Crazy about Crosswords

I am absolutely obsessed with crossword puzzles. I think the New York Times mini puzzles are great, and I see people doing them a lot, but I’m fortunate enough to have a personal subscription, and I take pride in my 12-minute times doing the full-sized Mondays and Tuesdays. 

For the uninitiated, every day the New York Times posts a new crossword puzzle. They increase in difficulty as the week progresses with Mondays being the easiest. There’s a common misconception that Sundays are the hardest, but from what I’ve found online, that title belongs to the Saturdays. 

As of right now, the farthest I've been able to solve without the autocheck feature has been a Wednesday, but I’d like to challenge myself this year to solve every puzzle for a whole week. You may be wondering what the difference in difficulty is between, say, a Monday and a Thursday. Well, it’s steep.

That’s not meant to say every Monday clue is easy or every Thursday clue is as ambiguous as MEDALS (em ee, Emmy, medals are awards). There’s a lot of variation in the puzzles but what remains constant are the names attached to them. While they have guest writers who submit the initial puzzle, Joel Fagliano and Will Shortz are the editors for every single one. 

The backstory here is that Shortz, whose Wikipedia page is definitely worth a search, graduated from Indiana University as the only known person with a degree in enigmatology. He literally majored in puzzles. If you’ve ever seen the printed versions of crosswords, often compiled into books, Shortz’s name is definitely attached somewhere. However, in February of 2024 he had a stroke which prevented him from contributing to the puzzles. Luckily, Joel Fagliano stepped in and has been working on them since March. I haven’t noticed any sort of decline in quality so as long as either of them are displayed as editors, you know you’re getting a good puzzle. 

I recommend doing crossword puzzles, both online and on paper, as a hobby. It’s so much fun to take the time you have and work at a clue, and when you finally crack it, the relief you feel is euphoric. There’s nothing like looking back at a completed puzzle and knowing that no matter where you look, you can follow an answer and have it make sense with the clue it corresponds to. I know there are free crosswords online too. I’m loyal to the NYT, but you don’t need a subscription to enjoy the magic of the puzzles. Any crossword will do. Look out for ARIA, ERE, and ERA to populate those puzzles. Once you’ve done a few, you’ll recognize clues being reused which I think is reassuring because I always know that I’ll have something on the grid.