We are shaped not only by our current geography but by our ancestral one as well. Americans, for instance, retain a frontier spirit even though the only frontier that remains is that vast open space between the SUV and strip mall. We are our past.

We help other people because we can, or because it makes us feel good, not because we're counting on some future payback. There is a word for this; love.

Psychologists call it "defocused attention," where you broaden your horizons, let your mind float and drift a bit. Coffee keeps us sharp and alert. It's great if you're driving at 3 o'clock in the morning. It's not so great if you're trying to come up with the next violin concerto.

Some places are like family. They annoy us to no end, especially during the holidays, but we keep coming back for more because we know, deep in our hearts, that our destinies are intertwined.

What is the ideal audio atmosphere for creativity and it turns out it is not complete silence, and it is not a very loud atmosphere, it's something about 70 decibels.

If you walk into a coffee shop in 1903 Vienna, you might find at the same table the artist Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Leon Trotsky and possibly Adolf Hitler, who lived in Vienna at the same time.

It is a fact of human nature that we derive pleasure from watching others engage in pleasurable acts. This explains the popularity of two enterprises: pornography and cafés.