- [Anne] Hey friends, it's Anne. And I'm gonna kick off this hour with a clue. What is a six-letter acronym for a long-running public radio show about curiosity, wonder, and intelligent optimism? Yup, TTBOOK. Our in-house shorthand for To The Best Of Our Knowledge. We are playing word games this hour. Crosswords, anagrams, rebuses, anything to take our minds off the news and our to-do lists. Join us. Puzzles are good for the brain and even democracy. Today's show, Playing with Words. After this.
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- [Anne] It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge." I'm Anne Strainchamps and today's show is all about puzzles. I wanna do one of your games.
- [A.J.] Oh, I, well, thank you for asking.
- [Anne] Do you have a puzzle?
- [A.J.] I do. Well, one of the things we love to do is it's a podcast, so we try to lean into the audio. And have audio puzzles for your ears, like Wordle for your ears.
- [Anne] This is A.J. Jacobs, a journalist known for turning his research into obsessive lifestyle experiments. And one of his latest fascinations, which includes a new podcast, is puzzles.
- [A.J.] There's a famous genre of puzzles called rebuses. A word is written in a certain way or you might have the word "grass" written in green typeface. So the answer would be green grass.
- [Anne] Okay, got it.
- [A.J.] So it's a word that is a clue to a phrase. So we have sort of the audio version of that. We call it earbus instead of rebus. I say a word in a certain tone or accent and you have to guess the phrase.
- [Anne] Okay.
- [A.J.] So if I said tide, then that is rising tide. That's the example. Rising tide.
- Oh, okay. Yes.
- All right. So I'll give you a couple of examples and see if you can come up with a two-word phrase. Mo tion.
- [Anne] Slow motion.
- [A.J.] There it is. Exactly. What about this one? Bana, na.
- [Anne] Banana split.
- [A.J.] Hey, I like it. See, I saw the aha moment when you did it and you're like, "I got it."
- [Anne] But I know you're going easy on me. Give me a real one.
- [A.J.] Well, all right, I'll give you a couple that are more immediate. This one might be hard just because I'm not a great actor. Try this one. Dressing. Dressing.
- [Anne] Oh, French dressing.
- [A.J.] Hey, you got it. You got it.
- [Anne] I couldn't decide if that was a French or a German actor. There's no German dressing.
- [A.J.] We'll see. Yeah, as I told you. What about this one? What about chamber, chamber, chamber, chamber.
- Oh, echo chamber.
- Exactly. How about this one? ♪ Chairs ♪
- [Anne] Musical chairs.
- [A.J.] There it is. You are nailing them.
- [Anne] This is so good for my ego. Keep going.
- [A.J.] How about birds! Birds!
- [Anne] Oh. I don't know. Yelling birds. Shouting birds.
- [A.J.] Yeah. What emotion are you have when you might be yelling?
- Angry birds.
- Angry birds, exactly.
- [Anne] Okay. I know those were easy and maybe you rolling your eyes. But A.J. has a way of making every kind of puzzle seem delightful. He goes deep into their history and lore on his podcast and in a book called "The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, From Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life." Which makes him the perfect person to explain why puzzles are suddenly everywhere. I started doing a crossword puzzle every single day to the point that now I can't really start my day without it. And I kind of thought, 'Okay, I guess I'm really getting old here," but I've noticed that my 40 something colleagues and my 20 something kids are all doing the same thing. Did something happen? Are crosswords suddenly huge?
- [A.J.] It's not just crosswords though, it's all of these games like Sudoku, but also New York Times has spelling bee and connections and yeah, it's a mixed blessing for me 'cause I cannot start my day before doing like five puzzles.
- [Anne] Oh my God.
- [A.J.] Yeah, it's a problem. But a good problem if I'm gonna have an addiction, it's the one I want. And as to your question, what happened? Certainly the pandemic was a golden age for puzzles. And there is some historical evidence that The Depression for instance, was a time when jigsaws really became a phenomenon.
- [Anne] Oh really?
- Yeah.
- Oh, interesting. When times get tough, people turn to puzzles. Which actually kind of makes sense. I'm fast forwarding to psychological effects of puzzles, but one theory you uncovered is that, well, puzzles give us this little momentary feeling that the world makes sense. That you solve the puzzle, you do the logical thing, and yeah, it's an illusion of control in a chaotic world.
- [A.J.] Yeah, exactly. It's this idea of making order out of chaos. Our life is filled with puzzles that don't have a clear answer, but these puzzles that we create, do. So you get that dopamine, you rush, you get that feeling of closure, you're like, "Ah, I solved a puzzle." And then you can go on with your messy chaotic day having at least accomplished that.
