With endless resources at our fingertips nowadays, you'd think it would be much more difficult for folks to get away with passing off fiction as fact. And yet, myths and misconceptions are just as prevalent today as they were in a pre-internet world.
Take the knuckle-cracking myth, for instance: Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, a majority of us still hold on to the belief that cracking your knuckles will lead to arthritis. (It won't.)
And somehow a shocking number of people still think that it's fine to eat food that dropped on the floor if it's only been there for five seconds—as if somehow bacteria are too slow to jump on board that fallen French fry.
And there are plenty more common myths that permeate society today.
Whether they're the result of twisted truths over centuries or rumors blindly accepted as reality, these are the well-known "facts" almost everyone believes are true but they're actually fiction.
And for more wrongs you probably need to right, check out the 25 Objects You Didn't Know You Were Using Wrong.
Thursday, May 28, 2020
Thursday, May 21, 2020
Aerobic exercise can improve thinking, memory in seniors
Want to give your brain a boost? Go for a swim, take a walk, or spin your partner on the living room floor.
A new study finds that aerobic exercise can improve older adults' thinking and memory, even if they're longtime couch potatoes.
This type of exercise increases blood flow to the brain and counters the effects of normal aging, according to the study published online May 13 in the journal Neurology.
"As we all find out eventually, we lose a bit mentally and physically as we age. But even if you start an exercise program later in life, the benefit to your brain may be immense," said study author Marc Poulin, of the University of Calgary School of Medicine in Canada.
"Sure, aerobic exercise gets blood moving through your body. As our study found, it may also get blood moving to your brain, particularly in areas responsible for verbal fluency and executive functions. Our finding may be important, especially for older adults at risk for Alzheimer's and other dementias and brain disease," Poulin said in a journal news release.
The study included 206 adults, average age 66, with no history of memory or heart problems.
For six months, they took part in supervised exercise program three times a week. As they progressed, their workout increased from an average 20 minutes a day to least 40 minutes. They were also asked to work out on their own once a week.
At the end of the exercise program, participants had a 5.7 percent improvement on tests of executive function, which includes mental abilities used to focus, plan, recall instructions and multi-task. They also had 2.4 percent increase in verbal fluency, a measure of how quickly a person can retrieve information.
"This change in verbal fluency is what you'd expect to see in someone five years younger," Poulin said.
On average, blood flow to their brain increased 2.8 percent -- a gain tied to a number of improvements in types of thinking that typically decline with age.
RELATED Fruits, tea, red wine may help fend off Alzheimer's disease
"Our study showed that six months' worth of vigorous exercise may pump blood to regions of the brain that specifically improve your verbal skills as well as memory and mental sharpness," Poulin said.
"At a time when these results would be expected to be decreasing due to normal aging, to have these types of increases is exciting," he said.
A new study finds that aerobic exercise can improve older adults' thinking and memory, even if they're longtime couch potatoes.
This type of exercise increases blood flow to the brain and counters the effects of normal aging, according to the study published online May 13 in the journal Neurology.
"As we all find out eventually, we lose a bit mentally and physically as we age. But even if you start an exercise program later in life, the benefit to your brain may be immense," said study author Marc Poulin, of the University of Calgary School of Medicine in Canada.
"Sure, aerobic exercise gets blood moving through your body. As our study found, it may also get blood moving to your brain, particularly in areas responsible for verbal fluency and executive functions. Our finding may be important, especially for older adults at risk for Alzheimer's and other dementias and brain disease," Poulin said in a journal news release.
The study included 206 adults, average age 66, with no history of memory or heart problems.
For six months, they took part in supervised exercise program three times a week. As they progressed, their workout increased from an average 20 minutes a day to least 40 minutes. They were also asked to work out on their own once a week.
At the end of the exercise program, participants had a 5.7 percent improvement on tests of executive function, which includes mental abilities used to focus, plan, recall instructions and multi-task. They also had 2.4 percent increase in verbal fluency, a measure of how quickly a person can retrieve information.
"This change in verbal fluency is what you'd expect to see in someone five years younger," Poulin said.
On average, blood flow to their brain increased 2.8 percent -- a gain tied to a number of improvements in types of thinking that typically decline with age.
RELATED Fruits, tea, red wine may help fend off Alzheimer's disease
"Our study showed that six months' worth of vigorous exercise may pump blood to regions of the brain that specifically improve your verbal skills as well as memory and mental sharpness," Poulin said.
"At a time when these results would be expected to be decreasing due to normal aging, to have these types of increases is exciting," he said.
