Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum. Here, we have a subset of folks around
Speaker 1: the office who love crosswords. It's a favorite happy hour
Speaker 1: pastime for a few of us. Solving these puzzles can
Speaker 1: be relaxing, fun to do alone or with a buddy,
Speaker 1: and research shows that it's good for your brain and
Speaker 1: pushing eighty years old. The New York Times Daily Crossword
Speaker 1: in particular, is an American institution. Strangely enough, The New
Speaker 1: York Times was the last major metropolitan daily newspaper in
Speaker 1: the country to start a crossword. When the crossword puzzle
Speaker 1: craze gripped the United States in nineteen four, the paper
Speaker 1: publicly condemned the fad, publishing a scornful editorial in which
Speaker 1: it called crosswords the latest of the problems presented for
Speaker 1: solution by psychologists interested in the mental peculiarities of mobs
Speaker 1: and crowds, which was a pretty sick burn. Back in
Speaker 1: Simon and Schoose published the first crossword puzzle book that year,
Speaker 1: and most American newspapers started a cross word between nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty four and nineteen twenty six. The holdout of the
Speaker 1: Times might have had something to do with the fact
Speaker 1: that it had never done comics or entertainment features of
Speaker 1: any sort. All that stuff was considered frivolous by its editors,
Speaker 1: but the crossword had staying power, and at the beginning
Speaker 1: of World War Two, the then editor of The Times,
Speaker 1: Arthur Sulzberger, decided it was time for the paper to
Speaker 1: start its own puzzle. We spoke with the current New
Speaker 1: York Times crossword editor Will Shortz. He said, the probably
Speaker 1: apocryphal story is that Saulsberger was tired of buying the
Speaker 1: competing New York Herald Tribune to get their crossword. It
Speaker 1: was the start of World War Two and it was
Speaker 1: thought that people needed to take their minds off the
Speaker 1: grim war news. So the Times had the good sense
Speaker 1: to ask Margaret Ferrar to be the crossword editor. She
Speaker 1: had co edited all the Simon and Schuster crossword books,
Speaker 1: going back to the very first one in four. Margaret
Speaker 1: immediately raised the quality of the crossword above anyone else's,
Speaker 1: the intellectual caliber of the puzzle, the cultural references, and
Speaker 1: just the quality of the puzzle, making more interesting vocabulary
Speaker 1: and fresher more on target definitions. Farrar was the Times
Speaker 1: Crossword editor for twenty seven years from nineteen forty two
Speaker 1: to nineteen sixty nine, and the puzzle evolved a bit
Speaker 1: over that time. At the start, she was given the
Speaker 1: directive that the puzzle should reflect the information that the
Speaker 1: reader was picking up in the pages of the newspaper.
Speaker 1: So if you go back to those early puzzles, you'll
Speaker 1: see a lot of war references. But Farrar thought the
Speaker 1: crossword should distract people from the harsher aspects of life,
Speaker 1: which is why over time she began to include more entertainment, literature,
Speaker 1: and non news subjects. Farrar was succeeded in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: nine by Will Wang, who was the head of the
Speaker 1: Metropolitan desk at The Times before he took the job
Speaker 1: of crossboard editor. Wang was an old fashioned newsman, but
Speaker 1: he had an abiding love crosswords. He had been creating
Speaker 1: puzzles for The Times for years before he became editor.
Speaker 1: Shorts said his greatest innovation for The Times Crossword was humor.
Speaker 1: He was a genuinely funny man, and his sense of
Speaker 1: humor came through in the puzzles. When retired in nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy seven and was succeeded by Eugene T. Moleska. I'd
Speaker 1: say the word play in the crossword themes became more
Speaker 1: varied and sophisticated. Under Moleska, it became more a word
Speaker 1: game than in previous years. But Moleska was a staid guy.
Speaker 1: He had been a school superintendent in the Bronx. He
Speaker 1: loved opera and classical music, and his puzzles had a
Speaker 1: more serious tone than will Wang's. Schwartz became Crossword editor
Speaker 1: in ninetee when Moleska died, and one of his goals
Speaker 1: has been to modernize the puzzle to include more current
Speaker 1: cultural references, more update language, and more playful themes. And
Speaker 1: the audience has broadened under Shorts. He said, it used
Speaker 1: to be you'd think of cross words as being mainly
Speaker 1: for older people, and I think that was true before
Speaker 1: I became editor. I can tell how the audience has
Speaker 1: broadened just of the people who contribute to the puzzle.
Speaker 1: In the whole history of the puzzle, before Shorts became editor,
Speaker 1: only six teenagers had gotten puzzles published in the Times.
Speaker 1: In Shorts's twenty five years as puzzle editor, he's published
Speaker 1: thirty seventeenagers and lots of twenty and thirty some things.
Speaker 1: The average age of contributors has come down by about
Speaker 1: fifteen years from the early fifties to the late thirties.
Speaker 1: The youngest person Shorts has published was thirteen, and the
Speaker 1: oldest person was a hundred and one. Shorts said, it's
Speaker 1: an extremely diverse group of people who make the Times Crossword.
Speaker 1: It reflects the Times readership itself. Shorts, you might have gathered,
Speaker 1: does not construct the puzzles himself, though he does create
Speaker 1: variety puzzles, unique and new variations in crosswords. Shorts and
Speaker 1: his two assistants get between seventy five and one hundred
Speaker 1: puzzle submissions every week, which they look through call to
Speaker 1: select the best ones, then edit for publication. These days,
Speaker 1: most crossword puzzles have themes, which means the long answers
Speaker 1: tied together in some interesting way. When creating a puzzle,
Speaker 1: you put your theme answers in a grid, first, plotting
Speaker 1: black squares around those, which divides the grid into sections,
Speaker 1: which are then filled with words. When you've polished the
Speaker 1: puzzle to the best of your ability, you write the clues.
Speaker 1: The Time's Crossword gets more difficult as the week progresses.
Speaker 1: Monday is the simplest, and the puzzle turns up the
Speaker 1: heat a little each day until the Saturday puzzle, which
Speaker 1: can seem nion impossible. The Sunday crossword is bigger, but
Speaker 1: as far as difficulty goes, it's like a hard Wednesday
Speaker 1: or easy Thursday. Sunday is the biggest circulation day of
Speaker 1: the week, so Shorts wants to make sure the crossword
Speaker 1: is accessible to the broadest possible audience. When Shorts started
Speaker 1: his job in virtually all the puzzles were created by
Speaker 1: hand on graph paper, and all of them were solved
Speaker 1: with a pencil or pen if that's the way you
Speaker 1: roll hot shot. These days, however, most crossword constructors use
Speaker 1: computer software to build their puzzles, and lots of people
Speaker 1: solve the puzzles online or otherwise electronically. Short said, you
Speaker 1: have to subscribe to solve the online version of the
Speaker 1: Times Crossword. Even if you subscribe to the printed or
Speaker 1: online versions of the paper, you have to pay extra
Speaker 1: for it. These days, or hundred and thirty thousand people
Speaker 1: subscribed to just the crossword. It's become a significant source
Speaker 1: of income for the company, and it can be a
Speaker 1: significant source of income for the writers. A successful cross
Speaker 1: word contributor can make between five hundred and two thousand,
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty dollars per puzzle, depending on the
Speaker 1: day of week and how many previous puzzles they've had
Speaker 1: accepted for publication. Today's episode was written by Jesslin Shields
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Clay. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other not so puzzling topics, becasit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. Brain Stuff is production of I heart Radio.
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