It's the birthday of E.M. Forster, the novelist born in London, 1879. He published A Room with a View and Howards End. And then wrote nothing for 14 years, while he worked for the Red Cross in Egypt during World War I and traveled to India. In 1924 he published A Passage to India, which many consider his masterpiece and though he lived for almost 50 more years, he never published another novel.

Two in three school-age children – 1.3 billion in all – do not have internet access at home, and it’s preventing them from learning vital skills they need to thrive, the UN said on Tuesday.
The findings, uncovered in a joint report by UN Children’s Fund UNICEF and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), also highlighted a similar lack of access for 15 to 24 year-olds, with more than six in 10 of them lacking web access.
The massive number 'is more than a digital gap – it is a digital canyon', said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF Executive Director.
She said that this lack of connectivity doesn’t just limit children and young people’s ability to connect online, it isolates them from work and prevents them from competing in the modern economy.
Globally, 58 per cent of school-age children from wealthiest households have an internet connection at home, compared with only 16 per cent from the poorest, the UN report found.

It is the anniversary of the Euro, 1999. On this day 11 European countries agreed to a common currency. The Euro had replaced the French Franc, the German Mark, the Italian Lira and so forth. Sweden, Denmark, and Great Britain opted not to use it.

Carl Sandburg was born in Galesburg, Illinois, on January 6, 1878. His parents had emigrated to America from Sweden. The Sandburgs were very poor; Carl left school at the age of thirteen to work odd jobs, from laying bricks to dishwashing, in order to support his family.
Sandburg worked his way through school, where he attracted the attention of a professor, who not only encouraged Sandburg's writing, but paid for the publication of his first volume of poetry.
After college, Sandburg moved to Milwaukee, where he worked as an advertising writer and a newspaper reporter. There he met and married Lillian Steichen, sister of the photographer Edward Steichen. The Sandburgs soon moved to Chicago, where Carl became an editorial writer for the Chicago Daily News.
He established his reputation as a poet with Chicago Poems (1916), and then Cornhuskers (1918). In the twenties, he started some of his most ambitious projects, including his study of Abraham Lincoln.
In 1928 the Sandburgs moved to Harbert, Michigan, and in 1943, seeking a mild climate, the family moved again, this time to Connemara, a farm in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where Sandburg lived the rest of his life, He worked as a farmer and writer, raising goats and singing folksongs.
Carl Sandburg died on July 22, 1967.

It is the Feast of the Epiphany celebrating the day when the three Magi visited Jesus and gave him the gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
James Joyce’s famous short story The Dead is set at a party for the Feast of the Epiphany. The story that ends: 'His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.'

Zora Neale Hurston was born on Jan. 7, 1891, in Notasulga, Alabama. Her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, when she was still a toddler. Growing up in this culturally affirming setting in an eight-room house on five acres of land, Zora had a relatively happy childhood . When Hurston was 13, her mother died and her father sent her to a private school in Jacksonville.
Hurston began her undergraduate studies at Howard University but then left after a few years, unable to support herself. She was later offered a scholarship to Barnard College where she received her B.A. in anthropology in 1927.
Shortly before entering Barnard, Hurston became one of the leaders of the literary renaissance happening in Harlem, New York, producing the literary magazine Fire!! along with Langston Hughes.
She published her masterwork, Their Eyes Were Watching God, in 1937.
Hurston never received the financial rewards she deserved. So when she died on Jan. 28, 1960--at age 69, after suffering a stroke--her neighbors in Fort Pierce, Florida, had to take up a collection for her February 7 funeral. The collection didn't yield enough to pay for a headstone, however, and Hurston was buried in a grave that remained unmarked until 1973.

And it was on this day in 1610 Galileo described his discovery of three of Jupiter’s moons, which was important evidence in support of the Copernican theory that the Earth went around the Sun.

