A philosopher’s case for living playfully without keeping score

Becca Rothfeld | Washington Post | Jan 08, 2026

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Nguyen is a connoisseur of games, and his musings about them are ingenious and entertaining. “Often in games,” he observes, “the goal isn’t what really matters. We adopt the goal in order to experience the process.” No one except the most brittlely competitive partygoer cares who wins a game of charades at a birthday celebration; the point of the undertaking is to allow us to make fools of ourselves in the company of our friends.

Sometimes, however, the state we hope to achieve is one of elegance, as in chess, or of bodily awareness, as in rock climbing. Many well-designed games, Nguyen argues, “make beautiful action.” They “call it forth” by directing our movements and placing odd obstacles in our way. Would anyone think to become skilled at maneuvering a ball with her feet if not for soccer’s prohibition on the use of hands? “This is what makes games unique as an art,” Nguyen writes. “In traditional art, the beauty is outside the viewer, in the art object itself. It is external beauty. But with games, much of the beauty shows up in the players’ own actions — in the feeling of their own bodies and minds.”

Six-decade math problem solved by Korean mathematician

Park Han-na | Korean Herald | Jan 04, 2026

Describing the research process, Baek compared it to repeatedly building and discarding ideas.

“You keep holding on to hope, then breaking it, and moving forward by picking up ideas from the ashes,” he said in an interview with a web magazine published by Korean Institute for Advanced Study.

“I’m closer to a daydreamer by nature, and for me mathematical research is a repetition of dreaming and waking up.”