Get great at the NYT crossword in two days 🔲 🔲 🔲 🔲

Cover art for Judge magazine (1924) by Holmgren

1. Find a NYT subscriber. They can gift a free subscription to one person. Be that one.

2. Start with WORDLE. It teaches you to figure out the word without using a clue. Now you won’t be scared of puzzles about curling rules or KPOP girls.

3. Do the mini crossword. It’s so small that when you have to get a hint – like just show me the damn word – the puzzle is finished before you can start feeling the weight of the cheat.

4. Learn these otherwise useless words that come up all the time: do is bread; epee is a sword; oahu, kauai, lanai are Hawaiian Islands; ella, ani, etta, enya are musicians.

5. Wait for a day when you wake up tortured by the super important thing at the top of your to-do list that you must do or your life will be ruined.

Push that thought to the back of your head by adjusting the pillow under your neck for optimum position for all day in bed. Take your ADHD medicine because first of all it’s in arm’s reach, but also, people with drive don’t skip meds on very important days. And this is your full-puzzle day.

If you have to answer the phone, say, “Is this urgent? I’m on the other line.” When the bathroom calls you, bring the puzzle — a proven method of puzzle mavens. Pause to memorize the greek letters because now it feels like cheating to google them.

Don’t eat except for chips in between clues. Don’t even stand up to get crumbs off the sheets. You are too busy. Move from the Monday archive to the the Friday archive. You are unstoppable.

Doze off thinking about a four-letter word with Z in the middle. Wake up when a pop up reminds you about that to-do list item. Turn off alerts. You do not need that to-do list because you’re saving your life by becoming a crossword 🔲 🔲 🔲.

 

 

 

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The “worst readers” are often the kids who read the most

There are two kinds of reading comprehension questions.

The first has a right answer. You read a passage, you find the information, you match it to the option that fits. These are multiple choice questions. They test whether you can locate and recognize a correct answer inside a text. They reward pattern detection and results correlate strongly with IQ. Read more

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My kid crushed every title I suggested

My oldest kid sent me an email with the subject line: “DO NOT LET Z SEE THIS EMAIL UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES OR I WILL KILL YOU AND HIM.”

She was telling me she’s trans.

When she was really young she wore girl clothes. I went with it for a while. We have pictures of her in a tutu. At Target she insisted we shop in the girls’ section. But around age five we said that’s enough. And she said okay. Read more

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Your children subsidize your ambition

Levittown, NY, a post-WWII suburban single-family sprawl

Gen Z is conservative. Not culturally, but in how they respond to collapse. They grew up inside system collapse—financial crisis, institutional failure, pandemic, climate instability—and they’re responding the way post-crisis generations always do: by seeking constraint. Read more

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Epstein isn’t the scandal. We are.

Ghislaine Maxwell and her father, Robert Maxwell

We clamor for the release of Epstein’s emails, but we already know what they’ll show: powerful men sexually abuse girls. What we’re avoiding is this: the U.S. government trafficked children as an intelligence operation, and we—the electorate—have spent two decades protecting everyone who made that possible. Read more

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Personality type posts! Come and get ’em!

Each week I post about personality type. If you don’t want to miss a post, subscribe!

INFJs are not negative; it’s fundamentally positive to think everyone can do better

INTJ: What happens when you optimize the wrong thing

ENFP hazard: learning forever, producing nothin

INFPs don’t need motivation, they need inevitability

ENTPs think rule-breaking is why they succeed

ENFJ trap: turning parenting into coaching

INTPs don’t need to master emotional conversation — just show up

ENTJ danger zone: I should just take this over

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Women we pay to raise our children

Farewell to the Wet Nurse by Etienne Aubry (1776)

For hundreds of years, middle-class women have maintained their social position by making childcare into dirty work that only desperate women do. The wet nurse was the original outsourcing: a poor woman feeding another woman’s child while the middle-class mother kept for herself the clean, socially acceptable parts of motherhood. Read more

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How many days in a row make a marriage?

I’m learning to serve a volleyball with my left arm, because my right can’t handle another ten years of impact. I keep having to use my right arm anyway, to remind myself how to serve with my left – to remember the little details. So my right arm coaches my left. Read more

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Why you should send money to Minneapolis right now

You should send money. I know most people don’t like sending money to random, unvetted recipients. But here’s why you should do that now.

All over Minneapolis there are neighboorhood groups on the ground helping people who have gone into hiding because of ICE. Hiding is isolating and scary. They cannot go to their jobs, they can’t take their kids to school, they can’t access their community support system. Read more

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It’s your weekly personality type email that you didn’t ask for

Book illustration by Yaacov Epter 1922

The subreddits for personality type torture me because people who misstype themselves are always the loudest – probably because misstyping ourselves is not a faulty attempt at a test but rather a faulty attempt at wish fulfillment. Read more

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