Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Our next Broadway on the radio event is happening in just over a week. We are taking a trip to Hadestown. The beloved musical just brought in a totally new cast for all five roles. There's a new Hades, a new Persephone, a new Hermes, a new Orpheus, and Eurydice. Here's a sneak preview of Jack Wolfe and Morgan Dudley in those roles.

Eurydice: Lover, tell me if you can Who's gonna buy the wedding bands?

Times being what they are

Hard, and getting harder all the time

Orpheus: Lover, when I sing my song

All the rivers will sing along

And they're gonna break their banks for us

And with their gold be generous

All a-flashing in the pan, all to fashion for your hand

The rivers gonna give us the wedding bands

Alison Stewart: We have all of the new cast members. Morgan Dudley, Kurt Elling, Rebecca Naomi Jones, Paulo Szot and Jack Wolfe here at WNYC studios in the Greene Space for an epic hour of live performances. You can be there too. It's happening on Thursday, October 30th at noon. You can get tickets by going to wnyc.org/hadestown. Again, head to wnyc.org/hadestown for more information and to get your tickets before they sell out. We'll see you next Thursday, October 30th. Now let's get this hour started with Puzzle Mania.

Welcome to Fit Lola. I'm Aristotle Swan. For puzzlers out there, you may have figured out that was an anagram for the way I usually start the show. This isn't Fit Lola, it's All Of It, and I'm Alison Stewart. Not Aristotle Swan. Although that is a good name for a public radio show host. Today we're talking about puzzles and the satisfaction that comes from wrestling an aha moment out of confusing clues. New York Times puzzle editor, Joel, I'm gonna try to say this. Fagliano.

Joel Fagliano: Nailed it.

Alison Stewart: Yes. Is here to talk about the new book, Puzzle Mania!: New York Times Games, Wordle, Connections, Spelling Bee, Minis and More!. Joel, thanks for being in studio.

Joel Fagliano: Yes, it's great to be here.

Alison Stewart: Your parents got you involved in puzzles as a kid. Why do you think some kids get truly hooked on puzzles?

Joel Fagliano: I think it comes from coming from a word-loving family. We played Scrabble, Boggle, and there was just so much debate about, "Is that a word?" "Oh, no, I can't believe you played that. What is that?" Hawaiian goose. There was a nae nae, for example. Things like that. You pick up words over time, coming from a word-loving family.

Alison Stewart: That's already come up twice since you've been in this room. Nae nae. Hey, listeners, we are going to play a game on the air. We're going to play a sort of a crossword game. New York Times puzzle editor, Joel Faglioni.

Joel Fagliano: Fagliano.

Alison Stewart: Fagliano, has prepared some puzzles for you based on common language of crosswordese. We'll get to that in a minute. Words that always seem to pop up over and over in crosswords. If you want to play, give us a call, 212-433-9692. 212-433-WNYC. You note in the introduction this idea of puzzling language, crosswordese. You can always expect Yoko Ono or Brian Eno to pop up in a puzzle. How does the puzzling world benefit from having these kind of inside dynamics?

Joel Fagliano: It's interesting whether it benefits or not. I think in some ways it makes it sort of this exclusive club that it feels really good to be a part of. It feels really good to know Elvis Presley's middle name is Aaron. A-R-O-N. Is that useful knowledge in the rest of your life? No, not really. It's never going to come up. Maybe at a trivia night at a bar or something. I think part of what's nice about puzzles is the intergenerational nature of them. When you're solving puzzles with somebody and they know the same things you do, and you're able to both delight over being able to solve a clue, it's a great way to connect with another person.

Alison Stewart: You got your degree in linguistics and cognitive science. I don't know if you know this, I had a brain injury in 2024. Part of my speech therapy is puzzles that my therapist gave us, word puzzles and cognition puzzles, memory puzzles, sometimes just a puzzle puzzle that's on the table. What's going on in terms of the science of the brain and cognition when we do puzzles?

Joel Fagliano: I would say it's far from my area of expertise because right after college I became a puzzle editor-

[laughter]

Joel Fagliano: -where we don't study those. I will say my uncle is a neuroscientist and he studies dementia. One of the ways they treat dementia is with puzzles. I think it has to do with recall. Puzzles are a way of testing your recall of things you know, and also of your way of exploring new avenues in the brain, making new connections, new synapses. If I can contribute in that to any way, I'm happy to. Otherwise, just trying to have people have a good time.

