Short Stuff: The NY Times Crossword

it's about all crosswords. Yeah, I want to see that. It's called word Play. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah. Sure. Jon Stewart's in it. He's a crossword fanatic, did you know. Yeah, a lot of people I know are crossword fanatics. Kim Jennings, of course, as you would imagine, is quite good at the New York Times Crossword A little on the nose if you ask me, Yeah, what is that guy not good at? Right? Um, podcasting, he's good at that. He's good at everything, good at talking to strangers the time

that I met him. Sure. Anyway, So one of the people who's in that documentary Chuck is Will Shorts, and Will Shorts has kind of become a legendary figure in the crossword community and even beyond, frankly, because he is just a straight up, interesting, neat kind of Um. I want to say comforting, and it doesn't feel like the right word, And when I'm describing a crossroad puzzle editor, I feel like I should have exactly the right word,

but comforting still works. He's just a cool dude. But he is the current editor of the New York Times crossword Puzzle, and he has basically taken it and catapulted it into international fame. It's like the crossword Puzzle thanks in large part to his efforts. Yeah, if you want to go back in time, though, it's pretty interesting in that The New York Times was the very last major daily metropolitan newspay for in the United States to start

a crossword puzzle. They were really popular all over the country, uh, starting in about nine and The New York Times even came out and was like, you know what, here's a quote for you, the latest of the problems presented for solution by psychologists interested in the mental peculiarities of mobs and crowds. That's what a crossword is going to do for you? No idea what they meant by that one. Well, they were just saying it's sort of base, uh, entertainment

and knowledge. I think I'm gonna have to go back and reread it. That's fine, but I'll take it. I'll take it on space. You know what I'm reminded of now when I think of crossroad puzzles as Rupert Sheldrake's theory that crossroad puzzles get easier to solve as the day goes on because of everybody's collective consciousness. Yeah, I'm

sure that's the case. So it is pretty surprising that The New York Times pooh pooed crosswords as fooi for twenty years easily by almost twenty years, um, maybe fifteen, So that crossword craze starts in the New York Times didn't finally published one until the beginning of World War One. No, I think it was probably World War two. What did I say? He said? World War one? Yeah, so the New York Times went back in time to beat everybody. So sorry, it was World War two when they adopted it.

So about fifteen years after the craze started, they held out and then finally, as the legend goes, the Times editor Arthur Sulzberger. Um. He he was tired of buying the New York Herald or note the Harold Tribune so that he could play their crossrood puzzle or do their crossrood puzzle. He wanted the Times to have its own, and he finally said, fine, we'll publish a cross world Yeah. I get the feeling. His name, his nickname was selzie m h. Yeah, Arthur Salzi Sulzberger. Yeah, it's the beginning

of World War two. And basically the thought was, besides the fact that he wanted one, is that you know, all we're doing is talking about World War two. Maybe a crossword puzzle is finally a good idea to kind of get people's mind off of things. So you over there, miss Margaret Ferrar, why don't you be our very first crossword editor. Uh, because you have been editing all these books, crossword books that Simon and Schuster has been putting out since right, and to get everybody's minds off of it.

By the way, make sure that the crossword puzzle answers and clues have to do with the news that are in that day's newspaper, which all happened to be about the war and the lead up to war. And so Ferrar was like, all right, you know what, I'm a crossword legend already. I'm going to I'm gonna make this one right. And she really did. She had like really

really great crosswords that she edited. Um and she pushed back I think fairly quickly on that idea that it needed to reflect the day's news and said, you know what, I think it needs to do the opposite that I think we need to um get references from literature, from popular culture, from um, just about everything but the day's news so that people can use the crossword as an escape, and managed to establish the New York Times crossword is

basically the preeminent crossword in the world. Yeah, and she did. Uh. She did this for twenty seven years, from forty two to sixty nine, which is a very long run, that's right. And it was a big, big hit, like he said. And then in nineteen sixty nine Mr will wang Uh succeeded her, and he I think was the head at the Metropolitan desk at the Times. Then he took over

as crossword editor. He was a little bit more of a of an old fashioned newsy type, but he did love crosswords and he had been writing these crosswords for a long time for the Times, and they finally said, bring your great sets of humor over here and become the editor. Yeah he was apparently, like the Times, crosswords were never funnier than when will Wang was editor. Lots

of pants dropping jokes, just super seventies stuff. You know, Ziggy made an appearance almost every day, and nothing's funnier than Ziggy. Right, So, um, Will Wang kind of had this, uh the paper under or the crossword under his wing for seven years, I think under Yeah, yeah, I didn't even mean to do that. That's a great example. So seven eight years he was the editor of the cross Word. Um, and then he was succeeded by a guy named Eugene

