Death may free you from the burden of life’s many decisions—as Sophocles put it, “For the dead, there are no more toils,” but shedding your mortal coil involves a host of pre-mortem considerations such as what do with that coil once you have shed it. Fortunately, there are a number of options for corporeal management. While most … Read more
The odds a person will die from an accident in a year (1 in 2,462) are roughly the same odds a female younger than 50 will be diagnosed with breast cancer in a year (1 in 2,337). It’s inevitable to ask, what are the odds that may happen to me? In what follows, Book of Odds … Read more
On June 19th, 2008, 49-year-old Esmin Elizabeth Green collapsed onto the floor of the psychiatric emergency room of Kings County Hospital Center in Brooklyn. She had been waiting for more than 24 hours for an inpatient bed. For 20 minutes she writhed on the linoleum floor, and then stopped moving. Forty minutes later, a nurse nudged … Read more
bookofodds.com/ Four-legged friends have long provided their own furry brand of affection—but pets can facilitate relationships of the human variety, too. Dogs in particular, with their long-held reputation as man’s best friend (and probably woman’s, too), have lately acquired a new role: wingman. Pongo, the canine protagonist of Disney’s 1961 animated classic, 101 Dalmatians, might have … Read more
You like her. She likes you. You’ve gone on a few dates, felt that fluttering excitement and ineffable chemistry, and now it’s time to take the next step. You want to have sex. Lord knows there are plenty of rough spots when you get to know someone intimately. But before you even slip between the … Read more
Loud sex is now as good as a warrant. Believe it or not, the Superior Court of New Jersey recently ruled that high-volume sex is cause enough for police to search a home. It is just the latest move in the battle over privacy in the US. The walls of solitude just got a little thinner, especially for … Read more
People are liars—lying liars, as Al Franken might say. From white lies to whoppers, people lie and mislead and obfuscate about everything: sex and relationships, work and money, feelings, opinions, intentions. The odds a person will tell a lie in a day are 1 in 2.49. Apparently, we evolved to lie: deception appears to have emerged … Read more
From satellite parts to hail, the skies teem with hard objects, and every now and then those objects fall to Earth. Then again, the sky is a big place, as is the surface of the earth, and a human being is relatively tiny. So just how likely is it to be hurt by something from … Read more
“I think I am becoming uncommonly tolerant of substandard coffee.” My Platoon Sergeant is sitting at the wooden picnic table across from me sipping from a Styrofoam cup. He fixes me with a dull gaze and puts his cup down and chuckles. “Sir, why you gotta use all them big words? Nobody here is impressed. … Read more
When a 21-year-old Yale student jumped to his death from the Empire State Building on March 30, 2010, he joined a rather small, sad club: the iconic skyscraper has seen only about 30 such suicides since it went up in 1931. About 3.5 million people visit the Empire State Building’s observation deck each year, which means the … Read more