And there, having spurned the vices of Vegas, we indulged our own, clustered around our team’s answer sheet as a quizmaster barked questions at us. The weekend, Geek Bowl XIII, had been put together as a blowout for quiz fiends who attended bar trivia nights across the US and still yearned for more. Friday was a warm-up quiz: calisthenics before the big game. On Saturday, 240 teams spent the evening packed into a Hard Rock auditorium, sweating their brains over 65 questions. You could buy beer and snacks while you quizzed, but no one seemed particularly keen on alcohol. You drink to forget; you quiz to remember. The only Elvis impersonators I saw that weekend were part of a special round in the quiz, in which Vegas street-theatre performers staged cryptic re-enactments of famous movie scenes. (We had to identify the movies.) Another round had questions to which the answers all included types of cheese: Alison Brie, Goat, Grand Coulee Dam. In a third, we had to construct portmanteau phrases from images of snacks and celebrities. NutElla Fitzgerald. OvalTina Turner. Desmond TuTuna Helper. No quiz I’ve ever attended has provoked this much pained groaning at the answers.
Which is saying something, because I’m entering my fourth decade of addiction. In my quizzing, there is to be found a story of my life. It is the single constant to which I’ve clung as I bounced between schools, universities, jobs and cities. In India, where I grew up, my obsession began with inter-school quizzes: teams of two or three, sitting behind desks, fielding questions in turn. When I was eight, I took part in my first, in Delhi. We missed out on winning on a tie-breaker, and for a week afterwards, I replayed that moment in my mind so vividly that I found it hard to fall asleep at night. In 1999, when I went to an American university to study journalism, I discovered Quiz Bowl tournaments, for which we practised once a week, dividing up into teams and holding mock-contests in empty classrooms late into the night. I returned to India and, while working as a reporter, sank into the circuit of “open” quizzes, so-called because anyone is free to form a team and take part. Three years ago, after my wife and I moved for a brief stint to Ireland, I joined the Dublin Quiz League, conducted in pubs but otherwise a serious affair with difficult questions.
Some residents, like Mr. Lane, have clung proudly to this image of Victoria. The city was established as a British trading post in 1843, before it became the seat of British Columbia’s government and a popular destination for retirees and honeymooners.
But increasingly shaped by a wave of new immigrants, a growing high-tech sector and a mayor who refused to pledge the traditional oath of allegiance to the queen, the picturesque city no longer aspires to be a “little piece of Old England.”
In many ways, said John Adams, 70, a local historian and city guide, the makeover of Victoria is not unlike the rebranding its newest and most famous residents are attempting.
Five years ago I flew over the Connecticut hospital mortuary where thousands of feet below my husband’s dead body lay. The map on the screen flashed up New Haven as we headed east over the Atlantic… leaving him behind. During the six-hour flight back to London I sat bolt upright, tearless and unable to eat, drink or even visit the loo. I felt nothing, utterly empty, numb and as close to inanimate as I imagine a person can feel.
Andrew, at just 52, had died at 8am that morning, killed by a vicious land grabber of a cancer that had taken 14 months to overwhelm every organ in his body. This was my trauma beginning, to be followed, inevitably, by grief. We knew from the start it was bad, but I didn’t somehow think he would actually die. We never discussed it. Now, this seems astounding to me. I am still perplexed by the strength of his denial. And by my complicity.
Until I looked around. Something extraordinary is unfolding for American female distance runners, and it’s making all of us better. Well into our 30s and 40s, we are performing at explosively high levels, levels that used to be unimaginable. The fastest among us have shattered barriers: In 2017, Shalane Flanagan, at 36, became the first American woman to win the New York City Marathon in four decades. The following year, Des Linden, at 34, won the Boston Marathon, the first American woman to do so since 1985.
That success had a quiet and powerful ripple effect, from Olympians and professional runners down to hundreds of amateurs like me.
“Run Me to Earth” is a gorgeous book about the bonds of friendship and the ruptures of war. Even more significantly, in telling the stories of a trio of Laotian teens, it inverts and reorients the American war story.
Not a red rose or a satin heart.
I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
like the careful undressing of love.