Cheating at Wordle

In which I confess to a weak moment that also has some interesting implications, or at least that's what I'm telling myself. (Issue #115)

Before we get to today's main topic, some miscellaneous goodies and things worth your attention…

• R.I.P. Post.News: I was sad to read Noam Bardin's Friday post on Post.News that the platform will soon shut down. Luck and timing are huge components of any startup's success (although retroactive delusions of meritocracy often blur this), and Post.News suffered from bad luck and timing. If, for example, Facebook had axed its News tab a year earlier, Post.News might have thrived. I also think that while Post.News solved a series of problems for news organizations (including micropayments), that didn't translate into solved problems for news audiences. Apple News, Google News, and even (shudder) Twitter/X surface news to the curious in adequate ways.

• Fargo on Hulu: La Profesora and I finally finished the fifth season of this terrific series in an intense, four-episode binge session. (We've never done this before.) This is some of the best television that I've ever seen, and it's a miscarriage of Emmy justice that when the show came out will prevent Juno Temple, John Hamm, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Richa Moorjani from getting nominations. Don't miss it.

• The Life and Death of Hollywood by Daniel Bessner in Harper's neatly summarizes the current issues facing the entertainment industry.

• NPR's Steve Inskeep's calm, point-by-point rebuttal of Uri Berliner's bizarre flameout screed was a breath of rational fresh air.

• This NYT chart ($) of where jurors in the Trump/Stormy Daniels criminal trial say they get their news is intriguing. Only two get news from TikTok, which is pleasantly surprising after this recent piece from Pew.

• Becoming Superman: My Journey from Poverty to Hollywood by J. Michael Straczynski is a breath-taking memoir that also contains oceans of mystery and suspense. I am a huge fan of Straczynski's iconic Babylon 5 television series, so I'm not sure how I missed this book when it came out in 2019. Here is the highest encomium I can give to this or any book: I picked it up at my local library around 3pm and started reading it in the lobby. It hooked me. I kept reading as I walked the mile and a half home: I have never done this. I took back roads to avoid getting run over by a neighbor. A man walking in the other direction said, "that must be a good book!" I grunted yes. I got home and kept reading until dinner. After dinner, I was reluctant to do the dishes... until I found that the audiobook was free on Spotify. I cleaned and listened, then went back to the paper copy. I turned the last page of this 460 page book just before 1:00am, less than 10 hours after I started. Straczynski has always written with a dazzling intellectual clarity and emotional nakedness, and this time he's writing his own story. It's amazing. As a writer myself, I am inspired and jealous, but mostly grateful.

• Hire me to speak at your event! Get a sample of what I'm like onstage here.

• Please follow me on Bluesky, Instagram, LinkedIn, Post and Threads (but not X) for between-issue insights and updates.

On to our top story...

Image created using DALL-E.

Cheating at Wordle

Bless me, Reader, for I have sinned.

La Profesora and I aren't competitive when the stakes are real, but this mutual support does not apply to vicious games of Gin Rummy or to the daily Wordle puzzle from The New York Times.

I resisted falling into the Wordle trap for years because I can—news flash!—get a little OCD about such things, which then sucks up time better spent on things like writing this newsletter. What I didn't realize was that, since NYT only releases one Wordle per day, I can't lose too much time. That also raises the stakes of the daily puzzle. (There's a lesson about strategic scarcity in that.) In December, I fell. Nowadays, La Profesora and the kids and I share our daily Wordle scores via text. In a separate thread, three of my beer buddies and I also trade scores. This is serious.

And there begins my sadness.

Early Tuesday morning, La Profesora texted the group chat that she had solved that day's Wordle in three moves. The gauntlet lay on the ground. My cheek stung.

I have a method for Wordle based, unsurprisingly, on research and strategy. The most statistically likely 10 letters in the English language are, in order, E,A,R,I,O,T,N,S,L,C. I can make two words out of those letters: TRACE and LIONS ("loins" also works, but who likes to keep on typing the word "loins"?).

Typically, I start with TRACE—since it contains E, A, and R—not really thinking about the puzzle until move three.

After two tries, I had T I _ _ E... and hit a wall. I texted the family thread: "I'm stumped after 2 tries and will return to this later."

Time passed.

I knew that the word did not have R,A,C,L,O,N, or S. That left 16 letters... and I only had one move left to tie La Profesora!

When it comes to solving Wordle, I have two weaknesses. The first is that I tend not to look for repeated letters, so it will take me longer to find "funny" than "honey" because of the pesky double N in funny. The second weakness is my vocabulary, which—after an advanced degree in Renaissance literature and a debilitating lifelong addiction to reading for which there is no Bibliophiles Anonymous twelve-step program—is vast. That is a problem because Wordle tends to feature common words. This has resulted in painful memories, like the puzzle from March 30:

This was before I had developed my TRACE and LIONS method—which would have yielded better results—but see how "pored" and "gorge" are both less common than the ultimate solution: force?

And yes, I screencap all my Wordle solutions. Remember that verging-on-OCD thing?

Back to Tuesday: at 11:20am, facing meetings that would take my mind far from Wordle, I phoned a friend (Google). I searched "five letter words that begin with t i and end with e." A cluster of answers popped up. The correct one was obvious: tithe.

Feeling stupid and ashamed at the same time is lethal.

I did not claim my fake three move score with either the family thread or the beer buddy thread. I did not even screencap the solved puzzle (which forced me to reconstruct my moves while writing this).

In attempting to tie La Profesora, I had cheated myself.

Can I get an ego te absolvo?

Although this is mostly an (I hope) amusing confession, there are two implications.

First, my Wordle guilt is unusual.

I have no compunction and zero guilt about cheating at Wordscapes, a similar game that my friend Juliet (curse her) introduced me to a year or so ago. Wordscapes is an infinite-play (and therefore infinitely addictive, which is why I'm not even linking to it... Spare yourselves! Remember me! Tell my story!) free game that will suck up your brain as you decipher how many words you can make out of seven letters. Each solved puzzle rewards you with points that you can use to get a clue when you're stumped on a later puzzle (you can also buy points; I won't). Since getting clues is a feature of the game, I have no issue with simply getting clues from another source (Google).

Wordle is different. Although other websites provide hints and cheats for Wordle, NYT does not. You're on your own. Still worse, if you solve Wordle for days in a row, then each day you'll see your "streak" get bigger, but if you skip a day or fail to solve the puzzle, it's back to the start. Unlike Wordscapes, your streak doesn't equate to points that you can use to get a hint. It's an intrinsic metric, pride, with no extrinsic value.

I care a lot more about Wordle than I do about Wordscapes.

Second, I have to work not to cheat at Wordle; I have to spend precious decision-making energy choosing the journey and not skipping to the destination, which is hard.

We're not built for this. The reason we have an obesity problem is that there are abundant supplies of junk food that appeal to our most primitive "need calories" instincts. The reason we have a misinformation crisis is that powerful algorithms optimize fake news stories that appeal to our worst prejudices and let us spread those fake news stories effortlessly.

As I've explored elsewhere, we now have to choose to make bland meals, write bad essays, take bad photographs, make boring presentations, and get lost while driving to learn how to cook, write, photograph, present, and navigate. This is hard because algorithms eagerly raise their virtual hands to do these things for us.

It's hard to say, "no thank you," but intrinsic metrics like pride can make it a little easier.

And that's why I'd rather lose to La Profesora than use Google to help me solve Wordle.

Late-breaking news: I lost on today's Wordle. Streak reset to zero. Failure shared with family and friends.

Sigh.

There's always tomorrow.

Thanks for reading. See you next Sunday.