Quotes by Jeffrey Kluger

My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home – and then watched that home explode, too.

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.

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.

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.

At the root of the shy temperament is a deep fear of social judgment, one so severe it can sometimes be crippling. Introverted people don’t worry unduly about whether they’ll be found wanting, they just find too much socializing exhausting and would prefer either to be alone or in the company of a select few people.

Vaccines save lives fear endangers them. It’s a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

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.

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.

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.

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.