- [Anne] Yeah. That you've had this little window of control. So you sound like somebody else I know. My husband, Steve Paulson, who will not get out of bed in the morning before he's done Wordle. Quordle, spelling bee, and connections, which I sometimes say, "Stop procrastinating. You're just delaying the minute you finally have to get up and get out of bed." But I think that that's not really doing him or puzzles justice. It seems like there's actually a pretty rich psychology or neuroscience here.
- [A.J.] Yes. Well that was one of the points of my book is that puzzles are not a vice. So when I said they were earlier, I take it back the idea is. And I think they're-
- [Anne] Maybe they're both.
- [A.J.] There you go. Exactly. Everything can be both good and bad, but they have so many advantages. There is some evidence that they help with the brain because you are keeping it stimulated. But it's not just puzzles. You can do the same thing by learning a new instrument or learning a new language. For me, what puzzles provide is this sense of curiosity. The puzzle mindset is what I call it. And this is the idea that to always be looking around the world as if it's a big puzzle and how can we solve it? How can we improve it? And I'll tell you, it's been so crucial during this very stressful political time because when I'm talking to someone from the other side of the political spectrum, instead of trying to have a fact battle with them or just pummel them, I view it as a puzzle. And I say the puzzle is, why do I believe what I believe? And why does this person believe what they believe? And what can we do about it? What evidence can I present or she can present to change our minds? And is there anything we can do if we still don't agree? Is there anything productive we can do that we can agree on? It's much more like a cooperative adventure instead of this ugly competition. And it makes it much less stressful and I believe more productive.
- [Anne] So this is like your puzzle theory of democracy?
- [A.J.] Yes.
- [Anne] Puzzles make us a more civic-minded people.
- [A.J.] I'm not kidding. Puzzle democracy is the ultimate puzzle.
- [Anne] There has to be some neuroscience here, right? There has to be something going on in the brain that also makes puzzles really attractive to us. Like my theory, for instance, is that every time when I'm doing a crossword and I get a word right, I get a little dopamine hit. It is literally addictive. Which is why I think it can be hard to tear yourself away if I finish one crossword and there's a little part of me that thinks, "Maybe I could just do another one before I get to work."
- [A.J.] There you go. I think your theory is 100% correct. I think the scientists I talk to will agree that our brains are wired for puzzles. And to get that dopamine hit, because it started with the puzzles of things like, how do I find something to eat? How do I use this stick to get the ants out of the anthill? How do I escape my predators? These are the kinds of puzzles we started with, and that's where we developed this dopamine hit when you solve a puzzle and come up with a good solution. And now, that same wiring we use for spelling bee for crossword. So yes, it is literally addictive.
- [Anne] But that's the same wiring we worry about when it's our teenagers who can't put their phones down or when we can't put our phones down.
- [A.J.] Oh yeah. No, it's a double-edged sword as is everything. First of all, when my kids have their phone and they're doing the mini crossword or the spelling bee, at least that's better than looking at-
- [Anne] Candy Crush.
- [A.J.] Candy Crush. I'm actually okay with. There's lots of-
- [Anne] Yeah, or just endless TikTok or whatever.
- [A.J.] Right. Exactly.
- [Anne] What's the last puzzle you did that you just really enjoyed?
- [A.J.] Oh, well what I love is now I have a daily podcast and I love writing the puzzles almost more than doing them. And I'll give you an example. I just love seeing puzzles everywhere. I read fiction at night 'cause it relaxes me. I was reading Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations" and I saw the word, "moped" and I was like, "What? They didn't have mopeds in 18, 19th century London." But then I realized, "Oh no, it's moped.
- Moped.
- It was not moped. And then I was like, "Oh, well that is fun. Are there other words where you can have the same exact spelling but have it pronounced differently?" And I came up with a whole list like mole and mole. Mole, the chocolate sauce. And I created a puzzle out of that. And it was just super fun because-
- [Anne] Wait, how does the puzzle go?
- [A.J.] The clue would be something like, "This is a spy inside a factory that makes chocolate sauce for Mexican food."
- [Anne] Oh, that's good, mole.
- [A.J.] A mole, mole. A mole mole. And I had a bunch of them. Some of them used the accent. Here's one I actually didn't use. I saw it after actress Leone's hot beverage. And that would be Tea.
- Tea.
- Tea.
- Tea Leoni, T.
- Tea Leoni, T. So that to me is almost more fun than solving puzzles because I just feel so creative and energized and I love spotting them in the wild.
- [Anne] So that kind of brings us to another side of puzzling. And that's the painful part. You know, a puzzle has to be just hard enough that it challenges you, but you can still do it. But there are lots and lots of puzzles that are unbelievably frustrating and unpleasant. Pretty much anything I can't do, I don't wanna do. So math puzzles, I just look at them and think uh-uh. But I think some people do. And you might be one of these, really enjoy the kind of psychological pain of puzzling.
