Crossword Puzzle Quotes

Because I can't help doing it," he said with a shrug. "And hey, if I keep loving you, maybe you'll eventually crack and love me too. Hell, I'm pretty sure you're already half in love with me." "I am not! And everything you just said is ridiculous. That's terrible logic." Adrian returned to his crossword puzzle. "Well, you can think what you want, so long as you remember-no matter how ordinary things seem between us-I'm still here, still in love with you, and care about you more than any other guy, evil or otherwise, ever will." "I don't think you're evil." "See? Things are already looking promising.

When asked "What do we need to learn this for?" any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

But I'm really enjoying my retirement. I get to sleep in every day. I do crossword puzzles and eat cake.

Some people do crossword puzzles. I do books.

Well, so you don't get too cocky, I myself often complete the TV Guide crossword puzzle." He puffed out his chest. "In pen.

Fighting with him was like trying to solve a crossword and realizing there's no right answer

Wouldn't it be wonderful if I won a helicopter in a crossword puzzle competition? There is not much hope though I am afraid, as they never give such practical prizes.

I turned to the Times crossword puzzle and asked Kate, “What’s the definition of a moderate Arab?” “I don’t know.” “A guy who ran out of ammunition.

One cannot live any longer on refrigerators, on politics, on balance-sheets and cross-word puzzles. One cannot live any longer without poetry, colour and love.

What I love about cooking is that after a hard day, there is something comforting about the fact that if you melt butter and add flour and then hot stock, it will get thick! It’s a sure thing! It’s sure thing in a world where nothing is sure; it has a mathematical certainty in a world where those of us who long for some kind of certainty are forced to settle for crossword puzzles.

Introverts feel “just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book. Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo.

The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.

Yes, I was a twenty-nine year old woman who lived with her mother. One who didn’t do drugs, party, or have sex. I read books, drank the occasional beer on a hot afternoon, and did the Times crossword puzzle on Sunday afternoons. I hadn’t attended college, I wasn’t particularly gorgeous, and I often forgot to shave my legs. On the upside, I could cook some mean dumplings and bring myself to orgasm within five minutes. Not at the same time, mind you. I wasn’t that talented.

At night his most frequent recurring dream was of doing The Times crossword puzzle; his most disagreeable that he was reading a tedious book aloud to his family.

Our lives aren't so different from a crossword puzzle, sure. But the thing about life is we don't get to draw the grid; we take the rows and columns we're given. Our bodies, parents, mental health issues, all that. What we do get to do is fill the cells.

So I just live with my insomnia. I do crossword puzzles, or wander out to the music room and fool around on the piano, or read. Those late hours when the world is completely still, when the only sound is the rustle of the air in the vents and the wind visiting the trees outside, when the darkness is tucked tight around the house and you feel as life itself the movements of your own consciousness-these are wonderful hours to read. There is no interruption.

Digger stood and ambled toward the balcony. “This explains so much. I feel like I’ve just finished a crossword puzzle.” “How do you know what that feels like?” Kelly asked

She liked her bookstore. She liked cups of chamomile tea and rainy days and the Sunday morning crossword puzzle. She liked her quiet life.

Mom asked me if I was okay. I shrugged and nodded. “Well, there you go”, she said. She said that sexual assault was a crime of perception. “If you don’t think you’re hurt, then you aren’t”, she said. “So many women make such a big deal out of these things. But you’re stronger then that”, she went back to her crossword puzzle.

Morning Poem" I've got to tell you how I love you always I think of it on grey mornings with death in my mouth the tea is never hot enough then and the cigarette dry the maroon robe chills me I need you and look out the window at the noiseless snow At night on the dock the buses glow like clouds and I am lonely thinking of flutes I miss you always when I go to the beach the sand is wet with tears that seem mine although I never weep and hold you in my heart with a very real humor you'd be proud of the parking lot is crowded and I stand rattling my keys the car is empty as a bicycle what are you doing now where did you eat your lunch and were there lots of anchovies it is difficult to think of you without me in the sentence you depress me when you are alone Last night the stars were numerous and today snow is their calling card I'll not be cordial there is nothing that distracts me music is only a crossword puzzle do you know how it is when you are the only passenger if there is a place further from me I beg you do not go

Some grow very attached to a modern diversion known as the ‘Crossword Puzzle.’ We’ve had several come here looking for answers. We have their souls now.

Crossword puzzles are designed to be solved, while codes and ciphers are designed to prevent solution. With codes, you have to be prepared to work for months—for years—and fail.

I don't get it?" she asked "I don't get it? Let me tell you something about what I get. You think you're so smart? I spent three years on a full academic scholarship at the best college-prep school in the country. And when they kicked me out I had to petition-petition!-to keep them from wiping out my four-point-oh transcript." Daniel moved away, but Luce pursued him, taking a step forward for every wide-eyed step he took back. Probably freaking him out, but so what? He'd been asking for it every time he condescended to her. "I know Latin and French, and in middle school, I won the science fair three years in a row." She had backed him up against the railing of the boardwalk and was trying to restrain herself from poking him in the chest with her finger. She wasn't finished. "I also do the Sunday crossword puzzle, sometimes in under an hour. I have an unerringly good sense of direction... though not always when it comes to guys." She swallowed and took a moment to catch her breath. "And someday, I'm going to be a psychiatrist who actually listens to her patients and helps people. Okay? So don't keep talking to me like I'm stupid and don't tell me I don't understand just because I can't decode your erratic, flaky, hot-one-minute-cold-the-next, frankly"-she looked up at him, letting out her breath-"really hurtful behavior." She brushed a tear away, angry with herself for getting so worked up.

Thank you for your attempt at trying to be thoughtful while stealing shit from me.” He picked up a crossword booklet from a chair and tossed it into the trash. “And for filling out my fucking crossword puzzles without me having to ask. I’m not sure how I’ve ever survived this long without you.

When I went to use his shower this morning, I came out to a copy of today’s Times with the crossword puzzle pulled out and already folded for me.

Certainly not! I didn't build a machine to solve ridiculous crossword puzzles! That's hack work, not Great Art! Just give it a topic, any topic, as difficult as you like..." Klapaucius thought, and thought some more. Finally he nodded and said: "Very well. Let's have a love poem, lyrical, pastoral, and expressed in the language of pure mathematics. Tensor algebra mainly, with a little topology and higher calculus, if need be. But with feeling, you understand, and in the cybernetic spirit." "Love and tensor algebra?" Have you taken leave of your senses?" Trurl began, but stopped, for his electronic bard was already declaiming: Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Reimann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways. Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not--for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a^2 cos 2 phi!

At home, he (A.C. Lee) encouraged Nelle to clamber up on him lap to "help" him read the newspaper or complete the crossword puzzle.

She liked cups of chamomile tea and rainy days and the Sunday morning crossword puzzle. She liked her quiet life.

Let certain things be uncertain. Appreciate the puzzle that life is, insofar as I know, after a scheme of steps, all Crosswords have a solution, and every Sudoku makes a lot of sense.

Change the setting, change the mood ... She'd taught him to make himself go outside if he was in, or inside if he was out, to interrupt the plummet with something as simple as making a cup of tea or spending a few minutes working on crossword puzzles.

New Rule: The person who sat in my seat on the flight before me and could not finish the People magazine crossword puzzle has to be ashamed of themselves. I don't know who you are, but "Desperate _____wives"? Nothing? A three-letter word for "Writing utensil, you're holding it in your hand." Here's one more for you: Four letters, begins with a v, something you shouldn't be allowed to do this November.

The point of trying to understand the cross better is not so that we can congratulate ourselves for having solved an intellectual crossword puzzle, but so that God’s power and wisdom may work in us, through us, and out into the world that still regards Jesus’s crucifixion as weakness and folly.

The mind state caused by ambiguity is called uncertainty, and it’s an emotional amplifier. It makes anxiety more agonizing, and pleasure especially enjoyable. The delight of crossword puzzles, for example, comes from pondering and resolving ambiguous clues. Detective stories, among the most successful literary genres of all time, concoct their suspense by sustaining uncertainty about hints and culprits. Mind-bending modern art, the multiplicities of poetry, Lewis Carroll’s riddles, Márquez’s magical realism, Kafka’s existential satire—ambiguity saturates our art forms and masterpieces, suggesting its deeply emotional nature. Goethe once said that “what we agree with leaves us inactive, but contradiction makes us productive.” So it is with ambiguity.

I have one core belief: don’t be an asshole; be kind to others. That one’s written in pen. The rest of my beliefs are all in pencil.

Try reading a book while doing a crossword puzzle; that’s the intellectual environment of the Internet.   BACK

Funny thing happened on the way to the moon: not much,” wrote Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan. “Should have brought some crossword puzzles.

Cruciverbalist. A person who is skilled at constructing or solving crossword puzzles.

Sorry, it's all those crossword puzzles I do. I love words...

Only to those who don’t know you–who are taken in by your delusive appearance of meekness and decorum.’ ‘I like your long words.’ ‘All out of crossword puzzles.’ ‘So educative.

The braggadocio aspect is important: a successful but modest man is ordinarily not called a k’nocker. A k’nocker is someone who works crossword puzzles—with a pen (especially if someone is watching).

...flow - a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle; interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations.

Sometimes I still set the table for two by mistake. I say a silent goodbye to you when I leave. And a silent hello when I return. But more terrible than those moments are the ones in which I no longer feel you. And they have been growing in number recently. Suddenly I can’t remember the shape of your ears. Suddenly I manage to complete a crossword puzzle without you. Remove a blockage in the sink drain without you. That’s when I feel an empty space where you used to be. I feel that this entire apartment is a space where we used to be. And if I stay here, I will become trapped in the cobweb of your death that is being spun around me, fated to die an insect’s death.

Lauren and Alexis each had their own, and Ed and I shared one, which was great fun. He was smart and funny and a real professional, and we quickly discovered that we had a lot in common. We were both happily married, with homes on the East Coast. Not only did we both come from New York theater backgrounds, but I’d forgotten that we actually won Tony Awards on that same magical night in 1976—mine for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical in A Chorus Line, and his for Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Play called Mrs. Warren’s Profession. We were even mutually addicted to the New York Times crossword puzzles, which we did together every day we worked.

