李老師陪你探索英文世界 Exploring English with Ms. Lee

Once there was a powerful magistrate. Because he always seemed to be roaring-at his servants, his wife, and even his children, everyone called him Magistrate Tiger. Magistrate Tiger’s son and daughter knew that their father was always working to become more powerful and that he even hoped the emperor himself would acknowledge him. The only people Magistrate Tiger did not roar at were his superiors. To kings and dukes and princes, his voice was silky and smooth. One day, Magistrate Tiger arrived home with an expensive qin. Magistrate Tiger had never shown interest in music before, so the entire household was surprised to see the stringed instrument in his hands. After mastering a few simple songs, Magistrate Tiger called his children to him. He gave each of them a bowl of rice and had them follow him into the garden. They stopped in front of the pond. Magistrate Tiger stationed his children on either side of him and, as he began to play the qin, instructed them to throw rice out into the water. The fish, seeing the food, began to jump up to eat the rice. They did this every day. For the son, it was the most enjoyable time he had ever spent with his father. One day, Magistrate Tiger came home with a grand official, Duke Zhe. Duke Zhe was a connoisseur of music. He came to Magistrate Tiger’s home to hear him play the qin. As his familiar chords rang through the air, the fish began to jump out of the water, expecting the rice that had always been there before. They leaped again and again, as if dancing to the music. Duke Zhe looked amazed and, without a word, bowed to Magistrate Tiger. Duke Zhe said, “To my ears, your playing was simple, but it must have conveyed such harmonious thoughts that only the fish could hear and rejoice at.“

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。

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Edward the eighth was born in 1894, son of George the fifth. He was a very charismatic and popular prince. However there were some character flaws. He had no sense of public duty, 沒有公共服務的使命感。 He just wanted to party, sleep with women. He also saw himself more as a German than a British subject. He spoke fluent German, spent a lot of time in Germany. He was always very sympathetic to Hitler. He thought Hitler was a good person. As a result, his attitude toward Hitler raised a lot of concerns in government circles even before he became king. He shared confidential information with people who were close to Hitler.His family was so worried that they put him under government surveillance. So even though the abdication is often seem as a man choosing love over his duty, the throne. It’s actually not as simple as that. The British government at the time was actually looking for a way to get rid of him. They even encouraged him to participate in dangerous sports, but he wasn’t killed. So Wallace gave the government an excuse to remove him from the throne.

When Wallace was able to get a divorce from her second husband, Edward the Eighth was determined to marry her. There were actually other solutions for them to be together. He could have chosen to marry her long after the coronation, or he could have kept her as a mistress. But he was too stubborn and stupid to see other paths. Wallace was actually still in love with her second husband. She didn’t really want a divorce. In a way, she was forced to file for divorce because of the pressures from the Edward the Eighth and the press. She actually told him that she didn’t think it’s a good idea for them to be married. She actually preferred to be the king’s mistress, for he gave her a lot of jewels, and she got to meet all the interesting people. But he threatened to commit suicide if she refused to marry him. In the end she felt trapped for having to marry a man who is emotionally very immature. He wrote love letters in baby talks and had a very strong sense of entitlement and always chased after things he couldn’t have. Prior to Simpson, he was notorious for dating married women. What was their interaction like? Wallace Simpson bullied him, humiliated him to tears in public, but the more she did this, the more obsessed and devoted he was to her. He was devoted to her to the end of his life, but she didn’t feel the same way about him. Because of his heavy involvement with the German, the British government was determined to keep him out of Britain after abdication.

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。那我們就下集見了

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https://youtu.be/P79vcyvdI0k

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In the summer of 1978, two friends opened a makeshift ice cream parlor in an abandoned gas station in northern Vermont. Using a single five-gallon ice cream maker, they churned out batch after batch of wacky flavors like Chunky Monkey and Heath Bar Crunch.

In the decades that followed, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield built Ben & Jerry’s into a legendary ice cream company, with more than 600 scoop shops in 35 countries around the world and annual sales now topping $500 million.

And to think, it all happened because one of them couldn’t get into medical school, and the other couldn’t sell enough pottery.

Jerry and I met in junior high, when he fainted in gym class. It made quite an impression on me, and we quickly became friends.

Some years later, I had dropped out of college and was trying to become a potter, but nobody wanted to buy my pottery, and Jerry had finished college and was trying to go to medical school, but nobody would let him into their medical school. So, I was delivering pottery wheels and working as a taxi driver, and he was a lab technician, working on rat brains and cow livers in a research lab, and neither of us really liked what we were doing with our lives. So we decided to try to start something together.

