By Matt Reed. I’m old enough to remember when “left to their own devices” simply meant “ignored.” Now the meaning is much more literal. More...

By Matt Reed. I don’t have much time for horror movies. I’d rather do a comedy, even a dumb one, than watch some cretin in a hockey mask wield a chain saw. It’s just not fun to watch people suffer. More...

By Matt Reed. As an instructor, I was never entirely sold on the multiple-choice format for tests. I would sometimes have a small section of it on an exam to test really basic factual knowledge -- how many senators does each state get -- as a sort of reality check, but it wouldn’t count for much. Life rarely comes at you in multiple-choice format, so it seemed kind of silly. More...

By Matt Reed. As longtime readers know, one of my favorite New Jersey sentences is “you catch the Dinky by the Wawa.”  Grown people say that. (The Dinky is a train in Princeton; Wawa is a convenience store.) I smile every single time I hear it. More...

By Matt Reed. The Onion did a piece a while back on Americans’ attitude toward mass transit. As the piece had it, 98 percent of Americans favor increased use of mass transit by other people; that way, their own commutes wouldn’t be slowed by so much traffic. More...

By Matt Reed. As family members, longtime readers and close friends know, I enjoy the occasional metaphor. One hit me this week that I can’t quite get out of my head. More...

By Matt Reed. "Full need*"
I spent some time this weekend scrutinizing ways to save money on cellphone plans. You’d think it would be relatively straightforward, but I had to break out a spreadsheet because each plan comes with its own qualifiers, asterisks, bonuses and unknowns. “Plus taxes and fees” appeared a lot, meaning something different in nearly every case. Sales tax was clear enough: New Jersey charges a nice, round 6.625 percent. But some providers charge other taxes and fees on top of that, and some don’t. Add “switch and get a free(ish) phone, except for sales tax, and you get it back in installments” calculations, and varying levels of compatibility between our current phones and various carriers, and it got far more complicated than it should have been. More...

By Matt Reed. When we know individually what we forget collectively. More...