Why do fools fall in love? I’ve always considered that a kind of cynical question, for it implies that people who don’t fall in love are not fools. Or, put another way, wise people do not fall in love. As most of us know, and are reminded ad nauseam for the weeks preceding Feb. 14, [...]

This year will be better than last year, won’t it? Because every year gets better than the one before, particularly when you’re the kind of person who can make resolutions and stick to them. That’s me: resolved to make a resolution and stick with it.
WHAT’S MY secret? I’ve learned to make resolutions that make [...]

Holiday stress is a popular notion, bigger than Santa almost. In recent years, some shrinks began noticing a spike in requests from patients for refills for anti-anxiety medications around the holidays. And ever since, the media have been obsessed with the paradoxical notion of people being unhappy at the supposedly most joyous time of year. [...]

My wife receives the reminder from our insurance company about twice a year: Is she aware that she’s entitled to a free annual mammogram and Pap smear? At a time when health insurers are not particularly known for their generosity, this is a welcome benefit — but why just for women? I don’t I get [...]

There are bad habits and there are bad habits. There’s the chronic tendency to leave cupboard doors open and an inexplicable inability to carry one’s dirty socks from floor to hamper. There’s the toilet seat thing that drives women nuts. There’s eating crackers in bed and hogging the remote. And then, of course, there are [...]

The other day at my son’s hockey game, I watched Tom jockey for position in front of the goal with an opposing defensemen. After rapping each other’s sticks, both were called for penalties. Immediately after the game, while the kids mingled near the stands talking to their parents, Tom’s nemesis approached him, grabbed his helmet’s [...]

When I think of food cravings I think of the clay-eaters of the South — people who have an unusual craving to eat clay or dirt. In many regions of South America, clay-eating, or geophagy (also known as pica), is also common, particularly among religious zealots and pregnant women. Those who indulge in the practice [...]

A recently released book called “The Adonis Complex” says that, in increasing numbers, men are feeling pressured to achieve physical perfection in the same way that women have for centuries. Millions of men, the authors say, are lifting weights and dieting compulsively, taking steroids, jamming hair plugs into their bald pates and surgically altering themselves [...]

Well, it was bound to happen. America has managed to export its latest pop-psyche obsession: that there’s something inherently wrong with boys.
The British Medical Journal, in a report issued two days before Christmas (who says the Brits don’t know how to be jolly?) and titled “The Fragile Male,” have declared that the human male [...]

Isn’t it gratifying (if you’re a man) to witness the rehabilitation of good old aggressive behavior? All of these years we’ve heard so much about testosterone-poisoning, how the evils of the world can all be traced back to the male propensity for in-your-face behavior.
THEN, of course, women discovered that to survive in the male-dominated [...]