And now for something completely different. Clive Thompson shares his discovery of the moral outrage over playing chess that cropped up in the 1800s. He quotes from an interview with the authors of Bad for You: Exposing the War on Fun!, which is a book about the historic complaints over new and popular entertainments.

Cunningham: Just wait. Each new wave of fear over the latest technology that interests kids is just that: a wave. The wave comes, it crests, and then it crashes against the shore and fades away. That’s partly why we chose to create the timelines in the book, like Youth-a-Phobia or Fear of the New, to give a historical view of these hysterical reactions. But with the distance of time, all these panics start to look foolish and quaint..

Pyle: Especially that “pernicious excitement” of chess embraced by children “of very inferior character.”

Part of that outrage is recorded in Scientific American: “Persons engaged in sedentary occupations should never practice this cheerless game; they require out-door exercises for recreation — not the sort of mental gladiatorship. Those who are engaged in mental pursuits should avoid a chess-board as they would an adder’s nest, because chess misdirects and exhausts their intellectual energies. Rather let them dance, sing, play ball, perform gymnastics, roam in the woods or by the seashore, than play chess.”

Thompson points out that these complaints are not completely fruit-looped, even if they are overstated. Would that young people were taking up live steel combat instead of this or other games for so-called good, clean fun.