Stephen Sondheim may have brought the cryptic crossword to America, but Richard E. Maltby Jr. brought it to Harper’s Magazine. The lyricist, director, and cryptic creator sat down with Harper’s and one of his checkers, Roddy Howland Jackson, to talk about the history of the puzzle, the declining use of dictionaries, and the rise in word puzzle fascination. After all, “What holds the country together is the diversity of different nerd populations.”

Subscribe to Harper’s for only $16.97: harpers.org/save
Richard E. Maltby Jr.’s puzzles in Harper’s: https://harpers.org/sections/puzzle/
A link to uploads of Stephen Sondheim’s Crossword Puzzles: http://blogfott.blogspot.com/2014/07/...
Christopher Tayler on T.S. Eliot’s legacy: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/09/t...
Ryan Ruby on Nabokov: https://harpers.org/archive/2022/11/h...

4:01: Stephen Sondheim’s cryptic crossword legacy
7:51: The musicality of the cryptic
14:14: “If you’re going to do something that is tricky, you have to be fair.”
17:44: There’s no such thing as the English language.”
26:26: On getting stumped by your own puzzle
33:56: Modernist poetry’s puzzles and contemporary poetry’s…plain prose
38:09: Clues are “designed to be read wrong.”
39:56: Nabokov’s crossword legacy
47:06: The dictionary as Bildungsroman
55:26: Wordle! Spelling Bee! “As the language gets more and more debased, people seem to be more interested in language.”
1:02:41: A cryptic proposal
Episode link: https://play.headliner.app/episode/16...

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