RCA Victor introduced the 45-rpm record on this date in 1949. The 78 had been around since the late 1880s. The 45 was smaller so you could fit more records into one jukebox and so it became popular with teenagers. And the rise of the 45-single coincided with the rise of rock-and-roll music. The 33-rpm did not come along until 1948.
Picture of 45-rpm record

1922, on this day insulin was first used successfully on a human being, so 13-year-old Leonard Thompson being treated for diabetes at Toronto General Hospital.

Jack London was born on January 12, 1876 in San Francisco. He was deserted by his father and raised in Oakland by his mother.
London's youth was marked by poverty. At the age of ten he became an avid reader, and borrowed books from the Oakland Public Library.
After leaving school at the age of 14, London worked as a seaman, rode in freight trains as a hobo and adopted socialistic views as a member of the protest armies of the unemployed.
Without having much formal education, London spent much time in public libraries, and at the age of 19 was admitted to the University of California in Berkeley. During this period he had already started to write.
London left the university before the year was over and went to seek a fortune in the Klondike gold rush of 1897. His attempt was unsuccessful. He spent the winter near Dawson City. In the spring he returned to San Francisco his notebook full of plans for stories. For the rest of 1898 London again tried to earn his living by writing.
In 1901 London ran unsuccessfully on the Socialist party ticket for mayor of Oakland. He steadily produced novels, nonfiction, and short stories, becoming one of the most popular authors in his lifetime.
In 1902 London went to England, where he studied the living conditions in East End and working class areas of the capital city.
London had purchased in 1910 a large tract of land near Glen Ellen in Sonoma County, and devoted his energy and money improving and enlarging his Beauty Ranch. He also traveled widely and reported on the Mexican revolution.
Debts, alcoholism, illness, and fear of losing his creativity darkened the author's last years. He died on November 22, 1916.

The baguette is a long, narrow tube-shaped bread. It is made of simple ingredients: water, flour, yeast and salt. It dates back a few hundred years in its early form. But, the baguette grew wildly popular during the 1920s and became a staple in French kitchens.
However, France’s cultural agency has warned that the country’s bread making tradition is failing. About 400 bakeries have closed every year since 1972, the agency reported.
Buying and eating baguettes is a “daily ritual” in France. Ten billion are sold in the country each year.
The French government will start a yearly baguette event, called “Open Bakehouse Day” to expand public understanding of the bread making tradition.
Asma Farhat is a baker at Julien’s Bakery near the Champs-Elysee in Paris. She said, “You can’t have a proper meal without a baguette."

SHAYAN: When we came to Australia, there was no soccer on the road after school. The streets were quiet and empty. The landscape was flat. It felt weird.
When we moved from Iran to Wagga Wagga five years ago, it was difficult to make conversations and talk the way I used to - so freely and easily in Persian, without needing to concentrate too much and be anxious.
English is not my first language, and not knowing it created uncertainties in my mind, like ‘how I will make friends’, ‘what will school be like’?
Lunch and recess were hard at first. It felt lonely at times.
But my parents inspired me to focus on the opportunities that life in Australia held, rather than dwelling on the hard things. I was playing in a soccer league and teammates turned into friends.
As my English improved things changed. I started getting excited about different subjects at school. I love modern history.
MALE TEACHER VOICE: “Can anybody tell me some of the important economic factors that are happening at this point between those two countries? Shayan! You’ve got your hand up again! This is great!”
SHAYAN: I’ve realised how important Persian cultural history and language is to my identity. I stay in touch with friends and family in Iran regularly. And when I get home from school, I only speak Persian with my parents. As we talk there’s a flow onto the language that is hard to describe. I feel like I can just go on and on in Persian.
It feels different when I'm speaking English to a friend; not only because it's a different language but because it's two different cultures and worlds. And I live in both.
I call Australia home now. But I feel lucky that I’ve held onto my culture.
I think those from different backgrounds, especially in rural areas, should keep learning and not forget their first language, as it shapes a massive part of them. Post-migration people tend to let this valuable asset slip away, especially in rural areas with less diversity and opportunities for communication in different languages. I won’t forget my first language. I’m going to keep expressing myself in Persian - It’s part of me.

