Welcome to Words With Friend

Hi! Welcome to Words With Friend, a place where you’ll find words (duh), eats (mmm), and other cool shit (tbd).

A moment on the name: Senior year of high school, we all used to change our Facebook names (it was still Facebook back then) to punny phrases that helped “hide our inappropriate photos” from colleges who might be stalking us on the Internet. For example, someone named Jenny Campbell might change her name to “Campbell TomatoSoup.” Around that time, the digital Scrabble game Words With Friends became popular. I played a lot — in between classes, as a distraction from homework — and found inspiration within the game for my own senior Facebook name: Wordswith (all one word) Friend (get it?). A hat tip to that game for providing me with a second round of inspo, this time for this very newsletter.

Last weekend, I re-downloaded Words With Friends to see if it was still as fun as I remembered. IT WAS STILL AS FUN AS I REMEMBERED. I stayed in bed for like an extra hour playing. And, well, I think I’m officially in my Games Era.

You know how in Cinderella, when the clock strikes midnight, her gown turns into rags as she flees the ball, losing the glass slipper that launches the prince himself on a whirlwind chase for his one true love? When the clock strikes midnight in my life, I open the New York Times Games app to play the next round of Connections.

If you’re still with me after that change-up of a paragraph and you’ve never played Connections, don’t (!!!!) stop reading this to go try it out. Do that at the end though, and let me know if you love the game as much as I do.

This silly little game, in which you’re given 16 words and have to form four groups of four “connections” that tie specific words together, has become an actual connector in my life. Every morning, I wake up to a series of Connections-related texts: from my parents; from my best friend in LA, from a group chat made up of my boyfriend, his cousin, and his cousin’s girlfriend…the list goes on.

It’s a self-indulgent game at heart — at the end of the day, you’re competing against your own brain. But Connections would be nothing if you didn’t commiserate when the house wins, complaining with everyone about how hard the puzzle was that day, or gloat when you get a perfect score, thriving off the high of impressing everyone with how smart you are.

For me, Connections is about community, which is something I’m always looking for more of. If you are too, I hope this newsletter becomes a place you turn to for everything from cookie recipes and Rome recs to hosting tips, hot takes, and a Very Biased List of my favorite burgers in New York. 

Did I mention I’m in a burger club? More on that (and a whole bunch of other stuff) later.