Games
Story Stream
Scrabble, Anonymous May 16, 2024
This morning, before breakfast, I played nineteen games of Scrabble on my phone. I won thirteen. It took less than an hour. Over the past twenty-five years, I’ve played Scrabble every day, predominantly on ISC.RO, a website hosted in Romania that all...
The Cult of Nonfiction May 16, 2024
What, other than literary fiction, is occupying the young male today? I posited, among other attractions, online gambling and video gaming. This drew strong reactions, particularly from gamers who suggested almost as many women are playing today. Fai...
Aaron Gordon Found His Destiny With the Denver Nuggets May 15, 2024
As Anthony Edwards stood to exit the press conference stage, his eyes drifted down to the box score in front of him, and the full accounting of the Minnesota Timberwolves’ Game 4 loss to the Denver Nuggets. The reigning champions had just carried out...
For Pete’s Sake May 14, 2024
The line between role model and reprobate runs through the middle of every human heart. Eighty-three-year-old Pete Rose, banished from baseball in 1989 for betting on sports, now signs baseball cards in half-empty exurban shopping malls to scrape a b...
The Joy of Defense May 14, 2024
Shortly after the Minnesota Timberwolves dismantled the Denver Nuggets in Game Two of the second round of the N.B.A. playoffs, in Denver, Nickeil Alexander-Walker, a Timberwolves guard, stood in front of his locker, talking to reporters about the gam...
The NBA’s One-Man Band Era Is Here May 10, 2024
Jalen Brunson is more than just the leading scorer in the 2024 NBA playoffs. He is the centerpiece of the best New York Knicks team in decades and the epitome of one of the biggest trends in the NBA from the 2020s. Over his past five games, Brunson h...
The Endless Game May 09, 2024
Toward the end of his life, as his blindness progressed, the shy librarian who answered to the name Jorge Luis Borges began to feel alienated from his alter ego, the celebrated writer. “I know of Borges from the mail,” he wrote in a prose poem publis...
'Dune: Part Two' Elevates the Original May 08, 2024
I was too young to see the Lord of the Rings trilogy when it hit theaters a little over two decades ago. When I heard that one of Hollywood’s finest working directors, Denis Villeneuve, would shortly be adapting Dune to the big screen, I was determin...
Our Dystopian Future Is Inside Your Gambling App May 07, 2024
Earlier this month, basketball player Jontay Porter, former Toronto Raptors benchwarmer, saw his short and unimpressive NBA career come to an abrupt end. This severe penalty stems from his involvement in a gambling scheme that exploited his access to...
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of 'Fallout' May 06, 2024
In terms of popular franchises that were ripe for adaptation, Fallout had to be one of the best candidates available. It’s an immensely popular video game series with a devoted fanbase, several bestselling games, and endless source material that a te...
How Fiction Became Edible May 02, 2024
When Chelsea Monroe-Cassel began chronicling the foods of Games of Thrones for her punnily named cookbook A Feast of Ice and Fire, she looked for culinary inspiration in the recipes of the Middle Ages.We’re talking properly medieval stuff. The sorts ...
The Only Relationship That Matters in 'Challengers' May 02, 2024
Tennis isn’t just a game—it’s a relationship, a thing that you share, something that happens between people. It’s a rare thing, Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) tells two boys she’s just met: In a match, you may see real tennis for only 15 seconds. It’s hard t...
Dave & Buster’s Is Taking a Sinister Gamble May 02, 2024
Have you ever wanted to put a little action on a game of skee-ball at an iconic arcade emporium with locations all over the country? Congratulations. You’re finally in luck.Dave & Buster’s will soon introduce a wagering component to its arcade games,...
The Novelist as Information Machine February 27, 2024
Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, is, in essence, a three-part novel where the first and last parts–comprised of the diary of a young French ethnologist named David Mazon–are relatively easy, light, comic, and the middle s...
Vertex Is the Last Good Place Online February 27, 2024
OK, look, I know how it sounds when I say that I wind down from a long day on the internet by playing a game on the internet. I’m a freelance journalist writing a book about private equity, which means I spend my working hours toggling between half a...
AI Companies Are Getting the Culture War They Deserve February 23, 2024
Whenever a new AI tool comes out, thousands of users rush to test it, trip it up, and figure out what it’s capable of. This week, it’s Google’s turn, as members test out various tiers and features of Gemini, its recently rebranded and upgraded group ...
Do You Know What You Want? February 22, 2024
According to ancient wisdom, we humans find lasting happiness only when we shrink our sense of self and its desires. When we reduce our wants, we reduce our frustrations, in this sun-whipped desert world of obstacles and lacks. Perhaps, done well, su...
The Old Soul That’s Giving the Miami Heat New Life February 21, 2024
When the Miami Heat, fresh off a trip to the Finals, needed a basket in the fourth quarter of their first game of the season, Erik Spoelstra didn’t put the ball in the hands of proven scorer Tyler Herro or playoff hero Caleb Martin. Instead, he calle...
The Swagger of Caitlin Clark February 20, 2024
Coming into the game between the University of Iowa and the University of Michigan, on Thursday night, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark needed eight points to break the women’s N.C.A.A. scoring record. It took her all of two minutes and twelve seconds to do that...
TikTokers Have Some Advice For Joe Biden’s New Account February 16, 2024
The Biden-Harris campaign made its TikTok debut during the Super Bowl Sunday night. Their first video, which already has well over 8 million views, riffed on the wild conspiracy theory that President Joe Biden rigged the game for the Kansas City Chie...
How the Chiefs Became the Last Great American Dynasty February 14, 2024
Did you really think that the Kansas City Chiefs were not going to win the Super Bowl? It’s true that they struggled offensively this season, and entered the playoffs as a wild card, forcing them to compete in an extra game while the San Francisco 49...
Manky Stuff February 13, 2024
When I was a student, we used to play a boasting game. The rules were simple: all you had to do was list every drug you’d ever taken. The person who’d snuffled up the second-highest number of mind-altering substances would then, unofficially, win. Ta...
A Fumble for American Democracy February 12, 2024
Is the future of the National Football League’s Super Bowl linked with the future of American democracy? The Super Bowl may seem to some like an overly commercialized sports championship game, but it holds considerable cultural significance. It has e...
How Britney Spears Explains Taylor Swift February 12, 2024
There seems to be a kind of paranoid storm swirling around Taylor Swift just now. It’s as though she’s at the center of a gothic novel filled with conspiracy theories and secret doubles, with the far right placing her at the center of government oper...
Taylor Swift, America’s National Hero February 12, 2024
A record number of Americans are likely to watch this Sunday’s Super Bowl, probably only half of whom will be following the actual game. The other half will be scanning the luxury boxes for tantalising glimpses of Taylor Swift, the country’s most fam...
