December 25, 2023 • 21 mins
Hello, Puzzlers! Today we're bringing you a special crossover episode with "This Day In Esoteric Political History," a show hosted by our own Jody Avirgan. A.J. was on recently to discuss a number of stories related to puzzles and WWII.
Join host A.J. Jacobs and his guests as they puzzle–and laugh–their way through new spins on old favorites, like anagrams and palindromes, as well as quirky originals such as “Ask Chat GPT” and audio rebuses.
Subscribe to The Puzzler podcast wherever you get your podcasts!
"The Puzzler with A.J. Jacobs" is distributed by iHeartPodcasts and is a co-production with Neuhaus Ideas.
Our executive producers are Neely Lohmann and Adam Neuhaus of Neuhaus Ideas, and Lindsay Hoffman of iHeart Podcasts.
The show is produced by Jody Avirgan and Brittani Brown of Roulette Productions.
Our Chief Puzzle Officer is Greg Pliska. Our associate producer is Andrea Schoenberg.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hello, puzzlers, Welcome to the Puzzler Podcast, The Partridge in
your Puzzler pear Tree. Merry Christmas, May your stockings be
filled with puzzles big and small. I am your host,
A j. Jacobs. We have a special holiday episode. We
(00:27):
are doing a crossover just like TV shows used to
do for Sweeps Week, and it is with a podcast
by our wonderful producer, Jody Averrigan. Welcome, Jody.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hey there, Aja, So this is I'm gonna give you
a puzzle. This is a type of podcast episode that
also means to be upset about something.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Okay, let's see, I think you stump me? Is it
a Tossover cross over? Nicely done? All right?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Do I qualify? Can I take over for you and Greg?
Or do I just have to stay as the producer
of the show.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Now, now, you are a deputy Chief Puzzle Officer something
like that. Okay, great, I think that's great. So in
addition to coming up with brilliant puzzles like that, you
also co host a wonderful podcast. So can you tell
us a little about that?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Sure? Yeah, I mean you know, I'm a podcast producer.
I love making the Puzzler with all of you, But
I also am a host and I have a show
with the network called Radiotopia that's called This Day in
Esoteric Political History. It does what it says on the
tin aj we take an interesting political story from that
day or close to that day in US political history.
(01:38):
And it's co hosted with two brilliant actual historians, Nicole
Hammer of Vanderbilts Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. That's produced
by Brittany Brown, who also produces this show. But yeah,
the show is really fun. We often do it just
the three of us, but we also have guests on
from time to time, and you were a guest very
recently for two episodes about how puzzles and history intersect,
and we thought we'd run one of them here in
(02:00):
the puzzler feed.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Fantastic and what just give me give me one example
of an esoteric day in political history.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So we've done stories on. We recently did a story
about the first telephone installed at the White House, Alexander
Graham Bell actually installed it for it rather for be Hayes.
We realized we don't get to many Brother for Behay
stories on the show, so there was one and.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I listened to that and the IRA still remember the
phone number of the White House one one exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Agent. I'm sure you were. I'm sure you loved the
story of the time that Jimmy Carter was attacked by
a crazed rabbit. Can you do so we've done that one.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
It's very Monty Python. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
So we do silly stories, we do serious stories. You know,
I really like some of the more lesser known angles
on more quote unquote serious stories. So, for instance, one
that always sticks in my head was we did a
story about a time that someone tried to assassinate JFK.
Two years before he was actually assassinated, someone tried to
blow him up with a car bomb. So, you know,
we mix it up. We do the swamp rabbits and
(03:02):
we do the attempted assassinations.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, I haven't heard that one. I'm going to have
to listen. And what I love is you always put
it in some sort of context, so it's not just
a random fact, it's an insight into actual history.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Well, you know, the present is a product of the past,
as my co host Nikki likes to say. So, I
think by studying this stuff we really kind of understand
how we got.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Here exactly and I tried to do that with the
history of puzzles, and we recorded a couple of episodes.
