I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.

We're learning how important it is both to preserve sibling relationships if they work and repair them if they're broken. We're also learning a lot about nonliteral siblings - stepsiblings, half-siblings - and the surprising power they can have.

Humans are crude linguists from the moment of birth - and perhaps even in the womb - to the extent at least that we can hear spoken sounds and begin to recognize different combinations of language sounds.

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.

Narcissism, like the other personality disorders, is a condition that's known as ego-syntonic. In other words, the paranoid person really does believe that people are after him, and the narcissist really does believe that he or she is better than or more entitled than other people, and truly doesn't see why that's not the case.

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.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.