Short Stuff: The NY Times Crossword

Today Chuck and Josh take a shallow dive in the warm pool that is the NY Times Crossword Puzzle.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you're welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh. There's Chuck,
just Josh and Chuck. No, Jerry's short stuff. Go. New
York Times crossword puzzle stumps Americans. That was a good one.
Mid Atlantic accent is what they call that. Yeah, we're
talking about the New York Times Daily Crossword. A crossword
puzzle I have never attempted to do in my life,

(00:25):
but it is a part of the fabric of America.
And there's a great documentary that I have have not seen
yet that I want to see about this. I think
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,

(00:48):
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

(01:08):
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,

(01:29):
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

(01:50):
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

(02:13):
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

(02:34):
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

(02:57):
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.

(03:20):
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,

(03:42):
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

(04:03):
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.

(04:24):
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

(04:46):
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

(05:09):
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

(05:33):
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

(05:54):
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,

(06:17):
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

(06:37):
who deserved a cliffhanger more than Eugene tie Moleska, I've
never met one. We'll be right back alright, Chuck. So

(07:17):
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,

(07:39):
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

(08:02):
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

(08:23):
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

(08:45):
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.

(09:07):
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,

(09:28):
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

(09:50):
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

(10:13):
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

(10:35):
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

(10:58):
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.

(11:18):
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,

(11:41):
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

(12:02):
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

(12:24):
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,

(12:45):
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.

(13:09):
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.

(13:29):
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