wug7a Head coaches in professional sports are masters at their crafts. They are paid handsomely to put up with onerous owners, petulant players, and fickle fans, all the while knowing that no matter how many championships they win, they’re never more than a losing streak away from the unemployment line. It’s long been said that coaches … Read more
When 88-year-old Betty White hosts Saturday Night Live on May 8, 2010, it won’t be because the producers had the bright idea to invite the veteran comedienne. It’ll be thanks to a grassroots campaign among fans, conducted via Facebook. The odds an adult has a Facebook or MySpace account are 1 in 2.08, but for a person 55 or older, they’re … Read more
If you have one heart attack, what are the chances you will have another? As former Vice-President Dick Cheney—who suffered his fifth heart attack this week—probably knows by now, the odds are high. And the chance you will suffer any heart attack increase with age. For someone in the age bracket from 65 to 74, … Read more
On any given night, approximately 664,000 people—1 in 449.6 Americans—have to find a place to sleep. Some end up on the street, some sleep in their cars, some are in shelter beds. Included in this number are members of homeless families. If members of homeless families were grouped by themselves into one city it would be … Read more
Book of Odds reporter Zachary Turpin recently sat down with Bradley Trevor Greive—author of Why Dogs Are Better than Cats—on a sunny beach on the Tasman Sea and discussed, over smoked salmon and vodka gimlets, what it is that makes canines so special to us. OK, almost none of that happened. The interview was, in fact, … Read more
It used to be that when you said the words “gym,” “workout,” and especially “weight room,” you could practically sniff the testosterone in the air. And the mental picture? Beads of masculine sweat dropping onto filthy mats and the kind of tight muscle tees that only people on HGH favor today. That was then (the dark … Read more
Mandi Schwartz, 22, and her teammates on the Yale women’s hockey team had just celebrated a win over Brown University in December 2008 when Schwartz, who was feeling unusually fatigued, got the bad news: she had acute myeloid leukemia (AML). She returned home to undergo chemotherapy during a 130-day hospitalization. Her cancer was knocked into … Read more
Exam time is here. And according to the US Department of Health and Human Services, roughly six of every 100 collegian brains are illegally swimming in amphetamines. That is to say, in FDA-approved, but illegally procured amphetamines, the kind that are bummed or bought without benefit of a prescription. You may know the most common … Read more
The main reason is to express our affection, our love for our partner. Another reason is cultural—we’re surrounded by TV shows and movies where kissing is extremely important in a romantic context, so we learn through a kind of osmosis. And the third reason is, as Freud pointed out, we all go through various stages … Read more