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

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.

The truth, of course, is that the only necessary and sufficient condition for human beings to murder one another is the simple fact of being human.

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.

The best you can sometimes do is learn to take a breath, count to ten and simply accept that try as you might, no, your husband will never, ever learn not to drop a wet towel on the bed. That acceptance too counts as resolving a fight.

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.

Learning to speak was the most remarkable thing you ever did.