David Furst: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm David Furst, in for Alison Stewart. Okay, listeners, we are looking for a 10-letter word. Here is your clue. Mystery boxes for word Sherlocks. If you guessed or, better yet, deduced crosswords, you know what we're talking about to close out the show today. Crossword puzzles and other word games have gotten immensely popular in recent years, thanks to innovations like Wordle or The New York Times Connections. These combination trivia and language puzzles have been around for over a century.

A new book from Natan Last, who interned with the famous puzzle master Will Shortz and now designs crosswords himself, has written a book that explores the history and cultural impact of the crossword. It's called Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. Natan Last joins us now to talk about it. Welcome.

Natan Last: Thank you so much for having me.

David Furst: That's a lot to get to there. I want to ask you about the cultural impact just ahead. First, what gave you the idea to take this in-depth look at humanity's relationship to crosswords?

Natan Last: I think my own relationship with language, with life, has been always refracted through the puzzle. The first time I solved a Saturday New York Times puzzle, I was at the beach with a high school girlfriend, could only do maybe half the clues, put it down, came back, and found that in my consciousness had materialized all of the answers. That kind of acquaintance with the neurological backburner is something we've all experienced. My first experience was through the crossword.

David Furst: You can remember that moment?

Natan Last: I remember the sensation of I didn't know the answers five minutes ago, but now I do. A lot of us, we wake up, and our dreams or just the night's sleep has helped us solve a problem. For me, it was going for a swim and eating some barbecue.

David Furst: [laughs] I'm waiting for that five minutes to happen when it comes to solving crossword puzzles. I'm definitely crossword challenged. You're going to have to help us out here today.

Natan Last: I'll do my best.

David Furst: How long have crosswords been around, and how were they first received when they first appeared?

Natan Last: The crosswords have been around for about a century. They begin in 1913 at the New York World. This is the era of Joseph Pulitzer's big newspaper. Arthur Wynne, an immigrant from Liverpool, had a Christmas deadline and some column inches to fill. New printing technology made it so he could print the grid right there on the newspaper page. They were a sensation overnight, and there was effectively an immediate backlash.

David Furst: Backlash?

Natan Last: There was an enormous sense that puzzles were a waste of time, that they distracted young intellectuals or intellectuals to be for more respectable matters. Librarians blotted them out when they were filed in the library.

David Furst: If they're a waste of time, blotting them out seems to be like an extra incredible waste of time.

Natan Last: Yes, exactly. Two wrongs don't make a right. Absolutely. It wasn't really working. I mean, people named this disease crossworditis. They were so aghast at how people were using their newfound leisure time. This is at the beginning of, and in the aftermath of World War I, the concept of leisure is a new thing. After the World War, Americans are doing things like yo-yo contests, dance marathons, seeing who could sit atop a flagpole for longest. This is a moment of aiming competitiveness that had been cast first in the war, but now at frivolous stuff.

David Furst: That you shouldn't be wasting your time this way.

Natan Last: Exactly.

David Furst: Interesting. Well, you note in the book that a lot of the so-called pop culture references in crosswords are really things that are not very up to date. A lot of times, it's things that have been popular decades ago. Some of these references have become very ubiquitous over the years. They've entered the crosswordese lexicon. What is interesting to you about that in terms of the social impact of crosswords?

Natan Last: I just think one of the things that happens with crosswordese, these are the often vowel-heavy words that we have to memorize if we become longtime solvers, is that there's been a long history of reimagining them. Before Will Shortz took over at the New York Times in 1993, the four-letter word Oreo was clued as a Greek prefix, meaning mountain in a combined form, which, of course, we all knew. It's not until 1993 that we can finally call a cookie a cookie.

Crossword constructors, especially younger ones, are interested in reformulating little morsels of language. Ont, the province Ontario, in an abbreviated form, in the hands of Erik Agard can become the phrase on T, so someone taking testosterone. I'm waiting for unc, U-N-C, to be clued as the new slang term as opposed to the school. Words are constantly evolving, and the crossword can both track it, but also have a hand in shaping it.

