Stefan Fatsis has been doing journalism since high school, when he wrote about his soccer and ice hockey teams for the weekly newspaper in his suburban New York hometown.

A chronological list of some career stops: The Pelham Sun, The Pel Mel (Pelham Memorial High School), WVOX Radio (New Rochelle N.Y.), The Daily Pennsylvanian (University of Pennsylvania), the New Haven Register, the Providence Journal, The Summer Pennsylvanian, the Miami Herald, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Slate. He’s also written or talked for: The New York Times, The Washington Post, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Play Magazine, New York, Defector, and a bunch more places he’s leaving out or forgetting.

Fatsis joined the AP as a local hire in Athens, Greece, in 1985 (initially making the drachma equivalent of $13 a day). Memorable stories included an earthquake in Kalamata; a terror attack on an synagogue in Istanbul; the bombing of a statue of Harry S. Truman in Athens; and the rise of basketball in Greece, which earned a thrilling byline in the International Herald Tribune. Then New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and, for five years, the AP’s business desk in New York covering Wall Street, insider trading and other white-collar crime—including the notorious collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert and the disgraced junk-bond financier Michael Milken.

Fatsis left the AP to write his first book, Wild and Outside: How a Renegade Minor League Revived the Spirit of Baseball in America’s Heartland, about the start-up independent Northern League in six cities in the upper Midwest and Canada. Wild and Outside was a finalist for Spitball magazine’s CASEY Award as the best baseball book of 1995. Fatsis then joined the The Wall Street Journal as a staff reporter, covering the business of sports and writing features on everything from the hilariously disastrous and short-lived XFL football league; to the rare phenomenon of single-digit MLB pitcher uniform numbers; to sports in Albania after the fall of Communism; to why NFL players wear less and less padding. Fatsis reported from the 1998 men’s World Cup in France, the 2004 Summer Olympics in Greece, the 2006 Winter Olympics in Italy, and lots of events in between. He also wrote the paper’s On Sports column for a couple of years.

While at the Journal, Fatsis stumbled on the world of competitive Scrabble. The paper rejected his story proposal (lol). So he started playing and reported on Scrabble on his own time, memorizing thousands of words, competing in dozens of tournaments, and, eventually, writing a book about the game. Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players, published in 2001, was a New York Times bestseller. It inspired a genre of books about quirky subcultures and several documentary films, not to mention hundreds of like-minded people to find their calling in this complex, challenging, brilliant mind game created by an out-of-work architect named Alfred Butts in the 1930s and ’40s. (Human spawns of Word Freak include several national champions, as well as Fatsis’s own daughter, Chloe, now one of the top players in North America.) Fatsis has been writing about Scrabble, mostly in Slate, ever since, and talking about it whenever anyone asks, including, for six years, as a writer and commentator for championship coverage on ESPN.

Fatsis again left a steady job to embark on another work of participatory journalism. After covering the NFL for the Journal for a decade, Fatsis asked one of his sources, Denver Broncos owner Pat Bowlen, if he could attend training camp as a placekicker to write a book about life in the league—a modern version of the writer George Plimpton’s 1966 classic, Paper Lion. Fatsis spent a year learning how to kick a football and bulking up (such as it was) his 160-pound body. He managed to boot a few 40-yarders—not bad for a 43-year-old who had never played the sport—and dressed for preseason games. Much more important, he gained the trust of his Broncos teammates, who opened up about the grueling, dangerous, paternalistic, and infantilizing life of an NFL player. A Few Seconds of Panic: A Sportswriter Plays in the NFL was a Washington Post Best Book of the Year in 2008.

After a book hiatus spent in part coaching youth soccer and school Scrabble, Fatsis wrote Unabridged: The Thrill of (and Threat to) the Modern Dictionary. The book evolved from a 10,000-word article in Slate, in 2015, about Merriam-Webster’s first-ever, online-only revision of its magisterial 1961 work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Fatsis spent a few years embedded with Merriam as a lexicographer-in-training, drafting around 90 definitions, including a bunch that you can look up now, including microaggression, safe space, headbutt, and sheeple. He also wandered around the world of words—voting on Words of the Year, visiting the headquarters of the Oxford English Dictionary, touring a collection of 20,000 language books in a Manhattan apartment. Publishers Weekly called Unabridged “a logophile’s dream.”

In addition to his written work, Fatsis from 1998-2014 was a weekly commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered,” where he talked to the show’s hosts (except for his wife, Melissa Block) about “sports and the business of sports.” From 2009-2024 he was a cohost, with Josh Levin for all of that time and Joel Anderson and Mike Pesca for some of it, of Slate’s weekly sports podcast, “Hang Up and Listen.” Stefan and Josh recorded more than 700 episodes of the show, which is a lot of sports talk.

Fatsis lives in Washington, DC, where he still runs a Scrabble club at Alice Deal Middle School; helps run the annual North American School Scrabble Championship; and helps advise The Beacon, the student newspaper at Jackson-Reed High School. Fatsis and/or his work has been a clue/answer in The New York Times crossword puzzle multiple times, and a quotation from Word Freak was the subject of the acrostic in The New York Times Magazine. Fatsis also has had one (1) crossword puzzle published, by the Los Angeles Times. He still plays competitive Scrabble. He does not kick footballs anymore.