BEWARE THE SNOW SHOVELS OF DEATH:

“Would it kill you to shovel the front walk?” A monster snowstorm raging from New Mexico to Maine raises this question afresh. Typically it’s posed by a woman standing with hands on hips and assuming a Thurberesque mien as she gazes down on a man exercising his thumb on the remote but otherwise in repose. The correct answer: “It might.”

Snow-shovel design may not rank up there with the Three Gorges Dam as an engineering challenge, but it kills more than 10 times as many people each year. My Slate colleague Juliet Lapidos has observed that the 1,200 annual heart-failure deaths attributed to blizzards represent only about 0.3 percent of all annual deaths from heart disease. But that’s a lot more people than die from watching a football game.

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