IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

There is no common ground between us; consensus is dead and buried. In these trying times, however, we need something, anything, to unite us on our lowest-common-denominator instincts. My suggestion: Logging into Wordle every morning, like I do, trying to figure out what five-letter word starts with a B and ends with an L.

I know I'm not alone in my daily moment of Wordle. The free-to-play browser game has recently gone viral, as my fellow obsessives post their high scores all across Twitter and brag to their group chats about their daily successes. This all happened in short order, too: The invention of Josh *ahem* Wardle, a software designer in New York, the game began as a private contest for Wordle and his word game-loving wife; they played it together for months before releasing it to the wider world last October. At first, Wordle had a daily player count in the triple digits. Today, that number has jumped to over 300,000.

The gambit is simple. You have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. With each entry, Wordle lets you know if your characters are in the right place, if they're in the wrong place, or if they don't appear in the word at all, until the player pares down their vocabulary into a solution. (For example: You might start with "OUIJA" and move onto "HINGE," before eventually deducing "TIGER.") There is only one new Wordle puzzle a day, and old Wordles are not archived on the site. That means I wake up to a smattering of friends tweeting out their own detective journeys -- marked by mysterious green, yellow, and gray squares that correspond with their progress -- which will spur either superiority or envy. Man, my sister-in-law arrived at TIGER in only three guesses?

Tweet   @brothersjudd