If we were a culture of high-risk alcoholics, and suddenly we had Jack Daniels piped into our houses, we would be feeding that fire. Social networking, and the internet as a whole, seems to have simply landed in an extremely fertile place in an extremely fertile time in history, when we all have these narcissistic tendencies anyway - you can go further back into the self-esteem movement, and Dr. Spock, and the 'everybody gets a ribbon at the track meet' sort of thing, which preceded the internet - and then you drop the internet into the middle of this, and we've all gone haywire.

Identical twins are ideal lab specimens for studying the difference between learned and inherited traits since they come from the womb preloaded with matching genetic operating systems. Any meaningful differences in their behaviors or personalities are thus likely to have been acquired, not innate.

A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.

A jellyfish is little more than a pulsating bell, a tassel of trailing tentacles and a single digestive opening through which it both eats and excretes - as regrettable an example of economy of design as ever was.

In both children and adults, there can be a hard-to-deny link between a robust sense of hope and either work productivity or academic achievement.

As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don't adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.

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.