Susan Sontag was born in New York City on January 16, 1933. But she grew up in Tucson, Arizona, and Los Angeles California, and entered the University of California at Berkeley at the age of fifteen.
At the age of seventeen she got married, but divorced in the late 1950s. With her son she moved to Boston and continued her studies at Harvard and later at the University of Paris.
From 1960 to 1964 she was an instructor in the religion department of Columbia University, and then a writer-in-residence for one year at Rutgers.
As a novelist Sontag started her career at the age of 30 with "The Benefactor".
In the bohemian New York scene of the early sixties, Sontag swiftly acquired a reputation as the radical-liberal American woman.
In 1992 Sontag published her third novel, "The Volcano Lover", which became a bestseller. In addition to essays and novels, Sontag wrote screenplays for experimental films and directed for the theatre.
Sontag died of complications of leukemia in Manhattan on December 28, 2004.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. His father died probably in 1810, and his mother died in 1811, leaving three children. Edgar was taken into the home of the Richmond merchant John Allan. Never legally adopted, Poe took Allan's name for his middle name.
Poe attended the University of Virginia from 1826-27, but was expelled for not paying his gambling debts. After winning a prize of $50 for the short story "MS Found in a Bottle", he started a career as a staff member of various magazines.
In 1836, Poe married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm, who died five years later. He addressed the famous poem "Annabel Lee", written in 1849, to her. After the death of his wife, Poe began to lose his struggle with drinking and drugs. The dark poem of lost love, 'The Raven,' brought Poe national fame, when it appeared in 1845.
Poe suffered from depression and madness, and he attempted suicide in 1848. In September of the following year, he disappeared for three days after a birthday party. He turned up in delirious conditions and died on October 7th, 1849.

It's the birthday of Patricia Highsmith, born in Fort Worth, Texas (1921). She wrote suspense novels in which unspeakable crimes turn out to have been committed by mild-mannered people.
Her first novel Strangers on a Train, was made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock, but the rest of her books were too morally ambiguous, even for him. Good characters were not necessarily rewarded, and murderers were not necessarily punished.
Patricia Highsmith's work sold much better in Europe, so she spent most of the rest of her life there. She died in 1995 after which her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley was made into a movie.

It was on this day in 1961, Robert Frost recited his poem "The Gift Outright" at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy. Robert Frost who was 87 years old; he had written a new poem for the occasion, entitled "Dedication." But the ribbon in his typewriter was rather faint, so he could barely see it, because the sun was in his eyes. So instead he recited from memory "The Gift Outright."

In 1525 on this day, a group of Swiss Protestants, known as the Swiss Brethren formed their first congregation. They were under the leadership of a Dutch minister named Menno Simons (1496–1561) and they took their common name, the Mennonites, from his first name. They came to this country to Pennsylvania in 1683. And the United States now has the largest Mennonite population in the world.

When reading texts of several hundred words or more, learning is generally more successful when it’s on paper than onscreen. A cascade of research confirms this finding.
The benefits of print particularly shine through when experimenters move from posing simple tasks – like identifying the main idea in a reading passage – to ones that require mental abstraction – such as drawing inferences from a text. Print reading also improves the likelihood of recalling details – like “What was the color of the actor’s hair?” – and remembering where in a story events occurred – “Did the accident happen before or after the political coup?”
Studies show that both grade school students and college students assume they’ll get higher scores on a comprehension test if they have done the reading digitally. And yet, they actually score higher when they have read the material in print before being tested.
Educators need to be aware that the method used for standardized testing can affect results. Studies of Norwegian tenth graders and U.S. third through eighth graders report higher scores when standardized tests were administered using paper. In the U.S. study, the negative effects of digital testing were strongest among students with low reading achievement scores, English language learners and special education students.
Both high school and college students overwhelmingly judged reading on paper as better for concentration, learning and remembering than reading digitally.
The discrepancies between print and digital results are partly related to paper’s physical properties. With paper, there is a literal laying on of hands, along with the visual geography of distinct pages. People often link their memory of what they’ve read to how far into the book it was or where it was on the page.
People approach digital texts with a mindset suited to casual social media, and devote less mental effort than when they are reading print.
A primary reason for the shift to audio and video is students refusing to do assigned reading. While the problem is hardly new, a 2015 study of more than 18,000 college seniors found only 21% usually completed all their assigned course reading.
Psychologists have demonstrated that when adults read news stories or transcripts of fiction, they remember more of the content than if they listen to identical pieces.
Researchers found similar results with university students reading an article versus listening to a podcast of the text. A related study confirms that students do more mind-wandering when listening to audio than when reading.
Students “read” the videos more superficially because they associate video with entertainment, not learning.
The collective research shows that digital media have common features and user practices that can constrain learning. These include diminished concentration, an entertainment mindset, a propensity to multitask, lack of a fixed physical reference point, reduced use of annotation and less frequent reviewing of what has been read, heard or viewed.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST: ChatGPT is a buzzy new AI technology that can write research papers or poems that come out sounding like a real person did the work. You can even train this bot to write the way you do. Some teachers are understandably concerned, but one graduate student has an idea of how to help. Janet Woojeong Lee, from NPR's Education Desk, has this report.
JANET WOOJEONG LEE, BYLINE: Teachers around the country don't know what to do. Since ChatGPT launched in November, many say they're worried this powerful technology could do their students' homework. Some school districts, including New York City and Los Angeles, have blocked access. But Edward Tian thinks that's the wrong way to go.
EDWARD TIAN: I'm not for these blanket bans on ChatGPT usage because that does really nothing. Students can get around it, just like you can use ChatGPT on your Wi-Fi at home. LEE: Tian is a 22-year-old computer science student at Princeton University. Just a month after ChatGPT got teachers worried, he built a bot to help them. It's called GPTZero. You can copy and paste any text, and it'll analyze each sentence, each word and judge how likely it is that a real person or a fake person wrote it.
TIAN: And teachers can, you know, make their own decision of, like, wow, this essay is, like, 100% ChatGPT-written, or this essay is, like, uses ChatGPT where it really made sense to help influence thought. That works. Teachers can make their own informed decisions.
LEE: Tian says having a handle on what is and isn't written by AI, down to the percentage of an essay, could help teachers who are intimidated by this new technology feel more in charge. There are other AI detection tools out there, too. Tian wrote his as a winter break passion project. He shared it on Twitter and was surprised to hear quickly from many teachers and even college officials who wanted to learn more.
TIAN: My own high school principal reached out. My own high school English teacher, Ms. Studka, reached out, and admissions officers have reached out saying they're interested.
LEE: Tian is now building a community of educators and students who want to figure out what to do with AI in the classroom. He believes instead of cheating, AI might be able to help teach and learn responsibly.
TIAN: Responsibly means somewhere in the middle. It can't be, like, students don't write any homework and don't do any homework anymore. But it also can't be, like, OK, we completely can't use these new technologies and are just ignoring them. So it has to be somewhere in the middle.
LEE: Students should learn how to use AI to their benefit, Tian says, because the technology is here to stay.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City on January 24, 1862 into an aristocratic New York family with ancestry dating back 300 years. Her role as a daughter of society was to learn the mannerisms and rituals expected of well bred young women in those days. Later she would rebel against this role but as a child she was schooled at home and had the privilege of using her father's extensive library. She began, therefore, at an early age to read extensively.
In 1885, at twenty-three years of age, she married Edward Robbins Wharton, who was twelve years her senior. They divorced in 1913.
She then traveled extensively and finally settled in France where she helped untiringly with refugees in Paris during the First World War. She actually returned only once again in her lifetime to the United States to accept the Pulitzer prize for her novel, The Age of Innocence, the first woman ever to receive the prize.
In Paris she held salon where the gifted intellectuals of her time gathered to discuss and share ideas.
Wharton continued writing until her death in France on August 11, 1937.

California gold rush began on this day in 1848. When a carpenter named James Marshall took his crew to build a sawmill for a man named John Sutter, along the Sacramento River. He had diverted water so he could work on the sawmill. And he looked where the water had been and he found flecks of gold.

