Popular (and good)

Popular is easy to measure. Good, not so much. Setting out to make something popular requires only a focus on the crowd and on the moment. Most pop music is popular simply because that’s what it was built to do. Good work can be good without being popular. And so the two goals aren’t easily

Read More

A nearly perfect score

After playing 498 days in a row, my score today in Bongo was the second-highest in the world: There’s a difference between casual online games that have a right answer, and those that are open-ended. In crossword puzzles and most of the games from the Times (like Wordle and Connections) you’re trying to guess what

Read More