Word: perilousness
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...Indian Ocean waterways that link Africa with the Arabian peninsula. Since the collapse of the last functioning government here in 1991, it has been better known as a crucible of bloody warlord anarchy, where 18 American soldiers lost their lives in 1993, and where journalists still visit at their peril. You don't move without an escort of gunmen, you don't stop anywhere for more than a few minutes, you keep your tinted windows closed and you drive to the limits of your vehicle. And yet, like Angkor Wat or south Manhattan after 9/11, the city has an irresistible...
...against what they see as medal inflation in recent wars, especially Gulf War I. And there may be fewer opportunities for Audie Murphy--style heroics when your enemy is planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) or driving a car bomb. But the nearly 3,000 war dead testify to the peril of those fighting in Iraq, and a growing chorus has been speaking out against the Pentagon's parsimony. They're asking why there have not been more élite medals and why there have been huge disparities in the number of awards given by different branches of the military...
Shadowed by peril as we are, you would think we'd get pretty good at distinguishing the risks likeliest to do us in from the ones that are statistical long shots. But you would be wrong. We agonize over avian flu, which to date has killed precisely no one in the U.S., but have to be cajoled into getting vaccinated for the common flu, which contributes to the deaths of 36,000 Americans each year. We wring our hands over the mad cow pathogen that might be (but almost certainly isn't) in our hamburger and worry far less about...
...finding ways to frame warnings so that people understand them. John Graham, formerly the administrator of the federal Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, says risk analysts suffer no end of headaches trying to get Americans to understand that while nuclear power plants do pose dangers, the more imminent peril to both people and the planet comes from the toxins produced by coal-fired plants. Similarly, pollutants in fish can be dangerous, but for most people--with the possible exception of small children and women of childbearing age--the cardiac benefits of fish easily outweigh the risks...
There's also the art of the flawed comparison. Officials are fond of reassuring the public that they run a greater risk from, for example, drowning in the bathtub, which kills 320 Americans a year, than from a new peril like mad cow disease, which has so far killed no one in the U.S. That's pretty reassuring--and very misleading. The fact is that anyone over 6 and under 80--which is to say, the overwhelming majority of the U.S. population--faces almost no risk of perishing in the tub. For most of us, the apples of drowning...