No one ever pretended that shopping for anything is a rational experience. If it were, would there be Fluffernutter? Laceless sneakers? Porkpie hats? Would the Chia Pet even exist?

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.

Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

When you're your parents' one shot at a genetic legacy, you may get to attend all the best schools, wear all the best clothes and eat all the best foods - at least relative to children in multiple-sibling households. But you also wind up with an overweening sense of your own importance.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

The vexing thing about human behavior is that when we say we know we should do something, we really and truly do know it. It's hard to be 50 lbs. overweight or smoke a pack a day or feel miserable every moment you spend at work and not understand in a deep and primal way that change is in order - and that in some cases it could even save your life.

Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served up by the plateful, three meals per day, in an era in which the supermarket was king, the farmer's market was, well, for farmers, and the word 'locavore' sounded vaguely like a mythical beast.