Month: March 2024

We missed this by hours in our last edition: for folks based in New York City or arriving in the area by Friday morning for ACPT weekend, Crossword Con on 5April is “a first-of-its-kind half-day conference about crossword puzzles” presented by Puzzmo. The agenda will have something for everyone in the crossword community.

An in-person ticket is $40, and comes with a one-year subscription or subscription extension to Puzzmo (worth $40 in its own right). The team is planning on providing a free virtual option and will release details when it is confirmed. We won’t have another News and Notes before the event, so stay tuned at the Crossword Con site.

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With Oscars season also comes the annual ORCA Awards, celebrating the previous year in crosswords. In addition to their longtime home at Diary of a Crossword Fiend, the ORCAs branched out this year to include public voting from a group of nominees, and an awards show streamed on Twitch.

Congrats to the winners:

BEST EASY CROSSWORD: Untitled, by Desiree Penner & Jeff Sinnock (New York Times, November 6)

BEST THEMED CROSSWORD: Two for the Price of One by Will Nediger (Bewilderingly, July 17)

BEST THEMELESS CROSSWORD: Themeless #50 by Tracy Bennett & Laura Braunstein (Inkubator, December 29)

BEST SUNDAY-SIZED CROSSWORD: Flying Colors by Rafael Musa (New York Times, June 4)

BEST TOURNAMENT CROSSWORD: Going Downhill by Rebecca Goldstein (Boswords Winter Wondersolve, February 5)

BEST CLUE: [Only human, briefly] for ADAM, in Untitled by Alex Rosen (ed. Will Shortz) (New York Times, February 9)

BEST CONTEST CROSSWORD: They Turn Into Superheroes by Quiara Vasquez (Matt Gaffney Weekly Crossword Contest, June 13)

BEST VARIETY CROSSWORD: Departure by Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon (Wall Street Journal, December 16)

CONSTRUCTOR OF THE YEAR: Rebecca Goldstein

LEVIATHAN AWARD for special achievement and service to the community: Jim Horne & Jeff Chen for their work on XWord Info

From the team here, a hearty congratulations to all winners and nominees (view the whole list here), as well as thanks to the same, and to everyone who plays a role in the crossword community to make it something worth celebrating. Special, special thanks to Rich Proulx, who has coordinated the last two years of the ORCAs and masterminded the addition of a live awards show.

With more than 12,000 puzzles published in 2023, the ORCAs nominating committee could always use more input. If you’re interested in lending a hand, fill out the Google Form here (which may be updated for 2024, but your response won’t get lost if it does). This year’s ORCAs cast a wider net into the indie puzzle community than ever before, and I hope we can do even better next year.

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The in-person component of this year’s ACPT is now sold-out. Spots on a waiting list were briefly available, but even that option is no longer presented. The virtual experience, with the same puzzles and streams of the evening events and finals, has no attendance cap.

In other tournament news, the Boswords Spring Themeless League is underway. Puzzle 2 drops tonight, but it’s not too late to join the league for this season.

Registration remains open for the Westwords Tournament in Berkeley, CA, in June, and we’re expecting an update from the Midwest Crossword Tournament (Chicago, IL, October) in the coming weeks.

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Preorders are still open for These Puzzles Fund Abortion 4: solvers who donate prior to 15 March will receive the pack as soon as it’s available. The team posted a preview puzzle, Forward March by Elise Corbin, earlier this weekend.

Puzzles for Palestine remains available, both the original pack and the custom puzzle option in support of UNRWA and human welfare in Gaza and the West Bank.

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Will Shortz shared in a brief audio clip during last week’s NPR Sunday Puzzle segment that he suffered a stroke in early February and has been recovering since. We don’t know Will well, but know he is generally a private person. Our very best wishes to Will for his return to health.

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Anna Shechtman’s long-awaited book The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle hit shelves last week, with a variety of accompanying media hits. From Harper’s Magazine: an excerpt titled “Cross Purposes”. At the Slate podcast “Working,” an interview with Anna herself, and in the Cornell Chronicle, an interview with Anna titled “‘Queen of crosswords’ recovers the puzzle’s feminist side.” (Anna is a Klarman Fellow in literatures at Cornell)

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For USA Today fans, Sally Hoelscher’s daily blog at Sally’s Take has been an indispensable resource for nearly four years. Beginning today, Sally’s writeups and USA Today solutions have a new home at USA Today itself, as well as a new name: Off The Grid. Read further details about the change at Sally’s Take.

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For cryptic and variety lovers:

The New Yorker released a primer on solving cryptic puzzles, including a pack of four puzzles with two levels of indicated hints for beginners to the form to bridge the gap to the magazine’s weekly offerings. Neville Fogarty’s 2019 Cryptic Triptych is another useful pack of gentle puzzles for newer cryptic solvers.

Speaking of, Hayley Gold’s monthly cryptic stream is soon. From Hayley:

Beware the Ides! Variety Cryptic stream a-coming on March 15th at twitch.tv/bewilderingly at 9pm ET featuring original puzzles by Bob Stigger of GAMES, plus special guests ACPT constructor/wordle celeb Tracy Bennet, and Tyler Hinman, who needs no introduction. (plus the usuals: Will, Al, and Hayley). Come for the puzzles, stay for the stabbing…I mean solving.

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In more crossword-adjacent topics, the New York Times added another offering to its Games lineup: Strands presents a word search without a list, but the help of hints, to deliver something different. A piece from The Atlantic contains some of the now-expected PR bits, but also muses on the nature of puzzles by contrasting Wordle, Connections and Strands.

Less happily, the Times also filed DMCA takedown requests against hundreds of Wordle variations and clones, including some that existed prior to the Times’ purchase of the game from Josh Wardle. The actual move from the Times here seems to tread somewhere between trademark and copyright law, perhaps taking advantage of many peoples’ confusion between the two. Of course, as in the case of most DMCA requests, almost all will simply comply rather than contest the inertia of a corporation.

There is a lot to read at the link — we encourage you to click through — but we’ll pull this quote:

Parker Higgins, a copyright expert, software developer, and crossword constructor, reviewed the takedown request and said “the Times is operating against the spirit of both the word puzzle community and the open source software world that fostered Wordle’s creation.” 

“In both puzzles and tech, people understand that you build on established conventions both to learn the craft and to discover new fun things incrementally. Wordle itself is a beneficiary of that dynamic. It builds on gameplay mechanics from the existing game Jotto, it incorporates community innovations like the emoji results-sharing system, and its reputation was absolutely bolstered by the popularity of variant versions,” he added. “To turn around and smother the ecosystem now is just kicking down the ladder. And it’s especially shameful given that the Times has enjoyed success recently with Connections, another great game with clear ties to prior art.”

Disclosure: Parker is part of the team here at DCL, providing tech support to our daily operations.

As at every point that the Times has pointed to the prestige of its crossword to credentialize other games while actively diverting resources and features from that same crossword, we are once again presented with the disconnect between New York Times Games operating as a capitalistic business venture and as a steward of puzzles as an art form. The Times has consistently chosen the former in recent years, all while telling us how wonderful they are at the latter. It’s difficult to reconcile.

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Congrats to constructors who have made debuts (in the short window) since our last edition!

New York Times: Samantha Podos Nowak (3/4), Joe O’Neill (3/7), Jackson Matz (3/8)
USA Today: Dena Witkes (3/4), Jake Halperin (3/5), Glenn Cook (3/7), David P. Williams (3/9), Susan Gelfand (3/10)

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