“Malley compared proxy talks to a Woody Allen story, ‘The Gossage-Vardebedian Papers.’ In it, two men play chess by mail. A letter goes ‘missing.’ Moves are lost. Both players claim that they are winning. Infuriated, they stop playing before the game is finished. The Russian envoy, Mikhail Ulyanov, described the Vienna process as one of the strangest in modern diplomacy. ‘The aim isn’t to update an agreement or elaborate a new one,’ he tweeted. ‘The goal is to restore a nearly ruined deal piece by piece. Was there a similar exercise in the history of international relations? I can not recollect anything like that. Can you?'” Sadly, this isn’t about a comedic chess game. It’s about a growing nuclear threat. Robin Wright in The New Yorker: The Looming Threat of a Nuclear Crisis with Iran.