A real-world Jurassic Park scenario. The puzzle of immigration, and the immigration of puzzles. The Mapplethorpe x Doolittle collaboration you never imagined. Finding solace in poetry. The inner lives of farm animals. All that—and more—in this week’s edition.

1. What Kind Of Future Does De-Extinction Promise?

Sabrina Imbler | Defector | December 6, 2023 | 5,436 words

Ever imagine what it would be like if a long-lost species roamed Earth once again? Colossal, a well-funded company at the forefront of the de-extinction business, plans to make this a reality. On the surface, this sounds like an ecological dream, as well as a way for humans to do good and reverse some of the destruction we’ve caused on this planet. But what does de-extinction entail? In this fascinating read, Sabrina Imbler explains that a recreated dodo would not actually be a dodo, but a genetic hybrid of the dodo and its closest living relative (the Nicobar pigeon). What, then, would teach this lone dodo how to be a dodo? Or, in the case of the mammoth, which would be developed with the genetic help of the Asian elephant, how would the animal physically come into being? The uneasy answer: a surrogate elephant mother who would never be able to consent to carrying another species. (In the hope of an alternative, Colossal has a team focused on developing an artificial womb, which—depending on your perspective—might be even creepier.) There’s a lot more to ponder here, including the key question of who, ultimately, de-extinction is for. As Imbler asserts, it’s not for the animals, but for Colossal’s VCs and investors, who include Paris Hilton. (Yes, you read that correctly.) Always, always click on a link with a Sabrina Imbler byline. They write my favorite kind of science writing: curious, thoughtful, and accessible. This piece is no exception. —CLR

2. Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?

Natan Last | The New Yorker | December 18, 2023 | 4,675 words

So here’s something about me: I take crossword puzzles seriously. I’ve done them since I was old enough to hold a pen. I’ve written about them. (More than once!) I don’t say this to establish any nerd bona fides, but to make clear that I know from good crossword stories. And in a week when multiple national magazines ran longform pieces about puzzles, Natan Last’s New Yorker feature—which ran in print under the far better headline “Rearrangements”—became one of the best crossword stories I’ve ever read. A longtime crossword constructor and writer, Last is currently working on a book about you-know-what. Still, this piece contains multitudes in the best way possible. On one level, it’s a profile of Mangesh Ghogre, a man from Mumbai whose love of crosswords increased his English fluency and ultimately earned him a so-called Einstein visa to the U.S. On another, it uses Ghogre’s story to interrogate the cultural history and linguistic conventions of American-style crosswords—and on a third, it contends with the current movement trying to push those crosswords out of their Western rut and to be more expansive in both their clues and their fill. This conversation has been going on for years among constructors and editors, and the resulting sea change is evident everywhere from the iconic New York Times puzzle to outlets like The New Yorker and USA Today. Yet, Last wraps a human-interest story and a thorny bit of discourse into a bundle that’s accessible to non-solvers while also being sharp and nuanced enough to satisfy obsessives like me. If you didn’t have a clue, now you do. —PR

3. A Work of Love

Lulu Miller and John Megahan | Orion | December 7, 2023 | 3,100 words

This utterly winning Q&A is about “the Noah’s ark you never heard about,” as Radiolab host Lulu Miller puts it in her introduction. Miller talks to John Megahan, an illustrator who spent years secretly drawing detailed pictures of animals engaging in queer behavior: “male giraffes necking (literally, that’s what scientists call the courtship behavior); dolphins engaging in blowhole sex; and rams and grizzlies and hedgehogs mounting one another in such intricate detail you can almost feel their fur or fangs or spines.” The illustrations, which eventually filled the pages of the seminal 1999 book Biological Exuberance, are entirely based on fact—they’re inspired by “well-documented cases of same-sex mating, parenting, courtship, and multivariate, rather than binary, expressions of sex (like intersexuality and sex-changing) in the animal world.” This interview about art as activism is a bright light at the end of a challenging year for so many of us. It is as funny as it is earnest, filled with laugh-out-loud anecdotes and eloquent articulations of important truths long sidelined by opponents of queer existence. “It definitely did not stay a day job,” Megahan says of his illustrations. “It became a work of love for me, in a sense. I became really committed to it. Once we got going and I saw the scope of the project and what it was all about, I basically wanted to pay respect to these animals.” —SD

