How You Play Wordle Is How You Live Life

Plus: 'Abbott Elementary,' the 'Yellowjackets' finale, and Happies! [View this email online]( [Pop Culture Happy Hour]( by Linda Holmes Welcome! It was the week when we [remembered Andre Leon Talley](. It was the week when [Joss Whedon spoke](. And it was the week when people couldn't stop talking about [not talking about Bruno](. Let's get to it. Opening Argument: How You Play Wordle Is How You Live Life There's a good chance you do not need a rundown of the basics of [the online game Wordle](. You have perhaps seen it appear in your Twitter timeline as cryptic posts from people you know, made up of little green, yellow and black boxes -- these are people posting their results. If you ever played the [board-and-peg game Mastermind]( as a kid, it's pretty much that, only with words, and while it's certainly not an idea no one has ever had, [the implementation of it that's taken off in recent weeks]( has been pretty wild. Here's the short version: You have six chances to guess a five-letter word. With each guess, they tell you which letters are correct letters in the right spot (green squares), which letters are correct letters in the wrong spot (yellow squares), and which letters are not in the word at all (gray squares). For instance, if the word is LIGHT and you guess GLOAT, you will get yellow-gray-yellow-gray-green squares, showing you that the word has an L and a G but not in those spots, and it has a T at the end where you put it. A new game is released every day, so everybody is playing the same one at the same time. It did not take long for me to conclude that Wordle is a metaphor for life, meaning that you can learn a lot about different ways to see the world from different ways to play Wordle. (If you are inclined to attribute this discovery on my part to prolonged social isolation along with seasonal madness as I stay inside my house to avoid breaking my kneecap while walking my dog across crusty snow and ice, I say: Stay out of my private thoughts, you.) For one thing, there is easy mode, and there is hard mode. You switch between them by toggling a setting. The difference is that in hard mode, you have to incorporate the letters you've already gotten into your next guess, so that every guess could plausibly be right, based on what you know. This means, for instance, that if you guess RENTS on your first try and you learn that the first letter is indeed an R, then you can't guess BALMY on your next try just to see if you can nail down some more letters. You are constrained to guesses that include that R. If you post your results after playing in hard mode, they appear with a little asterisk. "This person played on HARD MODE," the game tells all your friends, just to make sure that they know without you having to communicate it to them. It is the humblebrag of Wordle. But of course, you can choose to play in hard mode without switching the game to hard mode. You can play in hard mode on the honor system. This means that you will not get your little asterisk next to your results, but you will know you played on hard mode. You will know you carefully incorporated each piece of information into your next guess. As often happens in life, you are presented with a choice between telling everyone that you overcame an obstacle and smugly knowing and keeping to yourself the delicious knowledge that you overcame an obstacle. (Perhaps you can tell from this description which I prefer.) [Wordle image]( James Doubek/NPR There is also the matter of risk. The disadvantage of playing on easy mode is that if you make that leap from RENTS to BALMY with the information that the final word contains an R, you know that BALMY is not the actual final answer. You are knowingly giving up your opportunity to get the prized notification that you got the answer right in only two guesses, which is the smallest number that incorporates any skill. You are making a guess you already know is not going to turn all green and wiggle its letters up and down at you in excitement the way a correct guess will. If you are a person who always wants to keep the dream alive of that 2 score, then you want to go from RENTS to, say, ROYAL, because it could actually be royal! You are flying without a net! ROYAL could be correct! But if you guess BALMY, you have a better shot at getting another letter to join that R, the better to position yourself for your third guess. Would you rather play it safe and BALMY and be better equipped to avoid the difficult six-guess day, or the dreaded didn't-even-get-it-on-the-sixth-guess day; or would you rather bet on yourself, on your capacity for glory, and fly Top Gun-style into battle with your ROYAL flag waving? And how superstitious are you? Some people start every day with the very same first guess, usually something like CARTS or TRAIN that has a lot of common letters in it. Other people (I am one of these) take a different stab at it every day. And do you think you need a method, a trick, a hack, a secret strategy? I am strangely preoccupied with last letters, myself. Once I have a sense of where one letter might be, it's surprising how often the possible last letters begin to contract in number. But in all likelihood, this is no better as a solution strategy than anything else; I just like it. Because it's how I do it. It's how I Wordle. And I've been Wordling for about ... two weeks. So clearly, I have massive experience to draw from. All I'm saying is this: your approach to this word game is critically important. Just critically important. At least that's what I tell myself when I wake up with insomnia at 4:30 in the morning and think, "Ooh, I can play Wordle!" --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- We Recommend: Brian Cox -- that's Succession's Logan Roy -- [was on Fresh Air]( and shared thoughts on a great many things, including that buzzed-about Jeremy Strong profile. I didn't end up writing a full review of As We See It, [the new Amazon show]( from Jason Katims about three adults on the autism spectrum living together with their aide. And mostly, I'm curious to hear what people who have autism themselves think about it in terms of representation. But there are moments in it that I really liked, and Katims (Friday Night Lights, Parenthood) absolutely knows how to make audiences feel things. I should probably wait longer to recommend this, but since I'm going to wind up listening to it until I am retired, here we go: I am listening to the 43.5-hour audiobook of the [James Andrew Miller book Tinderbox]( which is an epic oral history of HBO, while ferrying my dog back and forth to daycare. I am currently about 8.5 hours into it, and I have just reached The Larry Sanders Show. I have definite beefs with what is and is not in the book (you gotta care a lot about boxing), but there's plenty in it that's fun, and if you do not go with the audiobook, you can (ahem) skim a little more than I am doing. Looking for something we’ll be covering soon that you can catch up with now? The film A Hero, written and directed by Asghar Farhadi, who also made Oscar-winners A Separation and The Salesman, [is streaming on Amazon Prime](. And a reminder! There is a new way to support the show! It’s called Pop Culture Happy Hour+, and it means you’ll get the same episodes, but via a sponsorship-free feed. If you prefer or your circumstances dictate, you can absolutely continue listening the same as before in the regular feed with sponsorships. But if you’re interested, check out your options and figure out a plan that works for you at [plus.npr.org/happy](. What We Did This Week: [Abbott Elementary image]( Gilles Mingasson/ABC Glen [spoke to Tre'vell Anderson and Amil Niazi]( about the HBO MAX show Sort Of. [Stephen talked to]( Ann Powers and Eric Deggans about music documentaries of 2021. Aisha talked to LaTesha Harris, Kristen Meinzer and E. Alex Jung [about the Sex and the City sequel]( And Just Like That.... And Stephen and Aisha [talked to Kiana Fitzgerald]( about the new show Abbott Elementary. [I reviewed HBO's new series]( The Gilded Age, which I like very much. From the creator of Downton Abbey, it certainly has plenty in common with that show, but I think it does some things better. I wrote about [the season finale of Yellowjackets]( and the questions it did and didn't answer. I rounded up some [questions that still need answers]( as Ozark enters its final (two-part) season. [We shared last week's newsletter essay]( about How I Met Your Father. What's Making Us Happy! Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - What's making Stephen happy: [The Onion: 20 Years Later]( - What's making Kiana happy: [Shuffle Synchronicities]( - What's making Aisha happy: [Twentysomethings: Austin]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. [Find a Station]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Subscribe to Pop Culture Happy Hour+](. 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