![]() ![]() All the constructors I spoke to praised him for elevating the Times puzzle to its current station. ![]() “Gangsta rap characters” were THUGS.īut Will Shortz, the Times puzzle editor since 1993, is an icon for a reason. A recent clue for the answer HAREM was “Decidedly nonfeminist women’s group,” and the clue “Exasperated comment from a feminist” led to the answer MEN. It’s been accused of tone deafness on issues of race and gender. It’s not just that the Times puzzle is staid, or geared toward olds. It was like, what if you made a crossword about rap, or something? That felt really radical at the time.”Ĭriticism of the Times puzzle seems to have expanded of late, beyond the stylistic and into the political. “Crosswords were staid, you know? As much as I enjoyed them, there was always this feeling that the voice of the Times was not my generational voice. These sylvan constructors could rewrite the stylebook. A risky proposition, but one that came with aesthetic upside. “Papers were dying, papers were dropping their crosswords.” And so some crossword designers decided to go it alone. Over (craft) beers recently, Ben Tausig, 1 the editor of the acclaimed indie American Values Club crossword, reflected on the early days of indies, over a decade ago. ![]() With few exceptions, all daily Times puzzles use 15-by-15 grids with rotational symmetry, a convention indies can and do break. Nor are they subject to the physical constraints of a major newspaper. Topics and themes, however recent, modern, niche or profane, are fair game. They also aren’t subject to the stylistic constraints of a large media institution. Indie puzzles don’t have to wait months in a publication queue, as they would at the Times. “My favorite thing about indie puzzles is the timeliness,” Neville Fogarty, an avid indie solver who helped found the Indie 500 crossword tournament, told me. The Times is a Budweiser lager the indies are small-batch saisons and IPAs. “I think of the indie world like we’re all craft beer brewers,” Brendan Emmett Quigley, a professional puzzle constructor, told me. And some of them can outrate the gold standard over at the Times. A vibrant ecosystem of independent crosswords - “indies” - exists on the internet, its component puzzles multiplying and evolving, finding their niche and trying to find ways to survive. Yet while BuzzFeed’s puzzle revolution fizzled, a devoted band of ragtag agitators remains devoted to the cause. “BuzzFeed Is Revolutionizing the Crossword Puzzle,” an Observer headline declared last year. There was hope, given BuzzFeed’s large amounts of traffic, that it would serve as a meaningful competitor to the starchy, hegemonic New York Times crossword. The BuzzFeed crossword, which launched in October, promised a millennial upheaval to the musty crossword genre: an internet-native, slang-fluent, pop-culture-obsessed puzzle aimed at young solvers. Its editor, 23-year-old puzzle wunderkind Caleb Madison, for whom this was his first job, left the company to strike out on his own. To a much quieter dirge, the BuzzFeed crossword puzzle published its final edition this month. Gawker wasn’t the only irreverent, iconoclastic internet media property to say farewell recently. ![]()
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