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New York Times crossword answers, stats,
and observations
Each December I take a look back at the most memorable NYT crosswords of the previous 12 months and name my Puzzle and Person of the Year. Crosswords, unlike , are journeys we actively participate in, so here’s my annual travelogue. As usual we’ll start with a few puzzles that caught my eye.
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Elizabeth C. Gorski provided a treat for math geeks everywhere with this .
Kevan Choset's clever
grid required us to BUY AN E in order to finish the puzzle.
Milo Beckman implored us to
in this clever grid.
introduced JESUSFISH, at 1 Across no less, but more importantly marked the 8,000th NYT puzzle edited by Will Shortz, including 1,000 Variety puzzles. That’s a remarkable accomplishment. Congratulations, Mr. Shortz!
Ian Livengood and J.A.S.A. Crossword Class gave us . It shared an answer with one of my favorite clues of the year,
I really enjoyed this inquisitive .
Raymond C. Young became the first constructor to squeeze a .
Corey Rubin’s LARGE PRINT grid caused a lot of .
Derek Bowman became the first constructor to .
Brendan Emmett Quigley and Elizabeth Donovan had us
in this puzzle that was easier for Canadians because they’re more likely to know Pierre Trudeau’s middle name.
had an innovative use of circles in the grid. Click to read my note.
was one of my favorites. It was great fun animating the mix of red and blue, and then seeing the Color Purple emerge on its own.
A little later, I got to animate
to demonstrate the two equally-valid central answers.
When , the two co-constructors were aged 16 and 99 – a difference of 83 years. Thanks to , we can now see far more of .
Overlapping I and S or I and C is a
I’ve never seen before. I’m not sure it was completely successful but the idea is cool.
Speaking of unique, I’ve never seen anything like
before either.
Sarah Keller doesn’t get the press that some of the flashier constructors do, but this year she quietly accumulated . She’s a solid puzzle maker.
Jeff Chen’s
concept was clever. I particularly recall feeling smug when I sussed out this theme.
Ian Livengood won the first ever , marking the date that Jeff Chen truly took over XWord Info and made it his own.
John Farmer continued his string of innovative grid ideas with his
theme. It’s a rebus puzzle where numbers in the Down answers have to be interpreted as the names of people on the corresponding American banknotes for the Across answers.
Damon Gulczynski created the . While perhaps not as memorable as some of its quantum predecessors, it’s still a remarkable accomplishment.
Another high-concept idea came from famous puzzle maker Mike Selinker in . Letter O’s had to be interpreted as braille bumps to spell the secret phrase.
Kevin Christian crammed a huge amount of theme entries into
Tom Pepper and Victor Barocas . Solvers had to supply them to make the entries around the outside border make sense.
was one of my most satisfying solves of the year.
is an awesome name for what turned out to be a terrific puzzle.
Jeff Chen said constructing
was harder than pushing a boulder up a hill. After all that work, he colored all the nicely symmetric theme entries so you’d be sure to appreciate them.
Jean O’Conor fit a
into a 15x15 grid. Delightful!
I really like this
from Peter A. Collins. Note the two unchecked squares, E and F for Empty and Full, on opposite sides of the ninth row.
was a nifty trick that required reinterpreting four squares we usually don’t have to write in.
Patrick Berry casually demonstrated his complete mastery of crosswords once again with . Each theme clue described two answers, with and without two circled letters.
A different subtraction idea came from David Steinberg with his .
Jeff Chen struck again with . You had to color in the theme squares at the top to make sense of the vertical theme answers below.
Heavy bars separating answer words are common in some other venues but George Barany and Michael Shteyman
this year. Across Lite can’t handle grids like this so XWord Info provided a
for online solvers who wanted to try the puzzle as intended. That puzzle also has another of my favorite clues of 2013: “”.
Unusual grids and words
Joe Krozel constructed the puzzle with the , as well as . I particularly like the latter. He also broke , albeit by using lots of blocks.
Andrea Carla Michaels had a
for the third year in a row, this time co-written with Michael Blake.
Four puzzles had
including .
Looking at the , there were two grids this year with double quad-stacks, both by . There were four grids with single quad stacks, all by Martin Ashwood-Smith. I have no idea how he does it but I enjoy tackling these huge seas of white.
Joe Krozel’s 18-block grid has , and
by Mr. Krozel tied the record for most grid-spanning 15-letter entries: twelve!
Year 2013 saw records broken for most , , , and
in a 15x15 grid.
included , , , , , , , , , , , , , and these three all from the same puzzle: , , and& .
Constructors
Congratulations to the 6 women and 31 men who made their NYT debut in 2013. In order, they are Bruce Haight, Jim Peredo, David Ben-Merre, Jaime Hutchison, Bruce Sutphin, J. R. Leopold, Daniel Landman, Adam Prince, Michael Wiesenberg, Steve Blais, Peter Broda, Severin T. Nelson, John Lieb, Elizabeth Donovan, Jean O'Conor, Kevin Christian, Mark Bickham, Richard F. Mausser, Robert Seminara, Tracy Bennett, H. David Goering, Jacob McDermott, Sue Keefer, Mangesh Ghogre, long-time puzzle maker Mike Selinker, Evan Birnholz, Amy Johnson, Jason Flinn, D. Scott Nichols, Andy Kravis, Alan Derkazarian, Mike Doran, Tom McCoy, David Woolf, Loren Muse Smith, Greg Johnson, and Jacob Stulberg.
The most prolific constructors again this year were Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon who, as usual, had an
published every fortnight, along with two Cryptics. Fred Piscop was the
runner-up with four Diagramless puzzles. Looking at , David Steinberg led with 15. Others in double digits were Ian Livengood with 12, Patrick Berry with 11, and Elizabeth C. Gorski, Joel Fagliano, and Jeff Chen with 10.
Long time constructors who dropped off the NYT grid in 2013 include Nancy Salomon, Robert H. Wolfe, Mark Diehl, Mike Nothnagel, Nancy Kavanaugh, Tony Orbach, and Natan Last.
