Angels, demons, spirits, wizards, gods and witches have peppered folk religions since mankind first started telling stories.

I'm a freelance writer, and I work alone at a big desk in the living room of my apartment. There are many days when I don't utter a single word to anyone but my husband.

Whatever the reason for any one individual's tendency to gain weight, the only way to lose the weight is to eat less and exercise more.

It's almost a rite of passage for the middle-aged, it seems, to invent generational stereotypes for dumping on the young.

Beliefs about how lying looks are plentiful and often contradictory: depending on whom you choose to believe, liars can be detected because they fidget a lot, hold very still, cross their legs, cross their arms, look up, look down, make eye contact or fail to make eye contact.

The English language has 112 words for deception, according to one count, each with a different shade of meaning: collusion, fakery, malingering, self-deception, confabulation, prevarication, exaggeration, denial.