Innholdsfortegnelse for May 2022 i Reader's Digest

My wife was dismayed when my sister told us that our two-year-old nephew was constantly asking to see me and never mentioning her. She could not figure out why a toddler would prefer his Uncle Chris (me) to his Aunt Crissy (her). I basked in my status as the favorite until the next time we saw him, when, with arms wide open, he ran right past me and to my wife, shouting, “Uncle Chris! Uncle Chris!” -CHRIS YODICE Levittown, New York I can’t do small talk. I just asked the lady cutting my hair what she does for a living. — @MOMJEANSPLEASE Ah, married life. While shopping for vacation clothes, my husband and I passed a display of bathing suits. It had been at least ten years and 20 pounds…

Before you go on your next two-wheeled adventure, make sure you’re familiar with the ins and outs of bicycle safety. This holds true whether you’re riding a traditional bike or an e-bike—one powered by an electric motor in addition to your pedaling. Many of the safety recommendations are the same for both types of bikes. Wear a helmet. Ride with the flow of traffic rather than against it. Make sure you’re visible to motorists (some e-bikes now come with lights). Know how to use your arm to signal turns (left: extend your left arm out to the side; right: extend your right arm or bend your left arm up at a right angle). Don’t talk on the phone, text, or listen to music. And if you’re an e-bike rider, heed…

LOOKING AT THIS lush landscape, you wouldn’t guess that back in the summer of 2018, just as farmers here were preparing to harvest their best wheat crop in decades, a series of terrible fires scorched these fields black. Resilient farmers then spent the fall and winter planting cover crops to salvage the more than 200,000 acres of soil that burned that fire season—the worst in the area’s history. This photo was taken the following spring, showing the verdant result of all their hard work. But where is it? (Answer on page 115.) A Dufur, Oregon B Hardin, Montana C Williston, North Dakota D Colby, Kansas…

FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES ONE OF THE MOST gratifying sounds in sports is the whoosh of a basketball snapping the netting on a perfect swish. Take away the net and all that’s left is the unsatisfying silence of a ball pushing air molecules around as it sails through the rim. Did it even go through? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. That’s why Anibal Amador, a former real estate agent from New York City, regularly dips into his own pocket to buy brand-new nets for playground rims. For the most part, the city does not provide them. “Without the nets, it is just not good,” Amador said. “No one prefers to play that way.” So, for the past few years, with the help of a stepladder he brings from his…

FROM USA TODAY THE DAY KABUL FELL FATEMA HOSSEINI: It seems impossible that civilization can be knocked back a few decades in an afternoon, that life as you know it can collapse before lunch, but it did. Sunday morning, August 15, 2021, began like most any other day. I picked up warm naan from the bakery and headed to the office in my usual jeans, dress, scarf, and sneakers. The streets were crowded. Hundreds of vendors spilled into the road hawking vegetables and fruits over loudspeakers: “Apple! Melon! Mango!” I weaved through their carts among women in colorful dresses. Kabul must be one of the loudest cities on earth. I passed my favorite restaurant, Taj Begum, always brimming with hookah mist and laughter. It is named for an Afghan warrior…

FROM ESPN The steps at the back of David Olson’s house in Norton Shores, Michigan, were crumbling and had to go. So one day last July, Olson decided to start the demo job himself. Olson yanked the first cinder block up with his hands. He took a step back, surprised to see that the ground underneath was sand, not dirt. Even more surprising, there were three bowling balls in the hole he’d made. “No way,” Olson said out loud. He’d recently joined two Facebook groups about people making strange discoveries, and now he had made one of his own. He posted some pictures to Facebook, then continued his work. All afternoon, Olson shoveled out sand and bowling balls. “I had to get to the bottom,” he says. “I couldn’t stop.”…

THERAPY FOR BACK PAIN More than 80 percent of American adults will experience chronic lower back pain at some point in their lives—and it’s notoriously difficult to treat. Chronic pain can be like a false alarm stuck in the on position, with certain brain networks overreacting to even mild pain stimuli. In a University of Colorado study, two-thirds of the chronic back pain patients who underwent four weeks of pain reprocessing therapy (PRT) were pain-free or nearly pain-free after one year. In PRT sessions, patients learn to think about pain as safe, rather than threatening, as they do things they’d been afraid to do. These results provide strong evidence that psychological treatment can deliver lasting relief for chronic back pain, reducing the need for medications, surgeries, and other invasive treatments…

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST ALMOST EIGHT YEARS ago, Al Nixon decided to begin each day from a bench with a spectacular view of the St. Petersburg, Florida, waterfront. “I call it ‘life rising’ because watching a sunrise makes me feel centered before starting my day,” said Nixon, who works for the city’s water department. A year later, a woman stopped to say hello, and she said something that changed his perspective on his daily ritual. “She said, ‘You know, every morning when I see you sitting here, I know that everything is going to be OK,’ ” Nixon recalled. “That’s when I knew: I needed to pay attention to the people walking past. I needed to make eye contact and let people know that we mattered to each other.” Instead…

AS THE LATE afternoon sun beat down on his Rock Port, Missouri, farm last May, Brandon Leseberg finished feeding his cows and decided to call it a day. As they often did, his two sons, Louie, 6, and Everett, 3, had tagged along. As they headed for the house, the two boys ran ahead of their father, who stopped to close the gate. Louie paused at a water spigot atop an old well to quench his thirst. Unknown to the Lesebergs, the board covering the well had, over time, grown brittle. When Louie stepped on it, it caved in. Brandon had just finished latching the gate when he turned around and saw only his youngest son. “Where’s Louie?” he shouted. “He fell in the hole!” Everett said. Brandon, 37, quickly…

