Actor Bryan Cranston admits to cheating on crossword puzzles to impress Ben Affleck, on the Argo set– and, at least until the linked article was published, he seems to have gotten away with it. Affleck claims to be a Friday-level solver, himself.
The Nation has more choice quotes by author/constructor Georges Perec on crosswords, while Will Shortz talks a bit about his early days in law school to Bloomberg.
The petition mentioned by Amy earlier in the week for an online New York Magazine crossword doesn’t seem to have gotten very far.
David Levinson Wilk has released Crosswords to Love for Lovers of Crosswords on iTunes. And Peter Gordon’s long-awaited 100 Years, 100 Crosswords (with five puzzles by meee) has dropped into my mailbox! Gotten yours yet?
According to Ali Baumann, Southwest Airlines might be getting a little racy with its cluing.
Finally, Design Within Reach had a special bonus New York Times crossword. If you missed it and you’re a fan of architecture and design, we got you covered.
Just to say, T … I really enjoy your weekly wrap-up of crossword news. Keep it up!
Ben Affleck’s comments at the end of the story suggest that the NYT Sunday puzzle gets harder over the course of the month. I hardly ever bother with the Sunday puzzle anymore — too much puzzle for far too little payoff relative to Thursday through Saturday — but I had no idea about that the difficulty was supposed to build across the month. Is it true?
No
BEQ does (has done?) the puzzles in Southwest’s Spirit magazine.
I note that the racy BEQ crossword was the “hard” one, see http://www.spiritmag.com/fun/
Good eye, Barry! More specifically, http://www.spiritmag.com/uploads/pdf/fun/1210_crossword2.pdf.