Word: shortz
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...innovations didn't please every Times solver. "You are sick, sick, sick," goes one of the letters Shortz reads aloud in Wordplay. Another correspondent is polite but perplexed: "This kvetching thing that's going on, I can't seem to get a grasp on it. 'The kvetcher's cry': 'Oy vey'? I don't get it. How is it used? Is it a Northern thing?" But most puzzlers I know are pleased with his work. More than that: he has given fresh life to their daily preoccupation...
...Shortz doesn't spend all his time at the Times. He is also the puzzlemaster for NPR's Sunday morning news show. ("I'm blessed," he says, "to work for the two greatest news organizations in the country: the New York Times and National Public Radio.") He occasionally contributes puzzles to Games. And since he was 25 (he's now 53), he has run an annual crossword puzzle tournament at the Marriott in Stamford, Ct. He founded it in 1978, mostly out of an urge - a strange one, considering the solitude in which crosswords are constructed and solved - to meet...
...SHORTZ' SUBJECTS...
...Times puzzle under Shortz' aegis has some famous fans, and Wordplay has tracked down most of them. Stewart, attacking a Tuesday puzzle, says, "I'm so confident, I'm gonna do it in glue stick." Dan Okrent, a former TIME executive who was the New York Times' Public Editor, notes that the best crossword solvers are mathematicians and musicians. (This applies especially to cryptic puzzles, a British refinement of the form that was imported to America when Stephen Sondheim created 40 or so for New York magazine in the early '70s. A few years later the cryptic became a regular...
...Clinton and his opponent in the 1996 Presidential race were the subjects of the most famous daily puzzle in Shortz' reign (and, the editor says, his favorite). In that Nov. 5 puzzle the clue for the central entry (two seven-letter spaces) read: "Lead story in tomorrow's newspaper!" It could be solved as either CLINTON ELECTED or BOBDOLE ELECTED. How? Each intersecting Down clue yielded two answers...