Word: dreadfulness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Which risks get excessive attention and which get overlooked depends on a hierarchy of factors. Perhaps the most important is dread. For most creatures, all death is created pretty much equal. Whether you're eaten by a lion or drowned in a river, your time on the savanna is over. That's not the way humans see things. The more pain or suffering something causes, the more we tend to fear it; the cleaner or at least quicker the death, the less it troubles us. "We dread anything that poses a greater risk for cancer more than the things that...
...same is true for, say, AIDS, which takes you slowly, compared with a heart attack, which can kill you in seconds, despite the fact that heart disease claims nearly 50 times as many Americans than AIDS each year. We also dread catastrophic risks, those that cause the deaths of a lot of people in a single stroke, as opposed to those that kill in a chronic, distributed way. "Terrorism lends itself to excessive reactions because it's vivid and there's an available incident," says Sunstein. "Compare that to climate change, which is gradual and abstract...
...Jill Mindlin, watching her 5-year-old daughter suffer-more times than any parent should-through an anaphylactic reaction to dairy, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, or seeds is torture because she sees the effect it has on Maya. One of the symptoms of food allergy is dread, Mindlin explains. She knows something is very wrong and literally tries to jump out of skin. It's unbearable to watch. As a result, Maya tends to shut down around food and new people. Some of Maya's first words, her mother says, were "Read the 'gredients...
...Stewart, host of “The Daily Show,” cried on the air.David Rees felt the same sorrow, confusion, and anger. “In New York City after 9-11 you could literally smell death,” he recalls. “It was dreadful.” But he had an entirely different reaction from those other funnymen. He decided to make a comic strip.Five years later, that strip, “Get Your War On,” (GYWO) has turned David Rees into one of America’s most forceful satirical...
...newest wave of horror films. Torture and barbarity are merely cheap shock. If you want a truly scary film, check out Roman Polanski's Repulsion or Rosemary's Baby. Polanski knows it's not gore that scares an audience but a steadily growing sense of overwhelming apprehension and dread...