There's plenty to read about keeping your sanity while raising children, but it's all common-sense stuff about task division and taking breaks and the relentlessly repeated magic of date night with your spouse. What's missing is some 'tude.

Kids are anarchy writ large.

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.

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.

When we're awake, cortisol can fragment memories - one reason eyewitness crime scene accounts are so unreliable. But at night that very fragmentation allows creative recombinations of ideas.

At the root of the shy temperament is a deep fear of social judgment, one so severe it can sometimes be crippling. Introverted people don't worry unduly about whether they'll 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.

The brain sits snugly inside the skull, but it's not a completely flush fit - there is still a layer of fluid between bone and soft tissue that serves as a natural shock absorber. Some shocks, however, can't be absorbed, and when the head gets clobbered too hard, the brain can twist or torque or rattle around inside its skeletal casing.

Odds are you know some narcissists. Odds are they're smart, confident and articulate. They make you laugh, they make you think; the first time you met, they probably charmed the pants off of you - perhaps even literally. The odds are also that that spell didn't last.

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.

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.

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.

Athletes often start life at the opposite end of the wealth and prestige spectrum, but as soon as they exhibit an unusual talent for swinging a bat or sinking a free-throw they may find that the rules have been suspended for them. They are waved through school and into the pros, and incidents of bad behavior are overlooked or covered up.

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.

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.

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.

A child gets vaccinated and soon after, autism symptoms emerge. The apparent cause-and-effect is understandable but erroneous - more a coincidence of the calendar and childhood developmental stages than anything else, as repeated and exhaustive studies have shown.

It's not mere extremism that makes folks at the fringes so troubling; it's extremism wedded to false beliefs. Humans have long been dupes, easily gulled by rumors and flat-out lies.

Marketers have long known that a name can make all the difference when you're trying to move the merch. The kiwifruit was once the Chinese gooseberry, after all - at least until the produce peddlers wised up - and the Chilean sea bass was once the singularly unappetizing Patagonian toothfish.

Marriage is a lot of things - a source of love, security, the joy of children, but it's also an interpersonal battlefield, and it's 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?

All behavioral or mood disorders - including depression, OCD, ADHD and addiction - have some neurochemical components, but sufferers can still work to overcome them.

People with anxiety disorders such as OCD know that nothing can be more paralyzing than having too many options. Go to a store to buy a sweater, find four that you like and the odds are pretty good you'll stare and stare... and buy nothing at all.

If you're an older sibling and you have a younger sibling who needs mentoring or is afraid of the dark, you develop nurturing and empathic skills that you wouldn't otherwise have.

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.

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.

My family went through divorces and remarriages and the later, blended home - and then watched that home explode, too.

Sisters have ways of socializing brothers into the mysteries of girls. Brothers have ways of socializing sisters into the puzzle that is boys.

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.

There's a sort of sibling moratorium when you're establishing yourself as an adult. So much of your energy has to be focused on other things like work and kids. But when people become more settled, siblings tend to regroup because now you're building a new extended family.

Some of the most rewarding times my brothers and I have are when all of us get together, and we can see what we've been building genetically and culturally.

Indeed, the best way to think of willpower is not as some shapeless behavioral trait but as a sort of psychic muscle, one that can atrophy or grow stronger depending on how it's used.

The best thing about science is that hard, empirical answers are always there if you look hard enough. The best thing about religion is that the very absence of that certainty is what requires - and gives rise to - deep feelings of faith.

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.

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?

A close family member once offered his opinion that I exhibit the phone manners of a goat, then promptly withdrew the charge - out of fairness to goats.

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.

You just put your head down and do the work.

I would not be unhappy were I the last cisgender male to play a female transgender on television.

Usually when you act, you know where you're going, where the point is.

Owning a bookstore was right up there with acting in life goals, but other than swaggering around the store, I'm not much use.

My wife thought I was Vincent Schiavelli, and we married.

So many people say they went to school on 'The Larry Sanders Show.'

I think shows being sent out this way - pressing a button and 10 episodes can go out to the U.S.A., and the U.K. and Germany, it's very cool.

If you see 'Pollock,' I weighed almost 270 pounds.

I thought I was gonna do Lear, but I'm gonna do Maura.

I worked at The Old Globe Theater under the great baton of Craig Noel. One of the great theater heroes that we have. He was so great and so inspirational. I think I did 'Antony and Cleopatra' and 'The Taming of the Shrew'. I lived in Ocean Beach, and my rent was $140 a month.

I am a huge believer - I always have been - in the power of comedy. That comedy will break hatred and will bring understanding.

There was a library near us in San Francisco. It was the West Portal Public Library. I would ask my father to drive me there at night and pick me up when it closed. I think he was worried about this routine but never let on. Also, I kept this a secret from my friends, as I don't think it would have been considered the 'coolest' habit.

I think of everything as comedy, but I don't think of it in terms of sitcom comedy, I think of it in terms of Chekhov comedy. Chekhov called his plays comedies. There's always a mixture of a laugh with sadness. So the plie to the laugh is sadness.

You want to feel, 'I know that character.'

I did not know that you had to learn makeup. I just thought you went, 'Oh, I'm gonna put on some makeup.'