#New york times first crossword editor how to

They know it’s popular and just leave me alone, which is great.” No one’s asking me to change this clue or do something else. The nice thing about the Times job is that I can do anything I want with it. But I love to read and I love to learn, so that’s never been a problem. It felt like an intellectual, literary sort of job that was beyond me. “When I was a kid, I never dreamed that I would be the Times crossword editor. I also wrote a paper on copyright protection for puzzles and games, which helped my puzzling career.” He eventually landed the most prestigious position in the crossword world. “I could get pretty good grades, and take only what I wanted to take, like a fascinating course on socialist legal systems and several courses on intellectual property and copyrights and patents. He therefore took the courses that interested him without worrying about their ultimate usefulness to a legal career. “It was fine,” he recalls, but by the spring of his first year, Shortz had decided that he wasn’t going to practice law. He started Law School in the fall of 1974. So my idea was to practice law for ten years and make enough money so that I could then shift into what I really wanted to do.” It’s hard to make a living constructing puzzles. “I just didn’t think it would be financially feasible. “I always wanted a career in puzzles,” says Shortz in recalling his decision to go to the Law School. Shortz’s celebrity status and financial success are remarkable in a field not known for either. He founded the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in 1978 and the World Puzzle Championship in 1992, and has collected more than 20,000 puzzle books and magazines from all over the world, which he houses at his beautiful Tudor home in Pleasantville, NY. More than 40,000 Times readers subscribe to his paper’s online crossword subscription service he has written or edited more than 100 puzzle books that a worldwide market gobbles up and he charms his weekly audience at NPR with his clever puzzles and affable repartee with host Lianne Hansen. Yet his fans think Shortz has a great deal of substance. Since my undergraduate degree was in enigmatology, which no one really takes seriously, my law degree from the University of Virginia gave me a substance that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.” I’m essentially a freelance person so that helped me in many ways. I also learned how the world works and how business works. That’s good training for puzzles and it’s good training for life.

#New york times first crossword editor how to

“The greatest benefit of Law School to me,” he says, “was to learn how to take apart a complex issue and deal with each part separately until you’ve solved it. at the Law School and ultimately used his legal training to develop the business savvy for pursuing a freelance career (not to mention hone his puzzling skills). Following the lead of his older brother who had become a lawyer, he earned his J.D. They accepted his proposal he now holds the world’s first and only degree in enigmatology (as far as Shortz can tell).

He proposed to the administration at Indiana University a degree and sketched out course requirements for a historical and analytical study of puzzling. He sold his first crossword puzzle when he was 14 and went to college determined to parlay his passion into a bachelor’s degree. In fact, he’s been happy about it ever since, pursuing a passion that has taken him to the highest perch in the puzzling world.

She showed him how to interlock words within the squares and he was happy doing so all afternoon. Will Shortz ’77, the New York Times crossword puzzle editor since 1993 and Puzzle Master of National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition since the program first aired in 1987, has been transfixed by puzzles since he was young boy when his mother gave Shortz a piece of paper ruled into squares. QUITE LITERALLY, LAWYERS are only as good as their words, so it should come as no surprise that a Law School graduate is the world’s foremost authority on the venerable crossword puzzle first introduced in this country in 1913. Will Shortz surrounded by his collection of