An Existential Crisis in the Crossword Community

Last Saturday, Mark Wegener was spending an evening violating his “marital rules” — doing the Sunday New York Times crossword, alone, on an iPad in bed. The next morning, when his wife started solving the same puzzle in The New York Times Magazine and discovered that it was missing a clue for 5-across, he had to come clean.

Wegener told me he immediately knew, from having already solved part of the grid online, that the print version was wrong. “But it was the source of much consternation,” he said. “I got a lot of dirty looks.”

That missing 5-across clue was the first sign something had gone awry. The New York Times Magazine, which for some subscribers arrives on Saturdays, had printed an unsolvable crossword.

On Saturday evening, the paper came clean. “Sunday’s crossword puzzle in the print edition of The New York Times Magazine contains a grid that does not match the clues,” the Times wrote on X. Clues didn’t align with their corresponding answers — or were missing altogether. The grid, as Wegener knew, was correct online. But for print-magazine solvers, the damage to their weekends, and esteem, had already been done.

Some solvers who, like Wegener’s wife, complete the Sunday puzzle in the print magazine (often with pen) complained on crossword forums and social media, saying they were “nearly in tears,” some with fears of “sudden onset dementia” or, worse yet, ineptitude.

For Irene Papoulis, a former writing instructor at Trinity College, the puzzle is typically a source of pride. “It didn’t even occur to me that it could be their mistake,” she told me. “I just blamed myself.” When Mike McFadden, in New Jersey, couldn’t crack it, he had a similar reaction. “I thought something was wrong with me,” he told me. “I didn’t think that they would have an error.” It nagged at him all day. At a function on Saturday, he couldn’t bring himself to mention it to his brother-in-law, a fellow solver; he was still too upset.

Some had such trust in the crossword that they believed the erroneous grid was purposeful. “I’m saying to myself, ‘Okay, maybe there’s some sort of scientific or mathematical trick,’” McFadden said. When I spoke with Will Shortz, the Times’ crossword editor, he said the Times does “so many tricks with the puzzles” that he could see how someone’s first thought would be “I wonder what they’re up to now?”

VH McKenzie, an artist in the East Village, said that while she’s not a “crazy crossword maven,” she keeps the magazine on her bedside table in an effort to stay off her phone. On Saturday evening, she started in the upper-left-hand corner, as always. “Usually I make a little progress,” she told me. “This time was shocking. I didn’t get anything.” She threw it on the floor and turned on The Pitt.

Several people told me they felt robbed of a sacred morning routine. As an insurance agent, McFadden’s whole job is “numbers and balance sheets and income statements,” he said. On Saturdays, he wakes up earlier than usual to grab the magazine “as soon as it hits the lawn,” puts jazz and a pot of coffee on, and gets started on the grid before his family wakes up.

“Maybe I’m overreacting,” he said. “But it ruined the best hour of my week.”

Barry Ancona, an avid solver and equally avid Times commenter, didn’t understand what the big deal was. To him, a problem with the grid is a mechanical error — far less worrying than an editorial one. He cited a 2016 mistake that confused Mark Twain’s birthplace with his burial site. Even that, he assured me, wasn’t a “tragedy.”

But for others, the error triggered an existential crisis. “We trust that it’s always going to be something that at least somebody can figure out,” Papoulis told me. “The world is making less and less sense. So it’s like, ‘The crossword puzzle? Not you, too!’”

As some crossword lifers surmised, this was the first time this had ever happened in the puzzle’s 84-year history. The error, according to Shortz, was made because of a recent redesign of the Times magazine. The new system, Shortz tells me, does not have a new template for the puzzle pages, so they are currently being ported over, copied and pasted, from an older version. Shortz said that, once new templates are introduced, it will be impossible for a problem like this to occur again.

McKenzie, for one, told me that while she has a lot of faith in the Times, it was a relief to know the paper was wrong this time. “It was the Times that lost its mojo,” she said, laughing, “not me.”