(apologies for this being a rough transcript).
Barry Joseph: Welcome to Matching Minds With Sondheim. On this episode, we start visiting some of my presentations connected to my current book tour. This week we’ll dive into a panel from the Brooklyn Book Festival, the annual book event held in the fall in Brooklyn.
But first, some quick updates. In the last month, I launched my book through a series of game and puzzle workshops and presentations at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. I also appeared for a book signing at the Locavore Variety store.
I did a talk for the Northwestern Alumni Association and I led a joint pair of workshops for NYU’s Game Center and their Graduate Musical Theater Writing Program. To read recaps and learn about other upcoming events, check out my website. Along with this podcast and special events like these, I also launched a popup exhibit. From October 5th through October 31st visit, Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Exhibit in New York City, hosted by the Drama Bookshop on West 39th Street. This free exhibit is based on rare items received through the generosity of Sondheim’s friends and fans as research from my book.
Many are being shown for the first time beyond the event for which they were originally designed. So if you wanna see in person many of the extraordinary games and puzzles of Sondheim that I describe in my book, this is not to be missed.
Finally, I know this is my 10th podcast, so it might feel like my book has been published forever ago, but it wasn’t. It only came out last week. It has been thrilling to receive photos from people all around the world as the mail has delivered their pre-ordered copies. Some first purchased over a year ago, if you can believe it.
I especially love seeing the comments that are appearing on Amazon, Good Reads, and more. Please keep them coming. As I said at the New York Public Library event, the book has now been released. What I mean is I have released it to you. It’s not mine anymore. It’s what you do with it. And I’m so excited to find out what that’s gonna be.
Okay, with that, let’s jump into the panel from the Brooklyn Book Fair. The panel was called, “It’s Puzzling the Power of Crosswords and Games” moderated by Natan Last, the author of Across the Universe, the Past, Present, and Future of Crossword Puzzles.
I was paired with Juliana Apache, author and creator of Black Crossword: 100 Mini Puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora. Our conversation explored the cultural significance of games and puzzles and how they reflect history and community. Let’s jump into it. Enjoy
Natan Last: Hey, welcome to “It’s Puzzling: The Power of Crosswords and Games” presented by NYU. Barry Joseph is a games based educator, game designer, and founder of The Games for Change Festival. Barry is an innovator in digital learning and teaches at New York University. He’s also the founding director of the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum.
His most recent books are about the games and puzzles of Steven Sondheim: Matching Minds with Sondheim, seltzer: Seltzertopia, digital design in museums: Making Dinosaurs Dance, and a COVID memoir: Friday is Tomorrow. Juliana Apache is the creator of Black Crossword, a daily mini puzzle that places emphasis on black culture from across the the diaspora.
Before launching Black Crossroad in January, 2023, she worked as a media professional leading social strategy at brands such as Le Fader and Rolling Stone. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. My name is Natan Last, uh, I’m a policy researcher and a writer. My research poems and essays appear in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Narrative, and elsewhere.
I write bimonthly crosswords for the New Yorker. And my book on the cultural, uh, history of crosswords, Across the Universe, is out from Pantheon this November. Welcome, Barry and Juliana. It’s, uh, it’s great to talk to y’all.
Juliana Pache: Yeah, thanks for having us.
Barry Joseph: Thank you, Natan. Great to be here with you and Juliana.
Natan Last: I think this will be fun.
Uh, so my first question is about audience. Uh, we’re in a moment where millions of people are solving word puzzles every day. 23 million Americans report solving a crossword every single day as a kind of daily ritual. Um, given that ever expanding solver, I thought I’d start out by talking about audience, audience size, audience composition.
Uh, Barry, in your book you discuss how Sondheim helped to popularize cryptic crosswords in 1968 when he was the founding editor at New York Magazine. Uh, even so Sondheim called Cryptics, the puzzle makers puzzle, but this is one for the insiders, you know, a poet’s poet, a small audience of elite initiates.
Um, so to kick us off, I wonder if you could talk about the relationship between the cryptic crosswords audience and the audience Sondheim had in mind and acquired with his musicals.
Barry Joseph: Thanks, Natan. That’s a great question. What I love is that Heim never underestimated his audiences, whether looking for a night at the theater or an afternoon tackling his crosswords with Cryptics, he assumed you were smart enough to wrestle with his clues, even if they looked impossible at first.
And with his musicals, he did the same thing. He never hands us an easy story. He trusts us to follow him into complicated emotions, fragmented structures, even endings without neat resolutions. So kind of in a way he sometimes treated his audiences as collaborators, whether solving the puzzle of his shows or following his lead through an elaborate clue.
Natan Last: Yeah, definitely. I think, I mean all of us who are San have heads have had that experience of feeling like we’re collaborating with the great Master. Um, Julia, same question for you. I mean, with a kind of different emphasis. You know, the puzzle crossword, um, tends to think of midi and mini crosswords, which were smaller than the standard 15 by 15.
You would see most days and say the times, um, is more accessible. I’m wondering if you could talk about how you think of. Of your audience for black crossword, whether these puzzles are people who don’t normally turn to crosswords, um, or for existing solvers who feel the puzzle could just be more interesting or more reflective of their culture.
Juliana Pache: Yeah, I would say that I think of the audience as all of the above. Um, it’s really a mixed bag of, um, of people who are drawn to black crossword. Um, I think for me, when I started out, I, I, I hadn’t constructed puzzles before. I had the idea for black crossword. So I was going in, uh, building the skills kind of as I went.
