Stuff You Should Know - Crosswords episode, perhaps?

Episode Date: March 2, 2023

Crossword puzzles have an interesting history and are a lot of fun to do. Dive in today to learn about Chuck's latest obsession.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who

have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, and this is Stuff You Should Know for one seven letters. I'm really excited about this one, because you and I chatted recently, I think probably on our super secret trip, our research trip out west, about my new crossword passion, which started sometime in 2022, where I started dabbling in the New York Times crossword for the first time, doing Monday, Tuesday-ish, I would try Wednesdays,

and then I was like, I wouldn't even try anything past that, because I knew they got progressively harder, and I was just sort of learning the language of crosswords, which is a thing we'll talk about, and then I was like, you know what, I'm gonna try these other ones, and before you know it, I'm doing all seven days, and finishing them with my little cheats, which we'll talk about as well. That's pretty cool, man. Saturdays too, huh? Saturdays too, and I love doing it so, so much, it has really added a lot of happiness to my life, I really, really enjoy it. Man, do some crosswords, take a good nap, drink some Amaro, you gotta figure it out. It's all coming up, Chuck. So, the New York Times, you just said it's all coming up, Chuck. The New York Times is probably

the most, at least iconic, if not well known in the United States, at least, crossword puzzle in the whole country. Sure. One thing I didn't know, Livia helps us with this, is that the New York Times was actually the last metropolitan newspaper by far to start running their own crossword, puzzle, because for a good 20-ish years, the New York Times just looked down its nose at crosswords as a brainless fad that would surely end any day now, and it just never did, and they finally caved, and then, you know, 60, 80 years later, something like that, about 80 years. Wow, that's crazy. It's now like the number one crossword puzzle of all time ever. Yeah, the paper of record. Yeah. So, should we talk about the inventor? Of the word cross? Yeah, that's what it was

called at first. His name was, he was a Brit, and he was an immigrant. Well, he was a British immigrant. What does that mean? He was an immigrant to the United States from Great Britain, from Liverpool to be specific. All right, I get it now. His name was Arthur Wynne with two N's and one Y, and an E, and a W. And he, there were some, we didn't really go over the prehistory of crosswords, but there had been sort of crossword-like word puzzles for hundreds and thousands of years in some cases, and Wynne was probably pretty familiar with these, and he managed what was called the Fun Section of New York World that had puzzles and jokes and things like that, and then finally in 1913, he said, in our Christmas edition this year, I've created a puzzle called a

word cross that was shaped like a diamond, had no blacked out squares, and had, you know, sort of crossword clues like we would recognize them today. Yeah, I mean, it was essentially a crossword. He just got the name wrong. He got the name swapped. Well, he got it right. Who got it wrong, but ended up being right, was an illustrator who accidentally swapped those words, and it was cross-word, capital C, capital W, and that name stuck in it. Eventually just, they said, let's quit with a little dash in the middle, and let's go ahead and make it one word. Yep, and Wynne was like, hey, this is actually starting to get kind of popular within just a few months, and he went to the publishers of the world and said, hey, we should probably patent this,

and the world said, do you know how much it cost to patent something these days? $100, get out of my office, and did not ever patent the crossword. And I think that was actually a really, it was a bad move on the world's part, but I think it was really great for the world. The world? You know? Yeah, totally. That would be very strange if crosswords were patented. Yeah, I don't think that they would be anywhere near as prevalent as they are now. So in that sense, the publishers of the world gave us all a pretty neat present. And we are going to give you a pretty neat present by introducing you to a woman named Margaret Petherbridge. This was at the time Arthur Wynne's secretary, and he said, hey, you know, you're pretty sharp. Why don't you take this job over?

And it turned out she had a real knack for not only creating crosswords, but kind of codifying what crosswords were and sort of the rules of crosswords. She was the earliest one to sort of put in place these rules like, hey, you should have a separate list for across and for down, and you shouldn't have any unchecked boxes, which is a square that's only part of one word, like it should all tie together. Yeah, and very early on, I think if she didn't add the black squares, which are called blanks, the squares you actually fill in, they're called lights. She helps standardize them because very quickly, if you look at a crossword, I never knew this before until we started researching this. If you look at all the blanks,

the black squares, they're symmetrical. If you look at the left side and the right side, they're mirror images of one another. You can turn it on its side and the top and the bottom are mirror images of one another. And I was like, why? How does that help anything? And apparently, they just decided, I think if it wasn't Margaret Petherbridge, it was somebody she was friends with early on, that symmetry is just beautiful, so make it symmetrical. Well, they're not always like that. They are. I mean, I'm looking at today's and it's not symmetrical. No, I spent so much time trying to find something that undermined that, and I didn't. I was like, oh, it is symmetrical, that's symmetrical. Holy cow, that's symmetrical. Did you look at any crossword puzzles? Yes,

