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.

Most experts, including the FBI’s crypto unit, agree that Oranchak and his team cracked the 340. Like the first cipher, it reveals a beguiling combination of high and low diction, spelling mistakes, and vague imaginings of immortality. Also like the first cipher, it lacks a hard clue as to the Zodiac’s identity.
But James Fitzgerald says that even the 340’s variations and mistakes hold valuable information for forensic linguists, including possible hints at the writer’s race, ethnicity, age, and gender. 

Colin Dickey | Longreads | March 2022 | 24 minutes (4,226 words)

This story was funded by our members. Join Longreads and help us to support more writers.

Two men are dead in a cabin on the side of a mountain — how did they die?

There is a whole host of questions like this — riddles that get grouped under the category of “lateral thinking puzzles.” Another: A man walks into a restaurant and orders the albatross soup. After finishing the soup, he leaves and commits suicide. Why? Or: There is a dead man, naked in the desert, holding a straw. How did he die? You can only ask yes-or-no questions, and the goal is to figure out the precise story. Many of these involve a dead man in one form or another. There is a dead man with a hole in his suit — how did he die?

Sometimes, the mechanism of the answer is something ludicrously complex, a thing that must be pieced out bit by bit. Several people were in a hot air balloon that drifted into the desert and started to lose altitude because of the heat and air pressure. They threw everything they could overboard, including their clothes, but when that wasn’t enough they drew straws to see who would jump overboard to save the others. Other times, though, the solution is simpler, but requires retooling your perspective. You hear “hole in his suit” and you think of a three-piece suit and your mind goes to a bullet wound. Once that image is set in your mind, it can take some work to dislodge it. You don’t necessarily think: “space suit.”

You hear “cabin on the side of a mountain” and you think of a small building built of wood and brick. Smoke out of the chimney from a pleasant fire. You don’t necessarily think: “airplane.”

***

Cabin is one of those words that seemed unremarkable to me until I spent some time thinking about it. It is a small room, a compartment, but beyond that it splinters in different directions. A cabin is a thing in the woods, remote, isolated — a place to escape to or where one goes to live simply. It is also a compartment on a ship, a private room in a large, more complex vessel. Or it is the main body of an airplane, where all the passengers (as well as the crew, if it’s a small aircraft) sit together. The kind of thing that you might find strewn on the side of a mountain.

Knowing the reason those two dead men are in that cabin on the side of the mountain answers some questions but not all. It doesn’t tell us why the crash happened, who was responsible, or anything about the lives of these two dead men. The lateral thinking puzzle is not truly interested in these questions.

***

I separated from my wife of 20 years at the end of 2019. We had previously lived in Brooklyn but had moved upstate to Dutchess County, New York, for several years — when people asked me why we moved, I often replied that it was the result of “a series of irrevocable decisions.” There, everything had fallen apart, and at the beginning of 2020 I moved back to Brooklyn, to an apartment a few blocks from where we’d lived together before. Upstate, we’d had a large house and plenty of room; now I was on the fifth floor of an apartment building, once again sharing walls.

Get the Longreads Top 5 Email

Kickstart your weekend by getting the week’s best reads, hand-picked and introduced by Longreads editors, delivered to your inbox every Friday morning.

Sign up now

I wanted very much to focus on myself. Now that I was, for the first time in decades, not bound by another person’s decisions and wants and happiness alongside my own, I could look inward and try to understand what I needed and what I wanted. The old me had died, I told myself. I could now be whomever I wanted. I made a decision to live more deliberately, to take some control over my life that I felt had been lacking. I was going to spend some time and really focus on figuring out exactly what had gone so wrong, how things had turned out so poorly. But I also decided to be more open to experience, to consider possibilities, to let myself be carried along by the moment if it meant new chances, new ways of being.

I only had about a month of this before the world came crashing to a halt and I found myself largely trapped inside for the next few months. Trying to merely stay alive, I made decisions that would have lasting impacts out of sheer reaction. I saw my day-to-day life as from a distance, a sort of eerie remove, as though it was happening to someone else. I established new patterns as a way of asserting some kind of order on the chaos and anxiety I felt, then watched myself as though someone else was going through those motions.

