The King is Trying to Feel Safe

Jonathan Lethem
Human Parts
Published in
8 min readOct 30, 2022

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Online Speed Chess as Self-Soothing, Tetris, or Collaborative Troll Art

A chess diagram showing four white knights and the white king harassing a solitary black king.
who’s that knocking at my door?

In the pall of first quarantine, the grocery-washing, Deborah Birx evenings, quiet but for distant sirens, while others in the house attended iPad school or Zoom subcommittees, I played speed chess online. Three-minute games, mostly. Sometimes one-minute games.

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