Alison Stewart: All right, we've got somebody on the line. Pat from White Plains is calling. Pat, are you ready to play?

Pat: I think so, Alison. Thank you for taking the call.

Alison Stewart: Okay.

Joel Fagliano: All right, Pat. The answer to each of these questions is a familiar piece of crosswordese, something that appears in puzzles a lot. This is four letters, and the clue is cookie in the shape of its first and last letters.

Alison Stewart: Oh, I got that.

Joel Fagliano: It's a four letter cookie. The first and last letters are the shape. If you'd like, I can give you the first letter.

Pat: Yes, please.

Joel Fagliano: The first letter is O.

Pat: Oreo.

Joel Fagliano: Oreo is right.

Alison Stewart: Thank you so much for calling. If you want to play our game with New York Times puzzle editor, Joel-

Joel Fagliano: Fagliano.

Alison Stewart: -he has some puzzles prepared for you with crosswordese. Our number is 2124-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. These are words that seem to pop up over and over again in crosswords. Let's see if you can get them as well. When you're creating a crossword puzzle or any kind of puzzle. When you're coming up with clues, what kind of factors go into engineering that aha moment? Like, I got it. Aha. I got Oreo.

Joel Fagliano: One of the things you do as a puzzle creator is you really try not to make a puzzle just for you, filled with references that you find funny and jokes that you find funny. That's a surefire way to make a bad puzzle. One of the things you have to do is put yourself in the shoes of the solver. I'm constantly thinking about, have I crossed these two words fairly? Is it safe to assume that maybe someone won't be able to get the across answer, but they can get the down answer?

Then you asked about clever clues. A lot of times, those are the ones-- This is a little inside puzzle tip for everyone out there. If you're solving a crossword and you see a clue with a question mark at the end of it, it's going to be a bad pun. Beware. Strap in. There is a pun incoming. You know, the puzzle's labeled it for you, and you'll be able to solve it.

Alison Stewart: All right, Isabel from Manhattan. Isabel, are you ready to play?

Isabel: Yes.

Joel Fagliano: Okay, Isabel, your clue is sea predator that can grow to roughly the size of a school bus. Four letters.

Isabel: Orca.

Joel Fagliano: Orca. She got it right away.

Alison Stewart: Way to go, Isabel. Jesse from Spring Lake, New Jersey, is ready to play. Hi, Jesse.

Jesse: Hi. How are you, Alison? Doing good?

Alison Stewart: Doing well. Let's go, Joel.

Joel Fagliano: Okay, Jesse, your clue. It's four letters again. Berry whose name is 3/4 vowels?

Jesse: Acai.

Joel Fagliano: Acai is right. Acai is right.

Alison Stewart: Oh, you are playing with a public radio audience. Yes, you are. Let's talk to Tom from the East Village. Okay, Tom, are you feeling good? Are you feeling ready?

Tom: I don't know. I'm a little nervous, but let's go.

Joel Fagliano: Okay, Tom, here we go. Three letters is your answer. Bird able to run faster than the fastest human. Three letter bird. It's appeared 587 times in New York Times crosswords.

Tom: Any hints out there?

Joel Fagliano: It's a tall, fast bird in three letters. Alison, do you-- You can find--

Tom: I'm trying to picture it.

Alison Stewart: E-

Joel Fagliano: It starts with an E.

Alison Stewart: -and an M and a U.

Joel Fagliano: That's correct.

Tom: Emu.

Joel Fagliano: It's Emu. Emu is right.

Alison Stewart: You're in charge of the Mini crossword.

Joel Fagliano: That's right.

Alison Stewart: All right, what's harder and what's easier when you're trying to come up with a compact version of the crossword?

Joel Fagliano: The Mini crossroad was started in 2014 when we launched our games app. The idea is basically that our normal crossword is incredibly hard, as many of you know. The Monday is the easiest, but then by Saturday, it's like the hardest puzzle in the world. We wanted to give some offerings that people could solve a little more quickly each day. My goal with the Mini crossword is to broaden the audience of people who think crosswords aren't for them. I think a lot of people pick up crosswords, and they're smart people and they know lots of things, but there's this barrier of, "I'm not sure I know all the things that go in these puzzles."

Despite the theme of our quiz today being crosswordese, I try really hard with the Minis to not include-

Alison Stewart: Oh, interesting.

Joel Fagliano: -words that you only know if you do a bunch of puzzles. It's just filled with regular vocabulary, but still interesting, entertaining. Let's call it New York Times level clues. That's the goal of the Mini crossword.