Where people once sought information to manage the real context of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use. The crossword puzzle is one such pseudo-context; the cocktail party is another; the radio quiz shows of the 1930's and 1940's and the modern television game show are still others; and the ultimate, perhaps, is the wildly successful "Trivial Pursuit." In one form or another, each of these supplies the answer to the question,"What am I to do with all these disconnected facts?" And in one form or another, the answer is the same: Why not use them for diversion? for entertainment? to amuse yourself, in a game?

Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an atom bomb doesn’t mean that you use your mind. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. That’s why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs.

Within the same hour as the murder took place, Isabel Trumbo sat in her armchair dozing, the Alaskan Outdoor magazine on her lap. Her kid sister Alma fidgeted in the other armchair, from time to time picking up her newspaper folded over to the day’s crossword puzzle.

His day-to-day life was fairly frivolous and lazy and laid-back. It was watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a bunch of cats hanging on his shoulders and maybe reading a book at the same time or doing a crossword puzzle." - Ken Morton, Edward Gorey's first cousin once removed, on Gorey's daily routines.

to test. Would weightlessness put them off their game? It did. The turtles moved “slowly and insecurely” and did not attack a piece of bait placed directly in front of them. Then again, the water in which they swam was repeatedly floating up out of the jar and forming an “ovoid cupola.” Who could eat? Von Beckh quickly moved on from turtles to Argentinean pilots. Under the section heading “Experiments with Human Subjects”—a heading that, were I a doctor previously employed by Nazi Germany, I might have rephrased—von Beckh reports on the efforts of the pilots to mark X’s inside small boxes during regular and weightless flight. During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following year, von Beckh was recruited by the Aeromedical Research Laboratory at Holloman Air Force

WHEN ASKED “ What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness. Because it’s true. Latin, geography, the gods of ancient Greece and Rome: unless you know these things, you’ll be limited to doing the puzzles in People magazine, where the clues read “Movie title, Gone ____ the Wind” and “It holds up your pants.” It’s not such a terrible place to start, but the joy of accomplishment wears off fairly quickly.

Sub-goals, some indication of progress. Part of the pleasure of a crossword puzzle is the feeling of progress as you get closer to completion, bit by bit, through the meeting of small goals. This is what much of gamification is about: using points or currency or badges or progress bars to indicate that you’re getting closer to the end;

I’ve tried and failed, I’m inoculated, exempt, classified as wounded. It wasn’t that I didn’t suffer, I was conscientious about that, that’s what qualified me. But marriage was like playing Monopoly or doing crossword puzzles, either your mind worked that way, like Anna’s, or it didn’t; and I’d proved mine didn’t. A small neutral country.

Whenever anyone asks me for investment advice, I tell them to buy a diversified portfolio heavily tilted toward stocks, especially if they are young, and then scrupulously avoid reading anything in the newspaper aside from the sports section. Crossword puzzles are acceptable, but watching cable financial news networks is strictly forbidden.#

The secret is to try to enjoy it. I never viewed training as some onerous duty I had to carry out while praying fervently for another space mission. For me, the appeal was similar to that of a New York Times crossword puzzle: training is hard and fun and stretches my mind, so I feel good when I persevere and finish—and I also feel ready to do it all over again.

introverts and extroverts differ in the level of outside stimulation that they need to function well. Introverts feel “just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book. Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo.

When you’re carefully paying attention to what your teacher or boss is saying, that’s your frontal lobe at work. Doing math? Frontal lobe. Crossword puzzle? Frontal lobe. Trying to figure out how to handle a former friend who has lately been talking behind your back? The integration of all those feelings, memories, and possible responses requires the quarterbacking of the frontal lobe.

But the other half of my motivation came from farther back in my brain, in the curious part that I inherited. It came from the spot in my skull that feels the burning need to unravel puzzles, finish crosswords, indulge in Internet games, and read all the mystery books I can get my grubby little paws on. Like it or not, need it or not, and want it or not, I can't leave a good mystery alone.

A mama's boy, loner, intellectual, voracious reader and gourmand, Dimitri was a man of esoteric skills and appetites: a gambler, philosopher, gardener, fly-fisherman, fluent in Russian and German as well as having an amazing command of English. He loved antiquated phrases, dry sarcasm, military jargon, regional dialect, and the New York Times crossword puzzle — to which he was hopelessly addicted.

What’s the date?” “September 8, 1998. Where you from?” “Next July.” We sit down at the table. Kimy is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. “What’s going on, next July?” “It’s been a very cool summer, your garden’s looking good. All the tech stocks are up. You should buy some Apple stock in January.” She makes a note on a piece of brown paper bag. “Okay. And you? How are you doing? How’s Clare? You guys got a baby yet?

I don't believe some teachers consider whether their classroom instruction fosters the development of reading habits in their students. Reflecting on the landslide of crossword puzzles, dioramas, annotations, and reading logs assigned to their students for every book they read, teachers might realize that instead of encouraging students to read, these mindless assignments make kids hate reading. Primarily assigned to generate grades and give teachers a false sense that they are holding students accountable for reading, these counterfeit activities—that no wild reader completes on his or her own—guarantee that their students will avoid reading. If we care about our students' reading lives, we must foster their lifelong reading habits and eliminate or reduce the negative influences of classroom practices that don't align with what wild readers do.

He makes it to the door before turning one-hundred-eighty degrees to jog right back to me. I have the smoothie in one hand and my crossword puzzle in the other, but Isaiah throws his arms around my shoulders, pulling me into a hug.  It’s foreign yet comforting, and my body holds no protest to his hug. He holds me as if I were important to him, needed in order for him to get through his day. It feels good, so good. He’s so good.

There was a time when this worthy housewife, tackling the Observer crossword puzzle, would snort and tear her hair and fill the air with strange oaths picked up from cronies on the hunting field, but consistent inability to solve more than about an eighth of the clues has brought a sort of dull resignation and today she merely sits and stares at it, knowing that however much she licks the end of her pencil little or no business will result.

today’s psychologists tend to agree on several important points: for example, that introverts and extroverts differ in the level of outside stimulation that they need to function well. Introverts feel “just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book. Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo.

Actually, most of those afflicted with the habit of traveling merely lie about its pleasures and profits. They do not travel to see anything, but to get away from themselves, which they never do, and away from rowing with their relatives--only to find new relatives with whom to row. They travel to escape thinking, to have something to do, just as they might play solitaire, work cross-word puzzles, look at the cinema, or busy themselves with any other dreadful activity.

The human mind is stimulated by change, motivated by meeting the challenge of novelty or threat or pleasure, rewarded with the sensations of being instrumental in altering environments, and will persevere in this as long as there is some degree of perceivable progress. People turn to knitting baby booties, doing crossword puzzles, collecting rare coins; they may even make an effort to understand E=mc2 or to study the genetic adaptations of cacti, but in all cases, they need to see some fruit of their labors.

Karma," he said once, "is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she choses." Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick. Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song.

When you’re doing a jigsaw puzzle, there is one right answer. I find that comforting…Virtually every other aspect of the world is in shades of gray.” She quotes an article she once read: “A jigsaw puzzle won’t solve all your problems, but it’s a problem you can solve.

Imagine you live on a planet where the dominant species is far more intellectually sophisticated than human beings but often keeps humans as companion animals. They are called the Gorns. They communicate with each other via a complex combination of telepathy, eye movements & high-pitched squeaks, all completely unintelligible & unlearnable by humans, whose brains are prepared for verbal language acquisition only. Humans sometimes learn the meaning of individual sounds by repeated association with things of relevance to them. The Gorns & humans bond strongly but there are many Gorn rules that humans must try to assimilate with limited information & usually high stakes. You are one of the lucky humans who lives with the Gorns in their dwelling. Many other humans are chained to small cabanas in the yard or kept in outdoor pens of varying size. They are so socially starved they cannot control their emotions when a Gorn goes near them. The Gorns agree that they could never be House-Humans. The dwelling you share with your Gorn family is filled with water-filled porcelain bowls.Every time you try to urinate in one,nearby Gorn attack you. You learn to only use the toilet when there are no Gorns present. Sometimes they come home & stuff your head down the toilet for no apparent reason. You hate this & start sucking up to the Gorns when they come home to try & stave this off but they view this as evidence of your guilt. You are also punished for watching videos, reading books, talking to other human beings, eating pizza or cheesecake, & writing letters. These are all considered behavior problems by the Gorns. To avoid going crazy, once again you wait until they are not around to try doing anything you wish to do. While they are around, you sit quietly, staring straight ahead. Because they witness this good behavior you are so obviously capable of, they attribute to “spite” the video watching & other transgressions that occur when you are alone. Obviously you resent being left alone, they figure. You are walked several times a day and left crossword puzzle books to do. You have never used them because you hate crosswords; the Gorns think you’re ignoring them out of revenge. Worst of all, you like them. They are, after all, often nice to you. But when you smile at them, they punish you, likewise for shaking hands. If you apologize they punish you again. You have not seen another human since you were a small child. When you see one you are curious, excited & afraid. You really don’t know how to act. So, the Gorn you live with keeps you away from other humans. Your social skills never develop. Finally, you are brought to “training” school. A large part of the training consists of having your air briefly cut off by a metal chain around your neck. They are sure you understand every squeak & telepathic communication they make because sometimes you get it right. You are guessing & hate the training. You feel pretty stressed out a lot of the time. One day, you see a Gorn approaching with the training collar in hand. You have PMS, a sore neck & you just don’t feel up to the baffling coercion about to ensue. You tell them in your sternest voice to please leave you alone & go away. The Gorns are shocked by this unprovoked aggressive behavior. They thought you had a good temperament. They put you in one of their vehicles & take you for a drive. You watch the attractive planetary landscape going by & wonder where you are going. You are led into a building filled with the smell of human sweat & excrement. Humans are everywhere in small cages. Some are nervous, some depressed, most watch the goings on on from their prisons. Your Gorns, with whom you have lived your entire life, hand you over to strangers who drag you to a small room. You are terrified & yell for your Gorn family to help you. They turn & walk away.You are held down & given a lethal injection. It is, after all, the humane way to do it.

