Passage One

(1) At the university where I teach, fewer and fewer new books are available from the library in their physical, printed form. And yet, the company that just published my textbook tells me that about 90 percent of students who buy my book choose to lug around the four-pound paper version rather than purchase the weightless e-book. So why would students opt for the pricier and more cumbersome version? Is the library missing something important about the nature of printed versus electronic books?

(2) Cognitive research shows that the way we read varies widely in different settings, with text acting as a prompt for very different kinds of mental pursuits. While reading, it’s possible, among other things, to generate strong visual images based on the text, to marshal arguments against the author’s main point, to speculate about the motivations of characters, to connect the text to personal experiences, to form an opinion, or to notice the sensory and aesthetic qualities of the text, to name just a few. Not all of these take place every time you read, so there is not just one activity called “reading,” done either poorly or well.

(3) A growing body of research shows that the same information can trigger very different thoughts depending on the cognitive goals that people have in mind. Readers can be instructed to create vivid imagery or to learn over time to make deeper inferences, both of which lead to better retention of the material they’ve read. And when readers are told to form an impression of people they’re reading about rather than to read for the purpose of memorizing the text, they organize the information from the text less haphazardly and are able to recall more of it.

(4) Cognitive goals can also be unintentionally triggered by cues that never even enter a reader’s awareness. So, just as people can be told to form an impression of a character they read about, they can also be prompted to unconsciously pursue the same goal. In one study, researchers asked people to unscramble sentences that contained words like evaluate, judgment, and personality before reading excerpts about a character. In another, these words were subliminally (潜意识地) flashed at subjects before they took part in the reading task. In both of these studies, simply seeing words related to the goal of character assessment affected readers in much the same way as asking them explicitly to judge character.

(5) The emerging research on cognitive goals and their triggers offers an intriguing way to think about why reading the same text in different formats or even styles of presentation might engage the mind in such different ways. A hard-copy textbook—including its four-pound heft—may serve as a powerful cue that sets off cognitive activities that are very distinct from those that are involved in reading your Twitter feed or thumbing through a paperback romance novel. Through its lifelong associations with classrooms and the intellectual calisthenics (健美体操 ) that take place there, a physical tome may spark a self-analytical frame of mind, prompting you to take stock of your understanding, re-reading passages to fill in gaps, and constantly “testing” yourself on your mastery of the material.

(6) The research should also motivate publishers—especially of online text—to think deeply about how elements of presentation and design can serve as signals to nudge the reader into the mental activities that do justice to the text. For example, an online literary mag that looks like a page from BuzzFeed may leave readers with limp, unsatisfying experiences simply because it’s too hard to arouse the contemplative and sensory goals that lead to properly savoring its content. The magazine needs to signal that a different kind of reading is called for, perhaps by borrowing some of the elements that poets have long used to cue readers to pay close attention to the language of a poem: stripping away graphic distractions, formatting text sparsely and unconventionally, and surrounding it with generous swaths of empty space.

(7) Understanding how reading works means abandoning the idea that the presentation of a text is as inconsequential as whether a plate of food is served with a sprig of decorative parsley. In fact, the packaging of text likely contains rich implicit instructions for what we do with it.

Passage Two

(1) It’s widely known that more than half of all corporate mergers and acquisitions end in failure. Like many marriages, they are often fraught with irreconcilable cultural and financial differences. Yet M&A activity was up sharply in 2013 and reached pre-recession levels this year. So why do companies keep at it? Because it’s an easy way to make a quick buck and please Wall Street. Increasingly, business is serving markets rather than markets serving business, as they were originally meant to do in our capitalist system.

(2) For a particularly stark example, consider American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer’s recent bid to buy British drugmaker AstraZeneca. The deal made little strategic sense and would probably have destroyed thousands of jobs as well as slowed research at both companies. (Public outcry to that effect eventually helped scuttle the plan.) But it would have allowed Pfizer to shift its domicile to Britain, where companies pay less tax. That, in turn, would have boosted share prices in the short term, enriching the executives paid in stock and the bankers, lawyers and other financial intermediaries who stood to gain about half a billion dollars or so in fees from the deal.

(3) Pfizer isn’t alone. Plenty of firms engage in such tax wizardry (巫术). This kind of short-term thinking is starting to dominate executive suites. Besides tax avoidance, Wall Street’s marching orders to corporate America include dividend payments and share buybacks, which sap long-term growth plans. It also demands ever more globalized supply chains, which make balance sheets look better by cutting costs but add complexity and risk. All of this hurts longer-term, more sustainable job and value creation. As a recent article on the topic by academic Gautam Mukunda in the Harvard Business Review noted, “The financial sector’s influence on management has become so powerful that a recent survey of chief financial officers showed that 78% would give up economic value and 55% would cancel a project with a positive net present value—that is, willingly harm their companies—to meet Wall Street’s targets and fulfill its desire for ’smooth’ earnings.”

(4) Some of this can be blamed on the sheer size of the financial sector. Many thought that the economic crisis and Great Recession would weaken the power of markets. In fact, it only strengthened finance’s grip on the economy. The largest banks are bigger than they were before the recession, while finance as a percentage of the economy is about the same size. Overall, the industry earns 30% of all corporate profit while creating just 6% of the country’s jobs. And financial institutions are still doing plenty of tricky things with our money. Legendary investor Warren Buffett recently told me he’s steering well clear of exposure to commercial securities like the complex derivatives being sliced and diced by major banks. He expects these “weapons of mass destruction” to cause problems for our economy again at some point.

