Drop Dead Healthy by A. Jacobs (books to read to increase intelligence .TXT) 📕

about as likely to take hold as capri pants for men (a very brief fashion trend I once wrote about at Esquire). It’s just never going to happen, even in Denmark. Libertarians would go bonkers. Walking helmets are just too dorky, even for me.

But step back for a minute. Pretend you’re from Mars. From a coldly rational point of view, pedestrian helmets aren’t a crazy idea. As Freakonomics points out, on a per-mile basis, more people die from drunk walking than drunk driving. Pedestrian accidents in general injure sixty thousand people a year and kill more than four thousand.

The reason I even brought up helmets is to illustrate an important point: The way we think about danger is illogical. We cannot do risk assessment to save our life. As Richard Thaler—a professor at the University of Chicago and one of the founders of the field of behavioral economics—told me, “People are terrible at knowing what is really dangerous and what isn’t.” We focus on the wrong dangers, the ones that get the splashy headlines, not the ones that are common or abstract.

Lisa Belkin wrote a provocative article about this topic in The New York Times. As she points out, the five things that cause the most injuries to children eighteen and under are car accidents, homicide (usually by someone they know), child abuse, suicide, and drowning. And the top-five things that parents are most concerned about, according to Mayo Clinic research: kidnapping, school snipers, terrorists, dangerous strangers, and drugs.

Belkin points out that we drive to the store to get “organic veggies (there is no actual data proving that organic foods increase longevity) . . . then check our email at the next red light (2,600 traffic deaths a year are caused by drivers using cell phones, according to a Harvard study).”

Even ten years after 9/11, I’m still jittery about taking the subway. I’m afraid some lunatic is going to blow up the C line. Often I’ll either walk or take a cab instead. Which makes no logical sense. The chance of getting hurt in a taxi accident is much higher than that of a subway bombing.

So what’s a semirational person to do? I’ve drawn up some rules of thumb. Worry about cars, not planes. Worry about fire, not abductions. Exercise, but not so much that it interferes with spending time with your family.

And maybe, just maybe, buy a helmet.

Chapter 27

The Finish Line

I GET A WEIRD JOLT every time I log onto Skype nowadays. The address book pops up, and there, on the front page, is “Grandpa Ted.” Even odder, his number has a green circle next to it, meaning that he’s somehow logged in, as if they have Wi-Fi in the afterlife.

I always think of clicking on it but decide it’d be too depressing when he never picks up.

I’m noticing these cues more and more, not just on my computer, and not just for my grandfather. As I get older, the city is filling up with morbid little landmarks of dead friends and family.

I’ll walk by Nick & Toni’s, an Italian joint, and think about how I ate ravioli there with an ex-girlfriend fifteen years ago. She suffered from depression and committed suicide last year in her “Obama mama” T-shirt.

There on the corner, that’s the deli where I chatted with Bob, the tech guy at Esquire, who died of a heart attack at fifty-one. I could do a macabre walking tour of Manhattan.

Today, I’m taking a trip into the center of it, my grandfather’s old apartment on Sixty-first Street. All the grandkids are encouraged to stop by to see if there’s a keepsake they want before it’s all sold or stored or given away.

My mother unlocks the door of 11-F, and I smell the familiar Grandpa odor: a mix of mustiness and Johnson’s baby powder. He used to pour it into his shoes every day like it was milk in cereal.

In some ways it looks like he just went out for a roast beef sandwich. The black rectangular magnifying glass he used to read with, it’s lying on the living room table. The plastic chess set with see-through cubic pieces is all set up, ready for him to make an opening gambit. His Dell computer with the huge keyboard is waiting for him to start tapping out e-mails.

As we walk to the bedroom, I step on a plastic chicken drumstick that one of his great-grandkids left under the kitchen table.

In the bedroom, large cardboard boxes cover the bed. One of his daughters had labeled each box with a black Sharpie: “Books 1,” “Books 2,” “Photos 1,” and so on. Occasionally the label has some charming editorializing, like the box that said “New York: The City That He Loved,” filled with a biography of city planner Robert Moses and an award from the Urban League.

I’d come in search of one item: the suit my grandfather had worn to Julie’s and my wedding. It was no ordinary suit. It was a red gingham jacket and pants, and it was bold and awesome and reminded me of something Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin’s Czech brothers would have in their closet. I don’t know if I’d ever have the courage to wear it in public, but I liked the idea of it in my apartment. It would be a checkerboard-patterned reminder of a life lived fully.

I swing open the closet door. There’s lots of eye-squintingly bright clothes, but no sign of the suit.

“I think it was so worn out that somebody threw it away,” says my mom apologetically.

“What about this?” She pulls out a hanger with a blue-and-red flower-print shirt. It’s no gingham suit, but it’ll suffice.

There are dozens of things left on my healthy to-do list. I haven’t joined a chorus (which has been linked to reduced heart disease). I haven’t eaten Japanese daikon radish or geranium extract, which is supposedly anti-inflammatory, antiviral, antibacterial, anti-everything-bad-in-the-world. I haven’t returned to the Sleep Clinic for my follow-up CPAP exam.

And the