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.”

“There are popular celebrities, there are unpopular celebrities and then there are the walking dead. You know the walking dead when you see them: they look like Mel Gibson, still striving for drunken charm in an L.A. County mug shot, after getting picked up on a DWI charge that included anti-semitic slurs directed at the police.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“It's a deep and all but certain truth about narcissistic personalities that to meet them is to love them, but to know them well is to find them unbearable. Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Everybody loves to spend money at least some of the time - because everybody loves the stuff you can buy with it. The key to the pleasure level of any transaction is the balance between the pain of the payment and the reward of the purchased object.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.”