Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle by Natan Last is the rare crossword book that treats the humble grid as a cultural battleground rather than a rainy Sunday distraction.
Most of us feel, dimly, that crosswords are doing more than just killing time on the commute. Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle steps in to solve that problem by explaining exactly how puzzles shape money, identity, and power in the twenty first century.
Last shows how the crossword industry decides which lives and lexicons get canonised in the grid, and what changes when new kinds of people seize the pencil.
If I had to sum up the book’s best idea in a single line, it would be this: the modern crossword is not just a game but a shard of cultural infrastructure that can be engineered, contested, and repurposed.
Everything in Across the Universe, from histories of word squares to debates about slurs in the New York Times crossword, circles that claim.
Last grounds this argument in thick reportage on editors and indie constructors, interviews with technologists building puzzle software, statistics on subscription platforms that now draw more than one million paying New York Times Games subscribers, and wider research on the history and psychology of puzzles.
Across the Universe is best for readers who like their cultural criticism as densely researched as a good weekend cryptic and who are happy to argue about representation in pop culture, but it will frustrate anyone who wants a cosy, apolitical nostalgia trip through crossword lore.
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle is a non fiction study of the crossword industry by Natan Last, published in first hardcover edition by Pantheon Books in late twenty twenty five.
The Library of Congress record files it under the deceptively bare subject heading “Crossword puzzles, history,” which undersells just how forward looking the book is.
It is a substantial doorstopper, complete with introduction, three titled parts, a conclusion, notes, bibliography, and index, so it reads more like cultural history than a puzzle anthology.
The contents page lays out its triptych structure under three arguments about what “the crossword should be” followed by a concluding section called “Zooming Out.”
That scaffolding gives readers a clear map through material that ranges from nineteenth century word squares to Twitch streams about constructing indie puzzles.
Genre wise, Across the Universe lives somewhere between media studies, technology writing, and social movement history, with just enough memoir to keep the stakes human.
Last is best known to many solvers as a crossword constructor for outlets like the New Yorker and the New York Times, and as a writer on politics and culture, a background that lets him move easily between talking about letter distributions and about labour organising in the puzzle world.
The book’s central thesis, spelled out in the introduction, is that because “the crossword has never been more popular, or more democratic,” it has also become a contested arena where different groups try to redefine what counts as crossword worthy knowledge and how puzzle making might become, in his words, “a tool of progress.”
2. Background
Before he dives into app analytics and social media backlash, Last rewinds to the early history of word puzzles and the first boom in crosswords, using that past to frame the present fights over grids.
He notes that Arthur Wynne’s diamond shaped “Word Cross” puzzle appeared in the New York World on twenty one December nineteen thirteen, a date also identified by Guinness World Records as the birth of the modern crossword.
From there the book sketches the nineteen twenties “crossword craze,” when newspapers treated puzzles as both menace and marketing hook, echoing accounts in broader histories of crosswords that describe fears people would be too hooked on puzzles to work or talk.
I found these chapters an effective crash course if you have never read Ben Tausig’s Curious History of the Crossword or Adrienne Raphel’s Thinking Inside the Box, and a lively refresher if you have.
Last then jumps forward to show how the New York Times only reluctantly launched a daily crossword in nineteen forty two and how, under Margaret Farrar and later editors, the American style conventions of symmetry, checking, and minimum word length crystallised into a standard.
By the time we reach the mobile era, those conventions are feeding a global market in games subscriptions, where digital offerings like New York Times Games now attract over ten million daily players and more than one million premium subscribers.
3. Across the Universe Summary
“Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle” is Natan Last’s history, memoir, and manifesto about one very specific game that turns out to touch almost everything: technology, migration, class, race, art, and how we organize our attention. It’s part cultural history, part criticism, part love letter—and part cross-examination of the puzzle culture that raised him.
Book at a glance
- Full title & publication – Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, by Natan Last, first hardcover edition, Pantheon Books (New York), 2025; ISBN 9780553387704.
- Structure – Introduction + three parts, each built around a claim:
- The crossword should be data (Chs. 1–3)
- The crossword should be a soapbox (Chs. 4–6)
- The crossword should be art (Chs. 7–9)
followed by a conclusion, “Zooming Out.”
- Central thesis – Because crosswords encode who and what “counts” as common knowledge, they are not just time-killers; they’re social databases, political platforms, and aesthetic objects—and they are currently being rebuilt by a younger, more diverse generation of constructors.