Personal notes
Before I get to the awards, a few personal observations.
struck a note with many readers. It generated about 30 insightful comments before the open comment period ended, and it also inspired more private correspondence than anything else I’ve ever written. Passionate mail flooded my inbox, some agreeing with me and some not. I’ve encouraged the best writers on all sides to consider publishing their thoughts. I don’t know if any will. Writing a daily blog is incredibly hard work. NYT crosswords are lucky to have so many points of view being expressed every day.
I may have mentioned this already but I have to once again thank Jeff Chen for taking over . He not only kept it alive, he turned it into a must-visit site for crossword enthusiasts with his daily commentary.
Also, thank you to the NYT Puzzle Staff who continue to go out of their way to help both XWord Info and the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project. None of this would be possible without ongoing help from Will Shortz, Ellen Ripstein, Deb Amlen, and the rest.
Ok, on to the awards!
Puzzle of the Year
This choice is often hard for me but this year, there’s one puzzle that clearly stands out. It’s the one that gave me the most pure Aha! joy when I solved it, the one I keep coming back to, the one I tell all my friends about. It’ it’s a magic trick published, appropriately, on Halloween.
The constructor David Kwong is a professional magician whose
is mind blowing.
If you somehow missed it, try solving this crossword in , or you can go straight to the .
By the way, I’m not sure how many people noticed this but
included a reference to his amazing trick.
Constructor of the Year
There was also a clear 2013 winner for me in this category. I’ve been a fan of Elizabeth C. Gorski for a while but this year, she outdid herself. She’s my Constructor of the Year.
Her ten puzzles include the fantastic , the chocolate-themed , the beautifully clever , the
for the lucky INSTANT WINNER, the ambitious
(similar themes have been tried before but never on a big Sunday grid), her , the beautifully executed , and a challenging themeless that introduced .
Even better, there were a couple of connect-the-dots puzzles, and they’re both lovely. In December we got to draw an angel in
Note how the slight asymmetry gives an impression of fluttering motion in the wings. I like
from June even more. There’s plenty of theme action and the final drawing is a thing of beauty. It might be the most successful connect-the-dots puzzle ever.
If you’re a fan too, there are plenty more Elizabeth Gorski NYT puzzles available for
subscribers to . Click the G box and scroll down until you see her name.
Even better, check out her blog
where you can get a weekly subscription to brand new crosswords sent by email.
In looking back over the past year, the books I've enjoyed the most happen to be novels and they happen to be long. Whether this is a literary trend, my own evolving proclivities, or just coincidence, I can't tell. There is one very significant exception which I'll get to at the end.
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton is absolutely extraordinary. I read it for the same reason it's probably in your bookshelf – it won the Booker Prize, now the Man Booker Prize since The Man Group became the sponsor. Over the years I've read most of the winners and many of the short-listed books. It's a good way to catch up on the latest by some of the great Commonwealth authors (next year Americans can compete!) and it tends to go to a respected, even famous, author with a long lifetime of great literature in the portfolio. This year it went to Ms. Catton from New Zealand?
Who? Don't worry, until this book showed up on the short list, nobody knew of her. She was 25 years old when she started writing this, her second novel, and by the time she was 28 she had won one of the most prestigious writing awards on the planet.
That all seems incredibly unlikely, until you read her book. Remember, this prize goes to a specific novel, not a body of work, so her thin resume doesn't technically count against Ms. Catton, but it would have to be a heck of a book to even be in the running, let alone win. It is, my friends, it is.
The book is a mystery so I'll describe what I love about it without giving anything away. Set mostly in a 19th Century New Zealand gold mining town, it exactly capture the spirit of the times. Ok, I admit, I know absolutely nothing about 19th Century New Zealand gold mining, but every note rings true. There's not a noticeable anachronism, there's not a sentiment expressed that seems out of place, there's not an obvious flaw anywhere. The writing style is precisely Victorian, told from the period-perfect omniscient narrator. Every chapter starts with an “In which…” italicized subtitle. The couple of dozen characters stay completely in character and are clearly delineated. The plot unfolds, no propels itself, in a way that is impossible to set aside.
And yet, as the story progresses, it becomes clear that this is a modern, very modern, hyper-modern novel. The author sets a very ambitious goal and, to my enchanted mind, pulls it off brilliantly. How many people can write an old-fashioned novel that happens to reinvent the art form of the novel? Maybe David Mitchell and a few others. Add Eleanor Catton.
The other two long novels are ones everyone has already been talking about, perhaps for different reasons. I loved The Secret History by Donna Tartt, was not crazy about her second novel The Little Friend, but fell right back in love with The Goldfinch. It's another explosively self-propelled plot and Ms. Tartt's mastery of writing is evident on every page. It's the most fun book I've read all year.
This last novel is cheating a bit because it's more than a year old, but it has stayed with me like few others. J. K. Rowling's The Casual Vacancy is a heart-wrenching story. It's not an easy read. Like , it starts with an excruciating death but this time there is no easy humor to ease the shock. Instead, a complex sequence of social interactions unfold where everyone's self-guided motives combine to ensure nothing quite goes as it should. It all seems so very real. Every character is not just believable but familiar, sometimes shamefully so. I know reviews have been all over the map on this one but for me, it's not just a good book, it's a Great Book. Just know ahead of time that you're in for quite a journey.
By the way,
is a cracking good detective story too.
Finally, the exception. The Tenth of December, a book of short stories by George Saunders, is something you must read. Better yet, you must read and . The audio book is a revelation. It's narrated by the author and his quirky voice brings out the humor and the darkness, and oh my, there is plenty of both. Once again, not an easy read. I've gone back and retraced each story several times. They're kind of like magic tricks. Once they're over, you have to go back just to see how he pulled them off, and then you're even more amazed.
