Once again, we're knocked out by the way science columnist John Tierney introduces us to...ourselves. We've been thinking about his latest all week, especially when pondering our choices of what to make for dinner, when to work out and how to spend the last days of summer. In an article about decision-making fatigue in last weekend's New York Times Magazine, Tierney explained that constantly having to choose between options can have a debilitating effect on our willpower, mood and energy levels. "Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car," Tierney wrote. "No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price." (By the way, can you guess what common ritual is "the decision-fatigue equivalent of Hell Week"?).  

My mother and I can’t have a conversation without her telling me the end of the movie I am about to see or the book I am about to read. She doesn’t mean to. But it will just come out, as in: “Honey, I just couldn't help it, I sobbed when the horse broke his leg and they had to put him down...right on the racetrack, by the finish line."

I am not the kind of person who hangs up on her mother. But I sometimes pretend the stove is on fire and drop the phone and run off screaming. Now, I can just stay on the line; knowing the ending actually improves a person’s enjoyment of a film or book. A recent study by researchers from the University of California at San Diego, Reuters reported, gave reader stories by John Updike, Roald Dahl, and Agatha Christie, only with two versions—the original, and another with a "spoiling paragraph" inserted in the text. 

The verdict: readers preferred the amended stories. My kids of course could have explain this to me—without words even. One look at their bewitched, glazed expressions as they watched Dinosaur Train, the underwater episode, for the millionth time proves the whole entire theory. (Just to increase your enjoyment: the little fish without any names do get eaten by the big friendly dinosaurs).

From now on, I will enjoy my mother's plot references, as long as my mother does not find out that I am enjoying them, at which point either I will be compelled to admit or she will be compelled to point out that—like our long hot endless childhoods visits to Civil War battlefields—this is officially for my own good.

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The back-from-vacation ah-ha moment!

For a long time, when I have been in-between jobs or just having one of my patented nightly anxiety spazes which inspires to me to mutter in bed—loudly—about mortgages and school bills, I have comforted myself with a few back-up plans. One of them is to invent a washing machine that comes preloaded with colorful little gumballs of detergent that pop out with each cycle (imagine: the end of lugging heavy, bag-breaking detergent bottles). The other is to open up a meatball shop called, uh, Leigh's Meatballs. For many years, when I mentioned the meatballs to strangers at cocktail parties, they would nod confusedly, and then say, "Oh......! You mean like meatball sandwiches!" 

Has this every happened to you? You're walking down the street, eating a muffin—which, like all muffins, is really a cupcake with added bran—while simultaneously talking on the cellphone:

My mother has a saying: It's easy to be nice...(long,  potent beat)...when you're feeling nice.  The same holds true for forgiveness. It’s to forgive the easy, inconsequential things—being stood up on a date or cut in front of in line at the grocery store. But what about the big wrenching losses, those life-changing wrongs that you know you must forgive—not just for the person who let you down, but for yourself?  (Bitterness, by the way, has been recently proven to reduce lifespan.)

We all believe in change at Oprah.com. But when you're in jail, that change is all the more difficult—if not, in many cases, impossible (one study found that 52 percent of all offenders in America end up re-incarcerated). This summer, as the Today show originally reported in this moving, altogether inspiring interview, an organization called Hope House reconnects kids with their incarcerated fathers by offering both parties a chance to catch up at an in-prison summer camp, complete with sing-alongs and art projects.

Last Tuesday, when Diana Nyad gave up her quest to swim—without a shark cage—to Cuba at age 62, we all cried. We cried even more when the New York Times reported that Nyad said she had no regrets and that she had concluded that the combination of her injured shoulder and the asthma attack made continuing impossible.