Emily and her boyfriend had just had a fight. She felt alone and hopeless. Then she went into the kitchen and grabbed what she needed before going back up to her room quietly. She switched on the TV and started eating…and eating…for hours, until it was all gone.

     What Emily didn't know at the time was that she was suffering from an illness called binge-eating disorder(BED)(暴饮暴食).

    For years, Emily didn't tell anyone what she was doing. She felt ashamed, alone, and out of control. Why don't famous people confess (承认) to BED, as they do to anorexia? It's simple: There's a stigma（污名）involved. “Overeating is seen as very bad, but dieting to be skinny is seen as positive and even associated with determination," says Charles Sophy, a doctor in Beverly Hills , California.

    "Some parents or friends may look at a teen with BED and think, 'Oh, a good diet and some will-power will do the trick.' But that's not true," says Dr.Ovidio Bermudez , a baby doctor at the Eating Recovery Center in Denver. "Eating disorders are real physical and mental health issues; it's not about willpower." The focus in treating BED shouldn't be on weight, because as with all eating disorders, the behaviors with food are a symptom of something deeper.

    Like most other diseases, genetics may play a big part in who gets BED and who doesn't. If you have a close relative with an eating disorder, that means you're more likely to develop an eating disorder of your own.

    Besides, many people with BED have tried at some point or another to control it by going on a diet, but paying more attention to food doesn't help. And it might even make things worse, like it did for Carla, who's 15 now and is recovering from BED. "My parents would always tease me about my weight, so when I was 14, I went on a very restrictive diet," she says. When you can't have something, you only want it more, so every time Carla would have a bite of something that wasn't allowed on her strict diet. She would quickly lose control and binge (狂欢).

    We have a problem，and the strange thing is that we not only know about it, but also celebrate it. Just today, someone boasted (自夸) to me that she was so busy she's averaged four hours of sleep a night for the last two weeks. She wasn't complaining; she was proud of the fact. She is not alone.

    Why are rational (理性的) people so irrational in their behavior? The answer is that we're in the midst of a bubble (泡沫). I call it “The More Bubble”.

    The nature of bubbles is that something is overvalued until—eventually—the bubble bursts, and we're left wondering why we were so irrational in the first place. The thing we're overvaluing now is the opinion of doing it all, having it all, achieving it all.

    This bubble is being enabled by a combination of three powerful trends: smart phones, social media, and extreme consumerism (消费主义). The result is not just information overload, but opinion overload. We are more aware than at any time in history of what everyone else is doing and, therefore, what we should be doing. In the process, we have been sold a bill of goods: that success means being supermen and superwomen who can get it all done. Of course, we boasted about being busy—it's code for being successful and important.

    And our answer to the problem of more is always more. We need more technology to help us create more technologies. We need to move our workload to free up our own time to do yet even more.

    Luckily, there is a solution to asking for more: asking for less, but better. A growing number of people are making this change. I call these people Essentialists.

    These people are designing their lives around what is essential and removing everything else. These people arrange to have actual weekends (during which they are not working). They create technology-free zones in their homes. They trade time on Facebook with calling those few friends who really matter to them. Instead of running to different meetings, they put space on their plans to get important work done.

    So we have two choices: We can be among the last people caught up in “The More Bubble,” or we can join the growing community of Essentialists and get more of what matters in our one precious life.

    When I was three years old, I couldn't speak. It was a strange reality that none of the doctors I visited could understand.

    One day, I was shadowing my mother. She found herself looking in a mirror, and through it our eyes met. She began to speak to me through the reflection, and I slowly began to mimic(模仿)her mouth's movements until I formed a word.

    It turned out I'm deaf in my left ear, and have a slight problem in my right. Being hard of hearing has been difficult, but I've never lived in a state of self-hating sorrow. Imagine being able to shut out all sound as you lay your head down to sleep by simply rolling over onto one side. That's my reality when I sleep on my "good ear", and it makes me feel like a superhero sometimes.

    People call my deaf side my "bad ear", but when I wear my hearing aid, I have access to a range of features that some other deaf people don't. In cinemas, for example, with one click of a button I can enjoy a whole film as though it were whispered to me from the mouths of the actors.

    Owning a hearing aid hasn't always felt good, however. On the first day I got my aid, when I was eight, I took it to school for show-and-tell. As I explained how it worked to my classmates, a boy yelled out, "Aren't those for old men?" At that moment, I felt different. It took a long time for me to get over that sense of being so unlike my peers.

