It’s not unusual for kindergarten teachers to spend a chunk of their school days trying to get their young learners to stop talking. Advice on managing classroom noise is easy to find. Far rarer, ...

I was always amazed at the ability of my husband’s parents to strike up conversations with total strangers any time in almost any place. Most memorable was an escalator ride going down to the main ...

Python 3.15 introduces an immutable or ‘frozen’ dictionary that is useful in places ordinary dicts can’t be used. Only very rarely does Python add a new standard data type. Python 3.15, when it’s ...

My husband, Don, will talk to anyone. In line at a store, on a plane, in a parking lot; it doesn’t matter where we’re at, he’ll engage. In fact, I have my current job because he was gregarious enough ...

Senate Republicans have for weeks been debating the use of the “talking filibuster” to guarantee the passage of the SAVE America Act in the upper chamber, after President Donald Trump called the ...

Zoomers, we have bad news: your six or seven minutes in the vanguard of the cultural zeitgeist are officially over. The New York Times has published a fresh guide to Gen Z slang. It’s all downhill ...

An old professor of mine once demonstrated to me that if I described a headache out loud—its color and shape, what substance it was made of, what it would say if it were a 6-year-old—it would often ...

Once, every middle-class home had a piano and a dictionary. The purpose of the piano was to be able to listen to music before phonographs were available and affordable. Later on, it was to torture ...

Ta-Da is a screen-free, touch-activated, smart paper book that talks to readers and teaches 1,000 essential vocabulary words through native-speaker audio, sound effects, and games. Buy Now: Ta-Da!

Small talk can be awkward and boring. It’s also a requisite skill to learn to participate as a socially adept person in society—as well as the workplace. But mustering “So, where are you going for ...