To reduce the spread of the pandemic (流行病), Corona Virus, our product manager has announced businesses to start working from home. For those who are working from home, dealing with this situation can be challenging. 【小题1】.

Create a work area. Your first challenge is to pick a corner in the home and create a work-space that is perfect for work from home. 【小题2】. You can make a large coffee table as a work desk. Keep the desk neat and tidy.

【小题3】. Get your laptop, cell phone diary in the right place. If you are in a noisy home, search for your noise cancellation headphone. Use your mouse for increased productivity. Find out who will take care of children as the schools are closed. Organize the home.

Learn technologies. It is important to learn technology for smoother communication. You can make use of Google Hangouts, Slack or other video tools for messaging. 【小题4】.

Ensure proper lighting is there. 【小题5】. Locating the office where you receive natural lighting is the best way to increase productivity. Ensure you have enough artificial lighting arrangements.

“We are becoming the people we wanted to be,” Gloria Steinem, a journalist and social activist, declared in the 1970s. So have women really become the people they wanted to be? Yes. 【小题1】 And they are nurses, clerks, doctors, scientists and so on. For a better understanding, here are some true data about women at work.

【小题2】

One of the great changes in gender equality is taking place in education. More women graduate from high school, attend and graduate from college. In 1994, 63 percent of female high school graduates and 61 percent of male high school graduates were enrolled in college the following fall, according to the Pew Research Center. By 2012, that number for women jumped to 71 percent, but remained unchanged for males, at 61 percent.

The wage gap between males and females is still existing.

Even as more women are flooding onto college campuses, here’s a disappointing trend. 【小题3】 But there still is a gap between their earnings and men’s earnings. Women in professional specialty occupations earn 72.7 percent of what men in the same position earn.

Is there any place women earn the same as men?

No. Unfortunately, there is no such place. But it can be to a woman’s advantage to work in a labor union. 【小题4】 So, while there is a gap, it’s much less than in professions without unions, where women make 72 percent of men’s incomes.

Women bring home more income.

【小题5】 Over 40 percent of moms are now the sole or primary source of income in U.S. households. Women are now the primary or co-money-maker in nearly two-thirds of American families and working married women bring home 44 percent of their family income.

In our magazine’s document room, from the June 1920 issue, I discovered a piece, What Editors Do, by Hazel Miller. What she talks about caught my eye: The first World War and its ending just two years before.

“During 1917 and 1918, when the World War was going, there was a huge demand for war material,” Miller writes. “Most magazines were carrying practically nothing but war stories. When the War ended in November, 1918, some editors still had a goodly supply of war fiction and articles—for which they had paid real money—on their hands, which most people by now are fed up with.”

Her words have stuck with me for the past 12 months as we’ve weighed which COVID-19 stories to run and which to hold. I’m writing these words with thick snow outside my window, but they will reach you in the green of spring. Will you be vaccinated(接种疫苗) and tired of reading about COVID-19 then?

We say writing is an art, and publishing is a business, but I worry we forget that publishing is also a gamble(赌博), Except for the immediate publication, everyone in the industry—agents, acquiring editors, magazine and journal editors, etc.—are betting on a story’s success in a future we cannot see. As is the nature of fortune telling, we are not so sure we will not occasionally lose: The 1920 editors sitting on a store of war stories no one wants, for example.

With so many factors outside your control, and so much uncertainty in the industry, isn’t it better to have stories written from the heart that you are truly enthusiastic about rather than some to please an ever-changing publishing market?

My future reader, it’s my hope that this issue finds you this spring doing just that: Writing the stories you need to tell—and the ones that will delight your own future readers for years to come.