I looked at crossword puzzles. Apparently, I didn't look at the one from today, though. Well, today's not. It has a great deal of symmetry now that I'm looking at it, and this is something I've never noticed. But for instance, I'm looking at one which on the right side is an L, and on the other side, it's an L minus the bottom square of that L. Okay. So it's not quite symmetrical, but it is kind of symmetrical in some parts. I'm so sick of this stupid conversation. Are you looking at the today's yet? I can't. I don't have my login right now, so. Well, I'll take a screenshot. I'll take your word for it, man. All right. I'm just so bummed, though. Because you thought that was like the fact of the show? It was one of them, for sure. Now it turned

out to be the incorrect fact of the show. Well, let's move on to the 1920s when a young company called Simon and Schuster said, Richard Simon's aunt, I think, said, hey, these crosswords are a lot of fun. You guys should package these together in a book because you're a book company. And so they hired Margaret Petherbridge, codifier of rules and master crossword designer, to put this book together. And she got a couple of other editors from the world and said, all right, let's get to work on this thing. It'll come out in 1924. It'll come with a free pencil and eraser, which is super cute. Yeah. And sold 123,000 copies in that first year. Yeah. And that one did so well that they released a second edition and a third edition, all within the same year.

And all combined, those three editions by Christmas time had sold more than a quarter of a million copies. Quarter of a million. For a fledgling publishing house, that's a pretty big thing. But also, they were very smart. Simon and Schuster, they created the amateur crossword puzzle league of America to basically help promote crossword doing solving, I guess is what they call it. Crossword doing? In order to help sell more books. And it worked, actually. It became a legitimate thing. They started standardizing crosswords as well. Oh, hold on. You know what? I think I'm wrong. I just sent you. Yes. Yes. So it's a mirror image in a way. It's not, I thought everything would correspond directly across from one another. No. But it also works

diagonally. So I see what you mean. It is symmetrical if you include the diagonal. So if you look in the top right corner, the bottom left corner should be the mirror image of that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's symmetrical. They're all symmetrical. It's insane. Because it makes it so much harder. Oh, man. I'm so glad we solved that for you because... Thank you. Thanks for going into that trouble. I made you feel dumb when I was dumb. No, you didn't make me feel dumb. Well, I kept looking at it and I was like, how can parts of it be symmetrical? That didn't make any sense. Right. But I was looking for like a direct flip. It's hard to explain how my brain was looking at.

This is a rare in-show correction. For one of us against the other. Right. So, oh yeah, back to the amateur crossword puzzle league of America. Yes. Which sounds like they were all wearing capes while they did crosswords. But they had some rules like no part of the puzzle can be completely cut off from the rest. Sure. So you can't use black squares to just make an island of one grid. You also can't use tons of black squares. They actually, as we'll see, make it easier to create a crossword because using black squares breaks up the stuff. So you don't have to come up with a typical, I think, New York Times crossword is 15 across and 15 down. So if you didn't use black squares, you would have to come up with

15 letter words. So no, I guess 30, 15 letter words, which would be really, really hard because they'd also all have to interact. So they use these black squares to kind of break things up and make it a little easier on themselves to shorten the letters and words and stuff like that. But the amateur crossword puzzle league of America said, okay, no more than one sixth of all the squares can be blanks, can be the black squares. Because after that, you're really just kind of making a lame crossword. Yeah. And I want to take another stab at correcting you. Oh, no. Or to maybe clear up, when you say 15 across and 15 down, that's 15 lines, not 15 clues.

Right. But there's also 15 spaces, right? Total. You know what I'm saying? And if there weren't any blacked out blanks, you would have a 15 letter word across at the top, a 15 letter word below that, a 15 letter word below that. And then from vertically, there'd be that have to make a, its own 15 letter word and so on and so forth. So, yeah, it'd be 15 across and 15 down, right? I just want to make sure people knew you didn't mean 15 across clues and 15 down clues. There's 15 lines vertically and 15 lines horizontally. And on each line, there can be as

many as, you know, four words. No, no, no. Four clues. Okay. But that's if you have black blank squares. If you didn't have blank, right. But if you didn't, you'd have to come up with 15 letter words, 30 of them that all interact with one another. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. But it sounded, are we really talking about this this long? Man, this is a brain buster of an episode. I wasn't expecting this. When you were talking about it initially, it sounded like you were saying there were 15

acrosses and 15 downs. Yes. If you didn't have black squares, there would be. Right. But there, that's not a crossword. Right. Right. Agreed. But the thing is, is you could keep adding more and more black squares to make it easier on yourself, the puzzle constructor. And if you- Why? Because they're shorter words? Yeah. It makes shorter words. It makes it easier to come up with words that interact and intersect with one another. And so-

I disagree. They said, well, you should take it up with the crossword puzzle constructors, because they say it makes it easier. Oh, really? Because I've begun working on constructing my own. Oh, yeah. That's sort of the giveaway. And I found that having a good long word is a good, is a real benefit. Okay. Yeah. It definitely can be. But imagine having to come up with 30, 15 letter words that all interact with one another.

That's not a crossword though. That's my whole point. Okay. Forget it. The other thing, the other way to look at it, Chuck, is that to show off, crossword constructors uses few blanks as possible. Yeah. So they can get those longer words. That's fine. Well, yes, we'll agree to that. Short words are challenging. I think you're thinking of a word search. No, I'm not. I know what I'm talking about. Will Shortz, please come to our aid and settle this once and for all.