JERRY: I guess I wanted to become a doctor. It's what Jewish kids from Long Island who were good in science did. Ben and I were very uncool. We were fat nerds. I was in the math club. Ben played the cello.

Q: How did your ice-cream business start?

JERRY: It was a bad time for us both. I had been rejected by 40 medical schools. We were clearly not succeeding in our chosen fields. So we started considering different ways to support ourselves. We wanted to live in a rural college town, do something where we could be together and that was fun. Since we love to eat, we immediately thought of food. Ice cream made sense, though we considered bagels, shish kebab, fondue. Ben & Jerry's scoop shop opened in Burlington, Vt., in 1978. Sixteen years later, Ben and I are as surprised as anyone that we're running a $150-million-a-year business, with 600 employees and 100-plus franchisees.

Q: Ben & Jerry's is considered a socially responsible business. Define that.

BEN: It's a business that cares about people, that seeks to use its power to improve the quality of life within society. It seeks profits and tries to integrate spiritual and social concerns into day-to-day activities. Typical businesses tend to do everything in terms of narrow self-interest. They want to maximize profitability and quality. We add a third factor: impact on the community, on the consumer, on our employees. We use suppliers like Greyston Bakers, which provides jobs for the previously unemployable. We buy our coffee from a rural cooperative in Mexico, helping to raise the standard of living there. We sell some of our ice cream through partner shops like Common Ground, which trains the previously unemployed. We give 7 1/2 percent of our pretax profits to our foundation, which, as far as we know, is the highest percentage of any publicly held company.

JERRY: We think making a better world increases profits. If you have a world where there are a lot of riots and disparities, that's not a world where you can sell a lot of ice cream. If you have a world where people are nurtured and their basic human needs are met, you can sell more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/on-small-business/when-we-were-small-ben-and-jerrys/2014/05/14/069b6cae-dac4-11e3-8009-71de85b9c527_story.html

https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/18/magazine/passing-the-scoop-ben-jerry.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。

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So who is this mysterious guest? Madam Chang does not look like any woman Rendi has ever seen before. Her features are fine and smooth, as if she were carved from ivory, and the light in her dark eyes make them shine like stars. Madam Chang has a gift in storytelling. She tells one story after another, and gradually her stories will transform the lives of people in this town, including Rendi.

Who is Wang Yi?

Long ago, so long that only the sky, mountains, and water can truly remember, six suns appeared in the sky. These six suns caused great suffering and devastation to the earth. People began to despair until Wang Yi stepped forward. Wang Yi was the strongest, bravest, and the quickest of all men. He decided to shoot down all the suns to save the people from suffering. He shot down the first sun, the second, the third, the fourth. Just as he was preparing his arrow for the fifth sun, Wang Yin’s wife took the sixth and last arrow from his case for she realized if he had shot all the suns, people would be forever in darkness.

After Wang Yi shot down the suns, all hailed him as a great hero. The Queen Mother of the Heavens decided to give him an unimaginable gift. It was a pill of immortality. The Queen Mother told him that the pill was not ripe yet, so Wang Yi hid the pill in his arrow case and told only his wife of his existence. Knowing that immortality waited for him, Wang Yi finally believed he should be treated as a god. He became proud and hard. He brutally punished anyone who displeased him. And through all this, Wang Yin’s wife watched, grief stricken, as the husband she loved changed into a cruel and selfish ruler. If Wang Yi becomes immortal, she thought, he will be emperor for all eternity. She decided to destroy the pill. While she was trying every mean to get rid of it, Wang Yi walked into the room. He stared at her, surprised and speechless. And in that moment of shock, she put the white pill into her mouth and swallowed. She herself had been transformed into a giant toad because the pill was not ripen. As WangYi chased her, she leaped away with all her strength and landed on the moon. Moon became her new home, and she eventually changed back into a woman and became the Moon Lady.

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。

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The novel opens with young Rendi’s having stowed away in a merchant’s cart. The moon has been missing for weeks, and every night, sorrowful moans can be heard in the air, but it seems that only Rendi has noticed these. As soon as the merchant discovers Rendi hiding in his cart, he throws him out and abandons him at a remote village of Clear Sky. Just like that, Rendi becomes the chore boy at the Inn of Clear Sky.

