LR2 Blogs

New York Times Crossword Creator Will Shortz Gets Rich Off Sudoku — New York Magazine

Interesting article.

The crossword editor for the New York Times is giving me an advance peek at the Sunday puzzle he will publish a week later. “See, now this grid is jam-packed with fresh uses of language,” Shortz says, sitting in his home office amid stacks of reference books like Brands and Companies 1995 and The Encyclopedia of American Cars. “MRPEANUT, great answer. GIJOE, great! Only five letters, yet it has a J in the middle—very pretty.” Shortz has only one complaint about the puzzle: It uses the abbreviation nle for “NL East,” which he thinks is too obscure. It only took him a few minutes to deftly scribble in a new tangle of words. AAMES, of “Willie Aames,” turns into AIMAT; AMMO becomes OLIO; and NLE becomes ULA—a “diminutive suffix,” such as at the end of “spatula.”