Alison Stewart: We are speaking with Joel-

Joel Fagliano: Fagliano.

Alison Stewart: -a puzzle editor at The New York Times, creator of their Mini crossword and editor of the new book of puzzles called Puzzle Mania. We want to get you in on this conversation. Joel has prepared some puzzles for you based on the common language of crosswordese. Words that seem to pop up over and over again in crosswords. Give us a call to play at 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. As we get the folks line up again, let's keep going. Every industry and workplace has its own way of talking about the job. What are some puzzle making jargon that you use with your colleagues that we would not necessarily know what you were talking about?

Joel Fagliano: Sure. Wow, there's so much of it.

[laughter]

Joel Fagliano: Well, we talk a lot about the grid and the fill. The grid is the diagram you see with the crossword, and the fill is what we call all the words that cross. We also talk about corners. In every big crossword, it's segmented by black squares. We focus a lot on whether a corner, a section of the crossword is fair. If you have too many names in one section or maybe a pile up of a lot of consonant heavy words where you're going to really need to guess one or two of them, we talk a lot about making sure there are fair corners to a puzzle.

Alison Stewart: All right, are you ready for some more folks?

Joel Fagliano: Sure are.

Alison Stewart: All right, is Jesse there calling in from Montclair, or Josie.

Josie: Yes, Josie and Joe.

Alison Stewart: Oh, Josie and Joe. Okay, Josie and Joe, are you ready? Let's go.

Josie: We're so ready.

Joel Fagliano: Okay, Josie and Joe, this is another four letter answer. Your clue is Olympics event with two accents in its name.

Josie: Is it Epee?

Joe: Epee.

Joel Fagliano: Epee.

Josie: Epee.

Joel Fagliano: Epee is right. The first and third letters are accented. That's appeared 748 times in The New York Times crossword.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling. Let's go to Emery in North Bergen. Emery, are you ready?

Emery: Yes, I'm so ready. This is my first time calling. Thank you for taking it.

Joel Fagliano: Okay, Emery, this is a three letter answer. Musician Brian, who composed the Windows 95 startup music.

Emery: Eno.

Joel Fagliano: Brian Eno, who I think owes us some royalties for how many times we put his name in the puzzle.

Alison Stewart: You owe him, one or the other.

Joel Fagliano: Yes, exactly.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk to Sophie in Brooklyn. Sophie, are you ready for this?

Sophie: Yes. Hi.

Joel Fagliano: Okay, Sophie, this is a three letter answer. I will say at the front, this is the word that has appeared the most in The New York Times crossword of any word. This is a new way that we're cluing it now. All right, here's your clue. Reputation or red for Taylor Swift in three letters.

Sophie: Reputation or red

Joel Fagliano: Red for Taylor Swift.

Sophie: Oh.

Alison Stewart: You can do it.

Sophie: It's an-- EPs.

Joel Fagliano: She had a tour that was called the blank Tour. Each of these is in.

Sophie: Oh, Era.

Joel Fagliano: In Era. Era. There we go.

Alison Stewart: Beautiful. Thank you so much for calling in. We really appreciate it. Somebody wanted to ask you a question. Are you up for that?

Joel Fagliano: Yeah, of course.

Alison Stewart: All right, let's go to Kesha on line seven. Hi, Kesha, thanks for calling All Of It. You had a question?

Kesha: Hi, I just wanted to ask about the Quartiles, the puzzles with the little squares that you guys have on the app. No?

Joel Fagliano: Say a little bit more about that puzzle.

Kesha: Oh, it's so fun. They split the word up into so many pieces and you have to put the words back together. It's called Quartiles, and I've just been addicted so much lately.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for calling.

Joel Fagliano: Thanks for the call. I'm not sure that's a New York Times game, but it sounds like a fun game-

Alison Stewart: I know, it does sound like a good time.

Joel Fagliano: -that I would like to play. I'm going to Google it right after this.

Alison Stewart: Well, it's interesting she mentioned this game and we've all heard about Spelling Bee and Wordle, the sort of newer to The New York Times. There was a coolness around playing games again. Can you walk us through the history of The New York Times puzzles and how different kinds of puzzles have brought in new audiences over time?