Um, and. I solve mini and mini puzzles more often than I do standard size, size puzzles. So I knew that, um, for me personally, that was something that I would want. So that. So that was top of mind when I thought about what to offer an audience. Um, and then also as a new crossword puzzle constructor. That was kind of, that was my entry point, and that was the easiest for me to sustain.
My goal was to make a daily mini puzzle. And so it’s just, it’s easier to manage as one person to make a minis and mids every day. Um, and then in terms of, uh, new solvers, existing solvers. Uh, definitely a mixed bag, but I do hear often from people that they have felt in the past that they weren’t good at crossword puzzles and now, um, this is kind of a, a, a great way for them to be introduced in, into the medium.
Um. And then I’ve also heard from folks who have been doing crossword puzzles for years that are excited about, um, the new, the new kind of things they can learn via black crossword, different types of wordplay. Because there, I mean, there is so much richness and there’s so much fun to be had with, uh, black language specifically.
Um. So, yeah. And then, and then I think also Black Crossword has the freedom to kind of use words and language in a way that maybe other mainstream puzzles wouldn’t feel like, um, necessarily served their large audience. So,
Natan Last: yeah. No, that makes total sense as a solver, uh, of both longtime, uh, puzzles and your puzzles.
It’s, it’s, it does feel like there’s something new going on, which is really nice. Um, and I think something about crosswords that they’re like, sort of infinitely recombinable and, and you can innovate on, on them forever. Um, yep. Sounds, it sounds like we’re all consumers of the things we’re writing about.
Um, so I’d love to maybe hear a backstory about how you all came to write the book. Um, you know, we’re kind of the target audience for our own books in that way. Lovers of musicals, of crosswords of Culture. Um, so Gianna, maybe I’ll start with you. What’s just the backstory of how Black Crossword came to be?
Juliana Pache: Yeah, so I had the idea for Black Cross. So Black Crossword started as a website, um, and then the books kind of followed, but. I had that idea in October, 2022. Um, I love the New York Times Mini I, I was solving it every morning. Um, and then spelling Bee and Wordle and all of the games. Um. And so there was this one morning where, um, the mini itself felt pretty skewed towards a mainstream, I guess we could call it, quote unquote mainstream culture.
Um, and I also had this parody song stuck in my head from, um, this parody music group called, uh, young Hamma. Flint, Flossy. I don’t know it. Natana, I don’t know if you’re familiar or, or Barry. I’m, yeah. Okay. Yes. So, um, I have that one parody song. Let, let Me SM It and Sm was that, so that song was stuck in my head that morning.
I was kind of reminiscing on, um, that era of internet memes, but. The word SM is five letters. And I thought, wow, that would be so funny if that was in a crossword puzzle. And then I was like, well, I wonder if there is a, like a, a, a regular digital crossword puzzle available that caters to black culture.
And I assumed that it already existed. So I went looking for it. Online I was doing all kinds of Google searches and it, it was very hard to find because when you search black and crossword together, you might get, uh, a bunch of search results that are, um, clue hints for if you’re trying to solve for the word black in a crossword puzzle.
Um, so I couldn’t find anything, and then I realized that the domain for black crossword.com was available, and so I jumped on that. Um, and again, I hadn’t made a crossword puzzle before. I was like, how hard can it be? It was much harder than I expected. Um, but much easier for me now. Uh, I, so then I launched in January, 2023.
Um. Folks were really excited about it. And from there I had a, a book publisher that reached out to me, um, and I was like, well, I, I guess I should get an agent. So I got an agent. And then in, um, the summer, I, I got a deal with Amad Harper Collins, um, for two puzzle books. So that’s how, that’s how the books came to be.
Natan Last: Amazing. Yeah. It all started with span, which makes sense. I think we all have origin stories like that.
Barry Joseph: I love that. Thank you Juliana.
Natan Last: Yeah. Same for, for you Barry. I’m curious, I mean, are you a, have you always been a Sondheim head? Are you a musical theater person? Have you tried your hand at this? I’m curious how, how all this came to be.
Barry Joseph: I love exploring this, this, this aspect of the creation of our books. But I actually don’t see myself as the audience for my book. I see my book and my related podcast and my public talks more of as a platform that I’ve created to weave the stories I wanna tell in the world, the values I want to promote, and building an audience that resonates with those values.
But that’s kind of now and what I’ve learned over my three years working on the project. But at first it was just a mystery that I had to solve. I wanted to know why Sondheim said in the early 1980s that he fantasized about leaving the world in musical theater and going instead into video games. Yeah, video games.
This is like the early eighties. And I thought, I’m sorry, what did I just read? This was in James The Pines, um, oral history of the creation of Sunday in the park with George. It’s mentioned once and it’s never referred to again, so I had to get to the bottom of this, so I wanted to. Understand how this musical genius had time in his life to pursue a passion.
For parlor games and board games and crosswords and treasure hunts and jigsaw puzzles, and even escape rooms. And the more I spoke with the people who knew him or worked with him over a hundred and the more research institutions revealed its secrets to me. I was fascinated by what I could learn about how both kind of his mind worked and how he used games and puzzles to design both moments of clarity and moments of connection for his friends, his colleagues, and his loved ones.
Natan Last: Yeah. That’s amazing. I mean, oh, go ahead, Juliana.
Juliana Pache: Oh, I was just saying that’s fascinating.
Barry Joseph: Yeah. Thank you,
Natan Last: Sam. No, and I especially love that the way you put it at the end, the idea that two of the things that puzzles and games and musicals offer are. Clarity in connection. Um, one of the things I read about in my book is how crosswords bring together pretty dissimilar tasks.
So you have the defamiliarization of language into just a combination of letters. Uh, but on the other hand, you have like the clue or reference to a piece of knowledge, um, that’s not only familiar, but but near and dear to that audience. Um, so it’s a connective. Act, um, crypto crosswords, the kind that Sondheim focused on, and it probably would take us the entire time to explain what crypto crosswords are, but maybe we’ll give a taste at some point.
Uh, but they have that real defamiliarization flavor. Uh, Barry in your book, you quote, Sondheim is saying. It’s a curious and perverted ability to be able to see a word as a collection of letters instead of having a meaning or a sound. Um, the American style crosswords, the kind that, that Juliana and I write, um.
You know, especially in the hands of someone like you, Juliana, they’re curatorial. Right? The, I love your use of the, if you know, you know, meme, um, as a kind of slogan for black crossword because it’s about this familiarity and the clarity that connects a, a community. So I’m curious about these two aspects of crosswords, you know, the pun, uh, that defamiliarizes and the illusion that connects the familiar, how those work together for you.
And I guess Barry, for, for your subject too, for Sunheim. So, um, Barry, I’ll start with you.
Barry Joseph: Uh, Natan. I, I love that quote from Heim that you referenced. He, he often used it to explain an experience that he once had when he was younger. I think probably in his twenties, he’s walking through the streets of New York City.
Maybe it’s the 1950s, maybe it’s a little bit earlier. And he is walking past a movie theater that’s advertising a film playing in cama. And then he immediately recognized, oh, those are the letters in American. It was instant. He wasn’t trying to figure it out. It just immediately came to him. He saw one word, cama and his mind immediately recognized as you described.
What’s that phrase you used? Yeah, the defamiliarization of language, right? That actually was just a collection of letters that can be recombined into a different word with a different meaning. American, another friend of his told me once, you couldn’t walk down the street with Steve, without him seeing a sign, scrambling the words and coming up with another word.
He said it was almost like a curse. Words and numbers were always moving through his beautiful brain. So of course, if that’s how your brain worked. This as again as you said, the defamiliarization of language into a combination of letters. Of course, this is gonna be totally up Stephen Sondheim’s alley me.
That’s not how my mind works, but it’s no wonder Sondheim was a master of both lyric writing and crypto crosswords, and in fact, he bashed knowledge base clues. When he first started at New York Magazine with his first crypto crossword, he also included an essay and in it. He described the pleasure to be found within an American crossword as the transitory ones of an encyclopedic memory, which he contrasted with Cryptics, which he referred to as offering the deeply satisfactory ones of following and matching a devious mind.
That of the puzzle’s author, he said, bafflement, not information is the keystone of a cryptic puzzle. A good clue can give you all the pleasures of being duped, that a mystery story can. It has surface innocence, surprise, the revelation of a concealed meaning and the catharsis of solution. So he went in really hard defending this British style of cryptics, which I’m happy to give an example of to help explain it to listeners and hard against what at the time were.
American ones, which were all about, just what do you know?
Natan Last: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. He said, you know, there are Crossroads and then there are Crossroads. Um, yeah, I read about Sondheim’s that, that intro in, in my book too, because, you know, all of his examples are, uh, information that definitely is obscure, but they’re also all from Uner, non-American cultures.
Right. He talks about, you know, Indonesian boats and uh, Brazilian nuts and Potter wheels from Malaysia. That’s right. There are definitely things that the average person doesn’t know, but it is interesting ’cause there are also things that one might have, one might find oneself glad to have learned about, um, whether you wanna, you know, mess your friends up and Scrabble or you want to just be curious about something else.
Um, and, and there’s, there’s, you know, an interesting way where now. It’s almost easier to having been stumped by an American style crossword, look something up and decide whether you’re excited by it. Um, so Gianna, Julianna, same question to you. I mean, I think, you know, these two aspects, the pun on the illusion is Barry’s talking about, you know, sondheim’s all in on the pun.
And I feel like, um, you know, in some sense you’re all in on the illusion, but they definitely work together, right? Um, so yeah, I’m, I’m curious about how you think about those two aspects.
Juliana Pache: Yeah. Um, hmm. To be honest, it’s, it, it’s not something that I’ve thought about directly in, in how you’re phrasing the question.
Um, but I guess in some ways it, it is happening instinctively as, as I’m creating this, the crossword puzzles, right. Um, because. Uh, I, I do want the puzzles to feel playful. Uh, I, I want to kind of, um, create an itch in someone’s mind and then for them to scratch that itch through solving. Um, in terms of the, the, if you know, you know, um, yeah, I mean I think you described it it really beautifully.
I think that that meme kind of captures a, a lot of what Black crossword represents. So, um. It, it kind of captures the feeling of, okay, this is, this is for us. If, if, you know, you might be in some ways tapped into this community, but at the same time it’s, it’s not really about exclusivity, it’s, it’s more so about a, a cultural understanding.
Um, and I think it’s a playful way to say, this is kind of our pool of common knowledge. And then at the same time, um, it, it really isn’t just common knowledge or black common knowledge. There’s also, I’m also pulling on information from across the diaspora. That’s pretty niche. Um, but yeah. But yeah, I think if, you know, you know, is, is a, a great way to tie all of that in.
