3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger Vaccines save lives fear endangers them. It’s a simple message parents need to keep hearing.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires – and gives rise to – deep feelings of faith.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger The golden child may be the oldest one, unless it’s the youngest. It may be the toughest one, unless it’s the most sensitive. It’s not even necessary that Mom and Dad have the same favorite – and typically they don’t.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger Paul McCartney had a baby when he was 61 Rod Stewart was 66 Rupert Murdoch was a stunning 72. Not only does that mean they’ll have less stamina than the average dad, that means they’ll, well, check out a lot sooner too.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger Habitual texters may not only cheat their existing relationships, they can also limit their ability to form future ones since they don’t get to practice the art of interpreting nonverbal visual cues.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group – to say nothing of gay marriage – are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes – as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger Toxins love to get you while you’re young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it’s mature and comparatively fixed.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger There aren’t a lot of ironclad rules of family life, but here’s one: No matter how much your parents deny it – and here’s betting they deny it a lot – they have a favorite child. And if you’re a parent, so do you.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger Becoming food savvy is one thing, but it’s amazing how fast savvy turns to snooty, and snooty leaves you preparing three-hour meals that break your budget and that the kids won’t even eat.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home – and then watched that home explode, too.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger We’re learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they’re broken. We’re also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings – stepsiblings, half-siblings – and the surprising power they can have.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don’t adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong – which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed they just fail to act on that knowledge.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half-sibs, and for a time I had step-sibs.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge – out of fairness to goats.
3 December 2020 Jeffrey Kluger The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.
