作者： chenchen

Winner

Michelle Zhibing Zhou, 15, from Hong Kong, read the Science article, “Videos Show That Leeches Can Jump in Pursuit of Blood.” Here is her response:

Leeches! Bleh! Famed for their role in medieval medicine, they’re often dismissed as repulsive, blood-thirsty parasites. So, imagine my surprise and morbid curiosity when I stumbled upon an article that added insight into their world and abated some of my irrational fears.

Surprisingly, leeches reminded me of something very different: myself. When I have a craving, like for chocolate, I scurry to the store. Similarly, when motivated by their craving for blood, leeches are “provoked [into] acts of startling athleticism,” springing through the air, then splatting on the ground comically. Adding even more intrigue, the video included ground-breaking footage ending the age-old debate about whether leech-leaping was even possible. The finding sent ripples throughout the leech research community and shivers down my spine.

As with many things in life, the more you know about something the less scary it is. The article helped dissipate some of my fear and disgust, presenting leeches as being motivated by food (like me!), and with amusing behaviors. The article changed my perception of leeches from nightmare fuel to riveting little creatures.

Don’t get me wrong though, while leeches are endlessly captivating, being that, to them, I’m a tasty walking bag of blood, I don’t want them snacking on me in a tropical forest. I’ll stick to watching them from afar, behind a screen, and preferably while nibbling on a bar of chocolate.

Runners-Up

In alphabetical order by the writer’s first name.

Nazira Musabaeva on “After 12 Years of Reviewing Restaurants, I’m Leaving the Table”

Noa Riss on “‘Crown Jewels of the Jewish People’: Preserving Memories of the Holocaust”

Shi Yi Yang on “A Family Dinner with My Wife and Girlfriend”

Sissi Ma on “When It Comes to Food and Politics, Kamala Harris Is Riffing on the Recipe”

Honorable Mentions

Alex Ding on “The Youngest Pandemic Children Are Now in School, and Struggling”

Angirmaa Shinebaatar on “Cows Are the New Puppies”

Blanche Li on “The Most Important Writing Exercise I’ve Ever Assigned”

Erin Yoon on “The Jewelry Shiona Turini Never Takes Off”

Joshua Zhuang on “I Was Settling Into My Morning Commute on the 4 Train”

Lindsey Huang on “What Your Grocery Cart Says About You”

Sarah Guo on “Defeated by A.I., a Legend in the Board Game Go Warns: Get Ready for What’s Next”

扫码查看夏季阅读比赛第 7 周更多获奖论文+导师亮点评析

Winner

Alex Cox, 16, from Bethesda, Md., responded to an article headlined “For Older People Who Are Lonely, Is the Solution a Robot Friend?” She wrote:

Is friendship becoming obsolete?

That’s what I wondered as I read this article, a sick feeling swelling in my gut. Many older people depend on ElliQ’s synthetic friendship. But I share Professor Porteny’s concern that these people can’t “enjoy the beautiful reciprocity that emerges from social interactions.” ElliQ provides something that almost mimics genuine human companionship, but is “almost” enough? If so, what’s the cost of trading real friendship for the artificial variety, especially for people nearing the end of their lives?

I spent last week with my grandfather, who’s almost 96. We had countless conversations over meals whose recipes my grandmother left us about everything from his former job as a NASA engineer to the German dialect he brought across the ocean fleeing World War II. That week, we did more than talk: we connected; we learned from each other; we united generations; we bridged worlds. The most fundamentally human action, after all, is to share.

What if instead of me, he’d spent the week with a robot? Something that could compute but not learn, hear but not listen, respond but not reciprocate? What if he’d died with nobody to share his rich, beautiful story?

Elderly people deserve companions. But they also deserve to have their recipes remembered, their dialects learned, and their stories told after their deaths. They deserve a human. As much as ElliQ can do, it will never be able to be one.

Runners-Up

In alphabetical order by the writer’s first name.

Anthony Babu on “Wildlife Protections Take a Back Seat to SpaceX’s Ambitions”

Cailyn Liu on “Welcome to Stucktopia”

Celina Chen on “What Your Grocery Cart Says About You”

Haiyang Zeng on “I’m a Psychiatrist. Here’s How I Talk to Transgender Youth and Their Families About Gender Identity.”

Joedie Sta. Cruz on “I’m a Psychiatrist. Here’s How I Talk to Transgender Youth and Their Families About Gender Identity.”

Honorable Mentions

Alex Xu on “Elon Musk’s Plan to Put a Million Earthlings on Mars in 20 Years”

Charlotte on “For Biden, a Race Against Time”

Chloe Jiang on “A Feline Scientist Explains Why Your Cat Might Actually Like You”

Ella Gentile on “Shelley Duvall, Star of ‘The Shining’ and ‘Nashville,’ Dies at 75”

Gabbi on “What We Know About the Assassination Attempt Against Trump”

扫码查看夏季阅读比赛第六周更多获奖论文+导师亮点评析

Winner

来自加拿大安大略省的14岁女孩安妮·马马（Annie Ma）回应了歌手德萨（Dessa）在《纽约时报》杂志上的文章 “Who Am I Without My Voice?”

