From TED To PERNOCTATED, Scrabble’s Best Player Knows No Limits

For Defector, Stefan Fatsis introduces us to Nigel Richards, GOAT of Scrabble, a man who can trounce you in English and French. Even though Richards doesn’t speak French, he’s said to have “inhaled some large chunk of the 386,000 words on the Francophone list” to win the French world championship in 2015.

At a time when artificial intelligence has assumed overlord status in the popular imagination, Nigel is a reminder of the unknown limits of human performance and the mysteries of the human mind. His feats of raw memory, linguistic magic, and strategic perspicacity—turning REALISM into HYPERREALISM and WITNESS into EARWITNESS; outfoxing opponents to steal seemingly hopeless games with intricate, multi-turn setups—are recounted among Scrabblers with awe and wonder.

Meanings don’t matter in Scrabble. Competitive players care only whether letters arranged in a particular order are acceptable in whatever lexicon governs play. The dictionary is a rulebook. Learn more rules, score more points, win more games.

Scrabble is about pattern recognition; players use anagramming websites and software like Aerolith and Zyzzyva to study and memorize thousands of letter strings.

… if Nigel has indeed memorized every acceptable word, that means he knows more than twice as many words as his rivals, and anyone else in the 40-plus years since Scrabble contested its first championship.

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The All-American Father

In this essay adapted from his forthcoming anthology, What My Father and I Don’t Talk About, Andrew Altschul explores the shades and gradients of a father’s love. He considers his dad’s detachment during his childhood, his fierce devotion to his young son, Joe Biden’s enduring love for Hunter Biden, and Donald Trump’s strange displays of dominance over his sons. In this deeply personal essay he examines how the rules of masculinity and fatherhood have ever so slowly evolved over time—for the better.

For a year or so after my son was born, I found myself feeling angry at my father. Driving home from work, or pushing the baby’s stroller in the park, I would think of my father and feel my jaw tighten with resentment. It didn’t take long for me to figure out where it came from: the overwhelming love and protectiveness I felt toward my infant son, the pain I felt when I had to leave him, was not something I’d ever heard my father describe. It was not something I could imagine him feeling. Why didn’t he feel it? Why didn’t he ever say to my mother, “Let me hold him, I need to hold him”? How could he have left the house every morning and put me out of mind for eight, ten, twelve hours until he returned, breath warm and smoky with Scotch, quickly ruffled my hair or maybe kissed my forehead as I slept before sitting down to eat the dinner my mother had cooked for him? And how might I be different had I felt from my father, every day of my childhood, the visceral and attentive love I am helplessly driven to lavish on my own son? Who might I be?

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Jacob’s Dream

Since the rise of QAnon, much has been made of “conspirituality,” the alchemical process that turns new-age thinking into MAGA-inflected conspiracy theories. But you’d be hard-pressed to find a better analysis than Frederick Kaufman’s profile of Jacob Angeli-Chansley, better known as “the QAnon Shaman” from everyone’s favorite 2021 insurrection. By mapping Angeli-Chansley’s personal brew of beliefs to the (surprisingly woo) history of science, Kaufman teases out a discomfiting truth dating back to Isaac Newton himself.

With this intellectual lineage, conspiracy theorists are not about to back down from their truths, because their own scientific method possesses a historical claim as deeply entrenched as ours. And they have a point: their spooky correspondences, their spheres of influence, their invisible forces, their gravities and their magnetisms, their parsing of the invisible effluvia—without these, there never would have been any science at all. And that’s the reason reason has yet to dent the citadel of MAGA, and never will.

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The Long Haul

In early 2020, at the start of the pandemic, people were bound by togetherness. We’ll get through these tough times. We’ll protect our vulnerable. But the world moved on. In this beautiful, reflective essay on mourning and loss, Lygia Navarro describes life with long COVID, becoming disabled, and being left behind.

When the forecast calls for the first snow, I make plans with a friend to meet at a nearby schoolyard for our kids to play, but, but we cannot even leave our driveway, as no one has shoveled the sidewalk. My wheels will not budge the snow. The only way to get across the street to the playground is to pick up my wheelchair and carry it over the ridge of slush at the edge of the road. This is too much for my body, but K is desperate to play. This is something tiny and beautiful I can do for my child right now, even if I’ll pay for it later.

