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. – Jeffrey Kluger
Scarily, football helmets, which do a fine job of protecting against scalp laceration and skull fracture, do little to prevent concussions and may even exacerbate them, since even as the brain is rattling around inside the skull, the head is rattling around inside the helmet. – Jeffrey Kluger
The best you can sometimes do is learn to take a breath, count to ten and simply accept that try as you might, no, your husband will never, ever learn not to drop a wet towel on the bed. That acceptance too counts as resolving a fight. – Jeffrey Kluger
Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate. – Jeffrey Kluger
Introverts listen better, they assess risks more carefully, they can be wiser managers. It’s not for nothing that the Silicon Valley billionaires are so often the retiring types. – Jeffrey Kluger
What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness – a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect aren’t possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering. – Jeffrey Kluger
Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they’re simple to deconstruct. – Jeffrey Kluger
It’s far too much to say that effective hoping is the only – or even the biggest – part of what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to hope, that means 86% is dependent on raw talent, fickle business cycles, the quality of the product you’re selling, and often pure, dumb luck. – Jeffrey Kluger
Certainly, people can get along without siblings. Single children do, and there are people who have irreparably estranged relationships with their siblings who live full and satisfying lives, but to have siblings and not make the most of that resource is squandering one of the greatest interpersonal resources you’ll ever have. – Jeffrey Kluger
As MBA professors endlessly tell their students, companies do best when they stick to what they do well. There’s a reason Apple doesn’t make blenders. There’s a reason Haagen-Dazs doesn’t sell meat. And there’s a reason drug companies should focus on saving and improving lives – not jeopardizing them. – Jeffrey Kluger
Never mind what you’ve heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job. – Jeffrey Kluger
Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served up by the plateful, three meals per day, in an era in which the supermarket was king, the farmer’s market was, well, for farmers, and the word ‘locavore’ sounded vaguely like a mythical beast. – Jeffrey Kluger
Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich would feel very, very bad. Spending $19,000 for a small family car would feel, well, more or less right. But as with physical pain, fiscal pain can depend on the individual, and everyone has a different threshold. – Jeffrey Kluger
Overspending is as certain a part of the holiday season as overeating. But pushing away from both the table and the cash register at least a little bit sooner can make the post-holiday hangover hurt a little bit less. – Jeffrey Kluger
The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human. – Jeffrey Kluger
Credit or debit cards, for starters, are nothing short of shoppers’ Novocain. Even in the age of digital purchases and virtual money, we still attach a special value to dirty paper with pictures of presidents on it. Handing some of that to a cashier simply hurts more than handing over a little sliver of plastic. – Jeffrey Kluger
Marketers have long known that a name can make all the difference when you’re trying to move the merch. The kiwifruit was once the Chinese gooseberry, after all – at least until the produce peddlers wised up – and the Chilean sea bass was once the singularly unappetizing Patagonian toothfish. – Jeffrey Kluger
Older fatherhood isn’t all bad: testosterone rates drop about 1% per year as men age, making them less reactive and more patient, and a professionally established middle-aged man is likely to have more time and money to devote to his kids than a twenty-something who’s just getting started. – Jeffrey Kluger
What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent. – Jeffrey Kluger
Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless. – Jeffrey Kluger
Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they’re the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet. – 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. – 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. – Jeffrey Kluger
When you’re your parents’ one shot at a genetic legacy, you may get to attend all the best schools, wear all the best clothes and eat all the best foods – at least relative to children in multiple-sibling households. But you also wind up with an overweening sense of your own importance. – Jeffrey Kluger
There’s no one place a virus goes to die – but that doesn’t make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out. – Jeffrey Kluger
When we’re awake, cortisol can fragment memories – one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas. – Jeffrey Kluger
Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form. – Jeffrey Kluger
As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of what’s known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear. – Jeffrey Kluger
It’s not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it’s extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies. – Jeffrey Kluger