Travellers arriving at or leaving from Stuttgart’s main railway station should be warned. They must allow an extra 10-15 minutes to get out of the building or get to the platforms to catch a train, because of an ugly maze of detours (绕路) around Germany’s biggest construction site. “It has been like this since I was at school 13 years ago,” shrugs the barista at a nearby coffee shop.

The ambitious plan for a new station in the capital of Baden-Württemberg, one of Germany’s most prosperous states and home to Daimler-Benz, Bosch and Porsche, was to be an advertisement for the state’s engineering prowess. By relocating tracks and platforms largely underground, it was supposed to speed up journeys to other places in Germany and all over Europe, while reclaiming (开拓) space for shops, housing and parkland in the centre of town. The city picked a design by Christoph Ingenhoven, a cool modernist architect from Düsseldorf, and the late Frei Otto, winner of the prestigious Pritzker prize for architecture.

But its fate has been similar to that of Berlin’s new airport, which was completed after a nine-year delay in 2020, having exceeded its budget by more than €4bn ($4.7bn). “Stuttgart 21” (named for the 21st century) was meant to be completed by the end of 2019 at a cost of €4.5bn. It is now forecast to be finished by 2025, and the cost may rise to nearly €12bn. The mega-site currently employs some 6,000 construction workers, who even have their own priest, Peter Maile, to provide (much-needed) pastoral care. The bosses of Deutsche Bahn may need the consolation of religion too. The loss-making German railway operator is in court, fighting the state, city, region and airport over who will cover Stuttgart 21’s exorbitant additional costs.

For some, Stuttgart 21 remains an awesome engineering masterpiece in the making; for others it is a bottomless pit wasting more and more taxpayers’ cash. In June the station could have celebrated the topping-out ceremony of its main building. Oddly enough, no one felt much like an underground party, or indeed any party at all.

Embedded (植入的) advertising has been running wild for decades. It forces its way into our daily lives, yet goes largely unnoticed. It’s become so perfectly inescapable that, at the end of the day, you just have to sit back and admire it — or at least accept it.

It used to be that embedded advertisements were harmless. They were obvious, but priceless too. These days, however, people have to draw the line when Tom Hanks makes best friends with a brand-name volleyball on the screen. Pretty soon may come the day when we can’t sit through a Renaissance-set show without local servants sporting the latest mobile phone! Many people have just grown indifferent to the brand promotion. It’s sad that we sometimes have to judge the worth of movies and shows based on how perfectly they’re able to include brands into a storyline.

We can look at The Social Network as an example of how embedded marketing can be destructive or made more pleasant. What could have been a two-hour ad for a famous social media site was instead fashioned into a thematic exploration of the network’s impact on its users. The film examines the networks expansion and makes us question how it has changed the concept of “connectedness” in the so-called information era. We really have to give credit for this.

In such cases the attempt is being made to introduce a certain amount of artfulness where there could have easily been none. Such examples are thought of as “progressive product placement”, which could serve as a model. If today’s embedded advertising can be dealt with in the clever and attractive way, people won’t remain either indifferent to or calm about it.

An article describing the attitude of post-1990s generations toward life has recently gone viral on Chinese social media, which resonates with (引起共鸣)millions of youngsters for reflecting their casualness and calmness under gradually increasing social pressure.

The article was first published on WeChat with the title of “The first group of post-90s generation who have become monks”. By using the phrase “Buddha-like youngsters” (佛系青年), it claimed that some of the post-90s generations, who were born between 1990 and 1992, have “seen through the emptiness of life” and kept a casual and calm attitude toward career and life.

“It’s fine to have something or not and there is no need to pursue or win anything,” said the article, while defining “Buddha-like” people and clarifying that the phrase has nothing to do with the religion of Buddhism. An easy example is that Buddha-like youngsters do not care about taking which way to return home or choosing what to eat for lunch, according to the articles.

The phrase has touched the nerves of the Chinese youngsters who are facing the fast-paced life, cut-throat world of career and great mental pressure in China, read a commentary by People’s Daily on Wednesday. The times and then read more than 60 million times on SinaWeibo by Wednesday.

“The phrase describes the mentalities and lifestyle of (same of) the post-90s generation in China, who have become less ambitious and more casual toward life due to the great pressure and fierce competition in today’s China”, one SinaWeibo user commented.