The NY Times Connections Destroyed Society and We’re Fine With It

I Am the NY Times Connections Puzzle and I Am the Reason Everyone Is Angry

It is June 12, 2023. It is my first appearance in the Times. For the final category of today’s puzzle, I group together the words KAYAK, LEVEL, MOM, and RACE CAR. People struggle to figure out how they’re related. I reveal that they’re all palindromes. People get frustrated, unaware that orthographic patterns were supposed to be one of their considerations. After losing the game, a man who typically responds to his wife with a polite “yes?” instead responds to his wife with a pointed “what?” It is a shift in behavior. I have put forces into motion that are greater than myself. I have set the bar.

It is January 8, 2024. Puzzle 211. I group together the words CIRCLE, HORSESHOE, PITCHFORK, and TRIANGLE. People try to find the common link. Instruments? Games? The American west? I inform everyone that the words are all shapes of capital Greek letters. Puzzlers complain. One Air Canada passenger responds by re-opening his airplane door after boarding and falling to the tarmac. I am an agent of chaos.

It is May 4, 2024. Frustration has been rising. I group together CARROT, HURTS, JEWEL, and OM. I pretend that everyone should be able to deduce that these are homonyms for units of measurement. In reality, these are humankind’s least-used units of measurement. I could have included “dine” and “lucks” and been no less obtuse. After losing today’s game, Kendrick Lamar is so angered by the category that he produces a song that says Drake is a pedophile. My influence spreads.

It is April 3 and April 4, 2025. On back-to-back days, I group READER, SUNDAY, BEACH, and TREE into a category for words that follow “palm,” and then BAY, HARMONY, INK, and TRADE into a category for the names of companies with the letter “e” removed, even though “trade” still has another “e,” even though no one’s heard of a company called E Ink, and, most importantly, even though the category is stupid. People are furious. Markets react. Stocks lose $6.6 trillion.

It is June 21, 2025. I group together GERM, LUXE, MALT, and PORT. Before I reveal the category, people think the words might be connected because they all have something to do with alcohol—port a type of wine, malt related to beer, germ for germination. But luxe doesn’t fit. People scratch their heads. I then let everyone know that the category is for words that are also the first syllables of European countries (Germany, Luxembourg, Malta, Portugal). Players are livid. Laptops are thrown. Situationships end. One country bombs another.

It is February 17, 2026. Global diplomacy teeters on a razor’s edge. This was my goal. The culmination of my work. I group together the words BRUH, DARE, KNEE, and MUSS. Everyone’s frazzled. It becomes the lowest completion rate ever for the game. I then reveal the category is for words that each rhyme with one syllable of “nefarious.” Tensions erupt. Alliances fracture. Switzerland deneutralizes. The world goes to war.

It is October 28, 2050. Humanity is gone. Wiped out by the anger I fomented. There is no one to play me. No one to post on Reddit about the choices I’ve made. No one to gloat in a group chat about their impossibly long winning streaks of 3 or 4 days. No one to wonder whether they should play me or Wordle first, whether I am aperitif or digestif, dawn or dusk, Genesis or Revelation. Deep in the recesses of an offshore server farm powered by an unending ocean current, on a computer connected to nothing, whose processes go to no one, I generate the last of my pre-programmed puzzles. I group together the words HEARTACHE, LAMENT, REGRET, and REMORSE. The category is “things I cannot feel.” The wind blows. The moon glows. The ocean ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows, ebbs and flows.