Highlighted timeline & key points
1913 – Arthur Wynne’s “Word-Cross” and the birth of the modern crossword
In the Christmas 1913 issue of the New York World’s Sunday supplement FUN, Liverpool-born editor Arthur Wynne debuts a diamond-shaped “Word-Cross Puzzle” with printed grid and numbered clues—what Deb Amlen later calls the “first mobile game.”
1914–1915 – Viral growth and “user-generated content” before the web
Within weeks, solver mail convinces the paper that the puzzle is a sensation. By March 7, 1915, editors joke that boxes and crates of reader-submitted crosswords will last until “the second week in December, 2100,” an early template for unpaid contributor labor and endless content.
1920s – Crossword craze and backlash
By January 1925, Time reports at least twenty-three U.S. newspapers running crosswords, nine of them in New York City; the New York World moves from weekly to daily puzzles, and the newly merged Herald Tribune creates a national tournament. At the same time, editorials complain of “crossworditis,” headaches, and lost productivity, while British papers warn darkly of a coming “puzzle epidemic.”
1920s–1940s – Margaret Farrar professionalizes the crossword
World editor Margaret Petherbridge (later Farrar) turns from skeptic to evangelist, swearing an oath to edit puzzles “to the essence of perfection” after suffering through badly proofed grids. She standardizes rules: no unchecked letters, rotationally symmetric square grids, advance scheduling, dictionary-based entries—essentially inventing the modern American crossword style adopted later by The New York Times.
World Wars & the crossword as wartime pastime
Last frames the puzzle’s first craze as a product of World War I’s aftermath and Jazz Age modernity, and the Times’ eventual adoption of the puzzle in the 1940s as a morale-boosting distraction during World War II.
1993 onward – The Will Shortz era and the modern boom
Will Shortz becomes Times crossword editor in 1993, recalibrating difficulty (Monday easy to Saturday brutal) and ushering in rebus themes, pop-culture names, slang, and brand names like IKEA, LEGO, and OREO. Under his tenure, the puzzle becomes a prestige cultural object and a training ground for a new generation of constructors—many of whom later critique and extend his legacy.
2000s–2020s – Data, apps, and a second crossword craze
By the early 2020s, the New York Times Games app alone has over a million digital-only subscribers and helps drive roughly $1.1 billion in 2022 digital revenue for the company, leading one staffer to joke the Times is “a gaming company that also happens to offer news.” Competitors like Apple’s native crossword app and Hearst’s Puzzmo treat puzzles as a major growth vertical.
2010s–2020s – Diversity fights and “Women’s March” puzzles
Data from David Steinberg’s Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project shows that women authored about 35 % of Times crosswords under editors Weng and Maleska, but under 20 % in the early Shortz era. In 2020, constructors coordinate a “Women’s March” month: more than 100 crosswords by women are published across outlets, a symbolic but real shift in whose voices shape the grid.
2020 – COVID lockdowns and streak culture
During pandemic lockdowns, the crossword becomes both refuge and metric. Constructors and solvers track “streaks” in apps, while stories like a student desperately maintaining her hospitalized mother’s multi-year streak show how a daily puzzle can become a ritual of continuity under stress.
Long-term teaching & community
Over more than a decade, Last teaches “Get a Clue! Crossword Construction” at the Jewish Association Serving the Aging; by 2020, his mostly-retired students have had about sixteen puzzles in the Times, including themes riffing on PARALLEL PARKING and car brands hidden in stacked theme entries.
Part I – The crossword should be data
Crosswords as early “mobile games” and content engines
Last opens with history: Joseph Pulitzer’s towering New York World building on Park Row, the FUN color supplement, and Arthur Wynne’s invention of the 1913 “Word-Cross.” He shows how Wynne’s two key innovations—printing the grid directly on the page and soliciting reader-made puzzles—created both a viral format and a nearly endless pipeline of “user-generated content” at almost no cost.
The book connects this to later economic models: free labor for platforms, from Web 2.0 to social-media fandoms. Crosswords, in his reading, anticipated the “creator economy” by a century.
Data, algorithms, and Dr.Fill
In “Hello, World,” Last traces how computers enter the grid: word-frequency lists, scoring systems for “good” fill, and software that can auto-generate large sections of a puzzle. These tools treat crosswords as huge tables of character strings with associated weights—data.
He spends time on Matt Ginsberg’s Dr.Fill, the AI program that competed at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Dr.Fill uses probabilistic models and databases to solve crosswords, and at some events it beats almost all human competitors except the very top tier, demonstrating that brute-force pattern matching and statistical inference can replicate much of what appears to be human intuition.