4. How the Poet Christian Wiman Keeps His Faith

Casey Cep | The New Yorker | December 4, 2023 | 5,978 words

Casey Cep profiles poet Christian Wiman who, nearly 20 years ago at age 39—newly married, his life before him—was diagnosed with a “rare form of lymphoma called Waldenström’s macroglobulinemia.” He imagined he had five years to live. As a child, his family’s anger and depression boiled over into violence in fits they referred to as “the sulls.” Wiman, so afflicted, used exercise to quell his feelings until he discovered reading as a way to change his life. He made poetry his obsession, “swallowing all of Blake, Dickinson, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Cervantes” and later John Milton, thinking that to write great poems, you first must consume them. Cep is nearly invisible in this piece; it’s so carefully researched and written, you feel as though you’re face to face with Wiman as he shares stories and what poetry has meant to him at various stages in his life. Poetry, he has written, is a salve “for psychological, spiritual, or emotional pain. For physical pain it is, like everything but drugs, useless.” Despite that, as Cep notes, when Wiman was in “the cancer chair” undergoing treatment and its excruciating side effects, he turned to verse. “In the cancer chair, Wiman would recite every poem he could remember, and, when he ran out, try to write one of his own,” she writes. Cep’s nuanced profile is a testament to dogged determination, coming to grips with faith—both in God and the power of poetry—and the feat of sheer will against despair. —KS

5. What Are Farm Animals Thinking?

David Grimm | Science | December 7, 2023 | 3,694 words

A couple of years ago, my downstairs neighbors kept chickens. (Finger, Tender, and Nugget. I take no responsibility for the names.) These sassy ladies realized that I was a soft touch, and every day merrily hopped up the stairs to my deck to peer in through the patio door, awaiting kitchen scraps. I soon noticed that when I got up and opened my bedroom curtains, the chickens peered up from the yard. Curtains open, they would race up the stairs: the café was in business. These girls were so on the ball that I have not eaten a chicken since we became acquainted. It’s little wonder, then, that I pounced on this investigation into research on the complexity of thinking in farm animals, an area I have mused on since the food-savvy chickens but that is often ignored by scientists. David Grimm bravely faces the “cacophony of bleats, groans, and retching wails” and “sour miasma of pig excrement” to enter the Research Institute for Farm Animal Biology (FBN) and learn about the questions being asked there, such as do cows have friends? (Considering that scientists have potty-trained cows here, I think they probably do.) Grimm keeps the tone light—sliding in a few quips between the science—but still provides a comprehensive overview of the work. With a staggering 78 billion farm animals on Earth, it is time we gave them more thought. —CW

Audience Award

What editor’s pick was our readers’ favorite this week?

In 2021, the psychologist and puzzle-maker Erica Hsiung Wojcik published the Expanded Crossword Name Database, a “list of names, places and things that represent groups, identities and people often excluded from crossword grids.” Because of English’s consonant-heavy phonotactics, crossword constructors make use of vowel-heavy French loanwords to fill out the grid—ete, oui, epee. That’s also, perhaps, why we know Jean auel, eero Saarinen, all the canonical iras. If vowelly nouns are so useful, why not arm constructors with an updated canon: Why not put eula Biss, Michaela coel, or yaa Gyasi in a crossword? One solver’s trivia is another’s lived lexicon; what’s “fair” to W. H. Auden might keep newbie solvers on the other side of the fence.

If Cicero’s aura of “understanding” is, behind the scenes, just another algorithmic operation, sometimes an alignment in perception is all it takes to build a bond. I see, given the way your position often plays out, why you’d be nervous about those fleets. Or, outside of Diplomacy: I understand, since living alone diminishes your mood, why you’d want to have a roommate. When the stock customer service moves—“I can understand why you’re frustrated”—figured into Cicero’s dialog, they had a pleasing effect. No wonder moral philosophies of AI lean heavily on the buzzword alignment. When two minds’ perceptions of a third thing line up, we might call that congruity the cognitive equivalent of love.

