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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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Journalist
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Screenwriter
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Better
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Recognize
Acknowledging
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Everywhere
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Keep
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Favored

More quotes by Jeffrey Kluger

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From the time we're born, our brothers and sisters are our collaborators and coconspirators, our role models and our cautionary tales.
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When our culture shifts, it tends to overcorrect, throwing out everything associated with an era we've moved past, rather than saving what was good and combining it with what is new.
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As with real reading, the ability to comprehend subtlety and complexity comes only with time and a lot of experience. If you don't adequately acquire those skills, moving out into the real world of real people can actually become quite scary.
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Narcissism, like the other personality disorders, is a condition that's known as ego-syntonic. In other words, the paranoid person really does believe that people are after him, and the narcissist really does believe that he or she is better than or more entitled than other people, and truly doesn't see why that's not the case.
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Part-black generally means all-black in Americans' minds. Just as part-Asian or part-Hispanic or part-anything-else usually puts individuals in those minority-groups' camps.
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Kids are anarchy writ large.
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There's no one place a virus goes to die - but that doesn't make its demise any less a public health victory. Throughout human history, viral diseases have had their way with us, and for just as long, we have hunted them down and done our best to wipe them out.
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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.
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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 no such thing as downtime for your brain.
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Narcissistic personalities usually do do better than you and me and the average person. We've always seen it in the office. The person who speaks up more in meetings, the person who's charismatic, who can sell an idea with more excitement and energy.
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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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Toxins love to get you while you're young. Lead, mercury, secondhand smoke and sundry other environmental nasties do a lot more damage when tissue is immature, vulnerable and growing than when it's mature and comparatively fixed.
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Operating-room errors hold a special terror for patients, if only because they seem like the most avoidable kind of complications. The occasional horror stories of patients who have the wrong leg removed or the wrong knee replaced generate the most headlines, as do tales of patients whose identities are mixed up entirely.
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Kids whose puberty begins too soon face not just psychological risks, but physical ones too, with an increased likelihood of cancer, as well as skeletal changes that could prevent them from attaining their full adult height.
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Why are some people born with a fire in the belly, while others need something to get their pilot light lit?
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.
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A fishnet is made up of a lot more holes than strings, but you can't therefore argue that the net doesn't exist. Just ask the fish.
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
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Even the best computer in the world has no idea that it exists. You do. No one knows what creates that ineffable awareness that we're here.
Jeffrey Kluger