In 2026 we are hooked on mobile. In 1929 people were alarmed by the “addiction” to crossword puzzles
At a time when heroin and cocaine were legal tender, activists, journalists and legislators decided that what was really worrying, what was really was destroying western civilization They were crossword puzzles. Yes, as it sounds: crossword puzzles. Yesterday’s moral panics. Thanks to Jose César Peralesone of the country’s leading addiction neuroscience experts, we come to what is likely to become my favorite case of “moral panic”: the newspaper’s anti-hobby movements. Although I would have to search the monumental “Verbalia” of Marius Serra To confirm this, popular wisdom tells us that this evolution of magic square What we know today as a crossword puzzle was invented in 1913 by the English journalist, Arthur Wynne, while working on the ‘Fun’ supplement of the ‘New York World’ newspaper. where does it come from. The success of the hobby was spectacular and throughout the decade newspapers around the world incorporated it into their pages. In 1922, comic strips about people doing crossword puzzles were already circulating, and in 1924, the New York Library assured that “the latest fad to hit libraries is the crossword puzzle” complaining bitterly that “puzzle fanatics” monopolized “dictionaries and encyclopedias scaring away readers and students who need these books in their daily work.” Popularization. That library report was not something isolated. In fact, during 1924, voices of alarm against the threat posed by crossword puzzles became increasingly popular. That year, as the Harrisburg Telegraph stated“professors at the University of Michigan had banned crossword puzzles in their classes.” “Crossword addiction”. Concerned about crossword puzzle fever, the Kingsport Times-News, a Tennessee newspaper, denounced that “if legislators have acquired the habit, as they presumably have, it is difficult to see how they will find time to legislate” and lamented that “opposition to crossword puzzle addiction had not yet been organized”, although they were convinced that it would soon do so. After all, until now he had only “interfered with relatively unimportant matters”, but as the addiction grew the problems would increase. It sounds familiar to us. I have no doubt, As Perales himself pointed outthat opposition to crossword puzzles was nothing more than a “hobby” in those wonderful 1920s that blew up after the crash of ’29. That is to say, to the chagrin of the Kingsport Times-News columnist, that anti-puzzle movement was never organized (or turned into a lobby). However, it is a paradigmatic example of what moral panic is; that is, “a reaction by a group of people based on the false or exaggerated perception of some cultural behavior.” It is something that we have seen repeatedly with video games and that has become an urban myth. But it is when we see it in things like crossword puzzles (or in the dozens of examples that this “technophobia archive” has that is ‘Pessimists Archive‘) when it becomes especially evident. It’s good to remember it from time to time. In Xataka | Helping the waiter clear the table seems like a kind gesture: psychologists see something much deeper In Xataka | The mirage of the hyperpresent father: they dedicate four times more time to their children, but mothers are still on the verge of collapse In Xataka | “It doesn’t give me life”: the phrase that summarizes the vital state of an entire generation of Spaniards in their thirties Image | Ross Sneddon
