TIME: Bobby Fischer was only 29 when, in the midst of the Cold War, he defeated the Russian defending champion Boris Spassky in the World Chess Championship on September 1, 1972, ending 24 years of Soviet dominance in the intense, rarefied realm of big-league chess. The match, held in Reykjavik, Iceland, was a massively hyped event — “The Match of the Century” — with a build-up worthy of a Super Bowl or the Olympics and the sort of pre-battle media conjecture usually reserved for heavyweight title bouts. Which, in a sense, the match was. That Fischer was a genius, […]

  NEW REPUBLIC: It wasn’t so long ago that Alec Baldwin—his never-all-that-imposing days as a leading man well behind him—was just another Hollywood dolt with a waning grip on our attention and an apparently well-deserved reputation as an arrogant putz. However you define “cultural cachet” in the 21st-century infotainment thunderdome, betting on him to achieve it would have made predicting a Newt Gingrich inaugural seem like the consensus opinion of reasonable people everywhere. Given their shared propensity for giving vanity a bad name, prognosticators would have felt on firmer ground guessing that both men would end up competing on Dancing […]

Photo by GEORGE SALISBURY As I type this, I am en route to Wayne Coyne’s house. Because Oz is so far away, and passage via hot air balloon is long and slow and WiFi-free, updates will be light today. But stay tuned, I will be checking in live and direct from the Flaming Lips compound later today. In the mean time, enjoy this…

The expertly told Beware Of Mr. Baker is one of the greatest rock n’ roll excess stories ever told. As someone who has read the rock press for decades, I was shocked I’d never read any brawling anecdotes about Mr. Baker, who relocated from England to Nigeria, to Italy, the U.S. and finally to South Africa, leaving a trail of wives, broken business, broken noses and general chaos in his wake. While reveling in the bad behavior, the film makes a serious case for Baker as the man to re-imagine rock drumming, a fearless outlier who boldly expanded the rhythmic […]

  FRESH AIR In a new book, The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War, journalist and author Fred Kaplan tackles the career of David H. Petraeus and follows the four-star general from Bosnia to his commands in Iraq and Afghanistan. Central to the story are ideas of counterinsurgency. Kaplan says that while counterinsurgency is not a new kind of warfare, it’s a kind of war that Americans do not like to fight. “We tend to call it irregular warfare even though this kind of warfare is the most common,” Kaplan tells Fresh Air’s […]

  Here’s a fairy tale for you. A mysterious, Dylanesque poet from the mean streets of Detroit makes a brilliant album of lush, faintly trippy folk-rock called Cold Fact. Like too many great pieces of art, the album fails to find its audience. The artist gives up on his musical dreams and settles into a twilight exile of obscurity and back-breaking manual labor. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the artist, his music has sparked a fire and fueled massive social change across the globe in South Africa. His music is banned by the government, but everyone still seems to have a copy […]

With Camera Obscura. Tickets go on sale Friday February 15th @ 10 AM.

FRESH AIR On March 16, 1968, between 347 and 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians were gunned down by members of the U.S. Army in what became known as the My Lai Massacre. The U.S. government has maintained that atrocities like this were isolated incidents in the conflict. Nick Turse says otherwise. In his new book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, Turse argues that the intentional killing of civilians was quite common in a war that claimed 2 million civilian lives, with 5.3 million civilians wounded and 11 million refugees. And as Turse tells Fresh Air’s Dave […]