Monday, May 11, 2020
Jerry Stiller
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Jerry Stiller, who played two of American television’s most cantankerous fathers on the sitcoms “Seinfeld” and “The King of Queens,” has died aged 92, his son Ben Stiller said on Twitter on Monday.
“I’m sad to say that my father, Jerry Stiller, passed away from natural causes,” wrote Ben, a Hollywood comedian who appeared with his father in “Zoolander” and other movies.
“He was a great dad and grandfather, and the most dedicated husband to Anne for about 62 years. He will be greatly missed. Love you Dad,” he added.
Jerry Stiller was part of a 1960s comedy team with wife Anne Meara. But he was in his mid-60s when he got what would become his signature acting role - Frank Costanza, father of ne’er-do-well George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander) on “Seinfeld,” a tense, bombastic man always on the verge of apoplexy.
In 1993, Stiller had thought his entertainment career was nearing an end when he got a phone call from Larry David, co-creator of “Seinfeld,” about joining the cast led by comedian Jerry Seinfeld.
The show, one of the most highly regarded in U.S. TV history, was in its fourth season at the time but Stiller said he had never watched a minute of it and had to ask, “Who’s Seinfeld?”
He was performing in a play at the time and had to turn down the TV job. Stiller got another chance at the role a few months later and took it.
Stiller was in only 26 of the 172 “Seinfeld” episodes but each appearance was memorable, whether he was screaming “serenity now!” in a tense situation, trying on a bra for men or explaining the odd rituals of Festivus, the Dec. 23 holiday he established as an alternative to Christmas.
Jerry Seinfeld on Monday paid tribute by posting a photo of himself holding “The Last Two People in the World,” a 1967 comedy album from Stiller and his wife.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus posted a clip of old bloopers from the sitcom, while Alexander called him “the kindest man I ever had the honor to work beside.”
Stiller said he was originally told to play Frank in a meek, understated manner in contrast to the character’s loud, shrill wife. A few days in, however, Stiller responded to one of the wife’s rants with an improvised tirade of his own and the show’s producers and cast liked it.
“And from that day on, it was the best years of my life as an actor because I worked with people who were the most generous actors in the world,” Stiller said in an interview with the Archive of American Television.
“Seinfeld” ended its nine-year run in 1998 and that same year Stiller moved into another sitcom dad role on “The King of Queens.” As Arthur Spooner, he played another blowhard oddball - although not quite as eruptive as Frank Costanza - living in the basement of the home of his daughter (played by Leah Remini) and her husband (Kevin James) through the show’s nine seasons.
***
Jerry Stiller, a classically trained actor who became a comedy star twice — in the 1960s in partnership with his wife, Anne Meara, and in the 1990s with a memorable recurring role on “Seinfeld” — has died. He was 92.
His death was confirmed Monday by his son, actor Ben Stiller, in a tweet, who said his father had died of natural causes.
Stiller’s accomplishments as an actor were considerable. He appeared on Broadway in Terrence McNally’s frantic farce “The Ritz” in 1975 and David Rabe’s dark drama “Hurlyburly” in 1984. Off-Broadway, he was in “The Threepenny Opera”; in Central Park he played Shakespearean clowns for Joseph Papp; on screen he was seen as, among other things, a police detective in “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three” (1974) and Divine’s husband in John Waters’ “Hairspray” (1988). But he was best known as a comedian.
The team of Stiller and Meara was for many years a familiar presence in nightclubs, on television variety and talk shows, and in radio and television commercials, most memorably for Blue Nun wine and Amalgamated Bank.
Years after the act broke up, Stiller captured a new generation of fans as Frank Costanza, the short-tempered and not entirely sane father of Jason Alexander’s George, on the NBC series “Seinfeld,” one of the most successful television comedies of all time.
Stiller was in fewer than 30 of the 180 episodes of “Seinfeld,” whose nine seasons began in 1989, and he did not make his first appearance until the fifth season. (Another actor appeared as Frank in one episode of Season 4, although his scenes were later re-shot with Stiller for the syndicated reruns.) But he was an essential part of the show’s enduring appeal.
FRANK COSTANZA was a classic sitcom eccentric whose many dubious accomplishments included marketing a brassiere for men and creating Festivus, a winter holiday “for the rest of us” celebrated with tests of strength and other bizarre rituals.
His most noteworthy characteristic was his explosive, often irrational anger, and most of the episodes on which he was featured found him, sooner or later, yelling, usually at either his son; his wife, Estelle, played by Estelle Harris; or both.
