I'm culturally Jewish but, like most scientists, an atheist: I don't believe there's a God or supernatural world. Buddhism offers guidance on what to do in a world without God: It opines that truly being present in the world‚ experiencing and hanging out with your loved ones, provides all the significance you could want.

What's it like to be a baby? It's like being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had three double espressos.

The more obsessively we focus on what a particular food is going to do for us, the less healthy we've become. Simple pleasures become complicated.

We pass our values, ideas and moral character on to our children, but we do that knowing that our children are going to revise our knowledge and reshape their values. There's something very paradoxical and profound about being a parent as opposed to parenting. We put in all this effort and energy not so that we can shape a child of a particular sort, but so that all sorts of possibilities can happen in the future.

Childhood is a fundamental part of all human lives, parents or not, since that's how we all start out. And yet babies and young children are so mysterious and puzzling and even paradoxical.

Texts and e-mails travel no faster than phone calls and telegrams, and their content isn't necessarily richer or poorer.

From an evolutionary perspective children are, literally, designed to learn. Childhood is a special period of protected immaturity. It gives the young breathing time to master the things they will need to know in order to survive as adults.