The usual suspects?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

The usual suspects?

Columbia’s Peter Muennig, who led the study published in the journal Health Affairs, said his team accounted for these factors this time.

“But what really surprised us was that all of the usual suspects -- smoking, obesity, traffic accidents, and homicides -- are not the culprits,” Meunnig said in a statement.

“The U.S. doesn’t stand out as doing any worse in these areas than any of the other countries we studied, leading us to believe that failings in the U.S. health care system, such as costly specialized and fragmented care, are likely playing a large role in this relatively poor performance on improvements in life expectancy.”

- Poor healthcare may shorten American lives: study, Reuters, October 7, 2010.

2. The holidays are a difficult time for the pessimist. As holiday cheer proliferates around them, the Schopenhauer-quoting, sky-is-falling type will inevitably have to contend with uninvited advice from perfect strangers every which way they turn: “Why so glum? It’s Christmas! How about a smile?” For the overly cheery and the bah-humbugger alike, a cold, hard dose of perspective may be in order.

Remember the Doomsday Argument? Formulated by the British cosmologist Brandon Carter in 1983, the theory posits a ninety-five-per-cent chance of complete planetary extinction sometime in the next 9,120 years. How (and exactly when) the end will come is, however, up for debate—will it end, as T. S. Eliot believed, “not with a bang, but a whimper”? Richard Horne’s “A is for Armageddon” provides plenty of options. The book, by the author of “101 Things to Do Before You Die” and the illustrator of “The Dangerous Book for Boys,” offers a catalog of potentially life-on-earth-ending catastrophes that will warm a pessimist’s heart. Horne helpfully tells you when and how much you should panic about each (one is entirely justified, for instance, in panicking about Gulf Stream Collapse right now), vital information for defending the practical side of a gloomy outlook on life. To further stress the real-world applications of cataclysmic thinking, the book also includes a handy “apocalist” of items to have on hand (certain of which seem dubiously useful—what good is a compass in a magnetic field reversal?—whereas others, like tin foil, are always a good idea), and a last will and testament to bury in the location of your choice.