- [A.J.] I have learned to enjoy it more. And you're right, there is a sweet spot. You want some frustration before you get the aha moment because otherwise, you haven't earned it. You don't get the dopamine hit unless there is a little bit of struggle. Now how much struggle? That is a personal taste question. There are people in the puzzle community who are amazing. There's this one puzzle called Kryptos and it's a sculpture at the CIA that has a secret code. It's 35 years old and it hasn't fully been solved and people are still going at it. Can you imagine the aha moment when they get it in 50 years? I don't have the patience to do 35 years, but I have extended my patience. And part of that is I did a wonderful interview with this guy who they call the Godfather of Sudoku, Maki Kaji. And he had a wonderful way of thinking about puzzles. He wrote it on the whiteboard in pen. He just wrote, question mark, forward arrow, exclamation point. Just those three symbols. And he said, "That represents every puzzle."
- [A.J.] That's good because you get there, you're baffled. And then the forward arrow is working through it. The exclamation point is that aha moment.
- [Anne] A.J., that's the symbol for life.
- [A.J.] Well, there you go.
- Don't you think?
- I agree. Well, he said that too, yeah. And the key, what I thought was so beautiful is that he said, "You have to learn to enjoy that arrow." That arrow, sometimes you're never gonna get to that exclamation point. And I just found that a much more poetic way than saying, you know, "It's all about the journey, not the destination." To me, it's all about that arrow, not the exclamation point. And I would make one slight tweak to his wonderful metaphor, which is that arrow is not a straight arrow. The arrow is like a curly cue all over the place. Because it's rarely that you get from the question mark straight to the exclamation point. You have to go on a journey.
- [Anne] What about in my natural territory of word puzzles? What do you think are the hardest?
- [A.J.] Well, some of the hardest are these British cryptics. It's sort of the British style of crossword puzzles. And American crossword puzzles originally were much more trivia. Like, this is the main river of Bulgaria. And they have become a little more word play-oriented, partly because of Will Shortz, the New York Times, partly because of Stephen Sondheim, weirdly, who wrote about British cryptic puzzles in the '60s and brought them to America.
- [Anne] What are they?
- [A.J.] Well they are super tricky word play. And I'll just give you a couple of famous examples. One is the clue might be gegs. That's the whole clue
- [Anne] Gegs like G-E-G-S?
- G-E-G-S.
- Huh.
- [A.J.] Yeah. You look at it, you say what, I don't even know where to begin. And the answer is A is actually a long answer. It's two words.
- [Anne] Okay, you will have to wait for the answer coming up right after this. It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX.
- [Anne] We left you with a British cryptic puzzle, not the easiest thing to solve. So let's get A.J. Jacobs back to sort it.
- [A.J.] It's all a play. It is sort of a rebus, you know. A rebus is where you have to look at it from a completely new angle. So think about GEGS, rearranged those letters, what might come up?
- Eggs.
- Yes. Eggs. So you're like, oh, okay, so eggs. But it's two words. So what's the first one? It's not rearranged eggs. It's not-
- Broken.
- [A.J.] Not broken eggs.
- [Anne] Broken, fried, poached, scrambled.
- [A.J.] You just said it. Scrambled eggs. So there you go. That's the kind of word play that they feature in these cryptics. And it's even more complicated than that. I can't even go into it 'cause it would take like 10 minutes to explain the rules. And it's an acquired taste. A lot of people hate them, but I have grown to love them.
- [Anne] I remember you talking to some guy, I can't remember who it was, who was introducing you to these British cryptics and who said, "These things are so sadistic, they're like, invasive. You just move into your life and take your life over." Which it did make me think, "Huh? There might be kind of a sadistic side of puzzle, at least for the puzzle makers." You know, sometimes you feel like they're being kind of mean.
- [A.J.] Right, it is interesting. I do think you have to have a little sadism. Too much sadism is bad 'cause you want the person to solve it in the end and have that aha moment. But you do want them to have the pain, otherwise that aha moment is not going to be as pleasurable. And I will say, since I have a puzzle podcast, I think my weakness is I'm not sadistic enough. I don't like to have people twisting in the wind.
- [Anne] Well, especially if it's in real time on your podcast. And people are just, "Yeah, no, that's mean. We should get to do that in private."
- [A.J.] Exactly. Some puzzlers say I am too easy with the hints. But like you say, this is a realtime audio podcast. You don't wanna hear someone silent for two minutes as they-
- [Anne] We'll call you the compassionate puzzler.
- What a lovely idea.
- Thank you. So what is the most hellish puzzle you ever encountered?
- [A.J.] Oh, that's a great question. Well, there are puzzles that are literally impossible to solve.
- [Anne] What? Like nobody's ever solved them?
- [A.J.] Yes, and for various reasons, some of them are just, they are so, these are codes that have not been cracked. And sometimes, they are so time consuming that it's impossible to solve. There's this one genre called Generation puzzles and they are called that because you have to pass them down from generation to generation.
