New in the MRB: Gordon Glasgow cracks his genetic code, mourns his god, lingers with Balzac, and more.

Thanks so much for hosting my guest lecture this morning @FordhamNYC and thanks to the students for asking great questions about the assigned essay “A Russian Novel Saved My Mind,” which I wrote for @unherd to introduce my novel Stop All the Clocks.

New in the Mars Review: open.substack.com/pub/marsre…

"A more conventional novelist might have telegraphed Limei’s trauma, her grief, her feral anger, but to read Kan-Sperling is to be denied such redemptive catharses, and to bask instead in her almost romantic eye for empty-looking women" Audrey Snow Matzke on Olivia Kan-Sperling

For the Mars Review, I investigate the world of online chess, where big money is at play and the stakes are higher than you might think. open.substack.com/pub/marsre…

After the mysterious death of young grandmaster Daniel Naroditsky, @chesscom’s biggest influencers, including @GMHikaru, have been quick to point the finger at @VBkramnik who had recently gone on an anti-cheating crusade. Is this fair, or are their darker forces at play?

Good interview. No one wants to speak ill of the dead. But to blame Kramnik while calling his suspicions "baseless"—when in fact Naroditsky admitted to cheating once and had other well-documented suspicious behavior—is indeed libelous and I'm glad Kramnik is filing suit.

First prize for Titled Tuesday is $1,000. 2nd is $750. Goes a long way in some countries if you're winning that weekly. But as I wrote in my article, I suspect it happens most for things like speedruns where you're trying to create tons of content in a short amount of time

Pretty confident we’re going to find out that pretty much everyone is cheating at least some of the time in online chess. But as with doping in cycling or steroids in baseball, we’ll just pick a few scapegoats and then forget about it

The Aleph

Kramnik did nothing wrong

post-slop

But I'm beginning to protest too much. Thank you for the excellent review, @SamBuntz and it has been a pleasure to converse with you both synchronously and aync. Hoping to continue the conversation on the page, in the world of bits, and perhaps some day in meatspace ;-)

It's true that software development does have a great "leveling effect" in the 21st century. But nothing makes this permanent. The main effect of the printing press has changed much over the centuries. Avram Parr himself has an inkling of this in the novel, though just an inkling

Many of the ills of our political system and of society broadly get metonymized as "tech" or "tech bros" or what have you, but really what we are talking about are the ills of politicization and of general passivity that always existed but are accelerated by global software

Moreover I am much more optimistic about technology than this would imply. Ofc one can be immiserated by passive consumption of one's feed but this is a separate problem from technological progress which holds myriad wonderful opportunities for the adventurous and high-agency.