There’s been a lot of talk around the mediabistro.com home office about Paul Hoffman‘s new book, The King’s Gambit—I’m pretty sure Laurel’s throwing a party for him at some point—and this week he gets the “So What Do You Do?” treatment from mb’s own Noah Davis. “I think chess is a world—whether you play it or not—that is inherently fascinating,” Hoffman says of his latest subject matter. “It seems like this game of wooden puppets, yet it brings out incredible emotions in the people that play it. It brings out all sorts of issues. It’s very hard to run away from the fact that if you lose, it’s because of something you did. You can’t blame a bad draw of cards or a bad bounce of the ball. Even if your opponent made the most brilliant move in the last century, something you could have done earlier would have stopped him from making it.” And if you think that sounds like a dry intellectual pursuit, well, there’s this one section in the book where Hoffman goes to Libya to watch a world championship and winds up on the wrong end of a government interrogation. Doesn’t sound quite so nerdy now, does it?
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