Quotes by Jeffrey Kluger

The most decisive and certainly most delicious option for an aggrieved worker in a narcissist’s office is simply quitting. Slamming your resignation letter on the boss’s desk and striding out to take a better job somewhere else is satisfying and in both its finality and its totality. Instantly the feared figure is stripped of all power, reduced to a person of utter inconsequence in your life. Not only does this spell immediate freedom for the exiting employee, it can also contribute to the long-term decline of the boss.

When an organization starts hemorrhaging talent, CEOs and boards of directors want to know why. If the boss gets blamed for the brain drain and is ultimately removed, it means relief for the employees still there and ex post facto vengeance for the former ones.

Since narcissism is fueled by a greater need to be admired than to be liked, psychologists might use that fact as a therapeutic lever - stressing to patients that being known as a narcissist will actually cause them to lose the respect and social status they crave.

As the National Football League and other pro sports increasingly reckon with the early dementia, mental health issues, suicides and even criminal behavior of former players, the risk of whats known as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), is becoming clear.

The families of many athletes - incensed at the sports leagues and hoping to make games safer overall - are increasingly making the brains of players who die prematurely and suspiciously available for study. Some athletes are even making the bequest themselves.

More and more NFL players have been willing their bodies to science so that their brains can be studied even if they die of other causes.

Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesnt mean your weakness for pricey swag isnt woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, its less TV ads or Labor Day sales that make you buy the things you do than the tastes and temperaments that are already part of you at birth.

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we cant even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

Its one of the worst-kept secrets of family life that all parents have a preferred son or daughter, and the rules for acknowledging it are the same everywhere: The favored kids recognize their status and keep quiet about it - the better to preserve the good thing theyve got going and to keep their siblings off their back.

Humans have a fraught relationship with beasts. They are our companions and our chattel, our family members and our laborers, our household pets and our household pests. We love them and cage them, admire them and abuse them. And, of course, we cook and eat them.

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.

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.

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?

As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you dont adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.

Vaccines save lives fear endangers them. Its a simple message parents need to keep hearing.

What people fear most about tragedy is its randomness - a taxi cab jumps the curb and hits a pedestrian, a gun misfires and kills a bystander. Better to have some rational cause and effect between incident and injury. And if cause and effect arent possible, better that there at least be some reward for all the suffering.

At the root of the shy temperament is a deep fear of social judgment, one so severe it can sometimes be crippling. Introverted people dont worry unduly about whether theyll be found wanting, they just find too much socializing exhausting and would prefer either to be alone or in the company of a select few people.

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.

Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love, security, the joy of children, but its also an interpersonal battlefield, and its not hard to see why: Take two disparate people, toss them together in often-confined quarters, add the stresses of money and kids - now lather, rinse, repeat for the rest of your natural life. What could go wrong?

The death of anti-gay hate speech is no doubt being hastened by the head-spinning speed with which gays as a group - to say nothing of gay marriage - are becoming an unremarkable and even quite traditional parts of American life.