Editorial Bored

Listen, I know I'm just a humble country rube and far be it from me to question the research or veracity of The Grey Lady and its vaunted social media arm, but I'm confused by this headline. Are they saying you're 30% less likely to die, period? Like, ever? Or is the scythe dude just 30% less likely to ring your doorbell anytime soon? Say I'm on deadline and mistakenly pound 3.8 cups of coffee, will that discount the life-expanding health benefit? If you read the sentence ten times in a row and once backward, as I did, it begins to seem like they’re implying test subjects were 30% less likely to die during the multiple-year study itself, which strikes me as a fairly arbitrary conclusion, since, for instance, you could also extrapolate that 70% were more likely to expire from the sheer tedium of being involved in a Times-funded coffee study. In any case, I'm sure this data came as a great relief to those who moderately swilled between 1.5-3.5 cappuccinos each morning while it was being conducted, even if they only got the data after the study was over and the panic attacks subsided, but at least they were distracted from their imminent bankruptcy due to the cost of 3.5 per-week teeth whitening treatments. Using this same logic and deductive reasoning, I'm going to go out on a limb and propose that people who don't eat 1.5 fistfuls of cement every day are 30% less likely over the course of a year to have bowel obstructions requiring surgery, regardless of whether they hang on the regular with Folger's pitchman Juan Valdez, and that's without even crunching the data.