One of the most beautiful things in the world is the IBM Selectric typewriter. It looks like a work of Mondrian, sounds like a tango, smells like the future, and responds like a thoroughbred beneath one’s fingertips. (That covers four out of five senses. I’ve never tasted a Selectric.) When I was quite young, I…
chess
The English Opening, or Is There Any Chess in Your Classroom?
The more chess that I play, the more I realize I do not know anything about chess. Recently, my third grader has taken an interest in challenging me. And it scares me. Not just because our chess set is made of good and evil Lego minifigures (with the evil ones being particularly menacing), but because…
It’s Your Move
There are images floating around the Internet and our collective consciousness of families sitting at the kitchen table playing board games. I’m sure you’ve seen these images. Many of them come from a time before color was invented, back when the entire world existed only in shades of gray, in a mythical time when only…