Magnus Carlsen Is Not Saving Chess

Miami-born challenger Fabiano Caruana during a press conference after the first round of the World Chess Championship in London.Fredrik Varfjell/Bildbyran via ZUMA

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The World Chess Championship is currently being played in London, pitting Magnus Carlsen, the three-time defending champion from Norway, against Fabiano Caruana, the challenger from the United States. The fourth game ended in a draw a couple of hours ago, just like all the games so far. The tournament score is 2-2.

Right now chess has a lot going for it. Carlsen is an affable, young, insanely talented prodigy. Caruana is even younger and is the first American to play for the world championship since you-know-who. But that doesn’t seem to be doing it any good.

Google Trends is hardly the final statement on what people do and don’t care about, but it sure seems to suggest that chess is becoming even less popular than it used to be:

Worldwide, interest in chess is perhaps eroding even more quickly than it is in the United States. Even in Norway interest has slackened since Carlsen won his first world championship in 2013. In Russia, interest has cratered since the era of endless Russian dominance ended about a decade ago. The only country where it seems to be on an upswing is China, for reasons that escape me.

Anyway, the fifth game will be played Thursday at 10 am Eastern if you want to watch over the internet. Caruana will be playing white.

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We'll also be quite transparent and level-headed with you about this.

In "News Never Pays," our fearless CEO, Monika Bauerlein, connects the dots on several concerning media trends that, taken together, expose the fallacy behind the tragic state of journalism right now: That the marketplace will take care of providing the free and independent press citizens in a democracy need, and the Next New Thing to invest millions in will fix the problem. Bottom line: Journalism that serves the people needs the support of the people. That's the Next New Thing.

And it's what MoJo and our community of readers have been doing for 47 years now.

But staying afloat is harder than ever.

In "This Is Not a Crisis. It's The New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, why this moment is particularly urgent, and how we can best communicate that without screaming OMG PLEASE HELP over and over. We also touch on our history and how our nonprofit model makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there: Letting us go deep, focus on underreported beats, and bring unique perspectives to the day's news.

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