The New York TImes has a story on the Summary of Vital Statistics for 2002 - the annually published authority on how New Yorkers die. It's a clinical thing with acres of tables and charts, but it also makes its subject a little less mysterious. A single death is difficult to comprehend, let alone all of the deaths in a city with 8 million residents, yet somehow these numbers make the hulking, imponderable event less abstract.
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