It may be of some interest to note, in this connection, that the crossword puzzle became a popular form of diversion in America at just that point when the telegraph and the photograph had achieved the transformation of news from functional information to decontextualized fact. This coincidence suggests that the new technologies had turned the age-old problem of information on its head: Where people once sought information to manage the real contexts of their lives, now they had to invent contexts in which otherwise useless information might be put to some apparent use.

It's from the newspapers that people I know - relatives and co-workers - have got the idea that crosswords are a prophylactic against Alzheimer's. Newspapers are of course also the place where crosswords (and now sudokus) are most readily available, so the association is presumably good for circulation.

I have known a number of actors very well. I have found them good company. Their gift of mimicry, their knack of telling a story, their quick wit, make them often highly entertaining. They are generous, kindly and courageous. But I have never quite been able to look upon them as human beings. I have never succeeded in achieving any intimacy with them. They are like crossword puzzles in which there are no words to fit the clues. The fact is, I suppose, that their personality is made up of the parts they play and that the basis of it is something amorphous. It is a soft, malleable thing that is capable of taking any shape and being painted in any colour.

I suppose that many think we live in a cheap and sensational age, all sky-signs and headlines; an age of advertisement and standardization. And yet, this is a more enlightened age than any human beings have lived in hitherto. For instance, practically all of us can read. Some of you may say: ‘Ah! But what? Detective stories, scandals, and the sporting news.’ No doubt, compared with Sunday newspapers and mystery stories, the Oedipus, Hamlet and Faust are very small beer. All the same, the number of volumes issued each year continually gains on the number of the population in all Western countries. Every phase and question of life is brought more and more into the limelight. Theatres, cinemas, the radio, and even lectures, assist the process. But they do not, and should not replace reading, because when we are just watching and listening, somebody is taking very good care that we should not stop and think. The danger in this age is not of our remaining ignorant; it is that we should lose the power of thinking for ourselves. Problems are more and more put before us, but, except to crossword puzzles and detective mysteries, do we attempt to find the answers for ourselves? Less and less. The short cut seems ever more and more desirable. But the short cut to knowledge is nearly always the longest way round. There is nothing like knowledge, picked up by or reasoned out for oneself.

These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles—for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow. For

Turn your obstacles to your advantage. If you can find a plus out of a negative, then it cannot weigh you down. I like to think I have a superpower called dyslexia. I am creative, intuitive, and empathetic. I am great with problem-solving, and I can think outside the box. Just the other day, I was helping my daughter with a crossword puzzle, and she said, “Dad, how do you find the answers so fast? And I said, “I have dyslexia, and it helps me see things differently. To which she replied, “Aw, I want that.” If we can see our differences or unique qualities as gifts, we can bypass the stigmas that come with them and impress upon ourselves and society we can do anything any other person can do, just differently, and sometimes better.

About 35-40% of the time, a player wants to create a word ending in a specific letter. This, however, is not the way we traditionally think, and, not to mention, this is not the way dictionaries are sorted. In other words, in many situations, conventional dictionaries are not arranged in an easy to use manner. This dictionary solves that problem by sorting on the last letter of the word.

Every phase and question of life is brought more and more into the limelight. Theatres, cinemas, the radio, and even lectures, assist the process. But they do not, and should not replace reading, because when we are just watching and listening, somebody is taking very good care that we should not stop and think. The danger in this age is not of our remaining ignorant; it is that we should lose the power of thinking for ourselves. Problems are more and more put before us, but, except to crossword puzzles and detective mysteries, do we attempt to find the answers for ourselves? Less and less. The short cut seems ever more and more desirable. But the short cut to knowledge is nearly always the longest way round. There is nothing like knowledge, picked up by or reasoned out for oneself.

today’s psychologists tend to agree on several important points: for example, that introverts and extroverts differ in the level of outside stimulation that they need to function well. Introverts feel “just right” with less stimulation, as when they sip wine with a close friend, solve a crossword puzzle, or read a book. Extroverts enjoy the extra bang that comes from activities like meeting new people, skiing slippery slopes, and cranking up the stereo. “Other people are very arousing,” says the personality psychologist David Winter, explaining why your typical introvert would rather spend her vacation reading on the beach than partying on a cruise ship. “They arouse threat, fear, flight, and love. A hundred people are very stimulating compared to a hundred books or a hundred grains of sand.

There are many different experiences we would rather continue than stop, including both mental and physical pleasures. One of the examples I had in mind for a situation that Helen would wish to continue is total absorption in a task, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow—a state that some artists experience in their creative moments and that many other people achieve when enthralled by a film, a book, or a crossword puzzle: interruptions are not welcome in any of these situations. I also had memories of a happy early childhood in which I always cried when my mother came to tear me away from my toys to take me to the park, and cried again when she took me away from the swings and the slide. The resistance to interruption was a sign I had been having a good time, both with my toys and with the swings.

Inside a wool jacket the man had made a pocket for the treasure and from time to time he would jiggle the pocket, just to make sure that it was still there. And when on the train he rode to work he would jiggle it there also, but he would disguise his jiggling of the treasure on the train by devising a distraction. For example, the man would pretend to be profoundly interested in something outside the train, such as the little girl who seemed to be jumping high up on a trampoline, just high enough so that she could spy the man on the train, and in this way he really did become quite interested in what occurred outside the train, although he would still jiggle the treasure, if only out of habit. Also on the train he'd do a crossword puzzle and check his watch by rolling up his sleeve; when he did so he almost fell asleep. Antoine often felt his life to be more tedious with this treasure, because in order not to be overly noticed he had deemed it wise to fall into as much a routine as possible and do everything as casually as possible, and so, as a consequence, despite the fact that he hated his wife and daughter, he didn't leave them, he came home to them every night and he ate the creamed chicken that his wife would prepare for him, he would accept the large, fleshy hand that would push him around while he sat around in his house in an attempt to read or watch the weather, he took out the trash, he got up on time every morning and took a quick, cold shower, he shaved, he accepted the cold eggs and orange juice and coffee, he picked the newspaper off the patio and took it inside with him to read her the top headlines, and of course he went to the job.

Looking at the sky, he suddenly saw that it had become black. Then white again, but with great rippling circles. The circles were vultures wheeling around the sun. The vultures disappeared, to be replaced by checkers squares ready to be played on. On the board, the pieces moved around incredibly rapidly, winning dozens of games every minute. They were scarcely lined up before they started rushing at each other again, banging into each other, forming fighting combinations, wiping the other side out in the wink of an eye. Then the squares scattered, giving way to the grille of a crossword puzzle, and here, too, words flashed, drove each other away, clustered, were erased. They were all very long words, like Catalepsy, Thunderbird, Superrequeteriquísímo and Anticonstitutionally. The grille faded away, and suddenly the whole sky was covered with linked words, long sentences full of semicolons and inverted commas. For the space of a few seconds, there was this gigantic sheet of paper on which were written sentences that moved forward jerkily, changing their meaning, modifying their construction, altering completely as they advanced. It was beautiful, so beautiful that nothing like that had ever been read anywhere, and yet it was impossible to decipher the writing. It was all about death, or pity, or the incredible secrets that are hidden somewhere, at one of the farthest points of time. It was about water, too, about vast lakes floating just above the mountains, lakes shimmering under the cold wind. For a split second, Y. M. H., by screwing up his eyes, managed to read the writing, but it vanished with lightning speed and he could not be sure. It seemed to go like this: There's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. There's no reason to be afraid. No. No, there's no reason to be afraid. No, there's no reason to be afraid.

I have always had a weakness for footnotes. For me a clever or a wicked footnote has redeemed many a text. And I see that I am now using a long footnote to open a serious subject - shifting in a quick move to Paris, to a penthouse in the Hotel Crillon. Early June. Breakfast time. The host is my good friend Professor Ravelstein, Abe Ravelstein. My wife and I, also staying at the Crillon, have a room below, on the sixth floor. She is still asleep. The entire floor below ours (this is not absolutely relevant but somehow I can't avoid mentioning it) is occupied just now by Michael Jackson and his entourage. He performs nightly in some vast Parisian auditorium. Very soon his French fans will arrive and a crowd of faces will be turned upward, shouting in unison, 'Miekell Jack-sown'. A police barrier holds the fans back. Inside, from the sixth floor, when you look down the marble stairwell you see Michael's bodyguards. One of them is doing the crossword puzzle in the 'Paris Herald'.

Why can't we sit together? What's the point of seat reservations,anyway? The bored woman calls my section next,and I think terrible thoughts about her as she slides my ticket through her machine. At least I have a window seat. The middle and aisle are occupied with more businessmen. I'm reaching for my book again-it's going to be a long flight-when a polite English accent speaks to the man beside me. "Pardon me,but I wonder if you wouldn't mind switching seats.You see,that's my girlfriend there,and she's pregnant. And since she gets a bit ill on airplanes,I thought she might need someone to hold back her hair when...well..." St. Clair holds up the courtesy barf bag and shakes it around. The paper crinkles dramatically. The man sprints off the seat as my face flames. His pregnant girlfriend? "Thank you.I was in forty-five G." He slides into the vacated chair and waits for the man to disappear before speaking again. The guy onhis other side stares at us in horror,but St. Clair doesn't care. "They had me next to some horrible couple in matching Hawaiian shirts. There's no reason to suffer this flight alone when we can suffer it together." "That's flattering,thanks." But I laugh,and he looks pleased-until takeoff, when he claws the armrest and turns a color disturbingy similar to key lime pie. I distract him with a story about the time I broke my arm playing Peter Pan. It turned out there was more to flying than thinking happy thoughts and jumping out a window. St. Clair relaxes once we're above the clouds. Time passes quickly for an eight-hour flight. We don't talk about what waits on the other side of the ocean. Not his mother. Not Toph.Instead,we browse Skymall. We play the if-you-had-to-buy-one-thing-off-each-page game. He laughs when I choose the hot-dog toaster, and I tease him about the fogless shower mirror and the world's largest crossword puzzle. "At least they're practical," he says. "What are you gonna do with a giant crossword poster? 'Oh,I'm sorry Anna. I can't go to the movies tonight. I'm working on two thousand across, Norwegian Birdcall." "At least I'm not buying a Large Plastic Rock for hiding "unsightly utility posts.' You realize you have no lawn?" "I could hide other stuff.Like...failed French tests.Or illegal moonshining equipment." He doubles over with that wonderful boyish laughter, and I grin. "But what will you do with a motorized swimming-pool snack float?" "Use it in the bathtub." He wipes a tear from his cheek. "Ooo,look! A Mount Rushmore garden statue. Just what you need,Anna.And only forty dollars! A bargain!" We get stumped on the page of golfing accessories, so we switch to drawing rude pictures of the other people on the plane,followed by rude pictures of Euro Disney Guy. St. Clair's eyes glint as he sketches the man falling down the Pantheon's spiral staircase. There's a lot of blood. And Mickey Mouse ears. After a few hours,he grows sleepy.His head sinks against my shoulder. I don't dare move.The sun is coming up,and the sky is pink and orange and makes me think of sherbet.I siff his hair. Not out of weirdness.It's just...there. He must have woken earlier than I thought,because it smells shower-fresh. Clean. Healthy.Mmm.I doze in and out of a peaceful dream,and the next thing I know,the captain's voice is crackling over the airplane.We're here. I'm home.