To be in a cabin on a plane, together with your fellow passengers, or to be in a cabin on a ship, alone by yourself, is to be a passenger of some kind. To be in a cabin in the woods is to be going nowhere at all — though, at least since Thoreau, to be in such a cabin is to be, on some level, on some kind of introspective journey, learning about yourself and how to live. I see now that at some point in those early months I began moving along three separate timelines. I was a hermit, ensconced in a cabin, trying to find myself; I was a passenger, moving along into the future without agency; and I was alive amidst a wreck — everything around me crashed, everything broken.

***

There is a specific cabin on the side of a specific mountain that I think about often. It is the cabin of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10-30, Air New Zealand Flight 901, which sits on the side of Mount Erebus, as it has for over 40 years. In 1977 Air New Zealand began operating sightseeing tours over Antarctica: The flight would leave Auckland at 8:00 a.m., fly a loop over the continent and return to Christchurch at 7:00 p.m., refuel, and return to Auckland. An experienced Arctic explorer on board would act as a guide during the trip, pointing out landmarks and features of the continent.

The approved flight plan involved flying directly over the 12,448-foot Mount Erebus on Ross Island, the second-highest peak in Antarctica, but due to a transcription error, the actual flight path used by most of the sightseeing flights involved flying down the length of McMurdo Sound, some 27 miles west of the mountain. A few days before the accident, another pilot noted this discrepancy, leading Air New Zealand to update the flight plan, albeit incorrectly.

On November 28, 1979, Flight 901 proceeded along a route that the pilot and copilot believed to be along McMurdo Sound, descending to 1,500 feet. Despite the crew being aware of visual landmarks all around them, they did not realize that their new path put them on a course to Mount Erebus and they did not see the mountain directly in front of them. A condition known as “flat light” or “sector whiteout” had occurred, where the mixture of snow on the ground, clouds, and light conditions caused the pilots to lose depth of field; they were unable to distinguish the mountain from the horizon all around them.

At some point, in those final moments, that horrifying trick of perspective revealed itself: The empty white horizon was in fact, a mountain. It was too late to pull up. At 12:49 p.m. the plane crashed into the side of Mount Erebus. All 257 people on board were killed.

Because of the expense and feasibility of a large-scale salvage operation, most of the wreckage is still on Mount Erebus. The bodies have been removed, but the cabin remains on the mountain.

***

Mount Erebus is an active volcano, and one of the more geologically important sites on the planet. It was named by Sir James Clark Ross, who named it after his ship, the HMS Erebus. Built in 1826, the Erebus had begun its service as a warship, but after two years it was refitted for Arctic exploration, alongside the HMS Terror, which had shelled Baltimore during the War of 1812. The two ships left Tasmania in November of 1840 and spent the winter exploring the island that would later be named for Ross; the two ships would make several subsequent expeditions back to Antarctica in the ensuing years. Then in 1845, both ships were outfitted with steam engines and used by Sir John Franklin in his doomed expedition in search of a Northwest Passage in the Canadian Arctic. Franklin sailed in the Erebus, in command of the entire expedition, while Francis Crozier captained the Terror. The two ships were last seen by Europeans entering Baffin Bay in August of 1845 by whalers, wherein they disappeared into the Canadian Arctic. The mystery captivated the British public, and multiple expeditions were launched in search of the Franklin Expedition. Eventually it became clear that all 129 men on board had been lost.

Those men died beholden to a fantasy of British imperialism, sleepers all sharing the same dream. But as the reality that no one had survived the Franklin Expedition sank in among the British populace, it became increasingly important to understand how they died. Local Inuits who had witnessed the Franklin Expedition reported that they had descended into cannibalism near the end, an accusation met with widespread condemnation tinged with racist vitriol. Charles Dickens accused the Inuits of having murdered the sailors themselves; “We believe every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel,” he wrote. Britons refused to believe that these men, bereft, starving, lost, and hopeless, could behave as anything but stalwart embodiments of British ideals. It was important that the people of England be able to tell themselves that these men had died well. To believe in this neat and tidy fiction, it seemed, was more important than any reality — that they had died well meant that the expedition wasn’t a total loss, that there was still something that could be learned from it: about stoicism in the face of despair, heroism in the face of defeat. The truth was far less important than the lesson.

