This Year’s World Scrabble Champion Blew Everyone Away With a Three-Letter Word | How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty | Essay | The Fighting Spirit of Bruce Lee

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You Might Like � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium This Year's World Scrabble Champion Blew Everyone Away With a Three-Letter Word - Slate Magazine    The 2023 World Scrabble Championship, held last month in Las Vegas, was an instant classic. The best-of-seven finals went the distance, with tense games, obscure words, strategic genius, and a Scrabble-record audience of 900 watching on Twitch. The winner was David Eldar, 33, of Melbourne, Australia, who defeated Harshan Lamabadusuriya, 44, a pediatrician who lives in Southmoor, England, to capture the $10,000 first prize. To reach the finals, they topped a field of 134 players from 29 countries—from Poland to Pakistan, Singapore to Sierra Leone—in a four-day, 32-game tournament. Lamabadusuriya posted a 23–9 record; Eldar was 22–9–1. Game 6 of the finals was hailed by Scrabble experts as one of most exciting high-stakes games ever. I discussed it online with the two competitors. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Continued here How to Love the World More: George Saunders on the Courage of Uncertainty - The Marginalian    Nothing, not one thing, hurts us more — or causes us to hurt others more — than our certainties. The stories we tell ourselves about the world and the foregone conclusions with which we cork the fount of possibility are the supreme downfall of our consciousness. They are also the inevitable cost of survival, of navigating a vast and complex reality most of which remains forever beyond our control and comprehension. And yet in our effort to parse the world, we sever ourselves from the full range of its beauty, tensing against the tenderness of life. How to love the world more by negotiating our hunger for certainty and our gift for story is what George Saunders explores in some lovely passages from A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (public library) — the boundlessly wonderful and layered book in which he reckoned with the key to great storytelling and the way to unbreak our hearts. In consonance with neurologist Oliver Sacks’s insight into narrative as the pillar of personal identity, Saunders examines the elemental impulse for storytelling as the basic organizing principle by which we govern our lives: Continued here You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Essay | The Fighting Spirit of Bruce Lee - WSJ    "Be water." To many, this gnomic statement summons the grace, power and inner strength needed to defeat a great foe. NBA star Klay Thompson has cited it as on-court inspiration for superhuman feats. In Hong Kong and Catalonia, pro-democracy demonstrators adopted it as a slogan for massive protests as they played cat-and-mouse games in the streets with authorities. It is also the perfect epigram for Bruce Lee, the actor and martial artist who popularized the Taoist aphorism and remains a global cultural icon 50 years after the release of his crowning achievement, "Enter the Dragon," on Aug. 19, 1973. Continued here

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