Everybody loves to spend money at least some of the time - because everybody loves the stuff you can buy with it. The key to the pleasure level of any transaction is the balance between the pain of the payment and the reward of the purchased object.

There's no such thing as downtime for your brain.

When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.

A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it consciousness because it's a species we dislike.

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.

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.

Never mind what you've heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President; Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.