Some thoughts on the state of crossword discussion on the Internet
I have a confession to make – I like crossword puzzles. Ok, ok, you probably do too, but I have an even deeper, darker, &please don’t tell a soul& confession – I enjoy New York Times crosswords. Wow, I just lost most of my audience! Never mind, the rest of us can now have a quiet little chat.
If you read the popular puzzle blogs, you may quickly conclude that, at least at the NYT, the state of the art is deteriorating, that the current Editor doesn’t understand crosswords or has poor taste or has become lazy and irrelevant, that there was some long-past Golden Age when NYT crossword puzzles were noticeably better, and that the Times puzzles are right at the bottom when stacked against crosswords from all the other major venues. Any art criticism is subjective, of course, but this dour view seems to be consistently expressed or at least implied by the independent blogs and largely reaffirmed in the comments. Spoiler alert! My own subjective view is that none of that is true.
I used to blog about crosswords myself. I quit for several reasons – my aversion to hard work, my short attention span, and my myriad other life aspirations which got put on hold for too long. I also became depressed by the increasing negativity of conversation on the web. Even my website became a magnet for hate mail so I tried to shut XWord Info down. Fortunately, it got turned over to Jeff Chen instead. He's one of the most likeable people around so I thought he'd be immune. Mostly he is, but we still get the occasional unsolicited flame. Here's an excerpt from one that arrived a few days ago from a non-fan we'll call Mark:
The commentary on this site is noticeably biased, and I think you should seriously consider whether you should be commenting on the xwords at all given the main remit of your website. Read the review of today's xword from Amy and Rex. Then read yours. Ask yourself if you agree with them more than you agree with your own commentary.
I took &Mark& up on his challenge and asked Mr. Chen whether he agreed more with those other bloggers or whether he agreed more with himself. He looked at me like I was crazy.
The two blogs Mark refers to have been popular for years. Amy Reynaldo runs
which is written by a consortium of expert (meaning very fast) solvers. They typically rate puzzles numerically, often up to three significant digits. NYT puzzles languish far down the scale most days. At the end of 2012, a list of best puzzles of the year included not a single NYT crossword, notably with no comment about this omission. The year before, there was not a single year-end mention of the
which I called the best word puzzle I'd ever done. They really don’t seem to like Will Shortz crosswords over there.
They rarely hate them though. For that kind of extreme reaction, you need to turn to the other blog Mark mentioned, . It’s not clear why the pseudonymous Mr. Parker does the NY Times Crossword Puzzle since it seems to be a painful experience for him most days, or why he chooses not to blog about the puzzles he considers superior instead.
Let's look at the most recent (as I write this) NYT puzzle, the . I thought the &change the SK sounds in common phrases to SQU sounds& theme was fantastic. I was charmed by all the theme answers and in particular the last one. The first three had phrases that began with SQU and just when I confidently started the last one with SQU, I realized I was fooled as the second word began with SQU instead. I love when that happens. Going against expectations on the final theme answer is a fairly standard NYT trick, expertly executed in the . All those Qs meant there was likely going to be some compromises in the fill, but that seemed like a worthwhile tradeoff to me. Let's see what the bloggers thought.
says “this theme has a glaring problem” objecting to the twist that particularly delighted me. Her brain started hearing the theme from Psycho &because all of the theme entries are supposed to have something in common.& To my mind, the theme is perfectly consistent – SK sounds are changed to SQU sounds. Each was amusing. Why ask for more?
: &With so much symmetry in crossword puzzles, the theme ought to hew to the same model. Did the fourth theme answer's structure throw you for a loop, or did you not care?& but it still ended up as the lowest rated puzzle of the day. I gritted my teeth and headed over the Mr. Parker's site, and sure enough : &More evidence of the NYT's declining standards, and what I can only imagine is a significantly shallower talent pool than in previous years.& Ah well, you have to admire his consistency.
So, what’s going on here? One theory would have to be that I’m just wrong, I'm completely out of the mainstream, and my enjoyment of NYT crosswords merely demonstrates my shallow lack of sophistication. After all, I am decidedly not an expert solver. Who cares what I might think? That's probably the correct conclusion but just for kicks, let's explore some other theories:
Blogs are written by people who are not the target audience for the puzzles. Every blogger can solve a typical crossword in minutes and while Mr. Shortz would surely like to appeal to them as well, they're only a small slice of his very broad constituency. The remark that &I never even saw the theme until I was finished& would be inconceivable to the vast majority of solvers for whom uncovering the theme along the way is one of the central joys. Solvers include young hipsters and older retirees. They include people from New York City and others from far away, subway riders and airline captains on auto-pilot, scientists and poets, on and on.
The blogs are written by people who have done so many puzzles that they've become tired of the standard forms. Ms. Amlen dislikes vowel progressions. Ms. Reynaldo doesn't care for words that come before and after. Others disapprove of puzzles that ask you to draw on the grid, and so on. These standard forms become standard because they allow for a wide variety of creativity and while any form can become monotonous, dismissing them outright seems like saying &if I hear another symphonic movement in sonata allegro from, I’m tearing up my season’s tickets.&
Counter-intuitively, while they tire of conventions, the bloggers seem to be more conservative than I am, often dismissing crosswords that push the envelope. I think the puzzle world has a place for Brahms-like masterful executions and for brash, discordant, Mahler-like showoff pieces and for Stravinsky-like 12-tone-experiments that might completely fail but that just might point to the future of the art form.
To my mind, bloggers have an unreasonable focus on the weakest short fill entries. Of course good fill is better than bad fill but give me a great theme or an awesome themeless with a few crappy entries and I couldn't care less about the clunkers. Besides, you and I probably won't even agree on which fill is bad. In that same Daniel Raymon puzzle, Mr. Chen complained about NEWSIES and THEIST, two of my favorite answers.
There’s a tendency to equate knowledge gaps with bad puzzle-making. Mr. Shortz says his audience is well-educated NYT readers who have a wide variety of interests. Nobody knows everything but I often see my favorite answer words being decried as flaws. Just because an unfamiliar word crosses a name you don't know doesn't mean either is necessarily bad.
