Betty is not a traditional American beauty. She wears unfashionable clothes, has thick red glasses, untidy hair and large metal braces (牙箍) on her teeth. But this doesn’t stop her from becoming one of Americans’ favorite TV characters. So how did she manage to do it?

The answer is that charm can be more attractive than beauty. Betty is the main character in the TV show Ugly Betty. The show is about her life as an office worker at a fashion magazine in New York.

The TV show has just started. Betty has many exciting experiences and romantic stories. Betty is often looked down on and laughed at by the people around. But she manages to do better than others with her hard work, charm and wisdom. The show tells us about how a girl goes from an ugly young duck into a beautiful swan.

Though you may know the ending of the show from the beginning and the story is familiar to many of us, it has still been a big success in the USA. It has attracted a large number of viewers and won two Golden Globe Awards, one of the highest honors for a television program in the USA. “ I think you can see a bit of Betty in all of us, and I mean men as well, because it’s about the underdog (弱者) , “ says Ashley Jensen, who plays one of the characters in the show.

The program is so popular because of the performance of the 23-year-old actress America Ferrera who plays the role of Betty. She brings the character alive on the screen.

The 2020 Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded to former U.S. Poet Laureate (桂冠诗人) Louise Gluck. The prize committee cited “her unique poetic voice that with plain beauty makes individual existence universal”. Gluck is the first American woman to win the award since Toni Morrison in 1993. Gluck, 77, joins a list of literary giants and previous Nobelists who include, in this century, Canadian short-story master Alice Munro, Chinese magical-realist Mo Yan, etc.

Gluck’s work includes 12 collections of poetry and a few volumes of essays on literary writing. “All are characterized by a striving for clarity (清晰). Childhood and family life, the close relationship with parents and siblings, is a theme that has remained central to her,” Anders Olsson, the chairman of the Nobel Committee for Literature, said. “She seeks the universal, and in this she takes inspiration from myths and classical motifs,” Olsson added, citing her 2006 collection Averno, which the committee described as “masterly” for its “visionary interpretation of the myth of Persephone’s (珀尔塞福涅) fall into hell in the captivity (囚禁) of Hades (哈得斯), the god of death”.

Being a professor at Yale and a resident of Cambridge, Gluck also served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2003 to 2004 and is no stranger to awards. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her collection of poems titled The Wild Iris, in which “she describes the incredible return of life after winter in the poem Snowdrops,” the Nobel literature committee said Thursday. She also won the 2014 National Book Award for the poem Faithful and Virtuous Night. In 2016, President Obama awarded the National Humanities Medal to Gluck in a White House ceremony.

The publicity-shy Gluck did not immediately issue any comment about the latest honor for her body of work, which spans more than half a century. In a 2012 interview, she acknowledged that prizes can make “existence in the world easier” but did not amount to the immortality (不朽) of a true artist.