Joel Fagliano: Sure. To bring it back to the book really quickly, that's what this book, Puzzle Mania, celebrates, is the old and the new, what made The New York Times games famous and classic and then what's caused this renaissance of New York Times games in recent years. Within the book, we have acrostics, which are a classic puzzle type. They've run in The New York Times magazine for decades and decades, as well as games based around Wordle and Connections, which came out in 2021 and 2022, respectively. I'll say the flagship puzzle of The New York Times is the crossword. We call it the big crossword now that we have the Mini.

Alison Stewart: The big crossword. [laughs]

Joel Fagliano: The big one. We've got 20 original crosswords that are in this book too, but the Mini and our newer games, I think, have broadened the audience of people who are interested in New York Times games. I mean, even coming on the subway over here, you can see people with their phones out playing the app.

Alison Stewart: Sure.

Joel Fagliano: As a puzzle loving nerd since I was a kid, it's just really thrilling to see puzzles become cool and mainstream and something people come up to me at a party and talk about, and that sort of thing.

Alison Stewart: How were you thinking about the structure of this book as you were putting it together?

Joel Fagliano: One thing that was really important to me, if you go to a bookstore and go to the puzzle section and open most of the books, it's grids. It's a lot of grids, black and white grids, which is certainly some people's thing. It's my thing, but what I really wanted with this book was you can open it and just start playing. There are lots of visual puzzles. There's trivia. There are pieces on the different puzzle makers who make up The New York Times team. Just something that's engaging for everybody of all solving skills.

Alison Stewart: There apparently is a section called Joel's Favorites.

Joel Fagliano: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell us a little bit more about that.

Joel Fagliano: I've made the Mini crossword for The New York Times since 2014, every day. That's like over 3,500 Minis.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Joel Fagliano: It's a lot. For this book, I went back through them and I picked out my favorites, my favorite Mini crosswords I've ever done, as well as the favorite clues I've ever written. They're all in the book. I'll say some of them at the time were a little too hard and weren't popular, but I liked them, and it's my book, and so they are in the book. They're the ones that sang the most to me.

Alison Stewart: I'm curious, what kind of puzzle editing goes into adapting digital native puzzles formats into puzzles for the page.

Joel Fagliano: People who are familiar with Wordle might be saying, "How is Wordle in a book? You need the tiles to flip over." The way we've adapted something like Wordle for the book, the game is called Wordle in One, and basically, picture that moment when you're solving Wordle and you're like, "Oh, there's only one possible solution left, given these yellows and green tiles." We've got basically that on the page. You have your green tiles, and it can either be lyric is shown, and you know it. The L and the I and the C are green. It's got to be logic, and you write that in. That was the ways in which we thought about even something like connections. How do you take connections and make it engaging for print? We've done different sizes, different variants, new kind of meta puzzles. There's a lot of spins on our favorite games.

Alison Stewart: All right, this one's coming from inside the house. It's from our control room.

Joel Fagliano: Okay.

Alison Stewart: They said, please ask him about how hard Connections is. How hard is Connections?

Joel Fagliano: I was expecting this question.

[laughter]

Joel Fagliano: Connections is hard. That's part of what makes it fun to me. We have a range of difficulty with our games. What's interesting about Connections is it all comes from one person's mind. Her name is Wyna Liu. She lives here in New York City. I won't give her address out.

Alison Stewart: That's a good thing.

Joel Fagliano: She is just a brilliantly creative person. Sometimes the wavelength that she's operating is not the wavelength that other people are operating on in terms of the connection she's finding between words, but in the same spirit as our other games, she's ultimately just trying to make something that's, yes, hard, but ultimately delightfully solvable.

Alison Stewart: In this year of 2025, what do you get from puzzles that you really can't get anywhere else?

Joel Fagliano: Oh, I would say just a reprieve. A reprieve is the word that comes to mind. To me, puzzle solving time is kind of this sacred break. I use puzzles as a way to kick start my day. I don't know how many other-- some people use it as a way to wind down, which I think is also a really nice thing before bed. For me, one of the things I love to do is play the Spelling Bee, I don't know if you've heard the Spelling Bee-

Alison Stewart: I have indeed.

Joel Fagliano: -with its hive of letters first thing in the morning. It's just a way to warm my brain up. I don't go right to reading the news. It gets me going for the day. I think puzzles can offer that. In this year of 2025.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is Puzzle Mania. I've been speaking to New York Times puzzle editor and Mini crossword creator Joel.

Joel Fagliano: Fagliano.

Alison Stewart: Thanks for joining us.

Joel Fagliano: Great to be here.