Any public-radio-listening polymath should know about MOOCs, or massive open online courses. These classes and lectures, often taught by the brightest minds at the most prestigious universities, are available online, often at no cost. They’re...
Do children still need to learn cursive? Following in our first discussion of whether cursive should be taught, many listeners now in their twenties say they didn’t learn cursive in school and have trouble reading it. Others view it as a lost...
A college senior has invented a word to describe that anxiety we feel when there’s unfinished work looming over us. He calls it desgundes. As in, “that twenty-year-old in the library making a three-foot boondoggle must likely be dealing...
Hi, language lovers! Happy March 4, and Happy National Grammar Day! (Get it? “March forth” and syntactically sin no more?) Join the revelry here: Just don’t say we didn’t warn you about the earworm from that grammar song...
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a fill-in-the-blank limerick puzzle, including: “There was once a coed named Clapper / In psychology class quite a napper. / But her Freudian dreams / Were so classic it seems / That now she’s a...
In this week’s episode: Just how far back could you go and still understand the English people were speaking? We crank up our trusty time machine to find out. Hint: You’d probably have a tough time getting around in the eighth century...