Becoming Wordle Man

On January 7, I published a story about Wordle in the Slate culture section. It's about 1,200 words long and took a morning to write. I'm not sure if I even proofread it before filing, because when you're a freelancer, you learn to pick your battles carefully. And yet, thanks to a masterstroke of SEO chicanery, the piece managed to lodge itself into the algorithm's spincycle. By lunchtime it had gobbled up oodles of clicks and summoned a tide of mystified normies to my mentions tab, as my take morphed into a shorthand annotation for anyone confused by the checkered grids that dominated the timeline in those wonderful early days of the Great Wordle Experiment. Somehow I found myself on the forefront of the word game beat, which is to say that two more editors were now asking me for Wordle stories. The feeding frenzy was on.

I could spend some time explaining what Wordle is, because that is what you are supposed to do when you write Wordle stories. (Trust me, I would know.) But I am operating under the correct assumption that if you subscribe to On Posting you are already completely fluent in Wordle discourse — if you weren't, you would've healthily left this newsletter behind long ago. So all you need to know is that it's now February, and I just sent off a rent payment consisting primarily of money generated by Wordle content. My 2022 portfolio is off to a historically bleak start. PC Gamer asked me to write about the upper-echelon of Wordle metagaming. (By the way, SOARE is the mathematically optimal opening word.) The Guardian had me take on "Absurdle," one of the many variant puzzles drafting in Wordle's unprecedented clout bonanza. PC Gamer reached out again, petitioning for a full-throated Wordle review, which occurred a few weeks after an AM news radio station in Toronto brought me on air for a dreamlike five-minute conversation about different methods to solve the game efficiently. 

I could've completed the trifecta when NBC LX — a streaming-only subsidiary of NBC — invited me to guest on a Wordle segment, but I passed on the opportunity because appearing on ghostly, Roku-bound TV is almost exactly the same as not appearing on TV at all. Someday I will write an essay about the baffling ubiquity of Cheddar, but I digress.

I like to tell young journalists about how disorienting it can be when people finally start reading your work. If you settle on a career in the media, you will likely churn out a mountain of content that reaches an audience of precisely nobody until one fateful day where a piece strikes a furtive nerve lingering deep within the cryptic framework of virality. Without warning, the algorithm draws your name out of a hat. Ideally, that moment occurs when you have written something deservedly transcendent, but far more often you will be suddenly shunted above water, into the overwhelming daylight of attention, because your byline is attached to a piece that has melded with whatever transient, disposable trend is eating up the bandwidth. Becca touched on this last year when she examined what it is like to cover TikTok as a beat — you can only be forced to intellectualize the actions of young hot idiots online for so long before you start wondering if you're the only person who hasn't lost their mind. It is, perhaps, slightly more humiliating as a freelancer, because there is plenty of money to be made when the men behind the curtain decide that you are a Wordle expert. I guess you could say I understood the assignment.

I've spent a long time trying to articulate the precise strain of brain rot that afflicts the average contract worker — or at least contract workers like me, who tend to write two or three times a week. It renders you something of a digital hunter-gatherer; ears pricked up for even the faintest sign of an exploitable trend. You detect a loose assembly of vaguely related tweets, centered on The Thing People Are Talking About Right Now, and dive in for the kill. By the end of the year, when you survey the clips left in your wake, you'll find a colorful array of stories that are fatally bound to ancient, decaying discourses that seem to disintegrate at the touch. Does anyone remember when people got angry about Lola Bunny's redesign in the cursed LeBron James Space Jam remake? Obviously not, but I still wrote about it. This is, of course, the essence of blogging; a famously transitory art defined by consistency more so than longevity. But that doesn't stop me from feeling profoundly adrift when I settle into my third consecutive Wordle story, for it is those moments where you feel sincerely microscopic in front of the gorging Maw of Content — all of these thirsty websites, newspapers, radio stations, and TV networks desperate to fill the gap with whatever flotsam is available. Today's answer is Wordle, tomorrow it will be something else.

Your reward are the rare incidents where one of those stories hit, and suddenly you're on Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal, and he is asking you the most anodyne questions imaginable; like how some pair of leggings went viral on TikTok, or the fashion sense of one Tyler "Ninja" Blevins. There are other, better, rarer times where you've written a piece you genuinely think is good, ideally equipped with one of those humongous JPEGs above the lede, and miraculously, everyone seems to agree with you. Is there anything better than spending a day with your precious URL locked in the Twitter search bar, basking in a bottomless supply of compliments? Has anyone ever gotten any work done when The Story Hits? But that well also runs dry eventually, and then it's back to the grindstone — destroying your mind and body to generate 800 intelligible, discerning words on Sea Shanties or whatever, while the next Big Feature seems eons away.

Josh Wardle just sold Wordle to the New York Times for a figure estimated to be in the "low seven figures." The transaction will keep the game topical for, I don't know, the rest of February, which means that I have not fully escaped the Wordle beat just yet. Any day now, another editor will materialize in my inbox, pinging me for a fresh take, and I will happily squeeze out whatever fetid juice left to be found in the husk. I have come face to face with the void, and I have told it that I'm always open for commission. That, my friends, is the way things work.