“Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– 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
“There’s only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent – and that’s being an adolescent. The moodiness, the volatility, the wholesale lack of impulse control, all would be close to clinical conditions if they occurred at another point in life. In adolescence, they’re just part of the behavioral portfolio.”
– 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
“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
“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.”
– Jeffrey Kluger
“Vaccines save lives fear endangers them. It’s a simple message parents need to keep hearing.”
– 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
“It’s one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it – the better to preserve the good thing they’ve got going and to keep their siblings off their back.”
– Jeffrey Kluger
“There’s a sort of sibling moratorium when you’re establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you’re building a new extended family.”
– Jeffrey Kluger
“Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.”
– 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
“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.”
– Jeffrey Kluger
“My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home – and then watched that home explode, too.”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– Jeffrey Kluger
“There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence – not the least being that we can’t even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?”
– 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.”
– 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?”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– 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.”
– 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
“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
“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