A crosswording miscellany

I just finished reading Natan Last’s 2025 book Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle. It was… fatiguing. Now, I myself am a “discursive” writer, so I’m throwing stones from a glass house here; but it seemed to me that Last’s every paragraph consisted of three or four anecdotes halfway told, capped off with some nonsensical simile. Open the book at random to page 31:

Source: https://quuxplusone.github.io/blog/2026/07/28/puzzle-miscellany. 8sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.