There is too much focus on symmetry and consistency. Artists know that balance is nice but asymmetry is often more interesting. Most grids have symmetric blocks but Mr. Shortz is willing to break that convention when he feels it is warranted. I realize opinion is divided here but I’m much happier when I can keep my Consistency Hobgoblin locked in its cage in the basement. Others keep it on a short leash or even clasped around their necks but not me. The puzzle is not better if the SQUs are all at the start or if four theme names are equally balanced between men and women, between northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere dwellers, between blondes and brunettes, between atheists and believers and whatever other arbitrary distinction you'd like to see. It's better off if the answers chosen result in the grid that's the most fun to solve. These are puzzles. They should be surprising!
There is irrational hand-wringing when made-up rules are broken. I often end up scratching my head trying to understand objections from Fiend blogger pannonica that seem completely arbitrary to me, but all the bloggers do this. Remember, there are no rules. There are some conventions but Mr. Shortz gets to do whatever he thinks will enchant his audiences. He's not &wrong& any more than Leonard Bernstein was &wrong& to start his West Side Story love song Maria with the much-maligned augmented fourth interval. Conventions can be broken at any time for any reason or for no reason. Editors don't owe us an explanation, only a finished product we can choose to consume or not.
And of course, choose to enjoy or not. Don't get me wrong. I would never imply that bloggers shouldn't express their strongest most critical opinions about any puzzle. The Internet is powered by people who can't help but express their strong and usually critical opinions and the great world keeps spinning. My opinion is no more valid and decidedly less educated then theirs, but my viewpoint is not completely without experience either. I have looked closely at every Shortz-era puzzle and now, thanks to the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project, many earlier ones. To my mind, we really are in a Golden Age of puzzles with more constructor and editorial creativity than ever before. I continue to have fun and that's the point. I enjoy crosswords from most publishers but NYT remains my favorite. I'm not smart enough to do the late-month Gaffneys. I'm not hip enough for the BEQs. I'm not educated enough for the toughest Fireballs. I love the Crossword Nation puzzles from Liz Gorski and I often enjoy CrosSynergy and LA Times. Reagle Sundays are usually fun. The NYT works just about right for me most of the time.
I can summarize in one sentence: even though most web commentary you read implies or even asserts that NYT puzzles are strapped to that famous free-falling hand basket, there's at least one small dissenting voice, mine.
What does Will Shortz like to see in a puzzle? What delights him and what are his pain points? How does he decide which puzzles to run and how much editing each needs? If you’re a solver, these are interesting questions. If you’re a constructor hoping to get another puzzle published, they’re critical.
There is a lot of commentary about crosswords on the web, and similar to the way you might choose your favorite 24-hour TV news station, you can select the crossword discussion site that matches your particular interest, level of outrage, style of humor, and so on. It’s all entertaining and mostly informative but there’s one voice that, until recently, was scarcely heard, and it happens to be the most important voice in crosswords, NYT Puzzle Editor Will Shortz.
It’s easy to see why. Most of the blogs are ruthlessly independent and an ongoing “director’s commentary” wouldn’t fit. What matters for them is the critical opinion of the bloggers, unsullied by inside influence, and the rough and tumble back and forth with the loyal fans. The few times that Mr. Shortz has ventured into responding directly to criticism in blogs like
have come across as defensive reactions based on personal frustration. They have rarely been productive. Enter .
XWord Info is decidedly not an independent blog. It’s not independent because it’s at least unofficially a part of the NYT Crossword inner circle, and it’s not a blog since there is, by design, no affordance for reader feedback through public comments. Jeff Chen recognized that this combination might provide a better home for commentary from the puzzlemaster and one of Jeff’s many innovations on the site was to provide a way for Mr. Shortz to contribute and then convince him to do so. ( has also begun to include editorial comments but, of course, not organized in a database.)
How to read Will’s notes
Will has been contributing daily comments for about two and a half months now. You can view them on each daily puzzle page () but seeing them organized is more insightful. There are several ways to do that on different variations of the XWord Info thumbnails page:
The 40 most recent .
but you can view the
and then you can navigate forward and back from month to month.
Constructors each have their own thumbnail page too (click on any constructor photo) and again, you can choose to view these with Will Shortz comments included. Here’s
with Will’s note that the colorful word F-BOMB was a close call but in the end, was deemed unsuitable, and the
where Will explains a little of why he sticks by this controversial constructor. These pages will become more interesting over time as the Will Shortz notes accumulate.
What Will’s notes tell us
NYT crosswords reflect the sensibilities and priorities of the editor and you can already tell a lot just by reading between the lines on the grids, but the Will Shortz notes on XWord Info are more explicit. Some interpretation is still required and his statements, like the constructor comments or like any blog post (including this one), can be self-serving.
Not all his comments are deep and some are more telling than others. In aggregate, though, Will’s notes tell a story of how he views the world of puzzles and his role in it. Remember, Will has to balance the desires of his whole huge audience, many of them aging, with the necessity of advancing the state of the art and bringing in new and younger fans. He is responsible for the legacy of the cultural institution that is the NYT Crossword. While I doubt he gets much explicit guidance from his corporate masters, he has to be cognizant of his role in maintaining the reputation and the style of the venerable New York Times itself. He can’t be as radical as
or as tricky as . Although he must be influenced by all manner of published opinion, he can’t, and doesn’t, bow to the whims of the most influential bloggers when he has his own legitimate and authentic view of what makes great puzzles.
Instead, he expresses his opinions eight times a week with a published puzzle that, he hopes, reflects his vision. And now, thanks to XWord Info, he can expand on that once a day and those of us who love puzzles can get a further peek into his brain.
I hate to brag, really I do, but this year I made a major contribution to the world of crosswords. All I had to do was quit trying to make a major contribution to the world of crosswords.
