When you've polished the puzzle to the best of your ability, you write the clues. When making a puzzle, you put your theme answers in a grid first, plotting black squares around those, which divides the grid into sections, which are then filled with words. These days, most crossword puzzles have themes, which means the long answers tie together in some interesting way. Shortz and his two assistants get between 75 and 100 puzzle submissions each week, which they look through, cull to select the best ones, then edit for publication. Shortz, you might have gathered, does not construct the puzzles himself, though he does create variety puzzles - unique and new variations in crosswords. "It reflects The Times readership itself." "It's an extremely diverse group of people who make The Times crossword," says Shortz. The youngest person Shortz has published was 13, the oldest person was 101. The average age of contributors has come down by about 15 years - from the early 50s to the late 30s. In Shortz's 25 years as puzzle editor, he has published 37 teenagers and lots of 20- and 30-somethings. In the whole history of the puzzle before Shortz became editor, only six teenagers had gotten puzzles published in The Times. But Farrar thought the crossword should distract people from the harsher aspects of life, which is why, over time, she began to include more entertainment, literature and non-news subjects. At the start, she was given the directive that the puzzle should reflect the information the reader was picking up in the pages of the newspaper - so if you go back to those early puzzles, you'll see a lot of war references. Margaret immediately raised the quality of the crossword above anyone else's - the intellectual calibre of the puzzle, the cultural references and just the quality of the puzzle-making: more interesting vocabulary and fresher, more on-target definitions."įarrar was The Times crossword editor for 27 years, from 1942 to 1969, and the puzzle evolved a bit over that time. She had co-edited all the Simon and Schuster crossword books going back to the very first one in 1924. So, The Times had the good sense to ask Margaret Farrar to be the crossword editor. "It was the start of World War II, and it was thought that people needed to take their minds off the grim war news. "The probably apocryphal story is that Sulzberger was tired of buying the competing New York Herald Tribune to get their crossword," says current New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz. The holdout of The Times might have had something to do with the fact that it had never done comics or entertainment features of any sort - the fun stuff was considered frivolous by its editors. Simon and Schuster published the first crossword puzzle book that year, and most American newspapers started a crossword between 19. When the crossword puzzle craze gripped the United States in 1924, the paper publicly condemned the fad, publishing a scornful editorial in which it called crosswords the "latest of the problems presented for solution by psychologists interested in the mental peculiarities of mobs and crowds." Which was a pretty sick burn back in 1924. Strangely enough, The New York Times was the last major metropolitan daily newspaper in the country to start a crossword. Pushing 80 years old, The New York Times daily crossword in particular is an American institution. It's relaxing, fun to do alone or with a buddy, and research shows it's good for your brain. If you don't enjoy solving crosswords, your friends or coworkers, parents or grandparents might. These days, lots of people solve the puzzles online or electronically. It used to be a major challenge to try and solve the Sunday puzzle in pen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |