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He also did a law degree, but never took the bar, because he went immediately into a career in puzzles. In college, where he did a self-designed major, he earned the world’s first degree in enigmatology, the study of puzzles.
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At 16, he began contributing to puzzle magazines. By writing limericks, short stories and, on one occasion, the name for a new line of chewing gum, she won their family money, appliances and two cars.Īt 14, Shortz sold his first puzzle. His interest in wordplay and competition was influenced by his mother, a writer of children's stories and articles with a knack for winning corporate writing prizes. Shortz, who was born in Indiana in 1952 and raised on a horse farm, has made puzzles since he was eight or nine. After editing, about half the clues in a typical puzzle are the author’s and half are Shortz’s.
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(The Times offers the industry’s highest rates – up to $750 for a weekday puzzle, and up to $2,250 for a Sunday – and authors are credited.) Every day Shortz and his colleagues choose submissions, factcheck and tweak them, then send them to test solvers. Ambitious journeymen seek apprenticeships with master puzzlers.Īt the Times and other publications, contributors submit crosswords, and are paid if theirs are chosen. Although countless people do crosswords, far fewer construct them. While Shortz shows me the first copy of the first edition of the first-ever published crossword book, his intern, Owen, a student at Princeton, shuffles around in the background. Forced to retreat from the library, Shortz uses a small adjacent room as his office. The shelves of his library, long full, are supplemented by towers of paper two and three stacks deep. Shortz’s aura is meticulous yet occasionally chaotic it is embodied in his charming, slightly cluttered house, which doubles as the home of what could be called the Shortz Collection: more than 25,000 puzzle books and magazines, including one from 1533, and various puzzle-related artefacts and trophies. File photograph: Craig F Walker/The Boston Globe via Getty Images Will Shortz during the National Puzzlers’ League convention in Boston in 2017.
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And later, when I face him in table tennis, I feel like a mouse who has suddenly found himself getting a free ride in the talons of a hawk. Meeting Shortz on a recent Friday, I discover that Stewart has exaggerated, but only slightly: Shortz, 68, is of medium height and build, although, like Flynn, he has a moustache. Meeting him in person, I definitely thought, 'Well, I was planning on taking your lunch money, but now I believe you could best me, in a physical joust, if you will.' So I backed off immediately." He's the Errol Flynn of crossword-puzzling. In a 2006 documentary, Wordplay, the comedian Jon Stewart says: "When you imagine Crossword Guy" – Shortz – "you imagine he's 13 to 14in tall, doesn't care to go more than 5ft without his inhaler. In addition to editing the Times crossword, he does a weekly radio crossword on NPR, directs the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and founded and owns the United States’s largest table tennis club. If it’s lonely at the top, Shortz doesn’t look it. Even his critics, particularly younger and female crossworders, who believe the Times puzzle is too white and male, acknowledge his “visionary leadership”. Observers, like the Kremlinologists of yore, speak of the “Shortzian” and “pre-Shortzian” eras. Shortz’s stature in the crossword world is difficult to overstate.
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It’s a great feeling, like a little drug.” He adds: “When we start filling in the last squares, it brings a rush of adrenaline and dopamine. "It gives us a sense of fulfilment, to complete a grid." "I think humans have a natural desire to fill empty spaces," Shortz tells me, as we sit in his Tudor-style house north of New York City. Depending on a puzzler’s skill and temperament, and on the day of the week (Monday puzzles are easiest, Saturdays hardest), that puzzler may race to the finish, surging with triumphant dopamine, or shatter a coffee mug against a wall. Every day thousands of people vie to outsmart one man: Will Shortz, the New York Times’s crossword editor of almost three decades.Ĭrossword fanatics – or “cruciverbalists”, in the parlance – must get their fix, and they prefer to get it from a man whose puzzle is considered the gold standard.