In a 2000 Wall Street Journal essay, Slate's founding Editor Michael Kinsley wrote that this here magazine once "thought of adopting the slogan 'Slate: The Thinking Person's Solitaire,' but rejected it as too honest." This is a reasonable assessment of our audience—you are reading this alone; you are brilliant—but a bit uncharitable when it comes to solitaire. The canonical single-player game is an easy punch line, most often cited as the preferred hobby of the office slacker or the intellectual playground of dullards. (George W. Bush was known to play the occasional hand while governor of Texas.) But the poor, benighted game is also—according to a Microsoft employee who worked on reprogramming it for Windows Vista—the most-used program in the Windows universe. We mock solitaire because it is our secret shame.

Though on its face it might seem trivial, pointless, a terrible way to waste a beautiful afternoon, etc., solitaire has unquestionably transformed the way we live and work. Computer solitaire propelled the revolution of personal computing, augured Microsoft's monopolistic tendencies, and forever changed office culture. It has also helped the human race survive innumerable conference calls and airplane trips. If solitaire is not the most important computer program of all time, it is at least in the top two, along with Minesweeper.