The summer after my sophomore year, I interned with Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword puzzle editor. Each day was a surrealist blend of letter and landscape. After a two-hour train ride from my house in Brooklyn, N.Y., to his in Pleasantville in Westchester County, N.Y., I would enter a ball pit of words, a house where fun with language was so pervasive that anything could be a game. Shortz would greet me in his crossword-print pajamas, just after finishing his daily bowl of Alpha-Bits. Fortune cookies after Chinese takeout turned into quick bouts of charades. Shortz had a remarkable talent for putting magic into the mundane. There's a reason he appears on the cover of some of his books with wand and top hat in hand.
I started the Brown Puzzle Club when I was a freshman. At the time, I'd had about eight crossword puzzles published in the New York Times, one of which appeared in the Sunday magazine. And after bringing Shortz to Brown for a crossword tournament, my fate as "the crossword kid" was set. Once, when I was walking by the Office of Residential Life, an administrator out on his cigarette break stopped me and talked crosswords for over half an hour. I was a hit with everyone's parents without ever having met them - moms dig crossword puzzles. Brown students did, too. Soon, there were 15 to 20 people showing up to Puzzle Club every week.
I like to think some fraction of Shortz's whimsy has found its way to Brown. In summer 2010, I suggested to Shortz that the New York Times could publish puzzles created by Brown students every day for a week. There was an enormous amount of press surrounding the event, and it was incredible to see a passion I had once thought only I felt be shared by five other students. We were "the crossword kids," a motley crew of students who loved tinkering with language. We were, as the New York Times noted, the most prolific college in America when it came to making puzzles.
Perhaps most "Brown" of all, everyone in our club came to puzzles from a different branch of learning. That week, concentrators in chemistry, computer science, literary arts, English and classics were published in the New York Times. And Puzzle Club continues to grow, its members trying to stump each other with this bit of esoterica or that cleverly worded clue (Results of some white lies, 10 letters? Answer: Snow Angels) and proving that this sort of enthusiasm could only spread at a place like here.
Natan Last '12 is an economics and literary arts concentrator from Brooklyn, N.Y. His book of 144 crosswords for a younger generation, titled "Word.," includes puzzles from other crossword-loving Brown students.
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