I was encouraged in my transition to philosophy by a certain disgust with mathematics, resulting from too much concentration and too much absorption in the sort of skill that is needed in examinations. The attempt to acquire examination technique had led me to think of mathematics as consisting of artful dodges and ingenious devices and as altogether too much like a cross-word puzzle. When, at the end of my first three years at Cambridge, I emerged from my last mathematical examination I swore that I would never look at mathematics again and sold all my mathematical books.

to look around. At first sight, the apartment was perfectly ordinary. He made a quick circuit of the living room, kitchenette, bathroom, and bedroom. The place was tidy enough, but with a few items strewn here and there, the sort of things that might be left lying around by a busy person—a magazine, a half-finished crossword puzzle, a book left open on a night table. Abby had the usual appliances—an old stove and a humming refrigerator, a microwave oven with an unpronounceable brand name, a thirteen-inch TV on a cheap stand, a boom box near a modest collection of CDs. There were clothes in her bedroom closet and silverware, plates, and pots and pans in her kitchen cabinets. He began to wonder if he’d been unduly suspicious. Maybe Abby Hollister was who she said she was, after all. And he’d taken a considerable risk coming here. If he was caught inside her apartment, all his plans for the evening would be scotched. He would end up in a holding cell facing charges that would send him back to prison for parole violation. All because he’d gotten a bug up his ass about some woman he hardly knew, a stranger who didn’t mean anything. He decided he’d better get the hell out. He was retracing his steps through the living room when he glanced at the magazine tossed on the sofa. Something about it seemed wrong. He moved closer and took a better look. It was People, and the cover showed two celebrities whose recent marriage had already ended in divorce. But on the cover the stars were smiling over a caption that read, Love At Last. He picked up the magazine and studied it in the trickle of light through the filmy curtains. The date was September of last year. He put it down and looked at the end tables flanking the sofa. For the first time he noticed a patina of dust on their surfaces. The apartment hadn’t been cleaned in some time. He went into the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. It seemed well stocked, but when he opened the carton of milk and sniffed, he discovered water inside—which was just as well, since the milk’s expiration period had ended around the time that the People cover story had been new. Water in the milk carton. Out-of-date magazine on the sofa. Dust everywhere, even coating the kitchen counters. Abby didn’t live here. Nobody did. This apartment was a sham, a shell. It was a dummy address, like the dummy corporations his partner had set up when establishing the overseas bank accounts. It could pass inspection if somebody came to visit, assuming the visitor didn’t look too closely, but it wasn’t meant to be used. Now that he thought about it, the apartment was remarkable for what

Being in flight is one of the most unnatural, extraordinary, ordinary experiences of modern life. When we climb to 30,000 feet, our perspective looking down at the world becomes that of a deity, and the rules of time and space are altered as we rush over the earth. In flight we are able to view the most remote corners of the natural world and the vast spread of the world we have constructed. It gives us the unique perspective to look at the interaction of the natural and constructed in a truly holistic way. In its totality, the unnatural or extraordinary experience produces great fear and excitement. We confront death a little every time the doors close – and this closeness to death intensifies the extraordinary experience of being in flight. On the other hand, our ‘in flight’ experience is filled with the most unremarkable daily activities: reading a comic book, finishing a crossword puzzle, eating, sleeping. The cabin becomes our shared world, temporally removed from the world that we’ve left back on land. What connects the ordinary and the extraordinary is a powerful trust in the human capacity to take us beyond the mundane. The plane becomes a temple of humanism, where we put faith in all that get us and keeps us up in the air – engineers, pilots, researchers, air traffic controllers – a web of people, underwritten by collective knowledge, keeping us alive, together.

She nods, turning the silver bangle around on her wrist. “She came from some village north of here, a few hours away. She traveled all the way to the city just to…” She trails off, feeling a lump grow in her throat. “…to take you to that orphanage?” Sanjay finishes for her. Asha nods. “And she gave me this.” She slides the bangle back on her wrist. “They gave you everything they had to give,” Sanjay says. He reaches across the table for her hand. “So how do you feel, now that you know?” Asha gazes out the window. “I used to write these letters, when I was a little girl,” she says. “Letters to my mother, telling her what I was learning in school, who my friends were, the books I liked. I must have been about seven when I wrote the first one. I asked my dad to mail it, and I remember he got a really sad look in his eyes and he said, ‘I’m sorry, Asha, I don’t know where she is.’” She turns back to face Sanjay. “Then, as I got older, the letters changed. Instead of telling her about my life, I started asking all these questions. Was her hair curly? Did she like crossword puzzles? Why didn’t she keep me?” Asha shakes her head. “So many questions." “And now, I know,” she continues. “I know where I came from, and I know I was loved. I know I’m a hell of a lot better off now than I would have been otherwise.” She shrugs. “And that’s enough for me. Some answers, I’ll just have to figure out on my own.” She takes a deep breath. “You know, I have her eyes.” Asha smiles, hers glistening now. She rests the back of her head on the booth. “I wish there was some way to let them know I’m okay, without…intruding on their life.

Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was “I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there.” She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, “My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He’s going to be friends with everybody.” I got home and immediately wrote a letter to Michael Bolton. I put my email address at the bottom. I printed out TV guides. I printed out crossword puzzles. I even printed a couple of pages of jokes and riddles and whatever would be fun to read and do and folded them up and put them in an envelope. All that was left to do was to write the address, put a stamp on the envelope, and put it in the mailbox. I put the envelope in the car in between the seat and the center console to take to the post office. I must have been distracted or had to do something else because the envelope sat there for months. Every so often I would look at it and go, Oh crap, I haven’t sent that yet. And then at some point I spilled something on it so I knew I would never send it now. I threw it out. To this day I’m worried that one day I’m going to be at the gas station in line and hear a voice behind me say, “I’m Michael Bolton and you never sent me my damn TV guide. You’re just like the rest.” He’s going to shank me in my side and that will be the end of the Noah Galloway story.

We cannot provide a definition of those products from which the age takes it name, the feuilletons. They seem to have formed an uncommonly popular section of the daily newspapers, were produced by the millions, and were a major source of mental pabulum for the reader in want of culture. They reported on, or rather "chatted" about, a thousand-and-one items of knowledge. The cleverer writers poked fun at their own work. Many such pieces are so incomprehensible that they can only be viewed as self-persiflage on the part of the authors. In some periods interviews with well-known personalities on current problems were particularly popular. Noted chemists or piano virtuosos would be queried about politics, for example, or popular actors, dancers, gymnasts, aviators, or even poets would be drawn out on the benefits and drawbacks of being a bachelor, or on the presumptive causes of financial crises, and so on. All that mattered in these pieces was to link a well-known name with a subject of current topical interest. It is very hard indeed for us to put ourselves in the place of those people so that we can truly understand them. But the great majority, who seem to have been strikingly fond of reading, must have accepted all these grotesque things with credulous earnestness. If a famous painting changed owners, if a precious manuscript was sold at auction, if an old palace burned down, the readers of many thousands of feature articles at once learned the facts. What is more, on that same day or by the next day at the latest they received an additional dose of anecdotal, historical, psychological, erotic, and other stuff on the catchword of the moment. A torrent of zealous scribbling poured out over every ephemeral incident, and in quality, assortment, and phraseology all this material bore the mark of mass goods rapidly and irresponsibly turned out. Incidentally, there appear to have been certain games which were regular concomitants of the feature article. The readers themselves took the active role in these games, which put to use some of their glut of information fodder. Thousands upon thousands spent their leisure hours sitting over squares and crosses made of letters of the alphabet, filling in the gaps according to certain rules. But let us be wary of seeing only the absurd or insane aspect of this, and let us abstain from ridiculing it. For these people with their childish puzzle games and their cultural feature articles were by no means innocuous children or playful Phaeacians. Rather, they dwelt anxiously among political, economic, and moral ferments and earthquakes, waged a number of frightful wars and civil wars, and their little cultural games were not just charming, meaningless childishness. These games sprang from their deep need to close their eyes and flee from unsolved problems and anxious forebodings of doom into an imaginary world as innocuous as possible. They assiduously learned to drive automobiles, to play difficult card games and lose themselves in crossword puzzles--for they faced death, fear, pain, and hunger almost without defenses, could no longer accept the consolations of the churches, and could obtain no useful advice from Reason. These people who read so many articles and listened to so many lectures did not take the time and trouble to strengthen themselves against fear, to combat the dread of death within themselves; they moved spasmodically on through life and had no belief in a tomorrow.

