These covers of mine appeared in the March 2009 issue of Vanity Fair under the hed and dek “Annals of Our Endangered Medium: Some shotgun magazine mergers you might soon see (first in a series).” I was excited to finally get a chance to deploy Franklin Gothic Extra Condensed for a Cosmopolitan parody:

The first one is a slightly different version than the one that actually ran. And there was a third cover, which I haven’t posted here.

I’ll be doing more of these for V.F. in the near future.

[Visit the magazine covers page for more stuff like this.]

As I mentioned late last year, my father, Eliot Hearst, recently published a book called Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games. He spent many years writing the book with help from a co-author, John Knott, and it now stands as the definitive work about the topic. Blindfold chess is the art of playing without sight of the board or pieces—an extraordinary intellectual feat that has a long, colorful history.

I recently designed a full-fledged website for the book; this new site superseded the placeholder site I created last fall. You can now read the entire introduction, which gives a great overview of the psychology and history of blindfold chess, including the record-setting simultaneous exhibition performed by the legendary Miguel Najdorf in 1947. In that astonishing performance, Najdorf played 45 games at once without ever looking at a board.

My father just posted a blog item about Bobby Fischer’s skill at playing blindfolded. As I explained in a post of my own in 2007, Bobby and my father were friends on the professional chess circuit in the ’50s and ’60s. My father’s blog post about Bobby begins like this:

In our book Bobby Fischer is only rarely mentioned and, strangely enough, never in any direct connection with blindfold chess. This omission was mainly due to Bobby’s failure to play any serious, formal blindfold games or exhibitions. However, friends were familiar with his playing without sight of any board and pieces in all kinds of informal settings: taking a walk, riding on a train or plane, having dinner, partying, or relaxing on a day off in a tournament. His master opponents often had no chess set available, either. Virtually none of the scores of those many games were recorded for posterity. But, to no one’s surprise, Bobby was a formidable blindfold player.

For more about my father’s book, visit blindfoldchess.net.

In November, I roped my pal Clive Thompson into joining me for one of the two AC/DC shows at Madison Square Garden. Though I wasn’t a huge AC/DC fan back when I was a guitar-playing, classic-rocking adolescent, I’ve become sort of obsessed with them in the last few years. Their rhythm section is one of the tightest, most rocking ever—viva Malcolm Young!—and their devotion to pure rock form hasn’t wavered in 35 years. Their new album, Black Ice, is pretty fine, and the lead track, “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” is one of their best since the early-’80s glory years with producer Mutt Lange, who focused the band’s raw power and shaped the rhythm section into an incredibly tight, earth-shaking combo.

Clive and I didn’t have tickets to the show, which was sold out, and neither of us wanted to pay face value, about $90 each. So we planned to try our luck with the scalpers outside. If we failed, we’d just go drink beer somewhere in the neighborhood. We showed up outside the arena an hour after the doors opened, figuring that scalpers would be eager to get rid of any unsold tickets by then. Our price goal: $60 each. We didn’t know if this was realistic, but we weren’t too worried about it, because drinking beer was a pretty good backup option.

And that’s how we came to buy two counterfeit tickets. First I’ll tell the story of how and why we bought them, and then I’ll show you the ticket.

Neither Clive nor I had been to an arena-rock show in years. We knew we’d have to be on the lookout for ripoffs and scams, but we weren’t sure we’d be able to detect a professionally forged ticket. For all we knew, recent advances in printing technologies had led to a mishmash of ticket styles, with different appearances generated by different printing systems: at the arena, at a record store, at Ticketmaster outlets, and so forth. Had increased computerization led to greater standardization of ticket appearance, or less? We didn’t know. We also wondered whether scalpers had enough design talent to forge tickets convincingly.

[Continue reading "The Unbearable Lightness of a Counterfeit AC/DC Ticket"...]

With a gigantic mob of revelers preparing to descend upon Washington for Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20, tickets to the handful of official inaugural balls will be extraordinarily hard to come by. There are usually about 10 or 12 official balls, and they’re organized around groups of states. Barring some sort of magic back-channel connection I haven’t discovered yet, I won’t be suiting up for an Obama ball this year. But I may head down to D.C. anyway, just for the fun.

I was lucky enough to attend presidential inaugural balls in both 1993 and 1997:

In late 1992 I began dating a woman who was working for the Clinton/Gore campaign here in New York. At the beginning of January, the Clinton whirlwind plucked her from Manhattan and deposited her in Washington at a job with the Department of Health and Human Services. A couple of weeks later, I traveled down to D.C. to attend Clinton’s inauguration and one of the presidential inaugural balls, which my girlfriend had scored us tickets to. I think it was the first time I’d ever worn a tux. It was an incredibly exciting 24 hours, heightened by everyone’s glee over the official end of 12 years of Reagan and Bush.

At the beginning of 1997, I was a few months into a yearlong stint at an editing job in D.C. A friend of mine easily scored us tickets to Clinton’s second round of inaugural balls. It wasn’t anywhere near as exciting as 1993, but it was still a swank and memorable night.