Psychopaths know the technical difference between right and wrong - which is one of the reasons their insanity pleas in criminal cases so rarely succeed; they just fail to act on that knowledge.

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.

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.

Your parents leave you too soon and your kids and spouse come along late, but your siblings know you when you are in your most inchoate form.

Well, I think of the folks who are the climate deniers as the flat Earthers and the people who say the moon landings never happened.

We are all born with an innate understanding of interpersonal equity - the idea that if you lend me your rake today, I'll respond in kind when you come to borrow my shovel tomorrow. Or nearly all of us are born with that. Psychopaths aren't.

There are popular celebrities, there are unpopular celebrities and then there are the walking dead. You know the walking dead when you see them: they look like Mel Gibson, still striving for drunken charm in an L.A. County mug shot, after getting picked up on a DWI charge that included anti-semitic slurs directed at the police.