Natan Last: Yeah, no, definitely. I mean, it reminds me a bit of. Maybe the unity of this is there’s a guy, Zach Sherwin, uh, who I think our listeners would really dig who makes this thing called the Crossword Show, uh, that combines so many of these different aspects. You know, he has a crossword writer create a puzzle, and then he has, um, two solvers who are comedians live, solve the puzzle, but also commentate on the puzzle.
So the puzzle lives on after its solution and just doing bits. Riffs based on what the puzzle is doing. And he writes the clues as a, a clue tune. It’s kind of a mix between like Patter Song Meets Twist, uh, meets Heim, uh, ’cause he has, he used to work for, um, epic rap battles of history. So, um, he’s, he’s, he’s pretty good.
Uh, so yeah, I mean, I, I just think about like both of these. Uh, ways of being with language, you know, can, can come together and like, like both of you’re saying, reinforce each other and like you’re saying, Juliana come out unconsciously. Mm-hmm. In, in the crossword form.
Juliana Pache: Yeah. You both, oh, sorry. Oh no, sorry.
Go ahead.
Barry Joseph: You both mentioned a meme that I’m not familiar with it. I’m wondering if you can explain it, Juliana.
Juliana Pache: If you know, you know, I’m actually not sure where it originates. Um, but it’s, it’s definitely a, a pretty common saying on the internet. Um, but, but it does kind of feel like, um, you know, if you’re, if you’re tapped in in some way, then, then you get it.
Um, that’s kind of the, the feeling. Or there’s another one, which I’m not sure the origins of, of this either, but I, I think it’s. S it’s pretty common in, um, the black community, which is, uh, what’s understood, doesn’t need to be explained. Mm-hmm. Um, yeah, that feels like it. It’s, um, in the same category. But so, and, and so this kind of ties into how I play around with language in black crossword.
So for example, um, the word edges, uh. Might be clued a certain way in a mainstream crossword puzzle, but in black crossword it might be clued, referring to, um, the, the small hairs at the front of one scalp. Uh, we also call those baby hairs. Mm-hmm. Uh, so, so for, for that clue, I might say, um, yeah. You lay these with a toothbrush, which that’s another cultural reference is some, some folks use a toothbrush because it’s a small enough brush that it’s perfect kind of to, uh, brush down those, um, those small hairs at, at your scalp.
Um, another one is. Cap, which could be baseball cap, but also cap is slang for a lie. Um, there’s cop which could refer to a police officer or it could refer to purchasing something cop, COP means to buy, uh, in slang. Um, and then there’s another one actually, which I saw in the New York Times mini recently.
I’m not sure if it if it had been in there before, but uh, the word ash. Uh, was clued with something referring to like, uh, lotion target, or in need of lotion, which is something that I put in black crossword a lot. Uh, because we call that kind of dry skin, that visible dry skin. We call that ash. Um, yeah.
Barry Joseph: Julian, I’m curious, you’re talking about the, if it’s okay, Natan, if I can ask a follow up question. You’re talking about the puzzles in the New York Times, those, many of those puzzles have their own discussion boards. And I’m curious if you read the discussion boards and what you think about the complaints that people sometimes have who are from different communities, different cultures who don’t feel like the, um, answers are fair ’cause they feel like they’re somewhat exclusionary.
Um, and yet at the same time. I feel like you’ve turned that on its head and you said, I’m gonna claim the domain that we’re working within, and you can identify your relationship with that domain, an insider or an outsider, but then expect that anything is gonna be fair if it’s within that domain. Yeah.
Versus New York Times, it’s just establishing it for everyone and then people often complain. Do you have any thoughts on that?
Juliana Pache: Right. I mean, I think that’s a really challenging place to be in. And so there is a lot of freedom that I have in black crossword because I am saying, well, I am catering to this specific demographic of people.
Um, so there is a lot of freedom there. ’cause it’s kind of like you come in knowing that that’s what you’re gonna get. Uh, with a mainstream crossword puzzle that can get very complicated because like, first of all, what is mainstream? That’s one. Um. And you’re kind of catering to all different types of groups and, and obviously crossword puzzles have historically catered towards white and male subjects.
Um, I haven’t been on the discussion boards. I have been on various Reddit threads. Um, I’ve been on many Reddit threads. Um, but I mean. I mean, some, oftentimes people have really good points. Other times I’m like, okay, I don’t really know what you’re mad about. It sounds like you know, what’s your
Barry Joseph: beef?
Juliana Pache: Yeah.
We, we all don’t solve the, the clues the same way. I don’t know, um,
Barry Joseph: my partner loves, sorry.
Juliana Pache: Oh no, no. Sorry. You go ahead.
Barry Joseph: My partner loves to let me know when people outside of the US complain about the New York centric. Clues. Yeah. You know, I’m, I’m, I’m in Bulgaria, how am I supposed to know that? And my partner’s response is, it is the New York Times.
It is saying it’s domain is New York. It’s, it’s for the world. But hey, if you don’t know what Katz a deli is, maybe you should learn.
Natan Last: Yeah. There was a, for a long time. Uh, I, I have a friend. This is, this is an insider’s peek into the way the New York Times, uh, editing process goes. Maybe 20 years ago now, he submitted a crossword that had everything bagel in it, which lovingly is 15 letters long.