We're going to play one right now, which was all
about puzzles and World War Two and how they crossed over,
including the decision by The New York Times to run
their very first crossword puzzle, which they were loath to
(03:46):
do for quite some time. So this one starts with
Jodie asking me a question.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Take a listen. I guess we should point out for
listeners that this is our December twenty fourth episode, And
so I guess we're calling this our Christmas episode. And
you know, we don't have a Christmas specific hook here,
but AJ tell me. I mean, it seems to me
like the holiday season and the war and puzzles do
(04:12):
intersect in an interesting way. And one way they do is,
let's start with this memo that is written at the
New York Times in December of nineteen forty one. And
we mentioned in the last episode that the Times was
reluctant to get into the crossword game. But now a
sort of generation later, during the war, around the Christmas
(04:32):
holiday season, there's this memo that goes out inside the
Times that basically makes the case as I read it,
that says like, hey, you know, our readers are kind
of struggling this holiday season. Maybe a crossword can help
cheer them up for something.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, that is my interpretation as well. As we mentioned
last episode, the Times was one of the only papers
that did not print crosswords. Instead, they printed articles about
what a scourge on society it was and how it
was wasting people's time. And The Times was, even back then,
kind of snooty, so they felt that it was too frivolous.
(05:07):
But then Pearl Harbor December seventh, nineteen forty one, I
got that date right. That would be embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Okay, a date that lives in it.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Would I would live an infamy if I got it wrong.
Less than two weeks after that, this editor at the
New York Times sent a memo saying, it is possible
there will now be bleak blackout hours, or if not that,
then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or another.
(05:37):
And he said, I think we have to go ahead
with the crossword puzzle. And actually the publisher, Arthur Sulzberg,
was a fan of crosswords. He just didn't think that
they were fit to print. But then he changed his mind,
and a little more than a year later, in February
of nineteen forty two, came the very first New York
(05:59):
Times crossword puzzle, and it has since become the market leader.
They were late to the game, but they kind of
took over.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well did they suffer for being late to.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
The game, Not really, because they hired One of their
great moves was hiring a genius named Margaret Petheridge Farr,
who has a great name, and she was she's a
legend in the crossword community. She actually had come from
these two guys in the twenties named Simon and Schuster
(06:34):
decided to print crossword puzzles like that was there. They
didn't have a business. It was not a publisher. Their
whole business was built on crosswords. And they hired her
as an editor. So she came from Simon and Schuster
and took over the New York Times. And as I say,
she's a legend because she introduced all these reforms. She
cleaned him up. There used to be all these mistakes.
(06:56):
She made the grid symmetrical, which is very important for
some puzzlers. I don't really care that much. She said,
no two letter words that's cheating. So she had all
of these and in that initial memo that we talked about,
he said, the editor said, I don't think we should
do anything radically different. We should just be the best
(07:17):
at it. We should do it better was his phrase.
And I think they did.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
That memo takes me back to the early days of
the pandemic, when everyone was kind of stuck at home,
that idea that these bleak, blackout hours we were doing
jigsaw puzzles. The New York Times at that time ran,
you know, usually in the holidays, they run this big
games insert that has all these different kinds of puzzles,
(07:44):
mainly aimed at kids, but kind of for the whole family.
And because of the pandemic, they were like, people need
puzzles and games to distract themselves and fill their time,
and parents need something to do with their kids. And
so they had run this enormous games insert, you know,
months earlier than they normally do, and I can I
totally get that sense of Look, people are coming up
(08:07):
on hard times and they're gonna need something to pass
the time, and they're going to need something to distract them,
which feels just like a very familiar thought process after
the last three years.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Yeah, because you really can't focus on anything else while
you're trying to sell sport and puzzle. I'm so like
laser focused on getting something right because I'm super competitive
when it comes to games, Like I definitely tune out
and for me sometimes I think it's a good thing
(08:38):
to that point.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
AJ Actually, and you know this is a little to
the side. I was thinking about asking this last episode two,
but like, is there a tension there between like this
as distraction and then clearly, I mean you you know,
you went deep into this world and I'm getting a
taste of it by making the Puzzle podcast. But there's
also clearly a whole group of puzzlers who do not
think of this as distraction. They think of this as
blood sport, right, And so was bad I mean, was
(09:02):
that there from the beginning too?
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Well, yes, because you had the people saying it's a
moral panic. But then you also had very early on
people saying that puzzles teach us. That's been a theme
since the Middle Ages, they said, you know, puzzles to
sharpen the Young Mind was one of the first puzzle
books ever in the sixteen hundred something, So you had
(09:26):
that that tension early on. I will say one fascinating
thing to go back to the distraction away from World
War Two. Weirdly, if they wanted to and if the
Times goal was to distract, they did not do the
best job. Because the very first clue one across in
(09:47):
the very first New York Times crossword puzzle was about
World War Two. It was it was it was famous
one eyed general. The answer was six letters and it
was this guy wa Vell Wavel, a British general who
lost his eye in World War One and was heading
up troops in World War Two. And there were several
World War two and Nazi related clues, so it was
(10:10):
a very interesting choice. But you had told me earlier, Nicole,
that you actually did the puzzle, So can you tell
us about what was that? Like, Yes, well, I'm about three,
not in nineteen forty we're.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Doing it now. I did not do it in nineteen
forty two, and either a time machine nor a magic potion.