- [Anne] Oh my God. You're kidding.
- No.
- [Anne] So like your grandfather's dying and bequeaths you the puzzle he never solved?
- [A.J.] Exactly. And these are physical puzzles. They are like the Chinese ring puzzles. And what it is, is you have to move the rings in a certain way to solve it. But it's an exponential problem. So if you have 50 rings and you move one every second, it'll literally take you billions of years to solve.
- [Anne] Oh my gosh.
- [A.J.] And as part of my book, I thought I'm gonna make the ultimate generation puzzle. So I created this one with a Dutch puzzle designer called Jacobs tower and you have to turn these little knobs and try to get out a steel rod. And if you do it one per second, the universe will die of a heat death before you solve it. So I'd say that is one of the worst puzzles ever created.
- [Anne] I don't even know if that qualifies as a puzzle. Is a puzzle really something that cannot be solved?
- [A.J.] Well, there you go. I mean this I did just as a reminder that we do have to enjoy the arrow sometimes. You've got to enjoy the solving. 'Cause there are two parts to solving a puzzle. There's the aha moment where you figure out the key and you're like, oh, I see these are all anagrams of colors. And then there's the work, the labor of actually going through and decoding each of the anagrams. So there's the big aha moment. And then there's the work, there's the mechanical work. And if you have too much of the boring mechanical work and not enough of the ahas, then that's not a good puzzle.
- [Anne] Right. Then it's just not fun.
- [A.J.] It's not fun. And likewise, you need sort of benchmarks along the way. You need aha moments as you go along solving the puzzle. So there's a genre of puzzles called puzzle boxes, which are these beautiful, they start in Japan, beautiful boxes. And you have to move all of these little parts of the box and you spin them and you turn them upside down. And the idea is to open them. Now a bad puzzle box would be that you work on it, work on it, get nothing, and then two hours later, you open it. A good puzzle box is every five minutes, you're able to open a tiny part that leads to another part because you want these aha moments spread throughout. You don't want start then nothing, and then the aha moment. All right, there's one, all right. This is a type of puzzle you've probably heard of. Charades probably played it right.
- [Anne] I'm not good at that either, but, okay.
- [A.J.] Well the original charades was not acted out. It was a literary form where it would be clues to parts of words. So that's where charades comes from. You break down the word into syllables and give clues to those syllables. And then you put them together. It would be, for instance, the clue might be a word heard on Halloween plus something that goes with lemon curd. That kind of rhymes but it didn't have to. A word heard on Halloween. So break it down.
- So let's say boo.
- Boo. Exactly. Plus something that goes with lemon curd often in a pie.
- [Anne] Whipped cream, ice cream?
- [A.J.] Something lemon, something pie. Lemon something, lemon.
- [Anne] God, I'm not even getting the example.
- Lemon.
- Meringue?
- [A.J.] Yes. Okay, now put those two together.
- Boomerang.
- Boomerang. Exactly. So there, that's it. Here you want another, how about?
- [Anne] Yes, give me one more.
- [A.J.] All right. I like it. And by the way, that was not bad. That was not the example. That was a tough one. How about no blank, no fuss. This is a three-parter. No blank, no fuss, plus blank and caboodle, plus blood, sweat, and blank. So break it down. No wait, no blank, no fuss.
- That's no muss, no fuss.
- So muss is the first.
- [Anne] Muss, okay.
- [A.J.] Blank and caboodle.
- [Anne] Kit and caboodle.
- [A.J.] Yeah, so muss, kit.
- [Anne] A musket?
- Muss, kit.
- Muss, kit, okay.
- And then blood, sweat, and?
- [Anne] Tears.
- [A.J.] Right.
- Musketeers.
- Musketeers. Exactly. So that's it. That is another game we play. And that goes back to the 1700s France and Jane Austin used charades in her book. So it's got a nice long history.
- [Anne] Oh, I just feel like, yeah, I could have tea with Jane Austin now and hold my arm. This is great. Thank you.
- [A.J.] My pleasure.
- [Anne] Yeah, A.J., this was so much fun. Thank you so much.
- [A.J.] Oh, thank you. I had a great time.
- [Anne] That is the inimitable A.J. Jacobs, author of "The Puzzler" and host of "The Puzzler" podcast. And to give you an idea of just how obsessive A.J. can get, his most recent book is "The Year of Living Constitutionally" in which he tries to get inside the mind of America's founders by adhering as closely as possible to the original meaning of the U.S. Constitution in his daily life. Which turns out to be really hard to do. Next, New Yorker Crossword constructor, Anna Shechtman remembers the moment when puzzles changed her life.
- [Anna] I first learned that there were actual humans behind crossword puzzles. When I was 15 years old. And I saw the documentary film "Word Play." It's about crossword puzzle construction and also crossword lovers and fans.
- [Merl] I wanted to think of words or phrases that contain the word word in a non-word context.
