The New York Times crossword took decades to earn cultural respectability

Jacobs traces the crossword's origin to a 1913 puzzle created by Arthur Wynne, noting that the format was initially dismissed by serious publications as a trivial fad rather than a legitimate intellectual pastime. The New York Times itself resisted publishing crosswords for years, viewing them as beneath its editorial standards, until public demand eventually forced a reconsideration during the 1940s. Editor Margaret Petherbridge Farrar is credited with elevating the form's craftsmanship and structure once the paper committed to it, establishing conventions around clue-writing and grid symmetry that persist today. Jacobs uses this history to illustrate how a puzzle format's cultural status can shift dramatically over decades without the underlying activity changing much, a pattern that recurs across several of the puzzle traditions he investigates. He also meets contemporary constructors who describe the surprising number of creative trade-offs involved in building a single well-crafted grid. Takeaway: what looks like a timeless institution today was often dismissed as a passing fad when it first appeared.