Day3:what the dog saw

　　All the pieces in What the Dog Saw come from the pages of The New Yorker, where I have been a staff writer since 1996.

狗子的世界这本书中所有文章，均曾收录在《纽约人》里，从1996年我就在哪里工作。

Out of the countless articles I’ve written over that period, these are my favorites.

在那段时间，我写了不计其数的稿子，这篇小说是我最爱的。

I’ve grouped them into three categories.

我把这篇小说分成3个章节。

The first section is about obsessives and what I like to call minor geniuses — not Einstein and Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela and the other towering architects of the world in which we live, but people like Ron Popeil, who sold the Chop-O-Matic, and Shirley Polykoff, who famously asked, “Does she or doesn’t she? Only her hairdresser knows for sure.”

第一部分是关于沉迷和我喜欢叫做镜子里的天才的东东 ，他们不是爱因斯坦、丘吉尔、曼德拉那样的人，他们也不是打造整个世界的建筑师，而是像销售万用剁碎机的罗恩·波佩尔（Ron Popeil），或是以一句广告语而名噪一时的雪莉·波利考夫（Shirley Polykoff）——“她染不染头发？只有她的美发师最清楚。

The second section is devoted to theories, to ways of organizing experience.

第二部分致力于学说理论，培养经验的方法。

How should we think about homelessness, or financial scandals, or a disaster like the crash of the Challenger?

就像是我们应该怎么考虑无家可归，或者经济界丑闻，就像挑战者碰撞的灾难?

The third section wonders about the predictions we make about people.

第三部分是猜想了我们如何推测人们的。

How do we know whether someone is bad, or smart, or capable of doing something really well?

我们怎么知道一个人是否是坏蛋，聪明，或是真的很擅长某些事情。

As you will see, I’m skeptical about how accurately we can make any of those judgments.

正如你将看到的那样，我很怀疑我们判断的准确性。