Karen

C. Thi Nguyen The Score How to stop playing someone else’s game 368pp. Allen Lane. £25. Games and metrics are cousins of a sort. They both give us targets to pursue, often in the form of numerical sco

CThi Nguyen is a gamer. Many people are gamers—artists, technologists, business leaders, even certain journalists—but many others still hold their noses at the term, as though there’s something overwh

Rolling around at the speed of sound in ONCE UPON A KATAMARI

A few years ago my best friend Lenny and I went out to Copenhagen to play in a big backgammon tournament. It was open to anyone and had various levels of competition. We entered the intermediate tier

As fascism hovers, austerity holds its nerve and access to basic resources divides the ‘haves’ from the ‘have nots’, these are not the politest of times. Perhaps it was inevitable that something so po

Our round-up of the funny, fascinating and unusual stories this fortnight