Well, ironically, I think we've been saying the same thing just in different ways. I think so too. We need Jerry here to interpret for us. Yeah. Jerry's not here today. That's why we're fighting. Are we fighting? This is as bad as our fights get. We should finish this part, I think, before we go on and take a break. And that is when things got hot in the crossword community was the 1920s in the United States. And it was a big deal such that there were people that came out and said,

hey, these cross, it was sort of like these jazz cigarettes are ruining our culture. Like these jazz puzzles are ruining things because people are just spending all their time doing crossword puzzles. And in the UK, there was, in 1924, a headline from the Tamworth Herald that said crossword puzzles should be a colon. And enslaved America. They were talking about how men are wasting, it was a sinful waste of time, and that it was a fad that would vanish. Yeah, that was the New York Times that called it a sinful waste of time. So yeah, there was a real like, if you consider yourself an intellectual, you definitely look

down on crosswords in the 20s because it was just such a huge popular pop culture sensation. There was a song that was called Crossword Mama, You Puzzle Me, and then in parentheses, but Papa's gonna figure you out. It's like vaguely intimidating. It is, it is. So it was like, it was a really big deal, but yeah, as much as the New York Times and some of the other of the tongue clucking set wished crosswords didn't go anywhere, they just became more and more popular. And eventually they did catch on in Britain Chuck, they have their own version called cryptic crosswords. Did you see anything about that?

Yeah, the cryptics are like the New York Times crossword will have a handful of clues that are sort of deal more and they're more clever. There's more word play, there's puns, they try to throw you off track. And apparently these in Britain are, that's all they are. They are, and they're really tough. They have really different rules than American ones. So one, an example I saw. They got no black squares whatsoever. A clue was artists phone hacked by terrible woman. And the answer is Shigal, who was an artist. But the reason Shigal is the answer is because in the middle of Shigal, there's the word hag. And if you take the word hag out of Shigal, you have call, which references a phone.

Like my brain just melted out of my ear a little bit. Yeah, my deal with the New York Times is I love a good clever clue like that, that I can figure out. Yeah, the best I saw for an American crossword, I don't know who wrote it, but the clue was it brings out the child in you. And the answer was labor. That's good. They have those routinely. That's what I'm talking about. That's a good example of a really good, clever, but gettable thing. You know, I really thought I was going to get a better response out of you than that. For that one?

Yeah, that's a great one. It brings out the child in you, labor, like you just gave birth to a child? Yeah, but there were two or three of those in almost every puzzle. I know that, but that one is particularly good. We need to start this episode over. All right, let's take a break and we'll go hatch this out. We'll be right back. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullock. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly

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All right, so we mentioned that the New York Times finally got their crossword puzzles years and years after they were all the rage in the 20s. And it was when we entered World War II, Inter, once again, Margaret Petherbridge, now Margaret Ferrara, wrote a letter to the New York Times, says, you know what, we're going into war. It's impossible to, and this is a real quote, you can't think of your troubles while sobbing a crossword. So like this is going to be a big distraction for everyone during this tough time. And the New York Times said, you know what, I think you're right. And why don't we hire you to do it? And you can be our editor. And she said, I'd be happy to do that for 27 years. Right, man. This was 1942, I think, that they brought her on

board. And Margaret Petherbridge Ferrara had been, or Petherbridge had been, like, involved in the crossword world since the beginning, since they were invented. And so who else would you bring on as the first editor of the New York Times crossword by her? Yeah. And she did it for 27 years, like you said, which is eclipsed in time only by the current crossword editor, Earl Shorts, who's been doing it for like, I think 30 something years, 32 maybe. But yeah, 30 on the nose. She had a really huge impact on crosswords. And that's something I think a lot of people overlook. The impact that crosswords have on society and culture is really like under the radar. But it is really significant. Because what you choose as words and clues and the way

that you put things has a, there's millions of people all experiencing that same, that same puzzle. And so it's like your planting seeds and millions of people's heads and those millions of people go on to talk and interact. And it has a really huge far reaching effect way more than you think of, especially the New York Times crossword. Yeah, there's something that I realized what there's is that, and I was just naive because I didn't know much about it. And I hadn't seen the documentary wordplay at that point. Have you seen it yet? Yeah, it's great. But there's a real community around it. And once I started doing it, I think I told you that Hodgman and I were talking on the phone about something else and the crossword came up. And he had been doing

it. He's a big words guy, no surprise, and does play Scrabble with his wife for years and years and decades. And so he's long done the New York Times. And I was like, Oh, cool. And we started talking about it. And I was so new to it. I was super excited. And I think that sort of read his motor a little bit, because I was, you know, I was a new guy that was like, thought it was the coolest thing ever. And so we started texting a lot about it. And then our friend Ben Harrison of the Greatest Gen podcast, Ben does it. So all of a sudden, I've got all these people like colleagues and other podcasters that we like text each other hints or, you know, John was like, man, text me if you don't know a thing. And I was like, well, I could just look

it up. And he said, text me, it's more fun. And I was like, right, it's there's a community here. Yeah, I can just go lock myself in the basement with a candle and look it up. And I wasn't saying I shouldn't get in touch with you about it. But it's like, why would I bug you about it? And he was like, no, bug me. That's the whole point is it's like, it can be a social thing, even though it's a generally a solo pursuit. Absolutely. So Margaret Ferrara, kind of like coming to our live podcast shows, huh? Yeah. So Margaret Ferrara, she retired in, I think, 1969. And the guy named Will Wang took over and Will Wang, he had a huge impact on the crossword as well. He had a great sense of humor. And so he got into that wordplay, those puns,