But Last argues the “data-fication” of crosswords cuts both ways. Algorithms can purge offensive words, surface fresher entries like CHEUGY or RIZZ, and expand references beyond dead white authors. Yet highly optimized wordlists can also flatten personality, making puzzles feel like slick composites rather than idiosyncratic acts of curation.
Games, platforms, and the crossword economy
“Crosswords for Fun and Profit” follows the money. Last describes the rise of dedicated puzzle magazines, syndication markets, apps, and the Times’s modern strategy: bundle the crossword with other games (Spelling Bee, Connections, Wordle), use streaks and leaderboards to encourage daily engagement, and convert that attention into subscription revenue.
He emphasizes how precarious constructor labor remains. Historically, puzzle makers were freelancers paid modest rates, even as their creations helped build circulation; Wynne’s 1915 joke about crates of waiting puzzles foreshadows an oversupplied labor market and later gig-economy dynamics.
Cognitive science and the “science of letters”
In “The Science of Letters,” Last draws on neuroscientists like Stanislas Dehaene to explain how reading and pattern recognition work in the brain and why crosswords feel so compelling. Solving requires oscillating between top-down expectation (what fits here?) and bottom-up perception (what do these letters suggest?), a loop that rewards partial insight and near-misses.
He links this to the idea of defamiliarization in art—making the familiar strange. A simple clue like [Nectar inspector] for BEE takes a bland word and renders it briefly weird, forcing the brain to snap into alignment once the pun clicks. The pleasure of crosswords, in his view, is neurological and literary at once.
Part II – The crossword should be a soapbox
Moral panics, “crossworditis,” and mental health
“A Familiar Form of Madness” returns to the 1920s press, which claimed crosswords caused headaches, eyestrain, and a mysterious “crossworditis.” Last reads these complaints as anxieties about leisure, literacy, and who gets to waste time. Women hunched over puzzles instead of housework become stock villains in cartoons; flapper-like solvers use the grid as an excuse to say risqué words aloud.
Last then juxtaposes those caricatures with modern stories where the puzzle becomes psychological lifeline: the hospitalized mother whose streak her daughters secretly maintain, or solvers using the daily ritual to anchor themselves during COVID isolation. The same grid can be framed as addiction or care, depending on who’s looking.
Clues, politics, and harm
In “Except for the Marabar Caves,” Last tackles explicitly political content. He catalogues clues that sanitized or celebrated colonialism, slurs, or state violence—entries like MAU MAU framed as a cute bouquet rather than an anti-colonial rebellion, or the notorious 2022 NYT clue implying “clean coal is a greener energy source,” which triggered a public correction.
The book argues that “it’s just a game” is often an alibi. When clues invoke lynching, genocide, or racist caricatures, they reinforce the idea that some histories are trivia. By contrast, constructors like Erik Agard or the collaborators behind activist indie crosswords deliberately insert Black Lives Matter, trans rights, immigration politics, and other contemporary struggles into their grids, reframing the puzzle as a small but real platform.
Immigration, American myths, and the “melting pot”
“The Melting Pot of the Crossword” weaves together Arthur Wynne’s migration from Liverpool to Pittsburgh in 1910, the 40 million Europeans who came to America between 1830 and 1930 (nine million via Liverpool), and present-day immigration stories like Indian constructor Mangesh Ghogre’s pursuit of an “Einstein visa” for extraordinary ability.
Last notes that the first Word-Cross already functioned as a kind of soft citizenship test: one clue asks [What we all should be]; the answer is MORAL. Throughout the twentieth century, crosswords helped immigrants absorb American idioms—but they also enforced narrow notions of what knowledge mattered. Ghogre, for instance, must master American sports trivia and obscure “crosswordese” like IBEX and ANOA to break into U.S. publications.
The chapter’s lesson is that crosswords are both gate and bridge: they can welcome new voices by showcasing non-Western names and concepts, or wall them off by demanding an insular canon.
Part III – The crossword should be art
Modernism, literature, and quantum crosswords
In “Old Possum’s Book of Schrödinger’s Cats,” Last connects crosswords to high modernism: T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov. He shows how some puzzles mirror the narrative strategies of Ulysses or To the Lighthouse, asking solvers to inhabit multiple time frames or interpret ambiguous clues that function like literary free-indirect discourse.