Just a few months after the final episode of “Seinfeld” (in which Frank had one last moment in the spotlight and, of course, spent most of it yelling), broadcast on May 14, 1998, Stiller was back on television playing another off-kilter father — a marginally more restrained version of Frank Costanza — on another sitcom, “The King of Queens,” which made its debut that fall on CBS.
A regular this time, he played Arthur Spooner, the excitable father of the wife (Leah Remini) of the working- slob central character (Kevin James), for the show’s entire nine-season run.
A guest star on several episodes of “The King of Queens” was Meara, whose character married his in the series finale. Younger viewers might not have known it, but their scenes together represented the reunion of one of the most successful male-female comedy teams of all time.
STILLER AND MEARA met in 1953, when they were both struggling actors, and married shortly afterward. They worked together in 1959 with the Compass Players, an improvisational theater group that later evolved into the Second City. They began performing as a duo in New York nightclubs in 1961 and soon made the first of about three dozen appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Visually, Meara and Stiller were a study in contrasts. She was statuesque and bright-eyed; he was short and stocky, and always looked a little lost. Another contrast formed the basis for much of their comedy: Her heritage was Irish-American and Roman Catholic (although she converted to Judaism in 1961); his was Eastern European and Jewish.
At a time when it was rare for men and women of different religions to date, let alone marry, Stiller and Meara broke new comic ground with their routines about the rocky but loving relationship of Hershey Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Doyle, characters loosely based on themselves.
The first such sketch, as recounted in Stiller’s autobiography, “Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara” (2000), set the tone. One exchange began with Mary Elizabeth saying, “They’re having a dance tonight at my sodality.”
Hershey replied, “At your what?”
“My sodality.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it’s a girls organization in my parish.”
“You mean like Hadassah?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a girls organization in my parish.”
The comedy partnership of Stiller and Meara flourished for more than a decade and found a new outlet when they began doing commercials. But they eventually went their separate ways professionally — although they remained happily married and continued to perform together from time to time. Meara died in 2015.
Stiller worked steadily into the early 1990s but was less active than Meara, who had recurring roles on several television shows. Then came the call from “Seinfeld,” and his career resurgence began.
GERALD ISAAC STILLER was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 8, 1927, the first of four children born to William Stiller, the son of immigrants from Galicia, and Bella (Citron) Stiller, who was born in Poland. His father drove a taxi and later a bus. His mother was a homemaker.
Growing up in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, young Jerry was inspired to perform by seeing Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante in person, and began acting at the Henry Street Playhouse while attending Seward Park High School.
After serving in the Army during and immediately after World War II, he studied theater at Syracuse University under the GI Bill, learning about Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama from the celebrated teacher Sawyer Falk. He began working in summer stock almost immediately after graduating in 1950, and was appearing off-Broadway a few years later.
Stiller remained active throughout his 80s. He was typically manic in a series of commercials for Capital One Bank, seen on television and heard on radio in 2012.
That same year, he played a group-therapy patient in the independent film “Excuse Me for Living.” In 2014 he provided the voice for the title character in an unorthodox animated television special, “How Murray Saved Christmas.”
In 2016 he reprised the role of the agent Maury Ballstein in “Zoolander 2,” the sequel to the hit 2001 comedy about a male model, starring and directed by his son, Ben.
“I’ve never thought of stopping,” Stiller told The Daily News of New York in 2012. “The only time you ever stop working is when they don’t call you.”
Stiller and Meara’s swan song as a team was a series of web-only video clips produced by their son and posted from November 2010 until March 2011. Each clip lasts about two minutes and consists of the two of them discussing a single topic. One topic is obituaries.
In that clip Stiller says he is “shocked” that The New York Times might have already prepared their obituaries and wonders whether the newspaper is “up to date” on his having worked with Veronica Lake in a production of “Peter Pan” (about six decades earlier). And Meara reveals that years ago Stiller had persuaded the Times to publish her father’s obituary by falsely claiming that he had written material for their comedy act.
Stiller’s agitated response: “What you just said is going to get us in trouble with The New York Times! I may never get an obit!”
He needn’t have worried.
“I’m sad to say that my father, Jerry Stiller, passed away from natural causes,” wrote Ben, a Hollywood comedian who appeared with his father in “Zoolander” and other movies.
“He was a great dad and grandfather, and the most dedicated husband to Anne for about 62 years. He will be greatly missed. Love you Dad,” he added.
Jerry Stiller was part of a 1960s comedy team with wife Anne Meara. But he was in his mid-60s when he got what would become his signature acting role - Frank Costanza, father of ne’er-do-well George Costanza (played by Jason Alexander) on “Seinfeld,” a tense, bombastic man always on the verge of apoplexy.
