Learning Strategies

Featured Categories

Books ›

• The Odyssey (my failed attempt to see the movie)
  August 12, 2026
• Murder off the Page
  August 6, 2026
• With Prejudice
  July 31, 2026
• Happy birthday (or maybe not), Messrs. Strunk and White!
  July 30, 2026

Dorchester/Boston ›

• Bred
  August 21, 2026
• Morning glories
  August 13, 2026
• Good stuff cheap! The story of Jerry Ellis and Building #19
  August 4, 2026
• Hydrangeas
  July 27, 2026

Food & Restaurants ›

• How was last night at Tavolo different from all other nights?
  May 7, 2026
• Dot Block Diner
  April 21, 2026
• Happy spring! Happy buck-a-shuck!
  March 20, 2026
• A special brunch at Tavolo
  March 1, 2026

Life ›

• Fireworks
  July 3, 2026
• Christina II
  July 1, 2026
• Speaking of Les Miz…
  June 27, 2026
• The Tartan Army: the day Scottish FIFA fans drank Boston dry
  June 26, 2026

Linguistics ›

• What, I hear you ask, is an inverted oloid? (For that matter what is a plain vanilla oloid?)
  August 14, 2026
• Why don’t Native Americans want to be called Native Americans?
  July 28, 2026
• Unabridged
  June 28, 2026
• Judeo-Arabic
  May 24, 2026

Math ›

• Very sad news
  October 17, 2025
• The metric system has gotten an update!
  July 14, 2025
• As Tom Lehrer says, that’s mathematics!
  July 9, 2025
• The Plinko Bounce
  June 28, 2025

Model Railroading ›

• Only the best…
  July 22, 2026
• Where are the women?
  April 13, 2026
• Famous railway modellers
  March 16, 2026
• “So you want a model railroad” — a well-known… okay… not-so-well-known Warner Bros. film from 1955
  November 22, 2025

Movies & (occasionally) TV ›

• Picard: Welcome to the Sticks!
  March 6, 2026
• The new Springsteen bio-pic
  November 11, 2025
• Breaking Silence: a truly outstanding documentary!
  July 29, 2025
• The Social Network
  May 11, 2025

Teaching & Learning ›

• Who’s better at understanding written English — you or some random teen in South Korea?
  January 22, 2026
• Triple threat: Carl Sagan, critical thinking, and an exam
  October 13, 2025
• Truly these are oldies but goodies — songs from… wait for it… two millennia ago!
  September 28, 2025
• Measles and polio down in the schoolyard
  September 8, 2025

Technology ›

• Claude vs. ChatGPT
  May 28, 2026
• Will the real John McWhorter please stand up? (No, no, that’s not the real one; that’s the AI John McWhorter!)
  January 18, 2026
• Not the other Wes Moore
  June 22, 2025
• Bye bye Mark Z.
  February 6, 2025

Travel ›

• Interesting address
  April 8, 2026
• Taunton vs. Colmar?
  March 4, 2026
• Written in the South Pacific during World War II
  February 17, 2025
• Globle
  February 15, 2023

Weston ›

• A former student’s PhD defense
  August 15, 2025
• “Dear parents of math geniuses…,” writes Tanya Khovanova
  December 6, 2022
• How can girls succeed at the highest level of high-school debate?
  November 20, 2022
• Reading Latin and Ancient Greek for fun and profit. For what? Fun? Yes, fun. Really. And the profit was purely intellectual, not financial.
  October 19, 2022