(Will Shortz and) I Return!
EMOCLEW (Welcome Back)!
After my last post, I let the vacation vibes sink in and reevaluated my priorities for a bit, resulting in a few days off from the ol’ Substack. But when I learned about this Sunday’s Puzzle Mania, I knew it was time to get back in the game.
The New York Times’ Puzzle Mania section is an annual event, and it may represent the spirit of Will Shortz as well as anything ever has—it has the restless visual and verbal creativity of his younger days at Games Magazine, but the wide-open design possibilities of full-sized newspaper pages. And Will himself has three bylines in the publication—a return to form after he’d taken much of this year off from editing duties to recover from his stroke.
He’s produced some wordplay true-or-false questions that offer beguiling challenges. He’s composed another “spiral,” a kind of crossword incorporating clockwise and counterclockwise spin, forward and backward motion. The cover puzzle of the current edition, seen above, resembles a spiral but isn’t quite the same—here’s a Shortz-designed puzzle from a past Puzzle Mania, below.
Will’s third piece, though, is a return to a lesser-known role he’s occupied now and again over his long career, that of puzzle historian. He reports on Rodolfo Kurchan, “Argentina’s Unsung Puzzle Maestro,” while the rest of the page presents a wide selection of Kurchan’s work.
Kurchan is indeed worthy of attention, but today, my nostalgia for an old name outweighs my curiosity for a new one. Seeing Will’s finely honed mind in print again is a welcome ray of sunshine.
Next up: “Off with their heads!”