- [Anna] There's a constructor named Merl Reagle. Brilliant constructor who sits down at his desk in Tampa, Florida.
- [Merl] How many vowels can you think of that? Go A vowel blank A blank.
- [Anna] And just starts plotting out a grid on graph paper.
- [Merl] I just thought of something that's gonna work nice.
- [Anna] I just thought he was a magician.
- [Merl] I like this puzzle.
- [Anna] And so I went home and I started trying to crosswords in my own graph paper notebook from my geometry class. I really got kind of obsessed and it was almost to the day that I also stopped eating. Over the course of the next few years, I developed a really serious pernicious eating disorder. And I always knew in my mind the desire to kind of control and tame language into this very orderly 15 by 15 grid. And the desire to control my body seemed like they were motivated by a similar metaphysical desire to be this kind of pure brain on stick. And that was at the time, a kind of ideal state for me. And I think also how to manifest something like control in a world that was completely out of my control. Sometimes, I've talked to people who are coders or mathematicians and they've understood this kind of physical sensation I've described. When you're writing a crossword puzzle, especially if you're doing it on grid paper as I was. You're focusing so hard on the string of letters and how to sort of tear them apart and build them back up until they're meaningful words again. Something about that level of focus was actually kind of soothing. Almost like a coping mechanism for any sensation of fullness that I didn't want. Now of course, crossword puzzles, it is still light and in many ways, salutary. There are all sorts of benefits of it. Of course, can never say that about anorexia nervosa,
- [Anne] Anna Zeman and the feminist history of crosswords. Next. I'm Anne Strainchamps. It's "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" from Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. Doing a crossword puzzle might seem like a great way to escape from the world. Just sharpen a pencil and forget all about politics and wars and headlines. But crosswords are never apolitical. And a new generation of puzzle constructors is pushing to make today's crosswords more socially and linguistically inclusive. Among them, Anna Shechtman at the New Yorker. She writes about gender and puzzle making and a new memoir called " The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle." She told Shannon Henry Kleiber, it's probably not an accident that her career in crosswords coincided with her recovery from anorexia.
- [Anna] What's strange is that for the first few years of writing puzzles, I was writing them essentially for no one. It was almost like part of my convalescence as a ill child. I was just writing them to pass the time and to test my own intelligence in a way. And it wasn't until I got to college that my first boyfriend, my college boyfriend thought, "You know, you could publish these." It had literally never occurred to me. I had made some for him or for friends as sort of gifts. And so I sent a couple of puzzles to Shortz. And he was-
- That's Will Schwarz.
- Will Schwarz, yeah.
- [Shannon] We should explain, I know a lot of our listeners will know who he is, but he's the famous-
- [Anna] Yeah, he's the long-term crossword puzzle editor of the New York Times. He started editing there in 1993.
- [Shannon] Yeah, you sent him puzzles and he was receptive.
- [Anna] Well, more than receptive. He has really mentored teenage constructors partially 'cause he was a teenage constructor. And he emailed me back right away and said, "If we rush," 'cause I was 19, "We can get you in this pantheon of teenage constructors." And so he really helped me improve those early grids and rush these two puzzles out.
- [Shannon] I actually wonder, I would love to watch how your crossword puzzles changed. How you changed.
- [Anna] Oh, they've changed dramatically.
- [Shannon] You can probably track your own personal history through the puzzle you create.
- [Anna] Totally, yeah. Every puzzle is an index of its maker and her fixations and preoccupations and joys. And it's funny 'cause I remember when I first started writing puzzles, I think I imagined that much of the work was just tearing these words apart and building them back up. And that they maybe didn't have very much to do with the meaning of the words at all. Just getting them to cross was hard enough. But you're completely right that if you go through the puzzles that I've written, I now write them for the New Yorker. But I wrote them for the times for many years that you could probably see, I'm certain you could, my sort of interest develop and maybe even my personality.
- [Shannon] One of the things I thought was so fascinating is that you have introduced words that no other crossword puzzle constructor has introduced. Some of these words were vine ripe. And what else? What are some of these words that you have introduced that no one else had used in a puzzle before?
- [Anna] Yeah. So in the times, some early words that I introduced, yeah, vine ripe. Gay anthem, I tried to get the term male gaze into the puzzle. That one, I lost that battle with shorts
- [Shannon] Because wasn't puzzle worthy.