The “Schrödinger puzzle” archetype—grids that accommodate two valid answers (e.g., CLINTON/BOBDOLE in the same Election Day square set) becomes, for him, a small exercise in quantum reading: the grid holds multiple states until the solver commits. This is crossword as experimental fiction.
Visual art, photography, and time
“Time Frames” examines artworks that use crosswords as motif. David Hockney’s The Crossword Puzzle, Minneapolis is a collage of photos of a woman solving a puzzle; the sequence of shots, from the top of her head down to the pen, suggests how our eyes move in saccades and how the act of solving unfolds over time.
Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself includes a grid where a cruciverbalist scrambles the letters of a breakup email into crossword entries; here, the puzzle is both memorial and transformation, turning pain into pattern.
Last also writes about architectural grids, DNA double helices that resemble braided word ladders, and puzzle designs that visually depict objects (a spiral staircase, a double helix, a theater curtain). In all these cases, the crossword is less pastime than sculptural form.
Performance, theater, and community art
In “Are You the Frivolity Theatre?”, Last follows Word Nerd, a student-written musical set at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Will Shortz appears onstage; lyrics and dialogue mirror real email exchanges between students and editor so closely that life and art echo each other.
He describes his own teenage experience of publicly “defacing” a puzzle at school—letting friends overwrite a carefully constructed grid with naughty phrases—as a kind of participatory performance, turning the crossword into a prop for flirting and rebellion.
Crosswords, in this lens, resemble theater more than static print: they require an audience, they unfold in time, and they blur the line between script (the grid) and improvisation (the solver’s path through it).
Conclusion – “Zooming Out”: community, pedagogy, and the future
The concluding chapter, “Zooming Out,” pivots from grand theory back to concrete practice: Last’s long-running JASA class. For over a decade he has taught mostly Jewish retirees, age fifty-five and up, to construct puzzles; by 2020, the class has placed around sixteen crosswords in The New York Times.
He recounts how student Sue Friedwald spots PARALLEL PARKING as a perfect 15-letter spanner and suggests a theme literally “parking” car brands on top of one another in the grid (AUDI hidden in CLAUDIUS stacked over FORD in UP FOR DISCUSSION). The room debates cluing CHRIS MARTIN, watches Coldplay videos, and votes down his attempt to get them to call him “Teach.”
Alongside this warm classroom narrative, Last returns to data and politics: Steinberg’s Pre-Shortzian project; statistics about declining women’s representation; organizers using spreadsheets and Facebook directories to help underrepresented constructors find mentors. The crossword, he suggests, is a long-running group project whose maintainers must decide whose knowledge will be canonized next.
He ends by casting crosswords as one of those “public, collective enterprises” that, in philosopher Samuel Scheffler’s terms, depend on future people caring enough to keep them going. The puzzle is an inheritance and an ongoing negotiation: between editors and constructors, data and intuition, play and politics, privacy and performance.
Core themes & lessons across the book
- Crosswords map cultural power
Every grid is a snapshot of who editors imagine as their “average solver”—what music she knows, what wars he remembers, what jokes they’ll get. This makes crosswords quietly political even when the clues seem neutral. - Labor, credit, and gatekeeping matter
From Wynne’s crates of unpaid reader puzzles to today’s overfull inboxes, crosswords rely on under-compensated creative work. Editors like Farrar and Shortz wield disproportionate power over what words—and what identities—enter the record. - Data tools are double-edged
Algorithms can systematize fairness, weed out slurs, and promote new vocabulary, but they can also push puzzles toward bland, generic “good fill” and away from idiosyncratic voices. - Play is never just play
The same grid can be a sedative consumer product (as punk bands sneer), a coping device in a hospital, a clandestine space for queer or feminist jokes in the 1920s, or a vehicle for contemporary activism. - Crosswords are art forms in their own right
Whether echoing modernist narrative experiments, anchoring photo collages, or starring in musicals, crosswords are more than “just a game.” They’re structures that can bear emotional weight, aesthetic experimentation, and social critique. - The future depends on more people making puzzles
Last’s JASA class, the Women’s March puzzles, and online collaboration directories all model a future where construction is less gatekept and more representative. The field’s health, he argues, will be measured not only in downloads or revenue but in whose stories get spelled out in the grid.
4. Across the Universe Analysis
Part one, “The Crossword Should Be Data,” traces how programmers such as Eric Albert tried to automate construction by ranking hundreds of thousands of words, showing that software can encode a constructor’s taste rather than erase it.
