The archives of NPR's Tavis Smiley Show feature Orrin Hudson's Life Lessons in Chess, with "teacher, mentor and motivational speaker Orrin Hudson about how life is like a game a chess and what young African Americans can learn from it."
Viswanathan Anand's performance in the Dortmund 2004 supertournament leads Mig Greengard to conclude "[Y]ou won't find many who would dispute the fact that Anand is playing better than anyone in the world right now."
Edwin Lam has a nice profile of GM Yasser Seirawan, on the occasion of Yasser's visit to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
The Toronto Star has a nice profile of Zhe Quan, the youngest FIDE master in Canada.
The New Jersey Devils professional ice hockey star Igor Larionov loves chess. He explained to Bloomberg News how it helps his hockey:
"When you play chess, you have to be able to think three, four, five moves ahead," Larionov said. "Hockey is a fast game, so you need to have one or two different options. Chess helped me big time."
The Baltimore Sun has a profile of University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC)'s Battsetseg Tsagaan as the school's chess team prepares for the Pan American collegiate chess championship in Miami. UMBC is defending the national collegiate title it has won for the past six years. The soft-spoken and attractive woman has gathered the nickname "The Mongolian Terror" for her fiercely aggressive approach to the game.
Rediff.com, an Indian journal, has a nice profile of Vishy Anand. The charismatic Indian GM has won 6 of 9 events entered this year, and is a contender for the "Chess Oscar," to be announced in February. Here's an excerpt:
"Chess as a sport is getting younger and younger," he says. "It is normal that as you get older your ability for calculations goes down. The sport is getting younger. My rivals are spotting me six-seven years. In chess, age, up to when you can keep fighting at the top, is more than in other sports. But it is coming down faster."