Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: The NY Times Crossword

Episode Date: April 22, 2020

Today Chuck and Josh take a shallow dive in the warm pool that is the NY Times Crossword Puzzle. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh Durst-Chuck, just Josh and Chuck. Now, Jerry, the 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, but it is a part of the fabric of America, and there's a great documentary that I have not seen yet that I want to see about this.

I think it's about all crosswords. Oh, it's good. Yeah, I want to see that. It's called Wordplay. Yeah, that's the one. Yeah, John Stewart's in it. He's a crossword fanatic. Did you know that?

Yeah, a lot of people I know are crossword fanatics. Ken Jennings, 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, 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 people who's in that documentary, Chuck, is Will Shortz. And Will Shortz 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, I want to say comforting. And it doesn't feel like the right word.

And when I'm describing a crossword puzzle editor, 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 to go back in time though, it's pretty interesting in that the New York Times was the very last major daily metropolitan newspaper in the United States to start a crossword puzzle. They were really popular all over the country, starting in about 1924.

And the New York Times even came out and was like, you know what, here's a 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 gonna do for you. No idea what they meant by that one. Well, they were just saying it's sort of base

entertainment and knowledge, I think. I'm gonna have to go back and reread it, that's fine. But I'll take it on its face. You know what I'm reminded of now when I think of crossword puzzles is Rupert Sheldrake's theory that crossword 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 poo-pooed crosswords as Fooie for 20 years easily, about almost 20 years, maybe 15. So that crossword craze starts in 1924, the New York Times didn't finally publish one until the beginning of World War I. No, I think it was probably World War II.

What did I say? You said World War I. Yeah, so the New York Times went back in time to beat everybody. So sorry, it was World War II when they adopted it. So about 15 years after the craze started, they held out. And then finally, as the legend goes, the Times editor, Arthur Solzberger,

he was tired of buying the New York Herald, or no, the Herald Tribune, so that he could play their crossword puzzle or do their crossword puzzle. He wanted the Times to have its own, and he finally said, fine, we'll publish a crossword. Yeah, I get the feeling his name, his nickname was Solzie.

Arthur Solzie Solzberger. Yeah. It's the beginning of World War II, and basically the thought was, besides the fact that he wanted one, is that all we're doing is talking about World War II, maybe a crossword puzzle is finally a good idea to kind of get people's mind off of things.

So you over there, Miss, Margaret Farrar, why don't you be our very first crossword editor? Because you have been editing all these books, crossword books that Simon and Schuster has been putting out since 1924. Right, and to get everybody's minds off of it, 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 Farrar was like, all right, you know what, I'm a crossword legend already. I'm gonna make this one right, and she really did. She had like really, really great crosswords that she edited, 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 of that. I think we need to get references from literature, from popular culture, from just about everything but the day's news, so that people can use the crossword as an escape and manage to establish the New York Times crossword is basically the preeminent crossword in the world.

Yeah, and she did this for 27 years from 42 to 69, which is a very long run. Summer of love. That's right, and it was a big, big hit, like you said. And then in 1969, Mr. Will Wang 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 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 greatsets of humor over here and become 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 70s stuff, you know, Ziggy made an appearance almost every day. And nothing's funnier than Ziggy. Right. So Will Wang kind of had the paper under, or the crossword under his wing for seven years, I think. Under his wing, 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 crossword, and then he was succeeded by a guy named Eugene T. Moleska. And if there's ever been a crossword editor who deserved a cliffhanger, more than Eugene T. Moleska, I've never met one. We'll be right back. ["Pomp and Circumstance"]

On the podcast, paydude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips?

Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's vapor, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling

of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so, my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Puzzles Become A Little More Varied"] All right, Chuck.

So how does it end with you, Gene T. Malesca? So Gene Malesca is running the show now. And the puzzles become a little more varied, a little more sophisticated. More wordplay, 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. Not that funny.

Nah, he was into opera, classical music. Not that funny. And it was just a little more serious in tone than Wang's 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 Wang. Yeah. So Eugene T. Malesca does a fine job.

He did it for many, many years from 1977 until I think 1993. And then Will Shortz comes along. And from everything I can tell after reading this and seeing Will Shortz in that documentary wordplay, he's like a perfect combination of every previous New York Times crossword editor that came before him. Like he's all of them rolled into one.

He's, you know, very sophisticated. He has a lot of culture like Malesca. He's got a sense of humor like Wang. He's really into crosswords and knows how to make him great like Farrar. He's just like the whole package. Like I didn't realize it until this moment. I'm a Will Shortz fan.

I don't even do crosswords all that often. Yeah, the big thing that Shortz did and that he has kind of become known for 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 crossword. Well, that was in large part thanks to Malesca.

Oh, for sure. So Shortz comes along and he's like, you know what I'm gonna do? And this is something I didn't even know. 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 listener does word searches and they submit them. Remember they did a stuff you should know word search and I think it was in USA Today. Oh, cool. Yeah.

Well, Shortz came along and said, we need a younger voice in here. And so I think only six teenagers previous to Shortz had ever gotten puzzles published. In his 25 years, he has published 37 teenagers and the average age has gone I think down. And of course he still has the oldest person at 101 years old.

But the average age of contributor has now come down to, has come down 15 years. Yeah. From the early 50s to about the 30s. Right, right. So that's, I mean that reflects an enormous change. Like the people who are creating these crossword puzzles are the ones who actually map out the puzzle,

figure out the answers, write the clues 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 more accessible to a larger group of people. Yeah, so they get about 75 to 100 submissions a week.

If you're building your own 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 artisan pencil sharpeners do graph paper still, yeah. They're getting their pencils from David Reese. That's right. So this is pretty interesting to me.

When you're making a puzzle, and I guess this kind of makes sense, kind of like there's 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 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. I didn't either. 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 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 part of my brain like was just an operation and I said, no, no brain. You're wrong. You've never tried to do a crossword.

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. 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 not filled out.

Yeah, you and I went on a little kick where we were doing crosswords and we bought a Chicago Tribune book of crosswords. It was pretty much up our alley. Supposedly, the New York Times is 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 did know that. That's one of the few things I knew because I know that the, I always thought the Sunday one was the coup de gras, but 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, the Saturday is the hardest and the Monday is 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 pretty decent source of income for the paper, the failing New York Times. Those people pay a million dollars a year for that subscription. That'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. And since I said that, it's short stuff away. MUSIC Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,

visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.