In 1993, Stiller had thought his entertainment career was nearing an end when he got a phone call from Larry David, co-creator of “Seinfeld,” about joining the cast led by comedian Jerry Seinfeld.
The show, one of the most highly regarded in U.S. TV history, was in its fourth season at the time but Stiller said he had never watched a minute of it and had to ask, “Who’s Seinfeld?”
He was performing in a play at the time and had to turn down the TV job. Stiller got another chance at the role a few months later and took it.
Stiller was in only 26 of the 172 “Seinfeld” episodes but each appearance was memorable, whether he was screaming “serenity now!” in a tense situation, trying on a bra for men or explaining the odd rituals of Festivus, the Dec. 23 holiday he established as an alternative to Christmas.
Jerry Seinfeld on Monday paid tribute by posting a photo of himself holding “The Last Two People in the World,” a 1967 comedy album from Stiller and his wife.
Julia Louis-Dreyfus posted a clip of old bloopers from the sitcom, while Alexander called him “the kindest man I ever had the honor to work beside.”
Stiller said he was originally told to play Frank in a meek, understated manner in contrast to the character’s loud, shrill wife. A few days in, however, Stiller responded to one of the wife’s rants with an improvised tirade of his own and the show’s producers and cast liked it.
“And from that day on, it was the best years of my life as an actor because I worked with people who were the most generous actors in the world,” Stiller said in an interview with the Archive of American Television.
“Seinfeld” ended its nine-year run in 1998 and that same year Stiller moved into another sitcom dad role on “The King of Queens.” As Arthur Spooner, he played another blowhard oddball - although not quite as eruptive as Frank Costanza - living in the basement of the home of his daughter (played by Leah Remini) and her husband (Kevin James) through the show’s nine seasons.
***
Jerry Stiller, a classically trained actor who became a comedy star twice — in the 1960s in partnership with his wife, Anne Meara, and in the 1990s with a memorable recurring role on “Seinfeld” — has died. He was 92.
His death was confirmed Monday by his son, actor Ben Stiller, in a tweet, who said his father had died of natural causes.
Stiller’s accomplishments as an actor were considerable. He appeared on Broadway in Terrence McNally’s frantic farce “The Ritz” in 1975 and David Rabe’s dark drama “Hurlyburly” in 1984. Off-Broadway, he was in “The Threepenny Opera”; in Central Park he played Shakespearean clowns for Joseph Papp; on screen he was seen as, among other things, a police detective in “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three” (1974) and Divine’s husband in John Waters’ “Hairspray” (1988). But he was best known as a comedian.
The team of Stiller and Meara was for many years a familiar presence in nightclubs, on television variety and talk shows, and in radio and television commercials, most memorably for Blue Nun wine and Amalgamated Bank.
Years after the act broke up, Stiller captured a new generation of fans as Frank Costanza, the short-tempered and not entirely sane father of Jason Alexander’s George, on the NBC series “Seinfeld,” one of the most successful television comedies of all time.
Stiller was in fewer than 30 of the 180 episodes of “Seinfeld,” whose nine seasons began in 1989, and he did not make his first appearance until the fifth season. (Another actor appeared as Frank in one episode of Season 4, although his scenes were later re-shot with Stiller for the syndicated reruns.) But he was an essential part of the show’s enduring appeal.
FRANK COSTANZA was a classic sitcom eccentric whose many dubious accomplishments included marketing a brassiere for men and creating Festivus, a winter holiday “for the rest of us” celebrated with tests of strength and other bizarre rituals.
His most noteworthy characteristic was his explosive, often irrational anger, and most of the episodes on which he was featured found him, sooner or later, yelling, usually at either his son; his wife, Estelle, played by Estelle Harris; or both.
Just a few months after the final episode of “Seinfeld” (in which Frank had one last moment in the spotlight and, of course, spent most of it yelling), broadcast on May 14, 1998, Stiller was back on television playing another off-kilter father — a marginally more restrained version of Frank Costanza — on another sitcom, “The King of Queens,” which made its debut that fall on CBS.
A regular this time, he played Arthur Spooner, the excitable father of the wife (Leah Remini) of the working- slob central character (Kevin James), for the show’s entire nine-season run.
A guest star on several episodes of “The King of Queens” was Meara, whose character married his in the series finale. Younger viewers might not have known it, but their scenes together represented the reunion of one of the most successful male-female comedy teams of all time.