It's a little humbling to realize that the best thing I could do was nothing, but that's exactly how it worked out. I started
in 2007 as an attempt to archive and organize NYT crosswords, highlight ones I thought were special, and run a few interesting statistical queries. The site was moderately successful, it got lots of traffic, and importantly to me, there was an effort to display each puzzle as close to the canonical print version as possible. No other site did that. No other site tracked puzzles by constructor either. There were plenty of other unique features.
Still, the site never really became part of the daily puzzle conversation. Bloggers and commenters mostly ignored it. Traffic was steady but stuck at around 2 million hits per month. Income was never quite enough for me to quit my day job. More importantly, it continued to be work. Will Shortz and his cadre of constructors kept innovating and XWord Info had to scramble to stay on top of each new wrinkle A small contingent of readers kept insisting on telling me my site sucked for one reason or another. I assured them the web had plenty of other URLs they would enjoy visiting.
Finally, I had enough. I wanted to go back to enjoying puzzles for their own sake, so I quit. More precisely, since a few people actually relied on the site to do their jobs for one reason or another, I announced the site was shutting down at the end of this year, giving them enough time to make alternate plans.
I got a few nice emails from people thanking me for the work I'd done and one or two from people who wondered if someone else could take over the project. The scope of XWord Info is huge, though, and it uses about a dozen different technologies. Nobody sane would want to dive in.
Enter Jeff Chen. He not only wanted to take it over but since he's a writer as well as a constructor, he wanted a forum to comment on each puzzle and saw this as an opportunity. Our conversation went something like this:
Me: So tell me, Jeff, what do you know about HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, jQueryUI, C#, SQL, or LINQ? What do you know about optimizing code for the disconnected HTTP protocol, about caching strategies and performance optimizations for complex websites, or about running a web service?
Jeff: Not much. But it's all just a big puzzle, right? I like puzzles.
I was sold. I handed the digital keys to Jeff, and let him run with it.
We have a shared OneNote where I write down ideas I think might be useful, and where Jeff keeps track of questions he needs to understand, but otherwise it's his show now, and I couldn't be more pleased.
My dry old site is suddenly vital. There are well over 9 million hits a month now. In my assuredly biased opinion, it has become the best crossword site on the planet. Jeff is an engaging new voice. He adds his own commentary to every puzzle from the perspective of someone who deeply understands and who deeply loves crosswords. On top of that, he has been able to get constructor comments most days as well. (One of the standard blogs has begun doing that too. I don't think Jeff intentionally copied that idea, he had talked to me about constructor comments from our earliest conversations, so it's rather a case of simultaneous invention.)
The site now combines many of the best features of a database and a blog. There are no reader comments and there never will be on XWord Info. I like to think that benefits the other blogs because readers who disagree with Jeff will have to go elsewhere to say so. WordPlay is the most likely blog to benefit. The vast majority of non-search inbound links come from WordPlay. Very few come from other blogs.
Even better, Will Shortz contributes his own thoughts to each puzzle. That turns out to be fascinating and unique and it will be the subject of my next blog post.
This is a transcript of today’s XWord Info Press Conference. Unfortunately, due to technical issues, some of the recording has been garbled and the text is unrecoverable. We regret the error.
JH: Thank you for that kind introduction. Please, sit down, everyone. Yes, I know, I know, please sit. Thank you. Really, thank you. It's great to have a chance to address you again as XWord Info reaches yet another milestone. I'll go over all the usual details and answer all the questions you've submitted in advance and, yes, there will be a chance for additional questions at the end with the usual caveats cited in your press package. There have been many surprises this year and once again I'll give you my perspective on what that means about the current state of crosswords and the industry and where I believe we're going given new trends in newspapers, in software, in cloud services, and in mobile devices. The most fascinating and utterly surprising change has been how quickly, basically over the past few months, constructors, editors and solvers have...
At this point, a portion of the 26-minute initial remarks, as well as the first few questions, have been lost. We pick it up as the fourth question is being answered.
JH: ...some over 40,000 times with one IP address responsible for nearly 70,000 word look-ups. For reasons I mentioned earlier, I never expected that. The ability to search crosswords, Variety puzzles and a dictionary at the same time turns out to be valuable.
Q: How can you insist that XWord Info is not about crossword statistics when it so clearly is?
(Crowd murmur.)
Let me try to explain this another way. XWord Info is based on a database so, yes, there are lots of statistics that are easily available and I expose them through the UI. I happen to think many are interesting but you're free to ignore them if you disagree. The stated goal of the site, though, "to celebrate NYT crosswords and the people who create them," has nothing to do with stats. I try to have the most accurate digital representation of the crosswords, even the non-standard ones, in the belief that the historical record is worth preserving. That's why I go to the trouble of making sure that puzzles with special gimmicks — writing outside the boxes, answers that turn corners or go backwards, images embedded in the grids, etc. — are properly displayed. All rebus entries are carefully untangled. All
have correct answers. I think of myself a curator of NYT crossword art.
Q: Then why so many pages about the most Qs and fewest blocks and so on?
I happen to find these interesting. Bloggers might celebrate a new record, might mention it in passing, or might pointedly ignore it. Their job is to express opinions. My site is different. It presents the data dispassionately. The few times I editorialize are clearly marked as JNotes. If you're curious about the records, XWord Info makes it easy to find them. That kind of searching is tougher in blogs.
Q: Do you really get so much hate mail about XWord Info? That seems incredible.
That's not quite what I said. I expressed surprise at the number of people who seem to go out of their way to tell me they never use XWord Info, or who want to inform me that they've heard second hand that someone else hates it. Complaints seem to fall into three buckets:
The presumed focus on stats encourages pangrams and stacks and other supposed construction sins.
Making the data available to the public puts too much stress on absolute originality. Who cares if there was a similar theme in 1994? Without databases, nobody would notice.
