Quotes from Jeffrey Kluger

I was born in the U.S., my wife was born in Mexico and emigrated here when she was in college, and my daughters were born in New York City. That makes them passport-carrying, natural-born, eligible-to-run-for-president Americans. But they're also Mexicans and they like that just fine.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

Habitual texters may not only cheat their existing relationships, they can also limit their ability to form future ones since they don't get to practice the art of interpreting nonverbal visual cues.

There's a reason narcissists don't learn from mistakes and that's because they never get past the first step which is admitting that they made one. It's always an assistant's fault, an adviser's fault, a lawyer's fault. Ask them to account for a mistake any other way and they'll say, 'what mistake?

Remember where you're standing when the spotlight goes off, Lovell warned me once, when our book was a best-seller and the movie it spawned was in theatres. You'll have to find your own way off the stage.

There was no established way for a man to tell his wife he was going to the moon. A man could tell his wife he was going to sea or going to war; men had been doing that for millennia. But the moon? It was a whole new conversation.

But Borman does remember one telegram—from a sender he didn't know—and he still likes to talk about it. The telegram said, simply, "Thank you, Apollo 8. You saved 1968." That, Borman realized, made him feel happier than gazing up at the moon ever did.

Small children, by their very nature, are moral monsters.

For all the drama, romance and seeming magic of childbearing, what happy expectant parents are really celebrating is nothing more than a parasite-host relationship. At the moment of conception, an effectively alien creature commandeers the mother's womb and uses it as a sort of beachhead from which to seize control of her entire body.

Commenting on the crew's Christmas Eve reading from Genesis, he looked down at the justices of the Supreme Court—a court barely seven years removed from having ruled prayer in the classroom unconstitutional—and said, "But now that I see the gentlemen in the front row, I'm not sure we should have read from the Bible at all.

So the first-man-on-the-moon profiles of Stafford were shelved, to be replaced by stories about Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong—and those were the stories that ultimately ran.

Before long, Commander Lovell—the man who had orbited the moon in a spacecraft that had done everything right—would learn what happens when a ship does everything wrong.

As far as the people in NASA's public affairs office were concerned, there was entirely too much conversation about balls and urine going on between the Apollo 8 astronauts and Mission Control.

He then farmed the problem out to Joe Laitin, a former wire service reporter who had later become a public affairs officer for President Kennedy and currently worked for President Johnson.

So the words Joe Laitin's wife had suggested were then typed onto a piece of fireproof paper—since Apollo 1, the only kind of paper allowed in a spacecraft—and the page was inserted at the back of the flight plan. There it would remain until Christmas Eve, when the mission to the moon would be nearly done.

If the Apollo 8 controllers were showing the strain, however, today none of that mattered. Chris Kraft, Gene Kranz, Bob Gilruth, George Mueller, and the other members of the space agency brass barely left the Mission Control auditorium except to go home for a shower, a change of clothes, and, if absolutely necessary, a brief nap.

Though history is being made today, we all need to try and comprehend the years of effort by many people involved in the eventual lunar landing.

and the wind-chime laugh that

The television show from inside the spacecraft would be even worse, with the happy, cocky Americans showing off for their countrymen back home—and showing up the people of Russia.