kind of like diversions, like making you think it was it's one thing when it's really another the use of a word giving labor. That's got to be a will wanger. Uh-huh. He was replaced after eight years. He moved on and by a guy named Eugene T. Moleska. And he was the editor from 77 to 93. And he's the one that I think a lot of people our age who don't like crosswords think of when they think of how much they don't like crosswords. Because he was really big into opera. He was a former school superintendent. He knew Latin. And he expected the crossword puzzlers, the solvers, I should say, to have the same background and education and tastes that he did. And a lot of people don't. It's not like you have to hate

opera, but if you don't really like opera, you're probably not at all into opera. It's not like I'm kind of into opera thing, you know what I mean? And to expect everybody else to understand the clue that, you know, word play about, you know, some opera, that it's not, I don't know. I just get the impression that the approachability of it really bottlenecked under Moleska. Yeah. And the one thing that John and I agree on is like, and this is true when we've designed our trivia games that we used to do, our pub trivia, is that the best clues in trivia, we believe, and in crosswords are ones that you can probably kind of figure out. And even if you don't know the answer. And the worst ones are, you know, this person wrote this book or this opera. And

you're like, well, if you don't know it, you don't know it. It's a lot more fun to try and test your brain and to seeing if you can kind of figure it out. And eventually you'll do that by getting other letters that intersect with that word, of course. But if it's just like, I don't know, it's kind of lazy to me to be like, you know, just name this person who starred in this movie. Yeah. Lazy is a good way to put it. But on the other hand, like the the converse of it is, like you just really touched on an important thing of crosswords and that they are approachable and they do something to your brain that taps into a part of your mind and your intellect that's not just rote memory, that where you can combine different things that don't seem to be at all

combined, and it just makes it a really like pleasurable thing. A lot of people compare, especially the British version, cryptic crosswords to reading like a miniature murder mystery. And when you figure out who it was, it turns out you were right. Your suspect was the one who did it, that that feeling of like, I knew it. That same thing can come from like every single clue almost of a really well written crossword. And it's kind of the same thing where there's this discovery and you also have that kind of rush of accomplishment for having figured it out without just knowing a fact that you learned in school. I think that was a really important point you made. Yeah, but also it's not, you can have, I wouldn't want to go all cryptic. Like

the good crossword total in its sum has a mix of both, because it's also nice when you do know something and it's, you know, this man let voices carry and you know it's Amy, you know what I mean? Did you get that one? I did, it was pretty good. I just made that one up. Wouldn't you have to, it's good Chuck, but think about it, you're gonna have to fess up and make it two ends. Well, sure. So that's a huge giveaway too. But that's part of the cheekiness of it. Yeah, no, I'm with you. Yeah. But sometimes it literally just says this person starred in whatever movie, you know. Right, that's like a snooze fest. So there's one other one I want to give a cryptic crossword

that just blows my mind. So that, that clue is lineage and the answer is eagle. Can you figure it out? Well, I mean, I know it because you, this is something that I read. Well, pretend like you just figured it out and share it. No, how about you as the audience? Well, audience, do you know? No. No, well, I'll tell you. It turns out that lineage can also be read as L in age, E-A-G-E. Well, if you put L in E-A-G-E, you get eagle. Yeah, I mean, those are tough, man. That is really tough. You have to be so thoroughly British to be like, yes, I totally am tapping into this. Yeah. It's just, it's just a different way of doing it. But it's the same thing. And I think it's neat that everybody's got their own way. Yeah. My, actually, let me amend

that. My least favorite clues, and I will bail on a puzzle all together if the theme, and we'll talk about the fact that they have themes in a minute, but if the theme is, it's just, you have to misspell this word in order for it to be right. I hate those. Yeah. You're like, if it's not a Duke's or a hazard theme, I don't want to have anything to do with that crossword. Back to Will Shortz in the timeline of editors, because like you said, there's only been what, one, two, three, four? Yeah. I mean, it's a good gig. Like the least tenured was what, eight years? Yeah, Will Wing. So it seems like a job that people like because they keep doing it forever. But Shortz has been there for 30 years. There was no full-time staff there besides himself when he

came on, just a part-time assistant. And he changed that, had somewhat of a staff all of a sudden. He added the byline, which is a big deal when you go to your daily puzzle, you see who wrote it and who constructed it, which is kind of cool. And before that, there was no byline at all. And then he said, you know what, we should also get like clues that like talked about people of color and talked about different types of cultures and more diversity overall. I'll also add brand names, which is something they never did before. Yeah, for sure. So just really kind of opened it up. He definitely did. He also started publishing from a lot of different people too, including teenagers, I think up to the Shortz era. Only I think like 16 teenagers had ever been published

in the New York Times. And since he's been there, I think it's like 64 now. No, that was 16-agers. 16-agers? That's even less than I thought before. Yeah, six. And then during his tenure, 46. Wow. So I really screwed the pooch on that one, but the gist was still correct. One thing that is also correct is they do get progressively harder. And I was sort of wrong when I first started doing it. I thought Sunday was the hardest. They get more intellectually challenging Monday through Saturday. And then Sunday is sort of

like a midweek level, but it's just larger. That's what I saw, about 140 clues usually. Yeah, it's not lines. I know not lines. It's not what I meant. Here's let's do this great example that Livia gave because this is another kind of fun head teaser, brain teaser. So the clues sandwich often given a twist might be the Saturday clue for Oreo, whereas the Monday version might just be Nabisco sandwich cookie. I saw that they start out easy on Monday and then get increasingly harder day by day because they assumed that the crossword solvers out there were still recuperating from the weekend coming on their morning and that they were getting sharper and sharper as the days went on.