Keeping even some of XWord Info outside a pay wall steals search traffic from the blogs so instead of getting thoughtful analysis and a chance to participate in a community of like-minded enthusiasts, searchers see the raw answers and go on their way. They’d rather that none of the pages were free. I do sympathize with this one, which is part of the reason I provide links to blogs. I hope to make the blogs more successful.
Q: How many of the top editors, constructors, and bloggers have XWord Info memberships?
I don’t give out any information on customers, sorry.
Q: What’s the point of XWord Info given
and several other databases already exist?
This question comes up every year. There are two main differences between Cruciverb and XWord Info. First, Cruciverb caters mostly to constructors and I mostly target solvers. There is a lot of overlap, of course, but Cruciverb has great value in many areas I don’t try to replicate. Kevin provides tips for constructors, help with grid design, identification of thematic answers, forum and email support for the community of professional and hobbyist puzzle creators, and on and on. Second, Cruciverb contains much more data since every puzzle from every major publisher is included. XWord Info focuses exclusively on NYT crosswords, including many Variety puzzles which I don’t think are found in any other database. I do have some features just for constructors like the
but most pages are for fans.
Q: So your value is that you make the puzzles, even odd ones, look pretty?
(laughter)
I suppose that’s part of it but there’s more. I show full clues and answers. I don’t think anyone else tracks lists of
and several other categories. Don’t forget the . There is a lot of great creativity there, including many of the best clues.
Q: What unique feature are you most proud of?
I think I have the only database that carefully tracks info by constructor. This is tricky since names can change over time or have alternate forms. For each Shortz-era constructor, I have lists of puzzles with thumbnails, lists of words debuted by that constructor, lifetime Scrabble average, etc. My absolute favorite page is . It’s an easy way to print out a set of older puzzles you may have missed by whomever your favorite constructor might be.
Q: What’s your role in the ?
I sit on the Board of Advisors. Will Shortz and Stan Newman are Editorial Advisors and I’m the Technical Advisor. As new, I mean old, puzzles get litzed and proofed, I host them on XWord Info. This exactly fits my goal of preserving and showcasing the art of NYT crosswords.
Q: You famously have a plugin-free Acrostic solver that works far better than the one on the NYT website. Why don’t you make it available to them?
I created it as a proof of concept for the Times. Turns out, they weren’t interested. Someone else? Yes, you at the back.
Q: What’s the single most often asked question you get asked about XWord Info?
Why don’t I make my Acrostic solver available to the New York Times.
Q: You also have a regular crossword solver written in HTML 5, right? Why can’t I use that to solve NYT puzzles?
That solver is available for constructors. When they Analyze a puzzle they wrote, they can create a link for test solvers or for the public that uses my solver. I can’t make it available for published puzzles because I don’t have permission to do so. That makes sense because NYT charges for electronic puzzle access. They finally have an HTML 5 solver of their own which is not too bad. It’s missing some important features and they haven’t figured out the perf issues yet but they’re learning to code modern websites and they’ll get there over time. They’re also helping to wean the world from the evils of Java which is a wonderful thing.
Q: What’s the point of all your gimmicks like the thumbnail tooltips?
I suppose I think they’re useful or fun. Not all browsers can show the tooltips but modern browsers do. I use tooltips to show thumbnails of the grids if you hover over dates, and constructor photos when I have them. I also use them in the grids so you can hover over squares to see the associated Across and Down clues. Some of this was just to investigate some modern programming techniques I wanted to explore for my day job. I provide ways to turn them off if they bug you. None of them work on an iPad which doesn’t handle hover states at all. Microsoft Surface tablets work fine.
Q: How do you get constructors to send you photos?
I ask for them. The nice ones oblige. I’m grateful to all who do.
Q: You spoke in your opening remarks about the future of XWord Info and some of it sounds intriguing. Can you provide some hints on the timeframe involved?
Sorry, no. We have time for one last question. Yes, you. Go ahead.
Q: You mentioned that you do analytics on your web traffic. Where do most of your hits come from?
Depends on how you look at the data but I find the breakdown by top cities interesting. Ones near the top include New York City, Chicago, Ottawa, Ashburn Virginia, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Saint Paul, Toronto, Vancouver, Mountain View, Montreal, Beijing (!), Calgary and Victoria. I’m not sure what it means that so many Canadian cities are on the list. Ok, we’re out of time. Thanks everyone. Feel free to use the comments below for additional follow up.
Every December I compile some observations on the past year of NYT puzzles. Normally, I include my Puzzle of the Year. This time, it’s a group of puzzles, and a special Person of the Year.
Let’s start with some of the puzzles that caught my eye.
Dan Schmiedeler’s
puzzle confused many solvers. The Editors of the Kansas City Star were so befuddled that they published an apology for incorrect clues, not realizing they had to substitute ALL for ONE and ONE for ALL.
A very strong contender for puzzle of the year was
by Charles M. Deber. That crossword is also notable for having a seemingly trivial but serious enough error to require a published correction.
Lynn Lempel, whose
in 2006 caused much ado, goosed the crossword community again with her cheeky
this year. The sensitive souls at
were scandalized.
Matt Ginsberg hid . Will Shortz included a note to indicate the presence of an Easter egg but it was still tricky to spot.
Jeff Chen really gets around. At least .
by Daniel A. Finan tripped people up but it’s a clever idea once you understand it.
I particularly like . The symmetry of the CROSS words is not pointed out anywhere but the attention to detail to pull it off was worth noting so I highlighted it on my site.
Another very strong puzzle-of-the-year candidate is . Every letter except the most common can be found in the grid.
Byron Walden’s
was so ambitious that experts from LitSoft (the Across Lite company) had to be called in to create the electronic version of the puzzle.
Xan Vongsathon’s
was the puzzle that generated the most confused email to me. People didn’t get it. Or they did and got to feel smug.
included all 12 pentominoes hiding in the black squares.
The Yiddish answers
are, appropriately, read right to left. We’re learning from the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project that reversal gimmicks were very popular in the Maleska era.
