Ah, it's shrink-wrapped--that makes sense. (Mentally calculating that into manufacturing cost because I am such a publishing geek. Yup, still makes sense.)

I wonder if it is a bureaucratic way of tracking how many pregnant women lost the baby in an accident, since the fetus wouldn't be counted among the other fatalities. It wouldn't be a cause of the accident, but they might not have had another category for it.

I assume the unknowns would also take in any incomplete data reporting: say, the local police reported total number of deaths in an accident to the national database but not whether those victims were drivers or passengers.

#87 Nanners: Stats I found don't distinguish the circumstances of the murdered child's death; but the total murder victims age 5-12 was only 178. So I wondered, did more kids die when there were more free-range kids? Again, just quickie internet research, but the Department of Justice has a chart of death rates by murder for 1975-2005, sorted by victim age, in which they lump together all kids age 14 and under; in that age group, the death rate was flat throughout that period. Doesn't constitute proof, but again, tends to suggest that the perception of risk vastly outweighs the actual risk.

I put all the links to data in my blog post doing the math. Cory blogged the vehicle accident data (which is total info-porn heaven), and the link to my blog post is there too.

#88 Fee: The car accident data lists pedestrian deaths separately, so you can easily find out how those have trended for this age group.

On your second point re sexual predation, that's a whole 'nother data set that I didn't try to track down, but your point that molestation is much more prevalent and therefore a greater risk than murder is well taken. Note, though, there is significant data that sexual crimes are perpetrated much more often by people the victim knows . . . which leads to a similar question: is a kid really less safe on a subway full of people than alone with a "trusted" adult? I haven't sought data, as I said, to support my view on that (might try another day, but I have actual work to get back to, alas). I do think experience in the world is how we learn whom to trust and not trust--and thereby assess risk and prevent harm of many types throughout all ages of our lives.

Okay, I got obsessed with the relative risk of a kid on the subway alone being abducted and murdered by Mr. Stranger Danger (anybody remember that?) versus a kid being driven everywhere dying in a car accident. So I did a little research and some back-of-the-virtual-envelope calculation in a blog post. The short version: a kid age 5-12 is 20 times more likely to die in as a passenger in a car than to be murdered (by anyone, under any circumstances).

I wonder how well that multiple bellyband with die cut is going to survive in stores. I used to hate anything with a die cut when I worked in a bookstore because people were always tearing them in handling--handling too roughly, or getting the corner of another book caught in the die cut when putting the book back on the shelf--and we'd end up with these perfectly good books that looked tatty and had to be returned because customers didn't want to buy something with a jacket or cover that looked damaged.

If this one is made of something heavier than the usual jacket stock, it might survive. Hope so, because it does look lovely.

#82: Yes, The Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler--loved that book! I wanted to run away and go live in a museum after I read that. Contributed to my lifelong love of museums, which my rural nieces and nephews are now learning. Whenever they come to NYC, we go to museums, and as each gets older, they're starting to be able to go there themselves. I write out directions and send 'em off with cell phone and Metrocard, because they won't spend their entire lives in a little farm town. So far, the only time the cell phone has been used was when my niece called to report that she was running a little late for our scheduled rendezvous at the end of the day, so I wouldn't worry.

I knew kids in college who had come from small towns and had no idea how to navigate a city--they were helpless and in some cases terrified. I don't want my nieces and nephews to grow up to be so handicapped, and their parents agree.

Gosh, I was taking public transit on my own in Chicago from about age 7 or 8. Wasn't a big deal.

There's a book about to come out (full disclosure: I work for the publisher) called Flirting with Disaster, which is about how disasters and their consequences come to occur and can be avoided. In one of the opening chapters, the author talks about perception of risk versus actual risk, and how pervasive media--much more access to much more information--is one of the factors that skews our perception of risk. This is certainly a case in point. Of course we've all heard about every abducted, molested, or murdered child, because we have a zillion channels, 24-hour news networks, the internet, etc. But we don't hear about every car accident that happens, because they're a common, everyday occurrence. Statistically, your kid is probably safer taking the subway than being driven around everywhere. But many people's perception of the relative risk is just the opposite, because it's the unusual that gets the attention, not the commonplace.

