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The elite, underpaid, and weird world of crossword writers
- robertlagrant 4y ago> the artists, web developers, professors, and other titles that imply a degree of wealth and elite connections Yes. You hear web developer, you think, "Probably knows the Clintons."
- strken 4y agoMy immediate response to hearing someone is an artist is not to look them up on the rich list and ask how many servants they have, either.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nkurz 4y agoI found this to be an odd set of paragraphs: For would-be constructors without such personal connections, there’s the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory. The Facebook group launched in 2018 with an associated Google form that pairs newcomers with mentors. It has always been explicit about its aims to provide resources to underrepresented groups: “This matching form is intended specifically for [women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and disabled people] as a tool for addressing structural inequities in the crossword industry. Because our mentors’ time is finite, if you’re not a member of any such group, we ask that you refrain from using the form.” The explicit intentions aren’t enough, though, and in fact at times the group has served the opposite purpose. When professional opera singer Daniel Okulitch, a white man, was inspired to try his hand at crossword construction after he first started regularly solving them during the pandemic, he found his way to the group. In response to a question he posted, Okulitch was contacted by Brad Wilber, a longtime constructor (60 Times puzzles since 2005) and an opera fanatic. A fan of Okulitch’s singing, Wilber offered his services as a mentor. Okulitch has now published three Times puzzles, including two with solo bylines. On one hand, obviously people should be able to choose on whatever basis they want where to concentrate their volunteer mentoring efforts, and I appreciate the delicacy of their discouraging phrasing. On the other, it seems remarkable that they New Republic would appear to celebrate the restriction of services on the basis of sex and skin color. Can you imagine the reverse, where black women or disabled transexuals are discouraged from applying? Is the article trying to call attention to this tension, or are we expected to take it for granted? And what's meant by "the explicit intentions aren't enough"? And is the point that Okulitch ("a white man") doesn't qualify under the "LGBTQIA+" heading? Are we supposed to assume that a white male opera singer couldn't be Gay or Bi or Trans or Queer/Questioning or Intersex or Asexual or "+" (anything else)? Or that he is at least one of these, and that's we he was able to participate? Wouldn't it be simpler (and better) to just let people who are excited about crosswords post a message and see if they meet someone interested in mentoring?
- danielfoster 4y agoThis is just one group. Presumably mentors could connect with mentees through other groups and channels.
- conviencefee999 4y agoEh it's safe to say other groups don't exist this is pretty common for many topics and branches for things.
- danielfoster 4y agoLife isn’t always fair.
- ysavir 4y ago> And what's meant by "the explicit intentions aren't enough"? And is the point that Okulitch ("a white man") qualifies under the "LGBTQIA+" heading? Are we supposed to assume that the a white male opera singer couldn't be Gay or Bi or Trans or Queer/Questioning or Intersex or Asexual or "+" (anything else)? Or that he is at least one of these, and that's we he was able to participate? Wouldn't it be simpler (and better) to just let people who are excited about crosswords post a message and see if they meet someone interested in mentoring? I think the point is that despite the given disclaimer and rules, disqualifying individuals are still making use of the group and supporting each other.
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoThe author seemed to be trying to build an article partly on a hook of "trying to be woke backfired" but in this segment, he intentionally conflates the facebook group and the google form for mentoring, which seems to have confused several here.
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- pvg 4y ago
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoWhy should they pay more if they already get 100x more submissions than they need? It’s clear that almost all constructors do it for fun so paying more isn’t going to improve quality. For solvers the real value add comes from the editor and selection process that ensures reasonable quality and consistency. I’m also curious when we switch to AI generated crosswords. It seems like it shouldn’t be too long from now that they match human constructors.
- whateveracct 4y agoOur of curiosity, do you regularly do crosswords? Like the NYT or otherwise?
- zeroonetwothree 4y agoYes, I do at least one daily, mainly NYT and AVCX.
- Khannor 4y agoNote that the NYTXW is not the only crossword publisher out there. I construct crosswords from time to time, and I always send my best puzzles to the NYT first, simply because they're the most prestigious and pay the most. (And you can't send a crossword to two publishers at once.) On your other note -- it's really not difficult to make a bad, or even mediocre, autogenerated crossword using pretty simple software. There's several free or inexpensive programs out there (I use CrossFire). The main obstacles for AI-generated crosswords are: (a) the "theme", the 3-5 longer answers that the Mon-Thu and Sun puzzles are usually centered around, most of which involve wordplay and misdirection -- it's possible, I'd like to see an AI reliably come up with those. (b) the clues, though I don't think these are intractable either.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rjh29 4y agoEven for Fri/Sat there is creativity in the fill and the layout of the crossword, and usually at least some creativity in the clues (referencing each other etc.) so I think we're a few years out from having AI consistently make good puzzles.
