"It’s a game, after all… Many people solve the crossword in the morning, and then forget about it by the afternoon."Īccording to Danielle Rhoades Ha, vice president of communications at the Times, von Coelln spoke with Muscat, Last, and Times constructor Anna Shechtman last week about the letter. "It's so easy to write off crossword puzzles as a frivolous activity," Aimee Lucido, a constructor for the New Yorker crossword who co-signed the letter, told Motherboard. Many are also crossword constructors themselves, who have made puzzles for the Times and for other outlets. The majority of co-signers on the letter are subscribers to the newspaper who solve the puzzle. "This occurs both at the selection stage-when puzzles are disqualified because they include references that are considered unfamiliar to an imagined straight, white, male, and middle-aged audience-and at the editing stage, when clues are changed to cater to this imagined community of solvers," the letter says.
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Those enthusiasts, professional constructors, and test-solvers voiced concerns about implicit bias at the New York Times in a letter openly published last week and addressed to Eric von Coelln, the executive director of puzzles at the Times.įollowing an article published in the Atlantic last month by Times crossword constructor Natan Last, as well as the recent resignation of constructor Claire Muscat over concerns about being tokenized in her role as a test solver, the letter asks readers to sign in support against "the systematic erasure of minority voices in puzzles written by women, people of color, and queer constructors." A group of current and former crossword constructors aims to change that-and they've amassed nearly 600 supporters in the process. Outlets running crosswords for hundreds of thousands of subscribers a week, in digital and print form, are overwhelmingly edited by white, cis-gendered men, catering to a white, cis-gendered male audience.
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