How that crossword got into your new D Magazine issue.
Holland Murphy, our executive editor, lives directly across the street from me, so I need to be careful with what I say here about her. It’s one thing to offend a co-worker; far worse to wound a neighbor. I’ll just say that Holland is lazy and feckless.
For barely over two years, Holland has written the back page of the magazine, mining our archives for interesting material and then reconnecting with old sources and writers to bring us new insight and amusement. With our September issue, now on newsstands, she has quit that project. Holland said it was “too time consuming” and that she was going to “pull [her] hair out and burn the magazine’s office to the ground” if she were forced to continue. I might not be quoting her accurately. In any case, she abandoned the back page like a litter of unwanted kittens and instead found a local constructor of crosswords, Matthew Stock, to fill the space. I’m sure I’ll return to Matthew and tell you more about him in the coming months.
Here is the important thing to know for now: even crossword writers need editors. And since Holland doesn’t do crosswords, she turned that duty over to our dining critic, Brian Reinhart, doing so by asking him one day, with feigned innocence, if he’d like to do a crossword. Brian was powerless to refuse.
Brian, you see, is a crossword freak. In college, he worked at the student newspaper, the Rice Thrasher, where he was in charge of the events calendar page. “They let me do whatever nonsense I wanted,” Brian told me. “One time I did the calendar as a choose your own adventure. Sometimes I made crosswords. I had a very primitive computer program that would load predesigned crossword grids and suggest words from an absolutely horrible dictionary that had every alternative spelling and obscure bureaucratic abbreviation known to man. First, I would write out lists of really long words. When they turned into an unsolvable acronym gunk, I’d draw it all out by hand and then start writing out trees of possible letters.” He had more to add about his wild college days, but I lost interest.
Point is, Brian is now essentially editing our crossword. No matter that he already generates more copy than anyone on staff. Now he has another job. So I hope you enjoy the new back-page crossword (it’s a print-only puzzle, but you can access the answer key online). If you don’t, write a strongly worded email to [email protected]. Now that she has free time, she’ll read it.