Roughly 1 in 1.72 (58%) American adults own a credit card, but an additional $620 billion in cold, hard currency is in circulation. That’s a lot of money—more than $2,000 per American in fact—but most of it actually does not circulate in the United States. Instead, a report from the United States Treasury Department (PDF) estimates that roughly 370 … Read more
Food porn: no, that doesn’t refer to provisions in promiscuous poses. Decadent, almost sinful, descriptions and visuals of food have been permeating television and the Internet in recent years as our obsession with food grows. The cable television channel Food Network is available in 90 million households and is a staple in many of those, … Read more
When my mother died in 2005, neither my siblings nor I thought my dad would last for long. To our surprise, he slowly reorganized his daily habits and moved forward with a steady, slow-paced life. Eight months after the funeral his furnace spat black smoke throughout every room in his house, destroying most of the … Read more
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