【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：What should “inclusion” include at the Paralympics? The games make a virtue of their diversity. But there’s still room to grow 正文：How inclusive should the Paralympic games be? The question is a tricky one for the organisers of the event, whose very ethos is to offer opportunities to athletes unable to compete in the Olympics. In many ways this year’s games were a testament to the success of that mission. More countries than ever before competed in Paris. Yet a wid...
Sep 11, 2024•23 min•Ep. 601
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：China’s One-Child Policy Sent Thousands of Adoptees Overseas. That Era Is Over. Beijing formally ends a program that was propelled by birth restrictions and that had been largely on hold since the pandemic 正文：China said it was formally ending almost all international adoptions, shutting down a process that saw tens of thousands of Chinese-born children join families in the U.S. and other countries since the 1990s. International adoptions from China had been declin...
Sep 10, 2024•17 min•Ep. 602
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Why is Thai health care so good? The country could become a model for the region. 正文：Political turmoil in Thailand is unrelenting. Over the past two decades, 11 different prime ministers have led the country. In the coming weeks that number could increase, as the constitutional court considers dismissing the current leader, Srettha Thavisin, over an allegedly illegal cabinet appointment. Yet amid such instability, one aspect of Thailand’s governance flourishes: it...
Sep 08, 2024•14 min•Ep. 603
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Woman in France Testifies Against Husband Accused of Bringing Men to Rape Her 正文：If the sight of dozens of men accused of raping her, including her husband of many decades, upset Gisèle Pelicot, she did not let it show. She swept into a packed courtroom on Thursday with steely poise, her face composed, her eyes dry beneath sunglasses. Her adult children trailed behind her. 知识点：the sight of sth The sight of something is the act of seeing it or an occasion on which ...
Sep 07, 2024•15 min•Ep. 604
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：‘I cannot afford to live’: Gen Z is full of financial angst despite inheriting a golden job market 正文：Gen Z is coming into the workforce and — in one of the grand traditions of what Millennials cringe-ily called “adulting” — they’re complaining about how much easier older generations had it. Before all the Boomers and Slackers throw their tablets across the room, let me note that Gen Zers — folks born between the late 1990s and early 2010s — are entering adulthood...
Sep 06, 2024•23 min•Ep. 605
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Pop Mart’s ‘blind box’ toys attract fans, detractors 正文：It’s a toy story that could only be made in China. This particular tale is coming from Pop Mart International Group Ltd., which has found huge success with its trendy series of collectible toys sold from “blind boxes” that don’t reveal their contents until after a buyer opens them following a purchase. Last week, Pop Mart reported stellar results for the first half of 2024, including 62% revenue growth and a ...
Sep 05, 2024•16 min•Ep. 606
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：5 Great Asian Food Cities You Shouldn’t Miss 正文：Travelers to Asia often stick to a big-city itinerary, where well-known chefs showcase their culinary skills. The restaurant standards are high, but can be more internationalized than authentic. As a food writer based in Asia for several decades, I discovered that some of the best dining can be found in smaller, lesser-known towns. This is where the local food lovers go—and the offerings easily justify a journey. Her...
Sep 04, 2024•14 min•Ep. 607
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Want the legal right to ignore your boss outside working hours? Learn from the French 正文：Millions of Australians just got official permission to ignore their bosses outside of working hours, thanks to a new law enshrining their "right to disconnect." The law doesn't strictly prohibit employers from calling or messaging their workers after hours. 知识点：enshrine v. /ɪnˈʃraɪn/ to make a law, right, etc. respected or official, especially by stating it in an important wr...
Sep 04, 2024•17 min•Ep. 608
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The great cover-up: Europe is losing its penchant for public nudity A columnist bares all in pursuit of the naked truth 正文：Man is born naked, but everywhere he is in clothes. Well, nearly everywhere. Visit a sauna in Denmark, bits of public parks in Germany or many a beach in France and clothing becomes as scarce as office workers at the height of August. Mortifying as it may seem to the clothes-minded, Europe is the spiritual home of nudity: a continent where eno...
Sep 02, 2024•24 min•Ep. 609
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：What happens to your data when you die? An individual’s digital footprint will long outlive them. That presents many quandaries 正文：Franz kafka died 100 years ago in literary obscurity. He had instructed his friend Max Brod to burn his unpublished works. Fortunately for generations of readers, Brod did not; he believed Kafka to be among the greatest writers of his time and instead edited and published his late friend’s writing. In other words, Brod decided that Kaf...
Sep 01, 2024•15 min•Ep. 610
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Digital twins are fast becoming part of everyday life 正文：When visiting a doctor a few years from now, you can expect to be accompanied by a virtual version of yourself. This so-called digital twin will be a working model of your body that can be summoned onto a physician’s computer screen. Updated with your latest vital signs, it will help the doctor make an accurate diagnosis. It also opens the door for medicines and procedures designed specifically for you, grea...