Master Chao, the innkeeper, needs someone to help with the chores because his son, Jiming, has disappeared. Peiyi, Master Chao’s young daughter, is forced to show Rendi around the small village. While strolling in this village, Rendi notices this strange, endless plain of stone that lies beyond the inn. Peiyi proudly tells him that place is created by her ancestor. Her esteemed great grandfather was an extraordinary man. He was so determined and courageous that when he wanted his tea made of Nan Ling water, he journeyed the hundreds of miles to the Long River to get it. One day he became outraged by the mountain next to his house because the mountain blocked the sky. He was determined to see the sky so he and his obedient sons began digging. One bucket at a time, they began to carry the mountain away. Obviously, this seemed an impossible task, like emptying the ocean with a rice bowl. The Spirit asked Peiyi’s great grandfather why he was trying to move the mountain and reminded him that it was impossible to move the mountain bucket by bucket. But her esteemed great-grandfather brushed away the Spirit’s words and said if he didn’t move the mountain in his lifetime, his sons would continue his work and their sons after that. Upon hearing these words, the Spirit left. The next morning the mountain was gone. Instead, there was an empty stone field that seemed as flat as a plate and as endless as the sky. A new guest arrives early this morning, alone, on foot, and paid for a room for a whole month. She says she may stay longer. It is unheard of for a woman to be staying alone at an inn, much less one who comes on foot and stays longer than a night.

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。那我們就下集見了。 Talk to you next time on Exploring English with Ms Lee. Goodbye

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June Huh enrolled in a class taught by the famed Japanese mathematician Hironaka, who won the Fields Medal in 1970. Hironaka was charismatic, and Huh quickly fell under his sway. For the first time, Huh witnessed research mathematics unfolding in real time. Hironaka’s lectures weren’t polished as in other undergraduate courses, where the answers already worked out. Huh loved the suspense of it, the act of trying to do something no one really knew how to do. Huh discovered that this kind of mathematics could give him what poetry could not: the ability to search for beauty outside himself. And he found that unlike when he was a poet, he was never motivated by the desire for recognition. He just wanted to do math.

Huh applied to about a dozen doctoral programs in the US. But because of his undistinguished undergraduate experience, he was rejected by all of them, save one. In 2009, he began his studies at the University of Illinois before transferring to the University of Michigan in 2011 to complete his doctorate.

In doctorate program, he immediately stood out. As a beginning graduate student, he proved a conjecture in graph theory that had been open for 40 years. His solution stunned the math community. It was at that point that the University of Michigan, having rejected his initial application, recruited him to their graduate program.

Mathematicians were also equally impressed by his demeanor. His talks at the conferences were always accessible and concrete. Other mathematicians remarked about his incredible maturity. Unlike most graduate students, he already had a program in mind, and ideas about how to pursue it. Many of his collaborators note that he’s incredibly humble and down-to-earth. When he learned he’d won the Fields Medal, “it didn’t really feel that good,” Huh said. “ Of course you are happy, but deep down, you are a little worried that they might eventually figure out that you are not actually that good. I’m a reasonably good mathematician, but am I Field Medal-worthy?“

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。

https://youtu.be/yO8lQWb6TZ4

June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

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When June Huh was younger, he had no desire to be a mathematician. He was born in 1983 in California, where his parents were finishing graduate school. The family then moved to Seoul, South Korea, when Huh was around 2 years old. There, his father taught statistics, his mother taught Russian language and literature. School was excruciating for him. He loved to learn but couldn’t focus or absorb anything in a classroom setting.

June Huh preferred to read on his own-in elementary school, he devoured all 10 volumes of an encyclopedia about living things. He tried his best to avoid math whenever possible. His father once tried to teach him out of a workbook, but rather than try to solve the problems,Huh would copy the solutions from the back. When his father caught on and tore those pages out, Huh went to local bookstore and wrote down the answers there. “He gave up at that point,” Huh said.

When June was 16 years old and in the middle of his first year in high school, he decided to drop out to write poetry. He wrote about nature and about his own experiences. He planned to complete his masterpiece in the two years before he’d have to attend university. That didn’t happen because he found writing process too focus on the self.

When he entered Seoul National University in 2002, he felt adrift. He briefly flirted with the idea of being a science writer and decided to major in astronomy and physics. But he frequently skipped class, and he had to retake several courses. “I was just generally lost. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I didn’t know what I was good at.”said Huh.

https://youtu.be/yO8lQWb6TZ4

June Huh, High School Dropout, Wins the Fields Medal | Quanta Magazine

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At the age of eighty, Hetty Green lived like a pauper in an unheated apartment. To save the cost of heating her food, she ate only cold eggs and onions. In order to save more money, Hetty wore newspapers instead of underwear. She had only the bottoms of her dresses cleaned. A very poor person, you say? No, Hetty was one of America’s richest women.

