Amsterdam, February 10, 2021– During the 1978 World Championships soccer in Argentina, I was hired by the KNVB not only because I lived in Buenos Aires and worked as a sports reporter for the NOS, but also and especially because I knew chairman, Wim Meulemans, from his time in Suriname. I also had several other…
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Betty Bigombe had already hiked eight miles through the jungle, and there was still no sign of life. She was no stranger to a long walk — growing up in northern Uganda, she’d walked four miles each way to school. She subsisted on one meal a day in a communal homestead where her uncle had eight wives. Now she…
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In Good Times and not so good Times How does Team building work? How do you ensure that in the end the product is greater than the sum of its individual parts and of the individuals in the Team? If I had an answer that, I would become a coach and I would have many soccer…
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Perhaps you’d like to take some time to read and refuel on geo-political issues, [in other words] the relationships in the world. If so, allow me to introduce Peter Frankopan’s “The New Silk Roads”. I’d strongly recommend however to put on your seat belts and check your air bags. Reading that book I felt as if I was being blown off my seat…
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Rio de Janeiro, Monday, January 25, 2021 – Somewhere in Flamengo, within walking distance of the beach, you’ll find the Largo do Machado, a square with majestic royal palm trees and the church that dominates the cityscape. Where retired men play dominoes. Where flower and plant stalls dominate on the markets. And on Saturdays the bookstores.…
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By the 16th century, European painters had become masterful at crafting illusions of perspective, giving viewers an impression of lifelike, three-dimensional depth on normally flat surfaces. Building on this well of Renaissance knowledge, a small handful of artists began pushing linear perspective further still, crafting works that required the viewer to occupy a single vantage…
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Flow experiences are very rewarding, and arise when our skill level and challenge level are optimally matched; too little challenge and we get bored, too much and we feel anxious. Chess is a great way to access flow, but as a lodestar for life, flow has limitations. Usually it describes a quality of consciousness, not…
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Concentration is not always that rewarding. It comes and goes, forms and collapses, builds up and then crumbles because there is an upper limit to what players can keep in their heads at any given moment. I find myself going up to my upper limit and getting off it repeatedly. When I look into the…
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Together we create a story, and narrative themes such as attack and defense are both reduced and reduced to certain movements with certain pieces on certain squares, which we incorporate as stenographers, in our own arcana of algebraic notation. The climax of a game’s story might be “Brutal counterattack!”, But the record only reflects the…
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