Opening Argument

There have always been "do the NYT crossword and talk about it" people; they deserve their due. But it felt like a new chapter of this kicked off when Wordle became really hot early in 2022. It was an indie game, similar to lots of old games and even one game show, but everybody seemed to agree that one of its genius moves was to make it very easy to share your result without spoiling the answer for anybody who hadn't played yet. Regrettably for those of us who prefer for no one outlet to own too much of anything, The New York Times bought Wordle shortly after it became popular and folded it into their puzzles app, along with the crossword and Spelling Bee, which debuted in 2018 and also has a healthy online chatter component, particularly over which words were allowed and which ones weren't.

The NYT app has continued to add on since then. I don't play Tiles or Letter Boxed, and I've never been a Sudoku person, because other than the very easiest ones, I'm terrible at it. But I do the crossword basically every day, and the Wordle, and the Spelling Bee, and now the daily Connections puzzle, too, where you divide a grid of 16 words into four groups of four based on some kind of thread that, well, connects them. Connections is somewhat controversial! (I use this term in a relative sense.) Some people think it's way too easy or the answers are too random, but I sort of like it. It doesn't take long, compared to something like the Spelling Bee that I can come back to again and again all day.

I love to follow social reactions to the Box Office Game too, particularly from my friend Joe Reid, who co-hosts the podcast This Had Oscar Buzz, because Joe has an eye-poppingly brilliant recall of movies and when they came out. My highest scores are similar to Joe's lowest scores.

I also take news quizzes -- there's one in Slate that I take every week, there's one in the NYT, and there's now a terrific one at NPR, too. (Although the NPR one sometimes points out the terribleness of the wrong answer you chose, like that you're off by 100 years or whatever. This is one of those "hurts so good" things you just have to embrace.)

And these, now, are the things I often process in real time along with other people. If I want to complain about a Spelling Bee word? I throw that on social media, and somebody else will be mad, too. Yesterday, I saw a joke go by about the weird Connections puzzle of the day, and I nodded knowingly. A couple of weeks ago, the next day's NYT crossword failed to show up at 10:00 p.m. as it usually does, and since that's often the last thing I do before I go to bed, I wailed to Twitter that my winding-down routine was ruined. And guess what -- someone else's was, too.

It's not the summer of "Who Shot J.R.?" by any means. Connections is not a cliffhanger. But if I can go out there and find at least one person who also doesn't understand why "FELLA" is allowed in the Spelling Bee and "HOLLA" is not, isn't that basically the same thing?