And then on Monday, you get to just blaze through one. No, no, like you're still hungover on Monday, so they made it easy on you. That's what I'm saying. And you get to blaze through it in 10 minutes and feel good about yourself again. Right, exactly. And then throw up from having to focus on the little tiny print for an hour. But just to explain, in case you don't do them at all and you're like, I don't get the Oreo thing sandwich often given a twist, people often twist the Oreo apart. It is a cookie sandwich. And as Olivia astutely points out, that also satisfies what you see a lot in crosswords, which is the short word with a lot of vowels. Like once a week, Inya, the new age artist,

Inya is a clue. She's never been, she's been topical for 30 something years because of her name. It's really funny. And there are different ways of like describing the the clue or whatever, but it's it's very funny. It's always like this new age or something like that. And so I say, there's Inya. Yeah. Yeah, that's another thing too that I think you kind of referenced earlier is, you know, you start to get a feel for the language of crosswords. And sometimes some clues are virtually the same as others. There's only so many ways you can describe Inya. So yeah, that'll start popping up, especially if it's a vowel heavy, heavy word. We should talk about themes a little bit more though, right? Sure. Well, they're themed a lot of times. Not always, but it seems like

out of the seven days, I would say three or four of them are usually themed at least. Okay. And that is when there would be like, it's usually like four or five of the clues have a theme. And then there would be an additional one that says, blank, blank, blank is the clue. And then it will say, or a great clue to the answers, you know, four, 17, 16 and 24. So it'll be a clue plus an additional thing that sort of help describe what the theme might be. Right. Like the theme, the answer might be double S. And that is also the theme of the other ones that you, you know, hopefully got by that point. One of the other things I saw that make theme crosswords popular, especially among constructors, is that the theme answers are usually multi-lettered, say 10 letters. And that's a big

long string of consonants and vowels that you can use to branch other words off of to intersect with. So you'll have four or five theme words. So you've got four or five, 10 letter words right off the bat. But you don't have to come up with 30, 15 letter words. So it's much more advantageous. Yeah. And like the example, Olivia gave of a theme, this is very typical. Winner of a preparing contest would be best-sheller. And so the theme ends up being adding an H in other common terms to make it a different term. So in other words, instead of best-seller, it's best-sheller. Another one in that same theme would be Lothario's line in a singles bar, pick up sticks instead of pick up sticks. So themes like that I really enjoy. But the themes I don't like are, like I said,

when it's like, this is the word misspelled or something. Okay. I got you. Okay. I'm getting on my crossword soapbox a little. I say we take our second break and then come back and talk about how people out there who are like, I like hearing about these crosswords. I'm going to go try one. Wait, wait, wait, because we're about to inform you how to solve them more efficiently starting in just a minute or two after this moment. What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the US and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. And I'm Alex French. In our newest show, we take a

darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century. We've tracked down exclusive historical records. We've interviewed the world's foremost experts. We're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books. I'm Smedley Butler, and I got a lot to say. For one, my personal history is raw, inspiring, and mind blowing. And for another, do we get the mattresses after we do the ads, or do we just have to do the ads? From I Heart Podcast and School of Humans, this is Let's Start a Coup. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. MySpace was the first major social media company.

They made the internet, which up until then had been kind of like a nerdy space, feel like a night club, and also slightly dangerous. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. Rupert Murdoch lost lots and lots of money on MySpace because it turned out it was actually not a good business. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new podcast, Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace, I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it, the users. Because what happened in the MySpace era would have sweeping implications for all the platforms to follow. Listen to Main Accounts, The Story of MySpace on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my

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Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the New York Times went so full bore into, which by the way is not sexual, kind of like balls out into crosswords, that they actually have a crossword column, not just a crossword, they have a columnist dedicated to writing about crosswords. Her name's currently Deb Amlin. That's probably always going to be her name from now on, but I'm saying the current columnist is named Deb Amlin. And she's at the New York Times, and she's got some tips that she maintains that they're pretty good if you want to start out learning how to kind of basically solve a crossword a little faster than you might have on your own. Yeah, for sure. And by the way, there are lots of

fun blogs outside the New York Times too that write kind of funny takedowns of the day's puzzle. Nice. But Amlin says to start by scanning for the answers you definitely know for sure. It's a good way to start. Take a guess sometimes, but use your eraser. Of course, I do mine on the app online version. And then once you get like the intersecting words more, things will reveal themselves. So it's fine to take a guess because you can go back and redo the word once you've realized that you were wrong. Another one she suggests is yours and Hodgman's method of working with another person via text or in person over the breakfast table. Sure. If you get stuck, just take a break. You don't have to finish this thing. It's not a competition.

