Searching for Archival Content About Bobby Fisher

As I said yesterday, The Atlantic's print content is now available for all to read on the website, including not just the current issue but also tons of archival stuff. Check out Rene Chun's "Bobby Fischer’s Pathetic Endgame" from 2002, for example.

Comments

All the archival information you really need to know about Fisher is here:

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/ezsearch.pl?search=fisher

Posted by rea | January 22, 2008 10:41 AM

The article seems to suggest that Fischer's fall was a morality tale, though it mentions even John Nash's schizophrenia. If one wants to look at Fischer, it's important to understand the role mental illness probably played in his later days. As to how he should be judged, I think IM Jeremy Silman put it best:

"Being Jewish myself, I somehow didn't see the problem: who cares what a mentally ill (but strangely likable) individual says? If he didn't make some money at chess, I could see him becoming a street person, shaking his fists at cars as they passed by his corner of the block. Isn't it preferable to have him in a self-sufficient position rather than as a liability of the state?"

Posted by Aaron | January 22, 2008 10:43 AM

How odd. I subscribe to the magazine and almost never get around to reading it. Give me one link to the online version, and I can fritter away an hour......

Posted by flory | January 22, 2008 1:40 PM

My two favorite articles from the Atlantic archive are Paul Gagnon's What Should Children Learn? and James Kunstler's Home from Nowhere.

. . .the three purposes of education -- for work, for citizenship, and for private life -- are by their nature distinct, many-sided, requiring different, sometimes opposite, modes of teaching aimed at different, sometimes opposite, results. Schooling for work is a "conservative" function, demanding disciplined mastery of tasks from the world of work as it is, not as we wish it to be, and objective testing of student competence. Schooling for citizenship, in contrast, is a "radical" activity, egalitarian and skeptical in style, mixing the hard study of history and ideas with free-swinging exchange on public issues. The school nurtures both teamwork and thorny individualism, at once the readiness to serve and the readiness to resist, for nobody knows ahead of time which the good citizen may have to do. To educate the private person, the school must detach itself much of the time from the clamor of popular culture. It must be conservative in requiring students to confront the range of arts, letters, and right behavior conceived in the past, toward the liberal end that their choices be informed and thereby free. . .

I'm also fond of the 1992 article The New Generation Gap on the differences between the generations.

Now look again -- and notice a countermood popping up in college towns, in big cities, on Fox and cable TV, and in various ethnic side currents. It's a tone of physical frenzy and spiritual numbness, a revelry of pop, a pursuit of high-tech, guiltless fun. It's a carnival culture featuring the tangible bottom lines of life -- money, bodies, and brains -- and the wordless deals with which one can be traded for another.

"Cash, Body & Brains" was for me very effective in describing a certain approach to life, and also effective in pointing to what an alternative approach might be. But maybe that's better reserved for Douthat's blog.

Posted by roublen | January 22, 2008 5:44 PM