ESSAYS BY JEFFREY KLUGER

Enough With New Countries (February 22,
2008)  So  let  me  get  this  straight:   Serbia
and  Montenegro  were  all  that  remained of  
Yugoslovia after Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia
and  Bosnia-Herzegovina seceded  during  the
Balkan Wars. Then Montenegro declared inde-
pendence. Kosovo seceded from Serbia,  and
now  the  northern  region of  Kosovo wants to
secede and rejoin Serbia.  I don't have a dog in this latest fight—
or even understand it much—but  if  someone  wants  to  quit  
the  firm,  it seems to me you ought to let him go... (Click here to
continue.)


    Elections Are Not That Complicated
    (February 15, 2008) Never mind John McCain
    and Barack Obama. When it comes to the true
    winner this week the big mo really belongs to
    the Big O which in this case means Ockham.
    Why are the wheels coming off the Hillary bus?
    Ockham. Why did Romney sink, Rudy fade and
    McCain soar? Ockham. Ockham himself, of
course, would have to take our word for all this, since he's been
dead since 1347... (Click here to continue.)


Space Brains (September 27, 2007) You
know your space program is in trouble when
you're not sure whether one of your rockets
just blew up. Americans go swoony when they
talk about the romantic early days of space
exploration, but what we forget is that a lot
of that period was less romance than pratfall.
Our worst pie-in-the-face moment came on Dec. 6, 1957, the day
we attempted to launch our first satellite... (Click here to continue.)


    The Psychology of a Surge
    (January 11, 2007) There are a lot
    of things you can call President
    George W. Bush's decision to
    send up to 24,000 fresh troops
    into Iraq: stubbornness, folly, or—
    an increasingly lonely position—a
    bold bid to save a worthy mission.
    What you can't deny is that it's
one more thing too: entirely human. If there's anything nominally
rational animals like us can't abide, it's the sense that we've
wasted our time... (Click here to continue.)


Get Pluto Out of Here! (August
20, 2006) History has no record
of Grover Cleveland and Grover
Cleveland ever sitting down
together. That's odd, since the
two Presidents occupied the
Oval Office just four years apart
—Cleveland from 1885 to 1889,
and Cleveland following him there in
1893. Had it not been for the four years Benjamin Harrison served
as President between them, the country could have transitioned
from one Cleveland to the other without even changing the
monogrammed bathrobe in the White House residence... (Click
here to continue.)





                   FEATURES BY JEFFREY KLUGER

    The Science of Romance
    (January 17, 2008) The last time
    you had sex, there was arguably
    not a thought in your head. O.K., if
    it was very familiar sex with a very
    familiar partner, the kind that—
    truth be told—you probably
have most of the time, your mind may have wandered off to such
decidedly nonerotic matters as balancing your checkbook or
planning your week. If it was the kind of sex you shouldn't have
been having in the first place—the kind you were regretting even
as it was taking place—you might have already been flashing
ahead to the likely consequences... (Click here to continue.)


What Makes Us Moral? (December
3,  2007)  If the entire human species
were  a single individual, that  person
would long ago have  been  declared
mad. The insanity would not lie in the
anger  and  darkness  of  the  human
mind—though it can be a black and raging place indeed.  And it
certainly wouldn't lie in the transcendent goodness of that mind—
one so sublime, we fold it into a larger "soul." The madness would
lie instead in the fact that both of those qualities, the savage and
the splendid, can exist in one creature, one person, often in one
instant... (Click here to continue.)


    The Power of Birth Order
    (October 17, 2007) It could
    not have been easy being
    Elliott Roosevelt. If the
    alcohol wasn't getting him,
    the morphine was. If it wasn't
    the morphine, it was the
    struggle with depression.
    Then, of course, there were
    the constant comparisons
with big brother Teddy. In 1883, the year Elliott began battling
melancholy, Teddy had already published his first book and been
elected to the New York State assembly. By 1891—about the time
Elliott, still unable to establish a career, had to be institutionalized
to deal with his addictions—Teddy was U.S. Civil Service
Commissioner and the author of eight books. Three years later,
Elliott, 34, died of alcoholism. Seven years after that, Teddy, 42,
became President... (Click here to continue.)


The Science of Appetite (June
11, 2007)   Somewhere   in  your
brain,  there's  a  cupcake circuit.
How it works is not entirely clear,  
and  you  couldn't see it  even  if  
you knew where to look.  But  it's
there  all  the  same—and  it's  a
powerful thing. You didn't pop out of the womb prewired for
cupcakes, but long ago, early in your babyhood, you got your first
taste of one, and instantly a series of sensory, metabolic and
neurochemical fireworks went off... (Click here to continue.)

Also, click here for a complete index to Jeffrey Kluger's work for
Time magazine.
CREDITS: "Enough with New Countries" photo Daniel Mihailescu/AFP/Getty; "Space
Brains" photo by NASA; "Get Pluto Out of Here" illustration by Rob Dunleavy; "Science of
Romance" photo by Ann Cutting; "What Makes Us Moral?" illustration by John Ritter; "Power
of Birth Order" photo by Rudy Archuleta; Science of Appetite" illustration by Leigh Wells.
JEFFREY KLUGER IN TIME MAGAZINE