tefan Fatsis is the only sports commentator I have ever liked. He appears every Friday on NPR’s All Things Considered to talk about “Sports and the Business of Sports” and he is so charming and well-informed that I could listen to him talk about golf for, I don't know, at least 10 minutes. As it turns out, he is also a total Scrabble geek. The following comes from Word Freak, a book he wrote about competitive Scrabble, the bizarre subculture he wanted to document and eventually wanted to join. I'm reading it right now, part of my one-woman board game renaissance. It goes something like this?

“Along with Monopoly, Candy Land, and a few other chestnuts, Scrabble is among the best-selling and most enduring games in the 200-year history of the American toy industry. Hasbro, Inc., which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, sells well over a million sets a year. Around a hundred million sets have been sold worldwide since the game was first mass-produced in 1948. In some households, Scrabble is extricated from closets around the holidays as a way for families to kill time; in others, it’s a kitchen-table mainstay. Regardless, say the word ‘Scrabble’ and everyone knows what you’re talking about: the game in which you make words.
But it’s much more than that. Before I discovered [the Scrabble players in] Washington Square Park, I was aware of the game’s wider cultural significance. Scrabble is one of those one-size-fits-all totem poles that pops up in movies, books, and the news …
Rosie O’Donnell regularly talks about her Scrabble addiction. Higher brows love it too. In a bit about mythical Florida tourist traps, Garrison Keillor lists the International Scrabble Hall of Fame. Charles Bukowski’s poem ‘pulled down shade’ ends with the lines: ‘this fucking/Scotch is/great./let’s play/Scrabble.’ Vladimir Nabokov, in his novel Ada, describes an old Russian game said to be a forerunner of Scrabble. The game is a cultural Zelig: a mockable emblem of Eisenhower-era family values, a stand-in for geekiness, a pastime so decidedly unhip that it’s hip. In places like the park, I’m learning, it also embodies the narcotic allure of strategic games and the beauty of the English language.”
-- from “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble” by Stefan Fatsis

If you have time, read this beautiful, haunting story by Joshua Allen recently published in The Morning News.