I wanted to design a chess variant which bridges the strategic underpinnings of football and chess on one playing board to celebrate the beautiful game(s).

Chess and football are also both beautifully democratic sports. Though they are incredibly difficult to master at the highest level, both have pretty low barriers to entry to begin playing.

Therefore, I created a series of accessible links to play the game of Football Chess (if it interests you and a friend). They can be accessed here:

• Football Chess Rulebook (comes with a printable board and pieces).
• Football Chess Interactive Online Gameboard (playable on Google Slides).

Enjoy! Please get in touch with me if you have any new ideas for the game!

How can we travel to other places without leaving our homes? Worldwide Fictional Travel is an escape I use to learn about the world, by reading books of fiction based in different locations; stories told from all corners of the globe. I built this map from Google Maps to mark all the physical locations where each of these books were located in. The goal? To learn about the world through empathy, and perhaps to read one from every country.

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It seems like an odd statement to lead with off the bat, but my biggest takeaway from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is nicely summarized by a Daniel Kahneman quote. “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it”. I'll come back later to explain exactly why I think this.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is based in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, based on Hannibal, Missouri, in the USA.

Tom Sawyer, a young boy living a carefree life in an 1840's small town by the Mississippi, is always scheming to break free from the routine constraints of school and work. Facilitated by his quick wits, Tom manages to influence and inspire other kids to either join him on his escapades or become an unknowing victim of their unfolding.

It's with these very quick wits that Tom exploits core biases and shortcomings in human cognition, shared by all of his peers, kids and adults alike. Mark Twain opens the book by saying that he wishes the book would help adults remember what it was like to be a child. After reading the book and reflecting on it a little, I came away with this thought; that on a cognitive level, children and adults are really not too dissimilar from one another.

For some reason, we draw hard lines between both of these developmental stages of our lives. We believe that the process of "maturation" somehow has rewired our brains to work in a more sophisticated and complete manner once we reach adulthood. On a neurological level, perhaps. But is the same true on a cognitive level? This book made reflect on two things about the minds of children and adults. I'll explain them both within the context of Tom Sawyer's adventures as well as psychological research.

Firstly, children and adults alike seem to be plagued by the same cognitive biases, heuristic errors and shortcomings to our thinking. As an example, the previously mentioned Daniel Kahneman quote nicely puts into words how the mind tends to want whatever it is not currently thinking about, whatever it is not free to think about. Mark Twain makes this apparent in Tom Sawyer's world and the best example of this comes when Tom is forced to paint a fence white by his Aunt Polly. Tom is reluctant to do the work and daydreams of going fishing instead. His friends come by and observe him doing this work. When they start talking, however, Tom claims to be having the time of his life. He says that painting is great fun, while also drawing attention to the exclusivity of the task, as Aunt Polly trusted him and no one else to do it. The observing children ask Tom to let them try it, but Tom strategically resists just enough so that other children are dead set on taking over the task. So much so, they start to trade their own treasures and belongings to Tom in order to be trusted with a paintbrush. Tom employs this reverse psychology trick to take away a freedom the children cared very little about, the ability to work. Once they became aware of their missing freedom, they wanted to do nothing more than to exercise that freedom.

Within social psychology, this is called "reactance". We are cognitively wired to protect our own freedoms, and as a result, we are willing to cling to those freedoms if they are threatened. This is what can lead us to reverse our behaviours as a means of reversing the threat.

As adults, we can fall prey to the same thinking without even noticing it. Have you ever watched a YouTube video whose thumbnail told you not to watch it? Have you noticed yourself becoming defensive over a romantic partner when they start getting attention from someone else at a party?

In truth, there are many cognitive biases which children and adults are unwittingly equally vulnerable to. This is in spite of the belief that we have differently functioning brains; an inescapable tenet of evolutionary biology. I put this chart together to show just some of the cognitive biases committed by characters in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which I believe adults similarly commit on a daily basis.

In fact, there is an incredible number of cognitive biases out there which have been studied. For a list of just some of them, follow this link. It was humbling to me to just scroll through the list, gaining insight into all the things we may overlook and not think twice about. It makes you question how much of our daily personal inferences of the world around us are accurate and truly real, though that's a question for another time.

Secondly, I also think it is important to recognise the ability children have for thinking in novel (and often innovative) ways, which adults have lost the ability to do. In the above chart, I give the example of functional fixedness, defined by the limits a person has to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used. For example, using a mug as a stand to prop up a mobile phone, as opposed to using it to drink out of. Children of the age of 5 have demonstrated superior abilities at coming up with many uses for a single object, an ability which their analytical and problem-solving adult counterparts pale in comparison to.

