Freida McFadden

In 2007, an acclaimed violinist named Josh Bell, who had recently sold out a concert with average ticket prices of a hundred dollars each, posed as a street musician. He stood in a subway station in Washington, DC wearing jeans and a baseball cap, where he played the exact same music as at his concert, on a handcrafted violin worth more than three and a half million dollars. “Hardly anyone even stopped to listen,” Dr. Kindred explains to the lecture hall filled with students. “In fact, when children would occasionally stop, their parents would grab them and usher them on their way. This man played a sold-out concert in Boston, and on that day, only about fifty people stopped long enough to put a dollar in his violin case.