The Puzzler: One Man's Quest to Solve the Most Baffling Puzzles Ever, from Crosswords to Jigsaws to the Meaning of Life

distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Puzzles have definite answers. When you’re trying to answer that crossword clue, you know the kind of answer you need, even if you don’t know what it is yet. Even when you don’t know the answer, you know the question, and you know that a corresponding answer exists. Puzzles are orderly; they have a beginni

The pattern continued for every genre of question. Pressed to make conceptual groupings—akin to the similarities questions on IQ tests—remote villagers reverted to practical narratives based on their direct experience. When psychologists attempted to explain a “which one does not belong” grouping exercise to thirty-nine-year-old Rakmat, they gave h

The idea of Solution was that if you asked questions and didn’t keep mindlessly building widgets, your score would be lower, but you would find out you were working in a factory that supplied machine parts to the Third Reich. Once you had this information, you could potentially slow your output. You could make the bare number of parts required not

Puzzles offer us the satisfaction of answering a question even while you’re missing the point completely. A society or an organisation that thinks only in terms of puzzles is one that is too focused on the goals it has set, rather than on the possibilities it can’t yet see.