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Marriage is a lot of things – a source of love, security, the joy of children, but it’s also an interpersonal battlefield, and it’s not hard to see why: Take two disparate people, toss them together in often-confined quarters, add the stresses of money and kids – now lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of your natural life. What could go wrong?
Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.