*But Should TIP Dust your electronics very lightly. You routinely change your sheets, but when was the last time you refreshed your mattress? And you run your dishwasher regularly, but how long has it been since you gave the machine itself a wash? Chances are, you haven’t thought to clean certain household items in a long while-and might not think to clean them at all, until they become bigger projects than they would be if you’d given them a little regular TLC. If you feel you already spend too much time cleaning, don’t despair. Many of these tasks are easy to tackle, especially if you tack them on to existing chores. We suggest routines for each, but these are simply standards to shoot for, not literal homework. To start, it’s…

ONE DAY I noticed an animal near the woods by my house. It wasn’t a skunk, an opossum, or a fox-in fact, it seemed to have no fur at all. Weeks later, I got a clear view of the critter: a big pink pig. I couldn’t imagine how a pig had strayed into our suburb, but she decided to move in. I left a bucket of water out, which she drank politely at first but then dumped to make a mud puddle. Soon she was seen wandering the neighborhood with her new bestie, a black Lab named Harley. Neighbors set up a pig-spotting page on Facebook, where we posted photos and videos of Porkchop, as we named her. Eventually, the sightings began causing traffic jams. We learned Porkchop was a…

My son was stationed in Korea, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him. So I baked a batch of his favorite cookies, packed them in a shoebox, wrapped the box, and sent it halfway around the world. When he came home on leave, I asked if he’d enjoyed the cookies. He gave me a quizzical look and said, “Mom, you sent me your red shoes.” -JOAN SHELTON Raleigh, North Carolina “Son, when the Marine Corps wants you to have a wife, you will be issued one.” -MARINE CORPS LT. GEN. LEWIS “CHESTY” PULLER (1898-1971) to a Marine who asked permission to be married It’s not news that seasoned Marines like to have fun with newbies. I had just landed on mess hall duty when my sergeant ordered me to double-time…

FROM THE WASHINGTON POST FOR THE MOST part, Hank, a two-year-old tan-and-white rescue cat, is a homebody—and for good reason. The one time he got out of his yard in Washington, DC, he managed to get stuck in a 60-foot-tall tree for five days and four nights with no food or water. Hank’s big adventure started last November 6. Delores Bushong, his 75-year-old owner, had just returned from a farmers market when she realized Hank hadn’t come in for his midday snack. She called his name, in alleys and streets around her home. As it got dark, she began to worry. Then she heard mewling, looked up, and spotted Hank, perched on a branch near the top of a neighbor’s tree. Bushong believes Hank got under a fence and then…

BY Reader’s Digest Readers A Treasured Friend I had just gone through three big life changes within nine months: a divorce after 32 years of marriage, a move, and receiving custody of my 22-month-old granddaughter. At the same time, an old college friend was diagnosed with a terminal illness and asked me to reach out to some of our classmates to let them know. One of them, Molly, was the first to our friend’s bedside. We hadn’t spoken in decades, but we kept in touch through the following weeks. It was very overwhelming to raise a toddler and adjust to the heartbreak and depression. One day, I came home to a gaily decorated box filled with birthday gifts for my granddaughter. It was from Molly. We received a similar box…

ANNISSA JOBB first limped into the office of Riam Shammaa, MD, a sports medicine doctor and pain specialist in Toronto, in 2017. Jobb had been working as an aide in long-term care facilities when her back pain first appeared about a decade earlier. The cause: an undiagnosed herniated disc, which had pinched a nerve. As the pain worsened, Jobb gritted her teeth and tried to keep going. Now she was des perate for help. “It’s been my calling in life, taking care of people,” says Jobb, now 55. Bu working with frail seniors involves a lot of lifting, bending, and pulling. “I had a drawer full of pain medication None of it was working. I’d snap,” she says. “My husband and I came close to getting divorced.” By November 2016,…

The Offer From Paramount+ “GANGSTER MOVIES ARE DEAD, ” an exec says to The Godfather producer Albert S. Ruddy (Miles Teller) while making the landmark gangster film. Dead, defunto, swimming with fishes—capisce? In this limited series, Paramount Studios revisits the famously hellish production of its beloved hit: a process of which real-life Ruddy once said “Every day of making The Godfather was the worst day in my life.” Everyone from mobster Joe Colombo to Frank Sinatra, who publicly berated Mario Puzo for writing washed-up warbler Johnny Fontane in his likeness, wanted the film whacked. But, like its inspiration, The Offer is a tale of the triumph of American ingenuity. Matthew Goode stars as producer Robert Evans, Dan Fogler as director Francis Ford Coppola, and Juno Temple as Ruddy’s right hand…

Fact or Fiction? MEDIUM Determine whether each statement is fact or fiction. To reveal the solution to the bonus question at the bottom, write the letters indicated by your responses in the corresponding numbered blanks. Turn the page upside down for the answers. BONUS QUESTION Which Sacramento-based Minor League Baseball team is affiliated with the San Francisco Giants? (Need help? Turn to “A Major Leaguer’s Second Chance at Life” on page 68.) Answers: 1. Fact. 2. Fiction; the Naval Academy has, or Notre Dame among non-military schools. 3. Fact; they get nutrients from the air. 4. Fiction; the Volga River is in Russia—it’s the Volta River in Africa. 5. Fact. 6. Fiction; it comes from the French m’aider, or “help me.” 7. Fiction; there is no official height limit. 8.…