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It's 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 they've got going and to keep their siblings off their back.

Jeffrey Kluger

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Jeffrey Kluger
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: May 21
Author
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Thing
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Recognize
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Keep
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Mother
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More quotes by Jeffrey Kluger

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Science has yet to isolate the Godiva Chocolate or Prada gene, but that doesn't mean your weakness for pricey swag isn't woven into your DNA. According to a new study of identical twins, it's 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.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Jellyfish serve as a model for bioengineers for the same reason yeast were once so valuable to geneticists: they're simple to deconstruct.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Spending $1 for a brand new house would feel very, very good. Spending $1,000 for a ham sandwich would feel very, very bad. Spending $19,000 for a small family car would feel, well, more or less right. But as with physical pain, fiscal pain can depend on the individual, and everyone has a different threshold.
Jeffrey Kluger
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My own life has in some ways been a decades-long tour of the sibling experience. I have full sibs, I have half-sibs, and for a time I had step-sibs.
Jeffrey Kluger
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I grew up in a suburb of Baltimore with an extremely high concentration of Jewish families - where the Levys and Cohens in the high school yearbook went on for pages, where I could count far more temples than I ever could churches. Anti-Semitism, in our cultural biodome, was mostly an abstract concept.
Jeffrey Kluger
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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.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Never mind what you've heard. Halle Berry was not the first black woman to win an Academy Award for Best Actress. She was actually the 74th white one. And never mind all this talk about America electing its first black President Barack Obama is actually the 44th white man to hold the job.
Jeffrey Kluger
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There's a deep-freeze of sorts for all good intentions - a place that you store your plans to make changes in your life when you know you're not going to make them at all.
Jeffrey Kluger
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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
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Kids are anarchy writ large.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Vaccines save lives fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.
Jeffrey Kluger
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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.
Jeffrey Kluger
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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.
Jeffrey Kluger
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What makes spinal-cord injuries as devastating as they are is that everything about them plays out in absolutes: they are instantaneous, utterly disabling and horribly permanent.
Jeffrey Kluger
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My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home - and then watched that home explode, too.
Jeffrey Kluger
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A cockroach likely has no less brainpower than a butterfly, but we're quicker to deny it consciousness because it's a species we dislike.
Jeffrey Kluger
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There's a universe inside your head - a place of pictures and passions, of songs and sorrows. It's everything you are - and it's an utter mystery.
Jeffrey Kluger
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There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't 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?
Jeffrey Kluger
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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.
Jeffrey Kluger
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Introverts listen better, they assess risks more carefully, they can be wiser managers. It's not for nothing that the Silicon Valley billionaires are so often the retiring types.
Jeffrey Kluger