But it's actually fascinating. First of all, there are tons
of World War two related clues, like the Nazis are
brought up a lot, so it doesn't quite take you
out of the wartime era. The thing that I was
so struck by. First of all, you know, always the
(10:44):
time crossword puzzles are products of their time. I often
buy these, like crossword puzzle collections from the New York
Times and even ones from like the nineteen nineties or
two thousands. The references have shifted just enough to make
them much more difficult because you don't have, like the
tip of your tongue a particular movie or song or
(11:05):
television show that would have been easily accessible if you
were living in that time. So I definitely noticed that
kind of product of its timeness. But also, you know
you had mentioned on the last show AJ the thing
about the cleverness of the clues for a crossword. I
had an ex boyfriend of mine who was a very
(11:26):
literal thinker, and this drove him in insane, especially for
like the Sunday New York Times crosswords, which are particularly clever.
He's like, that's not what that means. And I'm like, well,
if you think about it this way, he says, no,
that is not what it means. And this he would
have loved this crossword puzzle because it really is like, no,
we went to the dictionary and this was the definition
(11:47):
that gave us, and that is what we made, is
the clue, and now you can solve it based on
the dictionary definition of this word, and.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
That the third definition down, you know, and the dictionary
is like meaning one means to meaning very.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
I mean, I think that they do that a little
more now than they did. I think there was like
one in here that the clue would suffer and the
answer was let and that's kind of like the second
or third definition of you know, to suffer someone. And
so that was the only one that had that kind
of little twist of cleverness. But most of all, it's
(12:23):
mostly it's very very straightforward.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
That actually is a good segue to the second World
War two story because there was a split. It's become less.
But there was a split between American crosswords and British
crosswords up until the eighties, and American crosswords were much
more trivia oriented and British crosswords were all about crazy wordplay, anagrams,
(12:49):
looking at things upside down, and that there was a
very famous puzzle the same year as the New York
Times first puzzle that appeared in the British paper, the Telegraph,
and I argue, this is the crossword that helped save
the free world because it said, if you solve this
(13:12):
puzzle in twelve minutes or less, contact this number. And
it turned out that the puzzle was a recruiting tool
for the code breakers at Bletchley Park, which is which
was the British spy outfit that helped crack the Nazi code,
the Enigma code. So and the trick was that all
(13:34):
of these clues were super twisty. So I'll even give
I will tell you we are very lucky that the
fate of the world did not rest on me because
I could not solve this puzzle in twelve hours, much
less twelve minutes. But I'll give you. I'll give you
one example of the kind of clue that they used.
(13:56):
So all right, So seventeen across in this famous crossword
puzzle is is this town ready for a flood? Is
this town ready for a flood? The answer is six
letters And again I would never have gotten this in
all my life, but I'll walk you through it. When
you think of a flood, maybe what's the most famous
(14:17):
flood you can think of? What did no uh? What
did what did he need? What to get ready for
the flood? What did he do ARC exactly. So ARC
is in there. But if you are a town that's
ready for a flood, you don't want an old ARC.
You want a new work Newark.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Ready for Arkansas.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
You are so yeah, you know you can quibble, you
can quibble with it.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But but aj I mean you you went into this
story in your book, and you know I've I've encountered
this story kind of. It's a legendary story. It's in
that movie The Imitation Game right where this especially, I
think that woman Joan Clark is that her name shows up,
and no one believes that she solved it as fast
(15:10):
as she did. You know, every time I encountered this story,
my like apocryphal story, sensors go off. I mean, how
real is this story? I mean, was it really the
case that they found, like top they recruited through crossword puzzles.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I did try to fact check it as much as
I could. I don't know if they were the top one.
I mean, Alan Turing was not recruited through a crossword puzzle.
