High Stakes: The NYC Chess Teacher Who Gets You Stoned Before You Study the Board
Sam Adler has figured out that cannabis drops the ego wall — the one that keeps grown adults from admitting they don't know how a knight moves. His Puff and Chess events across New York City are quietly becoming one of the more unexpected social phenomena in the stoner community.
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“Cannabis culture isn’t a subculture anymore — it’s the main event.”
Something shifted this year. I’ve been covering the cannabis space for six years, watching it slowly, awkwardly try to shed its stoner-comedy skin. This is the first year cannabis showed up confidently at the center of culture — at art openings, fashion week after-parties, farm-to-table dinner series — not hidden in a corner with a wink, but presented as the main event it always deserved to be. The culture caught up. Now it’s our turn to document it properly, with the care and craft it deserves.
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Every week, Skye answers your questions about cannabis, culture, and the intersection of both. No judgment. Just opinions.
You’ve diagnosed the great irony of cannabis legalization: the more respectable it becomes, the more boring its packaging gets. Somewhere between “this will attract regulators” and “we need institutional investors,” brands forgot that counterculture actually had energy. The good news? A second wave is coming. Small-batch brands and craft cultivators are starting to reclaim weird, funny, and bold. Give it 18 months. The vibes are coming back.
Absolutely not — and also, your friends should come to dinner. Terpenes are real flavor compounds with documented interactions with food. A limonene-forward sativa genuinely complements citrus and seafood the way a crisp white wine does. Your intuition is scientifically defensible. The only difference between you and a sommelier is that the sommelier gets called sophisticated and you get called a nerd. Same thing, different decade.
We’re in the middle of it. Craft beer took 15 years to go from homebrew novelty to supermarket shelf staple. Cannabis has done it in 10, and with more regulatory friction. The small-batch cultivators, the rosin specialists, the single-origin obsessives — they’re the craft brewers of 2010. The interesting stuff is just starting.
The scene, curated weekly.