Like you can walk away from it and come back. And oftentimes you'll do that kind of unconscious thinking almost like sleeping on it without sleeping. And these things that just seem totally impenetrable will suddenly seem clear to you with fresh eyes. That happens almost every time I do that. And I told Hodgman that and he went, yeah, that's a documented phenomenon that happens. Another one is that it's, and this is very controversial, but everyone has their own way of doing it. There's no right way of doing it. There are some purists, I'm sure, that do not cheat at all. And if they don't finish it, I guess they just don't finish it. I like to finish it. So here's what I do. I will do all my crosses first. And then I'll do a check. And it tells you what you've

gotten wrong. Then I do all the downs. And then I do a check. Because I don't want to spend, I don't have like hours and hours a day to work on these things. And I want to finish them. So like, I don't want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out something and drive myself crazy if I've gotten the crossword wrong to begin with. Because then you're just throwing yourself off. So I do a check, one check down, one check across. And that's the only sort of cheats I'll use most times unless I'm just really stuck at the end. And I can't get the last couple, then I'll cheat. And I'll be like, all right, you know, because what you're doing is you're learning something. If you're if you're stopping three quarters of the way through, because you're like,

you refuse to cheat, then you might be missing out on learning something cool. So yeah, or, you know, solve it your own way. If you want to be a purist and just not finish it, that's fine too. So I think that's great words of advice, Chuck. Yeah, some other ones I saw are so when you're looking at the clue, the the plurality of it, if the plurality, if the clue is plural rather than singular, the answer has to be plural. So in that sense, if you see something that has a plural clue, you can just go ahead and add an S at the end, right? Same with tense. So if the clue is past tense, you can add an ED right at the bottom of the of the answer. And that's a great way to fill up a couple of squares right off the bat, too. And as you fill in other ones, say that are going

across and you're filling down answers with S's and Ed's, that stuff's going to fill up a lot faster and become clear. Yeah, we talked about the language of crosswords, which you just sort of get more familiar with as you do them. Partner, whenever you see the word partner in there, it's usually linking words together. So the example that Libya gave was partner of live. The answer would be learn because you usually hear live and learn stuff like that. They also will abbreviate words, but they say that they're abbreviating it. So like following the clue, it'll be say ABBR period or for short or in brief, or they'll actually put an abbreviation in the clue. So a clue of elephant group as in GRP. The answer is GOP, because that's an

abbreviation of grand old party. And the elephant group is the abbreviated group GRP. Does that make sense? Yeah, but not all abbreviations like it's usually if it's something's abbreviated, that usually isn't like group was abbreviated. If you see a good point, like what Libya put down is a great example. If you see VIP, that doesn't necessarily mean that the answer is going to be an abbreviation because VIP is common. Yeah, people don't typically abbreviate group. Right. You'll also very rarely see the same word twice in a single crossword. Yeah. It's considered bad form among crossword constructors. Constructors also frequently give you fill in the blank clues as a gimme. So there's a blank and then the second word or

something like that in a clue makes it probably pretty easy to figure out based on the number of letters. That's one you can start with. And then also I saw that you should start at the bottom right because the premises that constructors typically will start at the top left. And by the time they make it to the bottom right, which is the end of the puzzle, they're tired and they've stopped being quite as clever. So you can figure out the clues in the bottom right easier. Yeah. I'd start with one and one. That's how I do it. Okay. There's some other fun ones. And I wish I would have looked up an example, but one that you see every single day is like word preceding cat and basket. And it'll be a word that you often see linked up before

or cat and basket. That isn't one because I can't think of one for cat and basket. Case cat. Cat case and basket case. Okay. But that would be proceeding, but yeah. So they'll do that a lot. Here's some things that I didn't know, which now I'm going to be better at. Well, I did know this, if it's a question mark at the end of the clue, that usually means is probably a pun or some kind of word play like current events is really current events. So tides, because tides have currents, it's an event. Yeah, you thought it was news. And then you're like, what's that fifth letter for? Well, and a lot of times the obvious answer that's wrong will have the same,

if they're really good, it'll have the same number of letters. Right. So you're like, it has to be news. It fits. Yeah, exactly. But the ones I did not know was that if it's in a quote, then the answer is a synonym for a spoken phrase. And I sort of knew it was sort of like that, but I didn't know it was always like that. And then if it's in brackets, and I didn't know this at all, I never knew what the brackets meant. Yeah. The brackets usually mean that the answer is nonverbal. Right. Like the example Olivia gives us, that's painful in brackets. The answer might be grimace.

Right. Never knew that. The thing is, I didn't know the brackets one either. The thing I like about the quotes one is it's intuitive. Like I didn't know that that was a convention, but I know that I've figured that out plenty of times doing crosswords to see those quotes. It's just, it's a really great convention, I think. And then the heteronyms, these are my favorite. These are the really clever ones where it's something that can be pronounced in two different ways. And you're intuitively led down a path to believe it's one and it's really the other.

