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The writer visits the 2013 National School Scrabble Championship, a competition between children in the fourth through eighth grade: “The two boys have a laugh at my complaints. Frankly, I’m in a no-win situation. If I lose, I’m a loser. If I win, I’m the heartless bastard who beat two middle schoolers. Sam’s mother agrees […]

A writer and his wife participate in a centuries-old Scandinavian tradition known as “Wife-Carrying,” a sport where male competitors carry a female teammate while racing through an obstacle course: “And then my wife and I are 15 yards up the hill, and I am breathing hard, making it work. This isn’t so bad, I think. […]

A classic game is being undermined by technology, allowing players to come up with elaborate cheating schemes: “In the 2006 World Open in Philadelphia, the most moneyed tournament in the land — this year’s event, which concluded in July, had a kitty of $250,000 — tournament director Mike Atkins got bad feelings about a competitor […]

How Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo went from a small Wisconsin high school football field to the NFL, and what teammates, coaches, and a local sportswriter remember about Romo’s performance at one particular game: “‘He knew what he was doing,’ Luther says. ‘He doesn’t look like your prototypical quarterback in high school. He knew where […]

Tracing the modern Olympics back to their origin in rural England, where there was a very different set of competitive events: “Ah, but in Much Wenlock, the Olympic spirit thrived, year after year—as it does to this day. Penny Brookes had first scheduled the games on October 22, 1850, in an effort ‘to promote the […]

Cooper played heroic cowboys and espoused all-American values while the studio system helped hide his offscreen affairs: “Cooper became a hero to many, even as he developed a reputation as one of the most notorious philanderers in Hollywood. He had stiff competition — Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, the list goes on — but Cooper may […]

An explainer on Google’s challenges with privacy, its competition with Facebook and Twitter, and two big questions: Is search no longer central to its mission? And are Google’s recent moves “evil” by its early company standards? “It’s hard to understand how Google could screw up its core product like that. But there’s a remarkably simple […]

The story of the Polgar sisters, chess whizzes who were trained by their father from an early age: “When Susan was the age of many of her students, she dominated the New York Open chess competition. At 16 she crushed several adult opponents and landed on the front page of The New York Times. The […]

Comedy is also an industry of paying dues: Many long-time performers regard their first ten years as a kind of clueless wandering, and veteran comics tend to treat newbies like replacement troops: They are young, dumb, and could be gone soon, so it’s best to wait till they survive a while before learning their names. […]