The Seattle star. [volume] (Seattle, Wash.), 11 Oct. 1924. Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers. Lib. of Congress.
Doing a crossword puzzle might seem like a great way to escape from the world for awhile. Just sharpen a pencil and forget about politics and wars and headlines. But crosswords are never apolitical. A new generation of puzzle constructors is pushing to make today’s crosswords more socially and linguistically inclusive. Among them is Anna Shechtman at The New Yorker. She writes about gender and puzzle-making in a memoir called “The Riddles of the Sphinx: Inheriting the Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle.”