So the example that Olivia found was kitchen drawer. So you're trying to think of like, what's the kitchen drawer? What could it be? What could it be? And the answer is aroma. So it's not kitchen drawer, but a kitchen drawer, as in the aroma draws you into the kitchen. Such a great one. I know. I love that stuff. Not as good as labor, but still pretty good. Okay.

So you said you're trying your hand at constructing puzzles. How's it going? Well, I mean, I've started the idea of trying. I'm trying to find a partner, as Hodgman, and he sort of didn't say anything back. So I think that was a soft bath. Yeah, I think so too. Ben seemed a little more into it. And I wanted to see if I could get stuff he should know when there's a clue, because obviously that would be another bucket list thing for us. That would be great. Oh yeah, man. Can you imagine?

Yeah, that'd be cool. So the New York Times, actually Deb Ammon wrote, or Amlin, sorry, she hosted a blog post, a four or five part blog post, that is really in depth that where she interviewed the people who actually edit and create the New York Times crosswords and how they do it. And it is not at all created the way that I thought they were created. Did you see that at all? I haven't looked at that yet. It's on my list because I know it's going to inform my process,

but I've been kind of waiting. I kind of thought there might be programs that help you sort of lay it out. They mention that. They do use programs to kind of basically create grids and stuff like that more easily, but they don't use things like autofill, which will just populate it with words, and then come up with suggested clues or anything like that. They come up with them themselves, which you would hope with the New York Times crossword puzzle. But the way that they create this, and I think it's almost like an assembly line, if it's done the way the blog post suggests, where one team will come up with the theme

and they'll come up with the answers, the words for that theme. Okay. So let's say you have five different words that are the theme answers, and then that's it. They hand it off to the next people. The next people will create the grid, and they have to figure out where to put those five theme answers in there. And once they have that done and they have the black squares in there and everything like that, they hand it off to the people who populate the grid with words. You want to avoid three-letter words. You definitely know less than three. Yeah, you can't have less than three.

Right. So it's actually kind of hard to come up with words that are interesting, right? Because those are your answers. And then after that, after the whole thing's been populated, they hand it off to the people who write the clues based on the words in the grid. Isn't that nuts? It's like the opposite of solving it. When you say day though, do you mean is this when the New York Times is doing their own? So yes, that's my impression. I think for the most part, if you create, sorry, construct your own crossword, you're doing every step of this. I don't know if they broke it down into teams of two to make sure that everybody was interviewed in this, or if they really do an assembly line

style and a team of two will create the theme, a team of two will create the grid, a team of three populates with words, and a team of two writes the clues. But it's really mind-boggling how it all comes together. It comes together in the opposite way that you would solve the puzzle, which is one reason why Will Shortz, he was interviewed by Neil Conan on I think Science Friday, where he said people who are constructors are typically not good at solving the puzzles in vice versa. If you're really good at solving a puzzle, it does not mean you're going to necessarily be good at constructing it. You know who's good at both? Who?

Is Manny Nassowski. Yeah. Because Manny retired from medical practice in 1983 and got, was really into it and was published in 94. And then since that time, has created 254 New York Times crosswords to be the most prolific writer, or I'm sorry, constructor. We keep saying that. Yeah, I know. It's tough to remember. So Will Shortz, when he started in 93, he was getting 40 to 50 submissions a week, mostly from people age 50 or over. And as of April 2021, he started getting about 200 submissions a week. That means 200 different people went to the trouble of creating a crossword and sending it into the New York Times. And the age has declined tremendously to about the mid to late 30s today on average. And that's in large part because Will Shortz

made a determined effort, like you were saying, to be way more inclusive in the crossword world. Yeah. And women get a little bit of a bump. I think 20% of submissions come from women, but about 30% of published puzzles are from women. And I was kind of under the impression that all of their puzzles were submitted. So I didn't know that anyone on staff was writing them. I'm curious of the breakdown there. Yeah, I am as well. I don't know because they said that they get about 200 submissions per week, but they're only running seven. So that means that the acceptance rate is about three to 4%, which would mean that they are accepting like they're running nothing but submissions rather than housemaid ones. Yeah, this really made me pause. And I'm like,

how much time do I want to put into something that I have a 97% chance of like failing? Well, you know, there's other places that run crosswords aside from the New York Times. And I'll tell you that Toledo Blake would be more than happy to take yours. Other pleasures do you derive just from having done so? I think it'd be good, even if it doesn't get published, that doesn't mean, you know, I wrote a great 70 show spec script that never did anything. But in my mind, it lives as a real episode. I wrote a Great Simpsons episode that never did anything. And I love it too. Yeah, agreed. I'll tell you what people love though is crosswords and watch that documentary wordplay because you will see

a lot of it about the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which started in 1978, when crosswords kind of after the 20s and 30s, they didn't go away or anything, but the they kind of laid a little more low until the late 70s and they really kind of picked up steam again. And the marketing director of a Marriott Hotel in Stanford, Connecticut said, hey, in the wintertime, no one's coming up here. So let's let's do a crossword puzzle tournament like an official New York Times thing and get Will Schwartz to help us plan it. And they've been doing it there ever since. And it's, I think it's in late March, early April this year. And they get, you know, close to 1000 people coming to this thing. Yeah. And you get a really good sense of what

