excuses is that people, especially young people, get the idea that it's okay not to be totally honest all the time. There is a corollary (直接推论) to that: if good excuse is "good" even if it isn't honest, then where is the place of the truth?

When we meet someone for the first time, we usually get a vague sense of what kind of person they are by the way they shake hands, talk, or walk. In the age of social networking, however, first impressions are sometimes made even before we actually meet someone in person—that is, by looking at their profile photo.

    According to a recent study, these social images say a lot about our personality. In the study, presented in a paper at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, a group of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania in the US used software to analyze the profile pictures of 66,000 users of US social platform Twitter and 3,200 of their tweets. At the same time, about 434 participants were asked to complete a survey about their personality type. The researchers wanted to find out if there was a connection between personality traits—like openness, extroversion, and neuroticism(神经质)—and a person's profile picture.

    According to the results, open people are more likely to pose in an unusual way and use objects such as glasses or a guitar in their profile photo because they enjoy new and exciting experiences. Meanwhile, neurotic people often hold back their negative emotions. They try to avoid showing their face；Instead, they use an image of something like a pet, a car or a building.

    Apart from the objects in profile pictures, the colors used in them also give us some hints about the photo's owner. For example, extraverts were found to have the most colorful profile images, as they want to emphasize their personality and show themselves off, the researchers wrote.

    Although social media photos "usually represent an extension of one's self, they also allow a user to shape his or her own personality and idealized view," according to the researchers. So, when choosing a profile photo, maybe we should ask ourselves first what kind of image we'd like to convey. After all, first impressions always last.

Earth's next superpower

The following countries have been sitting on hidden talents. And now they're about to fly.

NIGERIA (尼日利亚)

Nigeria says it pumps out as much oil as the other two oil-producing countries, Kuwait and Iraq. All this oil is cycling cash into the Nigerian economy and creating extremely rich businessmen. Analysts say that if Nigeria can improve its schools and technology, it could balloon into the world's 13th largest economy by 2050, right between Turkey and Italy. If that reason is not enough for optimism, Nigeria's president also has the sunniest name of any world leader: Goodluck Jonathan.

VIETNAM

As agriculture has given way to industry, unemployment in Vietnam has dropped. What's Vietnam's trick? It's ready to work. Other countries' laborers aren't as cheap as they used to be, which makes Vietnam a relative bargain for companies that need new factories abroad. However, the country has almost no railroads, its highways are in poor condition, and its largest city has just one airport, which was built before the Vietnam War. So what's the use of producing export-ready goods if there's no convenient way to ship them? The good thing is that, however, officials are widening highways, building a new airport and so on.

CHILE (智利)

Pipes, computers, motors, and your microwave all have one thing in common: They're made with copper (铜). Copper makes the world go round. And luckily for Chile, it's got about a third of the planet's copper supply. It just needs a way to dig it up and the government is pouring money into the country's mines.