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Chess In the Media

Chess and whimsy lighten up Washington Square (Washington Square News)

Saturday night, as part of a new public art exhibition, Washington Square Park was subtly transformed into a magical metropolitan center of chess and the romance of light.

The project called "Well-Lit Chess Pieces" is the product of five years of effort by local artist Marjorie Kouns, who was inspired by what she called the simultaneously playful and serious nature of chess. In the four corners of the park, she has placed 26 colorful, varnished lamp shades over streetlights, as well as 11 giant chess pieces in the grass around the southwest corner.

Tourney of chess wows kids (New York Daily News)

When the school day was over, 11-year-old Mohamed Elmarakbi used to rush home and play Xbox - but that was before he discovered the intricate world of kings, queens and checkmate.

"When you play chess, it's like putting your mind to the test," said Mohamed, as he and his classmates at Public School 11 in Woodside prepared for a major youth chess tournament held Saturday at LaGuardia Community College. "It really helps me focus."

PS 11 began offering the game as an after-school activity through Councilman Eric Gioia's efforts to expand Chess-in-the-Schools, a nonprofit educational program that has helped almost 40,000 students in more than 160 city schools learn chess.

Did Chess Make Him Crazy? (Time Magazine)

Bobby Fischer is back in Iceland, and that is as it should be. Fischer put Iceland on the map for the first time since the Vikings happened by. And Iceland put Fischer on the map, providing the venue for his greatest triumph, the 1972 world chess championship. That was before he fell off a psychic cliff.

Three decades later, the fugitive ex-champion, sought by U.S. authorities for violating U.N. sanctions on Yugoslavia (in 1992 he played a high-profile rematch with Boris Spassky in Belgrade), is whisked out of a Japanese jail where he was awaiting extradition and offered shelter in Reykjavík. No one is too upset about this arrangement because he's clearly a sick man. His insane rants about Jews and America, his choice of a squalid, furtive life by a man who could have lived in princely admiration, his paranoia--he had the fillings in his teeth removed because if "somebody took a filling out and put in an electronic device, he could influence your thinking"--evoke pity and puzzlement.

Do you know of an interesting, humorous, or unique chess story published online? E-mail us at newsletter@uschess.org.