Where I Go: My New York Times Crossword Construction Quest

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

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

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! …

by Julian Kwan | November 18, 2021

The Black Scholar Who Gave Up Her Family to Earn Her Ph.D.

In the Early to Mid-1900s, Historian Marion Thompson Wright Had to Contend With the Prefeminist Rules and Culture of Howard University

by Graham Russell Gao Hodges | April 4, 2019

Marion Thompson Wright is best known as the first female African-American to earn a doctorate in history. Her 1940 dissertation, defended at Teachers College at Columbia University—The Education of Negroes …

I Heart N.J.

Call It Smelly. Call It Sleazy. Call It the Armpit of America. To Me, It's Home.

by Carly Okyle | June 19, 2015

I’m sitting in a circle during the second week of my freshman year of college, listening to everyone perform the introductions that have become comically commonplace: name, hometown, dorm. It’s …

Letting Go of Philip Roth

Thoughts On the Retirement Of the Genius Who Immortalized My New Jersey World

by Sarah Rothbard | November 12, 2012

I grew up surrounded by Rothschilds (the judge and his wife), Roths (owners of a chain of urban sneaker stores, they made a fortune off many iterations of Air Jordans), …

Making Monday More Miserable

My Weekly Visits to the Raymond Food Court In Newark

by Jeffrey M. Rothbard | June 28, 2012

Newark, New Jersey, where I’ve worked for almost 40 years, will never be a destination for foodies. Even Brooklyn, which just completed its looting of Newark’s NBA franchise, the lowly …

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