David Furst: How much does working on crossword puzzles really sharpen your mind and your skills to solve other puzzles, to deal with other questions in life?

Natan Last: That's a good question. I think it's given me a really misshapen vocabulary. When I was younger, I knew Shakespeare quotes because you could only clue tis one of seven ways, or I knew words like ambit or inure, high register words that appear in the crossword, but not really much in real life, and so I use them at terrible times. I think it can broaden your vocabulary.

Really high-caliber solvers tend to say that when you get better, you start to solve the grid more than you solve the clues, that it's a bit of pattern recognition. Everything from plurals end with s and superlatives end with est, to 80% of words in English, because of the Germanic origins, begin with consonants. You start to understand the skeletal structure of language in a way that I imagine has no use anywhere else.

David Furst: No use anywhere else, but it really helps if you're trying to solve the grid.

Natan Last: Yes, exactly.

David Furst: In the book's first chapter, the book is called Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. Natan Last is our guest today here on All Of It on WNYC. Looking at the, I guess, future of crossword puzzles in the book's first chapter, you write about the introduction of software tools in the puzzle maker's arsenal. What were the challenges involved in designing crossword creation programs, and how did they change the product?

Natan Last: Crosswords have three really dissimilar tasks for the crossword maker. You're thinking up a theme, and that's like planning a scavenger hunt. You're noticing some correspondence among words and following the logic. Building a grid is constructing. The raw material is the letter. One of my favorite writers, Georges Perec, called it letter-based arithmetic. All that matters is that words are this or that length and that their letters play nicely with the words next door. Writing clues is, of course, a very literary thing to do. That middle process, building the grid, has always been amenable to computer assistance.

It's really nice to know if I need a 10-letter word with X in the third slot. I want to know all the possibilities. It's useful to construct by cortex, but constructing with a computer alongside you can really help with that. Building the grid has become much easier with computer assistance. Sometimes coming up with a good theme can be useful if you've got a little script. One of my favorite crossword themes, the constructor noticed that the word sore loser repeats every single letter except for the L. The L is the leftover letter. It's really hard for a brain to think up other examples like that.

A small computer script will unearth phrases like Hippocratic Oath in which every single letter except for the R is duplicated. Not only that, but in this puzzle, because there were software assistants, the constructor was able to use the extra letters to, in order, spell out leftovers. It's an example of computer systems actually making a theme more interesting.

David Furst: Are you afraid, though, that the AI Natan Last is going to push Natan Last out of the way there?

Natan Last: I am. As always, I think this is more of a collective action and labor problem than a technical thing. Lots of the aspects of crossword making that are amenable to computer assistance, we already have good tools for. Now, it's a matter of not letting big publishers and other organizations use past puzzles in order to generate AI puzzles. That's the battle.

David Furst: Because that's stealing.

Natan Last: That's stealing.

David Furst: That's stealing. We are talking about puzzles with Natan Last. If you want to join this conversation, by the way, give us a call. 212-433-9692. That's 212-433-9692. If you have questions or observations about the history of crossword puzzles, what they mean to you, what you think they mean to humanity, give us a call. 212-433-9692. I have to ask you about Will Shortz. I mean, that's mandatory. You write about being an intern to New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, NPR puzzle master, back in 2009. You describe his legacy in this world as immense. How has Will Shortz changed the puzzling world?

Natan Last: When Will Shortz took over at the New York Times in 1993, he was kind of an avant-gardeist. He'd come from Games Magazine. He made the puzzle a lot more technicolor. He introduced brand names, pop culture, a lot more music. The puzzle was all of a sudden brimming with the sort of things that all of us encounter in real life. It also started to be a lot funnier. One of the funny things is, right before Will Shortz, the Times editor was a former Latin teacher in New York City and a superintendent who treated the puzzle with a sort of knuckle-wrapping rigor. This was about whether you remembered your Latin, and if you didn't, you got detention. You didn't solve the puzzle.