By January 2023, Chess.com reported hitting over 10 million active players in a single day—more than the daily average of World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, and Among Us combined—leading the site’s servers to crash. Its online schedule now features a who’s who of chess grand masters who provide content for users almost 24 hours a day. A new class of chess celebrities, like sisters Alexandra and Andrea Botez, who recently surpassed 1 million Twitch subscribers on their joint account, and international master Levy Rozman, who has over 3 million YouTube subscribers, regularly appear on Chess.com.

Hasbro is now trying to replicate with D&D what it did with its geeky corporate sibling, Magic: The Gathering. It built the fantasy card game into its first billion-dollar brand, thanks in part to an aggressive expansion into mobile gaming, media licensing agreements and ancillary products. Today, Hasbro makes about $4 billion a year from toys, $1 billion from entertainment and $1.3 billion from its Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming division. The company doesn’t break out D&D-specific numbers for investors, but Arpine Kocharyan, an analyst at UBS, has estimated that D&D generates more than $150 million in annual sales. In October 2022, the toy company set a goal of increasing its overall profit by 50% over the next three years, noting that D&D would be “a major growth priority.”

Judging by the game’s history, supersizing D&D’s coffers won’t be a simple quest. The brand has often struggled to live up to its potential, leaving in its wake decades of infighting, litigation and squandered opportunities. And sure enough, just as Hasbro was gearing up to mobilize its zealous fan base for the feature film, it hit yet another self-inflicted snag. 

All told, Atari was in many ways the early embodiment of the modern Silicon Valley narrative: groundbreaking innovation, unconventional business strategy and — most notably — the profound impact of integrating technology into our lives (namely in the form of the culturally ubiquitous Atari 2600 home gaming system).

By early 2021, Walsh had gathered ample evidence to prove that esports could bring in as many as 20 ­student-athletes per year and boost the college’s brand among potential applicants who’d been weaned on Fortnite and NBA 2K. Still, some of the school’s administrators scoffed at the idea that gamers deserved the same respect as, say, members of LCCC’s well-regarded rodeo team. “They’re not athletes, because an athlete, by definition, manipulates their body and muscles in a way to interact with some object,” Walsh recalls an administrator saying. “And I said, ‘You just described esports.’ And they’re like, ‘Well, no, they’re not moving.’ And I go, ‘They’re moving their wrists and their fingers with dexterity. And they’re using their brains in such a quick and decisive way. How is that not a sport?’”

By Claire Sewell

If the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us anything it’s that, given large stretches of time confined mostly inside our homes, we will eventually experience the desire to do something besides binge-watch television. Many people have long been daily devotees of crossword puzzles and games, but others turned to them as a comforting distraction from a newly unpredictable world. In lockdown, suddenly every night could be game night. But as the pandemic stretched on and evolved, and we started to move outside our homes a little more, it seemed like our fascination with puzzles and games was beginning to wane once more.

Then, last October, Wordle appeared on the internet, about as quietly as anything can nowadays. This daily word game became a viral puzzle phenomenon a couple of months later when the game’s creator, Josh Wardle, added a feature that allowed players to share their results without spoilers. The now-ubiquitous array of gray, yellow, and green squares began popping up all over Twitter along with bemused tweets asking what it was all about. Some have pointed out Wordle’s similarities to the board game Mastermind (itself a craze in the 1970s), a British game show called Lingo, and even a game-within-a-game in Fallout 3, but it’s hardly the first puzzle to build on its predecessors. Yet, Wordle’s simple, free, browser-based interface is an outlier in the world of gaming apps. A large part of this particular game’s popularity is the way that it creates a feeling of camaraderie. Together, we ride the high of guessing the word in two or three tries one day, but despair the next when we get our comeuppance if it takes five or six attempts. Or, worse still, we experience the ultimate letdown of not solving a Wordle and having to wait a whole day for the next six rows of empty squares.

Word games, puzzles, and board games may have regained popularity during the pandemic, but all have brought us together many times before. In Wordle’s case, the simplicity of it reminds us of the goodness of our shared humanity, even as we continue living with a global pandemic. Join me on a journey across history and down a rabbit hole of stories about the magic of puzzles and games.