And so as a society we protect against the unlikely, in this case by oversheltering kids, rather than focusing on the more probable sources of harm.

My sister worked for Amtrak back before 9/11. She said all the mobsters traveled by Amtrak--trains to/from Vegas especially--because they and their muscle could carry their guns. (Nutjobs also took their guns on the train; when they got drunk and disorderly, the crew had their hands full.) Which makes me wonder if the reason they're moving to "random" screening (rather than airport-like screening of everyone as you'd expect if they were legitimately worried about a bomb attack, say, as a train pulled into Penn Station) has anything to do with those mob guys.

I still believe your becoming a parent is a sign of the apocalypse.

Nevertheless, she's adorable, and Rob and I send our love.

Hockenberry used to be an NPR reporter; I was surprised when he turned up on a big commercial network, especially Dateline, which is not exactly the pinnacle of network TV news.

Obviously there's an interest in genuine news like the story Hockenberry had--among people like us here--and what's needed is a venue for it that is financially viable enough to fund the cost of getting those stories, by paying people like Hockenberry, etc. The market is there, and I suspect the main reason the need hasn't been met is that the market is not as great as the one for schlock-news; as long as a measure of viability is the ability to compete directly with "To Catch a Predator"/Paris Hilton/ooh-there's-a-terrorist-under-the-bed simplistic news, we won't see that news venue. Wouldn't it be nice (dreaming here, I realize) if someone were to decide to let their other kind of schlock fund something serious? Murdoch has had money-making HarperCollins funding the money-losing New York Post; wouldn't it be lovely if some other media baron decided to let his or her empire fund a network or paper or web outlet that specialized in in-depth reporting, investigative work, complex stories not easily summarized or pigeon-holed, etc.?

We need such an outlet because most of us just don't have the time to do the research to get to the bottom of the bias in the news we do see, and certainly not to seek out the news that isn't being reported.

I work for a company that publishes children's books, and we republish and repurpose a lot of older material. Most of these books are purged of anything potentially offensive to anyone anywhere (no images of weapons of any kind, thank you) because we want to sell them and that's what the buyers (chain store buyers who choose what the stores will stock, as opposed to customers like you, so there's no confusion) have said they want. Since customers don't actively seek books with violence, or gender or ethnic stereotypes or pictures of guns, but some do complain about those things, the buyers order accordingly and we meet their expressed need.

Not to say there aren't some wonderfully imaginative and subversive kids' books being published today--there are. We're talking here about old books.

I'd never heard of Joost Eiffers until the publisher I work for started doing some art books with him. Less original than these vegetable animals, but still kind of neat--the first one is a series of Monet's cathedral paintings done as an accordion fold, so you can fold the whole series out and see the progression of the light, etc., much as the Art Institute of Chicago exhibited his Houses of Parliament in a big circular room some years back. IIRC, in the book the reverse side of the fold-out is text by an art historian about each painting.

There's a Van Gogh one too; and others in the works. The series is called Objet d'Art, if anyone's interested.

Love the image of everyone on motorized roller skates. The machine scrubbing the bathtub while madame is receiving her maquillage would be a nice addition to my household as well.

Maybe by now the belle époque fashions were supposed to have gone out of style and come back in.

Thanks, Anonymous and Leonb; I did go to the Apple Store and even without my receipt (I couldn't find it, so they just looked it up) I got the $200 + tax back.

The Starbucks thing is, I suppose, meant to facilitate impulse purchases. All the Starbucks locations near me recently got big flat screen monitors that list the name of the song playing, which seems like a poor use of money and tech, so I assume they have something more up their sleeve, and I have to wonder what--like maybe playing trailers and clips so you can be tempted to impulse-buy movies, etc., while you get coffee? Don't know how practical that would be, unless the wifi at Starbucks is faster than I think it is.

They also dropped the price of the iPhone by $200--less than 2 weeks after I bought mine, and just over 2 months after it came out. I know prices come down after a while, but usually not this quickly. I'm sure I'm not the only iPhone owner (and long-time Mac enthusiast) who feels a bit ill-used.