CIPC #206: Chess in ‘Popular science’
Nothing is quite as unsettling to a scientist than his subject becoming self aware. Imagine the biologist that suddenly finds his fruit flies peering at him; the physicist who finds a very strange quark observing its observer; the mathematician whose pathological counterexample takes umbrage at that epithet. Or the chess blogger who finds his victims critiquing themselves. Just that happened to me when I was looking through old issues of Popular science. I suspect most of you might be familiar at least with its name, but for those few who aren’t: Popular science is a magazine dealing with — surprise, surprise! — popular science that has been published for well over a century. Look at this image from the December 1968 magazine:
CIPC #200: S. S. Van Dine, Le fou des échecs
This is the third year now that I do this blog. I have touched on movies, television series, paintings, comics, literature, sculptures – pretty much any type of cultural output. Yet, I still stumble upon something new, occasionally. Literary serials, for example. In the nineteen twenties, S. S. Van Dine’s1 detective character Philo Vance was as widely popular as he is now forgotten. His books were translated and appeared serialised in newspapers. This is how I found out about him and them: while combing Belgian newspaper Le Vingtième Siècle2 for its chess column, I suddenly encountered a story entitled Le fou des échecs by Van Dine. It is probably a translation (by A.-H. Ponte) of The bishop murder case and most certainly the subject of today’s post.