When it comes to raising civilized kids there are no hard rules, but there are two things on which most parents agree: Boys are generally wilder than girls, and adolescents are wilder than kids of any other age. If you've got an adolescent boy, you're in the sweet spot for trouble.

Older siblings get more total-immersion mentoring with their parents before younger siblings come along. As a result, they get an IQ and linguistic advantage because they are the exclusive focus of their parents' attention.

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.

Spare a thought for the poor introverts among us. In a world of party animals and glad-handers, they're the ones who stand by the punch bowl. In a world of mixers and pub crawls, they prefer to stay home with a book. Everywhere around them, cell phones ring and e-mails chime and they just want a little quiet.

Narcissism is actually a clever guise adopted to mask its exact opposite, which is a deep well of self-loathing, a well of low self-esteem, rather than high self-esteem. This helps explain why narcissists are so sensitive to criticism, why narcissists tend to break into outrage if they're criticized, because their self-esteem is actually much more brittle than it seems, and once they're challenged, that mask falls apart.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?