In their continuing efforts to warn us of the threats of climate change, researchers regularly note new harms being produced by a rapidly changing biosphere. Sometimes the threats are […]

            This blog often talks about risks that we fret over too much. Time to talk about one we worry about too little; the air we breath…indoors. For a number […]

            I remember wondering that day as I was getting ready to go to work if I should pack a toothbrush. A Superior Court judge was set to rule on […]

 The most revealing and important line in Angelina Jolie’s OpEd in the New York Times today  is not the one in which she reveals she has had her breasts removed […]

 The Dow Jones Average is about to break 15,000. Any day now the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will break 400 parts per million. Think there’s a connection? A couple other […]

             The idea of Big Brother government snooping on us, listening in on our phone calls, intercepting our e mails, watching us with all kinds of surveillance devices, offends most […]

Last week taught us some important lessons about fear. One is that fear is neither good nor bad. What matters is how we let fear affect us. It spurred racism […]

            What a revealing real-time lesson we are living through right now in how humans respond to risk. More than a million people in Boston and several large surrounding cities […]

      So how terrorized will we be this time? Maybe terrorized is too strong a word. But how much more worried will we be, how much more uneasy, how much […]

            You know how sometimes when you put your foot in your mouth and say something really stupid, you try to recover but only stammer out something even dumber and […]

 Dan Fagin’s new book “Toms River, A Story of Science and Salvation”, about a classic type of environmental story back in the 80s and 90s, the ‘cancer cluster’, is a […]

             My career as a reporter spanned a remarkable time in local TV news, of both incredible journalistic creativity and commitment, and a profit-driven abandonment of journalism’s civic responsibility to […]

Update: A couple hours ago, a judge struck down the New York City ban on large-sized sodas as arbitrary and capricious, in part because the ban did not also include […]

     Over at “Mind Matters”, my fellow blogger David Berreby offers an intriguing post Is Individual Liberty Over-Rated about some some new discussion of an old theme that I also […]

            I was 19, a college sophomore. It was Spring, 1970, and the anti-Vietnam movement was bringing the progressive 60s to a crescendo. Four college students had been shot to […]

            The New York Times reports that an MIT statistics professor has found that flying on a commercial jet has never been safer. Not that it was ever that much […]

         Americans have always disagreed, about a lot. Somehow though, we’ve managed to get along with each other while we do. Why, then, has disagreeing become so nasty, so fierce, […]

            You and I make risk judgments for ourselves all the time, based on a few facts and a lot of subjective, instinctive emotional factors. As a result we sometimes […]

Getting risk wrong leads to dangers all by itself, and we will remain vulnerable to these mistakes until we let go of our naïve post-Enlightenment faith in reason and accept that risk perception is inescapably an affective system, not just a matter of rationally figuring out the facts. 

        Humans are blessed, and cursed, with a risk perception system that mostly gets things right, but sometimes creates what I call a Risk Perception Gap, when we worry more […]