Runners-Up

Qiaorui Zhang on “What Does Anxiety Look Like? How Pixar Created the ‘Inside Out 2’ Villain”

Emma Reznik on “Defeated by A.I., a Legend in the Board Game Go Warns: Get Ready for What’s Next”

Henry Hudson on “Covid Cases Are Rising Again. Here’s What to Know.”

Jianxi Wu on “Is Xenophobia on Chinese Social Media Teaching Real-World Hate?”

Madison Perreault on “Pattern of Brain Damage is Pervasive in Navy SEALs Who Died by Suicide”

Phineas Collins on “Justices Give Trump Substantial Immunity”

Sophie Lee on “My Son Was in a Pyschiatric Hospital. Why Was I Celebrating?”

Vivian W. Chang on “Along the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a Struggle to Make a Living"

Honorable Mentions

Ethan Wu on “Our Pandemic Puppy Brought Pure Joy. Losing Him, Pure Heartbreak."

Anne on “I Saw My Anxiety Reflected in ‘Inside Out 2.’ It Floored Me.”

Christina Htay on “The Angst and the Joy of Celebrating Pride Month in a Small Town”

Lara on “Are We in the Middle of a Spiritual Awakening?"

Lena Singh on “Stampede at Religious Gathering in India Kills More Than 100”

Samira Kennerly on “When Your Identical Twin Wins a Grammy”

Zihao Ye on “Can I Use A.I. to Grade My Students’ Papers?”

扫码查看夏季阅读比赛第五周更多获奖论文+导师亮点评析

每年夏天，在为期 10 周的时间里，世界各地的青少年都会受邀回答以下问题：“本周《纽约时报》的什么内容最让您感兴趣？” 以下是最受官方喜欢的答案：

夏季阅读比赛第 9 周获胜者：‘On Stonehenge and Mispronouncing ‘Kamala’’

夏季阅读比赛第 9 周获胜者：‘A Battleground in an Intergenerational Conflict’

夏季阅读比赛第 8 周获胜者：‘The More You Know About Something the Less Scary It Is’

夏季阅读比赛第 7 周获胜者：‘The More You Know About Something the Less Scary It Is’

夏季阅读比赛第 6 周获胜者：‘Is Friendship Becoming Obsolete?’

夏季阅读比赛第 5 周获胜者：‘A Voice Can Change You’

夏季阅读比赛第 4 周获胜者:‘As a Muslim, Those Words Pierce My Soul’

夏季阅读比赛第 3 周获胜者:‘First Someone Dies, Then Everyone Expects Us to Eat’

夏季阅读比赛第 2 周获胜者:‘Mom, I’m Sorry’

夏季阅读比赛第 1 周获胜者：‘Costco, Don’t Give Up on America as a Nation of Readers’

这封信由 Ridge High School in Basking Ridge, N.J. 16 岁的 Anya Wang 撰写，是学习网络学生公开信竞赛的前 9 名获奖者之一，我们收到了 8,065 份参赛作品。

Dear The New York Times Learning Network,

I’m not sure if you imagined that someone would write a letter to you when you announced that we could write an open letter “to anyone you like.” Well, whether or not you did, here I am.

Don’t get me wrong. I admire your contests and resources deeply. But after three years of pouring hours into your contests yet receiving nothing but a copy-pasted rejection email in response, I want to bring a facet of your contests into scrutiny. A facet that you may have never thought twice about.

That is, your policy that you do not provide feedback on submitted essays.

I get it. You received 12,592 submissions for your last editorial contest. But after all, you’ve named yourself the Learning Network. Feedback is how students grow. It’s how we learn. Without it, every time I’ve received a “You lost!” email from you, I’ve felt sorely disappointed and lost, not knowing where to look or what to change to improve my writing.

And I know that I’m not alone. In fact, your contests leave the vast majority of your participants stranded in the dark. In last year’s editorial contest, the chance of getting recognized — not even winning — was a measly 1.199 percent. Winning was bestowed upon just 0.087 percent of your participants — a rate almost 40 times lower than Harvard’s class of 2027 acceptance rate.

You want to be prestigious. You want to be selective. But what you’re creating for the thousands of hopeful teens who enter your contests — nearly 100,000 in just your editorial contests alone — is not a network for learning and growth. Instead, you’re creating a cutthroat competition where feedback and encouragement are given at a rate even below what the Ivy League has deemed ethical. It’s discouraging and unresponsive — a culture far from conducive to learning.

