leaving the party

On Tuesday last week, the failing New York Times published an op-ed by world class dumb ass Bret Stephens with the following headline: “No, Israel Is Not Committing Genocide in Gaza.“

This is, of course, flatly untrue. Since the October 7th attacks in 2023, there have been more than 60,000 people killed in Palestine by the Israeli regime, a number which Bret Stephens at the New York Times basically scoffs at in his first few paragraphs. Israeli military violence against Gaza is also still ongoing, meaning this is not a final count or even a truly accurate estimate: last month, DW reports on an independent study that this death toll may actually be too low by 41%.  As I type this, Israel continues to choke resources out of Palestine, starving the people of Gaza and even shooting and killing people who were seeking aid from U.N. aid trucks. This is not even mentioning the long history of violent occupation between Israel and Palestine, for which I highly recommend reading The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi. Straightforwardly, Israel’s relationship to Palestine is a campaign of total annihilation, and has been for a very long time. I feel this is the single most important political issue of our current moment.

There is a very small “journalistic” part of me that feels compelled to link the piece so you can read it yourself, but I’ve decided not to. Don’t worry too much; you’d probably get paywalled out anyway. Still, though, if you can help it, I suggest you don’t click on their website at all. And if you’re on your web browser at your job right now, I suggest you close the tab you have open for today’s Connections. In fact, I’m writing today to propose something that seems at this point obvious to me but still needs to spelling out: I suggest you divest completely from the New York Times. That means no reading their publishing, no clicking on their links, no sharing links to their articles, and crucially, no more playing their games. That especially includes Wordle.

I suggest this because the failing New York Times seems to be editorially invested in the destruction of Gaza. This new op-ed from Bret Stephens is not the first time the newspaper has made controversial headlines defending the violence of the Israeli occupation. The New York Times has a long history of uncritically publishing pro-Israeli voices. In a January 2024 analysis published by Adam Johnson on the Intercept, we see pretty clearly that there is a pro-Israeli bias in the New York Times and its contemporaries in the first several weeks of Netanyahu’s siege on Palestine, its coverage prioritizing Israeli narratives and routinely devaluing the lives of Palestinians. This has continued since then, just as the genocide and mass starvation of Palestine has. 

Wordle, of course, is just a harmless little word game. It’s pretty simple: you have five boxes for five letters, allowing you to guess one five letter word, and the game tells you by coloring the boxes in as green or yellow which letters are in the word and whether they are in the correct spot. You have six guesses total, and as long as you can get the word correctly within those six guesses, you win. It’s an incredibly simple yet powerful feat of game design, and usefully, it’s very memetic too, allowing you to share your Wordle scores simply using emojis to replicate the state of the board at your victory. The New York Times purchased the game in 2022 for a seven figure sum and it has been a staple of their games section ever since, overtaking even the popularity of their long established crossword. It has become indisputably the breadwinner for the New York Times game section.

I call Wordle their breadwinner because thanks to the New York Times purchasing it shortly after the explosion in Wordle’s popularity, they have made a lot of money off of their games and expanded their games page to follow suit. It now features several other word games like Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, and the crossword. This is important because, whether they like it or not, the NYT is a gaming company now. In 2024, many people (including Zack Zwiezen at Kotaku in April of that year) have pointed to the data gathered and created by NYT investors which shows that their gaming page now drives more traffic to their website than all of their journalism combined. This means Wordle is bringing in even more subscriptions for the New York Times, since subscribing now gives you access to their backlog of all the daily games they have been posting over the years since this pivot. They even offer a unique, less expensive Games subscription, giving you access to their archive of word games and crosswords and nothing else. The New York Times has again and again demonstrated an editorial bias toward the genocide on Palestine and Gaza that has proven destructive. None of this is even to mention their biased and false coverage on the wave of transphobia in the United States, a wave that they helped to create in the first place. They do not deserve your money, your ad revenue, your site traffic, or your time. 

I have a very very stressful and taxing job which usually involves a computer. Many – almost all – of my coworkers have played the Wordle. Most of them still do it every day, sharing and comparing their scores amongst each other in our work group chats and on their screens. At risk of being a huge killjoy, I have decided to stop using it entirely, and have recommended to some to do the same. As the BDS calls for boycotts and divestment from Microsoft for their support of Israel, Wordle is among games like Minecraft and the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater remakes which I have decided to turn away from: simple, elegant, and incredibly well designed games that are now at the mercy of publishers who elect to support genocide. It is frustrating to have to stop playing some of these, but a small sacrifice in the face of the violence these companies choose to support.

There are, thankfully, lots of alternatives. If you like crosswords and little puzzle games you can play on a laptop or desktop at work, I recommend Puzzmo! A series of puzzle games that update every day, including a crossword if you’re like me and really into that sort of thing. I really like the Flipart game on Puzzmo; you simply rotate the different shaped blocks until all of them fit perfectly into a rectangle without overlapping. It’s a relaxing bit of simple and satisfying light interaction that I could see myself doing all day. The crosswords, or “cross|words,” have a clean looking design that emphasizes when an answer is actually multiple words with thickened “space bars.” These games are each meant to be accessible, easy to understand. They’re meant to invite you in. There’s tons of games like this, including several clever word games, a poker hand building game where you try to build a 5×5 grid of poker hands which work in every direction, or “Really Bad Chess” which is just a game of chess with all the pieces in different places each day. Each game is well conceived and designed, and gives you a score so you can see where you place on the leaderboards or see some words other people found or how fast someone beat this or that puzzle. I have made a habit of checking Puzzmo pretty much every morning, and it’s been a incredibly easy way to satisfy the craving for short form daily word games.

I even like their manifesto quite a lot, which I recommend reading in its entirety. I want to quote my favorite piece of it here:

Games are people. Games are made by people, designed by people, and written by people. Games are little pieces of us that can come out and play when little pieces of you show up asking. Being together as people makes games very special.

EDIT: lol so i’ve since publishing this learned that puzzmo was kind of sneakily acquired in its infancy by hearst newspapers, one of the largest media companies on earth. this does kind of suck, and make the construction of this post really weird. im not rewriting it but i dont want to be dishonest either so here’s the disclaimer, make of that what you will.

So there’s my plea. If you care about people, and I know you do, then care about the people in Gaza, and the trans people in your life. Please don’t buy a New York Times subscription, and don’t buy a games subscription either. If you have one, cancel it! Stop giving them your money. If you’re still playing the Wordle, go play something else. Mostly anything is fine. If you absolutely need to play the Wordle, play any one of the Wordle knock offs or play Unlimited Wordle as much as you want. Play some PokeDoku! Why not. I really like Raddle, another daily word game puzzle! My friend Tess has been playing this quiz where you name every country in the world. Could be fun! I’m interested in puzzles that come from a place of love for games, for play, and for people. The New York Times, on the other hand, has made clear that their editorial bottom line is mostly concerned with death.