Cracking the Code of Female Loneliness

I’ve been amused by recent reports of the deciphering of the fourth message embedded in the artist Jim Sanborn’s encrypted sculpture Kryptos, which has been on display at the CIA headquarters since 1990. Three of its messages have already been solved using complex cryptographic techniques. The fourth and possibly final code was cracked by the writers Jarett Kobek and Richard Byrne. Far from bumbling onto the solution, they uncovered the code, which most everyone else had overlooked, in a text that was perhaps accidentally discarded in the Smithsonian archives. After Kobek and Byrne’s discovery, they were subjected to merciless attacks on their motives, their qualifications, and their method of completing Sanborn’s puzzle piece. Much of the outrage was triggered by the fact that Kobek and Byrne are, after all, primarily writers! Who are they to solve what far more qualified cryptographers had not?!