So it spans the entire length of like a standard 15 by 15 crossword grid. And the New York Times rejected it ’cause uh, will, Schwarz hadn’t heard of Everything Bagel, and he was like, how is this possible? So it is very New York centric, but then also every now and then, it’s maybe a little more Westchester centric we wanna say.
Or, you know, people, even, even US New Yorkers have our provincialism, right? Um mm-hmm. I mean, the, the thing I love about what you’re talking about is like, you know, this gets to your point, Barry, you know, in the New York Times you have, I don’t know if you had smg, let’s say, is an answer, right? The clue would be extremely proper and kind of tripping over itself.
To handhold the solver, you know, port mano of smash and bang, comma in, in, you know, new slang or something. And all those qualifiers can feel a little othering. They can feel a little, uh, like you’re festooning the answer with, you know, accolades to make it seem real when it just is a thing. Right? And so Juliana’s clues, I feel like you’re just straight up and direct because these are just how the things are described.
Mm-hmm.
And to your point there, I mean, I mean, as someone who makes, I make puzzles for the New Yorker and I get, you know, I get my fair share of hate mail all the time. It’s often just unpredictable. Right. I, I had put chip witch the like ice cream dessert in it and I got a Instagram DM that was like, chip witch.
Are we serious now? People? I love me.
Barry Joseph: Good. Chip witch.
Natan Last: Yeah, I do too. Fun word. Um. But I often think about, uh, Eric Agard, who’s a really, really great crossword constructor who makes puzzles kind of both for, uh, himself and his blog and his own community, and also is a really prolific mainstream constructor, um, including for, you know, places like The Times and the New Yorker, and he just sees them.
Kind of as you’re describing Juliana, as different projects, right? There’s a project of, uh, expansion where you’re trying to get people who aren’t necessarily puzzle lovers to see themselves in the grid, and then there’s a project of education where you do put in his case. Uh, it’s often, you know, African heads of state or, uh, song lyrics or, uh, in, in Eric’s case in particular, a lot of like indigenous references and names that like, we kind of ought to know but don’t necessarily see in a crossword.
And again, as long as the crossings are fair, you know, you walk away having solved it. Maybe it was a challenge and, you know, hopefully you, you’ve learned something too, right? The idea that you can bring the curiosity that someone has. When they’re starting a crossword to the post crossword solve. Right.
It’s kind of a, a love letter and an introduction. Um, and yeah, I guess, I guess to that point, um, I’d love to talk about community ’cause we’re kind of all talking about the ways that. Wordplay is not just an individual pursuit. Right. Sondheim walking down the street with someone and feeling compelled not to just anagram, uh, cama, but to share it.
Right. And, and Juliana, the way you talk about the connective tissue, um, around the, uh, the way things are clued and the way, I mean, I know even the solving that, that you do in community, right. Um, and, and that’s true in general of. Puzzles and games, you know, they’ve gone from a traditionally individual pursuit, um, to, you know, sharing your word or score in the group chat.
Um. Gianna, you have that great Langston News line as an epigraph, um, to the book, which ends, you know, what we’re gonna do in the face of what we remember, right? This idea. And the reason I love that is because crosswords really straddle this ephemerality. You solve it and then you toss it, right? But it’s in the New York Times, it codifies who’s important.
So it’s really like fleeting. And also forever in that, in that way. And yeah, Barry, you’ve got those great stories about Sondheim’s rise as a puzzler being inextricably linked to the people around him. Um, you know, sharing, solving times other people being jealous that he can solve a cryptic in 20, um, and being encouraged by Hammerstein at a young age.
Right. Um. You know, my book, I talk about how the crossword streak brings together, uh, a pair of siblings after their mother’s passing, or a daughter finding, uh, her father’s unfinished Sunday puzzles and finishing them, finishing the solving, um, and calling it a collaboration across time. So I’m wondering if you could just riff on, on this theme of the specific power crosswords have at generating community and, and Juliana I’ll start with you.
Juliana Pache: Yeah. Um, well, well for one, uh, there’s the connectivity, right? Well, for black crossword specifically, I think people feel very connected to, um, the clues and the people referred to and the cultures represented. Um, and some of our colloquialisms and. And things like that. So there’s, so there’s that, there’s the connection.
Um, but I think there’s also, um, I mean, black culture is so diverse. There are black, it really should, is black culture is plural, right? And, but there are so many threads that connect us culturally. There are customs that show up across all of these cultures. Um, so I, I do feel like crossword puzzles are ki are a beautiful medium.
And feel kind of like a beautiful metaphor for connecting all of these different cultures. Um, so there’s that element of it. And then for me personally, or I guess maybe in the physical world, outside of the digital space, um, I also do live puzzling events. And so we do a lot of, we have a lot of word games there.
We’ll do crosswords, we’ll do word searches, we’ll do trivia. Um, and for example, with the word searches, I might have, there was one time I did a word search on different dishes made with plantains. Um, because yeah, across the black diaspora there are so many plantain dishes. Uh, so there were maybe 25, 30 words, and people were coming up to me after saying, oh, I’m surprised you put this word in there.
I never, I never thought I’d see it in a, in a word game or a word search. Um, so there’s that element. And then, um, that links in Hughes poem. Actually, when I picked that poem, I got it from, um, uh, the selected poems of Langston Hughes, the book, and in. That book, the poem was titled Puzzled actually. Uh, which you see the apograph in in the book.
Uh, it says Harlem One.
Natan Last: Yeah.
Juliana Pache: Um, which the, you know, when I sent the request into the publisher, they sent it back and they said this is the actual title for it. But it, but previously he has had, he has titled it Puzzled. So I thought it was a really beautiful poem to start with, um, because it touches on.
The state of the worlds, the, the climate in society. Um, and then I, I mean the, the idea of remembering and connecting to knowledge, I felt like that was apparent in the poem as well. So, um, yeah, I felt like it was a beautiful way to lead into the book.
Natan Last: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a lovely, that’s really fun that it was called puzzling.
It makes me wonder if, if Langston News was also a puzzle head. I mean, you know, uh, TS Elliot used to solve, uh, the London Times cryptic under his desk while he was like editing the criteria. And, you know, and he talked about, he sent a letter to Ezra Pound saying, finding my name in the cryptic is the best thing.
Uh, being canonized in specifically this way, uh, is more important to him than, you know, uh, a good review, uh, for the wasteland of which, of which there were both not that many at the time, and also people called the Wasteland, either a work of genius or. Uh, a like, frustrating crossword puzzle, right? So there was this like crossword puzzle school of poetry in the twenties during modernism where, where poems were seen as things that you could solve.
And it reminds me in a lot of ways of Sondheim, um, where there’s things you have to untangle in, in the lyrics. So, I mean, bear, I’ll turn it over to you to this question about, uh, community and, and, and wordplay and all of that. Feel, forget it.
Barry Joseph: I love this topic and in fact, there’s so many different places I want to go, so I’m going to go in a number of those places and try and tie them all together.
But I’m gonna start with this broken Harmons found floating in Manhattan. We’ve been talking about crypto crosswords, as you mentioned in time, we haven’t explained exactly what they are and how they work. So I want to do that by using this clue from Chop Logic, which is one of Steven Heim’s, um, uh, crypto crossword puzzles from 19 68, 8.
I think I got
Natan Last: it
Barry Joseph: Broken. Harmon’s found floating in Manhattan. So before you answer it, Natan, let’s explain for those who don’t know how they work, how you approach. A clue of an a cry crossword and, uh, a typical American crossword. The puzzle is usually fairly straightforward. Um, it certainly was back in the sixties, in the cryptic.
They’re always a puzzle, and there’s certain rules to how the puzzles are solved. In most cryptics, it has to be a sentence that somewhat sounds normal, that kind of sounds normal, but actually isn’t. It’s all designed to distract and there is a line you can place between two words. You have to choose where that line goes.
That’s part of the first challenge. And on one side is gonna be a straight definition, like a typical, you know, straightforward explanation. And then the other side is something else like an anagram or something else. So let’s start Natan if you think you have it. Where do you think the line goes in broken harmonica found floating in Manhattan?
Which one is the, uh, where between, what two words does the line go to Split it up?
Natan Last: Yeah. Harmonica,
Barry Joseph: excuse broken harmonies.
Natan Last: The cryptic part is broken Harmons. That’s right. And the direct part is found floating in Manhattans.
Barry Joseph: So broken is gonna signal to us if you do cryptics, that this is gonna be an anagram.
And so the word Harmons is an anagram for the answer. Did you figure out what the answer was?
Natan Last: Yeah, Marish.
Barry Joseph: Marinos. And when you think about something floating in Manhattan, I picture the Hudson River, I pictured a bunch of broken Harmons. That’s clearly a distraction. This didn’t say found floating in the Hudson River.
It said floating in Manhattan. That doesn’t seem right. So there’s something off there for us to figure out. What did you figure out about what the Manhattan is in found floating in Manhattan?
Natan Last: So it’s the drink, right?
Barry Joseph: It’s the drink. And what do you have in a Manhattan?
Natan Last: Marino Cherry,
Barry Joseph: amino cherry. So found floating Manhattan is a fun way to simply describe amino cherry.
And broken Harmons is the anagram of Harmons, and that’s in the answer for whatever that number is. So that’s how Cryptics work. Every single clue is a puzzle to solve. Right. And Len, uh, and Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim loved solving them together on the set of putting together. Their collaboration for the Broadway musical West Side Story, the Listener was one of the publications that Steven Heim loved to do the, uh, cryptics of.
And in fact, he would save, he would solve them and then save them, and then use them as inspiration for his own. And this is a British publication. We’re now talking about the 1950s th this Sunday issue would be. Would arrive in America on Thursday. So everyone understood Thursday morning, west Side story, no work was getting done.
It was gonna be Steven Heim sitting with Leonard Bernstein and the two of them together head to head with their own copy, trying to solve it and see who’s gonna get it done first. So one of the most powerful things about puzzles is that, yeah, while they might seem solitary, they almost always generate community.
Heim understood this. His crypt. His cryptics weren’t just things you solved alone, they were things you talked about with friends debated over dinner or worked on in teams at his famous game nights in, in his treasure hunts. And in fact, that’s kind of like the paradox of puzzles, right? The moment of clarity might happen alone, but the joy multiplies when it’s shared.
Crossword culture today proves the same thing. Whether it’s people comparing their daily minute, cryptic solve on TikTok or solving puzzles together online, talking about in discord, like you mentioned, Juliana, the puzzle becomes a spark for connection. That’s what Sondheim did in his musicals too, right?