Ben Pall's
caused the most work for me in XWord Info in order to display it properly.
This year’s contest, , may not have been as spectacular as last year’s but it was a fun challenge.
I liked Joe DiPietro’s
for its clever visual wordplay.
Constructors
Congratulations to the 4 women and 34 men who debuted as constructors this year. In order, they are Dan Schmiedeler, Michael Dewey, Francesco Trogu, Stu Ockman, Tom Pepper, James F. C. Burns, Dave Sarpola, Steven Riley, Gregory Philip Butler, Sean Dobbin, Michael David, Susan L. Stanislawski, Neville Fogarty, Guy Tabachnick, Jules P. Markey, Kevin Adamick, Kyle T. Dolan, Eric Williams, Derik Moore, John R. O'Brien, Caleb Emmons, Pawel Fludzinski, Jim Horne, Sam Ezersky, Rosemarie Dolan, Christopher Geach, Amanda Yesnowitz, Lou Borenstein, Kenneth Leeser, Barry Haldiman, Andrew Reynolds, John Guzzetta, Peter Koetters, Erik Agard, George Fitzgerald, Zhouqin Burnikel, Don Gagliardo, and Steve Savoy.
The most prolific constructor again this year was Patrick Berry whose 15 new puzzles brings his lifetime total to 169 NYT crosswords. One I especially liked was . Peter A. Collins had an even dozen, including , and Joe Krozel and Barry C. Silk were close behind with 11 each. Long-time constructors we didn’t see all year include two super-solvers: Trip Payne and Tyler Hinman.
I can’t help it. I have a crossword database so I keep track of these things. Andrea Carla Michaels had a
for the second year in a row. A record four grids had . Five, if you count
by Ian Livengood.
have no three-letter answers. Stu Ockman had the
in one grid. An amazing . Seven puzzles were what I call
– answers go backwards or turn corners or do other odd tricks.
Constructors were hungry this year. The
was ATE with EAT tied for second.
entered the database including , , and the recent Microsoft acquisition , each of which has already been reused twice. Steve Riley blew away the old record for .
It’s time to talk about Joe
The discussion of records so far has an obvious omission. Joe Krozel is not my Person of the Year but he could be. Let’s look at what he’s accomplished.
The most famous record in crosswords is the block (black square) count, and
with 17. In another puzzle,
for fewest answer words in a grid with 52.
Then there are the stacks. Three puzzles this year had quadruple-stacks of 15-letter words: one , one , and then another .
And then, on December 29, the nearly unthinkable happened. The
appeared, created by Joe Krozel.
Every constructor tries to be creative. Everyone wants to push the limits. Joe does it like nobody else. Take a look at . Like many pioneers, he’s largely unappreciated. He gets no love from the bloggers and many solvers dismiss his prowess as cheap tricks. He’s just showing off. (Guess what. That crossword I built with Jeff Chen? I was showing off.) Those asymmetric grids are cheating! (A concept, I confess, I just don’t understand.) He breaks all the rules. (That’s a bad thing? Besides, I have news. Crosswords are like jazz. There are no rules, only what editors think will delight.)
My favorite Joe Krozel puzzle this year was a rule breaker of a different sort. You’ve heard the one about I before E except after C, right? . Joe fit in eight counter-examples with perfect symmetry.
Puzzles of the Year
I usually name a puzzle of the year but this time, like Joe, I’m cheating. It doesn’t happen every week but once again this year, my favorite solving experiences were often in the NYT Variety Puzzles. I love the Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon acrostics, and you get one every fortnight! You can , even if you don’t have an XWord Info membership. It's a good one.
I’m not sure why the Cryptic puzzles in particular aren’t more popular. They’re full of the kinds of clues bloggers often comment on. Diagramless puzzles combine wordplay with logic in a way I find especially satisfying.
Why don’t they get the same attention as the daily puzzles when they’re often more fun? I suspect it has something to do with not being conducive to speed solving, but I’m not confident that theory is valid.
Seriously, give these a chance. If you have a NYT subscription, you already have access to hundreds of them.
lists them in a nicely organized way. Click on the Across Lite links, print a few out, and solve them on paper.
or dig around the NYT archives if you don’t have an XWord Info membership.
Person of the Year
I’m trying something new this year. I want to recognize remarkable contributors to crosswords. To be clear, and fair, NYT employees or people who work for them aren’t eligible.
Crosswords don’t have a long history but it’s mostly a forgotten one. What’s more ephemeral than a puzzle printed on cheap newsprint that you solve once and then throw away? As with many art forms, the genius and effort and creativity are noticed later, after much of the work is lost.
Trying to pull together new electronic versions of all the New York Times crosswords going back to their beginning in 1942 would be completely insane. Who would be crazy enough to even attempt such a thing, knowing the data are incredibly hard to retrieve, the fidelity of the information you get is often questionable, and the vastness of the project would require organizing an army of crossword-savvy volunteers? The answer is crossword constructor and historian David Steinberg, my Person of the Year.
I’ve been a fan and supporter of
since it started but I thought their likelihood of success, at least in my lifetime, was small. And yet, as of today, they’re about 38% of the way to their goal. Awesome.
David has created crosswords for several publications, he’s now the crossword editor at The Orange County Register, he writes a blog, oh, and he just turned 16. It’s possible he has a bright future.
Correction
The original version of this post said that, along with his new record for fewest blocks and his ground-breaking quintuple stack, Joe Krozel also broke the record for fewest words. In fact,
of 52 set in 2005 by .
The JimHBlog regrets the error.
If you’re a crossword person, you probably have a notion of what Maleska puzzles were like compared to Shortz ones. Thanks to , I’ve been able to look at nearly 2,000 such crosswords going back to 1989.
It’s certainly not true that Maleska grids were devoid of playfulness or clever themes. Many outstanding puzzles would delight solvers today. It is true, though, that Maleska and Shortz have different notions of desirable or even acceptable answer words. I thought it would be interesting to see the list of common Maleska answers that never again saw the light of day in a NYT daily or Sunday grid.