Now, Will Shortz, of course, I mean, he's been doing this since 1993. The world around the puzzle has not just expanded, but totally changed. The Times Games app is an entirely different thing. It's made entirely differently than me and Will Shortz with a clipboard in hand in his attic in his Pleasantville home. The legacy is immense. It's also the case that he has given birth to a huge number of imitators and people who are interested in taking that legacy even further.

David Furst: Who else from the longer history of these puzzles should we be crediting with the development of this medium?

Natan Last: Margaret Farrar is a really important figure. She's the New York Times' first puzzle editor, and she's the person who actually suggests that the Times add a puzzle. For a long time, the New York Times was the last daily metropolitan paper that did not have a crossword puzzle. Everyone else had gotten the game.

David Furst: It seems incredible now.

Natan Last: It's wild to see this sort of rhythm of acceptance and rejection. The Times held out. It wasn't until Pearl Harbor that Margaret Farrar suggested people might need a distraction at the home front. There were going to be blackout hours. It was a bleak moment. "You can't think of your troubles," she said, while solving a crossword. Of course, those early puzzles then went on to be pretty much constantly in conversation with the war. You'd have an answer like graveyard for Nazi subs, and the answer would be the Atlantic Ocean. It's like, "All right, we got them."

Farrar really was an immense figure in standardizing and conventionalizing the puzzle. This was maybe 10 years earlier. She helped change the convention so that grids are symmetric, so that there's no two-letter words, so that obscurities are discouraged. She really helped the crossword become what we understand it to be today.

David Furst: We are speaking with Natan Last. The new book is called Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. If you'd like to join this conversation, just give us a call. If you have a question about crossword puzzles or the history of puzzles, 212-433-9692. We have someone texting here, sending in an observation. "When I was a kid, it was a brag that your mom could do a crossword puzzle in pen as opposed to pencil. Now it's all digital. I miss those days when you can brag. I do the puzzle in pen."

Natan Last: [laughs] I feel the same. I actually am an old-school solver and prefer to solve on paper. I mean, there's something tactile about it. Same way I like reading books more than I like reading on my phone. Solving in pen is amazing.

David Furst: Let's take a call. This is Stephen in Montclair, New Jersey. Welcome to All Of It. Do you have a question or observation about crosswords?

Stephen: Yes, I have an observation. It's a great topic. I took up crosswords several years ago and even have taken a stab at constructing them. What spurred me to do it was I had a very difficult battle with Lyme disease, where it had crossed the blood-brain barrier and caused a whole bunch of neurological symptoms. Doing crosswords was a really important part of rebuilding my neural pathways. It's just extremely effective for taking on that kind of challenge. I feel indebted to crosswords.

David Furst: Wow, what a great comment. What about that, Natan?

Natan Last: It's wonderful. First of all, there's a lot of stories in the book that are just like that amazing tale where crosswords are not only this engine of intellectualism and facts, but also help people get through really tough moments and breed a kind of new intimacy with your own mind. I'm really happy to hear that crosswords could play a small role.

David Furst: Have you heard that from other people that working on puzzles was really an important part of their rebuilding, rehabilitation?

Natan Last: Definitely. I have a lot of stories in the book about people whose attention felt totally truncated during COVID, and for whom solving the puzzle every single day helped them rebuild not just a focus, but a motor to increase their abilities over time and be able to see that they had changed for the better.

David Furst: So many people encountering puzzles in a big way during lockdown, right?

Natan Last: Oh, 100%. That's when a lot of the Times' offerings begin to expand. It's also when you get the half-joke repeated internally at the times that the New York Times is a gaming company that just happens to offer news.

David Furst: Is that right?

Natan Last: Yes.

David Furst: Okay.

[laughter]

David Furst: If you want to join the conversation, it's 212-433-9692. You write in your introduction to this book, Across the Universe, that it's written, in part, for people who earnestly ask if the crossword itself might be a tool for progress. What do you mean by that?

