Garry Kasparov

Garry Kasparov was the thirteenth world chess champion. Also a former Russian politician, a writer, and a political activist, he is the chairman of the Human Rights Foundation and the founder of the Renew Democracy Initiative. He is the author of Winter Is Coming: Why Vladimir Putin and the Enemies of the Free World Must Be Stopped (2015) and Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins (2017). (January 2020)

Matryoshka dolls featuring Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump, Moscow, Russia, December 3, 2019

A Popular Front to Stop Trump

Even in stable democracies, moderates find it difficult to compete against the overheated rhetoric and outlandish promises of radical demagogues. Reasonable leaders are expected to produce results, a bar that is constantly lowered and eventually discarded altogether by autocrats.

January 28, 2020

Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer after Spassky won the first game of the 1972 World Chess Championship, held in Reykjavík, Iceland. Fischer went on to win the championship.

The Bobby Fischer Defense

Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall—from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness

by Frank Brady

March 10, 2011 issue

Garry Kasparov during his rematch against the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue, 1997

The Chess Master and the Computer

Chess Metaphors: Artificial Intelligence and the Human Mind

by Diego Rasskin-Gutman, translated from the Spanish by Deborah Klosky

February 11, 2010 issue