The NYT crossword archive

The best part of my New York Times subscription is access to not just the last 30 years of its daily crosswords (about 10,000 puzzles in all), but to a well-designed interface for solving them online. I have started from the start and am playing my way forward.

The fun extra layer of solving puzzles from 1994 is to remember not just what the clue might refer to, but also how a clue that means one thing today could have meant something different then (five-letter word ending in “A” for “North American trade agreement” was “NAFTA” then, not “USMCA”).

The puzzle interface gives the solver options that the paper puzzle cannot. Using Autocheck (which lets me know if a character I enter into a square is right or wrong) has let me focus on the part of doing a crossword puzzle I enjoy while cutting way down on the part I don’t. (In exchange for using Autocheck, I abstain from consulting dictionaries, encyclopedias, or any other references.)

My one complaint: Some puzzles use a rebus feature, in which a single square can hold multiple characters. I wish the interface had an option to highlight those squares when a puzzle has them. I like to know what I’m up against.

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News sources about the war in Ukraine

When I had a Twitter account, I gorged on news from Ukraine, spending at least an hour a day following about 20 accounts for up-to-the-minute news and speculation.

My Twitter account getting locked after I used it for frequent criticism of the service owner provided me with an opportunity to re-think that approach.

I now read two sources to keep up with the Big Picture of what’s going on, and turn (with big grains of salt at hand) to the New York Times, the BBC, and the English-language service of Deutsche Welle for breaking news during a big event.

My two regular sources:

1. Phillips P. O’Brien from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, for whose Substack account I am a paid subscriber: https://substack.com/@phillipspobrien
2. The Institute for the Study of War’s daily Russian Offensive Campaign Assessments: https://www.understandingwar.org

Both sources are pro-Ukranian, but committed to evaluating and reporting the facts they gather as honestly, transparently, and accurately as possible, with the ISW focusing on tactics and O’Brien focusing on strategies.

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The importance of context

From an article in the May 24, 2014 issue of The Economist about how racial minorities in the United States live in places where they breathe dirtier air:

[…]The study does not address why [race matters more than income in determining whether someone will live exposed to dirtier air]. A possible explanation is that many Americans prefer to live among people who look like themselves. For example, well-off urban blacks may be choosing to live in traditionally black neighbourhoods, despite the worse air and the fact that they could afford to live elsewhere.

A slight re-write of the paragraph above:

[…]The study does not address why [race matters more than income in determining whether someone will live exposed to dirtier air]. A possible explanation is that people prefer to live where they will be treated like fellow human beings. For example, well-off urban blacks may be choosing to live in traditionally black neighbourhoods, despite the worse air and the fact that they could afford to live elsewhere.

The latter paragraph tells a different story; a story readers of The Economist need to hear.

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What is a newspaper?

“The special characteristics of the newspaper [as it developed in the 19th century] were: (1) publication at regular intervals; (2) production by an editorial team; (3) division into separate departments and fields; (4) reporting that went outside the regional and social horizon of its readers; (5) a rise in topicality, which in Germany meant that the proportion of news less than a day old rose from 11 percent in 1856 to 95 percent in 1906; (6) increasingly industrial production, based on the latest technology, which required considerable capital investment for a mass circulation press; and (7) a fluctuating market that depended on daily decisions by customers at the newsstand, except in the case of subscribers.”

–Jürgen Osterhammel (trans. by Patrick Camiller), The Transformation of the World : A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University, 2014), pg. 30.

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Ray Taliaferro

When I was in junior high school in the early ’80s, I had terrible insomnia. I used to lay awake at night and listen to the Giants game on KNBR, then listen to the Giants post-game show and the news. If I was still awake (it would be midnight by this point), I would turn the dial to KGO and listen to Ray Taliaferro until I finally dozed off.

I grew up in an upper-middle-class suburb of San Francisco and considered myself to be a Reagan Republican, but I loved to listen to a guy from the City who eloquently and forcefully disagreed with what I had been brought up to believe. He didn’t change my mind, but he helped me understand what other people were thinking and what other ways there were to look at the world.

Taliaferro used to say that the KGO signal reached well into Oregon, Washington, and Nevada, and he would sometimes get calls from small towns hundreds of miles away. I wonder now how many other people in little towns across the West would lay awake at night, in those days before the Internet, listening to Ray Taliaferro spin their mental kaleidoscopes.

All this comes to mind because I have been getting over a cold, which has made it hard to get to sleep at night; so I’ve moved my transistor radio next to my bed and listened to KBOO as I laid awake sniffling. Two nights ago, it was the poetry of Richard Brautigan. Last night, it was reggae Christmas carols. If I can’t sleep tonight, it will be punk music, selected by the awesome Erin Yanke. I love KBOO.

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Newspaper control

Newspapers have a much greater importance in America than they do in Europe. You must not conclude, however, that the press is more free in the New World than in the Old. With us it is the government that watches over and controls the newspapers; in the United States, the religious sects and political parties tyrannize over the editors, who, it must be said, rather cultivate this servitude and even take advantage of it.

— French composer Jacques Offenbach, 1876. Had he been alive to visit the United States 50 years later…well, he would have been a marvel for being so very old; but, aside from that, he could have added “department stores” and “car dealers” to his list of tyrants.

(Offenbach, by the way, was the composer of the “Can Can”.)

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