by Dan Moren
Inside the New York Times’s puzzle team
Nice article from last month by Vanity Fair‘s Charlotte Klein about the New York Times‘s puzzle team. And there’s even an Apple connection:
There’s been talk inside the paper even further back about the possibilities of expanding into games. About a decade ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook gave Mark Thompson, then CEO of the Times, and David Perpich, now publisher of The Athletic, some advice. The Times executives were in the Apple boardroom, demoing the NYT Now app—a short-lived attempt to attract young readers—NYT Cooking, and the new NYT Crossword app. The Times, said Cook, should really be the leader of digital puzzles, according to a source familiar with the discussion. (The Times declined to comment on this meeting.)
I’m an avid player of the Mini, Wordle, and Connections, but at the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I think of those as my daily puzzle appetizers: the Times crossword remains the entrée.