- [Anna] At the time, yeah, it wasn't understood to be puzzle worthy, which is, I should say after I graduated from college, my first job was being Will assistant at The Times, which was a completely fabulous first job. But very strange. I went up to his home office in Westchester, New York. We sat at his desk and we reclued or wrote new clues for up to 95% of the words in every crossword puzzle, which meant just a tremendous amount of basically free associating together. You know, I was a 23-year-old from lower Manhattan and he was in his 60s from rural Indiana. So you can imagine that our frames of reference and also our sense of what is puzzle worthy would be really different. And it ends up being a quite political question 'cause it has to do with who is your imagined audience for the puzzle. And I remember Will was very explicit about this. He wanted the puzzle to be as inclusive as possible. But what that meant for him at the time, and I know it's evolved since then, was that he wanted as many people to be able to solve the puzzle as possible. And so as a result, he didn't wanna include words that, you know, at the time he called niche. And that always, you know, sort of stab me in the heart. 'Cause it basically meant words that were marked by various subcultures. Queer culture, Black culture, women's culture, yeah.
- [Shannon] But if you take away some of those, then there's a whole part of the world you're not inclusive to.
- [Anna] Exactly, yeah. And as I say, I think that his sense of what inclusivity means has changed. But you know, with some of my peers in the cross world, as we sometimes say, I've actually compiled a variety of lists of words that whether it's at The Times or at other mainstream daily publications or newspapers, words that have been deemed niche or unpuzzle worthy.
- [Shannon] What are some of those words?
- [Anna] Yeah, words like matcha tea or garter stitch or SNCC, S-N-C-C.
- [Shannon] Those are such interesting examples because my kids who are Gen Z are all about matcha tea. And Garter stitch is all about my mother's generation. And SNCC is about, you know, the 1960s. I think completely different generations, time periods. But you think that maybe people from other subcultures might not get to them, but it's kind of part of the challenge too to keep that all together.
- [Anna] Yeah. And a lot of them, a lot of the ones that didn't make the list or didn't make them into puzzles would be proper names. So Laverne, Cox, Gucci, Maine, oh, and entire crossword puzzle based around the idea of WNBA teams. And once you start to see these words on the page, you can see a pattern develop, which is that they tend to come from non-white cultures. Marie Kondos. They tend to come from non-white cultures and/or this category. That is something that I wanna sort of put pressure on throughout the book, which is women's culture. What is women's culture? Certainly, my editors at the New Yorker make a real point of trying to kind of diversify the words that we understand to be common knowledge or general knowledge but it has not been necessarily easy in part because it's I think there are some people, and I get the impulse who would just sort of say, why politicize this pastime? And there was a really grumpy comment section person who, a friend of mine put reparations in a puzzle. And I thought, "Why do I have to think about reparations when I'm solving a crossword puzzle?" For those of us who do see the value in increasing the kinds of frames of reference and diversity of language that make their way into the crossword puzzle, we would sort of say, well the whole thing is political from the beginning. Because that grid is kind of legislating the borders or patrolling the borders of what is supposed to be common. Whether that's a kind of national culture or creating a kind of shared sense of what we all think is worth knowing.
- [Shannon] Well let's talk about that. So is the job of a crossword puzzle to entertain and to challenge? Or is it, or maybe and is it to help us form a more common knowledge together that makes us feel like we're all part of the same community?
- [Anna] So I think it's absolutely both. We end up having to ask ourselves questions like, what is a good crossword word? For me, I'm trying to imagine a solver. What are they gonna like? And my sense is that every time that I feel really satisfied when solving, it's either because I've had to really kind of work to play with language to get the answer. A clue I wrote recently was Kingdom for a Horse, right? Which is a line from Shakespeare and the answer is animalia. So that's literally the kingdom for horses. I like those kinds of clues that really play-
- That's a good one.
- Yeah. Thanks. That really play on language and where you have this sense of recognition, which I think has to do with this idea of community and shared culture. And maybe you wouldn't necessarily expect to see it in a crossword puzzle, but once you do and you recognize it and you see it, for some reason, it's really gratifying to see a word or phrase that maybe you wouldn't expect to see in a puzzle. I remember the first time this happened to me, actually. It was a puzzle that came out and it had soldier boy tell him in the puzzle. And I just thought, that's so strange. That's the music I'm listening to on the radio and there it is in my crossword puzzle. And I think there is a sort of clash of expectations there, but also a sense of like recognition, right? Oh, this is for me in a certain way, but for me and also us, right? Because you know that hundreds, thousands, maybe millions of other solvers are having that experience.
- [Shannon] Who is creating the puzzles has so much to do with the slang, the understanding, the type of words that are used, the insight.
- [Anna] Yeah. In the 1980s and '90s, various computer engineers and programmers got interested in crossword puzzles as a natural language processing phenomenon. Basically trying to answer the question, can a computer write a better crossword puzzle than a human can? And I should say the answer is starting to approach yes. which is something we can talk about.
- [Shannon] Oh yeah. Okay.
- [Anna] I mean, chatbots are really bad at writing crossword clues, but actually compiling the grid is something that with some human assistance, well a fair bit of human assistance, a puzzle can do extremely well. There is a programmer named Matt Ginsberg who did create a solving program that he called Dr.Fill, F-I-L-L. And that won the American Crossword Puzzle tournament, I don't know, five, six years ago.