As for the doomed Flight 901, investigations would later suggest that the pilot and copilot of Flight 901 were not entirely in command. The original accident report cited pilot error as the cause of the crash, blaming the pilot’s decision to descend below the customary minimum altitude and his willingness to continue at that altitude after it became clear that the crew wasn’t entirely sure of their position. But a subsequent inquiry by Justice Peter Mahon cleared the crew of blame, and instead blamed Air New Zealand for altering the flight plan without advising the crew. This second report also blamed the whiteout conditions, what Mahon termed “a malevolent trick of polar light.” Mahon also accused the airline of a conspiracy to whitewash the inquiry; he charged it concealed evidence and lied to investigators.

This conspiracy accusation was subsequently dismissed by New Zealand’s Privy Council, but it still seems fair to say that the pilot and copilot of Flight 901 were not entirely in charge of what happened that day, constrained, as they were, by faulty information, flight plans, data and computers, to say nothing of the weather — all of which conspired to prevent them from fully understanding what was happening as they flew into the Antarctic wilderness. Most importantly, the inquiry failed to ascertain how the crew and passengers of Flight 901 died; it attempted to provide a narrative, one that could perhaps lead to some kind of closure — instead what it found were contradictions, lies, and ambiguity.

***

In those early months of the pandemic one of the few things I learned was how a single life can split into a series of paths simultaneously. There were times I felt absolutely in control, and times like I was swimming through an endless chaos. I remained in my tiny cabin of an apartment while I hurtled through space, both in and out of control at once. I learned that there is not a single narrative; that at some point in your life your story can splinter and divide and run in parallel tracks. Elements from one of your stories can affect all the others. At some point, you hope, these tracks will combine again. Often this can take years. Often it never happens at all.

The lateral thinking puzzle, on the other hand, only works if there is a single solution. The cabin is an airplane cabin, it is nothing else. If it is this then the solution is evident. If it is not, then the question — how did these men die? — becomes more urgent. Bear attack? Starvation? Cabin fever? We don’t know, cannot know.

Help us fund our next story

We’ve published hundreds of original stories, all funded by you — including personal essays, reported features, and reading lists.

Become a member

As we sped into the unknown in those early days, all we wanted to know was who was spared, and for how long? Who died and how did they die? We knew there was a disease but we didn’t understand how it worked. We knew there were precautions that could keep you safe but we didn’t know which ones worked and why some people who followed them still got sick. Lives were wasted and lost less because of the disease itself and more because of a fealty to a broken set of ideas, a belief in a certain way the world worked that could not be altered. That the economy should be our primary concern, that businesses should stay open at all costs. That it wasn’t the government’s job to intervene. That personal choice was more valid than collective action. That change was not required. And tens of thousands of people were carried along to their graves in service of these beliefs.

***

You come outside your Brooklyn apartment one morning in April 2020, and the entire street is roped off in police tape. Across the street from your front door, there is a woman’s body in the trash. How did she die?

April 2020 is when everything seemed to have crashed, when there was nothing but wreckage. Through the middle of March, I had watched warily at the unfolding news, still trying to cling to some measure of hope; by the end of March the reality had begun to set in and everything seemed strange and emptied. It began a period when I literally could not imagine life beyond the next two weeks — I couldn’t see ahead in my life, as though I had entered a fog that obscured the future entirely. By April, there was nothing but the monotony of days, the litany of body counts and infection rates, and whatever grim rituals could be done to ward off despair and hopelessness.

And then on a bright, spring Wednesday morning I came outside to find that a body had been discovered across the street: a woman who’d been wrapped in a black and white tarp and left in a pile of trash.

The cops were still on the street, and I approached the one wearing a mask, speaking loudly so he didn’t have to get close. When I asked him what happened, he replied, “They’re doing an investigation.” “Did someone die?” I asked him. “Honestly,” he replied, “the news knows more about it than I do. It’ll be on the news.” It seemed to be his job not to know anything, to studiously avoid knowing anything. “Can you tell me anything? Should I be worried?” I asked him. He repeated the line. “They just have to do an investigation.”

Behind my question was not merely idle curiosity; it was of utmost importance at the time to know how people were dying. Was this a homicide? Was I at risk for my safety? Did I need to change my patterns of behavior when I was outside — avoid certain street corners or neighborhoods or times of night? Was it a COVID death? Had the outbreak spread so far and wide that people were just simply giving up, dumping bodies willy-nilly? Was this body a harbinger of a complete breakdown in the city?