Hetty Green was born in 1835, in a rich section of Bellow Falls, Vermont. When her father died, she was left a large fortune. She took all of her money and invested in the stock market. Her stocks did so well that she became known as “the wizard of Wall Street.”

But though she was rich, Hetty Green was extremely cheap. For instance, when her son, Edward, broke his leg,she refused to call for a doctor. She felt it would cost too much. So she carried her son to a charity hospital. Still, young Edward’s leg got worse. Finally, the leg had to be removed to save the boy’s life. But Hetty still didn’t want to pay the hospital fee. Instead, in order to save more money, she had her son’s operation done on the kitchen table in her house.

When Hetty died in 1916, she was worth over $120 million. Yet this tight-fisted woman had lived as though she barely had a cent.

Before Hetty Green was born, her family had made millions with their whaling fleet and shipping interests. Hetty’s grandfather would talk to her about financial matters and encourage her to read financial papers. When Hetty was 20, her father bought her a wardrobe full of the finest dresses of the season, in order to attract wealthy suitors. However Hetty sold her new wardrobe and bought government bonds with the proceeds.

However she took a $6 million inheritance and invested it into a fortune worth $2.5 billion in 2020 dollars on the stock market, making her the richest woman in the world at that time. What’s her investment strategy? Well, she was one of the pioneers of value investing, way before Warren Buffet. She amassed her vast fortune through discipline and conservative methods. She told the New York Times in 1905, “ I buy when things are low and nobody wants them. I keep them until they go up and people are anxious to buy.” This has caused her to be called “ the grandmother of value investing.

Aside from the fortune she made, Hetty’s most notable accomplishment is probably living her life exactly as she wished in a make-dominated society and industry at a time when by law a woman’s property was controlled by her husband. She was known to use vulgar language, carry a gun, and travel great distances alone. She also created an early example of prenuptial agreement, when she married Edward Green, a wealthy Vermont businessman. Unlike her, he was a very incautious investor who liked to speculate wildly and live extravagantly. After separating from her husband, she set up her own office and a steady stream of men regularly sought her investment advice.

So what happened to all that cash? She left her estate evenly divided between her son and daughter. Ned lived extravagantly, then left what remained to his sister. Sylvia, like her mother, kept her finances entirely separate from those of her husband. The couple had no children and when Sylvia died, she left all her fortune to a number of charities.

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So how did Jimmy Chin go from being simply an outdoor adventure junky to a world renowned outdoor adventure photographer? He said in an interview, “ I never studied photography; I didn’t take any classes in photography. I actually had a friend who wanted to be a photographer show me how to use his camera while we were on a climb in Yosemite. I took a photo with it and he was trying to sell his photos, which were slides at the time. He sold one photo and it happened to be mine, for $500.00. He still says, I started Jimmy’s career, which is true.

So I picked up photography then and was very fortunate to start shooting right away for commercial clients. I started shooting for Patagonia and the North Face right away because they wanted someone they didn’t have to worry about when they were up climbing. Galen came into my life when I started looking at a lot of different photography. He embodied this form of adventure photography that was very participatory.

I walk in the office, and the receptionist is there and she’s like, can I help you? I'm like, yeah, I'm here to see Galen. And she’s like, and you are…? I'm like, well, I'm Jimmy Chin. She’s like, okay. She goes upstairs. She comes back.

She’s like, he just came back from this huge shoot and there’s all these photo editors there; he doesn’t have time to see you today. So I was like, well, that’s cool; do you mind if I hang out and look around a bit? She’s like, that’s fine. So I sit in the lobby that day, the rest of the afternoon, kind of like moping around and looking at pictures. The place closes and I leave. I come back the next day and same thing. They’re like, oh it’s you again. I'm like, yeah, is he around? And they’re like, not really.

So basically I do the same thing on Tuesday, do the same thing on Wednesday, do the same thing on Thursday and by then, they’re kind of like: dude, what’s your deal? And one of the guys there, a little bit younger, was like, man, what are you doing? And I'm like, I just want to meet him. I just need ten minutes of his time.