You, Joelle, are fucking goddamn mind-blowingly beautiful. I have no idea how you don't see it. Those glasses that you think made you look nerdy? If they're nerdy, then nerdy is so incredibly hot. Because when you wear your glasses, you look smart and sexy. Your hair that you think is unruly and messy? It's not. It's wild. And wild is so fucking hot, I can't even begin to tell you." He presses his eyes shut and shakes his head, like he can barely contain the thought. "I can't take my eyes off it. Every time you brush past me and I feel your hair on my skin, I get goose bumps. And your skin is so soft that every time I've touched you, I've almost lost my damn mind. Like when you were on my lap kissing me, I honest to god thought I was going to pass out. I mean, did you not feel my boner against you? You felt so fucking good I could barely take it." My eyes are wide as I soak in every word he says. "When we started working in the same space together, I overheard you mention how big your ass is when you were joking with your mom and aunt. Why? Your ass is a fucking national treasure. Why do you think I spent so much time grabbing it while we were fooling around?" Against his palm, I let out a muffled "oh" sound. It's the sound I make when I've figured out an especially challenging crossword puzzle clue. These are some damn good points he's making. Shaking his head, he looks away for a split second, like he's so frustrated, so hell-bent on getting these words out that he needs a moment to collect himself. His eyes cut back to me. "Do you have any idea the way people look at you? Everywhere you go, people can't take their eyes off you. Nonstop. And you don't even notice it because you're too focused on others. Do you have any clue how sexy it is? Everyone else is so concerned with their image and what people think of them. But you don't give it a second thought. Even if you don't realize it, you come off so sure of yourself. It's the hottest thing ever.

He fakes a smile and then turns to unlock the door. I follow him inside; he stops me at the kitchen island. “I found it right here.” He points to the countertop. “You found what right where?” I ask, feeling my face scrunch up in bewilderment. “The crossword puzzle from today.” He pulls it out of his pocket. “I found it here when I was making breakfast this morning.” “Wait, you didn’t get it in the mail?” “I’m sorry; I thought I mentioned that.” “No,” I say, holding back from whacking him in the head. “I think I would’ve remembered if someone had broken into your apartment. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, and then lets out a stress-filled sigh. “So, someone broke in here last night while you were asleep?” “I’m not sure. I was thinking that, too, but then . . . what if I just didn’t see it last night when I got home?” “Are you sure you didn’t set your mail down here, maybe even for a second, and then leave this piece behind?” “What difference does it makes?” “It makes a huge difference.” My voice gets louder. “The difference between someone breaking in or not.” I peer around the kitchen and living room, trying to see if anything looks off. “I don’t know.” He reaches for a box of cereal. “I mean, I’m pretty sure I would’ve noticed getting another puzzle in the mail, especially since we’ve been talking so much about this stuff.” “Who has a key to your apartment?” “No one that I know of.” “None of your friends? Did you leave a spare under the doormat, maybe?” “No, and no.” “Then what?” I ask, completely frustrated. “Look,” he says, running his fingers through his shaggy brown hair. “I don’t have all the answers. That’s why it’s a puzzle.” “This isn’t funny,” I tell him. “Someone’s sending you threatening notes, writing twisted messages on your door, and possibly breaking into your apartment. Worrying isn’t an option. It’s an order.” “So what do you order me to do?” “Call the police.” “And tell them what? That someone’s sending me crossword puzzles? That I got an angry message on my door, but I didn’t even feel the need to save it? They’ll give me a Breathalyzer test and ask me what I’ve been drinking.

When I worked in community education programs, one of my jobs was to help family and community members better understand the experience of mental illness. We’d begin each session with an opening exercise that was intended to simulate the experience of schizophrenia. It begins by asking participants to work on a simple task like a jigsaw puzzle or easy crossword. While they are doing the task, the leader turns on several different radios placed around the room—each one tuned to a different station. There is a confusion of sounds and music. One of the leaders also changes the lighting, randomly turning lights on and off so that the room is alternately dimmed and brightened.

Our lives aren’t so different from a crossword puzzle, sure. But the thing about life is we don’t get to draw the grid; we take the rows and columns we’re given. Our bodies, parents, mental health issues, all that. What we do get to do is fill the cells.

schnorrer

searched for a how-to manual. The first one I found was A Pleasure in Words (1981), Eugene Maleska’s memoir-cum-manual of his life in word puzzles, which contains

These days, everyday words and phrases, even if they haven’t yet made the dictionary, are encouraged. Avoid, as the Times put it, “uninteresting obscurity (a Bulgarian village, a water bug genus).” Crosswordese (ESNE, ESTE, YSER) should be kept “to a minimum,” and no two extremely tricky answers should cross each other.

Crossword Puzzle Challenges for Dummies (2004), the crossword guide in the notorious “for Dummies” series, is somewhat surprisingly one of the most authoritative and comprehensive resources, since it’s by Patrick Berry, one of the top constructors alive. (Though the “for Dummies” version is currently out of print, Berry has the rights to the PDF, which he’s retitled the Crossword Constructor’s Handbook, and which he now sells for would-be constructors to download.) Also, around the crossword’s centenary in 2013, T. Campbell compiled an exhaustive monograph, On Crosswords: Thoughts, Studies, Facts, and Snark about a 100-Year-Old Pastime, that presents a taxonomy of basically every kind of themed and themeless puzzle in existence. Fortuitously for me, in near-eerie parallel timing with my adventure in crossword construction, the Times’s Wordplay blog ran a series called “How to Make a Crossword” in 2018. The

There are two ways to begin a puzzle: themed, with the major answers constellating around a mini-riddle; or themeless, usually with longer clues, and no help from a little internal narrative. If I were going to create a themeless puzzle, I’d start with what constructors call a “seed patch.” Seeds are the two or three ne-plus-ultra answers of the themeless, the ones that inspired the whole thing, and without which the puzzle would have no reason to exist. A seed might be a triple or quadruple stack of fifteen-letter words. Or a seed patch might be a few somewhat unrelated but buzzy bits of a recent news cycle. Prolific constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley publishes a new themeless puzzle on his website every Monday, mostly aimed at crossword junkies for whom the easy Times Mondays don’t cut it. Quigley’s themelesses often serve as something of a digest of the latest memes.

jubilance of Philadelphia Eagles fans.) A great themeless doesn’t necessarily rely on weird central words. Lack of ostentation can be equally impressive. In On Crosswords, T. Campbell classified smooth themelesses as “puddings”: perfectly crafted fill with no awkward crosswordy quirks, the Japanese Zen gardens of the crossword biodome.

I could make what Campbell called a “string” theme: FIRST AID STATION, SECONDHAND SMOKE, THIRD BASE UMPIRE, FOURTH CLASS MAIL.

Grid art has only gotten better over time. In a Times crossword from 2009 by Elizabeth Gorski, the black squares at the grid’s center formed a spiral, with THE SOLOMON R GUGGENHEIM / MUSEUM as answers spanning the top of the spiral, and—for the geometrically impaired—SPIRAL SHAPE across the bottom. Eight artworks hanging in the spiral-shaped Guggenheim museum appeared as clues, with each artist hung as an answer in the puzzle.

The teaching sector—her experience told her, as did that of her armadillo-backed-mother—was the garbage dump of overestimated mediocrity: everyone saw themselves as essential and indescribably valuable, but almost no one really was. Clara admitted to herself—though not to the high school rectors—that she had little to contribute and that for her, teaching was just an excuse to read and solve redaction problems like Sunday crossword puzzles.

Don’t be afraid to guess. Like it or not, there’s a certain amount of trial and error inherent in the process of interest discovery. Unlike the answers to crossword puzzles, there isn’t just one thing you can do that might develop into a passion. There are many. You don’t have to find the “right” one, or even the “best” one—just a direction that feels good. It can also be difficult to know if something will be a good fit until you try it for a while. Don’t be afraid to erase an answer that isn’t working out. At some point, you may choose to write your top-level goal in indelible ink, but until you know for sure, work in pencil.

I find factual science to be quite interesting and intellectually stimulating, however, I find the materialistic version only to be interesting in the sense that I liken it to a customized crossword puzzle filled with hidden mistakes just waiting to be discovered. Which would actually be quite counterproductive if it were not for the eye opening results that occur once the discoveries are made public.

normalcy? an answer to a crossword puzzle question my body bears the strain of a suicide wannabe the look in my eye turns people away humanity frightens so easily that the words bubble to the top of the lobotomized

But, as someone who's spent his professional life caring for those with brain disease, when it comes to counteracting the forces of aging, or fortifying yourself against degenerative brain disease, you can't do any better than learning to play a musical instrument. If you really want to grow your brain, put down the crossword puzzle, or the Lumosity app, and pick up an instrument

It was a hand-drawn crossword puzzle. Messy and a little lopsided, the whole square leaning to the right. At the top of the page, Larkin had tried to recreate the doodled ‘S’ I’d shown him before, writing out Seb’s Special Crossword in the same style.

CROSSWORD INSTRUCTIONS 1.Read the Clues: Start by carefully reading through all the clues, both across and down. Each clue corresponds to a word or phrase you must fill in the grid. 2.Scan for Easy Answers: Look for clues that seem easy to solve based on your initial understanding of the clue or if you immediately know the answer. Fill in these answers first. 3.Work from Known Letters: As you fill in words, use the letters you've already entered to help solve other clues that intersect with them. 4.Think of Synonyms: Clues often contain synonyms or indirect references to the answer. If you're stuck, think of alternative words to fit the clue. 5.Consider Word Length: Pay attention to the number of letters in each answer. This can help you eliminate possibilities and narrow down potential answers. 6.Don't Get Stuck: If you're completely stuck on a clue, don't dwell on it for too long. Move on to other clues and come back to it later with fresh eyes. 7.Check for Mistakes: Once you've completed the puzzle or filled in as much as you can, go back and double-check your answers. Look for any mistakes or inconsistencies, especially where intersecting words meet. 8.Enjoy the Process: Solving a crossword puzzle is meant to be fun and challenging. Don't get discouraged if you find it difficult at times. Take

Dim the lights an hour or two before you turn in. Relax your muscles with an Epsom salt soak. Add a couple of drops of soothing lavender oil. Relax your brain by dumping out whatever is in there: Make a to-do list or write in a journal. Pour out resentments or anger, and follow that exercise with a gratitude list. Think about what kind of content you consume at night. Some people can read a tense thriller and conk out, and others need to neutralize. A crossword puzzle, a YA novel (yes, adults can read these too), gentle poetry, spiritual essays. Find what works for you. If you can’t turn off your brain, listen to relaxing music or use a white-noise machine.

It is only Tuesday; the crossword is less of a puzzle and more of an ego hand job.

26. In intimate relationships is your inability to linger over conversations an impediment? 27. Are you always on the go, even when you don’t really want to be? 28. More than most people, do you hate waiting in line? 29. Are you constitutionally incapable of reading the directions first? 30. Do you have a hair-trigger temper? 31. Are you constantly having to sit on yourself to keep from blurting out the wrong thing? 32. Do you like to gamble? 33. Do you feel like exploding inside when someone has trouble getting to the point? 34. Were you hyperactive as a child? 35. Are you drawn to situations of high intensity? 36. Do you often try to do the hard things rather than what comes easily to you? 37. Are you particularly intuitive? 38. Do you often find yourself involved in a situation without having planned it at all? 39. Would you rather have your teeth drilled by a dentist than make or follow a list? 40. Do you chronically resolve to organize your life better only to find that you’re always on the brink of chaos? 41. Do you often find that you have an itch you cannot scratch, an appetite for something “more” and you’re not sure what it is? 42. Would you describe yourself as hypersexual? 43. One man who turned out to have adult ADD presented with this unusual triad of symptoms: cocaine abuse, frequent reading of pornography, and an addiction to crossword puzzles. Can you understand him, even if you do not have those symptoms? 44. Would you consider yourself an addictive personality? 45. Are you more flirtatious than you really mean to be? 46. Did you grow up in a chaotic, boundaryless family? 47. Do you find it hard to be alone? 48. Do you often counter depressive moods by some sort of potentially harmful compulsive behavior such as overworking, overspending, overdrinking, or overeating? 49. Do you have dyslexia? 50. Do you have a family history of ADD or hyperactivity?

sold a number of crossword puzzles to magazines specializing in that sort of thing. I still remember the definition of which at the time I was the proudest: “The poet’s on the pumpkin.” Five letters.

A consequence of the brain’s plasticity is that it may change with every experience, thought and emotion, from which it follows that you yourself have the potential power to change your brain with everything that you do, think, and feel. So brain fitness and optimization are about much more than crossword puzzles and blueberries; they are about cultivating a new mindset and mastering a new toolkit that allow us to appreciate and take full advantage of our brains’ incredible properties.

I was just beginning to wonder how long I would have to wait when finally a guard sauntered up and said, “Galloway, get your stuff, get your bed.” I ran to my cell to get my stuff and I grabbed the toothpaste. The toothpaste was in this clear tube and was clear like hair gel. It had a muted, watered-down mint flavor. Everything you got in jail was made specifically to be as safe as can be. One of the guys told me, “Don’t ever take anything from being locked up. It’s bad luck.” But I told myself, You ain’t coming back. You ain’t getting locked up again, so you’re taking a souvenir. I grabbed that little clear tube and I put it in my pocket and walked out of my cell. As I came out, all of the guys from my cellblock were lined up to say goodbye. The guard had this look on his face like, “What is going on?” I walked down the line shaking each man’s hands. They all told me they were glad they had met me. They told me that I made an impact on them. One guy said, “You came in here and you’ve been to war and back, you’re missing two limbs, but you still had a smile on your face the whole time. You’ve gone through so much and you are able to keep smiling. That motivates me.” I was really touched. I kept going down the line, shaking hands and saying my farewells, and finally I got to Michael Bolton. He said, “Hey, man, I’ve asked people this before and they never follow through with it but I believe you will. Could you print out some TV guides? Because you know we just tell them the number. We don’t know what’s on at what time, what station.” I said, “Yeah, man, I’ll do that.” And I looked around to the other guys and asked, “Does anybody want any crossword puzzles or anything like that?” They all said that would be awesome. “All right, Michael, I’ve got your address so I’m gonna send it to you. And listen, man, I’m gonna give you my email address. When you get out shoot me an email. I want to stay in touch and see how things are going.” I turned to the guard who was still baffled by what was happening and said, “I’m ready.” He rolled his eyes and opened the door. We walked out and they handed me my clothes. I pulled off the orange jumpsuit and tossed it. I changed back into my clothes. I signed everything I had to sign, got some paperwork to take with me, and walked out a free man again. Well, my epic freedom moment was short-lived, because I realized my cell phone was dead. I walked down the road to a gas station and asked if I could use the phone. I called Tracy and told her where I was and asked her to pick me up. When Tracy arrived I hopped in the car and the very first thing I said to her was “I gotta get home. I have to print out some TV guides and I need to write a letter to some of the guys in there.” She started laughing and when she could compose herself enough to talk said, “My sisters and I all said we guarantee Noah is going to come out of jail with new friends. He’s going to be friends with everybody.

And Mendeleev’s guesses showed that induction is a more subtle process in the hands of a scientist than Bacon and other philosophers supposed. In science we do not simply march along a linear progression of known instances to unknown ones. Rather, we work as in a crossword puzzle, scanning two separate progressions for the points at which they intersect: that is where the unknown instances should be in hiding. Mendeleev scanned the progression of atomic weights in the columns, and the family likenesses in the rows, to pinpoint the missing elements at their intersections. By doing so, he made practical predictions, and he also made manifest (what is still poorly understood) how scientists actually carry out the process of induction. Very

She became a question mark. An unfinished puzzle. An intricate crossword. An impervious shooting star yet to determine her course.

He's kind of like a crossword puzzle, in and of himself, a grid of clues leading to the complete theme.

Used with care, substances that harm neural tissue, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle-solving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around them, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents. After a night of poison. your brain wakes up in the morning saying, “No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America.

On one side of the room, a middle-aged couple filled the boxes of a newspaper crossword puzzle, their faces lit with broad smiles, their demeanors odd to all but themselves.

Some grow very attached to a modern diversion known as the ‘Crossword Puzzle.’ We’ve had several come

During weightlessness, many of the letters strayed from the boxes, indicating that pilots might experience difficulties maneuvering their planes and doing crossword puzzles during air battles. The following

START BROWSING...

Something, which the police called a bomb, had exploded in his shed. Investigations were begun, and the efforts of the authorities were soon to be categorized by the appropriate officals as "feverish", for bombs began to go off all over the place. The police collected fragments of the exploded bombs, and the press, anxious to help the police in their work, published impressive pictures of the fragments as well as a drawing of a reconstructed bomb together with a very detailed description of how it had been made.The police had done a really first-rate job. Even my brother and myself, both of us extremely untalented men in technical matters, could easily grasp how the bomb makers had gone to work. A large quantity of ordinary black gunpowder, such as is the be found in the cartridges sold for shoutguns, was encased in plasticine; in it was embedded an explosive cap, of the type used in hand grenades during the war, at the end of a thin wire; the other end of the wire was joined to the battery of a pocket flashlight -- obtainable at any village store -- and thence to the alarm mechanism of an ordinary alarm clock. The whole contratation was packed into a soapbox. Of course my brother did his duty as a journalist.He published the police report, together with the illustrations, on page one. It was not my brother's doing that this issue of the paper had a most spectacular success and that for weeks men were still buying it; no. the credit for that must go to the police; they had done their bit to ensure that the peasantry of Schleswig-Holstein would have a healthy occupation during the long winter evenings. Instead of just sitting and indulging in stupid thoughts, or doing crossword puzzles, or assembling to hear inflamatory speeches, the peasantery was henceforth quetly and busily engaged in procuring soapboxes and alarm clock and flashlight batteries. And then the bombs really began to go of.... Nobody ever asked me what I was actually doing in Schleswig=Holstein, save perhaps Dr. Hirschfeldt, a high official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, who had recently taken to frequenting Salinger's salon. Occasionally, and casually, he would glance at ne with his green eyes an honour me with a question, such as: "And what are the peasants up to in the north?" To which I would usually only reply: "Thank you for your interest. According to the statistics, the standard of living is going up -- in particular, there has been in increased demand for alarm clocks.

She did tai chi daily and always seemed to be completing a new crossword puzzle

People of religious distinction maintain that human beings exclusively possess souls, on the strength of which they may gain admittance to heaven. Only human beings lie, devise pogroms, murder for recreation, steal, libel, slander and perform crossword puzzles. This says nothing new about the condition of being human, but it does help to illuminate the special contributions of the soul.

Elderly people are not always craggy, wrinkled, stooped over, forgetful, or wise. Teenagers are not necessarily rebellious, querulous, or pimple-faced. Babies aren’t always angelic, or even cute. Drunks don’t always slur their words. Characters aren’t types. When creating a character, it’s essential to avoid the predictable. Just as in language we must beware of clichés. When it comes to character, we are looking for what is true, what is not always so, what makes a character unique, nuanced, indelible. This specificity applies, obviously, to our main characters, but it is equally important when creating our minor characters: the man at the end of the bar, the receptionist in the doctor’s office, the woman with the shopping bag on the street. They don’t exist simply to advance our protagonist from point A to point B. They are not filler—you know, simply there to supply some local color. There is no such thing as filler or local color in life, nor can there be on the page. Ask of yourself: How does this character walk? How does she smell? What is she wearing? What underwear is she wearing? What are the traces of her accent? Is she hungry? Thirsty? Horny? What’s the last book she read? What did she have for dinner last night? Is she a good dancer? Does she do the crossword puzzle in pen? Did she have a childhood pet? Is she a dog person or a cat person?

So what are you going to do?" He asked. I thought about that for a second. "I'm going to watch Fox News for a while, and later, I am going to work a crossword puzzle while I sit on the toilet.

You’re sure good at that. I never have been able to work crossword puzzles.” “I’m good at it, Wanda, because my mind is brimming over with useless facts and information.

Today, the “mental workout” has gained great currency in the popular imagination. Brain gyms and memory boot camps are a growing fad, and brain training software was a $265 million industry in 2008, no doubt in part because of research that shows that older people who keep their minds active with crossword puzzles and chess can stave off Alzheimer’s and progressive dementia, but mostly because of the Baby Boomer generation’s intense insecurity about losing their marbles.

I looked at my sister, so tired and yet so happy, and I admit I felt a little envious. And the whole thing still seemed unreal and incomplete to me, and I couldn’t really believe it had happened without me. It was as if I had put only one word in a crossword puzzle and someone else finished it when I turned my back. Even more embarrassing, I actually felt a little bit guilty that I hadn’t been there, even though I wasn’t invited. Debs had been in danger without me, and that felt wrong. Completely stupid and irrational, not at all like me, but there it was.

