The Allendale Cultural Center has expanded its arts program to include classes for young adults. Director Leah Martin announced Monday that beginning in September, three new classes will be offered to the Allendale community. The course titles will be Yoga(瑜伽) for Teenagers; Hip Hop Dance: Learning the Latest Moves; and Creative Journaling for Teens: Discovering the Writer Within. The latter course will not be held at the Allendale Cultural Center but instead will meet at the Allendale Public Library.

    Staff member Tricia Cousins will teach the yoga and hip hop classes. Ms. Cousins is a skilled choreographer(舞蹈指导) as well as an experienced dance educator. She is a Master of Arts in dance education from Teachers College, Columbia University. The journaling class will be taught by Betsy Milford. Ms. Milford is the head librarian at the Allendale Public Library as well as a columnist(专栏作家) for the professional journal Library Focus.

    The courses are part of the Allendale Cultural Center's Project Teen, which was organized by Leah Martin, Director of the Cultural Center. According to Martin, this project is a direct result of her efforts to make the center a more necessary part of the Allendale community. Over the last several years, the number of people who have visited the cultural center for classes or events has steadily declined. Project Teen is primarily funded by the McGee Arts Foundation, an organization devoted to bringing arts programs to young adults. The other members of Project Teen are two students at Allendale's Brookdale High School and three adults with backgrounds in education and the arts.

    The creative journaling class will be cosponsored by Brookdale High School, and students who complete the class will be given the opportunity to publish one of their journal works in Pulse, Brookdale's student literary magazine. Students who complete the hip hop class will be qualified to participate in the Allendale Review, an annual concert sponsored by the cultural center that features local actors, musicians, and dancers.

    All classes are scheduled to begin immediately after school, and transportation will be available from Brookdale High School to the Allendale Cultural Center and the Allendale Public Library. For more information about Project Teen, contact the cultural center's programming office at 988­0099 or drop by the office after June 1 to pick up a fall course catalog. The office is located on the third floor of the Allendale Town Hall.

The Secret to Happiness

    A new report makes it clear that when it comes to the life satisfaction of UK citizens, the ball is in the government's court. For some time, sensible people have been arguing that governments need to focus less on economic growth and more on the wellbeing（幸福）of citizens. Be careful what you wish for.

    In response to this demand, from 2011 David Cameron instructed the Office for National Statistics to gather data on people's self-reported happiness and life satisfaction. Little practical good has come from this so far, but a new report by George Bangham for the Resolution Foundation is one of the best attempts to make useful sense of the data. He concludes: "The best prospects for policymakers targeting future increases in national wellbeing lie in raising job quality, raising incomes, particularly at the lower end, and policies to improve security in the housing market."

    The age correlation（相关）turns out to be certainly linked to politics, despite the fact that no political party can make a difference to your date of birth. The happiness of pensioners is not just a function of their age, but of policy. On average, 70-year-old boomers today are the most affluent retirees in history, often owning their own homes and in receipt of generous pensions. People of 70 are not going to be as content in 30 or 40 years' time if they are unable to retire, don't own their homes and have small incomes.

    However, there is one respect in which teens and recent retirees are remarkably similar. Compared to other age groups, they tend to inhabit a sweet spot of having high degrees of freedom. The typical 16-year-old has new freedoms without ever having had any serious responsibilities. The typical 70-year-old, having experienced a lifetime of work and family duties, has a very different kind of freedom, one born from relief.

    Besides, it should not surprise us to find that people tend to be happier when they have fewer worries. But this, too, has important political implications. If the government is really interested in raising overall national happiness, it has to make sure as many citizens as possible feel secure in their health, their housing and their incomes. Different states' records in achieving this is one important reason why Nordic countries repeatedly score highly in international life satisfaction surveys and North America underperforms relative to its GDP.

    Whichever way you look at it, there is no escaping the conclusion that increasing wellbeing across society requires joined-up, long-term policy efforts. This is exactly what the Resolution Foundation recommends.

