John Boucha

I can say with all certainty that the best collection of words ever strung together on the royal and ancient game of chess, and I mean the very best, is found in a marvelous little pocket novella titled A Chess Story, written by the brilliant Stefan Zweig in 1941. It’s a story that draws together two grandmasters through situational ...

Behind the congenial face of every human being lies the cumbersome burden of great expectation. For within the dreamscape of our creative imagination is a vision of the future, a pleasant rendering of how things will, or ought, to be. We expect success over failure, wealth over poverty, love over rejection, and good vanquishing evil. Yet, the more we expect from life the more we fall prey to the c...

The pedestrian, even in his ambling speed, is of the most undaunted and dignified of people — gentlemen of the road searching for nothing but enjoyment in their deliberate wanderings. They walk for pleasure, never in a hurry and are completely happy in the company of their own mind. People in this age are too distracted with obligatory engagement to acknowledge, or even remember, how life once m...

In America, and elsewhere, there is the belief that hard work, duty, and self-sacrifice are the noblest of human characteristics. Children are beaten with the idea that if they work hard enough, anything is possible. And so they grow up with visions of stratospheric success, like becoming presidents, astronauts, and professional baseball players. But if these same children and adults were at all c...

At the ready age of 22, Charles Darwin set sail on what would become the most important event of his life, an epic adventure circumnavigating the globe as the HMS Beagle’s tag-along naturalist, to study the flora and fauna of places largely unknown to the developed world. The five-year plan was tremendously opportunistic for the young scholar as those experiences became the origins of his profou...

Bill Shakespeare once wrote of life’s most bothersome quandary, “To be, or not to be?”, the well-known, but often misunderstood, imperative to living that begets compounding influence over our future self. The Laws of Reality, it would seem, have bound us to the dichotomy of decision trees and forced us to choose between life's diverging paths. To fight or flight, to swim for a goal or to fl...

Some people think baseball is boring. As if nothing were more wretched than an afternoon watching a professional sport where doping is so widespread yet the only physical contact deemed essential are the few congratulatory butt slaps. So I wonder what would make baseball more exciting, more bedazzling to ...

The shape-shifting morals of any society metamorphose with the behavior of its individual members. Through the choice of action and non-action we cast votes in a twisted sort of democratic election, nominating the variable truths and virtues we submit to. But however honest our intentions may be, humans are not without bias and this shoddy conventionalism surrenders poignant examples of skewed pri...

Without doubt, the most attractive period in human history is that radical decade we fondly remember as the nineteen-eighties. Our senses are aroused by the unabashed frosty-eyed exuberance that erupted into a melange of neon color, synth pop, joysticks, lasers, guitar solos and hairspray excess. No other crosshatching of culture, cinema, music and technology resonates into today with such bitchin...

There are many disturbing consequences of one species’ unchecked population growth towards a suffocated oblivion, but one of the more unsettling outcomes of this reckless and egocentric lunacy is seen in the United Nation’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs prediction...