And it's actually a little messier because, as is always
the case in history, they announced a crossword tournament. So
there was a room of people and they had to
solve it in twelve minutes or less, and then the
(15:43):
puzzle was printed the next day in the newspaper. So
it wasn't like people were reading it on the underground
and was like, oh, I'm a genius, I'm a cryptographer
in the making. But as far as I can tell,
it did happen, and they did recruit at least some
code breakers. That's enough for me to say it saved
the world.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Kind of amazing. Isn't there another story, you know, if
we're kind of cruising through some World War Two anecdotes
and tidbits, isn't there another story about a guy who
wrote a crossword and people thought he was giving away
secrets in his crossword? Is that right? I feel like
you've mentioned that on the Puzzler one time.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah. That one also not apocryphal. This was the same newspaper,
the Telegraph in Britain nineteen forty five, and that they
printed a series of crossword puzzles that happened to come
out in the days leading up to D Day, the
Normandy invasion, And the problem was that several of the
(16:40):
answers in those crosswords were top secret code words related
to D Day, So Utah was in there, which was
a beach Omaha was a beach of Neptune, was the
naval portion of D Day. Weirdest of all was Overlord.
Not a normal word, you hear, and that was the
(17:02):
code name for the entire D Day operation Overlord Operation. Well,
they did not at the paper, not because they didn't know,
but the British Secret Service noticed and they flipped out
and they actually arrested the crossword maker, who was this
quiet school headmaster named Leonard daw and they interrogated him extensively.
(17:26):
In the end, he was released and they decided at
the time that it was just a weird coincidence. There
are still in the crossword community some conspiracy theorists who
say it was not a coincidence, and one theory is
that the school was located near some sort of military
facility and the kids would help him write it, and
(17:49):
the kids overheard the soldiers talking saying these words. But wait,
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
The real takeaway from this story is that in the
day's up to D Day, the people in charge of
the top secret plans, we're sitting around doing crossword puzzles.
I know, how would they How would they have noticed otherwise.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Can't work.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Time away. This is.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Just making their minds sharper, Jody. As I've argued, was
it was good for them?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
All right? Well, aj as we start to wrap up here,
I mean, I'm gonna try really hard to somehow make
this our Christmas episode. But talk to us, you know
in a bigger sense. You touched on it a little
bit last episode, But talk to us in a bigger
sense about kind of what this era of crosswords teaches
us about. How as you say a puzzle mindset can
bring people together, do you have any recommendations for puzzles
(18:46):
for people to do around this Christmas holiday season? You know,
this is your chance. You have the floor to sing
the praises of puzzling.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
I will I will stretch the stretch the puzzle as
far as it can go and say, yeah, it can
save us from fascism. That's my which we need more
than ever right now. And I do think it can
bring people together. In my book, I cited a study
(19:16):
by Cass Sunstein, who's a Harvard law professor and behavioral economists,
and he talked about a study that he did where
they had liberals and conservatives and that one of the
only activities that brought them together was solving a crossword puzzle.
So having a common goal really is super important. So yeah,
(19:41):
that's my holiday message that we should all work together
to solve our big problems, like whether it's fourteen down
or whether it's a radical climate change.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Twenty years from now, you're going to issue an updated
version of your book and there will be a new chapter,
the Puzzle that Defeated Fascism, and it's.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Gonna be amazing.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Well, happy holidays to you, AJ Jacobs, Thank you so
much for doing this.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Thank you. I had a great time. It was as
fun as doing a crossword if not more fun.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Nicole Hemmer, thanks to you. Thank you, Judy and Kelly
Carter Jackson, thanks to you.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
My pleasure.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
All right, there you go. That was our crossover. AJ.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
You have a great podcast and we love having you
as a producer, and I love listening to your show,
so great to combine them.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, I'm very happy to be part of the Puzzler family.
And I will say to folks that if they want
to listen to more This Day, you can go find
us at this Day pod dot com, or you can
just search for This Day in Esoteric political history, and
before we go a little business. There is no extra
credit today, so you have the day off, but of
course we would never deny you the extra credit answer
from the last episode of The Puzzler, even though this
(21:00):
is a special crossover, so stick around. Greg will bring
you that right now. But thanks for listening, and Merry
Christmas everyone, Happy Holidays.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Hello puzzlers.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Greg Pliska here with the extra credit answer from our
previous show.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
On that show, we asked you to solve this off
with their heads puzzle.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
The clue was a beer named for an old and
trite story, and the answer involves taking a word and
cutting off the first letter to get a new word.
In this case, we do that twice for a three
word phrase. A beer named for an.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Old and trite story is a stale tale Ale.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
That's s t a L E stale tail al.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Congrats to everyone who got it, and we'll see you
next time on The Puzzler podcast.
