The piece was inspired by John F. Kennedy Jr.’s fatal plane crash in July of 1999.

这本书受小约翰·肯尼迪鼓舞（即灵感来源），他在1999年7月份遭遇致命的飞行事故。

He was a novice pilot in bad weather who “lost the horizon” (as pilots like to say) and went into a spiral dive.

他是个新手飞行员，在一次恶劣的天气里迷失方向（正如飞行员常说的那样）并且螺旋下降。

spiral dive:螺旋俯冲

（PS:参考其他翻译lost the horizon 消失在地平线）

To understand what he experienced, I had a pilot take me up in the same kind of plane that Kennedy flew, in the same kind of weather, and I had him take us into a spiral dive.

为了理解他所经历的，我让一名飞行员带我感受和肯尼迪那次一样的飞行，同样糟糕的天气，同样螺旋俯冲下来。

It wasn’t a gimmick. It was a necessity.

这不是噱头，是一项必需（的尝试）。

I wanted to understand what crashing a plane that way felt like, because if you want to make sense of that crash, it’s simply not enough to just know what Kennedy did.

我想体验飞机坠毁是什么感觉，因为如果你想搞清楚坠毁，仅仅知道肯尼迪做过什么是不够的。

make sense of 搞清楚，弄明白

“The Picture Problem” is about how to make sense of satellite images, like the pictures the Bush administration thought it had of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.

“图片问题”是关于如何弄清楚卫星图片的，就像布什当局认为他们掌握萨达姆·侯赛因的大规模杀伤性武器的照片一样。

I got started on that topic because I spent an afternoon with a radiologist looking at mammograms, and halfway through — completely unprompted — he mentioned that he imagined that the problems people like him had in reading breast X-rays were a lot like the problems people in the CIA had in reading satellite photos.

我开始这个主题是因为我和一名放射科医生花费一个下午研究乳房x线影像，进行到一半，完全是自发性的（参考翻译:毫无提示的情况下），他提到，他认为这个问题就像，如他般在看乳腺x光影像，就和人们在中央情报局看卫星图像似的。

I wanted to know what went on inside his head, and he wanted to know what went on inside the heads of CIA officers.

我想想到他大脑里在想什么，而他想知道中央情报局的官员在想什么。

I remember, at that moment, feeling absolutely giddy.

我记得那个瞬间，我感觉天旋地转。（就如醍醐灌顶般?发现新大陆的感觉吧个人理解）