RIP Name Drop

For a couple of years, The New Yorker Magazine had an online puzzle that I kind of loved. Name Drop was published every weekday and readers had 100 seconds and six clues to identify a mystery person, someone from the arts, history, or politics. The fewer clues it took to guess the person, the more points awarded, and there was also a witty bit of praise (Congratulations, George and Amal would be impressed!) or reproach (Just think if today were opposite day, you’d have the highest possible score.), depending on one’s results. 

Here’s an example: 

Clue 6: My album “Van Lear Rose” (2204), which I released at the age of seventy-two, was produced by the White Stripe’s Jack White, who was forty-four years my junior.  

Clue 5: In a feminist anthem that was reportedly banned by dozens of radio stations in the seventies, I sing, “This old maternity dress I’ve got is going in the garbage/ The clothes I’m wearing from now on won’t take up so much yardage.”  

Clue 4: I was close friends with Patsy Cline before her untimely death; I named one of my daughters after her, and, in 1977, I released the tribute album “I Remember Patsy.”  

Clue 3: My sister, Crystal Gayle and I performed a duet medley with the Boston Pops Orchestra in 1989, which included portions of my songs “We’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” and “You Ain’t Woman Enough (to Take My Man).  

Clue 2: Sissy Spacek won an Oscar for playing me in a 1980 bio-pic which shares its name with a 1970 hit in which I sing about my humble upbringing in Kentucky, in “a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler.”  

Clue 1: I was a country singer whose hits included “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (with Lovin’ on Your Mind),” “The Pill,” and my signature song, “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” 

Not to brag, or maybe to brag a little bit, but I nailed that one on question 6, to which the game replied, “Congratulations you are officially the smartest person who ever lived.” 

In addition to the challenge of the trivia quiz, not surprisingly, I often learned new things about these folks, and sometimes I even learned about people I was not familiar with. The game also revealed my cultural and generational bias; more often than not the subjects I could not identify were people of color, especially young people of color. Even so, it felt good to own up to that shortcoming and work in the smallest of ways to overcome it. 

Clue 6: The street formerly known as Congress Parkway, which runs from the Jane M. Byrne Interchange to Grant Park was renamed for me in 2019.  

Clue 5: After taking over as the editor of the Free Speech and Headlight, I wrote about the murder of my friend, Thomas Moss, a co-owner of the People’s Grocery.  

Clue 4: I often published under the pen name “Iola” and I’m best known by my maiden name, although I married the attorney Ferdinand Barnett, in 1895.  

Clue 3: The journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose display name on Twitter references me, co-founded a center that’s named after me at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.  

Clue 2: In 202, I was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for my reporting on lynchings across the U.S., in such publications as “The Red Record” and “Southern Horrors.”  

Clue 1: I was a journalist and activist who led the Alpha Suffrage Club, a pioneering Black women’s organization in Chicago, and I participated in the founding of the N.A.A.C.P. 

The answer? Ida B. Wells, which I could not get either the first time or, shamefully, the next time (today) I took the quiz, considering how important her work and how accomplished she was. 

Suffice it to say, that Name Drop was a fun and edifying part of my day, and so you can imagine my distress, a few weeks ago when I noticed that every time I tapped the link for the new daily quiz I was met with an old puzzle, which I knew because I recognized the clues. It took days of searching before I finally found The New Yorker’s announcement that the last new game had been published on September 8. They had ceased publication without warning or explanation, replacing it with a random generator of old quizzes. 

When confronted with this sad news, I confess to feeling a tiny void in my life, one that I have not been able to fill quite yet. I miss that little dose of biography that gave me the chance to engage with a notable individual and, humbly (sometimes), be inspired.