| In this week’s Talk of the Town, the longtime New Yorker contributor Ben McGrath details recent cheating scandals in an eclectic mix of pastimes: professional chess, poker, and even the world of competitive fishing. Where there are rules, it seems, people figure out how to break them. In 2008, The New Yorker published “All the Answers,” a Personal History by Charles Van Doren about his role in the quiz-show scandals of the nineteen-fifties. “I was considered well spoken, well educated, handsome—the very image of a young man that parents would like their son to be,” Van Doren recalls. But the image was a mirage: before his numerous appearances on the trivia show “Twenty-One,” the seemingly wholesome young man had in fact received answers from producers. Van Doren, the son of a prominent Columbia professor and the nephew of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, would go on to win more than a hundred thousand dollars on the show—but would then be exposed as part of an imbroglio that included congressional hearings, a second-degree perjury plea, and termination from an on-camera job at the “Today” show. Decades later, the episode resurfaced when a movie producer contacted Van Doren about “Quiz Show,” a film about the affair that would be directed by Robert Redford. (The movie was released in 1994 and earned four Academy Award nominations.) Would Van Doren accept a hundred thousand dollars to consult on the production? For the former game-show contestant, the proposal engendered a new ethical dilemma, and a debate within his family—questions for which, this time around, a TV producer couldn’t provide the solution. | 
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