He took something intricate and personal and turned it into a shared experience building communities of people who felt together that thrill of figuring it out. Steven Sondheim was clearly obviously in America, and he had just a few friends he could do the British Cryptics with, but in the late sixties he met someone named Eric Choley.
Eric Choley was a carpenter and. In the world of Cryptics in England, it didn’t matter where you came from, if you knew how to do them, you could construct them, you could create them and maybe get them published. And he had, um, a pen name called Apex. And Apex was inspired by Jimenez. Jimenez for decades was one of the leading cryptic instructors in England and.
Ap, I’ll call him Eric now for short. Um, wanted to do something for Jimenez. He wanted to give Jimenez an opportunity to, um, try and guess the answers to some puzzles. And so he wanted to build a community through mail of people who would try and solve them together. And he invited Stephen Sondheim to be part of that group.
So maybe in the late sixties there was just a, a dozen of them. And over the years, he created something that took his pseudonym. Apex, A PEX and redesigned it. So it meant a puzzle every Christmas, extra Christmas. So every December for decades, he would create a crossword puzzle after Jimenez passed away.
And Steven Sondheim and Leonard Bernstein and Will Schwarz and all the people around the world would receive it. And it was like his present to them. And then they would solve it on their own. And then one of the clues would be left Uncl. One of the answers would be left to include and they all would submit their own answer to it.
And so people like Steven Heim would then put in their, their favorite answer, and then the Eric would then send them back to everyone who would then judge them and come up with the best one. So even though we’re talking about puzzles in England and people around the world wanting, connecting with them, using the mail system, this community was built over decades.
And when Eric passed away a few decades ago, it was passed to somebody else. And it still continues to this day, even though many of them. Original members of it and the people leading it have since passed on. So when we love something, when we’re passionate about something, we will always work as humans to connect with others to share it and enjoy it together.
And, and crosswords and puzzles, I think are no different.
Natan Last: Yeah, I mean, that’s really beautiful. I mean, it, it reminds me just like how. Much, the changes in technology are just changes in the way that we share these things. Whether you’re mailing something or sending the group chat, your Wordle score. Um, I mean, it also reminds me how fun it is, to your point, Juliana, to solve in person together.
It’s a thing that happens all too rarely, uh, but it’s just so fun to get around a table and see that, you know, our own knowledge is kind of fragmented and together we can figure stuff out. Um, or when you’re solving a cryptic, different people will. Uh, uncover different aspects of the clue. Um. Yeah. That’s great.
Yeah,
Juliana Pache: I agree. It is, it is really beautiful. And Barry, that was, that was gorgeous. I’m really touched by that. I didn’t know that existed, but that’s, that’s really great that it’s lasted so long. Um, something that I really love hearing people say when they talk about solving black crossword is that they are maybe solving it with a partner or a sibling.
Um, so for example, I have a friend who she. Uh, her background is, um, uh, she’s of Trinidadian descent and her partner is, I believe, Puerto Rican and Dominican, or I think he’s both. Um, and so they’ll solve the puzzles together and, and they’ll kind of lean on each other for different cultural references. So I love that kind of connectivity.
Um, when it comes to Black crossword specifically.
Barry Joseph: For my book, I had the privilege of getting to see not just Stephen Sondheim’s crossword puzzles, which were published uh, in the early eighties, and people have sent copies around, but accessing things that were for small private events, you know, parties at his home or someone else’s home for special occasion, um, event.
Something he might create for a cast of a show. And seeing from people who were there, what they had. And then taking those puzzles, which never had answers. I always just had the puzzles and seeing if I could solve them. So I always often turned to my family members, you know, one of my kids, my sister, and it was really fun for me and such a delight to get to be with them and see which puzzles connected with how their mind worked.
My sister specifically was like, I hate puzzles. She, I love doing escape rooms. She never wants to go to escape rooms with me, but she’s like, Hey, I’ll take a look. And there was one I was totally stuck on and she got it right away. And it was just wonderful to see how there’s different puzzles, speak to different people in different ways, and getting to do that together and get to see these different sides of each other, um, through the puzzles that we were doing together.
It was just such a delight and a privilege.
Natan Last: I agree. Yeah, it’s really wonderful. The, the, the daughter psychoanalyst, Deborah Soen, who I talk about in my book, who found her father’s uncompleted, uh, Sunday puzzles in this portfolio and starts, it’s after he’s passed and she’s trying to fill in the rest of the grade.
I mean, there’s two big feelings she experiences. Mm-hmm. One is seeing how he would always get the Greek pathology ones ’cause he was a classicist and just seeing that he laid this foundation and that was his knowledge base that she could never get. But she was a, a writer and a psychoanalyst. So all of the sciencey clues and the poets, she would always be able, uh, to fill in.
But then that weird facson of seeing that he got something wrong. He’s gone and, you know, writing over his, uh, his letters in a way that you gotta be gentle with it. Um, it, it, it, it can be very powerful to work together across generations alive and dead right on these, on these puzzles that they’re not just one day affairs.
Um. That’s wonderful. And I think, I mean, maybe to to close, we can all talk about our own, you know, we’re talking about puzzles and the politics of it and the power of a larger community, but it, of course starts with our own immediate community. Um, and you know, Barry, it’s great. It’s, it’s always great to hear about how puzzles, uh, you know, Karen into different parts of one’s family and who, who accepts it and who doesn’t.
