Back in March, when the COVID-19 virus had just started its deadly influence across the country and people were terrified about a lack of every daily necessity, Jonny Blue focused on one particularly urgent need. Blue, a 33-year-old doctor saw reports of people buying and storing toilet paper. He came up with a simple yet clever solution.

One Saturday morning, Blue took a piece of cardboard, wrote “Share Your Toilet Paper” on it in huge letters, and camped out on the street corner. “It just inspired me to remind people that if you have a lot of something, that probably means there are people who don’t have very much of it because you took it all,” Blue said. “So sharing it is probably a good thing to keep in mind.”

The response was immediate and positive, with motorists honking horns(鸣笛) in support. Drivers stopped to drop off spare rolls of toilet paper, and, just as quickly, Blue handed them out.

“This guy said he just ran out and was going to a bunch of stores and couldn’t find any,” Blue said as cars went by. “Somebody had given me some, so I gave it to him. He was excited. He was like, ‘Do you want me to pay you?’ I said, ‘No, man. Take it.’”

A moment later, a driver in a white pickup truck slowed down just enough to take out a roll to add to Blue’s collections.

“People are loving it,” Blue said. “They’re honking, smiling, laughing. It’s kind of a hard time right now. People want a sense of community.”

How much money is time worth? The question really matters, especially for the government. Before pursuing projects, governments weigh costs and benefits. And for many projects, especially those having to do with roads or bridges, one of the biggest benefits is time saved.

A new study sponsored by the rideshare company Lyft conducted experiments on 3.7 million customers in nine American cities. They adjusted prices and wait times to test when users requested and didn’t request rides. Then, they were able to figure out how much people are willing to pay to wait less for their rides.

For a long time, researchers have relied on surveys in which they asked questions like “How much would you pay to save five minutes?” People in these surveys may not accurately give the value of their time because it’s hypothetical (假设的). But Lyft’s data has information on the actual decisions that people make about how they value their time. If Lyft makes you wait five minutes more for your ride, will you take it? What if it charges you more for a shorter wait?

After analyzing the numbers, the researchers found a precise estimate for the average value of time: $19 an hour. They’ve also found that people’s value of time shifts throughout the day. The value of time is 50% larger in peak commute (通勤路程) time than in non-peak commute time. During commute time, minutes matter. People don’t want to be late for work. The value of saving minutes on rides increase when it’s raining or snowing.

Regarding their overall estimate, we should note that their experiments were conducted in nine of the richest urban areas in America. These are busy areas where being five minutes late for business meetings or dinner reservations can matter. Plus, the residents there are the type of people who pay for taxis. The researchers said they took pains to address these by adjusting their samples to match nationally representative surveys done by the government, and that they were confident in their findings. Maybe more research is needed to prove their findings.

Reading doesn’t come naturally to people, but most of us have learned how. Eighty-six percent of the world’s population is literate(有读写能力的)，and this rate has been increasing for centuries. Literacy makes it possible to navigate a world filled with books, websites, text messages, road signs and more.

Could a growing number of people participate in today’s world without reading or writing at all? Technology makes it possible. Most of our devices now talk to us and take spoken commands. Smart cars ask for a destination and then give directions.Smart virtual assistants listen for requests to report the weather, play a song, set a timer, order groceries, and much more. Software can also read text aloud or turn speech into text. These interactions aren’t perfect-the software still makes silly mistakes. But it’s getting better and better. It’s possible to imagine a future world where all of our communication with our devices and each other is spoken.

But reading and writing are powerful tools.For one, most people read faster than they speak. A podcaster or audio book narrator speaks at around150to 160 words per minute, while a strong reader can cruise through a text at 300 to 400 words per minute. That’s twice as fast! Research has also found that people remember more information and stay more interested when they read as opposed to listen. Learning to read also creates new connections in the brain. In her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf writes that with the invention of reading, human beings “rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which changed the intellectual evolution of our species.” Would we really choose to give up that progress?What do you think? Do you hope people keep on reading and writing, or will technology make literacy obsolete(淘汰的)?