Hello, puzzlers, Welcome to the Puzzler Podcast, The Partridge in
your Puzzler pear Tree. Merry Christmas, May your stockings be
filled with puzzles big and small. I am your host,
A j. Jacobs. We have a special holiday episode. We
(00:27):
are doing a crossover just like TV shows used to
do for Sweeps Week, and it is with a podcast
by our wonderful producer, Jody Averrigan. Welcome, Jody.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Hey there, Aja, So this is I'm gonna give you
a puzzle. This is a type of podcast episode that
also means to be upset about something.
Speaker 1 (00:48):
Okay, let's see, I think you stump me? Is it
a Tossover cross over? Nicely done? All right?
Speaker 2 (00:57):
Do I qualify? Can I take over for you and Greg?
Or do I just have to stay as the producer
of the show.
Speaker 1 (01:02):
Now, now, you are a deputy Chief Puzzle Officer something
like that. Okay, great, I think that's great. So in
addition to coming up with brilliant puzzles like that, you
also co host a wonderful podcast. So can you tell
us a little about that?
Speaker 2 (01:17):
Sure? Yeah, I mean you know, I'm a podcast producer.
I love making the Puzzler with all of you, But
I also am a host and I have a show
with the network called Radiotopia that's called This Day in
Esoteric Political History. It does what it says on the
tin aj we take an interesting political story from that
day or close to that day in US political history.
(01:38):
And it's co hosted with two brilliant actual historians, Nicole
Hammer of Vanderbilts Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley. That's produced
by Brittany Brown, who also produces this show. But yeah,
the show is really fun. We often do it just
the three of us, but we also have guests on
from time to time, and you were a guest very
recently for two episodes about how puzzles and history intersect,
and we thought we'd run one of them here in
(02:00):
the puzzler feed.
Speaker 1 (02:01):
Fantastic and what just give me give me one example
of an esoteric day in political history.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
So we've done stories on. We recently did a story
about the first telephone installed at the White House, Alexander
Graham Bell actually installed it for it rather for be Hayes.
We realized we don't get to many Brother for Behay
stories on the show, so there was one and.
Speaker 1 (02:22):
I listened to that and the IRA still remember the
phone number of the White House one one exactly.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Agent. I'm sure you were. I'm sure you loved the
story of the time that Jimmy Carter was attacked by
a crazed rabbit. Can you do so we've done that one.
Speaker 1 (02:39):
It's very Monty Python. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:40):
So we do silly stories, we do serious stories. You know,
I really like some of the more lesser known angles
on more quote unquote serious stories. So, for instance, one
that always sticks in my head was we did a
story about a time that someone tried to assassinate JFK.
Two years before he was actually assassinated, someone tried to
blow him up with a car bomb. So, you know,
we mix it up. We do the swamp rabbits and
(03:02):
we do the attempted assassinations.
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Yeah, I haven't heard that one. I'm going to have
to listen. And what I love is you always put
it in some sort of context, so it's not just
a random fact, it's an insight into actual history.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Well, you know, the present is a product of the past,
as my co host Nikki likes to say. So, I
think by studying this stuff we really kind of understand
how we got.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Here exactly and I tried to do that with the
history of puzzles, and we recorded a couple of episodes.
We're going to play one right now, which was all
about puzzles and World War Two and how they crossed over,
including the decision by The New York Times to run
their very first crossword puzzle, which they were loath to
(03:46):
do for quite some time. So this one starts with
Jodie asking me a question.
Speaker 2 (03:51):
Take a listen. I guess we should point out for
listeners that this is our December twenty fourth episode, And
so I guess we're calling this our Christmas episode. And
you know, we don't have a Christmas specific hook here,
but AJ tell me. I mean, it seems to me
like the holiday season and the war and puzzles do
(04:12):
intersect in an interesting way. And one way they do is,
let's start with this memo that is written at the
New York Times in December of nineteen forty one. And
we mentioned in the last episode that the Times was
reluctant to get into the crossword game. But now a
sort of generation later, during the war, around the Christmas
(04:32):
holiday season, there's this memo that goes out inside the
Times that basically makes the case as I read it,
that says like, hey, you know, our readers are kind
of struggling this holiday season. Maybe a crossword can help
cheer them up for something.
Speaker 1 (04:45):
Yeah, that is my interpretation as well. As we mentioned
last episode, the Times was one of the only papers
that did not print crosswords. Instead, they printed articles about
what a scourge on society it was and how it
was wasting people's time. And The Times was, even back then,
kind of snooty, so they felt that it was too frivolous.
(05:07):
But then Pearl Harbor December seventh, nineteen forty one, I
got that date right. That would be embarrassing.
