Yet Another Bad Chess Analogy

In a story on the prosecutor who’ll decide whether to bring charges against Elliot Spitzer, The New York Times clumsily invokes chess: “In a way, the case is like a chess match with two grand masters, in which the high-powered players know and trust each other but will pull no punches.”

Trust each other? Suspicion, not trust, seems to dominate relations between the world’s chess elite. This is a sport in which top players freely level cheating accusations at each other when things aren’t going their way.

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Caucus, Schmaucus

Here’s an absolutely beautiful sentence, especially when read in isolation:

“But she will continue to find herself in a difficult position mathematically.”

It’s from today’s New York Times.

Chess Admits a Prospective First Lady and a Serial Killer

Two people in the news this past week were revealed to be practitioners of the royal game. The New York Times reported that Michelle Obama and her brother played chess as children. Their mother prohibited them from watching more than an hour of television a day, and so they “were expected to fill their time with books, chess, sports….”

Michelle Obama is an illustrious addition to the gallery of chess players. Not so for the other addition, Steve Kazmierczak, who shot up Northern Illinois University. In high school, the Times revealed, Kazmierczak “was a B student with a baby face who was active in chess club….”

All the News That Fits in a Trunk

I am a fairly faithful reader of The New York Times but I missed this awesome correction to an article about the jury award in the Knicks sexual-harassment lawsuit: “An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a 2005 sexual encounter between Stephon Marbury of the Knicks and a team intern. Mr. Marbury testified that it took place in his truck, not in the trunk of his car.”

Thanks to Elizabeth Vicary’s chess blog, I learned of the correction.