Where I Go: My New York Times Crossword Construction Quest

Getting a Sunday Puzzle Fit to Print Seemed Impossible Until I Did It

When I moved to northern New Jersey in 2012 and took a software test engineering job in midtown Manhattan, I suddenly found myself with an hour-long bus commute. I’d solved newspaper crossword puzzles sporadically for the preceding 15 years, but I had very little patience and wasn’t very good. So when I resumed my crosswording during those long trips, I was determined to become a better solver.

There’s a perception that in order to solve challenging crosswords, you have to be some sort of master of obscure facts, like a Jeopardy! …

More In: Where I Go

Where I Go: Afropalonia | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Where I Go: Afropalonia

Writer and Poet Rashaad Thomas Imagines ‘a Planet Only for Black People’

eath sits next to me, hip bones touching mine on a twin bed in the center of a revolving room in Arizona that’s progressively increasing in speed. Frequency numbers, lifeless …

A mural on a wall in the former Jewish ghetto of Vilnius

Where I Go: Lithuania’s Vanished Center of Jewish Life

In Vilna, Where Thousands Were Murdered, I Learned How Difficult It Is to Mourn an Absence

I did it all backward. Instead of taking my research trips before writing my book, like any normal historian would have, I’d waited. Only after I had completed my first …

Where I Go: The ‘Meandering, Beautiful, Dangerous’ Angeles Crest Highway | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Where I Go: The ‘Meandering, Beautiful, Dangerous’ Angeles Crest Highway

This Pacific Crest Trail Gateway Is Southern California’s Most Accessible Scenic Byway—When It’s Open, That Is

The Angeles Crest Highway winds thousands of feet above the Los Angeles basin, a meandering, beautiful, and dangerous road that leads to the hiking trails of the Angeles National Forest …

Sisson Callahan Trail

Where I Go: Hiking the Mountain That Almost Killed John Muir

Finding an Adventure Story and a Portal to the Past Beneath Mount Shasta

The great outdoor adventurer John Muir—who had skipped over glaciers in Alaska, surfed an avalanche, and gleefully rode a wildly swaying tree in a storm in the Sierras—lay in a …

Where I Go: The Geology of Memory | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Where I Go: The Headlands of Yehliu

It Took Me 20 Years and Five Visits to Develop My Own Relationship to Taiwan

I was hiking the Port Orford Heads State Park on the coast of Southern Oregon this summer when I realized how closely the rock formations and coastline resemble the rugged …