By Harvey Blume
To play Xiangqi (Chinese chess) as earnestly as I have been lately is to revisit a familiar situation, one in which I am at the gateway of another culture, hungry for the experience, but positioned as a junior. That was the case with African drumming and with neurological difference, for example, especially Asperger’s [...]

By Harvey Blume
Whether you are seriously hooked on chess or casually intrigued by it, you probably think of the tables in Cambridge’s Holyoke Center as the Boston area’s one big outdoor chess venue. That’s, after all, where the Chess Master sets out his board a few tables down from his counterpart, the redoubtable Chess Mister. [...]

By Harvey Blume
Though it does not originate in the Kuiper Belt, the Beijing summer Olympics (8/8/08-8/24/08) is bearing down upon us like an outsized asteroid, bringing China out of feudal/communist distance into full twenty-first century relief. Sports, at this point, remain secondary:before we get to ping-pong, swimming, the shot-put and gymnastics, Americans have unprecedented [...]