Inside Japan’s Puzzle Palace (Martin Fackler, The New York Times, March 2007)

The first puzzle craze that I vividly remember is Sudoku. A number puzzle, it became popular in America around 2005, just before smartphones and apps took over. I began to notice Sudoku paperbacks taking up space at bookstores and on newsstands right next to the crossword puzzles, word search games, and other old reliables. Suddenly everybody was taking pencil to paper, trying to fill in nine-by-nine grids with the numbers one through nine without repeating any of them in a row, column, or square. Thinking back, it’s almost baffling that a puzzle like this took off, but the element of unpredictability is precisely what makes puzzles so fun. Maki Kaji, the former president of Nikoli, a Japanese puzzle publishing company, first popularized Sudoku in Japan and talks about the puzzle phenomenon in this 2007 interview. Kaji died in 2021, but his legacy can be found in the “democratization of puzzle invention” where anybody might capture our collective curiosity.

Sudoku’s popularity in the United States caught Mr. Kaji by such surprise that he did not try to get the trademark there until it was too late. As a result, Nikoli receives no royalties from sudoku-related sales overseas by other publishers. In hindsight, though, he now thinks that oversight was a brilliant mistake. The fact that no one controlled sudoku’s intellectual property rights let the game’s popularity grow unfettered, Mr. Kaji says. Nikoli does not plan to trademark other new games, either, in hopes this will also help them take off.

Puzzle Trouble: Women and Crosswords in the Age of Autofill (Anna Shechtman, The American Reader, August 2014)

Anna Shechtman constructs crossword puzzles for The New Yorker, but in 2014 she was just getting her start working as an assistant to the puzzle titan himself, Will Shortz (puzzle editor for The New York Times), at his American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. There is still a gender disparity behind the grid, with more men than women constructing puzzles. Shechtman is currently writing a book that explores the history of women and crosswords alongside her own experiences as a cruciverbalist, or “a person skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles.” After all, a woman, Margaret Farrar, was the first crossword puzzle editor for The New York Times. The paper’s current — and first — Editorial Director for Games, Everdeen Mason, is also a woman. Shechtman’s account for The American Reader gave me a new appreciation for everything that goes into constructing and solving crossword puzzles, and I’m really looking forward to reading her book. 

A “pastime of privilege,” puzzle-making requires very specialized skills and offers very little compensation. In this sense, it’s remarkably well suited to the brogrammer culture skewered on shows like HBO’s Silicon Valley—spaces buzzing with mental agility and free-floating virginity. It’s not that women aren’t up to the challenge of tech-based constructing (Bennett and Reynaldo also use software to make crosswords), but the decline in female puzzle-makers may be a symptom of the aesthetics of tech culture, not the technology itself.

Game On: Why We Are Playing Board Games More Than Ever (Lennlee Keep, PBS Independent Lens, August 2019)

One of my favorite games is Carcassonne, a Eurogame involving tiles that are used to map out a landscape and a curious little game piece called a meeple. Eurogames differ from their American counterparts since gameplay is often based on constructing the board from individual pieces, with a player’s final score as the objective, rather than eliminating players to arrive at a winner. Role-play and strategy games like Dungeons & Dragons have also experienced a surge in popularity in recent years. Lennlee Keep’s delightful essay explores a variety of board games and what keeps us in their thrall. 

For the first time, I had something that my big brother needed. I’d never felt so powerful. The cards were stacked in my favor and I knew what I wanted: his allowance, and not just a dime or a quarter, I wanted the entire dollar. It was agreed that I would play a minimum of two hours per day and his allowance was mine. There were “no take-backs.”

A Brief History of Word Games (Adrienne Raphel, The Paris Review, March 2020)

You might be surprised to learn that the crossword puzzle wasn’t invented until 1913. I was even more shocked to learn that the word search puzzle first appeared in 1968. I love a good word search, and I’ve been known to complete the crossword puzzle in the back of People magazine a time or two. Yes, both of those are very low stakes as far as word puzzles go, but there’s the crux of Wordle’s genius. Aficionados of the notoriously challenging New York Times crossword puzzle aren’t at any more of an advantage than the rest of us when faced with the utter blankness of the Wordle world. In her post for The Paris Review blog, Adrienne Raphel gives us a peek into the deeper historical origins of crossword clues and the riddles that keep us guessing. She also wrote a book about cruciverbalists.

