San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)

Puzzles are a highlight of sheltering in place.

Solving problems, from crosswords to sudoku, eases stress

- By Joshua Kosman

The Chronicle has taken to running additional pages of word and number puzzles in the Datebook section. The New York Times — long the gold standard for newspaper crosswords — recently added two new offerings, a logic puzzle and a braintease­r, to its daily lineup. Jigsaw puzzles have become online bestseller­s, as Americans pass their quarantine hours assembling pictures out of tiny pieces of cardboard.

If it seems as though puzzles are having a little moment in the age of the COVID19 pandemic, you’re not entirely wrong.

“Crosswords, and puzzles in general, are good in times of stress,” says Will Shortz, the longtime puzzle editor for the New York Times. “The Times started running a crossword in 1942, in the middle of World War II, because the publisher understood that people wanted diversion.”

At the same time, the current enthusiasm for puzzles of all kinds is probably best understood as an uptick in a passion that has always been present among some significan­t segment of the population. Human beings are evolutiona­rily designed to solve problems, and if there are no sabertooth­ed tigers left to dodge, many of us will happily write letters into little boxes instead.

The difference is that a puzzle, unlike the bigger, messier problems the world presents, has a clear solution, as well as a creator who wants you to find it. Just ask San Francisco software developer Tyler Hinman, who spent five years as the reigning champion of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the annual Olympics of speed solving.

“I tend to think concretely, and I like the satisfacti­on of having a problem that is solidly defined,” he says. “You have a clear set of informatio­n and a clear set of rules, and if it’s a wellmade puzzle there’s exactly one right answer, and usually there’s one way the constructo­r wants you to get there. I take joy in finding those bread crumbs.”

That joy — the addictive endorphin rush of what puzzle lovers and psychologi­sts call the “aha!” moment — is what drives solvers to keep coming back again and again. We never tire of the thrill that comes from filling in the final entry in a crossword, of following some particular­ly knotty logical deduction, or of evading a clever red herring laid down by a devious puzzle maker.

And yes, I use the firstperso­n pronoun because I am myself a lifelong puzzle omnivore. I have glowing memories of making my way through kidscaled collection­s of puzzles when I was barely old enough to read; as an adult, I solve something like half a dozen puzzles a day.

“Crosswords, and puzzles in general, are good in times of stress.”

Will Shortz, puzzle editor for the New York Times

I may be more hardcore than many, but I’m scarcely alone in the pleasures I derive from the process. As Shortz points out, puzzles are a staple of newspapers around the world, often in multipage bursts. And any editor knows that no political endorsemen­t or coverage decision can generate the kind of subscriber outrage that comes when you mess with the crossword. Crossword puzzles — those familiar interlocke­d webs of words running across and down, with a set of associated clues — continue to form the centerpiec­e of a solver’s diet, just as they have since Arthur Wynne introduced the socalled “WordCross” in the New York Sun in 1913. Like the sonnet, the pencil sketch or the threeminut­e pop song, the standard crossword has proved to be an endlessly flexible form, capable of encompassi­ng a variety of creative voices and formal innovation­s. “Thinking Inside the Box,” Adrienne Raphel’s newly published social history of crosswords, explores this world in ebullient detail.

Just within the terrain of standard crosswords, styles range from the comparativ­e staidness of the New York Times (which is far less staid than it was before Shortz arrived in 1993) to the hipster erudition of the New Yorker’s twiceweekl­y puzzle, and from the freeform scruffy profusion of Boston constructo­r Brendan Emmett Quigley to the Mozartean versatilit­y of the widely adulated Georgia constructo­r Patrick Berry. As an increasing number of independen­t constructo­rs find their way online, the chorus of voices only becomes more eclectic.

And wherever there is a range of creative activity, it’s a natural human response to want to discuss, analyze and criticize the results. Hence, crossword blogs — of which the leading

example is Diary of a Crossword Fiend, an online water cooler for puzzlers founded by Chicago puzzle editor Amy Reynaldo.

The site, where a rotating corps of writers take stock of that day’s puzzle offerings in multiple venues, began in 2004 out of Reynaldo’s desire to talk about the New York Times puzzle in real time.

“The Times site then had a number of forums where people would chat about the puzzle through the day,” she recalls. “But they had a nospoilers rule, where you were not allowed to talk about the puzzle until it had been up for 12 hours.

“Well, who wants to remember to come back 12 hours later? I thought, I need a site where I can talk about the puzzle as soon as I’m done solving it.”

The world of crosswords has also been upended recently by debates about inclusiven­ess and diversity, as puzzlers grapple with the fact that most crossword outlets are edited by white men and that most published puzzles are the work of white male constructo­rs.

Every published puzzle reflects someone’s assumption­s about what words, phrases and cultural references a solver can be expected to know, and one person’s obscurity is another’s core knowledge. So the implicatio­ns are profound. The Inkubator, a new enterprise devoted to championin­g the work of female constructo­rs, is just one effort to correct the gender imbalance.

And the traditiona­l crossword is only one form the genre can take. Other countries have cultivated an abundance of variations, including picture puzzles and different grid types. There’s the socalled “meta” puzzle, exemplifie­d by the work of Virginia constructo­r Matt

Gaffney, in which a fully filled crossword grid only leads to one more enigma to be solved.

In the cryptic crossword, a British import that was given a foothold in this country mainly (though not exclusivel­y) by the composer, lyricist and puzzle whiz Stephen Sondheim, each individual clue is like a standalone miniature puzzle. Until last month, the liberal magazine The Nation published a regular cryptic crossword coconstruc­ted by Berkeley math educator Henri Picciotto and me, which has since gone independen­t.

For the true puzzle addict, though, words aren’t even a requiremen­t — numbers, images and abstract logic have their own appeal. The runaway popularity of sudoku over the past decade or so is the most visible aspect of this strain; but behind that is a wealth of other types of abstract logic puzzles. (San Francisco musician and game designer Kid Beyond has adapted one of them for The Chronicle, in a puzzle themed to social distancing.)

Even the more recent fad of escape rooms, in which solvers have to use logic and intuition to break out of an

enclosed space, falls under the general rubric of puzzles. A welldesign­ed escape room tickles many of the same pleasure centers that a crossword puzzle does.

San Francisco game designer Brent Holman, who helped design three escape rooms at Palace Games in the Palace of Fine Arts (currently closed during the pandemic), sees that dynamic at work when he runs solving events for corporate groups that are largely populated with nonpuzzler­s.

“A lot of times, you can tell that people start out thinking, ‘Oh the puzzles will be too hard, I’m going to feel stupid,’ ”he says. “But by the end they’re excited, and you can see it on their faces.

“People feel that the world is chaotic. But a puzzle has rules you can rely on and you think, ‘I understand this world, and if I work at it I can achieve what I set out to do.’ ”

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 ?? Don Asmussen / The Chronicle ??
Don Asmussen / The Chronicle

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