Speaker 2 (05:14):
Okay, a date that lives in it.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Would I would live an infamy if I got it wrong.
Less than two weeks after that, this editor at the
New York Times sent a memo saying, it is possible
there will now be bleak blackout hours, or if not that,
then certainly a need for relaxation of some kind or another.
(05:37):
And he said, I think we have to go ahead
with the crossword puzzle. And actually the publisher, Arthur Sulzberg,
was a fan of crosswords. He just didn't think that
they were fit to print. But then he changed his mind,
and a little more than a year later, in February
of nineteen forty two, came the very first New York
(05:59):
Times crossword puzzle, and it has since become the market leader.
They were late to the game, but they kind of
took over.
Speaker 2 (06:07):
Well did they suffer for being late to.
Speaker 1 (06:09):
The game, Not really, because they hired One of their
great moves was hiring a genius named Margaret Petheridge Farr,
who has a great name, and she was she's a
legend in the crossword community. She actually had come from
these two guys in the twenties named Simon and Schuster
(06:34):
decided to print crossword puzzles like that was there. They
didn't have a business. It was not a publisher. Their
whole business was built on crosswords. And they hired her
as an editor. So she came from Simon and Schuster
and took over the New York Times. And as I say,
she's a legend because she introduced all these reforms. She
cleaned him up. There used to be all these mistakes.
(06:56):
She made the grid symmetrical, which is very important for
some puzzlers. I don't really care that much. She said,
no two letter words that's cheating. So she had all
of these and in that initial memo that we talked about,
he said, the editor said, I don't think we should
do anything radically different. We should just be the best
(07:17):
at it. We should do it better was his phrase.
And I think they did.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
That memo takes me back to the early days of
the pandemic, when everyone was kind of stuck at home,
that idea that these bleak, blackout hours we were doing
jigsaw puzzles. The New York Times at that time ran,
you know, usually in the holidays, they run this big
games insert that has all these different kinds of puzzles,
(07:44):
mainly aimed at kids, but kind of for the whole family.
And because of the pandemic, they were like, people need
puzzles and games to distract themselves and fill their time,
and parents need something to do with their kids. And
so they had run this enormous games insert, you know,
months earlier than they normally do, and I can I
totally get that sense of Look, people are coming up
(08:07):
on hard times and they're gonna need something to pass
the time, and they're going to need something to distract them,
which feels just like a very familiar thought process after
the last three years.
Speaker 4 (08:17):
Yeah, because you really can't focus on anything else while
you're trying to sell sport and puzzle. I'm so like
laser focused on getting something right because I'm super competitive
when it comes to games, Like I definitely tune out
and for me sometimes I think it's a good thing
(08:38):
to that point.
Speaker 2 (08:38):
AJ Actually, and you know this is a little to
the side. I was thinking about asking this last episode two,
but like, is there a tension there between like this
as distraction and then clearly, I mean you you know,
you went deep into this world and I'm getting a
taste of it by making the Puzzle podcast. But there's
also clearly a whole group of puzzlers who do not
think of this as distraction. They think of this as
blood sport, right, And so was bad I mean, was
(09:02):
that there from the beginning too?
Speaker 1 (09:05):
Well, yes, because you had the people saying it's a
moral panic. But then you also had very early on
people saying that puzzles teach us. That's been a theme
since the Middle Ages, they said, you know, puzzles to
sharpen the Young Mind was one of the first puzzle
books ever in the sixteen hundred something, So you had
(09:26):
that that tension early on. I will say one fascinating
thing to go back to the distraction away from World
War Two. Weirdly, if they wanted to and if the
Times goal was to distract, they did not do the
best job. Because the very first clue one across in
(09:47):
the very first New York Times crossword puzzle was about
World War Two. It was it was it was famous
one eyed general. The answer was six letters and it
was this guy wa Vell Wavel, a British general who
lost his eye in World War One and was heading
up troops in World War Two. And there were several
World War two and Nazi related clues, so it was
(10:10):
a very interesting choice. But you had told me earlier, Nicole,
that you actually did the puzzle, So can you tell
us about what was that? Like, Yes, well, I'm about three,
not in nineteen forty we're.
Speaker 3 (10:22):
Doing it now. I did not do it in nineteen
forty two, and either a time machine nor a magic potion.
But it's actually fascinating. First of all, there are tons
of World War two related clues, like the Nazis are
brought up a lot, so it doesn't quite take you
out of the wartime era. The thing that I was
so struck by. First of all, you know, always the
(10:44):
time crossword puzzles are products of their time. I often
buy these, like crossword puzzle collections from the New York
Times and even ones from like the nineteen nineties or
two thousands. The references have shifted just enough to make
them much more difficult because you don't have, like the
tip of your tongue a particular movie or song or
(11:05):
television show that would have been easily accessible if you
were living in that time. So I definitely noticed that
kind of product of its timeness. But also, you know
you had mentioned on the last show AJ the thing
about the cleverness of the clues for a crossword. I
had an ex boyfriend of mine who was a very
(11:26):
literal thinker, and this drove him in insane, especially for
like the Sunday New York Times crosswords, which are particularly clever.
He's like, that's not what that means. And I'm like, well,
if you think about it this way, he says, no,
that is not what it means. And this he would
have loved this crossword puzzle because it really is like, no,
we went to the dictionary and this was the definition
(11:47):
that gave us, and that is what we made, is
the clue, and now you can solve it based on
the dictionary definition of this word, and.
Speaker 4 (11:54):
That the third definition down, you know, and the dictionary
is like meaning one means to meaning very.
Speaker 3 (12:01):
I mean, I think that they do that a little
more now than they did. I think there was like
one in here that the clue would suffer and the
answer was let and that's kind of like the second
or third definition of you know, to suffer someone. And
so that was the only one that had that kind
of little twist of cleverness. But most of all, it's
(12:23):
mostly it's very very straightforward.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
That actually is a good segue to the second World
War two story because there was a split. It's become less.
But there was a split between American crosswords and British
crosswords up until the eighties, and American crosswords were much
more trivia oriented and British crosswords were all about crazy wordplay, anagrams,
(12:49):
looking at things upside down, and that there was a
very famous puzzle the same year as the New York
Times first puzzle that appeared in the British paper, the Telegraph,
and I argue, this is the crossword that helped save
the free world because it said, if you solve this
(13:12):
puzzle in twelve minutes or less, contact this number. And
it turned out that the puzzle was a recruiting tool
for the code breakers at Bletchley Park, which is which
was the British spy outfit that helped crack the Nazi code,
the Enigma code. So and the trick was that all
(13:34):
of these clues were super twisty. So I'll even give
I will tell you we are very lucky that the
fate of the world did not rest on me because
I could not solve this puzzle in twelve hours, much
less twelve minutes. But I'll give you. I'll give you
one example of the kind of clue that they used.
(13:56):
So all right, So seventeen across in this famous crossword
puzzle is is this town ready for a flood? Is
this town ready for a flood? The answer is six
letters And again I would never have gotten this in
all my life, but I'll walk you through it. When
you think of a flood, maybe what's the most famous
(14:17):
flood you can think of? What did no uh? What
did what did he need? What to get ready for
the flood? What did he do ARC exactly. So ARC
is in there. But if you are a town that's
ready for a flood, you don't want an old ARC.
You want a new work Newark.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
Ready for Arkansas.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
You are so yeah, you know you can quibble, you
can quibble with it.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
But but aj I mean you you went into this
story in your book, and you know I've I've encountered
this story kind of. It's a legendary story. It's in
that movie The Imitation Game right where this especially, I
think that woman Joan Clark is that her name shows up,
and no one believes that she solved it as fast
(15:10):
as she did. You know, every time I encountered this story,
my like apocryphal story, sensors go off. I mean, how
real is this story? I mean, was it really the
case that they found, like top they recruited through crossword puzzles.
Speaker 1 (15:23):
I did try to fact check it as much as
I could. I don't know if they were the top one.
I mean, Alan Turing was not recruited through a crossword puzzle.
And it's actually a little messier because, as is always
the case in history, they announced a crossword tournament. So
there was a room of people and they had to
solve it in twelve minutes or less, and then the
(15:43):
puzzle was printed the next day in the newspaper. So
it wasn't like people were reading it on the underground
and was like, oh, I'm a genius, I'm a cryptographer
in the making. But as far as I can tell,
it did happen, and they did recruit at least some
code breakers. That's enough for me to say it saved
the world.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
Kind of amazing. Isn't there another story, you know, if
we're kind of cruising through some World War Two anecdotes
and tidbits, isn't there another story about a guy who
wrote a crossword and people thought he was giving away
secrets in his crossword? Is that right? I feel like
you've mentioned that on the Puzzler one time.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Yeah. That one also not apocryphal. This was the same newspaper,
the Telegraph in Britain nineteen forty five, and that they
printed a series of crossword puzzles that happened to come
out in the days leading up to D Day, the
Normandy invasion, And the problem was that several of the
(16:40):
answers in those crosswords were top secret code words related
to D Day, So Utah was in there, which was
a beach Omaha was a beach of Neptune, was the
naval portion of D Day. Weirdest of all was Overlord.