The ancient Romans loved word puzzles, beginning with their city’s name: the inverse of ROMA, to the delight of all Latin lovers, is AMOR. The first known word square, the so-called Sator Square, was found in the ruins of Pompeii. The Sator Square (or the Rotas Square, depending on which way you read it; word order doesn’t matter in Latin) is a five-by-five, five-word Latin palindrome: SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (“the farmer Arepo works a plow”).

What’s Behind the Pandemic Puzzle Craze? (Rebecca Bodenheimer, JSTOR Daily, December 2020)

In 2020, sales of jigsaw puzzles went up by as much as 400% after people began reaching for nondigital distractions to pass the time. Now that we’re almost three years into the pandemic and the world has opened up, we’re spending less time doing puzzles and more time revisiting previous pastimes. People couldn’t resist posting photos of their puzzles-in-progress on social media, though, and I miss seeing those bespoke glimpses of what people were up to. Bodenheimer’s JSTOR Daily post is a puzzle in itself, with links to further reading about the fascinating history of puzzle popularity.

A 2018 poll conducted on behalf of game company, Ravensburger, found that 59% of people surveyed found puzzling to be relaxing, and 47% felt it relieved stress. In other words, for many, puzzling has a calming effect. Unlike actual meditation, whose goal is to quiet the mind and be fully present in the body, working on puzzles involves active brain work, sometimes even strategy. Puzzling is engrossing because it taps into an ambition to challenge oneself and finish a project in order to feel a sense of accomplishment.

The Surprisingly Messy Culture Wars Within The New York Times Crossword Puzzle (Hallie Lieberman, Kotaku, January 2022) 

Crossword puzzles are intrinsically tied to the language and culture surrounding their construction. Words that are now recognized as offensive or problematic are rejected by editors in the effort to keep the game both inclusive and fun. The New York Times created a diversity panel in 2019 to review its crossword puzzles and announced its Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship last month. Hallie Lieberman brings together some of the most well-known crossword constructors to share their thoughts on improving the game.

During the pandemic, [the crossword community has had] the same type of reckoning that we’ve had in the rest of American society…where we’re looking at representation, we’re looking at inclusion,” said Rebecca Neipris co-host of the Crossnerds podcast. “Hundreds of thousands of people are consuming this thing on a daily basis and paying for it. So you also have this responsibility to at least be aware of what it is that you’re feeding those people.

Wordle Founder Josh Wardle on Going Viral and What Comes Next (Ingrid Lunden and Amanda Silberling, TechCrunch, January 2022) 

As I was compiling this reading list, the news broke that The New York Times purchased Wordle. The acquisition makes sense considering the popularity of its crossword puzzle and Spelling Bee, a seven-letter word game that also gained popularity earlier in the pandemic. Although the Times stated that Wordle will “initially remain free,” you can go ahead and grab the game’s source code for yourself if you want to keep it that way. I can only imagine what it would be like to create a word game for personal enjoyment and then have to navigate it suddenly going viral. In this interview from a few weeks ago, Josh Wardle discusses his creative process and offers his thoughts about Wordle’s success.

With Wordle, actually, I kind of deliberately did what you’re not meant to do if growth is your goal. And bizarrely, I think, those things have led to growth. But obviously, a ton of it is luck, and being in the right place at the right time. I think people have an appetite for things that transparently don’t want anything from you. I think people quite like it that way, you know?

It’s hard for some families to see each other because of COVID, and sometimes it’s hard to come up with a topic of conversation. But Wordle is just such a low-effort way to check in, and sometimes you just post your result, sometimes you can respond to others’, but it’s this really comforting way of letting other people know that you’re thinking about them. It’s a shared experience.

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Claire Sewell is a librarian and writer in Houston, Texas. She is the author of The Golden Girls Fashion Corner blog, and her writing often focuses on television, gender, and memory.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands