That is an version of The Surprise Reader, a e-newsletter during which our editors suggest a set of tales to spark your curiosity and fill you with delight. Join right here to get it each Saturday morning.
I’ll admit proper off the bat that I’m not a lot of a puzzler. Rising up, I at all times most well-liked the short satisfaction of a e-book or a film to the extra irritating problem lurking within the Sunday paper. However over the previous few years, as I frolicked with our crossword-puzzle editor Caleb Madison’s essays concerning the artwork of puzzling, I’ve began to know the enjoyment of the hunt. Take, for instance, his current description of the custom of a Sunday print puzzle:
The again web page of a print journal is consecrated house for a puzzle: one last flourish, just like the cherry on a sundae or the outro of an influence ballad. Even in our age of ephemerality, the important expertise of the crossword, to me, stays sitting across the breakfast desk with family members and the Sunday New York Instances Journal, shouting solutions, arguing, passing the puzzle round, pooling information to forge forward and collectively rise to the mental problem.
As of this summer time, The Atlantic has added its personal print puzzle to the combo: Caleb’s Inferno, which begins off simple however turns into devilishly tough as you’re employed your method down. Crossword puzzles converse for themselves. However writing and speaking about puzzles can add yet one more layer to the wealthy texture embedded within the grid. At the moment’s e-newsletter explores a few of our greatest writing about puzzle-making and puzzle-solving.
On Puzzling
The Puzzle That Will Outlast the World
By A. J. Jacobs
One transfer down, 1,298,074,214,633,706,907,132,624,082,305,022 to go.
A Gradual Descent Into Devilish Issue
By Caleb Madison
Our new print crossword puzzle places a recent narrative spin on a traditional.
Six Books That Really feel Like Puzzles
By Ilana Masad
These titles symbolize an eclectic combine of assorted types and moods, however any considered one of them might be precisely proper if you would like a brainteaser.
Nonetheless Curious?
Different Diversions
P.S.
In 2013, our editor Becca Rosen spoke with Deb Allen, the author of what was then the official crossword weblog of The New York Instances. Their dialog is an enchanting view into the years when know-how was beginning to reshape the world of crosswords.
— Isabel
