Last year, Tracy Bennett and Wyna Liu joined our team. Sam Ezersky came along a couple of years later. He then joined me full-time when he graduated from college. Joel Fagliano was my summer intern from 2011-13.
The big change has been the expansion of the editorial department. I feel that used to give me an edge over other puzzle editors in writing fresh clues, and I still use my books. My office is filled with dictionaries and reference books on almost every topic you can think of. At home, however, I have a really good reference library. Now, of course, virtually anything can be found on the internet, and I never have to go to The Times. But I would go into the Times building once a week and use The Times’s library to look up facts that I couldn’t verify at home. I edited the puzzles at home, as I still do. In your opinion, how has the transition from print to digital affected the puzzle and your editing of it?Īs I mentioned, the Times Crossword used to be a department of one. And many crosswords that ran just five years ago might not make the grade today. Theme ideas that were startling or far out in the 1990s might now be considered tame or maybe even trite. Of course, the Times Crossword has continued to evolve. Before I started, OREO was always clued as “Mountain: Comb. But since commercialism is a big part of modern life, I felt that well-known commercial names were fair game. One minor change that got a lot of attention at the time was the acceptance of commercial names as answers. 21, 1993, and was constructed by Peter Gordon, set the tone: It included squares that were to be filled with colors of the rainbow - red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet - each appearing in the grid twice. The very first crossword I edited, which ran on Sunday, Nov. Well, the changes I mentioned above started immediately. That seemed too august for someone with my background. While I wanted to have a career in puzzles, I never really aspired to be the New York Times crossword editor. I grew up on an Arabian horse farm outside a small town in Indiana. Also, he said he liked the sample crossword I submitted.Īs for nervousness when I got the job … a little. I also had a good résumé: 15 years at Games, founder/director of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and holder of the world’s only college degree in puzzles. I think Rosenthal foresaw the digital revolution, and probably felt that a younger person would have the best chance of navigating that. I think I was picked for the job partly because of my age at the time - at 41, I was younger than the other candidates.
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