What’s a Six-Letter Word for Fanatical Devotion to Solving Things?

There are many completely different sorts of puzzles. Heaps. Crosswords, anagrams, rebuses, jigsaws, mazes, chess issues, math and logic, ciphers/secret codes, visuals (assume “The place’s Waldo”), cryptics: The listing goes on and on, and Jacobs delves into each with relish. His earlier books (like “The Yr of Residing Biblically” and “The Know-It-All”) contain what he calls “life-style experiments” — and “The Puzzler” isn’t any exception. A puzzle fanatic himself, Jacobs gonzos his method into every thing from C.I.A. headquarters (to research Kryptos, the copper sculpture embedded with a secret message that continues to defy cryptanalysts) to the World Nationwide Jigsaw championships. He flew to Spain to compete and apparently, since nobody else from the US signed up, he and his spouse and three youngsters represented the US. They completed second to final, which Jacobs fairly rightly noticed as a win. U.S.A.! U.S.A.!

Alongside the best way we meet all method of puzzle masters, in addition to the merely possessed. There are the speedcubers, individuals who memorize lots of — and typically 1000’s — of algorithms to cut back the variety of turns per clear up. (In the event you assume that nothing is extra boring to observe than golf, simply know that speedcubing tournaments have spectators, in addition to fantasy leagues the place you possibly can gamble in your favourite champions.) There may be Adrian Fisher, who modestly calls himself probably the most prolific maze designer “within the historical past of humankind”: His work features a Beatles-themed maze in Liverpool, a maze within the passenger terminal of Singapore’s Changi Airport and one on the facet of a constructing in Dubai, “which shouldn’t be tried except you’re Spider-Man.” And naturally there’s Will Shortz himself, the NPR/New York Instances editor who’s to puzzles what Kim Kardashian is to buttocks: There may be none finer, or extra mentioned amongst aficionados. On the partitions of Shortz’s front room hangs a private letter to him from Invoice Clinton: “Even once I can’t end them, they’re the one a part of The New York Instances that ensures a great feeling.”

Jacobs’s love for puzzles is infectious, and it’s not onerous to grasp why. Puzzle individuals draw us in with their monomania. “I’m a sucker for people who find themselves captivated with one thing,” Jacobs notes, “no matter how foolish that zeal might sound to others.” He exhibits us how one can even cherish puzzles that you simply don’t have the endurance (or ability) to resolve.

The reality is, we’re all puzzlers, whether or not we’re making an attempt to recollect our passwords or shedding sleep as a result of we’re staying up until 12:01 a.m. to do Wordle — a easy phrase puzzle that ballooned from 90 every day gamers on Nov. 1 to 300,000 at first of the yr to thousands and thousands now. All puzzles aren’t so harmless — assume Zodiac Killer, who nonetheless has a number of web sites devoted to cracking a few of his unsolved notes. However puzzles additionally convey us collectively in methods massive and small. If I’m having an existential disaster at 3 a.m., there’s a whole globe of individuals on the market enjoying on-line Scrabble in actual time. And I’ve really had fascinating conversations on Phrases With Buddies with strangers. As puzzlers usually say, “It’s not the puzzles you clear up, it’s the individuals you meet.”

What saved my youthful self from a silly, determined alternative is what Jacobs calls the true puzzle lover’s ethos: “We must always have a look at an issue and work out potential options as a substitute of simply wallowing in rage and doubling down on our biases.” With the dreadful puzzle we’re discovering our world in at this time, this simply is perhaps the reply.