How Puzzles Explain WWII w/ A.J. Jacobs

This Day in Esoteric Political History

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 24 December 2023

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

** It’s the Radiotopia fundraiser! Support the show using this link and you’ll get a 20% discount to our new merch store! https://on.prx.org/46XCf1R **

It’s December 24th. Today, we look at a number of puzzle-related stories from the WWII era. This is when the New York Times finally got in the crossword game, codebreakers used puzzles to recruit great minds, and more.

Jody, NIki, and Kellie are joined by author and podcast host A.J. Jacobs to discuss what that first crossword looked like, why it was such a hit, and how puzzling can help explain the world.

A.J. is the author of “The Puzzler” and also host of the new daily puzzle podcast of the same name — which is produced by our own Jody Avirgan and Brittani Brown! Learn more at thepuzzler.com

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Our team: Jacob Feldman, Researcher/Producer; Brittani Brown, Producer; Khawla Nakua, Transcripts; music by Teen Daze and Blue Dot Sessions; Audrey Mardavich is our Executive Producer at Radiotopia

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.
0:06.7	My name is Jody Abergen.
0:08.6	And the great A.J. Jacobs is back host of the podcast The Puzzler, author of the book The
0:15.8	Puzzler among many other great books. Now last episode A.J. talked about the very first
0:20.7	crossword puzzle which appeared in 1913 right before World War I
0:24.3	and now we go to World War II to talk about puzzles in the 40s and as it happens there
0:29.8	are all sorts of interesting ways that puzzles intersect with the war and that era. So AJ is going to talk with us about a few of them.
0:37.6	Welcome back to the show, AJ. Thanks for doing a second episode with us.
0:41.6	I am delighted to be here and yes go check out the
0:45.7	puzzler hosted by a jay produced by me wonderful show but here as always Nicole
0:50.9	hammer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.
0:53.9	Hello there.
0:54.7	Hi Jody.
0:55.5	Hey there.
0:56.7	And I guess we should point out for listeners that this is our December 24th episode
1:01.2	and so I guess we're calling this our Christmas episode and you know we don't have a Christmas specific hook here
1:07.6	But AJ tell me I mean it seems to me like the holiday season and the war and puzzles do intersect in an interesting way and one way they do is let's start with this memo that is written at the New York Times in December of 1941 and we mentioned in the last episode that the
1:25.7	Times was reluctant to get into the crossword game but now a sort of generation
1:31.2	later during the war around the Christmas holiday season,
1:34.3	there's this memo that goes out inside the times that basically makes the case as I read it
1:38.3	that says like, hey, you know, our readers are kind of struggling this holiday season
1:42.4	maybe a crossword can help cheer. Our readers are kind of struggling this holiday season.
	...

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