THE PARALYMPICS—SO CALLED for the Greek prefix para, meaning “alongside”—give elite disabled athletes the chance to compete at the highest level. Not all contenders in the games, which typically run after the Olympics, use wheelchairs, but those who

Arrange the rubberwood pieces from the Kubb Empire standard size set into two rows, 26 feet apart. Players hurl six batons at their opponent’s formation until they’ve knocked over all the blocks. Then they can fire at the king in the middle of the pi

MICHELLE CLEERE, ELITE PERFORMANCE EXPERT I specialize in helping athletes develop mental skills to face challenges both in their sports and in life. I try to emphasize to my clients, most of whom are between the ages of 11 and 15, that they have to

Attached to a metal shaft, the forged steel head was about the same size and weight as its contemporary wooden cousins, but differed in one key way: It was hollow. That configuration kept the mass at the perimeter, making the club slightly more forgi

KATIE LIM, DIRECTOR OF TOY DESIGN FOR SUPER CHEWER Appealing to a dog’s natural instinct to hunt is a great way to get them to have fun. We test all the contents we send to our BarkBox subscribers by observing pups in play sessions. We look for a lot

JOANNA HARPER’S RESEARCH STARTED NOT IN A LAB, but on the track. Though she didn’t have a background in sports science—she held a master’s in medical physics, and her work involved tailoring cancer radiation treatments—she was an athlete in a unique

It is 10°F outside of the wood-beamed shelter at St. Croix State Park, a 34,000-acre pine-and-oak expanse in eastern Minnesota. Hell, it’s cold inside, despite two fireplaces blazing, their smoke pulled into flared metal chimneys that resemble the bu

WAITING IN LINE CAN TEST EVEN the most patient person, but the happiest place on earth can make the longest of queues fly by. All it takes is these three tricks of the mind—no Disney magic necessary. When you wait for Space Mountain, for example, wal

WHEN SCIENTISTS BRING dolls into the lab, the toys transcend their role as playthings. They can expose racism and unleash aggression. The humanoid forms are easy to identify with, allowing them to serve as scientific stand-ins and therapeutic compani

It was the first Saturday of December 2018—tournament day—and he thought the cars he’d built could outperform anyone’s. They were compact. Sleek. Speedy. He watched anxiously as his pinewood derby racers took their spots at the top of a long, sloping

IN THE 1996 FILM SPACE JAM, Bugs Bunny supplies his demoralized Looney Tunes teammates with Michael Jordan’s “Secret Stuff,” which delivers the boost they need to win the game. But unbeknownst to Daffy and the gang, it’s just water. The scene depicts

THE OLDEST KNOWN JOKE DATES BACK NEARLY 4,000 years, and it’s a fart gag. The fact that we’ve been crackin’ wise for so long suggests there’s something innate about the need to laugh. Heck—chimps, rats, and perhaps even dolphins do it. Neuroscientist

ONE OF THE BEST SURF SPOTS in the United States to practice aerial tricks is in central Texas, some 200 miles from the Gulf Coast. On a brisk December day at the BSR Surf Resort, Caroline Marks was ripping a front-side air reverse. Aquamarine water s

• The Rube Goldberg machine above is not the first that art and photography duo The Voorhes have created. But building one composed exclusively of playthings that fit on an 8-foot-by-8-foot bright-yellow wall while still leaving room for the text on

No matter how hard you try to spin the house balls at your local bowling joint, they rarely curve. That’s because they are simple spheres built for durability, not fancy moves. But a small handful of companies—among them Storm Bowling—create gear tha

The track, home to the British Grand Prix and among the most famous in racing, features a tricky series of sweeping curves best approached with a delicate balance of gas and brakes. Baldwin, however, attacks them at 110 miles per hour, risky given th

PEOPLE HAVE BEEN challenging their wits since at least the third millennium BCE, when ancient Sumerians carved riddles into stone tablets. (Try this one, for example: “There is a house. One enters it blind and comes out seeing. What is it?”) Over tim

THERE WAS A LOT WE DIDN’T know a year ago when we picked “Play” as the topic for this issue. We didn’t know that a pandemic would put much of the United States and the world on lockdown. We didn’t know the Olympics, one of the reasons we selected the

THE CHEAP YO-YOS OF YOUR youth spun simple physics into fun. Fling down the plastic body, then snap it back up with a gentle tug on the string. Or let it sleep and roll along the floor to “walk the dog” before calling it home. Competition-grade model

BARBARA EBERSBERGER, VICE PRESIDENT OF APPAREL AT REEBOK When the first exercise bra debuted in 1977, it resembled two jockstraps sewn together, which is actually what inspired it. More than 40 years later, despite all the R&D put into shoes and othe