Humans Have A Fraught Relationship With Beasts.

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.

Every Batch Of Sperm Represents An Opportunity For Genetic Typos - Called De Novo Mutations - To Be Passed On. A 20-year-old Man And Woman Will Each Pass On About 20 De Novo Mutations To A Baby They Conceive. By The Time The Couple Is 40, A Woman's Total Has Remained At 20, While A Man's Has Jumped To 65 - And It Keeps Climbing From There.

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.

Older Fatherhood Isn't All Bad: Testosterone Rates Drop About 1% Per Year As Men Age, Making Them Less Reactive And More Patient, And A Professionally Established Middle-aged Man Is Likely To Have More Time And Money To Devote To His Kids Than A Twenty-something Who's Just Getting Started.

There May Be No More-radioactive Term In The English Language Than What We Now Almost Always Refer To As The 'n-word' - Itself A Coy Means Of Linguistic Sidestepping That Is A Sign Of How Perilous It Is To Utter The Thing In Full, Even In Conversations About Language.