Tamerlan Tsarnaev is telling no tales. The older of the two brothers who committed the Boston Marathon bombings was likely the one who planned the attack, but when he died in a shootout with police just days after the blasts, his thoughts and motivations vanished with him.

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.

A child gets vaccinated and soon after, autism symptoms emerge. The apparent cause-and-effect is understandable but erroneous - more a coincidence of the calendar and childhood developmental stages than anything else, as repeated and exhaustive studies have shown.

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.

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.

Part-black generally means all-black in Americans' minds. Just as part-Asian or part-Hispanic or part-anything-else usually puts individuals in those minority-groups' camps.

Toxins love to get you while you're young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it's mature and comparatively fixed.