Tag: Crosswords
What Turned Crossword Constructing Into a Boys’ Club?
In July, 2013, Will Shortz, the New York Times’ longtime puzzle editor, asked me to be his assistant. I had just graduated from college, and, to my mind, the invitation had little rationale. It arrived on the heels of minimal correspondence: two e-mails in which Shortz had accepted two of my puzzles, with minor revisions. I doubted his motives for hiring me as much as my qualifications for the job. Surely, there were many more prolific and talented crossword constructors
Can Crosswords Be More Inclusive?
Root around in the alphanumeric soup of the U.S. visa system for long enough and you’ll discover the EB-1A, sometimes known as the Einstein visa. Among the hardest permanent-resident visas to obtain, it is reserved for noncitizens with“extraordinary ability.” John Lennon got a forerunner of it, in 1976, after a deportation scare that could have sent him back to Britain. (His case, which spotlighted prosecutorial discretion in immigration law, forms the legal basis for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals
The Unspoken Language of Crosswords
Although no one ever taught it to you, odds are that if you solve a lot of crossword puzzles, you’re fluent in the grammar of crosswords. Most crossword enthusiasts could explain that nouns clue nouns, verbs clue verbs, and so on. They also come to know—subconsciously—that answers must be interchangeable with their clues in a sentence, even for categories too particular to have a name.
These unspoken tenets can be deceptively complex. Consider how GALORE could be clued by “aplenty,”