You're standing outside a friend's car. You want him to roll down his window so you can talk. If you're from my generation or any earlier, you make a rotating, cranking…

Speak Up on Saturday night was a special night for us. It was our 122nd Speak Up show, dating back to 2013. In some ways, these shows have become old…

I discovered the secret to the perfect marriage a long time ago, and I didn't even realize it. A friend recently joked that she couldn't imagine what my wife, Elysha,…

Wedding season is upon us. I haven't worked a wedding for more than a year now, but from 1996 to 2024, my partner, Bengi, and I were the DJs at…

As an elementary school teacher for 27 years, I have been asked to spell words hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Every time I have been asked -- without exception…

A Veblen good is something people value because it’s expensive. The high price itself signals status, exclusivity, or prestige, so demand can actually increase as the price rises—the opposite of…

This is a photo of A.A. Milne, the author of the Winnie the Pooh stories, along with his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and the stuffed bear that inspired Winnie the…

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which incompetent people overestimate their abilities. Unskilled individuals suffer from a false sense of superiority, mistakenly rating their abilities much higher than…

I made this point recently on a social media post, but I wanted to make it here, too, for the masses: Last week I wrote a screed against the chronically…

The Metropolitan Opera in New York is in difficult financial straits: Recent box office revenue is a fraction of the yearly budget. In an effort to raise some money, they…