They were like, maybe come back tomorrow. So I show up on Friday, same thing. And at 4:00 on Friday afternoon, Galen comes down and he just looks at me and he’s like, so you must be Jimmy. And I said, yup. And he was like, okay. Well, you have my undivided attention for the next two hours; what can I help you with?

I walk in the office, and the receptionist is there and she’s like, can I help you? I'm like, yeah, I'm here to see Galen. And she’s like, and you are…? I'm like, well, I'm Jimmy Chin. She’s like, okay. She goes upstairs. She comes back.

She’s like, he just came back from this huge shoot and there’s all these photo editors there; he doesn’t have time to see you today. So I was like, well, that’s cool; do you mind if I hang out and look around a bit? She’s like, that’s fine. So I sit in the lobby that day, the rest of the afternoon, kind of like moping around and looking at pictures. The place closes and I leave. I come back the next day and same thing. They’re like, oh it’s you again. I'm like, yeah, is he around? And they’re like, not really.

So basically I do the same thing on Tuesday, do the same thing on Wednesday, do the same thing on Thursday and by then, they’re kind of like: dude, what’s your deal? And one of the guys there, a little bit younger, was like, man, what are you doing? And I'm like, I just want to meet him. I just need ten minutes of his time.

They were like, maybe come back tomorrow. So I show up on Friday, same thing. And at 4:00 on Friday afternoon, Galen comes down and he just looks at me and he’s like, so you must be Jimmy. And I said, yup. And he was like, okay. Well, you have my undivided attention for the next two hours; what can I help you with?

https://open.spotify.com/episode/3kevIQubzqwmCjitXMpyZc?si=gKEiAM5SR6yu5b5DhoqzLw

https://youtu.be/FSdim3HDlOo

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Pellegrin said that photography is not actually about taking pictures-taking pictures is incidental. It’s a by-product, in a sense, of everything else. What you are doing is giving form-photographic form-to a thought, to an opinion, to an understanding of the world, of what is in front of you. And so if we think in these terms, then you have to improve the quality of your thoughts.

Pellegrin was born in Rome, into a family of architects. His father, Luigi, was an internationally renowned designer of public buildings and schools, and his mother, Luciana Menozzi, was an architect and a professor who came from a family of faded aristocrats. Pellegrin said, “There was this family imperative that you had to express yourself, either in the humanities or the arts. And there was this absolute disdain for anything that was related to office work.

Luigi treated his time with the children as an opportunity to impart his aesthetic world view. He would expose his children to art and history of art. There were pilgrimages to the Met, the Louvre. He felt that there’s a duty to transmit his interests and his knowledge to his children. “Through artistic expression, Luigi instructed his children, “you have to pay for the oxygen you breathe.”

But after three years, it just became clear to him that it wasn’t his calling. So one day, when he was twenty-two, he walked into his father’s studio and told his dad that he was terminating his architectural studies. The only certainly he had in that monologue was that at one point he realized that he could not get away with it without suggesting an alternative-photography.

Pellegrin read essays on photography by Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, and Susan Sontag, and noted the ways in which great authors and poets, such as Rilke, observed and refracted the world in front of them. Pellegrin worked various odd jobs, and spent much of the proceeds on photography books.

Glaucoma is one of the most common causes of blindness for people older than sixty, but it’s rare in young people, and the factor that trigger it remain poorly understood. No area of vision that is lost to glaucoma can be restored. Glaucoma did not deter Pelegrín’s desire to photograph more. Instead it filled him with a rage to see. To see more, to see beyond- to see at the maximum. If anything, he has come to see glaucoma as an ally, a kind of secret weapon. It imbued his work with a kind of finality. It gave an urgency to everything he did. And perhaps to go blind at the end of his life can be seen as the completion of his opus( 作品) . He feels, like a group of devoted calligraphers in Pamuk’s novel “My Name Is Red.”, and like them, he has given his eyes to God.

Source

Paolo Pellegrin’s Photographic Quest for the Sublime | The New Yorker

A Photographer’s Month in Ukraine - The New York Times

這次的podcast的資料來源都是從2022年五月23月Ben Taub在紐約客雜誌上取得。裡面還有更多跟Pellegrin精彩的訪談，也希望大家能去閱讀。

如果你覺得我的podcast對你的英文學習有幫助就請到Apple podcast 幫我按五顆星訂閱和分享。也可到李老師陪你探索英文世界的臉書和IG粉絲專頁按贊追縱或留言。那我們就下集見了。 Talk to you next time on Exploring English with Ms Lee. Goodbye

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