Arts and Entertainment

Sometimes the cartoon world, at least as reflected in the colorful pictures and captions of mass media, gets so bonkers that a real-world headline would be right at home in a humor magazine. Take the ludicrous bauble that prompted this article. It appeared in no less a distinguished place than the front page of The New York Times on the Web: "Bathroom Dispute Halts Chess Championship." We could have gone with that. No doubt about it. But we prefer to see the everyday za...

Chess is one of the world's great board games. For centuries chess players around the world have been mesmerized by its challenges, and its great masters have been revered as superstars of a different order -- superstars with brains. Origins and background of chess Like many of our popular board games, such as checkers (draughts) and backgammon, chess originated sometime in the first millenium AD, somewhere along the Silk Road that ran between Europe, Egypt, India an...