In his writing, I think Mark Twain does a phenomenal job of helping us empathise with what it was once like to be (and think like a child). I think he did this so well in fact, that I can't help "feeling childish" after reading it, realising that I am not really to different from Tom, Huck, Becky and all the other characters in the book. It's a humbling feeling, however, one which I am very pleased with.

Having spent three years a legal adult, I think the main problem with societal expectations of adulthood is this; we assume that our brains are fully developed and our thinking is clearer than that of deluded children. Research suggests that the former assumption isn't the case, and Mark Twain helps us see that the latter isn't either. I think that by becoming aware of all the cognitive biases which are commonly shown explicitly in children through speech and dialogue, we exercise a form of intra-personal empathy that helps us recognise them within ourselves. It's dangerous to stubbornly live the life of an adult who believes they have developed past these silly shortcomings to thought. However, like most things akin to the human experience, there are more similarities between us, regardless of age, than there are differences.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is available for purchase on Amazon.

This Google Map marks all the locations of the fictional books that were read as part of this series. If you have any recommendations for new books to read, please send me your recommendations!

How can we travel to other places without leaving our homes? Worldwide Fictional Travel is an escape I use to learn about the world, by reading books of fiction based in different locations; stories told from all corners of the globe. I built this map from Google Maps to mark all the physical locations where each of these books were located in. The goal? To learn about the world through empathy, and perhaps to read one from every country.

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Close your eyes and picture in your head what you think the apocalypse will look like. What did you see? Zombies? Another global pandemic? An asteroid hurtling towards Earth?

Moon of the Crusted Snow is based in a fictional Anishinaabe reserve in Northern Ontario, Canada.

Waubgeshig Rice pictures it a little differently, from his own perspective as an Anishinaabe writer and novelist. Rice sets this dystopian thriller in an indigenous reserve located in Northern Ontario belonging to an Anishinaabe tribe; specifically, one which is more technologically sophisticated than the cliche versions which we tend to see on TV. The protagonist, Evan Whitesky, is an everyman character who finds himself with one foot in the past (trying to connect with his Anishinaabe roots through traditional hunting rituals, language and storytelling) and one foot in the present (often returning to his wife at home to find her watching sitcoms on a flatscreen TV monitor).

A question we should ask ourselves, however, is exactly what kind of "present" does Evan live in? The novel draws attention to many of the technological advancements which the white man brought to the reserve which Evan and his small community all live in. Some have improved the lives of its members, while others have caused them to lose touch with the traditional ways. We see this first hand when the electricity which powers the entire reserve is cut off, leading its people to panic in a fall which is rapidly approaching a seemingly harsh winter. When the supply-chains which the community has grown reliant on are cut off, many realise that they are unable to hunt or collect the firewood necessary to support themselves.

I feel inclined to say that this community is one which finds itself in "transition", but upon completing the book I realised that this is far from the case. Rice does a great job of painting the reserve as one which tries to reflect the lives of modern Anishinaabe living in Canada. They talk about Hockey and listen to a varied array of musical genres while driving diesel-powered four-wheel drives. There is no case of past and future, the tribe just is. For someone who was keen to read this book to learn more about First Nations in Canada, I'm pleased to have come away with many shattered notions of indigenous life in the 21st century.

Digression aside, what I think is important to recognise, is the context. An unforgiving winter where the community has no power and limited options to hunt marks a dystopian apocalypse for the reserve. For others living in the West, this might sound bad, but not bad enough to be categorised as a disaster. The reserve certainly feels its disastrous effects, however, as they struggle with the many challenges this throws in their way. Their way of life, values and humanity are all tested as winter approaches, revealing how this Anishinaabe tribe responds to such challenges.

Without revealing too much, I think that the strongest theme of this book is certainly that of the cause-and-effect relationship of struggle and resilience. The Anishinaabe as people have faced hardships as Southerners have tried to oppress them in the past, including a ban on their language and the theft of their land. Nevertheless, they continue to survive, though their limits are tested amidst this harsh winter. This is encapsulated by the reserve's response to a white refugee named Justin Scott who asks to join their community.

In summary, the book is very hard to put down. It's as gripping as it is educational. There are a few things in particular which Rice comments on in this book which I really enjoyed; love in small communities, homesickness when entering a world so different to that of your own, the epidemiology of suicides, alcohol and drug abuse, trust in white southerners, the scarring legacy of residential schools and the oppression of Ojibwe language.

If you have six hours on a cold snowy day and want to feel something different as you sit comfortably on a warm sofa seat in a well-lit living room, I couldn't recommend this book more.

Moon of the Crusted Snow is available for purchase on Amazon.

This Google Map marks all the locations of the fictional books that were read as part of this series. If you have any recommendations for new books to read, please send me your recommendations!