Um. So maybe we could just, we close talking about that. I mean, my, my mother who’s a Moroccan immigrant, you know, doesn’t speak English super, super well, but has like a very, uh. Boisterous sense of rhythm. And I feel like the way that she tells jokes and the way that she, uh, tells stories, often the exact language isn’t there, but the structure of a joke is there, or the structure of a story is there.
And I feel like she taught me a lot of things about languages, abstract, you know, skeleton that are, are really wonderful and, and have less to do with specific words and more to do with rhythm. Um, and yeah, it’s, she does not like solving my puzzles, but my dad does. My dad is, uh, from Brooklyn. And, uh, I think for him it’s the, if you know, you know, thing, he’s got like a real, like, he loves seeing the jazz musicians and the political leaders that tend to crop up in my puzzles.
And I think he’s gotten to know me better by solving life puzzles in a way. Hmm. Maybe we can, uh, we can close with, with that kind of personal note, uh, Juliana,
Juliana Pache: um, yeah, sure. Um. So I actually, while you were speaking, I was, and you talked, you mentioned jazz. Uh, I was thinking about, um, something that I just read about James Baldwin.
I’m reading the new biography, uh, Baldwin, A Love Story. And uh, at one point, I don’t remember which, which book had just come out, but he was facing all this criticism and there were mixed reviews on, on one of his works. And, um, he was, someone was critiquing. Uh, his use of language and he was essentially paraphrasing here.
He was essentially saying, um, don’t compare me to everyone else. My inspiration in my, I take a lot of inspiration in my writing from jazz musicians, um, and. Yeah, so I, I felt that very deeply. I think that when it comes to me personally and how I’m thinking about puzzles and crafting them, um, I’m kind of, I’m, I don’t know.
I’m kind of just not, I’m not winging it, but I’m, I feel the freedom to kind of do it in my own way. Um, and then I think, I think play in general for me and how, uh, it’s incorporated into my life is, um. I, I just really love the playfulness of it. Um, I love the potential to learn, um, that crosswords specifically bring in a kind of lighthearted, low stakes format.
Um, I’m not sure that that answers the question, but those were, those were my thoughts.
Barry Joseph: And for me, what comes to mind is actually what I usually do at the end of my podcast. I usually do this. Remember, someone is on your side when matching minds with Heim, and what I’m doing there is trying to hit three notes.
One, when you’re doing someone’s puzzle, you get to know them. You get to know how they think, and you get to be with them. Because you are trying to understand who they were when they were creating the thing that you’re experiencing. Second, Steven Heim, when he created his puzzles, wasn’t trying to make you think how great he was and how smart he was.
He wanted you to feel smart about yourself. He has your back. Someone who’s on your side is a, a lyric from a song and into the woods, and it’s emphasizing this idea that when you’re doing a Heim puzzle, he’s with you and he’s encouraging you every step of the way he’s mentoring you. And finally, when you do his puzzles.
It’s similar to seeing one of his shows. Many people love his theater because they feel seen being part of his audience in a way they don’t feel in other venues. And I think you can feel that same way as well. When you’re doing his puzzles, you feel like he sees you, he’s recognizing you, and he’s rooting you on.
Natan Last: Yeah. That’s amazing. That’s, um, I think that’s a great note to end on, uh, feeling seen and feeling like someone’s on your side. Um, so thank you so much. I mean, this has been, it’s puzzling the power of crossroads in games presented by NYU. Uh, it’s been my great honor to talk to Barry Joseph, author of Matching Minds with Sondheim, the Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Legend.
And Juliana Pache, uh, author and creator of Black Crossword a hundred MIDI puzzles Connecting the African Diaspora. Um, I’m naan last, uh, my book Across the Universe, the past, present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle comes out this November. Thank you all so much. Thanks Juliana. Barry,
Juliana Pache: thank you. Thank you for such thoughtful questions.
I had a great time.
Barry Joseph: Thank you. And thanks for everyone who’s listening today. We were there.
Marty Morris Lee: Oh, it’s so much fun.
Etai Benson: There’s no better way to represent his brilliance than through puzzles.
Colm Molloy: I feel like he was probably more obsessed with puzzles than musicals. Maybe that’s heresy.
Will Shortz: He was a brilliant puzzle solver. and a great mind.
George Lee Andrews: It was quite amazing when you walked Into his apartment because it was full of games and puzzles.
Michael Mitnick: When Sondheim started to build the cryptic crosswords for New York Magazine.
Stephen Rodosh: His treasure hunts were legendary.
George Lee Andrews: Everybody was just running around screaming and laughing and having
Erin Ortman: it’s almost ridiculous to be like, yeah, I went on a. Scavenger Hunt created by Stephen Sondheim.
Michael Counts: You know, in some ways you could almost consider him like the sort of inventor of the, very form of escape rooms because he
Taylor Myers: Stephen Sondheim blurted out when the final exit door opened, but I wanna stay.
Marty Morris Lee: How cool that we’re sitting here trying to figure this game out, again!
Richard Maltby, Jr.: I have to say, I’m so grateful to be invited to participate in this. I can’t tell you. It’s just such a gift. You know, and he’s here, you know, he’s here.
Ann Morrison: Matching minds with Sondheim. Tell a friend and quiz him. Test him on his anagram. He’s pure hedonism. His songs and his shows. Mary Flynn, Mama Rose. Everybody already knows they’re superbly designed. But where would we be without a puzzle to bring us glee. Even someone in a tree would believe we need Steve and his mind.