Credit...Elena Xausa

The Nicest Place on the Internet

Communities around the Crossword, Spelling Bee and more help beginners fall in love with puzzles.

21 Jan 2024, 12:51 by https://www.nytimes.com/by/deb-amlen · NY Times

New York Times Games — which includes the Crossword, Spelling Bee, Wordle, Connections and more — has a devoted fandom. But I think the word “community” is a better way to describe them.

I joined The Times in 2011, when Wordplay — the Crossword column I write with Sam Corbin and Caitlin Lovinger — was a blog that presented a well-written analysis of each day’s puzzle, aimed at a small but devoted readership of experienced solvers. My assignment was to bring in a wider group of readers, who might love and respect the puzzle but who thought it intimidating and intellectually out of reach. It was a shame, in my opinion, that these people, who were smart in other aspects of their lives, were missing out on the confidence-building satisfaction of conquering the puzzle and the joy of spotting clever wordplay in the clues.

So I made it my mission to find ways to smash through that intimidation barrier. I told my readers that Wordplay was a party, and that everyone was invited.

We needed to show new solvers that crossword puzzles were nothing to fear by unlocking the rules of solving them — teaching readers, for example, that a question mark at the end of a clue is an indicator that they should not take it at face value, or that the tense of an answer has to match the tense of the clue. Wordplay began talking directly to beginners, because I knew that every day new people pick up crosswords for the first time. The more experienced solvers rose to the occasion in the comments, and began helping beginners find their way.

As New York Times Games has grown, we’ve carried that sentiment forward into the communities surrounding our newer games.

Readers who comment on Wordplay, or in the forums for Spelling Bee, Connections and Wordle, are a warm and generous bunch. They greet newbies, help each other solve and even check in on one another if someone hasn’t posted in a while. They have sat down to meals in North Carolina, California and England. When members of the community die, the group mourns their loss together. That sense of community even inspired one solver to take off on a road trip to meet some Spelling Bee friends in real life. One reader commented that she thought the Wordplay column and comment section must be the nicest place on the internet. I can’t think of a higher compliment.

The conversation surrounding these games gives our readers a sense of fellowship that can be otherwise hard to find. Perhaps most important, the community provides readers with a chance to do the very thing that inspired New York Times editors of the 1940s to publish a crossword puzzle in the first place: They can talk about something pleasant and, for at least a little while, leave their worries at the door.

For more

Try this month’s bonus crossword, a 2023 pop-culture lookback by Sam Ezersky, a Times puzzle editor.
Our Tiles game has a brand-new palette, Soho, released as part of Well’s six-day challenge to set you up for a more energetic year. Subscribers can select the palette from the settings menu.
Sam Corbin, one of the Wordplay writers, reported from the American Dialect Society’s annual gathering to select the word of the year.
Elite chess players keep accusing one another of cheating.

NEWS

Middle East

Iran accused Israel of launching an airstrike in Syria that killed senior Iranian military figures. And U.S. officials said an American army base in Iraq came under attack from Iran-backed militants.
Israel’s limited progress in dismantling Hamas has caused frustration and doubt among some army commanders, who believe that hostages can be freed only through diplomacy.
A Palestinian American teenager was killed by a barrage of gunfire in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Hundreds of ships are sailing thousands of extra miles around Africa at considerable cost to avoid potential Houthi attacks in the Red Sea.

More International News

Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, is under almost daily bombardment. A radio station serves as a megaphone for residents’ fears and frustration.
North Korea’s intensification of nuclear threats has experts wondering whether Kim Jong-un has moved beyond posturing.
Rising temperatures, glacier loss and less snow are forcing Swiss farmers to adapt.
In Taiwan, growing doubts about the U.S. could be dangerous as China asserts its claim to the island with greater force.

Politics

Anti-Trump Republicans have rallied around Nikki Haley ahead of New Hampshire’s primary, in a long-shot bid to stop Donald Trump’s march to the nomination.
Haley is making her most forceful case yet for the Republican nomination but has little time to make up a lot of ground before New Hampshire, Jazmine Ulloa, Anjali Huynh and Jonathan Weisman write.
This week, Bridgeport, Conn. will host another Democratic mayoral primary after a judge threw out the results of the previous one, citing evidence of election fraud.
Judges in Trump’s civil fraud and defamation trials took different approaches to reining him in inside the courtroom. Their tactics could offer lessons for the criminal cases ahead.