I walked a bit away, out of earshot from the first cop, and put the same question to another cop. “It’s just that it’s suspicious, is all,” he told me. “So they have to do an investigation.” There was, I’m sure, a low note of panic in my voice. “But what was it? Someone was murdered? Was it homicide?”

“It’s just suspicious,” is all he would say. Neither officer was willing to even state the basic fact that I already knew. Neither was willing to name the antecedent to that pronoun, “it.” The death itself. Neither would even cop to the basic fact that there was a body.

A few days later, I learned from the news that it had not been a homicide, nor had it been related to COVID-19. The woman was believed to have overdosed and the man she was with had panicked, dumping her body rather than calling the paramedics. This man was later charged with concealment of a corpse — a law passed in New York in 2015, referred to as “Amanda Lynn’s Law,” after Amanda Lynn Wienckowski, a 20-year-old woman who was found dead in the trash in Buffalo in 2009. (Wienckowski’s death had also been ruled an overdose, but a private autopsy paid for by the family concluded that she had been strangled, leaving unresolved the question of how she died.) After that, the story dropped out of the news.

Having the solution to the puzzle solved nothing for me. It was, on a brutal level of reality, the best case scenario for discovering a body in the trash: It wasn’t a homicide, and it wasn’t related to the ongoing pandemic (at least not explicitly so). The fact that it was neither meant that my personal safety wasn’t any more or less impacted by this gruesome discovery. And yet, very little changed for me. I wasn’t reassured. Knowing the cause of death changed nothing. Could she have been saved? Did he try to save her? Why was she there? Was it all a terrible accident? Did she want to die? Why did he panic? Why couldn’t he have tried harder?

How did she die?

***

My own life went on. I tried not to think about her, that body in the trash, that woman whose name was never revealed. But she remains there, carried with me, nameless but insisting. I still pass the spot where her body was found several times a day. There is no memorial there, nothing to commemorate what happened; you’d have to have been there at the time to know it happened at all.

My street is filled with ghosts. There are memorials for others up and down the block: piles of candles and fading flowers, graffitied “RIPs” on the sides of buildings, laminated sheets of paper with smiling faces above dates tacked to trees. So many ways to be confronted with the same questions: Who was saved, and who was doomed — and how did they die?

For the families, and sometimes the police, there is nothing academic about these questions — they need to be answered, one way or another. But what about for the rest of us — the bystanders, who know a death has happened but aren’t involved directly? We who are too far removed personally to ever know the story, but also too close in physical proximity to ever forget that something has happened?

To live in a city like New York during a catastrophe is to be reminded a hundred times that you will never know the answer to these riddles, that the work of living through such times is to carry these unanswered questions with you, to never dismiss them. Sometimes the work we do for the dead involves fighting for justice. Sometimes it involves remembrances and testimonials and obituaries. Sometimes it involves asking questions that you cannot answer. Our obligation to the proximate dead is both very little and more than we can possibly hope to achieve; we ask the questions knowing there are no permanent or stable answers, only the questions themselves and the endless attempts to answer them.

***

The term “lateral thinking” was first coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, where he argued that the key was the switch from familiar patterns of thinking to different and unexpected perspectives, allowing for new insight. Rather than using critical faculties, reasoning out the true value of statements and attempting to understand and correct errors, lateral thinking is designed to radically break one out of established patterns and broaden one’s tools for problem solving.

De Bono published multiple books on his concept. He made a name and a career for himself, but he could never quite articulate how the process worked. He offered inspiring examples from the world of business and culture but hesitated to provide a roadmap for how the reader could imitate such successes. “No textbook could be compiled to teach lateral thinking,” he wrote in 1970’s Lateral Thinking: A Textbook in Creativity. As with other self-help gurus like Malcolm Gladwell, de Bono mainly offered a satisfying narrative built around sudden eureka moments that ignored the way solutions are usually found: communal problem-solving, trial and error, and dogged work. Less a significant contribution to cognition and more likely a pseudoscience that appealed to the CEOs who hired him to give presentations at their Fortune 500 companies, lateral thinking is a buzzword and a magic trick, obfuscating the stubborn work of thought behind ersatz epiphanies.