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST: Well, as we have been reporting, Monterey Park is not the only mass shooting America has suffered this month or even this week. Just since the weekend, Monterey Park, Oakland, Half Moon Bay, all mass shootings that took the lives of at least 19 people, collectively. And that is just in California.
ARI SHAPIRO, HOST: If the number of lives lost to guns in this country feels overwhelming and extreme, well, the data back that up. We're going to take a moment now to lay out some numbers that help paint the picture of gun violence in America. It's the only country in the world with more civilian-owned guns than people, with about 120 guns for every 100 Americans.
KELLY: There is still a week left in January, and there have already been 39 mass shootings, from coast to coast.
SHAPIRO: So far, more than 2,800 people have died by gun violence this year, the majority by suicide.
KELLY: Nothing cuts childhood short more than guns in America. It is the leading cause of death for kids here. Recent years have been particularly awful. More than 3,500 children were killed by guns in 2021.
SHAPIRO: No group of people in America is spared, but Black people bear the heaviest burden of gun deaths. Black men and boys, aged 15 to 34, are 21 times more likely than their white counterparts to die because of gun violence based on one recent analysis.
KELLY: And the percentage of people who used guns to defend themselves from violent crimes, less than 1%.
SHAPIRO: Yet more Americans are buying more firearms year after year after year.

IFA: I'll never forget what I was told in my first job interview.
FEMININE VOICE: "You're too soft-spoken. Umm… We're looking for someone confident, with experience."
IFA: She listed everything I wasn't. I went home ashamed of myself. I thought being an adult meant independence and a source of income to… I don't know, keep surviving? I thought I eventually had to be an architect or graphic designer; get a 'proper' job.
My friends already had jobs while studying. I felt left behind.
I grew up watching cartoons and anime. I'd read manga and pour over illustrations in picture books. I've always preferred slice-of-life stories over action or fantasy.
Being an animator or an illustrator wasn't talked about much at school, but it's all I thought about. I'd draw characters in stolen moments, delving into a world of my own creation, a place I felt happiest.
When I flunked that job interview, I was crushed. So, I decided to focus on what I knew and did well: creating art.
I found a grants program for emerging artists: a three-month placement with an arts organisation and funding to create work. I applied and got it! I published and sold my first zine, collaborated with a friend in an exhibition for young creatives and — I held my first solo exhibition!
For me, being an adult means coming to terms with your younger self. I love creating the stories little me would have loved to see. Art is my form of escapism; where I express my emotions and process things; where I'm most confident, where I can be everything I am.

Commemorating 75 years since the liberation of the notorious Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, independent UN rights experts said that "urgent action" is needed to combat mounting antisemitism.
In a statement issued ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, they said that States around the world are failing to sufficiently counter antisemitic violence, discrimination, and hostility within their societies or to ensure that their populations are appropriately educated about the Holocaust.
The UN experts pointed to Toulouse, Pittsburg, Brussels, Poway and Jersey City as "just some of the places where Jews have been murdered in recent years."
The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which affirms and protects the rights of all, is a key legacy of the Nazi Holocaust, when around six million Jews, alongside other targeted groups, were systematically and brutally murdered.

It was on this day in 1754 that the word "serendipity" was first coined. A word defined by Merriam-Webster as "the faculty or phenomenon of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for." And it was recently listed by a translation company in the U.K. as one of the 10 most difficult words to translate in the English language. Other words on that list included plenipotentiary, gobbledegook, poppycock, whimsy, spam, and kitsch.
The word "serendipity" was first used by Horace Walpole in a letter to an English friend. Serendipity the fortuitous finding of some wonderful thing you didn't know you were looking for. And the word came from the word "serendip," in a fairy tale called "The Three Princes of Serendip." "Serendip" was the Persian word for Sri Lanka.
There were many wonderful things found accidentally including Kellogg's Corn Flakes, invented through serendipity, Charles Goodyear's vulcanization of rubber, inkjet printers, and Silly Putty, the Slinky, and chocolate chip cookies.
Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming accidentally after he had left for vacation without disinfecting some of his petri dishes filled with bacteria cultures; when he got back to his lab, he found that the penicillium mold had killed the bacteria.
Viagra was developed to treat hypertension and angina pectoris; it didn't do such a good job at those things, but researchers found during the first phase of clinical trials, that it was good for something else.
The principle of radioactivity, was found when researchers were looking for something else. And X-rays and infrared radiation.
Julius Comroe said, "Serendipity is looking in a haystack for a needle and discovering a farmer's daughter." And Wiktionary lists serendipity's antonym, the opposite of serendipity, as "Murphy's law" and "perfect storm."