it's like in wordplay, like you were saying, really a great, like if this has been at all interesting to you this episode, go check out wordplay, you will absolutely love it. Even if you're not into crosswords, it's a great, you know, social. What is the word? Social connector, bonder? No, the type of documentary where it's like a little peek inside of Oh, sure. Yeah, one of those. Yeah, one of those. It's worth seeing for sure. As far as the making you smarter, and this was something that you and I talked a little bit about, like one of the reasons I started doing it is because I wasn't under the impression that word games kept you from descending into dementia. And it kind of depends on the study. Some studies

have sort of confirmed, or at least backed it up. Some studies said there was no effect. Some studies say that it might just be the placebo effect happening. Other people say, like, these things are fine, but being like genuinely creative with your brain is better for staving off dementia. So I read this stuff and I was a little disappointed, but I kind of figure it can't hurt. And it's can be a part of the recipe of keeping your brain sharp. Yeah, as far as I know, none of the studies were like, don't do crosswords, they're going to completely rot your brain. Yeah. Yeah, what that that one about the placebo effect I thought was pretty interesting when they advertised that the puzzle is a brain training people did better on

an IQ test than people who were in a control group and did the same puzzle, but it wasn't advertised as brain training. So I don't think it matters. If a placebo effect doesn't matter, it doesn't diminish it. You know, like if you can take a sugar pill and get the same result as taking a medication, like, great, that's fantastic. I don't understand why everybody's always putting down the placebo effect. Yeah, that sugar pill probably didn't have side effects too. Well, it is sugar. So there's probably some, but you know, there was a study in 2014 that found that if you're a crossword or Scrabble, it says expert, but I would even say enthusiast, then you had a stronger working memory than the group compared, which was, I think college

students who had a 700 or better verbal on the SAT. Yeah. And apparently they're better at like visual, visual. Can I say that right? I don't think so. I think that is right. Visual spatial information and integrating verbal and visual, man, visual space. You're not going to help me help you, are you? No, VS information. How about that? VS information in your short-term memory. Geez, I got to go finish. I'm ironically pretty stumped on today's crossword, as you can tell. Oh, yeah. Have you been doing it while we've been talking? No, no, no. I made a little bit of time earlier, but I'll usually not do it all on one go. Like the Monday through Thursday, I'm sorry, the Monday through Wednesday, I can generally knock out pretty quick. Like Mondays,

sometimes you can knock those out in like 11 minutes and that's super speed. What? Yeah, I've done, that's my record, I think. Wow. That's impressive, man. But yeah, shout out to Ben and John Hodgman and Mark Gagliardi, another podcasting friend who was an enthusiast. Nice. It's fun, fun doing this stuff. Shout out to all you constructors and solvers out there, right? Yeah, if I ever get my own byline, then you can bet stuff you should know will be a clue. Awesome, I appreciate that big time, Chuck. Since that is probably it, right? You got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, then that means it's time for a listener mail. I'm going to call this correction on animal stuff. Oh boy. This is from Daniel,

and this is a good correction too, because this feels like one of those things that's just printed everywhere and everyone believes is true, but apparently possums don't eat ticks. Yeah. Okay, all right, fine. Hey guys, I'm writing because I was listening to the Possums podcast, and I heard you guys repeat an old myth that was fact and I wanted to set the record straight. The idea that possums eat thousands of ticks a year is a complete myth. It's based on a single study in which researchers placed 100 larval ticks on many different animals, waited four days, then counted all the ones that fell off, the ones that did not fall off or assumed to have been eaten, someone read that study, assumed this was the same as the number of ticks they'd eat in the

wild, and came up with the numbers that we heard. So is there anything out there that disproves it, or is this really just a critique of this quality of the study and the extrapolation? Yeah, part two. Okay. More recently, guys, the study was done with possums in the wild and found no evidence that they ever eat ticks. They checked the stomach of many wild possums, couldn't find evidence of even a single tick eaten. Here's a link to an article on the study, and this is from Field and Stream Magazine, and I'm not gonna argue with those guys. They carry guns. Yeah, they cover both field and stream. So, just a couple of things. Number one, Daniel ruins everything. No. Number two,

I still have plenty of possum pride, and it's fine. Sure. It doesn't diminish the possums one iota in my eyes. Nice try, Daniel. No, I agree. I think it's like possums were great before the tick thing, so they're certainly great taking the tick thing away. Yeah, okay, fair enough. I can tell you that Instagrammer's not gonna like this. Well, you know, what are you gonna do? Can't please everybody? No, you can't. If you want to be like Daniel and ruin something for us or try to, but fail at it terribly, you can do it via email to stuffpodcastatihartradio.com. Stuff you should know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts,

my heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Dr. Romany, and I am back with season two of my podcast, Navigating Narcissism. This season, we dive deeper into highlighting red flags and spotting a narcissist before they spot you. Each week, you'll hear stories from survivors who have navigated through toxic relationships, gaslighting, love bombing, and their process of healing. Listen to Navigating Narcissism on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. MySpace was the first major social media company. They made the internet feel like a nightclub. And it was the first major social media company to collapse. My name is Joanne McNeil. On my new

podcast, Main Accounts, the story of MySpace. I'm revisiting the early days of social media through the people who lived it. Listen to Main Accounts, the story of MySpace, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you find your favorite shows.