Every morning my wife begins her day with a sudoku puzzle. At 6 a.m., I find it tremendously challenging to read the newspaper at the same time I’m tipping a cup of coffee to my desperate lips without sloshing the coffee onto the couch. But as I struggle to regain consciousness, there Karla sits, pencil in hand, brow furrowed, blowing away number puzzles of the “hard” or “fiendish” variety. To be frank, I’d rather launch the day by driving a steel spike into my forehead, but to each his own. Karla’s fanatical devotion to sudoku—​may I use the word “addiction”?—should have put me on notice. I should have known how some readers of The Week would react when, to make room for an altruistic new feature called “Charity of the week,” we pulled our own sudoku off the Puzzle Page. Gadzooks! Now I know how Hosni Mubarak felt when he noticed 500,000 very ticked-off people massing in Tahrir Square.
Every single day, the e-mails have hit my in-box like brickbats. “How could you?” “Don’t you know that sudoku is the perfect way to finish the experience of reading the magazine?” “Are you insane?” Yes, evidently, we were insane. But my medication has kicked in, and starting with this issue, the sudoku is back on the Puzzle Page. “Charity,” meanwhile, has found a new home on the Making Money page, on the logic that once you’ve made it, you can give some away. Now, please: Call off the rebellion. Tell those nice young men with rocks in their hands to go home. The people have spoken! If you just clear the square, we’ll never again trample on the inalienable right to solve sudoku puzzles. I swear.
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