Additionally, you’ve commonly mentioned a Round 4 in your recognized finalists, but never explained how Rounds 3, 2 and 1 work. I desperately want you to tell us more. What if you discreetly told each participant which round their essay reached, and then shared some general thresholds that prevented essays from proceeding to the next round?

I hope that won’t be too logistically difficult — you probably already need to sort essays into different rounds to determine contest winners. I also hope that you won’t balk at the supposed decrease in prestige such a change might bring. You’re a global leader in journalism. You know how things are for teens right now. You know, with the world changing at breakneck speed, with everything from A.I. to full-blown wars flung at us, how sharply teen voices demand to be heard.

Don’t leave us in the dark. Shine a ray of light into our writing, and prepare all teen voices to take the stage.

Signed,
A “Loser”

Works Cited

Harvard College Admissions and Financial Aid. Admissions Statistics | Harvard. Harvard College, 2024.

Schulten, Katherine. How to Write an Open Letter: A Guide to Our Opinion Contest. The New York Times, 19 March 2024.

The New York Times Learning Network. Open Letters: Our New Opinion-Writing Contest. The New York Times, 12 March 2024.

The New York Times Learning Network. The Israel-Hamas War: A Forum for Young People to React. The New York Times, 16 Oct. 2023.

The New York Times Learning Network. The Winners of Our 10th Annual Student Editorial Contest. The New York Times, 29 June 2023.

The New York Times Learning Network. What Students Are Saying About Learning to Write in the Age of A.I. The New York Times, 25 Jan. 2024.

这封信由印第安纳州布卢明顿市 Bloomington 高中 17 岁的奥利弗·博洪 （Oliver Bohon） 撰写，是学习网络学生公开信竞赛的前 9 名获奖者之一，我们收到了 8,065 份参赛作品。

Eli Lilly,

As a Type 1 diabetic living in Indiana (where you’re headquartered), I’ve known your name for a long time. Every meal I have your insulin delivered into my bloodstream, something I’ll need my entire life. But I’ve come to associate your name with frustration, not gratitude.

You, alongside Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, control 90-plus percent of the insulin market worldwide. You posture about capping costs, providing aid, serving the people first. These claims make you look great — you’re doing all you can to aid your patients.

Except you aren’t.

Frederick Banting, Charles Best, John Macleod and James Collip helped to discover and purify insulin in 1921. In 1923, Banting, Best and Collip sold their patents on the drug for $1 each.

The reason? As Banting said, “Insulin belongs to the world.”

Yet so many people today still find themselves on short supply of that miracle drug — rationing it, fighting with insurance over it, buying it from third parties.

What happened? We’re no longer in the days of purifying pig pancreas extract. We have synthetic biology! We can mass produce insulin — more than we’d ever need — and it’s cheap, easy, and efficient. It’s the simplest business imaginable. Think about it — I, alongside countless others, can’t survive without insulin. I’m reliant on you. So you got to work approaching my life like an economics class — there’s always demand, so why not increase prices?

But (eventually) political pressure started, and for once you seemed threatened. So, about a year ago, you announced that you’d limit the cost of a vial of non-branded insulin to $25. In the announcement, you boasted about how this is the lowest price since 1999.

The lowest price since 1999 still has a profit margin of 417 percent (at $6 per vial). Obviously, you’re a company — you exist to profit. But to claim you’re doing any charity with this is a farce. You gouged prices for decades, cut them down once any pressure was applied, and then acted a hero for it. Even the price cut wasn’t selfless! It helped you avoid millions of dollars of rebates under the American Rescue Act. You did the bare minimum and nothing more.

There’s an issue when a life-or-death drug can be played like a stock — where companies are incentivized to gouge the prices of their drugs for the patient while paying their C.E.O. $26.5 million per year.

I don’t have any power. I can’t boycott insulin, nor undo the pain you’ve caused. What I hope to share with this letter is that I’m tired. I’m tired of the Eli Lilly name being associated with greed over patient care. I’m tired and frustrated, and I think people have the right to understand why, and to determine whether such a company deserves support.

Oliver Bohon, a diabetic

Works Cited

100 Years of Insulin. Diabetes UK.

Feldman, William B, and Benjamin N Rome. The Rise and Fall of the Insulin Pricing Bubble. Vol. 6. JAMA Network Open. 14 June 2023.

Knox, Ryan. Insulin Insulated: Barriers to Competition and Affordability in the United States Insulin Market. Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Volume 7, Issue 1, January-June 2020.

Lilly Cuts Insulin Prices by 70% and Caps Patient Insulin Out-of-Pocket Costs at $35 per Month. Eli Lilly and Company New Release. 1 March 2023.

Robbins, Rebecca. Eli Lilly Says It Will Cut the Price of Insulin. The New York Times, 1 March 2023.