Ti Moleska. And if there's ever been a crossword editor who deserved a cliffhanger more than Eugene tie Moleska, I've never met one. We'll be right back alright, Chuck. So how does it? How does it end with Eugene tie Meleska. So Gene Moleska is running the show now, and the puzzles become a little more varied a little more sophisticated uh more word play, but not as much of a sense of humor. I get the sense from when Wang

was doing it. He was a school superintendent in the Bronx. No, he was an opera classical music and it was just a little more serious in tone than Wangs were. Yeah, I mean all you have to do is say opera and classical music enthusiast editing a crossword puzzle, and that's you know, polar opposite of of Wang. Yeah. So Eugeneie Moleski does a fine job. He did it for many many years, from um, nineteen seventy seven until I think

ninetee and um uh then Will Shortz comes along. And from everything I can tell after reading this and seeing Will Shorts in that documentary word play, he's a like a perfect combination of every previous New York Times crossword editor that came before him, Like he's all of them rolled into one. He's, you know, very sophisticated. Um, he has a lot of culture like Moleska. He's got a sense of humor like Wang. He's um really into crosswords and knows how to make him great. Like Ferrar, He's

he's just like the the whole package. Like I I didn't realize it until this moment. I'm a Will Shorts fan. I don't even do crosswords all that often. Yeah. The big thing that Shorts did, uh, and then he has kind of become known for is is modernizing it some and bringing a more youthful tone to it. It was kind of seen as like an old person's thing to sit around and do the cross words. Well that was

in large part thing to Molaska, oh for sure. So uh, Shorts comes along and he's like, you know what I'm gonna do? And this is something I didn't even know. I didn't know that regular people just write these things out and submit them, which is an amazing fact. If you did not know that, I knew that. I knew that. Do you know why? Because a stuff you should know, a listener does words searches and they submit them. Remember that they did a stuff you should know word search

and I think it was in USA today. Oh cool. Yeah, Well, Shorts came along and said, we need a younger voice in here, and so uh, I think only six teenagers previous to Shorts had ever gotten puzzles published. In his

twenty five years. He has published thirty seventeen agers and the average age has gone Uh, I think down and you know, of course he still has the oldest person a hundred and one years old, but the the average age of contributor has now come down to UM has come down fifteen years from the early fifties to about the thirties. Right, So that's I mean, that's that reflects

an enormous change. Like the people who are creating these crossroom puzzles are the ones who, um, who actually map out the puzzle, figure out the answers, right, the clues and the choices they're going to make are going to reflect their age group a lot more so, just by virtue of selecting puzzles that are written by a slightly younger group of people, they're going to be a lot more modern and current and um more accessible to a larger group of people. Yeah. So they get about seventy

hundred submissions a week. Uh. If you're building your own crossword puzzle, you probably are not using graph paper like they used to do. You're probably using a computer program to help you out. I'll bet some hipsters who hire artism pencil sharpeners do graft papers still Yeah, they're getting their pencils from David Reese. So this is pretty interesting to me when you're making a puzzle, and I guess this kind of makes sense, um, kind of like there's

one way to build a boat. You put your theme answers in the grid first, and then you put your little black squares and plot it out out and divide it into your sections, and then you write the clues. Yeah, so you basically reverse engineer the puzzle, starting with the words, then the black spaces, then the clues. I had no idea. I've been doing it wrong. I start with the black spaces, then the clues, then the words. It rarely works out. Have you ever tried to write one? No? No, I know,

I really don't think so. You know that part of your brain that inserts false memories when you want to answer yes to something, that that part of my brain like was just an operation. And I said, no, no, brain, you're wrong. You've never tried to do a crosswords. You never tried to make a crossword from scratch? Shut up. Yeah, I enjoy crosswords, but I don't seek them out. I'm not an enthusiast. Um. There was when I was in college.

I would do the one from the Red and Black every day, and then when I fly on Delta, I will do the one in the Sky magazine if it's filled out. Yeah you mean. And I UM went on a little kick where we were doing crosswords, and we bought a Chicago Tribune book of crosswords. It was like pretty much up our alley. Supposedly the New York Times is um. They they it is well known as a very difficult crossword, but that over the span of the week it actually gets progressively harder, which I didn't know.

Did you know that? Yeah? I didn't know that. That's one of the few things I knew because I know that the UM. I always thought the Sunday when was the kuda grab. Apparently the Saturday is the most difficult. The Sunday is larger, but it's more like a Wednesday or Thursday on the easy scale. So I guess that's what I thought was it was bigger, so it was harder, not that there was just more to it. But yeah, the Saturday is the hardest and then Monday's the easiest.

That's right. And now that they're online, of course, you can subscribe only to the Times Crossword and they have close to a half a million people that subscribe just to the crossword and apparently it's a it's a pretty decent source of income for the paper sailing New York Times. Does people pay a million dollars a year for that subscription. It's amazing. It's a lot of dough way to go, will shorts way to Go. And by the way, if you're into crossword puzzles at all and you haven't seen

Wordplay yet the documentary, go see it. Um And since I said that it's short stuff away Stuff you should Know is a production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts. For My Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.