Not a normal word, you hear, and that was the
(17:02):
code name for the entire D Day operation Overlord Operation. Well,
they did not at the paper, not because they didn't know,
but the British Secret Service noticed and they flipped out
and they actually arrested the crossword maker, who was this
quiet school headmaster named Leonard daw and they interrogated him extensively.
(17:26):
In the end, he was released and they decided at
the time that it was just a weird coincidence. There
are still in the crossword community some conspiracy theorists who
say it was not a coincidence, and one theory is
that the school was located near some sort of military
facility and the kids would help him write it, and
(17:49):
the kids overheard the soldiers talking saying these words. But wait,
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (17:55):
The real takeaway from this story is that in the
day's up to D Day, the people in charge of
the top secret plans, we're sitting around doing crossword puzzles.
I know, how would they How would they have noticed otherwise.
Speaker 3 (18:11):
Can't work.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
Time away. This is.
Speaker 1 (18:17):
Just making their minds sharper, Jody. As I've argued, was
it was good for them?
Speaker 2 (18:23):
All right? Well, aj as we start to wrap up here,
I mean, I'm gonna try really hard to somehow make
this our Christmas episode. But talk to us, you know
in a bigger sense. You touched on it a little
bit last episode, But talk to us in a bigger
sense about kind of what this era of crosswords teaches
us about. How as you say a puzzle mindset can
bring people together, do you have any recommendations for puzzles
(18:46):
for people to do around this Christmas holiday season? You know,
this is your chance. You have the floor to sing
the praises of puzzling.
Speaker 1 (18:54):
I will I will stretch the stretch the puzzle as
far as it can go and say, yeah, it can
save us from fascism. That's my which we need more
than ever right now. And I do think it can
bring people together. In my book, I cited a study
(19:16):
by Cass Sunstein, who's a Harvard law professor and behavioral economists,
and he talked about a study that he did where
they had liberals and conservatives and that one of the
only activities that brought them together was solving a crossword puzzle.
So having a common goal really is super important. So yeah,
(19:41):
that's my holiday message that we should all work together
to solve our big problems, like whether it's fourteen down
or whether it's a radical climate change.
Speaker 3 (19:55):
Twenty years from now, you're going to issue an updated
version of your book and there will be a new chapter,
the Puzzle that Defeated Fascism, and it's.
Speaker 1 (20:01):
Gonna be amazing.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
Well, happy holidays to you, AJ Jacobs, Thank you so
much for doing this.
Speaker 1 (20:12):
Thank you. I had a great time. It was as
fun as doing a crossword if not more fun.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Nicole Hemmer, thanks to you. Thank you, Judy and Kelly
Carter Jackson, thanks to you.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
My pleasure.
Speaker 2 (20:29):
All right, there you go. That was our crossover. AJ.
Speaker 1 (20:31):
You have a great podcast and we love having you
as a producer, and I love listening to your show,
so great to combine them.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Well, I'm very happy to be part of the Puzzler family.
And I will say to folks that if they want
to listen to more This Day, you can go find
us at this Day pod dot com, or you can
just search for This Day in Esoteric political history, and
before we go a little business. There is no extra
credit today, so you have the day off, but of
course we would never deny you the extra credit answer
from the last episode of The Puzzler, even though this
(21:00):
is a special crossover, so stick around. Greg will bring
you that right now. But thanks for listening, and Merry
Christmas everyone, Happy Holidays.
Speaker 4 (21:14):
Hello puzzlers.
Speaker 3 (21:15):
Greg Pliska here with the extra credit answer from our
previous show.
Speaker 4 (21:19):
On that show, we asked you to solve this off
with their heads puzzle.
Speaker 2 (21:25):
The clue was a beer named for an old and
trite story, and the answer involves taking a word and
cutting off the first letter to get a new word.
In this case, we do that twice for a three
word phrase. A beer named for an.
Speaker 3 (21:41):
Old and trite story is a stale tale Ale.
Speaker 2 (21:46):
That's s t a L E stale tail al.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
Congrats to everyone who got it, and we'll see you
next time on The Puzzler podcast.
Hosts And Creators
Greg Pliska
A.J. Jacobs
Popular Podcasts
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
The Bobby Bones Show
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.