But for Principle #2, challenge yourself to find joy in the simple waiting for things. Try to break it up into chunks. For instance, if you know you might have to wait an hour to see the eye doctor, tell yourself the first fifteen minutes you will read a magazine. The next ten you might write a letter or do a crossword puzzle. For at least five minutes, close your eyes and do nothing. Listen to the noises around you. Absorb the world from a new perspective, through your ears instead of your eyes.

Just because you can solve a crossword puzzle or build an atom bomb doesn't mean that you use your mind. Just as dogs love to chew bones, the mind loves to get its teeth into problems. Thats why it does crossword puzzles and builds atom bombs. You have no interest in either. Let me ask you this: can you be free of your mind whenever you want to? Have you found the “off” button? You mean stop thinking altogether? No, I can't, except maybe for a moment or two. Then the mind is using you. You are unconsciously identified with it, so you don't even know that you are its slave. It's almost as if you were possessed without knowing it, and so you take the possessing entity to be yourself. The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity the thinker. Knowing this enables you to observe the entity. The moment you start watching the thinker, a higher level of consciousness becomes activated. You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken.

Somehow, and perhaps especially because they have less invested, a director who’s struggling with his own dilemmas can see another director’s struggles more clearly than his own. “It’s like I can put my crossword puzzle away and help you with your Rubik’s Cube a little bit,

She’d been building junk-art birds, mostly cranes, since before I was born. Making those birds was a cross between pure love and a nervous habit, the way some might do crossword puzzles or needlepoint. She sold them in the restaurants where she worked or at small flea markets and coffee shops for a little extra money. I thought they were the most beautiful creatures I’d ever seen and always felt a twinge when they flew away to their forever home, wishing we’d find ours.

While we were standing by, Clinton was doing the New York Times crossword puzzle, which he reputedly could dispatch in a matter of minutes. He asked me about a clue—a three-letter word starting with some letter or other. I had no idea, so I asked my son Jamie. ¶ 'Who's so stupid they don't know that?' Jamie retorted in a voice that could be heard at the other end of the phone. ¶ 'The President of the United States,' I said.

A man boards a plane and, to his surprise, finds the pope in the seat next to him. Shortly after takeoff, the pope opens the newspaper and starts working on the crossword puzzle. Almost immediately, the pope turns to the man and says, “Excuse me, do you know a four-letter word that ends in ‘unt’ and refers to a woman?” Just one word leapt to mind, an extremely vulgar one. The man thinks to himself, “I can’t suggest that word to the pope. There must be another word…” Then it hits him. He turns to the pope and says, “I think the word you’re looking for is ‘aunt.’” “Of course!” exclaims the pope. “I don’t suppose you have an eraser?

He leadeth me beside the still waters. He restoreth my soul…. —Psalm 23:2–3 (KJV) I grew up on a farm, doing chores after school and helping with garden or livestock during the summer. I worked hard as a farm wife and mother, and later held a demanding job with a church social service agency. Although I’m now retired, I’m still most comfortable with a never-ending to-do list. That’s why I said no when my husband, Don, asked me to attend a business conference with him. “There wouldn’t be anything for me to do,” I explained. “The resort brochure lists golf as the main draw, and I don’t play.” Don didn’t give up, so I reluctantly packed my suitcase and off we went. The hotel was surrounded by the golf course. There were four swimming pools, but the daytime temperatures were in the low sixties. For the first time in years I had nothing to do. No schedule, no phone calls, no meetings. To my great surprise, I enjoyed it! I read the entire newspaper and worked both crossword puzzles. I ate lunch outdoors amid an improbable but stunning landscape of palm trees and pines, grape hyacinths, honeysuckle, and a dozen types of cacti. Afternoons, I walked the easier trails, sat in the sunshine, and watched ducks paddle around a pond. Since there was nothing productive I could do, I didn’t feel guilty about not doing it. The best part, though, was the lesson I took home: God speaks most clearly when I don’t do; I simply be. Heavenly Father, thank You for teaching me to still my soul. —Penney Schwab Digging Deeper: Ps 46:10

People were all puzzles. Some twenty-piece pictures of Big Bird. Some two-thousand-piece pictures of the ruins of Athens. Some crosswords. Some Rubik’s cubes. All mysterious to some degree or for some time. Jackson was more enigmatic than most.

It’s as if we are requiring the player to solve a crossword puzzle in order to turn the page to get more of the novel.

I hate you, Andy,’ says Jen. ‘I really HATE you. I REALLY, REALLY HATE YOU!’ ‘Jen!’ says Mum, coming into the room with a cup of tea in one hand and a crossword puzzle book in the other. ‘What an awful thing to say to your brother! Apologise to him this instant!’ ‘But, Mum …’ says Jen. ‘No buts,’ says Mum. ‘There’s no excuse for speaking like that. Apologise right now!

Sometimes what’s exceptional about a sign is not the sign itself, but its timing. Your favorite pick-me-up song plays on the radio just when you’re feeling especially down. The number 100 appears on your Starbucks receipt just when you’re worrying about flunking a test. The answer to a crossword puzzle clue is randomly spoken by someone on TV just when you’re about to give up on it. All of these simple, surprising occurrences can be signs from the Other Side, because their timing makes us feel connected to the world in a way we can’t quite explain—as if all we have to do is release our feelings of fear and doubt into the universe, and the universe will respond with playful, wonderful reassurances.

Another default sign is what we might call a meaningful coincidence, or synchronicity. Synchronicity shows our innate and active connection to one another and to the world around us. You think of someone, and all of a sudden they are right in front of you. You hum your favorite song, and suddenly it starts playing on the car radio. You’re doing a crossword puzzle, and the very answer you’re looking for appears on the TV news. All of these things can happen without us asking for them or expecting them.

Nearly all constructors use a program such as CrossFire or Crossword Constructor,

Journalist Oliver Roeder, writing for the statistical website FiveThirtyEight, helped prove Parker’s plagiarism beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Cruciverbalists Will Nediger and Erik Agard created a Puzzle Collaboration Directory to match mentors with new talent.

I enlisted a couple of sherpas to guide me through the world of word combinations. One was OneLook, a combination reverse dictionary and thesaurus site. When I typed a string of letters, OneLook found words that began with, contained, or ended with that string. I could also give OneLook gap-toothed strings, that is, combinations of letters and blanks, and OneLook would find possible combinations: all seven-letter words, say, that have A as their second letter and end with C. But my primary helper was XWord Info, which mines data from the entire New York Times crossword archives. XWord Info provides helpful options like bite-sized fragments of common speech that wouldn’t necessarily appear in a dictionary list (ARE TOO, AM SO, OR NOT). XWord Info also knows every clue that has been used for every answer to every past Times puzzle ever published, save a handful that were lost to posterity after newspaper strikes in the 1940s.

Sunday school magazine. In 1965, Shortz encountered Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities by Dmitri Borgmann,

he became obsessed with crosswords after seeing Patrick Creadon’s documentary Wordplay, the 2006 film about the world of competitive crosswords that became one of the highest-grossing documentaries of all time.

Enjoyable is the ne plus ultra of any crossword, the “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” barometer

Exercise 1: How to Invigorate Your Relationship with Your Romantic Partner STEP 1: Privately, each person should think about time spent with their partner. Without talking about it, each of you should make a list of the shared times together that could best be described as “very pleasant” or “exciting.” Think about things you do at home, for work, in the community, for leisure, on vacation, or anywhere else where you did something with your partner that made you feel excited. For instance, think about when the two of you: Went to a concert or a club Played or watched a sport or games of some kind Shopped Learned a new skill Talked Volunteered Solved a problem Took care of other people, animals, or things Went to a spiritual or religious event/workshop/meeting Played music Had sex (the more details, the better) Worked out Relaxed Spent time in a different environment than you are usually in (beach versus mountains, suburbs versus city, noisy versus quiet, teeming with people versus sparsely populated) Engaged in strenuous physical and/or mental exercise Joined an organization that you both believed in Pursued a hobby Worked on the house, the yard, the car, the boat Cooked new recipes Went to the movies Sat in the same room and did your own thing, like read, did needlework, or worked crossword puzzles Planned the family budget Took a class Something else (the sky is the limit—add any activities that fueled you)

chief

Take

normalcy? an answer to a crossword puzzle question my body bears the strain of a suicide wannabe the look in my eye turns people away humanity frightens so easily that the words bubble to the top of the lobotomized

I wrote the gift in my private Time on carbon black Ink.

the first-ever attempt at any art form is rarely a shining example of the genre.

Puzzles can teach us lessons about fresh perspectives, compassion, and cooperation. If we see the world as a series of puzzles instead of a series of battles, we will come up with more and better solutions, and we need solutions more than ever.

If you think of yourself as just one in seven billion It can make you want to die But if you think of yourself as an irreplaceable one of one Doesn’t it stir just a little bit of courage?

Solving Sudoku demands time and careful thought. Remember that this is a number puzzle game, not a crossword puzzle. As a result, it can be really challenging... at times.

crossword puzzle book for adults

When we allow ourselves to have immersive experiences—through meditation, focused periods of work, painting, doing a crossword puzzle, weeding a garden, and many other forms of contemplative single-tasking—we’re not only more productive, we actually feel better.

But I love the blue-eyed problem for another reason. It’s a crash course in perspective-taking, in seeing the world from someone else’s point of view. Which to me is an absolutely crucial skill, especially in these times of heightened tribalism.

I even talk in probabilities. “When will you be home?” Julie will text me. “There’s a 70 percent chance I’ll be home at 6:30 p.m.

As the great philosopher Bertrand Russell said, certitude is a dangerous thing. “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

I see erasers as a guiding symbol for my life: Embrace the Way of the Eraser. As the saying goes, “Everyone makes mistakes. That’s why there is an eraser on the end of every pencil

A British journalist devoted an entire book to the phenomenon called The Quest for the Golden Hare, and he writes:

Tens of thousands of letters from Masqueraders have convinced me that the human mind has an equal capacity for pattern-matching and self-deception. While some addicts were busy cooking the riddle, others were more single-mindedly continuing their own pursuit of the hare quite regardless of the news that it had been found. Their own theories had come to seem so convincing that no exterior evidence could refute them.

Our mental frames change the way we interpret the world. And that’s why I think these optical illusions are such powerful metaphors for life. I’ve come to believe in the importance of frames and reframing. As with the vase and the face, there are often different ways to interpret the same situation.

