In Tuesday’s newsletter, I wrote about the comfort of a Rubik’s Cube:

When so many of life’s problems are unsolvable, solvable problems are a wonderful distraction. When so many things seem unfixable, fixing something feels amazing.

I forgot to shout-out Bernard Suits in The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia:

“Playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.”

As I wrote in my letter “Unnecessary obstacles”:

[That quote is] a favorite of philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, whose new book The Score: How To Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game both thrilled and exasperated me. I’m still processing it, and I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it later, but for now I’ll just say: I think it’s such a pleasure to see an academic write in a conversational voice and swing for the fences with a book that appeals to a general audience. “All of my hobbies involve basically micro-dosing epiphanies,” he says, and it’s hard not to love a writer who’s so passionate and articulate about his pasttimes. (See: my letter, “Your hobby looks exhausting!”)

I read so much about play and games while I was writing Don’t Call It Art, but a lot of it didn’t wind up showing up. Writing is weird!