Credentialism, Chess Champs, and Juliet’s New Problem

Plus grief and lost futures

Some of the world’s top chess players are stuck waiting for travel visas for the Candidates Tournament being held in Toronto next month. While Canada is hosting the big event, the country hasn’t exactly produced many big competitors. Unless you consider Montreal’s Eric Hansen. Sasha Chapin profiled the not-so-typical player:

When Eric Hansen isn’t at the club or at the gym, he can often be found on the online-streaming platform Twitch, where more than 15,000 subscribers know him as the face of the channel “Chessbrah.” There, he performs barely believable feats of chess mastery. Hansen, twenty-five, primarily trades in “bullet” games—high-octane speed chess in which each player has one minute total to make all of their moves. He’s got a knack for what enthusiasts call “calculation,” the brute-force brainpower that allows players to examine many long chains of potential moves near simultaneously. Sometimes he’ll win in as little as fifteen seconds. [Read more ]

The war in Sudan may soon trigger the “world’s largest hunger crisis .” Not long after the conflict first broke in 2023, Nehal El-Hadi wrote about the beauty of Khartoum, and her longing to return, in “Grieving a Lost Future in Sudan ”:

At dawn, the local mosque sounds the call to prayer, followed by syncopated echoes from other neighbourhoods. A dog barks. The happy magenta of bougainvillea interrupts the streetscape, poking over walls and gates. Women in bright colours contrast with the blue and white of men’s jalabiyas. Sunlight has a different quality here, shadows are harder to find, and the sounds of traffic, street vendors, animals, music, and neighbours travel farther in the air. The city smells of sweat, sandalwood, diesel, and frankincense. It sounds like livingness and worship. [Read more ]

“Skills-based” hiring is a bit of a dud, according to a new piece published in Forbes, arguing that removing degree requirements from job postings hasn’t really helped would-be workers, since “very few people without college degrees are getting the jobs that once required them.” Josh Greenblatt explored credentialism and the lack of on-the-job training in “Can Microcredentials Get You a Better Job? ”

If companies rely on the external labour market to equip workers with the skills they need, the onus to prepare prospective employees now falls on colleges and universities. Colleges in Canada are generally geared toward vocational study. But in today’s job market, is a bachelor’s degree enough? Probably not. That’s likely why universities around the world now offer professional certificates alongside their continuing-education courses. [Read more ]

So many tourists have touched the right breast of a statue of Shakepeare’s Juliet in Verona, Italy, that a small hole has appeared . The act is thought to bring the toucher luck in love. Apart from the many questions this brings up, including “Have these people read Romeo and Juliet to the very end?”, perhaps we should also be asking if the bard still needs so much academic attention. In a piece we reprinted from The Line, Allan Stratton argued Shakespeare’s full plays shouldn’t dominate high school syllabi: Today’s students aren’t so much studying Shakespeare as learning to do linguistic and cultural archaeology. Or autopsies. Shakespeare is used for purposes of literary “dissection” and “analysis.” That means spotting metaphors and similes, like those kindergarten puzzle games where you find the bananas hiding in the picture. It’s like pulling the wings off flies to see how they work. Or studying a joke to understand why it’s funny. [Read more ]

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