STILLER AND MEARA met in 1953, when they were both struggling actors, and married shortly afterward. They worked together in 1959 with the Compass Players, an improvisational theater group that later evolved into the Second City. They began performing as a duo in New York nightclubs in 1961 and soon made the first of about three dozen appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”
Visually, Meara and Stiller were a study in contrasts. She was statuesque and bright-eyed; he was short and stocky, and always looked a little lost. Another contrast formed the basis for much of their comedy: Her heritage was Irish-American and Roman Catholic (although she converted to Judaism in 1961); his was Eastern European and Jewish.
At a time when it was rare for men and women of different religions to date, let alone marry, Stiller and Meara broke new comic ground with their routines about the rocky but loving relationship of Hershey Horowitz and Mary Elizabeth Doyle, characters loosely based on themselves.
The first such sketch, as recounted in Stiller’s autobiography, “Married to Laughter: A Love Story Featuring Anne Meara” (2000), set the tone. One exchange began with Mary Elizabeth saying, “They’re having a dance tonight at my sodality.”
Hershey replied, “At your what?”
“My sodality.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, it’s a girls organization in my parish.”
“You mean like Hadassah?”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a girls organization in my parish.”
The comedy partnership of Stiller and Meara flourished for more than a decade and found a new outlet when they began doing commercials. But they eventually went their separate ways professionally — although they remained happily married and continued to perform together from time to time. Meara died in 2015.
Stiller worked steadily into the early 1990s but was less active than Meara, who had recurring roles on several television shows. Then came the call from “Seinfeld,” and his career resurgence began.
GERALD ISAAC STILLER was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on June 8, 1927, the first of four children born to William Stiller, the son of immigrants from Galicia, and Bella (Citron) Stiller, who was born in Poland. His father drove a taxi and later a bus. His mother was a homemaker.
Growing up in Brooklyn and on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, young Jerry was inspired to perform by seeing Eddie Cantor and Jimmy Durante in person, and began acting at the Henry Street Playhouse while attending Seward Park High School.
After serving in the Army during and immediately after World War II, he studied theater at Syracuse University under the GI Bill, learning about Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama from the celebrated teacher Sawyer Falk. He began working in summer stock almost immediately after graduating in 1950, and was appearing off-Broadway a few years later.
Stiller remained active throughout his 80s. He was typically manic in a series of commercials for Capital One Bank, seen on television and heard on radio in 2012.
That same year, he played a group-therapy patient in the independent film “Excuse Me for Living.” In 2014 he provided the voice for the title character in an unorthodox animated television special, “How Murray Saved Christmas.”
In 2016 he reprised the role of the agent Maury Ballstein in “Zoolander 2,” the sequel to the hit 2001 comedy about a male model, starring and directed by his son, Ben.
“I’ve never thought of stopping,” Stiller told The Daily News of New York in 2012. “The only time you ever stop working is when they don’t call you.”
Stiller and Meara’s swan song as a team was a series of web-only video clips produced by their son and posted from November 2010 until March 2011. Each clip lasts about two minutes and consists of the two of them discussing a single topic. One topic is obituaries.
In that clip Stiller says he is “shocked” that The New York Times might have already prepared their obituaries and wonders whether the newspaper is “up to date” on his having worked with Veronica Lake in a production of “Peter Pan” (about six decades earlier). And Meara reveals that years ago Stiller had persuaded the Times to publish her father’s obituary by falsely claiming that he had written material for their comedy act.
Stiller’s agitated response: “What you just said is going to get us in trouble with The New York Times! I may never get an obit!”
He needn’t have worried.
Trapped at Home? Board Game On!
I am, in the best circumstances, a poor loser. I’m also a clumsy, fidgety winner.
Yet I have spent the past month playing games. All kinds of games: Twenty Questions, I Spy, matching games, memory games, and as much hide and seek as a three-room apartment allows. Mostly, I have been playing board games with a fixation I haven’t known since I was 9 or 10 and cheating at Candy Land (slipping the Queen Frostine card just below the top of the deck and then saying, brightly, to my sister, “You can go first!”).
If you, like me, grew up with a battered box of Sorry and a Battleship missing at least two of its boats, you should know that board games have improved. With a large number released each year, the variety of games and the mechanics that govern them are almost infinite.
My library books remain unread, a stack of untouched New Yorker issues has become a household obstacle, and I can’t make it through a movie, or even a 23-minute sitcom, without reaching for my phone. So why can I spend a focused hour-and-a-half bartering for camels in an Indian marketplace playing Jaipur or simulating quilt-making in Patchwork?
