I am a fanatical woodpusher, and I’ve devoted a staggering number of hours not just to playing chess but also to reading and writing about the game. A few months ago I stumbled on a curious report on ChessBase.com that the 19-year-old Norwegian phenom Magnus Carlsen, currently ranked No. 1 in the world, had recently been found to be related to Matt Damon. The actor’s mother had seen a picture of Carlsen and noted the physical resemblance to her son, 20 years his senior. A little genealogical investigation proved that the two men were second cousins who had never met. ChessBase posted a series of paired photographs of Carlsen and Damon in which their facial features and gestures were remarkably similar. The report concluded by saying that Damon had invited Carlsen “to visit him on the set of his next film about a shogi champion [shogi being a Japanese version of chess] who inspires a nation to put aside its differences and unite in celebration of his sport.” I’m a fan of Carlsen’s, and I e-mailed the story to a few fellow chess nuts. The only problem was that the story wasn’t true—I hadn’t noticed the April 1 dateline.
My gullibility was particularly embarrassing because I myself have a history of perpetrating hoaxes. I was the editor in chief of DISCOVER when, in 1994, the magazine embarked on a five-year run of publishing a sham news article every April. I had gleefully followed the venerable BBC’s periodic science pranks—my two favorites were a televised report on the defeat of the destructive pasta weevil (accompanied by images of Swiss workers harvesting spaghetti from trees) and a radio interview with an astronomer who urged listeners to jump into the air to experience a once-in-a-lifetime diminution in gravity as Pluto passed behind Jupiter. I wondered if the British are particularly credulous (after all, they still believe in princesses and queens), or if hard-boiled Americans would also fall for fake science stories. DISCOVER was my laboratory, and as a result of a half-decade of rather unscientific experimentation, I can report that Americans are pretty gullible too.
