A Conversation with Paul Hoffman
by Howard Goldowsky
Chess
is at the brink of mainstream popularity and who better to bring it over the
edge than Paul Hoffman. Years ago, after playing chess religiously as a kid,
he escaped the addictions of the game to attend Harvard, and to build a career
as one of the premier science journalists of our time. He has been an editor
at Scientific American, president and editor-in-chief of Discover magazine,
and president and publisher of Encyclopaedia Britannica. On television, he
has hosted science programs for both PBS and the major networks. David Letterman
and Oprah have swapped math jokes and high-tech jargon with him on the air.
And if the rest of his career isn’t impressive enough, this year Hoffman
finished his eleventh book, Wings of Madness: Alberto Santos-Dumont and the
Invention of Flight. His previous book, The Man Who Loved Only Numbers, was
an international bestseller.
On January 29, 2000, Hoffman played in his first rated chess tournament after
thirty years. Shortly after, with the same passion to educate the layperson
as he has had for science and math, Hoffman began to write about chess. He
is a class-A player with a combined skill at chess and talent for writing that
allows him to publish chess articles in such prestigious publications as the
New Yorker, Smithsonian, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Time.
(A complete bibliography of Hoffman’s chess writing is given following
this interview.) This man, who has a personality for television, a passion
to promote chess, and a deep understanding of our game as well as the technology
emerging as humanity’s rival to it, is, starting November 11th, going
to be the liaison between ESPN’s audience and our chess world. He will
be a commentator alongside Yasser Seirawan for all four games of the Kasparov-Fritz3D
match at the New York Athletic Club in New York City. We chessplayers,
our game, and prospective fans, can’t go wrong.
Paul Hoffman and I met for a few hours recently in the lounge of the Novotel
Hotel in Times Square, New York City. We spent the time previewing the upcoming
Kasparov-Fritz3D match, and we discussed topics such as Hoffman’s role
as commentator, and the related issues of computer chess and how to promote
chess in America.
Here is the full
interview with Paul Hoffman by Howard Goldowsky for the Chess
Cafe. Note that the interview will be available in its current HTML form for
a few weeks only. After that you can read it as a PDF
file in the Chess Cafe Archive.
Links