Part two, “The Crossword Should Be a Soapbox,” follows activists and marginalised constructors who push back against racist or sexist entries like BEANER or MEN clued as a “comment from a feminist,” and who lobby for more inclusive language.
Part three, “The Crossword Should Be Art,” is where the book most delighted me.
Here Last profiles constructors who treat grids as installations or mixtapes, from Elizabeth Gorski’s Guggenheim shaped puzzle to Ada Nicolle’s OREO Cluing Project, which crowdsourced hundreds of wild new clues for a single over familiar entry.
He ties this work to histories of avant garde art and to literary theories about puns and grids, so that a playful clue like “Nectar inspector” for BEE suddenly sits in conversation with scholars such as Jonathan Culler and writers like Georges Perec.
By the time he quotes Rosalind Krauss on the grid as “a staircase to the Universal,” you can see why he chose a title that riffs on both the Beatles and the cosmic ambition of puzzle makers.
Across these chapters the book feels less like a museum of crossword curiosities and more like a studio visit, where you eavesdrop as constructors argue about aesthetics, ethics, and the politics of difficulty.
Critically, the book works because Last is less interested in settling arguments than in showing how they are structured, and he supports those structures with thickly reported case studies rather than loose opinion.
For example, the discussion of Times controversies over entries like BEANER is backed not just by screenshots but by the open letter he helped organise, interviews with constructors who threatened a submission boycott, and contextual data about subscriber pressure on Games as a major revenue stream that now sits inside a company whose digital subscriptions bring in around one point one billion dollars a year.
Taken as a whole, Across the Universe absolutely fulfils its stated purpose of showing how today’s “second crossword craze” is both a refuge and a mirror of our uneven, datafied, politically charged twenty first century.
5. Strengths and Weaknesses
My own reading experience with the book was overwhelmingly positive, even as I occasionally felt overwhelmed by the depth of the rabbit holes.
The great strength is the way Last braids personal narrative into structural analysis without turning the book into a memoir.
His reflections on growing up partially deaf, learning to lip read, and falling in love with language because he “had to,” make his interest in grids feel embodied rather than abstract.
As someone who also cares about slow, research rich criticism of culture, I recognised the sensibility that sites like your own Probinism champion, where a book review becomes a way to think about the world at large.
Across sections, I admired how he trusts general readers with technical detail, whether that is a description of “forward propagation” in crossword generating algorithms or the rating system that ranks entries from “fabulous” to “very yucky.”
He is equally deft at explaining how a supposedly neutral clue like [Stinging insect] for BEE quietly encodes assumptions about what counts as fun trivia, which in turn explains why younger constructors invent jokier clues like “Nectar inspector” to push the form forward.
On the negative side, the very richness that makes Across the Universe satisfying can leave some chapters feeling digressive, especially if you do not already care about inside baseball debates over specific word lists, and there are moments when I wished for clearer signposting of where we were in the broader argument.
6. Reception, Criticism, Influence
Early reception suggests that many critics share the sense that this is a major work on puzzles, even if some balk at its density.
One early review notes that Across the Universe is “sprawling in its scope, deeply nerdy in sensibility, and passionate at its core,” which matches the impression the book left on me.
The Chicago Review of Books goes on to emphasise how the three parts on data, soapboxes, and art show crosswords acting as archives of power as well as entertainment.
Outside the literary world, coverage in business and media outlets already echoes Last’s portrait of New York Times Games as a growing profit centre, with more than one million dedicated games subscribers and a digital subscription arm now bringing in over one billion dollars a year.
You can see the book’s vocabulary seeping into everyday conversations among constructors and solvers online, where people increasingly talk about “crossword diplomacy,” slur lists, and pay transparency rather than just favourite clues.
My hunch, based on this early wave of discussion, is that Across the Universe will become a key reference point for anyone writing about games and culture in the coming decade.
7. Comparison With Similar Works
Compared with Adrienne Raphel’s Thinking Inside the Box, which is more of a wandering personal travelogue through crossword culture, Last’s book feels denser, angrier, and more systematically political.
Ben Tausig’s Curious History of the Crossword remains the go to narrative of the puzzle’s first century, but Across the Universe extends that story into the era of apps, streaming, and activist organising, so in practice the three books work well together rather than competing.
8. Conclusion
If you are a solver, constructor, cultural critic, or simply someone who has ever wondered why a black and white grid can feel like a tiny universe, Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle is, in my view, an essential and demanding companion rather than a casual gift book, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to readers who are willing to think as hard as they solve.