- [Shannon] It makes me think about how the crossword puzzle, especially because it's daily, is also a historical document in a lot of ways.
- [Anna] Totally. Yeah.
- [Shannon] You might go back and look at things and realize this happened during a certain war, or just this happened during political upheaval. And if people focused on that as a, I don't know, a way of telling our history.
- [Anna] Yeah. Well the strange thing is, is that both world wars were really interesting kind of inflection points for the crossword. During World War I, that was the start of what is sometimes cultural historians sometimes called the crossword craze. And this was really a nutty time. And I wouldn't believe that it was true at all if I hadn't gone back and looked at a ton of newspapers and just saw, yeah, there seems to be this kind of obsession with crossword puzzles in a way that exceeds anything of my lifetime. Like it far exceeds even Pokemon or Tamagotchis.
- [Shannon] Why was that?
- [Anna] It seems to me not incidental that it was around World War I, Margaret Farrar, who ended up becoming the first editor of the New York Times crossword puzzles, which was during World War II 'cause the Times had famously held off initiating a crossword puzzle thinking that it was a gateway to other debased forms like classifieds and comics or something. But she used to say, "You can't think of your troubles while solving a crossword." Which is interesting 'cause as you say, if you go back and look at puzzles from around the time Margaret started editing them, they're filled with references to World War II, to all sorts of cities along the eastern and western front. Different battles, different warships and warheads. Like they're filled these words, even though, you know, ostensibly you can't think of your troubles while solving them. Although it's a rumor that Arthur Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, was actually running across the street to buy the Harold Tribune so that he could solve the crossword puzzle so that's when he decided really it's time to bring one to The Times. But the crossword craze of World War I and into the '20s, I think there's some irony to the way that it was discussed. There were all these fears that baseball managers were afraid that the grid would replace the diamond as America's pastime or hotels would put encyclopedias and dictionaries next to the Bible in their rooms. Or there was a run on encyclopedias at the bookstore, at the library.
- [Shannon] Wow.
- [Anna] But one of the strangest things about it that I found from my research is that, and this goes back to how sort of woman coded. The early crossword puzzle was both in the people who are writing it and also what people thought of when they thought of crossword puzzles is that there's so much ephemera that links the new woman or the flapper to the crossword puzzle. So you'll have cartoons that show a woman huddled around the grid frantically solving clues while her husband, who's sort of emasculated, I suppose, is caring for their child. There was one divorce attorney in Ohio who said that he had over 30 cases of divorce where the cause, 'cause there was no fault divorce at the time. The cause was crossword puzzlelitis. The puzzle itself was siphoning off energy from the home and certainly from the couple. And she was having this illicit affair with crossword puzzles.
- [Shannon] How did then it become such a male dominated genre to create these puzzles?
- [Anna] Yeah. I think there are three factors. The first, as we were talking about, has to do with the changes in the workforce. That women who are still expected to do childcare and housework and are starting to work outside of the home as well, just don't have time to do word work. With the rise of crossword constructing software, not everyone, but a lot of people started to get interested in the puzzle as this natural language processing or coding phenomenon asking, can we not necessarily test our own intelligence, but test machine intelligence or artificial intelligence? If you look at the history of computing, this question, can a computer do X better than a human can? So often ends up being, can a computer do X better than a woman can? 'Cause it's the work that a computer has historically been programmed to do is clerical work. Work that was largely women's work or work that women were allowed to do with the idea that it was sort of an extension of the home, but it wasn't until the '60s or '70s, the same time these demographic changes, you start to see them that we have the image of a nerd. The nerd becomes this cultural phenomenon as well. And we imagine the nerd as a white man, whether it's revenge of the nerds from the 1980s or what began to be known in the late '60s as the computer boy. Those early computer programmers, many of whom were actually women, but the engineers were men. I know for me, when I started writing crossword puzzles and remember I was really trying to prove to myself in the world that I was this capital S Smart girl. The idea of a nerd had a lot of appeal to me. I even liked to identify as a nerd at the time. And I'm okay, you know? Sure, I'm a nerd, still fine. But it carried a lot of weight with me. Being a girl nerd was almost a oxymoron to negotiate socially.
- [Shannon] You were part of a group who wrote a letter to the New York Times trying to make crossword puzzles more diverse through who would be creating them. Tell me about that letter.
