What’s So Great About Writing Crosswords, Anyway?

Have you done this week's crosswords?

Subscribe The Daily Beast Crossword is where power, pop culture, and politics intersect—quite literally.   Designed to be more challenging throughout the week, you can test your knowledge with five puzzles each week: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday. Play This Week's Puzzles Get in the Game With Matt Gaffney People ask me: is writing crosswords fun?    Answer: Yes, it is extremely fun, and one of its joys is getting paid to research themes online.    Consider this: for my April Fool's Day puzzle, I was forced to read accounts of the greatest baseball pranks ever played in my relentless search for a 10-letter entry to match OPENING DAY in the grid. I read through dozens of April 1st stadium pranks, looking for that perfect one for my grid. Its two criteria were: 1) be a good prank and 2) have a 10-letter punch line for the grid.   CELL NUMBER won out; Mike Trout's a superstar now, but in 2011 he was a promising rookie whose teammates decided to arrange it so that his cell phone number appeared on the stadium's scoreboard during a game, along with a suggestion that fans call it to ask him whatever questions they had. Just right for a prank: unexpected, annoying, a little embarrassing, but really funny, too. You think your phone blows up sometimes? Never the way Mike Trout's did that day.   A common "occupational hazard" among crossword writers is to jump on Wikipedia looking for a new way to clue a word, spend 10 minutes reading articles looking for that perfect clue...and then realizing that you've forgotten which word you went to clue in the first place.  How we crossword writers suffer for our art...   Got a good theme you want me to research? Tweet it to #beastxword and I'll get right on it.  Play This Week's Puzzles © Copyright 2021 The Daily Beast Company LLC  555 W. 18th Street, New York NY 10011  Privacy Policy If you are on a mobile device or cannot view the images in this message, click here to view this email in your browser. To ensure delivery of these emails, please add emails@thedailybeast.com to your address book. If you no longer wish to receive these emails, or think you have received this message in error, you can safely unsubscribe.