Aug 31, 2024•15 min•Ep. 611
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The US tipping system is teetering Customers are growing more resentful as gratuities soar 正文：Defenders say gratuities inspire good service from waiters, parking valets and manicurists. Others call it a form of extortion. Either way, they cloak an employment system that is nearly unique. In the US, customers, rather than bosses, determine whether service workers make a decent living. Nowhere is this more true than in full-service restaurants, which pay their wait ...
Aug 30, 2024•11 min•Ep. 612
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The arrest of “Russia’s Mark Zuckerberg” rattles social media Why Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, is in a French jail Telegram 正文：Soon after his private jet touched down on August 24th at Le Bourget airport, on the outskirts of Paris, Pavel Durov was arrested by French police. A statement later released by prosecutors said that the 39-year-old billionaire had been detained as part of an investigation into Telegram, the social-media app of which he is the founder...
Aug 29, 2024•15 min•Ep. 613
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：NASA insists that two astronauts are not “stranded” in space The Starliner mishap is another embarrassment for Boeing 正文：What a treat to glimpse the cosmos up close. Which is not to deny the inconveniences of space travel. There are bodily troubles. “The toilet—I literally sit on it like a witch on a broom,” wrote Valentin Lebedev, a cosmonaut, in his diary. “It won’t forgive your mistakes.” Suffice to say that relieving oneself in zero gravity involves leg restra...
Aug 28, 2024•20 min•Ep. 614
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：China's Hit Game 'Black Myth: Wukong' Has Tricky Legends Behind It 正文：I’m not a gamer, but I perked up to the news this week that millions of people around the world were obsessed by a virtual role-playing extravaganza based on a 16th century Chinese novel about a trickster monkey, a naive monk, a laconic hermit and a libidinous pig. 知识点：tricky adj./ˈtrɪki/ 1. requiring care and skill because difficult or awkward (任务,问题,情况)需细⼼和技巧的,难对付的 • applying eyeliner can be a...
Aug 27, 2024•15 min•Ep. 615
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Apple can’t do cars. Meet the Chinese tech giants that can Baidu, Huawei and Xiaomi have built thriving auto businesses 正文：As he screeches around corners at wildly unsafe speeds, one of the designers of the Jidu Robocar 07calmly talks your correspondent through how the electric vehicle (EV) works. An alluring feature is its entertainment system—on which he is competing in a race-car game (thankfully, the actual car is stationary). 知识点：thriving adj./ˈθraɪ.vɪŋ/ grow...
Aug 26, 2024•14 min•Ep. 616
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Mike Lynch was Britain’s first software billionaire He was celebrating his freedom when his yacht sank in a freak storm 正文：Bayes’s theorem, an 18th-century formula, holds that with the right understanding of probabilities, most outcomes are predictable. But sometimes freak events occur. In the early hours of August 19th, a superyacht owned by the wife of Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur who only months ago was cleared in a vast American fraud case, was stru...
Aug 25, 2024•21 min•Ep. 617
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：What Bill Gates reveals about other billionaires An unusual biography of the technologist-turned-philanthropist 正文：“Americans appear to be growing increasingly uneasy about billionaires,” observes Anupreeta Das, a journalist and former finance editor at the New York Times. Do they embody the American dream or endanger it? And who gets to decide what billionaires owe to society? Ms Das has chosen an original way to address these questions: by writing a biography of...
Aug 24, 2024•26 min•Ep. 618
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Indian women march to ‘reclaim the night’ after doctor’s rape and murder Protests reflect anger at 31-year-old’s killing, as well as a failure to address the daily struggles faced by many women 正文：On Monday, Indians celebrated the Hindu festival of Raksha Bandhan, marking the bond between brother and sister. Sisters tie a “rakhi”, or bracelet, around the wrists of their brothers as a symbol of love for which the brothers in turn pledge to protect them from harm. 知...
Aug 23, 2024•15 min•Ep. 619
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Black Myth: Wukong – the summer’s most exciting, and most controversial, video game 正文：When Chinese developer Game Science revealed its debut console game Black Myth:Wukong last year, it immediately caused a stir. Inspired by the great 16th-century Chinese novel, Journey to the West, the actionpacked footage featured the titular mythological monkey Sun Wukong battling Buddhist-folklore demons and sword-wielding anthropomorphic foxes in lusciously rendered forests....
Aug 22, 2024•18 min•Ep. 620
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Our new forecast for America’s presidential election 正文：With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to paint Kamala Harris’s polling surge as inevitable. Americans consistently told pollsters they were dissatisfied with their presidential nominees. But Ms Harris has far exceeded expectations. She has transformed her personal ratings and enthused the Democratic base. She leads Donald Trump nationwide by three percentage points and has overtaken him in the most recent...
