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. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
It’s a deep and all but certain truth about narcissistic personalities that to meet them is to love them, but to know them well is to find them unbearable. Confidence quickly curdles into arrogance; smarts turn to smugness, charm turns to smarm. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
There are a lot of ways to make people not like you, but one of the most powerful – if least fair – is to be really, really successful. Nobody resents the guy who just lost his job. But the guy whose Internet start-up made him a billionaire at 25? That’s a whole different kettle of envy. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
Narcissism falls along the axis of what psychologists call personality disorders, one of a group that includes antisocial, dependent, histrionic, avoidant and borderline personalities. But by most measures, narcissism is one of the worst, if only because the narcissists themselves are so clueless. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
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? Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
Paul McCartney had a baby when he was 61; Rod Stewart was 66; Rupert Murdoch was a stunning 72. Not only does that mean they’ll have less stamina than the average dad, that means they’ll, well, check out a lot sooner too. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
There’s only one thing harder than living in a home with an adolescent – and that’s being an adolescent. The moodiness, the volatility, the wholesale lack of impulse control, all would be close to clinical conditions if they occurred at another point in life. In adolescence, they’re just part of the behavioral portfolio. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
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. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
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. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote
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. Jeffrey Kluger Read Quote