ChatGPT launched last November as part of a larger set of technologies developed by the San Francisco-based company OpenAI.
It is part of a new generation of AI systems that can have a discussion and create written work. It can even produce new images and video based on what it has learned from a large database of digital books, online writings and other media.
But unlike previous AI tools known as “large language models,” ChatGPT is available for free to anyone on the internet. It is also designed to be more user-friendly. It works like a written conversation between the AI system and the person asking it questions. Millions of people have played with the tool over the past month. They used it to write poems or songs. Some tried to trick it into making mistakes. Others used it to write email. All of those requests are helping it to get smarter.
Like similar systems, ChatGPT can produce strong writing. But that does not mean what it says is factual or makes sense.
Its launch came with little guidance for how to use it. But the program will admit when it is wrong. It will also question “incorrect premises” and reject requests meant to bring about offensive answers. Its popularity has led its creators to try to lower some people's expectations.
Sam Altman is the head of OpenAI. He said on Twitter in December that ChatGPT is very limited, but good enough at some things to make people think it is great. He added that it should not be used for “anything important right now.”
Many school systems in the U.S. are still deciding how to set policies on the use of AI programs and how they can be used. The New York City education department said it is restricting use of ChatGPT because it is worried about negative impacts on student learning, as well as “concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content.” But there is no stopping a student from using ChatGPT from home or on a personal device.
Jenna Lyle is a spokesperson for New York schools. She said the tool may be able to provide quick and easy answers to questions. But she told The Associated Press: “it does not build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”
When VOA asked ChatGPT whether the program could be used to write school papers, it said that using it for writing papers is “cheating” and does not help the students. ChatGPT then provided a very similar answer to Lyle’s saying, “using such a tool doesn't build critical-thinking and problem-solving skills which are essential for academic and lifelong success.”
The Associated Press asked ChatGPT how to know if something was written by a human or AI. The program said, “To determine if something was written by a human or AI, you can look for the absence of personal experiences or emotions.” It noted that AI writings could also contain unnecessary words or repeated sentences.
In a human-written statement, OpenAI told the AP that it plans to work with educators as it learns how people are experimenting with ChatGPT in the real world. “We don’t want ChatGPT to be used for misleading purposes in schools or anywhere else, so we’re already developing mitigations to help anyone identify text generated by that system,” the company said.

Norman Mailer was born in Long Branch, New Jersey, on January 31, 1923, but he was raised in Brooklyn, New York.
Mailer's first literary effort was a 250-page story, called 'Invasion From Mars', which he wrote at the age of nine in notebooks. In 1939 he graduated from Boys High School and then studied at Harvard University.
During World War II Mailer was a sergeant in the United States Army. He wanted to go to Europe and be in the first wave of invasion troops, and was disappointed when he was sent to the South Pacific. In 1946 he was discharged, and the next year he enrolled at the Sorbonne. The Naked and Dead was written in fifteen months. It was published when Mailer was just 25, and made him world famous. Subsequent novels did not receive similar respect.
In the mid-1950s Mailer started to gain fame as an anti-establishment essayist. His outspoken style led him in the 1970s into collision course with the feminist movement. Mailer supported the Persian Gulf War for patriotic reasons in 1991, feeling that the United States was in a bad state and needed a war.
Mailer died on November 10, 2007 in Manhattan.