read简单

If, like most business people, you spend your life dashing from office to plane, train to home, boardroom to washroom, what you really need to do is stay in more, sit down — and read a book.

如果你像大多数商务人士一样，一辈子都在奔波——从办公室到飞机，从火车到家里，从会议室到洗手间——那么你真正需要做的是多待在家里，坐下来——读一本书。

Read fiction.

读小说吧。

And just read a single poem. In his Oxford lectures, Seamus Heaney argued that a poem draws a picture of reality, a “glimpsed alternative” that sets up a contradiction with your own, in ways little and large. The negotiation, between you and it, is the heart of the matter. What does the poet see that you don’t? What does the difference mean? It could be one of the best conversations you ever have. Forget self-help books; reading is self-help in action.

再读一首诗就好。谢默斯·希尼在牛津的讲座中提出，一首诗描绘了一幅现实图景，即一种“瞥见的另一种可能”，它在大大小小的方面与你自己的现实形成矛盾。你与诗之间的协商才是问题的核心。诗人看到了什么你没看到的东西？这种差异意味着什么？这可能是你一生中最好的对话之一。忘掉那些自助类书籍吧；阅读本身就是付诸行动的自助。

But for the most part, this isn’t what the business community does. I have yet to meet a chief executive who reads regularly. Many skip newspapers, and magazines are a stretch. They don’t have time, they say. It’s inefficient; they can get the information they need from those around them. At a pinch, they might pick up a business book before a long flight, in the hope that, like a cookbook, it will provide a foolproof recipe. Some are drawn to what I think of as “business car crash” books — the stories of Theranos, Purdue, or WeWork. But outside those narrow pools of interest, a vast ocean awaits, bountiful with simmering ideas, mental adventure and imaginative refreshment.

但在大多数情况下，商界人士并不这样做。我还从未见过一位经常阅读的首席执行官。许多人不看报纸，杂志对他们来说也很勉强。他们说自己没有时间。阅读效率太低；他们可以从身边的人那里获得所需的信息。实在不得已时，他们可能会在长途飞行前拿起一本商业书籍，希望它能像食谱一样提供万无一失的秘诀。有些人被我所说的“商业车祸”类书籍所吸引——比如Theranos、普渡或WeWork的故事。但在这些狭小的兴趣池之外，一片浩瀚的海洋正等待着你，那里满是酝酿中的思想、心灵的冒险和想象力的焕新。

I first discovered the Napoleonic cryptographic battle a few years ago when I was reading Sir Charles Oman’s epic History of the Peninsular War.

几年前，我在阅读查尔斯·欧曼爵士的鸿篇巨制《半岛战争史》时，第一次发现了拿破仑时代的密码战。

I was keen to read more, but was surprised to find that Oman’s appendix, published in 1914, was the only considered thing that had been written about this secret war.

我很想读到更多相关内容，却惊讶地发现，欧曼1914年出版的这篇附录是唯一一篇经过深思熟虑写就的关于这场秘密战争的文字。

It is increasingly easy to read donkeys’ DNA sequences.

解读驴的DNA序列变得越来越容易。

It sends a mixed message, and your counterpart gets to choose what signals to read.

它传递出矛盾的信息，而对方就可以选择去解读哪些信号。

Look up Homo sapiens in the “Red List” of threatened species of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and you will read: “Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline.”

在世界自然保护联盟（IUCN）的濒危物种“红色名录”中查找智人，你会读到：“列为无危物种，因为该物种分布极广、适应性强、目前数量正在增长，且不存在导致其总体数量下降的重大威胁。”

Visual recognition, reads the study, is “an automatic psychological process, occurring rapidly and intuitively with little or no apparent conscious deliberation”.

研究中写道，视觉识别是“一种自动的心理过程，迅速、直觉地发生，几乎没有或完全没有明显的有意识思考”。

No shock there, considering how much work it is to raise a kid without a partner to lean on; yet to hear Sandra and Britney tell it, raising a kid on their “own” (read: with round-the-clock help) is a piece of cake.

考虑到在没有伴侣可依靠的情况下抚养孩子有多辛苦，这并不令人震惊；然而听桑德拉和布兰妮说起来，她们“独自”（意思是：有全天候的帮手）抚养孩子却是小菜一碟。

(46) It was also, and this is unknown even to many people well read about the period, a battle between those who made codes and those who broke them.

（46）这也是一场编码者与破译者之间的战斗，甚至许多熟读这段历史的人都不知道这一点。