DECEMBER 17 — DECEMBER 23
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The very first crossword puzzle appears in a newspaper. |
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On December 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, an editor at the New York World, ran the first crossword puzzle of all time in the FUN section of the paper; he called it a “Word-Cross Puzzle.” (A few weeks later, a typographical error rendered the puzzle’s title “Cross-Word,” and the name stuck.) Starting there, crossword puzzles became more and more popular; the World started running front-page banners pointing readers to the puzzle, and the crossword became a selling point.
As Adrienne Raphel reported in Thinking Inside The Box: Adventures with Crosswords and the Puzzling People Who Can’t Live Without Them, despite readers obviously loving crossword puzzles, for decades one institution disdained them: The New York Times. For a few decades, the Times was the only major metropolitan newspaper in America without a crossword puzzle, and through the 20s and 30s, the paper ran op-eds decrying crosswords as a passing lowbrow craze. But in 1942—two months after Pearl Harbor—the Times gave in and added a crossword section, to “keep readers sane with the rest of the news so bleak [and] provide readers something to occupy time during coming blackout days.”
So if you’re looking for a throwback—or just a simple and fun task—in these unprecedented times, try solving that very first crossword puzzle that ran in the New York World today 108 years ago: |
See a clearer version of the puzzle here and check your answers here. (And once you’ve completed it, you can try the second crossword of all time, which Wynne ran the following week. Don’t say we never gave you anything for the holidays.)
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The Cundill History Prize, the leading international prize for history writing, has named its 2023 finalists: Red Memory by Tania Branigan, Queens of a Fallen World by Kate Cooper, and Charged by James Morton Turner. Each receive US$10,000 and are now in the running for the US$75,000 prize.
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MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM
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“The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.” |
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In other (old) news this week |
Thomas Paine publishes his first “American Crisis” essay, in which he writes: “These are the times that try men’s souls (December 19, 1776) • Zora Neale Hurston finishes the manuscript for Their Eyes Were Watching God (December 19, 1936) • Bad literary husband Ted Hughes is announced as the next Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, but only after Philip Larkin turns down the post (December 19, 1984) • Virginia Woolf’s first published essay, “Haworth, November 1904,” an account of a visit to the Brontë family home, appears in a women’s supplement to a clerical journal (December 21, 1904) • The controversial Holden Caulfield appears for the first time in “I’m Crazy,” published in Collier’s (December 22, 1945) • Jane Austen’s best novel (?) Emma is published (December 23, 1815).
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“The first duty of the novelist is to entertain. It is a moral duty. People who read your books are sick, sad, traveling, in the hospital waiting room while someone is dying. Books are written by the alone for the alone.” |
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“The reason one writes isn't the fact he wants to say something. He writes because he has something to say.” |
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