For the most part, Guan Tianlang, had a pretty good month. At 14 not only is he the youngest player *ever* to participate in the Masters, but he also was the only amateur to make the cut, earning him additional coverage (which thankfully wasn’t overshadowed by the latest Tiger Woods scandal). While Tianlang did have [...]
It’s always great fun to see visual depictions and analysis of activities I’ve studied. Unlike Dance Moms, the drama in the recent documentary Brooklyn Castle isn’t manufactured. It brings an important story, and activity, to a broader audience– in a way not done since the 1993 movie Searching for Bobby Fischer. Below is my review [...]
I have a soft spot for scholastic chess. In 2005 I started studying chess as part of my dissertation research (which is forthcoming as Playing to Win: Raising Kids in a Competitive Culture). One of the things I loved the most about the chess scene is the diversity of people who meet and engage over [...]
I admit that I am a Scrabble tournament virgin. I’ve only ever seen a Scrabble tournament while watching the documentary Word Wars, and I’ve read about this particular subculture in Stefan Fatsis’ delighful Word Freak. But in many ways the Scrabble tournament world doesn’t seem to differ too much from its intellectual cousins, or “sports [...]
Whenever children participate in activities, including unsupervised play or organized non-competitive activities, they acquire skills through socialization. This is also true of participation in organized activities which do not have an explicitly competitive element, as I have argued before. But many activities that were previously non-competitive have been transformed from environments that only emphasized learning [...]
In response to yesterday’s post on child beauty pageants in Australia (or not) I received a variety of thoughtful comments. One of them was from The Family Factor who wrote, So what happens to the girls’ views of the audience when they realize the[y] did not cut it? The idea that outward appearance is what [...]
This week’s New Yorker has an interesting article, “The Prince’s Gambit,” on Magnus Carlsen (written by D.T. Max, who incidentally wrote one of the more terrifying non-fiction books I have read in recent years, The Family That Couldn’t Sleep). Carlsen is a twenty-year-old chess player from Norway, with Justin Bieber-esque looks, who is ranked first [...]