    But it's not just school kids who can make us deaf and hard-of-hearing people feel like burdens. Every video on social media that lacks subtitles(字幕), for example, means an entire community of deaf people is unable to enjoy it. Completely deaf people are excluded from enjoying many movies too, as subtitles in cinemas are almost impossible to find.

    And with hearing aids costing around $2,500 each, it can be hard for many people to afford to be able to listen to the things that others take for granted. As for me, I can listen to music, enjoy films, and catch conversations - I'm lucky. I'm deaf, but I can still hear everything. I've been blessed with wonderful life experiences, and I am human. And when it comes to sleeping, I'm even superhuman.

    A mystery surrounds my grandmother's collection of salt cellars (盐瓶). No one in the family seems to know when she started collecting them, or exactly how many she had.

    My grandmother died just over two years ago. At 91, she had spent 30 years without her right leg, which was removed due to cancer the year I was born. She was a poet, an artist, a food lover and a salt cellar collector. The funny thing about the salts, as she called them — I never once heard her say salt cellar — was that although everybody knew they were her hobby and everyone was always searching for them at yard sales or in stores, nobody seemed to know what they meant to her and they just wanted to make her happy. Grandma kept her salts in a dark wooden corner display case in the living room. Since her death the case has remained exactly as she left it. Grandpa tries his best to preserve his memories of her just as they are.

    Now I am collecting, too. Collecting memories about my grandmother's hobby, a way she spent her time. And as I hold one of them in my hand, I picture her holding it in her hand on the day she got it. She is smiling. My mother and her two sisters all have small collections, but my mother admits that she was more interested in finding salts to send to Grandma.

    Grandma once wrote a poem titled “When April Comes”. The poem contains the line, “When April comes and I am not around, remember me when daffodils are found.” Now, Grandpa is working on a poem with the line, “April came and you were not around”.

    But she was, somehow. She was there in the memories left behind by her possessions.

All Aboard for a Family Trip by Train

    If you're looking for a family vacation idea, look no further. Explore America with Amtrak. On the train, your family will have plenty of room to spread out and relax.

    Once on board, the family can take in the scenery from the Sightseer Lounge（观景车厢）. Plus, most of our overnight trains feature Dining cars that serve three meals a day, with full menus and table service. If you're looking for lighter fare, grab a bite to eat or a drink in the Café car. You can also reserve Sleeping car accommodations and let the gentle rhythms of the train sway you to sleep. It's the best way to arrive at your destination rested and ready to go.

    Learn More about the Onboard Experience on www.amtrak.com

    A Dining Experience like No Other

    From full sit-down meals to more informal food service, many trains have one or more option for onboard dining. If you're not hungry, you might start to hear your stomach rumbling（腹鸣） after looking at our menus. We provide you with more dining choices, onboard dining reservations and the different types of dining cars, like long distance dinning car, lounge car and café car.

    Sleeping Accommodations

    Sleeping accommodations are available on most long-distance routes. Amtrak trains traveling on long-distance routes typically use either two-level Superliner or one-level Viewliner train car equipment, each of which include bedrooms arranged in various configurations and private and public bathrooms and showers.

    Seating Accommodations

    On most Amtrak trains, you have three options for seating accommodations. The availability of these options varies depending on your route and the type of train equipment in use:

    Coach Class: Designed for You to Relax.

    Business Class: More Amenities. More Comfort.

    First Class: Exclusively on Acela Express.

Few people enjoyed getting shots at the doctor's office. But many of these shots are important vaccines (疫苗) that help prevent us from getting certain diseases or types of infection.

Vaccines got their start in Europe in the 1720s, when a British woman named Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was visiting Turkey. She saw Turkish doctors purposefully inoculating (接种) people with small amounts of smallpox. Smallpox is a painful, deadly disease that had no cure at the time. But Lady Montagu was amazed that the patients not only recovered, but then proved to be immune (免疫的) to the disease!

Lady Montagu quickly returned to England, excited to share this new procedure. But inoculation took many years to catch on. One problem was that no one had a correct way of inoculating people safely. Occasionally, patients would become fully infected and then begin spreading the disease. However, inoculation eventually saved enough people for it to become the common practice for preventing smallpox.

Some years later, a scientist named Edward Jenner discovered that people who had been infected with a disease called cowpox became resistant to smallpox. Cowpox was less much harmful than smallpox. Jenner convinced doctors to inoculate people with cowpox, which led to a very safe vaccine and far fewer outbreaks of smallpox. Finally, a French scientist named Louis Pasteur realized that Jenner's idea could be used to treat other diseases. Since then, vaccines have been made for many other diseases, such as polio, tetanus, and rabies.

Today, scientists and doctors continue to create new vaccines that could potentially save millions of lives worldwide.