The hidden words below appeared on average more than once a year pre-Shortz but never since. See how many you can guess? Click the more or less canonical clues to see the answers and all the other clues for that word. Answer length is indicated and note that answers appear in this list in alphabetical order.
(5) (singluar form is more common, )
(5) (singular form is )
(5) (Byron Walden used this one in a )
(5) (singular form has appeared )
(5) (I find this one particularly weird.)
(4) (Very popular entry in late-Maleska puzzles)
(4) (Also clued as Altman’s “Welcome ___” which at least is possible)
(4) (hmmm…)
How did you do? If enough people are interested, there’s another similar list I could create – words very common in Maleska puzzles that appeared only once or twice since.
That’s a personal question, of course, but I have a scientific way of determining which crosswords are memorable to me, and I’ve been thinking about what that means for the art form.
I’ve been solving crosswords for years but until recently, I wasn’t a particularly careful observer. Puzzles came and went, I could complete them or not, they were blasé, satisfying, or delightful. It wasn’t until five years ago when I wrote
that I started examining them more closely. As I added more and more to my database, starting from present time and working backwards, it was a chance to relive the crossword part of my life in Benjamin Button order. I was an archeologist going backwards through time as I dug through the strata of grids and clues.
Now and then I’d hit a puzzle that gave me a flash of excitement, a rush of reminiscence. That was a fun one. I remember that one! By definition, that one was memorable.
I started noticing patterns. The first was that so many of the ones I particularly recalled were by Manny Noswosky. That caused me to look more closely at those constructor names and I soon discovered several more with more than their fair share in the “memorable” pile. Elizabeth C. Gorski’s year-end Sundays were a treat I looked forward to rediscovering. I had memorized the poem in
and it became a kind of party trick.
There are many recent crosswords I’m sure I’ll long remember too:
delighted me because I love the story behind that painting. (Maybe I just like art because
also stands out.) Joe Krozel’s , and especially his
thrilled me. I’ll remember the snappy surprising answers from so many Paula Gamache or Karen M. Tracey puzzles, the beautiful grids of Frank Longo or my friend Jeff Chen, and many more for a long time. I’ve called Patrick Berry’s
the best word puzzle I’ve ever done.
What these have in common is an adventurous and surprising spirit. They make me wonder how someone thought of it. They expand my idea of what is possible to accomplish in a crossword.
There’s something that these puzzles don’t have, though. Most are missing the single ingredient that most crossword commentary (including emails I get) focuses on. They’re lacking in, for want of a better word, flawlessness. (I’ll admit Mr. Berry’s comes close.)
I’ve fallen behind in my blog reading but these are the kinds of puzzles that generally are not well reviewed. I remember commenters on Wordplay often targeted what they perceived to be the weak spot, an answer perceived to be inelegant, and disdainfully proclaimed that the whole experience was wrecked. I’ve accepted the facts that 1) I’ll never understand this, and 2) I’m in a tiny minority of people whose endorphin levels are much more highly calibrated to the ingeniousness of the breakthrough idea. Aim for the stars and if you get most of the way there, I’m a fan. A perfect jewel-box of a traditional puzzle can be satisfying but it’s not nearly the same kick. In particular, I won’t remember it years later. Give me the Thursday craziness, the fold spindle and mutilate, the thinking outside the box. Surprise me.
Thanks to the , I’m continuing to retreat further in time, back to 1990 now. The April 1 puzzle that year, “Please Think Twice!” was by Bert H. Kruse, a frequent contributor in those days, and I remember it. That’s way before NYT began making Across Lite versions of puzzles but . Maybe, like me, you’ll remember it, or at least you’ll see why it’s memorable. It’s not easy, mostly because the clues are both non-contemporary and Maleska-style (thank-you-MAAM is a road bump), but perhaps you can at least get through enough to find the Aha Moment. If you’re impatient, .
Nope, it wasn't me. I didn’t write it but I can see why you're confused.
is a way insiderly novel about people who live in the Seattle area, some of whom work at Microsoft just around the corner from my building, and maybe travel to Antarctica. If any of that describes you too, and even if not, this book is a . The details are surprisingly accurate. Oh, and funny! Yes, this is a comedy. The first one I can think of to poke fun at TED talks, which have been ripe for satire for way too long. I was giggling through the very first chapter which, by the way, is a school report card. Bonus: You even get to find out the secret code for the Microsoft Executive Shuttle Service which can whisk you around campus without ever having to wait. Not that I have ever, ever abused that knowledge.
I fell in love with two women reading this book. The author
has a sense of humor that exactly tickles my funny bone. The (fortunately!) fictional Audrey Griffin is one of my favorite characters in modern literature. Her stubborn adherence to her own skewed world-view in the face of all evidence to the contrary is enchanting. You Go Girl, as they used to say, for reasons that escape me now.
Given that I love this book, what
tell me I should read next? A huge part of Amazon's success is that it learns about your literary drugs of choice, and then offers complementary highs. Their famous secret recipe of 11 different algorithms and spices is magically delicious. Except when it's not.
I decided to accept the first recommendation Amazon gave me, and downloaded , purposely avoiding any reviews or even information about the author, one Rachel Joyce. Bingo! Amazon was right. I can't imagine what the two books might have in common or why people who bought one might enjoy the other, but I'm a person who bought one and enjoyed the other, so clearly Amazon is smarter than me. “Harold” is a gentle, very English, surprisingly affecting novel. I'll say no more so you can have a similar experience if you like.
This game is fun! Let me type &Harold Fry& into
search box and see what else I can find. Let's see. The first two hits are the Rachel Joyce novel in molecular and electronic forms. Then there's something about a lighthouse and some other novels that don't seem related but might be somehow. And then, … What? Oh my, Uh, forget what I said. Please Do Not attempt that experiment.
I hope no kids are reading this post!}