The excellent article “Rearrangements” in the December 2023 issue of The New Yorker centres around Mangesh Ghogre, a forty-three-year-old man from a small suburb of Mumbai who, based on his “extrao­rdinary ability,” obtained an EB-1A visa (also known as the Einstein visa) to live and work in the US. Ghogre’s extraordinary ability is writing crossword puzzles, which, being a crossword puzzle writer myself, thrilled me. Ghogre began his crossword journey when, as an engineering student in India, he and his fellow students worked on newspaper crosswords to improve their English fluency. With help from online forums, message boards and mentors, Gohgre entered the world of crossword writing and eventually had one of his puzzles published in the Los Angeles Times. His first trip to the US was for the 2012 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. When he was not hanging out with other crossword writers “playing Boggle, trading puzzle ideas and punning compulsively,” he was trying American products that he had only encountered in crosswords: BLT, PBJ, OREOS. According to the article, crosswords came to America via an immigrant from Liverpool, whose first American puzzle (published in the New York World) set off a craze in the US. Of course, British puzzlers looked on in horror at what Americans were doing with “their” puzzles; American clues were too mechanical and required a dictionary, while British clues were whimsical and, above all, fair. From the article we also learn that Vladimir Nabokov published the first known Russian crosswords—his clue for DISAPPEAR was “what the Bolsheviks will do.” The immigrant connection is strong in the crossword world and these days there’s a push to widen the scope of acceptable words and clues to include other languages and realities. For instance, a clue for TPS would usually hint at toilet paper in some way, but Nancy Serrano-Wu chose to refer to Temporary Protected Status, which allows people from certain unsafe countries to live and work in the US temporarily. Natan Last, the author of “Rearrangements,” is also a puzzle writer, so the article is peppered with words like “grok” (to understand intuitively or by empathy) and “alembic” (something that refines or transmutes as if by distillation), plus multiple bits of crossword trivia. To top it off, Last points out that his first name, NATAN, is a palindrome (a word spelled the same both forward and backward) and his surname, LAST, is autological (a word that describes itself). So much wordy goodness!

‍—Meandricus