• faint hope for the Monarchs


      The Monarch figures for 2017 were released in February: down 1/3 from the previously year, which was only slightly better than the figures for 2014 and 2013, the lowest in at least 20 years, a decline of more than 80% in recent decades. According to a report in the New York Times by Michael Wines there […]

  • Why are smells so hard to recall?


      The sense of smell has a conflicting relationship to memory: the memories it evokes are the most intense and emotional, while scent itself is so elusive as to seem beyond memory. Proust may have been the first person to describe the phenomenon of scent/taste-induced memory, a memory so complete that it feels like the […]

  • the 7 Wonders: lost and found


      By the end of the Roman Era, all the Wonders except the pyramids had disappeared and only the idea of a List of Seven Wonders survived. For several hundred years no record existed of the original list’s makeup, though new lists continued to be developed. In the early 1500s, after Antipater’s poem had come […]

  • why can’t I appreciate wine?


      I am a good cook and have a reasonably good palate. But I’ve never been able to identify very many flavors in wine and can never remember any of them. This has always been something of a mystery to me. Scent, like music, which I also can’t remember, seems totally ephemeral to me. It […]

  • the tradition of blood feuds


      From a distance, a blood feud—in which two families commit to decades of mutual hate and revenge killing—seems like a form of madness. In America, it became a famous bit of our early history through its appearance in literature; or did it make it into literature because it was so famous? The Hatfield and McCoy feud, at the […]

  • twin studies and sibling rivalry


      Why are some twins so close as to develop something approximating a private language (called idioglossia or cryptophasia) while others are connected only by animosity? For a look-alike conversation between infant twins see this very funny clip. Are identical twins close more often than fraternal twins? If so, does this suggest that the determining […]

  • why is 7 a magic number?


      There are many theories for this, among which, that seven (like three, another sacred number) is a prime number, indivisible; that our daily lives are organized around a seven-day week; and that seven is the limit to the amount of information we can process and remember at one time. This last theory was developed […]

  • sibling rivalry, a rare topic


      Sibling rivalry is a key life challenge for most people. According to a new book, “The Sibling Rivalry Effect,” by Jeffrey Kruger, conflicts arise every 17 minutes between 3-7 year-olds and every 9.5 minutes between 2-4 year-olds: an impressive frequency. Such struggles often last a life-time, and sibling relationships tend to be more long-lasting than […]

  • sibling versus parental input


      Arguments are being made that sibling influences outdo parental ones in importance. A 2014 NPR article reported on research indicating that younger siblings tend to copy the elder in out of wedlock pregnancies. Similar influence is shown in behaviors such as smoking and drinking. Richard Rende, a professor of psychiatry at Brown University and one […]


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