Other Big Stories

In towns in New England, one ritual has endured for over a century: the presentation of ceremonial canes to their oldest residents.
A backlash against “wokeism” has led states to ban public university diversity programs. Emails and other documents reveal the tactics behind one strand of the campaign.
Harvard released its most detailed account of its handling of plagiarism accusations against Claudine Gay, its former president.

FROM OPINION

Stop laughing at Trump. His threat to American democracy is too dire to treat him like a joke, David Kamp writes.

The hawkish foreign policy of a Haley presidency could be more dangerous than a second Trump term, Ross Douthat argues.

Nicholas Kristof’s childhood friend was a good person who committed a monstrous crime. Who’s really responsible for his mistakes?

The Sunday question: Is the Republican presidential primary functionally over?

Trump’s dominance in Iowa and near total takeover of the G.O.P. nationwide mean the race is likely to end soon, Karen Tumulty writes in The Washington Post. But Haley still has a chance to beat him in New Hampshire, and if Trump is disqualified from the ballot or convicted in court, she could step in as the nominee, CNN’s Frida Ghitis argues.

MORNING READS

Don’t laugh and drive: Federal officials want states to avoid humorous highway signs. State leaders say they “break through the noise.”

American fears: What are people in the country most of afraid of right now? Read a sociologist’s answer.

Stardom: Tetsuko Kuroyanagi has been one of Japan’s best-known entertainers for seven decades. At 90, she’s still going strong.

Vows: Josh Radnor, the star of “How I Met Your Mother,” and Jordana Jacobs, a psychologist, fell for each other while tripping on mushrooms.

Lives Lived: Lev Rubinstein was a Russian poet, essayist and political dissident during both the Soviet and Putin eras. He died at 76.

TALK | FROM THE TIMES MAGAZINE

By David Marchese

Tom Hanks is a co-executive producer on the upcoming Apple TV+ World War II miniseries “Masters of Air,” which premieres next week. He talked about that project, and how to depict American history, when I spoke to him in 2022.

Your American history projects almost always offer some redeeming idea about the country’s values. But are there certain American stories, which maybe don’t offer anything redemptive, that you wouldn’t be comfortable telling?

You have to take into account the economics of what I do for a living. We come along and say we would like $250 million, in the case of “Masters of the Air,” to do a miniseries. About what? Americans bombing Nazis. That’s pretty commercial to me. But how are we going to do that? It’s not just, “Yea, we bombed the Nazis.” Then, we can’t go back and just show white people saving the world, because the Black airmen who got shot down were in these stalags, too. So to answer your question, this stuff costs money, and it has to make money. That means we have to sneak up on the trickier stuff.

You talked about an American sense of right and wrong. Has your faith in that been shaken?

There are events that shake up those Americans who still believe there is a right way to do things. Now, a certain administration came down the pike, and the people who were screaming seemed to rule the day. Why? Because the people who cared about what’s right didn’t show up. Well, something egregious enough comes along, and guess what? People will show up.

When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?

I’ve been acting for a paycheck since I was 20. I now know what was evident when I was 20 years old is what Spencer Tracy said: “Learn the lines. Hit the marks. Tell the truth.” That’s all you can do.

Read more of the interview here.

What to Watch For

Paris Fashion Week’s haute couture shows will begin on Monday.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will announce Oscar nominations on Tuesday.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will announce whether the time of its “Doomsday Clock” will change on Tuesday.

What to Cook This Week

The dark and cold of the winter months can mean a slide into unhealthy dinner practices, Mia Leimkuhler writes in this week’s Five Weeknight Dishes newsletter. To help counter bad habits, she offers up easy recipes that welcome more vegetable content. Add some more kale to Eric Kim’s gochujang potato stew, drizzle the pan drippings from hot honey chicken onto an extra helping of leafy greens or double the amount of arugula in this buttery lemon pasta.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were belonged, boondoggle and boondoggled.

And here are today’s Mini Crossword, Wordle, Sudoku and Connections.

Can you put eight historical events — including the founding of Chicago, the first tomato soup recipe and “The Tale of Genji” — in chronological order? Take this week’s Flashback quiz.

Thanks for spending part of your weekend with The Times.

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