Lifestyle
Navigating this world-record corn maze is a test of the human psyche
Deep inside one of the world’s largest corn mazes, where the tri-tip sandwiches and soft-serve ice cream purchased at the concession stand have become but a memory and all that can be seen in any direction are dirt paths and dead-end walls of green plants whispering in the breeze, people tend to reveal themselves.
From humble beginnings with a not-very-impressive pumpkin patch two decades ago, a farming family in this Solano County town decided to move into the corn maze game, hoping to have some seasonal fun and earn a little extra cash. And then, fueled by corny ambition and creative use of Excel spreadsheets, the Cooley family of Dixon went big. Really big.
Their Cool Patch Pumpkins corn maze has caused traffic back-ups on Interstate 80. It has prompted a frenzy of 911 calls to the Solano County Sheriff’s Department from people who find themselves lost in the labyrinth. It has twice earned a Guinness World Record as the world’s largest corn maze. And in doing so, it has become “a big part” of the farm’s revenue, according to Tayler Cooley, despite the vast acreage the family farms year-round.
Over the years, the maze has also served as a towering 60-acre experiment in human psychology.
“You can learn a lot” about a person from how they behave in a corn maze, said Brett Herbst, who said he built the first one west of the Mississippi in 1996, and now has a company, the Maize, that designs and builds them each fall for farmers around the country. (Cool Patch is not one of his customers.)
Minions created from hay bales greet drivers en route to Cool Patch Pumpkins in Dixon.
(Hector Amezcua / The Sacramento Bee)
Some people, it turns out, approach a hokey seasonal activity as they would an Olympic race: Speed is the goal. They grip their paper maps with tight fingers and fierce concentration. They blast around corners of corn, barely dodging small children. Woe to anyone in their group who wants to take a rest.
Others like to wander. They turn this way and that through the rustling 10-foot stalks, laughing when they get lost, and pausing for chats, snacks and selfies atop the four elevated bridges that connect different parts of the maze.
Sit quietly amongst the ears of corn, and it becomes easy to spot who is who:
“Guys, pick up the pace,” a young woman from UC Davis screamed at her companions as they ran by on a recent afternoon, explaining that they were racing against another group and could not pause to talk.
Contrast that with Amari Moore, 22, of Sacramento, who was taking a nice long break at one of the bridges. “I’m getting a little tired,” she said.
And then — and there is no nice way to put this — there are the cheaters. These are the people who, despairing of finding their way out honestly, simply smash and bash their way through the corn willy-nilly.
Or, those who lose all hope of escape and in their panic call 911 to plead for rescue from sheriff’s deputies. (The dispatchers tend to counsel waiting for help from on site — or taking the cheater’s route out.)
“You can learn a lot” about a person from how they behave in a corn maze, says professional corn maze designer Brett Herbst.
(Tayler Cooley)
Mazes and labyrinths have been around for thousands of years. In Greek mythology, the Minotaur — with the head of a bull and body of a man — was imprisoned at the center of a labyrinth in Crete and ate anyone who couldn’t find their way out. Theseus managed to kill the Minotaur, but still needed help from a princess to escape.
The farm town of Dixon, population 19,000, made its mark in mazes about 20 years ago — about the time corn mazes began to take off across the U.S. thanks to new computer programming that helps farmers plot out massive labyrinths with a sinuous web of passageways.
Matt Cooley, a second-generation farmer of walnuts, tomatoes, sunflowers, wheat and alfalfa, decided to grow a few pumpkins for Halloween and sell them by the side of the road. Then, someone gave him the idea to create a maze.
The Cool Patch maze, which rises from the flatlands near Interstate 80 just before the Sacramento Valley rolls up into the Vaca Mountains, got ever larger and more creative. Tayler Cooley, Matt’s daughter-in-law, is the designer. Each year, it has a theme. This year, the words “A House Divided Shall Not Stand” are carved into the corn, along with “God Bless America.” Is it a comment on the coming election, and the country’s profoundly divided electorate?
“This year we encourage our visitors and society as a whole to band together for the greater good of our nation,” the Cooley family explains on the Cool Patch website.
In recent years, the farm has also become famous for a symbol that people can get behind no matter their political persuasion: the minions of the “Despicable Me” film franchise. In recent years, one of the farm’s employees, Juan Ramirez, has crafted giant minions out of hay bales that are visible from the freeway.
Some scholars think mazes embody paradoxes. And it may be a paradox of modern agriculture that the Cooleys’ farm is not the only one that now brings in a substantial portion of its income from a maze that sprouts for only a few weeks each autumn. (The corn from the maze is harvested in November, Tayler Cooley said, and becomes animal feed.)
Four elevated bridges connect sections of the massive corn maze at Cool Patch Pumpkins in Dixon.
(Tayler Cooley)
Farming is a tough business, especially for small- and medium-sized farms, which can be rocked by the weather and fluctuations in commodities pricing and fuel costs.
When it comes to agritourism, corn mazes once lurked in the shadows of pumpkin patches, U-pick berry operations and apple orchard hayrides. But, perhaps because of those mythic roots and their ability to test the human psyche, they’ve exploded in popularity.
Herbst, founder of the Maize, said the first commercial corn maze he knows of was grown by a farmer in the early 1990s. Herbst built his own in 1996. These days, his company prepares maze designs for hundreds of farms. For an additional charge, his crew will carve out the maze.
“Corn maze has become a staple word for October, just like pumpkins,” he said.
In 2023, according to Guiness, a farmer in Quebec usurped Cool Patch for the title to world’s largest maze. But for the thousands of people who now view a trip to Dixon as one of their autumn rituals, it hardly matters.
“I grew up coming here,” said Becca Invanusich, 32, who was visiting on a recent Saturday from Santa Rosa with her fiance and two friends.
As a child, her maze style was to cheat: “I would just shoot right through it,” she said, gesturing to the rows of corn.
But as an adult, she said, she savors the mental challenge. Her group planned to solve the puzzle, no matter how long it took.
If you go: Cool Patch Pumpkins is located at 6150 Dixon Ave. W, off Interstate 80 in Dixon. Fall hours are daily, 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., weather permitting. The entry fee runs $22 per person. Children under 5 are free and so is parking.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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