    A mixture of deep sorrow and anger has swept Brazilians across the country — particularly in the city of Rio de Janeiro — with the burning of their beloved Museu Nacional, or National Museum.

    By Monday morning, when I visited the site, the firemen were busy trying to enter the huge, early 19th-century neoclassical building. For all we know, everything may have been burned to ashes. Fortunately, no one, not even the four security guards who witnessed the beginning of the fire, has been injured.

    Nobody yet knows the cause of the fire, but it is the officials' irresponsibility and the funding shortages in particular, which are being blamed for this tragedy.

    Some of the museum's researchers told the press that they had been able to save some things from the exhibition rooms before the fire moved in. However, we Brazilians have lost much of the material memory of our short past. A good part of our 518 years of history, or that which had been transformed into storable objects, disappeared in just a few hours.

    The people of Rio de Janeiro were fond of taking their children  or grandchildren to the museum to show off their knowledge of the odd-looking mummies brought in from Egypt by the Emperor Dom Pedro II, a huge skeleton of a humpback whale, or the brightly coloured feathers of a headdress of the Kayapo tribe.

    When I think that I can no longer take my youngest daughter to the Museu Nacional — that is what gets me emotional. It is this feeling that has penetrated (穿透) our souls and may leave Brazilians feeling empty for a long time to come.

    One day when I was 5, my mother scolded (责骂) me for not finishing my rice and I got angry. I wanted to play outside and not to be made to finish eating my old rice. When angrily opening the screen door with my foot, I kicked back about a 12-inch part of the lower left hand corner of the new screen door. But I had no remorse, for I was happy to be playing in the backyard with my toys.

    Today, I know if my child had done what I did, I would have scolded my child, and told him about how expensive this new screen door was, and I would have delivered a spanking (打屁股) for it. They never said a word. They left the corner of the screen door pushed out, creating an opening, a breach (裂缝) in the defense against unwanted insects.

    For years, every time I saw that corner of the screen, it would constantly make me think about my mistake. For years, I knew that everyone in my family would see that hole and remember who did it. For years, every time I saw a fly buzzing (嗡嗡) in the kitchen, I would wonder if it came in through the hole that I had created with my angry foot. I would wonder if my family members were thinking the same thing, silently blaming me every time a flying insect entered our home, making life more terrible for us all. My parents taught me a valuable lesson, one that a spanking or stern (严厉的) words perhaps could not deliver. Their silent punishment for what I had done delivered a hundred stern messages to me. Above all, it has helped me become a more patient person and not burst out so easily.

In 2019, after retiring from her career as a social worker, Ane Freed-Kernis decided to build a home workshop and devote all of her free time to stone carving. "I might be covered head to toe in dust but I'm happy—it was something I needed more of in my life when I hit 60," she says.

This appeal has its origins in Freed-Kernis' childhood. Growing up on her father's farm in Denmark, she used to wander through the fields with her eyes fixed on the ground, looking for stones to add to her collection. "I've always been drawn to the shapes and textures（质地）of stones," she says.

After moving to England in 1977 and training as a social worker, Freed-Kernis soon became occupied with her busy career and the demands of raising her son. Stones were the last thing on her mind, until her father died in 2005. "He took a stone carving course in his retirement, and I always thought stone seemed so fun but never had the time to look into it myself," she says. "After he died, I became determined to learn in his honour."

Signing up for a week-long stone carving course at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Freed-Kernis began to learn how to turn a block of rock into well-designed shapes. "It was really scary at the start because you would spend hours just hammering（锤打）."

Now 65, Freed-Kernis has a thriving small business built largely through word of mouth. She creates 12 to 15 pieces a year that can take anywhere from a few days to three weeks to complete, while her prices range from £200 to £3, 000. "I'm making smaller ones," she says. "I don't have to depend on the money much, so I want to keep prices in the range that people can afford, mainly just covering costs and labour（劳动力）."