Recently, I was watching a webinar from a child psychologist. The topic was something like “a parent’s guide to surviving quarantine,” and I figured I could use all the help I could get. During the webinar, the psychologist gave the following advice: “Don’t get furious. Get curious.

The author and podcaster Julia Galef talks about the scout mindset versus the soldier mindset. Scouts explore the intellectual terrain looking for truth, for information that counters their biases, for evidence one way or the other. Soldiers, on the other hand, are looking to win the intellectual battle by any means necessary. They are looking to confirm their biases using motivated reasoning.

Psychologist Adam Grant uses a different schema in his bestseller Think Again. He categorizes thinkers into scientists, preachers, prosecutors, and politicians. Only one of them, the scientist, is open to changing her mind; the others are using motivated reasoning.

He says we need to think more like engineers and less like lawyers, because engineers look for solutions, while lawyers look for evidence that reinforces their side.

We could all use more curiosity, one of the greatest human virtues. I once interviewed the late Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek for a magazine article, and he told me something I think of often. He said, “I’m curious about everything—even those things that don’t interest me.” It’s a bit paradoxical, perhaps even nonsensical. But I think it’d be a better world if everyone was more like Alex. ABC: Always be curious.

I tell him that such stories make me nervous for the future in the face of advances in AI. Garry shakes his head. “I’m more optimistic about the future of humanity,” he says. “You’re not worried about AI taking over?” “Why should I be? I was the first knowledge worker whose job was threatened by machines,” he says. I laugh. It’s true. In 1997, Garry was famously beaten in a chess match by IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue. “I think it’s wrong to cry about progress,” he says. “The future is not humans fighting machines. The future is humans collaborating with machines. Every technology in history destroyed jobs, but it also created new ones.

I learned the surprising history of puzzles, perhaps the oldest form of entertainment. I learned how they’ve played a part in religion, love, and war. How the British secret service used a crossword puzzle in The Daily Telegraph to recruit codebreakers against the Nazis.

I’ve seen the dark side of puzzles, how they can overlap with paranoia and obsession. And I grew to love types of puzzles that never appealed to me before. I talked to scientists about why we’re so drawn to puzzles, why an estimated 50 million people do crosswords every day and more than 450 million Rubik’s Cubes have been sold.

A tightness in my chest grows with every step she takes away from me. I hate the feeling sprouting inside of me like a weed, tangling around my heart like a vine, almost as much as I hate Iris walking away from me.

The Way of the Eraser is about being okay with mistakes, okay with tentative beliefs, okay with flexibility. I could be wrong, of course, but I believe that my years of crossword solving have made me more flexible in every part of my life, from parenting to writing to marriage.

During our meeting, Peter told me one of the keys to solving crosswords is to keep your mind flexible. Keep it open to new perspectives. Don’t fall in love with your hypothesis. Good advice for both life and puzzles.

This is another absolutely key strategy Peter and I discussed. When stuck, take a break. Let the problem marinate in the back corner of your brain. Loosen your grip. Puzzle fan Leonardo da Vinci knew this long ago. As he said about painting, “Every now and then go away, have a little relaxation, for when you come back to your work your judgment will be surer.

Within these pages, I have included my favorite puzzles from history. Why just read about the first-ever crossword puzzle from 1913, when you can solve it?

As I mentioned: devious. I ask Peter why he thinks people—he, I, and millions of others—are so addicted to crosswords. “Well, life is a puzzle,” he says. “Who should you marry? That’s a puzzle. What job should you take? That’s a puzzle. With those puzzles, it’s hard to know if you got the best answer. But with crosswords, there is one correct answer. So that’s comforting.” I nod: puzzles provide a level of certainty you don’t get in this confusing real world. It’s a solid theory, though not the only one, as I’ll discuss next chapter.

According to this theory, every morning you should spend two minutes giving your spouse your full and complete attention. Look deeply into their eyes, ask how they are, and really listen to the answer. Then, after work, do the same thing for three minutes. And finally, two minutes before bed. Seven minutes a day, and—voilà!—a lifetime of matrimonial bliss.

I fall asleep by going through the alphabet, thinking of something to be grateful for with each letter from A to Z (A is for the apple pancakes my son made us, and so on).

Constraints lead to creativity. As Orson Welles said, “The enemy of art is the absence of limitations.

Well, a chorizont is a person who believes that The Odyssey and The Iliad were written by two different people.

Now, as soon as I wake up, I check my iPhone for the New York Times Spelling Bee, a find-a-word game that is both compelling and maddening (What?! You’re telling me “ottomen” isn’t a word? Then what’s the plural of “ottoman”?!). Before going to sleep, I do Wordle and the Times crossword puzzle.

I think of Barack Obama’s dream of opening a T-shirt shop. He once said he was so sick of hard decisions that he fantasized about opening a T-shirt shop on the beach that sold only one item: a plain white T-shirt, size medium. Freedom from choice. Several years ago, I wrote a book in which I followed all the rules of the Bible, and even though I’m not religious, I saw the appeal of a highly structured life. The freedom to choose has many benefits, but in certain circumstances, so do strict limitations.

A Fermi problem is one like this: “How many piano tuners are there in New York City?” You have to estimate the size of something about which you are totally ignorant.

As Epstein writes: “How many households are in New York? What portion might have pianos? How often are pianos tuned? How long might it take to tune a piano? How many homes can one tuner reach in a day? How many days a year does a tuner work?” You won’t guess it exactly, but you’ll be much more likely to be in the ballpark. As Epstein writes, “None of the individual estimates has to be particularly accurate in order to get a reasonable overall answer.

Actually, a vast number of men, even when they are in the springtime of their lives, “kill” time by reading “shockers”, solving crossword puzzles, studying the worthless tips of racetrack touts, by loafing on the street corner or in pubs and by scores of other time-wasting devices. In most cases, time is all they have. It is their only capital. And their steady desire is to destroy it. Speaking of crossword puzzles, Mr. Esme Wingfield-Stratford truly says: “Energy must find an outlet somewhere, even in the most atrophied mind, and that it may drain itself easily and agreeably into vacancy, puzzles and competitions are devised, culminating in the invention of the crossword, perhaps the most scientific of all time-killing devices, with its capacity for holding the attention just sufficiently to keep the brain employed in the most useless of all possible activities for hours on end.

Besides not tasting good, the dodo had one or two fateful weaknesses. It laid its eggs upon the open ground, instead of concealing them. And it could not fly. As to why it could not fly—It seems inevitable for it to be said that this was because there were no predators on Mauritius. Indeed there were none either, in Australia, where lived the emu, which could not fly. There were none in New Zealand, where the flightless moa dwelt, in awful ignorance of the awful fact that some day its chief fame would be as an adjunct to the composers of cross-word puzzles. There were no predators in Iceland, to the great comfort of the great auk. Nor were there any on the frozen shelves of Antarctica, land of the flightless penguin.3 However, does this really explain anything?

Love is like a rose. It's the beautiful, elegant petals and perfume that sell the flower. But those things don't last very long. The petals wilt and die. In the end, it's the stem--the thorny, sturdy green stem--that keeps the flower alive. It's what endures after the petals wilt and the perfume fades. Love is two old people doing crossword puzzles together at the end of their lives and helping each other when they become too feeble to walk. It might not sound exciting, but it's better than that. It's love. [Justin Ek]

Mussina was a brilliant high school pitcher in Montoursville, Pennsylvania, one town over from Williamsport, home of the Little League World Series. Milwaukee special assistant Doug Melvin was an Orioles scout then, and he saw Moose pitch and was blown away. Melvin said Mussina was an 18-year-old who pitched like he was 28. Moose had an advanced way of thinking about pitching. He saw it as a puzzle; Mussina has always been a puzzle guy, you know, crossword puzzles and such. He tried to think of the optimal way to keep hitters off-balance, to make them uncomfortable. With his pitching stuff and his keen mind, nobody in high school could touch him

In 1913, English journalist Arthur Wynne published a “word-cross” puzzle in the New York World. The rectangular grid with squares to be filled in with cued words became wildly popular and its name was altered a few years later to “crossword.

though I’m guessing Stella’s brain is mostly thinking “Next time, asshole, just give me the peanut butter on a spoon.

puzzle mindset—a mindset of ceaseless curiosity about everything in the world,

Puzzles can teach us lessons about fresh perspectives, compassion, and cooperation. If

Why do we watch horror movies and do triathlons?

Denys Overholser reported back to me on May 5, 1975, on his attempts to design the stealthiest shape for the competition. He was wearing a confident smile as he sat down on the couch in my office with a preliminary designer named Dick Scherrer, who had helped him sketch out the ultimate stealth shape that would result in the lowest radar observability from every angle. What emerged was a diamond beveled in four directions, creating in essence four triangles. Viewed from above the design closely resembled an Indian arrowhead. Denys was a hearty outdoorsman, a cross-country ski addict and avid mountain biker, a terrific fellow generally, but inexplicably fascinated by radomes and radar. That was his specialty, designing radomes—the jet’s nose cone made out of noninterfering composites, housing its radar tracking system. It was an obscure, arcane specialty, and Denys was the best there was. He loved solving radar problems the way that some people love crossword puzzles. “Boss,” he said, handing me the diamond-shaped sketch, “Meet the Hopeless Diamond.” “How good are your radar-cross-section numbers on this one?” I asked. “Pretty good.” Denys grinned impishly. “Ask me, ‘How good?’ ” I asked him and he told me. “This shape is one thousand times less visible than the least visible shape previously produced at the Skunk Works.” “Whoa!” I exclaimed. “Are you telling me that this shape is a thousand times less visible than the D-21 drone?” “You’ve got it!” Denys exclaimed. “If we made this shape into a full-size tactical fighter, what would be its equivalent radar signature… as big as what—a Piper Cub, a T-38 trainer… what?” Denys shook his head vigorously. “Ben, understand, we are talking about a major, major, big-time revolution here. We are talking infinitesimal.” “Well,” I persisted, “what does that mean? On a radar screen it would appear as a… what? As big as a condor, an eagle, an owl, a what?” “Ben,” he replied with a loud guffaw, “try as big as an eagle’s eyeball.

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