In the new print issue of Esses, a quarterly print magazine covering motorsports and the culture around it, Duncan Fyfe writes about the most bizarre Formula One video game ever made. Centered around Gerhard Berger, a former racing driver from Austria who competed in F1 from 1984 to 1997, Gerhard Berger’s Formula 1 Quiz is a quirky video game from 1993 that raises more questions than it asks. Fyfe digs into the mystery, investigating the quiz’s grammatically awkward questions and the game’s developer, Austria Soft, whose existence is questionable. (Esses subscription may be required—consider becoming a member.)

THE REAL QUIZ, it soon becomes clear, is not a test of one’s F1 knowledge, but figuring out what the game expects to hear. This only becomes more difficult, and even sinister. Question nine: FROM WHAT COUNTRY IS JEAN ALESI REALLY? The answer is not France, where Alesi was born and grew up, and under whose flag Alesi competed for over a decade. To progress in the quiz, the game forces one to submit that Alesi was born to Italian parents, and thus is “really” from Italy.

The game’s questions all have correct answers that cannot be submitted, and yet they are less difficult to answer than these ones: Who made this game? Why? And what was Gerhard Berger thinking?

“Taste is a new core skill,” OpenAI President Greg Brockman declared earlier this year—one voice in a growing chorus of pronouncements about the centrality of judgment and preference in an economy built on artificial intelligence. And yet taste itself is largely undefined by many of its loudest proponents. Celine Nguyen considers the historic relationship between automation and taste; the “seemingly irrelevant, unimportant” inputs that shape our critical perceptions; and the perils of wielding taste like a cudgel. A striking, insightful blend of criticism and personal essay.

Today’s frontier models are trained on enormous quantities of data. One takeaway from Anthropic’s 2025 settlement with a group of authors, in which the company agreed to pay $1.5 billion (or an estimated $3,000 per book) for scraping copyrighted books from shadow libraries like LibGen, is that its models have “read” at least 482,460 books. But even Claude Opus 4.8 hasn’t written a short story that I enjoy more than those by Lydia Davis or Jessi Jezewska Stevens — both of whom, despite being prodigiously well-read, have almost certainly read fewer books.

Joël Kyaviro is a professional cyclist from the Democratic Republic of the Congo who has risen above government instability, war, violence, poverty, and Ebola, overcoming every “tack in his path” to become the first rider from the DRC to win a Union Cycliste International race. What’s more, he’s used his success to get the next generation of kids interested in the sport by founding Tumaini Academy, “a cycling program aimed at transcending war by getting Goméen kids on bikes and in school.”

He rolled into the finish zone alone, a full ten seconds ahead, the cushion so big that he was able to victoriously throw his arms in the air. He coasted the last few meters no hands, grinning ear to ear, as his old club president, Charles Guy Makongo, leapt up and down on the sidelines.

Makongo’s sneakers got soaked in the puddles, but he did not care. In the entire 126-year run of the Union Cycliste International, no Congolese rider had ever won a UCI race. On Instagram that night, a picture of Joël ran with a banner header reading, “A historic moment in Congolese cycling.” Posting on an African cycling forum, Makongo proclaimed, “Today’s victory is much more than a sporting result.” It showed, he said, “that talent can flourish even in the most challenging environments.”

Running with Rachel Entrekin must be pretty wild—she encourages competitors and stops mid-race to pet dogs. But her personality is even bigger off the course. Tough and empathetic, her running success has come after 13 years of hard work and a battle to transform an addictive, perfectionist past into a healthier relationship with food, rest, and herself. And even as success came and ultramarathons were won, she watched opportunities go to her male competitors. Gloria Liu honors the incredible achievement of “smashing records while battling impostor syndrome and the fragility of your own self-worth in a world enamored with men, and their accomplishments.”

The key word, however, is average. As any female runner who’s ever passed a dude working himself into a froth to stay ahead of her on the trail knows, women beat men on an individual basis daily. And as athletes like Entrekin and Dauwalter have shown, they do so, occasionally and spectacularly, even at the elite level. We have an understandable reflex to point to categorical advantages that might explain why women can do this, Malcolm says: “It’s inherently feel good, the David and Goliath aspect of a woman winning outright.”

But in searching for the advantages we hope all women have, we may be missing a simpler truth: Most men are faster than most women, but some women still beat most men. The point is not that we have any advantage. The point is that they have almost every advantage—and we still win.