Lateral thinking presents itself as finding a novel solution — you reframe your perspective and you see it, there it is: The proper way to go. But sometimes there is no proper way to go, there is no trick of perspective that makes everything clear. I imagined, in those early days — and in the many, many days since, that if I spent enough time looking at what had happened to my life, if I turned around the question in my mind long enough, the answer would come clear and a simple solution would present itself. But I have never found this to be the case.

When I teach beginning students how to write a personal essay, I usually tell them there is a standard structure they can follow. There is a past self, the one who experiences the events in question, and a current self, the one writing about these experiences afterward. The essay is a dialogue, I tell them, and it is built around the difference between these two selves. The current self has learned something, understands something, and is communicating that takeaway to the reader.

The essay tries to answer the question: How did you live? You went through something, you were changed in some way, you came out the other side. How did you do it? What did you learn? The perspective, the reframing has happened, and now the writer sees clearly. What was ambiguous or uncertain is now resolved.

It’s a neat structure and makes for a satisfying read, but most of the time it’s a trick. You write a triumphant essay about getting over an ex and you’re still thinking about them months later. You write about meeting the love of your life and by the time the essay is published you’ve broken it off with them. You write an essay about what you’ve learned about yourself and you’re the same enigma the next day.

I’ve always distrusted the form of the personal essay because I recognize the lie here, recognize how easy it is to put together a satisfying narrative conclusion about an incident in my life, one that delivers on a certain promise made to the reader — a satisfaction entirely built on smoke. These neat, pat resolutions at best can only describe one facet of one’s life, at one particular moment. Meanwhile the rest of you — these parallel lives — remain messy, untidy, ambiguous, complicated.

Enough time has passed since those early days of 2020 — and I’ve spent more than enough time thinking and puzzling on them — that by now I assume I should know something, I should be able to offer a takeaway of some kind. What those days meant to me. What I see now that I couldn’t see then. How I was changed. How I was saved. How I lived.

But none of this is true. All that I find I can do is keep adding new layers to the same question, one on top of each other. The only thing that feels true about myself is the series of questions I’m constantly asking myself, that never get answered fully but get asked again and again in an ever-evolving light. How did they die? How did I live?

***

The mountain reveals itself and the plane crashes. The ship reaches its destination and the passenger disembarks. The hermit, enmeshed in solitude for long enough, has an epiphany. The inquiry is finished, the cause of death announced. The pandemic winds down. The essay reaches its conclusion.

You think that something has ended here, but it’s just a trick of perspective.

***

Colin Dickey is the author of four books of nonfiction, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places, and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained.

Editor: Krista Stevens

Copy Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Fact checker: Julie Schwietert Collazo

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.

***

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

At the the Huffington Post Highline, Jason Fagone reports on how a dyslexic cereal box designer with a penchant for puzzles and patterns figured out a loophole in the Cash WinFall state lottery game, earning $27 million in gross profits playing the lottery over nine years in two states.

Looking for a little more Fagone in your life? Read an excerpt of his book, The Woman Who Smashed Codes and learn how “know-nothings” Elizebeth Smith Friedman and William F. Friedman became the greatest codebreakers of their era.

So perhaps it was only fitting that at age 64, Jerry found himself contemplating that most alluring of puzzles: the lottery. He was recently retired by then, living with Marge in a tiny town called Evart and wondering what to do with his time. After stopping in one morning at a convenience store he knew well, he picked up a brochure for a brand-new state lottery game. Studying the flyer later at his kitchen table, Jerry saw that it listed the odds of winning certain amounts of money by picking certain combinations of numbers.

That’s when it hit him. Right there, in the numbers on the page, he noticed a flaw—a strange and surprising pattern written into the fundamental machinery of the game that, like his cereal boxes long ago, revealed something no one else knew. A loophole that would eventually make Jerry and Marge millionaires, spark an investigation by a Boston Globe Spotlight reporter, unleash a statewide political scandal and expose more than a few hypocrisies at the heart of America’s favorite form of legalized gambling.

The last time Jerry and Marge played Cash WinFall was in January 2012. They’d had an incredible run: in the final tally, they had grossed nearly $27 million from nine years of playing the lottery in two states. They’d netted $7.75 million in profit before taxes, distributed among the players in GS Investment Strategies LLC.

Read the story