Thinking Inside the Box Quotes

“Cruciverbalists Will Nediger and Erik Agard created a Puzzle Collaboration Directory to match mentors with new talent.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“Journalist Oliver Roeder, writing for the statistical website FiveThirtyEight, helped prove Parker’s plagiarism beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“Nearly all constructors use a program such as CrossFire or Crossword Constructor,”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“David Steinberg suggested another culprit in the twenty-first-century gender gap: computers. Steinberg, a teenage puzzle prodigy, published his first Times crossword at age fourteen. In June 2012, he launched the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project to digitize every crossword in the New York Times since the puzzle’s debut in 1942, and by 2015, he had finished every available puzzle. Steinberg combed the Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project and XWord Info for data on constructors and discovered that the decline of female constructors correlated exactly with the rise of crossword software.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“lacunae.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“English professor Michael Sharp blogging as Rex Parker”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“schnorrer”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“Enjoyable is the ne plus ultra of any crossword, the “I-know-it-when-I-see-it” barometer”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“Sunday school magazine. In 1965, Shortz encountered Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities by Dmitri Borgmann,”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“I could make what Campbell called a “string” theme: FIRST AID STATION, SECONDHAND SMOKE, THIRD BASE UMPIRE, FOURTH CLASS MAIL.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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.”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them

“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”
― Adrienne Raphel, Thinking Inside the Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can't Live Without Them