Natan Last: It's always important to start that conversation by saying I work in politics by day, I work in policy. These moral pursuits are very important to me. I think revolution happens on the streets, not at the desk. There's a really key way in which puzzles can correct the record. People come to crossword expecting an encyclopedic one-to-one relationship between clue and answer. This is the part of the newspaper that, even more so than the reportage, prints facts. In fact, there are all these ways that the puzzle keeps the bias and skew of the editors who oversee it. There are ways in which the puzzle just reflects the world in ways that we've changed.

One of the stories I tell in the book is about the Kenyan decolonial freedom fighters, the Mau Mau, M-A-U M-A-U. Great letters for a crossword puzzle maker, mostly vowels. In the '50s, when that organization begins and when that revolt happens, the clues in the New York Times puzzle read something like African terrorist or Kenyan menace. That sort of othering, basically racist view of an event that was perpetuated in the international reporting desk at that same moment. It's not until 2013 that that same six letters gets a clue, like freedom fighters for Kenyan independence. Six letters, same event. The crossword can play a small role in correcting the record.

David Furst: Let's see. I'm getting a text right here. "I'm doing the super huge New York Times crossword with my son, who lives in Atlanta. We solve together over the phone. I love this time with him. That is such a great thing to add to this discussion. Thank you for that." Let's take another call. Emmy in Maplewood, New Jersey, welcome.

Emmy: Hi. Thank you.

David Furst: Do you have an observation you want to share?

Emmy: Yes, I do. Well, I have an observation and a question. I do the New York Times every day on the app. One thing I started to do is, each puzzle on the New York Times now has an associated article, which, of course, inevitably means that there are comment sections for every puzzle. I've noticed that there is a trend of deeply held personal beliefs about what a puzzle should or should not do. I'm wondering if that's a trend that you've noticed, and what do you feel underlies the sort of deep emotions that solvers feel about their puzzles?

Natan Last: Absolutely something I've noticed. When I first started making puzzles, I was a New York City high school student, and there weren't a lot of online fora where you could discuss the puzzle. There was Rex Parker. Because he was one of the few people reviewing the Times puzzle every day, I, at the beginning, wanted to impress him or wanted to impress my friends, wanted to make a puzzle with Simpsons references and Nabokov references, because that's what I thought was cool.

Now I think there just are all these moments in fora in which people can rabble about the puzzle. I think they probably always had strong opinions about it. It's just much more in our face. As a constructor, it's nice to know, actually, that you make something that people react strongly to. There's a reason it's a little bit satisfying to make a bad pun and hear someone groan.

David Furst: [laughs]

Natan Last: That bodily reaction makes sense.

David Furst: It's no fun without the groan.

Natan Last: It's no fun without the groan.

David Furst: Yes. Let's take another quick call. Jillian in Sanford, New Jersey, welcome.

Jillian: Hi. Thanks for taking my call.

David Furst: Yes. Do you have a question?

Jillian: Well, actually, just wanted to say my husband and I met working on a cruise ship together, and we would always do the printed out New York Times crossword together. He would read a clue one way, and I would read it a totally different way. Between the two of our brains, we would solve every puzzle because we were always looking at it from our own mind's perspectives, which were very different. I just loved that insight into our personalities and how his brain works in a totally different way than mine, but together we could solve this puzzle. It was just so cool.

Natan Last: Yes, that's wonderful. I love stories like that. The puzzle is thought of as this individual, solitary pursuit. Of course, it's bringing people together all the time. Because the clue writers are having the same kind of free associative dance that you're talking about, it's really beautiful to see solvers have that same thing. When I first started solving puzzles, I was a high school student, and we would get the Times delivered and crowd around the Tuesday and have to collectivize our knowledge just to solve one of the easier puzzles. You're always drawing on so many different worlds to be able to solve.

David Furst: I love these stories of people working on puzzles together. I'll read one more text here. "Hello. I am blind, so I can play crossword puzzles with my wife. It's a wonderful way to still do something together, but it doesn't take physical vision. Together, we are speaking to each other and learning about each other. Thank you, crossword makers."

Natan Last: That's beautiful.

David Furst: The new book is Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. Natan Last, thanks for joining us today.

Natan Last: Thank you so much for having me.