Aug 21, 2024•18 min•Ep. 621
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：How Gen Zs rebel against Asia’s rigid corporate culture Young workers are striking, slouching off and setting sail 正文：When a gaggle of Generation-Z employees from Seoul, Shanghai, Singapore and Tokyo gets together in one place, the ensuing conversation will usually be conducted in decent English. The participants are all equally fluent in another common language—that of corporate despair. 知识点：gaggle n./ˈɡæɡəl/ You can use gaggle to refer to a group of people, espe...
Aug 20, 2024•16 min•Ep. 622
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Colin Huang, the founder behind Pinduoduo and Temu, overtakes bottled water tycoon Zhong Shanshan as China’s richest person 正文：After several moderately successful ventures in gaming and e-commerce, Colin Huang got sick and retired. At one point, the young entrepreneur stayed home for a year thinking about his next move. The former Google engineer eventually started Pinduoduo, an e-commerce platform known for selling dirt-cheap products with massive promotions, in ...
Aug 19, 2024•15 min•Ep. 623
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：As Matthew Perry discovered, there seems to be a fine line between doctor and drug dealer in Hollywood 正文：“I loved the way I dedicated my services to her,” wrote Dr Conrad Murray of his “most noble” patient. “It was totally selfless because when I agreed to serve her, I literally had no idea that she was then widely known.” Sure, sure. And the name of that patient, which I feel certain this most self-effacing physician might be persuaded to offer up? “The world re...
Aug 18, 2024•17 min•Ep. 624
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：A court says Google is a monopolist. Now what? The ruling could lead to a bigtech showdown 正文：Amid the 286-page judgment, issued after nearly four years of trial proceedings and petabytes of evidence, four words stand out. “Google is a monopolist,” wrote Amit Mehta, the judge of a district court in America, adding that “it has acted as one”. His ruling, handed down on August 5th, could lead to big changes for the multi-billion-dollar search market—and for the wide...
Aug 17, 2024•19 min•Ep. 625
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The U.S. Wanted to Knock Down Huawei. It’s Only Getting Stronger. 正文：Five years ago, Washington sanctioned Huawei, cutting off the Chinese company’s access to advanced U.S. technologies because it feared the telecommunications giant would spy on Americans and their allies. Many in the industry thought it would ring the death knell for one of China’s most vital tech players. Huawei struggled at first—but now it’s come roaring back. 知识点：knock sb down/over to hit sb ...
Aug 16, 2024•14 min•Ep. 626
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Why Warren Buffett has built a mighty cash mountain. Berkshire Hathaway’s boss is an impressive investor, not an economic oracle 正文：No investor commands attention quite like Warren Buffett. As boss of Berkshire Hathaway, an investment firm that he has run for almost six decades, Mr Buffett’s every movement is scrutinised. When he shifts in his seat, investors large and small ponder what it might mean for their portfolios. 知识点：command v./kəˈmænd/ to deserve and get...
Aug 15, 2024•13 min•Ep. 627
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：The Musk-Trump X interview: a surprisingly dull meeting of two planet-sized egos 正文：Oscar Wilde once described the English country gentleman galloping after a fox as “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”. Elon Musk interviewing Donald Trump surely qualifies as the incoherent in full pursuit of the unendurable. 知识点：gallop v. /ˈɡæləp/ 1. when a horse or similar animal gallops , it moves very fast and each stride includes a stage when all four feet are o...
Aug 14, 2024•15 min•Ep. 628
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Paris closes the Olympics, and Los Angeles turns to Tom Cruise for its 2028 mission 正文：Setting out to prove that topping Paris isn’t mission impossible, Los Angeles rolled out a skydiving Tom Cruise, Grammy winner Billie Eilish and other stars on Sunday as it took over Olympic hosting duties from the French capital, which closed out its 2024 Games just as they started — with joy and panache. 知识点：turn to sb/sth to go to sb/sth for help, advice, etc.向…求助（或寻求指教等） • S...
Aug 13, 2024•13 min•Ep. 629
【欢迎订阅】 每天早上5:30，准时更新。 【阅读原文】 标题：Would legal doping change the Olympics? The impact would be smaller—and worse—than proponents of drug-taking claim 正文：Trying to rid elite sport of drug cheats is an expensive and often thankless task. Competition organisers can never be sure that an event is clean: retests of samples from the Beijing and London games led to more than 100 medallists being disqualified. A small minority—including Aron D’Souza, an Australian businessman—believe it is time to lift the...
Aug 12, 2024•21 min•Ep. 630
