On Dec. 18, 1941, shortly after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lester Markel, the Sunday editor of The New York Times, sent a memo to Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the paper’s publisher. In light of the bleak blackout hours to come, he argued, it was time to add a feature that The Times had resisted for nearly three decades: a crossword puzzle.
Markel was acting in part on the urging of Margaret Farrar, then the editor of Simon & Schuster’s puzzle books. “I don’t think I have to sell you on the increased demand for this kind of pastime in an increasingly worried world,” she told him. “You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword.”
The crossword has served this role — a solace for the anxious — throughout its history, particularly in times of crisis. Like any game, the crossword offers surmountable, lighthearted obstacles that provide a refuge from the outsize struggles of daily life. But the crossword also has a peculiar quality of straddling frivolity and seriousness. Its clues can cement the enduring status of their subjects, yet the crossword itself is ephemeral: solved, discarded and reborn the next day, in a state of constant reinvention.
As a distraction, a crossword might seem trivial — but the process of solving it has the distinct shape of intellectual labor, lending a refined sense of accomplishment to every solution. As a result, crosswords have always flourished in times of crisis — and may yet prove useful now.
Every crisis is, in part, a crisis of values. Confronting the horrors of wartime, or enduring a pandemic, or facing the uncertainties of political change, we might find ourselves abandoning the values that we held previously.
When we’re jolted into wondering about a world to come, games help us “make an alternate self,” per the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, clarifying our values and demonstrating “what you can do and what you should want.” When we are collectively forced to renegotiate the boundaries between work and play, games that look like both take center stage, demonstrating that the madness of solving a diversionary puzzle can serve as a salve for the madness of daily life. It’s not surprising that during the isolation and anxiety of the pandemic “more games were being played than at perhaps any time in human history,” according to the data journalist Oliver Roeder.
The crossword’s diversionary qualities have been in evidence since its invention by Arthur Wynne in 1913. Wynne ran The New York World’s weekly color supplement, Fun, which served up kitschy riddles, comics and one-liners. In December 1913 he devised a diamond-shaped interlocking set of words, wrote clues for them and told readers, “Fill in the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.” He called it a “word-cross puzzle.” Even that first puzzle is in places less a trivia game than a prescription for living: “What we all should be” clues the answer “moral.”
Because the puzzle originally arrived as part of a newspaper, it also elicited a special blend of criticism. Some tarred the puzzles as an “epidemic,” “as catching as the flu and as certain in its conquering power.” Critics tallied the working hours given over to this “unprofitable trifling.” Eventually, the authorities stepped in: Grids in newspapers at libraries were blotted out and professors banned them from classrooms.
Yet the allure of the crossword proved powerful. A “crossword craze” in the 1920s produced black-and-white hats and dresses, speed-solving tournaments and crossword-themed novelty songs. Even in the puzzle’s earliest form, its proponents recognized its singular power to provide a test of wits alongside a game of knowledge curation. At times when language can seem to fail to adequately represent the madness of life, the crossword will defamiliarize language in its puzzle grid, as we solvers build up words letter by letter, as though making language anew.
The crossword constructor Laura Braunstein once explained that the crossword is a possible answer to the question, “What do you need to know in order to be a person of the world?” Solving affirms that you can continue to exist in that world, even trust it. In moments of mistrust and informational overload, the puzzle persists, saying to its solvers: Just know these things; for now, that’s enough.
After campaigning for the puzzle in 1941, Farrar went on to become the inaugural puzzle editor for The Times. If her credo — “You can’t think of your troubles while solving a crossword” — hasn’t proved exactly right, in the 15×15 grid your troubles do seem momentarily manageable.
Crosswords have been there for us in this crisis and the next, provoking strong reactions and easing our anxiety. And if we can’t solve today’s puzzle, there’s always tomorrow’s.
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