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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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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Chess has been a source of friendship, refuge and growth since I was five, and I have been a grandmaster for twenty years. The lifetime title is the highest awarded to chess players and is based on achieving three qualification standards at international events that often deliver top performances, combined with an international rating that…
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