While I have slashed most discretionary spending, I keep lowballing used children’s games — Outfoxed!, Ticket to Ride: First Journey, Sushi Go! — and a few adult ones on eBay. The other week, I fell into a Google abyss comparing cooperative puzzle games. When I finally clawed my way out, I found that I had ordered Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, from England. The shipping was surprisingly reasonable.
With so much of life transported online, there is huge satisfaction in the tactility of board games, an almost indecent pleasure in rolling dice, dealing cards, hopscotching a game piece to a square. And many of them are beautiful, eye-candy confections of color and shape. But library books, after all, are tactile. Some of them are even illustrated. Why games?
I wrote to Joey Lee, who directs the Games Research Lab at Teachers College at Columbia University, hoping he could figure out this one. Tabletop games, he said, create a “magic circle,” an idea borrowed, more or less, from the cultural historian Johan Huizinga. Lee wrote that the circle, inside which everyone agrees to abide by the same constraints and rules, provides “a structure and environment that sparks laughter, creativity, joy and other pleasure-filled moments that come from solving problems successfully, optimizing one’s strategies, working together or competing against other players.”
That sounded like an ambitious way of describing what happens when my 3-year-old and I fend off trolls in My First Castle Panic, but sure.
Nicholas Fortugno, a games designer and lecturer, explained why playing games with my two young children improves on our flustered attempts at homeschooling. “Games level differences in age,” he said. “If I’m a 10-year-old playing a game with my parents, the authority structure that normally governs how I behave is actually kind of released. For the purposes of the game, we’re equal.”
When I try to teach place value to my 6-year-old, there’s a hierarchy at work. When we play Zeus on the Loose, which has her practice addition and subtraction as we lay claim to Mount Olympus, we play as equals.
Sort of.
I should probably confess that I have been throwing a lot of these games, cheating as avidly as I ever did, but now in favor of my opponents. Losing offers valuable lessons — grace, resilience, accepting the randomness of a flicked spinner. But being confined to our home without birthday parties or play dates feels like lesson enough. So somehow the children always seem to beat me, simultaneously, at Scary Bingo.
I have also been playing board games with my husband, because they are a welcome change from our other games like, Hey, Have You Looked at the 401(k) Lately? and Why Are You Drinking So Much? As long as I had game experts on the line, I asked several to act as games concierges (“I prefer sommelier,” Fortugno told me) and recommend games that wouldn’t push us any closer to divorce, or at least delay it until after lockdown. I also mentioned that I’m the kind of monster who takes games very seriously.
“Board games are one of the few outlets in life where that is kind of a socially acceptable thing,” said a reassuring Erik Arneson, who writes books on tabletop games. “As long as you don’t get angry and flip the table over if you lose.” I told him that I wouldn’t. Our table is very heavy.
He recommended Patchwork, “a lovely little two player game that’s about making quilts.” Coincidentally, my husband had bought a sale copy of Patchwork. (An exception to my “games are beautiful now” claim, its color scheme combines a sickly beige and a clinically depressed green.) Arneson had warned that I would sometimes resent my husband for snatching a piece I needed. And I did. But that particular resentment, unlike my feelings about the distribution of emotional labor, say, was discrete and local.
Still, I suggested a move toward cooperative games. The best cooperative game, several experts agreed, is Pandemic, which seemed just a little on the nose. Instead, we have spent a few companionable evenings playing that Sherlock Holmes game and sampling escape room games. These, too, are a little on the nose, in that family life during a pandemic does have the feel of a locked room, but in the game at least, escape is possible. Two nights ago, we broke out of a sinister museum, and felt — against all real-world evidence — like we had really accomplished something.
We could have played any of these games in the past several years, but we didn’t. I was out at the theater most nights. The children sleep fitfully. No previous pandemic marooned us indoors. “A lot of games,” Fortugno said, “were invented because groups of people had to be around each other and were bored.” That’s most families. But it doesn’t quite explain why games — even Patchwork — feel so specifically soothing right now.
Games can be a healthy escapism, according to Robert Hewitt, who runs Brooklyn Game Lab, an after-school program that has since moved online. “When you sit down to one of these games, you’re existing within the parameters of the game,” he said. “For an hour or two hours, you’re concentrating on managing your sheep and your barns and your goats and you have that total sense of control. So I think that’s pretty calming.” (Really hoping this goat game isn’t a hypothetical.) He sent me a picture of his kitchen table covered in Robinson Crusoe, a solo game involving hundreds of cards and tokens. Consider Hewitt extremely calm.
