These are the slides of a talk I gave in the UT Odyssey public lecture series in 2007. It was a partly historical talk on the way certain puzzles seem to grab the public’s attention and become an obsession for a period of time, Rubik’s cube being a classic example of the recent past. Another wildly popular puzzle was the Famous Trick Donkeys 1858 puzzle by Sam Lloyd. The original links on the slides don’t seem to work anymore.