- gergi 4y agoIf anyone finds this interesting, I would also like to recommend watching Jon Stewart’s Wordplay. It is much more interesting than it sounds.
- jpmattia 4y agoCan confirm: If you're into crossword puzzles (and maybe even if you're not) it's a fun documentary. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492506/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492506/
- jl6 4y agoDiversity is what will kill crosswords, and I don't mean diversity in the skin color or gender of the setters, but the fragmentation of culture where nobody watches the same TV channels or reads the same newspapers any more. We increasingly hive off into our own bubbles of preferred content, tied only by whatever cultural commonality we acquired in grade school. There's just too much art, too many books, too many TV shows, and too much access to it all, to go back to the mostly-shared corpus of mostly-mutually-understandable cultural references we had in the 20th century. You would think that people would at least have read the really famous books, or seen the super popular TV shows, but I am regularly surprised to meet people who haven't. Fair clues are foundational to crosswords, and foundational to fairness is understanding what the solver can be expected to know. A Guardian crossword last week referenced The Beatles, Anthony Eden, and the Russian revolution. Fair game? All part of a standard British upbringing, surely? Perhaps for now, but for how long?
- ZeroGravitas 4y agoOr, it'll lead to more micro-communities creating crosswords that are topical and relevant to them, for example: https://www.private-eye.co.uk/crossword https://www.private-eye.co.uk/crossword Private eye crossword, with downloadable version for use in apps, which references british (and world) politics.
- jl6 4y agoYes, probably. My favorite such example is this regex crossword: https://jimbly.github.io/regex-crossword/ https://jimbly.github.io/regex-crossword/
- abrookewood 4y agoThis is clever, incomprehensible and absolutely horrific!
- yieldcrv 4y agodespite there being much more fragmentation for what a pop culture reference is, than the 1900s, people still act surprised when you aren’t aware of a cultural reference from their own little microcosm like the default isn't to just briefly explain it, the default is to genuinely confused for the next 5 minutes and derail the whole conversation
- javajosh 4y ago[flagged]
- quesera 4y agoIt doesn't strike me as anti-anything to point out that structural inequalities exist. Cultural divides are real, and standardized testing (or crosswords) written by members of a majority culture are likely to be inaccessible to some others.
- javajosh 4y agoThat's not what the TFA said. The "proof" for structural inequality was that crossword puzzle authors are mostly white men. That's it. There was no charge of rejecting women or people of color from writing crossword puzzles systematically or individually. And in fact the three black people encouraged to write the puzzles quit because of "lack of time". The cultural inaccessibility is not a problem, as you noted in your (now deleted) anecdote about how you don't get _Lemonade_. Not everything has to be accessible to everyone. Audiences largely self-select, and it makes no sense to attack something because the audience is all one color, and even less sense if this only upsets you if it's one particular color.
- quesera 4y agoI deleted that anecdote because it was unnecessarily personal and distracting. But yeah -- Lemonade was not written for me. And as I originally wrote, if it was the only record available iTunes/Spotify, I would have no cultural connection to popular music[1]. (good thing, bad thing, you decide!) Crossword puzzle authors being only white men is absolutely culturally separate from many people. And maybe that's OK. It's no one's job to be all things to all people. Still, it's clearly structurally unequal. Now...whether it's important or interesting that other cultures are denied the pleasures of crossword puzzles... That's a good question. I'm of the general opinion that those other cultures are not missing much. Crossword puzzles might just be an old white person anachronism that will fade out in a generation or two. The likelihood of that increases if crosswords are not accessible to our future majority-minority population. [1] This is superficially relevant because Lemonade is a cultural touchstone, universally acclaimed, and (according to Wikipedia) contains elements of a dozen musical genres, more than half of which are personally meaningful to me -- and yet I found it to be inaccessible to me when it was released. Clearly I owe it to myself to re-listen.
- Magi604 4y agoCrossword puzzles seem like something an AI can generate, with things like topics or niches or word length/"difficulty" as options to toggle.
- throwaway675309 4y agoThis was an incredibly tedious article, I went in expecting more weird but the whole article comes off as a diversity fluff piece, and even in that regard it didn't really succeed at saying anything significant. Feels like the author didn't really have any particular passion about the art of cruciverbalism.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago
- stevage 4y agoI'm amazed there is such diversity already. My local paper, The Age, as far as I can tell has a fixed set of seven composers, one for each day of the week, which pretty much never vary. They are only identified by initials. I'd be alarmed at having so many new composers to deal with. It takes time to get familiar with each one's style.
- oolveea 4y agoWhy not just throw ai at this, i.e. some generative architecture that comes up with puzzles
- hwh43 4y ago0. Years