Naomi Clark, a professor at New York University’s Game Center, described games as safe spaces to practice patterns of thought that now feel risky in the real-world, like long-term planning or resource allocation. She also mentioned some neuroscience research suggesting that games occupy the same neural pathways that might instead flashback to traumatic experiences, like, say, living through a pandemic. “Games actually sort of turn your brain down other pathways to allow your brain to heal,” she said.
In two months or six months or whenever lockdown relaxes, I can’t imagine we’ll play together as much. The children will spend most of the day in school; Broadway has to reopen sometime. We’ll pass some board games onto friends, donate others to the Brooklyn Library’s lending collection. But until then, we’ll open the box, unfold the board, shuffle the cards just so. Deal me in.
Some of Our Favorite Games
For the Whole Family
Animal Upon Animal It’s like Jenga, but better. This dexterity game asks players to stack sturdy wooden pieces (an alligator, hedgehogs, penguins, some weird little guys who might be lizards).
Outfoxed A cooperative game for kids, it asks you to play as chickens investigating a fox who stole a pot pie. (What is in that pot pie, anyway?) The fox hasn’t beaten us yet — even when I don’t let the kids cheat.
Scary Bingo The mechanics of this game are simple and familiar: A caller selects random tokens, players cover the relevant squares. But the design is witty and the monsters exuberantly weird.
And for Two Adults
Exit These escape room games have frustrating aspects — you have to be very precise in how you manipulate the pieces and you destroy some elements during play, so you can’t pass a game on. But the puzzles are delicious and solvable if you peek at the preliminary hints.
Patchwork The aesthetics are appalling and the set-up may seem overly simple. Just how complicated can a game about quilting get? Very. The design encourages you to think several moves ahead.
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective This cooperative game, if you can track down a copy, is meticulously constructed and maniacally engaging. You and yours play Baker Street Irregulars solving a Holmesian mystery.
--- By Alexis Soloski
Yet I have spent the past month playing games. All kinds of games: Twenty Questions, I Spy, matching games, memory games, and as much hide and seek as a three-room apartment allows. Mostly, I have been playing board games with a fixation I haven’t known since I was 9 or 10 and cheating at Candy Land (slipping the Queen Frostine card just below the top of the deck and then saying, brightly, to my sister, “You can go first!”).
If you, like me, grew up with a battered box of Sorry and a Battleship missing at least two of its boats, you should know that board games have improved. With a large number released each year, the variety of games and the mechanics that govern them are almost infinite.
My library books remain unread, a stack of untouched New Yorker issues has become a household obstacle, and I can’t make it through a movie, or even a 23-minute sitcom, without reaching for my phone. So why can I spend a focused hour-and-a-half bartering for camels in an Indian marketplace playing Jaipur or simulating quilt-making in Patchwork?
While I have slashed most discretionary spending, I keep lowballing used children’s games — Outfoxed!, Ticket to Ride: First Journey, Sushi Go! — and a few adult ones on eBay. The other week, I fell into a Google abyss comparing cooperative puzzle games. When I finally clawed my way out, I found that I had ordered Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, from England. The shipping was surprisingly reasonable.
With so much of life transported online, there is huge satisfaction in the tactility of board games, an almost indecent pleasure in rolling dice, dealing cards, hopscotching a game piece to a square. And many of them are beautiful, eye-candy confections of color and shape. But library books, after all, are tactile. Some of them are even illustrated. Why games?
I wrote to Joey Lee, who directs the Games Research Lab at Teachers College at Columbia University, hoping he could figure out this one. Tabletop games, he said, create a “magic circle,” an idea borrowed, more or less, from the cultural historian Johan Huizinga. Lee wrote that the circle, inside which everyone agrees to abide by the same constraints and rules, provides “a structure and environment that sparks laughter, creativity, joy and other pleasure-filled moments that come from solving problems successfully, optimizing one’s strategies, working together or competing against other players.”
That sounded like an ambitious way of describing what happens when my 3-year-old and I fend off trolls in My First Castle Panic, but sure.
Nicholas Fortugno, a games designer and lecturer, explained why playing games with my two young children improves on our flustered attempts at homeschooling. “Games level differences in age,” he said. “If I’m a 10-year-old playing a game with my parents, the authority structure that normally governs how I behave is actually kind of released. For the purposes of the game, we’re equal.”
When I try to teach place value to my 6-year-old, there’s a hierarchy at work. When we play Zeus on the Loose, which has her practice addition and subtraction as we lay claim to Mount Olympus, we play as equals.
Sort of.
