Hey there, it's Steven Dubner with a quick announcement.

We've just published an audiobook called Making Messiah, how Handel got his mojo back and created a masterpiece.

The publisher is Simon & Schuster, and the audiobook is adapted from our recent Freakonomics radio series

about the history, legacy, and

economics of George Fuderick Handel's Messiah. You can buy Making Messiah now wherever you get

your audiobooks. For more information, go to making messiah.com.

Over the years, we've made a bunch of Freakonomics Radio episodes about the risk that comes with an activity that billions of us do every day.

Get in a car. Those risks have fallen over time, but because more people drive, more miles than ever, the number of deaths from traffic crashes is very high, more than a million people per year globally. And that's just deaths. There are many

more injuries and the financial costs are massive. Traffic deaths are more likely in low-income

countries, but among high-income countries, the U.S. is an outlier with more than 40,000 deaths a year.

That works out to roughly one death by car crash every 13 minutes in the U.S. Why so many? Well, it's complicated.

Here's what we heard in an episode we published a few years ago called

Why is the U.S. so good at killing pedestrians?

The cars we're driving are bigger, patter, faster.

The problem of distraction has gotten much worse.

In the United States, we've decided that car movement is really the supreme consideration when it comes to designing our streets.

And in another episode we made called Why is Flying Safer than Driving, we learned how the aviation

industry devoted itself to safety. If you go back 30 or 40 years, air crashes were not uncommon.

It was something the industry spent an enormous amount of time, collaborating together, sharing information, sharing learnings, working closely with the FAA to understand best practices

and how we could have an open book with our regulator.

And in our last couple episodes, our friends at the Search Engine podcast looked at the

contested future of driverless cars.

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