- [Anna] Yeah, this was at the start of the pandemic and it was inspired by the fact that an assistant of Will Shortz is at the time reached out to me and was sort of frustrated that she was the only woman on the staff there, which was the position I was in as well. And she was frustrated because she felt like she was sort of, the way she described it, she was supposed to be a female sensor. Her only job was to sort of say, "Well that's sexist. Don't put it in a puzzle." But in terms of sort of recognizing the breadth of her expertise and intelligence, she felt tokenized essentially. I was happy to be another woman she could vent with. I mean, delighted even, you know, it's cathartic for me too. But we got to thinking about what we could actually do. And you know, we love the Times crossword, we love Will Shortz, but it seemed like there were some structural changes that could be made that would make writing crossword puzzles a better experience for women and hopefully ideally, non-white constructors as well. Although the history of crossword puzzles as we've been talking about, has all these interesting demographic changes around gender, it's white all the way down. That's, to me, historically fascinating and much thornier or harder question to answer because it's not at all that like Black Americans don't like crosswords or like solving crossword puzzles.
- [Shannon] So that's just a whole part of crossword puzzle constructors that is missing. It is all white right now.
- Well.
- Still today.
- [Anna] With some really remarkable exceptions, the first two black women constructors published in The Times were published in 2021.
- [Shannon] That is so recent.
- [Anna] It's so recent. There are amazing women, Portia, Lindy and Soleil Saint-Cyr. So why is that? Why is it that, and I had this fantastic conversation with Soleil about black nerd culture versus white nerd culture and how the crossword puzzle has not been assimilated into Black nerd culture. In part, she was speculating and Portia speculated this to me as well, that the crossword puzzle in its role of legislating or patrolling what common knowledge is, can really make a solver feel stupid if it's not reflective of their knowledge base. Portia was talking to me about, this is something she discovered, not until she published her own crossword in The Times, but her father, who's from Ghana, actually ran with his uncle a crossword puzzle tournament in Ghana and then never solved one when he came to the States or stopped immediately because he felt dumb. If you can't get the first few answers, the chances are you'll probably stop. So she was talking to me about this in the context of writing her own puzzles. And so she wanted the early answers in her grid to be knowledge that stemmed from, in this case, Afro Caribbean culture. Why would we try to write this letter to the times that was meant to be, I mean we were obviously at some level ringing a note of grievance 'cause of the conditions under which we started writing it, right? But we also were hoping to make some constructive suggestions for how to change some of the requirements or conditions for writing a puzzle. Including just having more women who are working on the puzzles and games section at the times.
- [Shannon] What did you ask for?
- [Anna] Among the things we asked for was to have more women and people of color represented on the puzzles and games editorial section. So Will Shortz has a ton of authority, but there are still other people who work in that office. So that way, one person doesn't feel tokenized. Other things we asked for where that constructors can see their proofs before they go out because it's so personal. What was happening was, as I say, will Shortz would edit up to 95% of the clues and then it would go out. And sometimes, that meant that there were words and phrases that the very constructor didn't know or references I've heard of people having the experience of not being able to solve their own puzzle.
- [Shannon] Oh wow.
- [Anna] Yeah, because the clues had changed. But also there could be references that would be taken out that were women coded, right? Or coded that would be straightened up or made less distinctively drawn from something like women's culture. So if we get our proofs, we can sort of push back and say, "Hey, this was important to me that this went in there. I wanted to see more women in the puzzle, or I wanted to see this trans artist I really care about in the puzzle. That's important to me. Please don't take that out." Or heaven forbid, and this has happened at certain times. "Like, that's actually offensive. Please don't run that under my byline." You know.
- [Shannon] I think that seems reasonable. I mean that's, as a journalist, you wanna see your piece before it's published.
- [Anna] Yeah. And I will say all of the requests that we made, or suggestions, recommendations we made were all, as far as I know without any contest, accepted and they are changes that have happened.
- [Shannon] I wanted to ask you about crossword puzzles in the brain. You hear about so many people aging and we're all aging and that it's a good thing for us to be doing crossword puzzles. What do you think? Does it help the agility of our brain?
- [Anna] Something that interests me about crossword solving and in general is why people enjoy doing this kind of work. Like it's work that we do in our leisure hours. And I'm sure part of it is people want to exercise that brain muscle maybe with the hopes of staving off decline. But I think a lot of us also just solve puzzles 'cause we like to. I've always wondered what is it about this work that's not work that's pleasing? And I think part of it is that in the world we live in, there's sort of constant work, 24/7 work. And so I think the sense of completion is probably really rewarding. It's work that's not work, but it also provides the satisfaction of just like I did that it's done as opposed to the endless work we do all the time.
- [Anne] That was puzzle constructor, Anna Shechtman, talking with Shannon Henry Kleber. Anna teaches at Cornell, writes for the New Yorker and is the author of a memoir called, "The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle." "To The Best Of Our Knowledge" is another type of word and sound puzzle. Constructed each week at Wisconsin Public Radio by Shannon Henry Kleber, Charles Monroe-Kane, and Angelo Batista. Our technical director is Joe Hartke with help from Sarah Hopefl. Additional music this week from One Man Book. Steve Folson is our executive producer and I'm Anne Strainchamps. If you'd like to read more of our words, sign up for the TTBOOK newsletter at TTBOOK.org
