Aspergers or ADHD? The answer will surprise you.

Recently a flurry of articles about academic overachievers appeared in scientific journals. Specifically, the research found that people with a diagnosis of autism were more frequently high achievers in school. And people diagnosed with ADHD were more frequently low achievers in school.

A paper published last week in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders explains the reason for the gap in achievement between kids with ADHD and kids with autism: overachievement in written communication was common among kids with autism and kids with ADHD. But kids with autism were overachievers in reading comprehension and math, whereas kids with ADHD were underachievers in those areas. Read more

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This is a great time to make a career change

I learned about bouncing back from the diet industry. This is not surprising. All the best research about personal development comes from the diet industry because there’s so much money to be made if you can figure out how to help people lose weight. One study that I have never forgotten is that if you are trying to lose weight and you have a bad eating day, you’ll be fine if you just tell yourself “I’m good at my diet” and you go back to eating well the next day. Read more

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I was calm until I read about colleges staying closed until September 2022

Each night before I go to sleep, I lay in bed torturing myself with the day’s news. I know we are not supposed to do that, but there are very few vices I can fully engage in when we have five people living in a 1000-square-foot apartment. Screen-time news right before bed is a vice that takes very little space and does not involve the bathroom. Read more

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It’s time for Seder, which is Zeder, in our modern-day-plague ravaged Passover

Last week I received a very long email with instructions for Zeder. This year millions of Jews around the world will log into Zoom, and try to continue a 2000-year tradition of not changing the tradition. We will recall plagues of past like infestation of locusts and raining frogs and we’ll silently scoff that Egypt didn’t even have to shut down the schools. Also, I expect that like teachers who can’t believe how quickly a full day of lesson plans zip by on Zoom, we will be shocked that a dinner that usually lasts 4 hours and 7 glasses of wine will be over in less than half that time on video. Read more

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What it’s like to be a single parent who has coronavirus.

I knew something was wrong the day my son lay in bed in an emergency room waiting for his MRI to come back. A nurse entered his room and said, “Has your son been outside the country recently?”

I did a double-take. “It’s pretty late to be asking that, isn’t it?”

“Ma’am, yes or no?”

“No.” Read more

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