I should probably confess that I have been throwing a lot of these games, cheating as avidly as I ever did, but now in favor of my opponents. Losing offers valuable lessons — grace, resilience, accepting the randomness of a flicked spinner. But being confined to our home without birthday parties or play dates feels like lesson enough. So somehow the children always seem to beat me, simultaneously, at Scary Bingo.
I have also been playing board games with my husband, because they are a welcome change from our other games like, Hey, Have You Looked at the 401(k) Lately? and Why Are You Drinking So Much? As long as I had game experts on the line, I asked several to act as games concierges (“I prefer sommelier,” Fortugno told me) and recommend games that wouldn’t push us any closer to divorce, or at least delay it until after lockdown. I also mentioned that I’m the kind of monster who takes games very seriously.
“Board games are one of the few outlets in life where that is kind of a socially acceptable thing,” said a reassuring Erik Arneson, who writes books on tabletop games. “As long as you don’t get angry and flip the table over if you lose.” I told him that I wouldn’t. Our table is very heavy.
He recommended Patchwork, “a lovely little two player game that’s about making quilts.” Coincidentally, my husband had bought a sale copy of Patchwork. (An exception to my “games are beautiful now” claim, its color scheme combines a sickly beige and a clinically depressed green.) Arneson had warned that I would sometimes resent my husband for snatching a piece I needed. And I did. But that particular resentment, unlike my feelings about the distribution of emotional labor, say, was discrete and local.
Still, I suggested a move toward cooperative games. The best cooperative game, several experts agreed, is Pandemic, which seemed just a little on the nose. Instead, we have spent a few companionable evenings playing that Sherlock Holmes game and sampling escape room games. These, too, are a little on the nose, in that family life during a pandemic does have the feel of a locked room, but in the game at least, escape is possible. Two nights ago, we broke out of a sinister museum, and felt — against all real-world evidence — like we had really accomplished something.
We could have played any of these games in the past several years, but we didn’t. I was out at the theater most nights. The children sleep fitfully. No previous pandemic marooned us indoors. “A lot of games,” Fortugno said, “were invented because groups of people had to be around each other and were bored.” That’s most families. But it doesn’t quite explain why games — even Patchwork — feel so specifically soothing right now.
Games can be a healthy escapism, according to Robert Hewitt, who runs Brooklyn Game Lab, an after-school program that has since moved online. “When you sit down to one of these games, you’re existing within the parameters of the game,” he said. “For an hour or two hours, you’re concentrating on managing your sheep and your barns and your goats and you have that total sense of control. So I think that’s pretty calming.” (Really hoping this goat game isn’t a hypothetical.) He sent me a picture of his kitchen table covered in Robinson Crusoe, a solo game involving hundreds of cards and tokens. Consider Hewitt extremely calm.
Naomi Clark, a professor at New York University’s Game Center, described games as safe spaces to practice patterns of thought that now feel risky in the real-world, like long-term planning or resource allocation. She also mentioned some neuroscience research suggesting that games occupy the same neural pathways that might instead flashback to traumatic experiences, like, say, living through a pandemic. “Games actually sort of turn your brain down other pathways to allow your brain to heal,” she said.
In two months or six months or whenever lockdown relaxes, I can’t imagine we’ll play together as much. The children will spend most of the day in school; Broadway has to reopen sometime. We’ll pass some board games onto friends, donate others to the Brooklyn Library’s lending collection. But until then, we’ll open the box, unfold the board, shuffle the cards just so. Deal me in.
Some of Our Favorite Games
For the Whole Family
Animal Upon Animal It’s like Jenga, but better. This dexterity game asks players to stack sturdy wooden pieces (an alligator, hedgehogs, penguins, some weird little guys who might be lizards).
Outfoxed A cooperative game for kids, it asks you to play as chickens investigating a fox who stole a pot pie. (What is in that pot pie, anyway?) The fox hasn’t beaten us yet — even when I don’t let the kids cheat.
Scary Bingo The mechanics of this game are simple and familiar: A caller selects random tokens, players cover the relevant squares. But the design is witty and the monsters exuberantly weird.
And for Two Adults
Exit These escape room games have frustrating aspects — you have to be very precise in how you manipulate the pieces and you destroy some elements during play, so you can’t pass a game on. But the puzzles are delicious and solvable if you peek at the preliminary hints.
Patchwork The aesthetics are appalling and the set-up may seem overly simple. Just how complicated can a game about quilting get? Very. The design encourages you to think several moves ahead.
Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective This cooperative game, if you can track down a copy, is meticulously constructed and maniacally engaging. You and yours play Baker Street Irregulars solving a Holmesian mystery.
--- By Alexis Soloski
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