(5) There’s a less obvious but equally important way in which Wall Street distorts the economy: by defining “shareholder value” as short-term returns. If a CEO misses quarterly earnings by even a few cents per share, activist investors will push for that CEO to be fired. Yet the kinds of challenges companies face today—how to shift to entirely new digital business models, where to put operations when political risk is on the rise, how to anticipate the future costs of health, pensions and energy—are not quarterly problems. They are issues that will take years, if not decades, to resolve. Unfortunately, in a world in which the average holding period for a stock is about seven months, down from seven years four decades ago, CEOs grasp for the lowest-hanging fruit. They label tax-avoidance schemes as “strategic” and cut research and development in favor of sending those funds to investors in the form of share buy backs.

(6) All of this will put American firms at a distinct disadvantage against global competitors with long-term mindsets. McKinsey Global Institute data shows that between now and 2025, 7 out of 10 of the largest global firms are likely to come from emerging markets, and most will be family-owned businesses not beholden to (感激) the markets. Of course, there’s plenty we could do policy-wise to force companies and markets to think longer term—from corporate tax reform to bans on high-speed trading to shifts in corporate compensation. But just as Wall Street has captured corporate America, so has it captured Washington. Few mainstream politicians on either side of the aisle have much interest in fixing things, since they get so much of their financial backing from the Street. Unfortunately for them, the fringes of their parties—and voters—do care.

Passage Three

(1) Like most recovering overachievers, I have a complicated relationship with self-help books. That is, I approach the entire genre with a mixture of interest and dread. While I am certain I can become a better version of me with the help of someone who has a research staff and a lucrative book contract, I know my relationship with the self-help book of the moment will end badly. It always does.

(2) Everyone wants to be better at something. Right? Wasn’t this very country founded 238 years ago on the unalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of flat abs (平坦腹肌)? I dare you to name someone who does not want flat abs. And yet they are so difficult to attain, unless you are an Olympic swimmer or under the age of 10.

(3) This is the problem with self-help generally: real change is hard. So while you could fill whole libraries with the books that have been published in an effort to help us all get flat abs, when it comes to said books, there’s no such thing as strength in numbers. There is only strength in crunches, planks and other core exercises you probably wish didn’t exist. But if you are a recovering overachiever, the drive for self-improvement remains so persistent that it creates a selective memory in which all failed attempts at effectively using self-help books—to attain flat abs or to do just about anything else—are magically erased, along with the pain of childbirth and the tragedy (for me and all the other vans in the world) of the Dutch losing the 2010 World Cup final. Which explains why, when Daniel J. Levitin’s The Organized Mind:. Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload landed on my desk, I thought, “Oh goody, something that can help me become a better me at work and at home!”

(4) After spending decades in consumer magazines, I can say with certainty that after flat abs, what Americans want most in life is organized closets. And I know, as Levitin does, that you cannot have an organized closet without first having an organized mind. His book is full of amazing tidbits (趣闻), like the chart that compares the average global temperature with the number of pirates in the world. What does that have to do with organizing? Who knows? Levitin is a professor, and he easily summons up lots of diverting facts to illustrate how distracted we are. For example, he knows that women’s Cortisol (皮质醇) levels spike when they are confronted with clutter but men’s don’t, which gave me a fantastic idea for my own self-help book: How to Live Happily With a Man Who Doesn’t Notice the Pile of Crapola at the Bottom of the Stairs.

(5) Did Levitin’s book change my life? Well, first I need a leave of absence from work to finish it, as it is 512 pages long. Which brings us to another problem with self-help: those most likely to own self-help books are those least likely to have time for self-help books. Years ago, when my children were small and the working-mother routine felt particularly Sisyphean (永远做不完的), my well-meaning husband gave me a book called How to Calm Down . It sat on my night table for six months or so until I realized that what would calm me down most was less time spent awake. I do, however, have an awesome framed photograph of my middle son holding the book and laughing maniacally. So it was good for something.

(6) The one self-help book I have ever been able to get through is Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish’s How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk, because the margins are very wide and half the book is fill-in-the-blank exercises, so the part you actually have to read is quite short. If you haven’t read it, here’s the key takeaway.-when your child comes home and says, “I’m so mad that my math teacher took away my phone when I was texting in class,” you are not supposed to problem-solve or scold or, heaven forbid, call the school. You are just supposed to say. “Wow, it sounds like you’re really mad. ” That’s right: parenting as parroting. Weirdly, it totally works, in part because it’s such an easy concept that even time-pressed lunatics can remember it.

(7) As for the rest of the self-help volumes on your night table? Face it: they are dusty markers of inadequacy, reminders of the better you that will never be. They mock you, just like the fancy cookbooks with recipes for things like coq au vin that you will never learn to spell, much less make; the glue gun you absolutely will never use to DIY anything; the set of Rosetta Stone CDs for a language that it turns out you can get by fairly well without. Taken together, these little failures are all quite bad for your self-esteem. And you will certainly never get flatter abs if you don’t take care of your self-esteem problem first.

Passage One

Passage Two

Passage Three