During those months, I grieve all that has been taken from me: the enjoyment of my body, the friends of decades who have disappeared, my health, the chance to watch K experience a normal childhood. And I grieve for my family. Our lives are filled with indignity after indignity. My husband must wash my hair now, bring me food in bed. He is always dead tired and on the brink and we receive so little help. This fact alone leaves me aching.

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DNA Tests Are Uncovering the True Prevalence of Incest

At-home DNA test kits like AncestryDNA and 23andMe reveal that children through incest are more common than we think. Sarah Zhang writes about Steve Edsel, a man in his 40s who discovered that he is the child of two first-degree relatives: a sister and her older brother. The piece is an emotional and challenging read on a sensitive topic—”one of the most universal and most deeply held taboos” across cultures. Zhang blends her reporting and current statistics with a very personal human story of discovery, truth, and belonging.

When Steve first discovered the truth about his biological parents, a decade ago, he had no support group to turn to, and he did not know what to do with the strange mix of emotions. He was genuinely happy to have found his birth mom. He had never looked like his adoptive parents, but in photos of her and her family, he could see his eyes, his chin, and even the smirky half-grin that his face naturally settles into.

But he radiated with newfound anger, too, on her behalf. He could not know the exact circumstances of his conception, and his DNA test alone could not determine whether her older brother or her father was responsible. But Steve could not imagine a consensual scenario, given her age. The bespectacled 14-year-old girl who disappeared from the hospital had remained frozen in time in his mind, even as he himself grew older, got married, became a stepdad. He felt protective of that young girl.

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Nightmare in Mission Hill

In an epic feat of reporting and storytelling*, a team of Boston Globe journalists examines the legacy of one of Beantown’s most infamous crimes: the 1989 shooting of Charles and Carol Stuart. Carol, who was pregnant, died of a gunshot wound to the head; her baby was delivered via emergency c-section and lived only a few days. Charles survived a bullet to the back and claimed that a Black man had attacked him and his wife, setting of a racist manhunt across Boston. But Charles was the person behind the crime, and as this project reveals, he may not have acted alone or pulled the trigger. Certainly, other people were complicit in keeping his secret—nearly three dozen, in fact:

The story of the Stuart case holds that much of the world was shocked when the truth came out that Chuck was the real killer.

On Boston’s North Shore, it was old news.

The Globe found—through an analysis based on police files, grand jury testimony, recorded phone calls, and more—that at least 33 people knew the truth by the time Matthew went to police with his story on Jan. 3, 1990.

Thirty-three people knew that—as Matthew Stuart said to Michael Stuart three days after the murder—“There’s no Black person that did this.”

And yet, almost every one of those people stayed quiet, even as Chuck identified in a lineup a man they knew to be innocent.

Much like the rumor about Willie Bennett shared by a few teens in a Mission Hill smoke session, this, too, was a perverse game of telephone. Siblings told friends, who told friends, who kept it secret.

In Mission Hill, an 18-year-old Black man told his mother, who told a detective.

But in Revere, a type of omerta took hold among some Stuarts, their friends, and friends of friends. They talked—just not to police.

The Stuart case is not just a story about institutional failures by police, politicians, and the media. It is a story about the failures of regular people, too. People who believed themselves to be good and moral and decent who watched something terrible happen and did nothing.

The Globe reached out to every person who knew the truth before the police. None of them agreed to speak.

*This story is behind a paywall.

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The Many Lifetimes of an Old Red Bike

This is a beautiful essay on family and aging, told through a bike passed down through generations. Ian Treloar explores the history of his family with respect and self-awareness. A reminder to honor your family treasures, and where they came from.

I guess I always had some distant awareness of the fact that the red bike was a part of family history stretching further back than my period of guardianship, but I was too caught up in the everyday to really engage with that story. There was Life Stuff to deal with: big things like relationships, work, family, as well as all the little things we get hung up on, thinking they’re big things. Covid-19 was a kind of a reset, though. More time at home with the kids. A more poignant relationship with my older relatives, particularly my Grandma over in South Australia, who I used to see a couple of times a year but who I now hadn’t seen for two years. And the whole time, growing increasingly dusty and rusty, the red bike and the secrets it held lay waiting under my parents’ floorboards. 

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