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Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle
An entertaining and eye-opening look at the history of the crossword, who constructs it, and why it matters as both a reflection of and influence on our culture
From WORDLE to SPELLING BEE, we live in a time of word game mania. Crosswords, in particular, gained renewed popularity during the Covid-19 lockdown, when games became another kind of refuge. Today, 36 million Americans solve crosswords once a week or more, and nearly 23 million solve them daily. Yet, as longtime New Yorker crossword contributor Natan Last will tell you, the seemingly apolitical puzzle has never been more controversial.
In recent years, popular puzzle makers like The New York Times—the original and still the gold standard for word games—have been challenged for the way they prioritize certain cultures and perspectives as either the norm ( white and male) or obscure (everyone else). At the same time, the crossword has never been more democratic. A larger, younger, more tech-savvy, and solidaristic group of people have fallen in love with puzzle solving, ushering in a more inclusive rise to the kinds of people constructing them, challenging the very idea of them and, in fact, what "normal" actually is.
With a critical eye toward its history, Natan Last explores the debates about the future of the crossword and investigates those who want the puzzle to transform into a tool of progressivism; ultimately, asking if the crossword can help us reshape the world. Across the Universe interrogates all the ways words—and the games we make using those words—change our culture while bringing us into the worlds of those pushing for the crosswords’ much-needed evolution.
From WORDLE to SPELLING BEE, we live in a time of word game mania. Crosswords, in particular, gained renewed popularity during the Covid-19 lockdown, when games became another kind of refuge. Today, 36 million Americans solve crosswords once a week or more, and nearly 23 million solve them daily. Yet, as longtime New Yorker crossword contributor Natan Last will tell you, the seemingly apolitical puzzle has never been more controversial.
In recent years, popular puzzle makers like The New York Times—the original and still the gold standard for word games—have been challenged for the way they prioritize certain cultures and perspectives as either the norm ( white and male) or obscure (everyone else). At the same time, the crossword has never been more democratic. A larger, younger, more tech-savvy, and solidaristic group of people have fallen in love with puzzle solving, ushering in a more inclusive rise to the kinds of people constructing them, challenging the very idea of them and, in fact, what "normal" actually is.
With a critical eye toward its history, Natan Last explores the debates about the future of the crossword and investigates those who want the puzzle to transform into a tool of progressivism; ultimately, asking if the crossword can help us reshape the world. Across the Universe interrogates all the ways words—and the games we make using those words—change our culture while bringing us into the worlds of those pushing for the crosswords’ much-needed evolution.
336 pages, Hardcover
First published November 25, 2025
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7783 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 62 reviews
June 30, 2025
3.25
I always say I love reading novels written by poets because you can just *tell* through their beautiful and lyrical and flowery writing. And in a similar (but maybe slightly less positive) vein, you can tell that this is written by someone who also writes crossword puzzles? lol
At risk of making myself just sound stupid, I do think the writing style and timeline of this was hard to follow. Writing about clever wordplay by using tons and tons of clever wordplay yourself was... a lot. Every sentence felt like a clue I needed to dissect and I felt like the really interesting points and stories were lost amid the efforts to make them sound really cool.
I obviously love language but this just felt overwritten. Still a fun and interesting read if you love crossword puzzles, but it did take a bit of work to get through (work that I sometimes just preferred to spend on actual puzzles and not confusing sentence structures).
I always say I love reading novels written by poets because you can just *tell* through their beautiful and lyrical and flowery writing. And in a similar (but maybe slightly less positive) vein, you can tell that this is written by someone who also writes crossword puzzles? lol
At risk of making myself just sound stupid, I do think the writing style and timeline of this was hard to follow. Writing about clever wordplay by using tons and tons of clever wordplay yourself was... a lot. Every sentence felt like a clue I needed to dissect and I felt like the really interesting points and stories were lost amid the efforts to make them sound really cool.
I obviously love language but this just felt overwritten. Still a fun and interesting read if you love crossword puzzles, but it did take a bit of work to get through (work that I sometimes just preferred to spend on actual puzzles and not confusing sentence structures).
January 25, 2026
Always eager to read while educating myself in equal measure, I turned to this fascinating—and unexpectedly contentious—slice of cultural history by Natan Last. A longtime New Yorker crossword contributor and devoted puzzle enthusiast, Last traces the century-long evolution of the crossword, examining how it has transformed over the decades and what its future may hold as newspaper and digital word games continue to flood the market.
From Wordle to Spelling Bee, we are living in a full-blown word-game renaissance. Crosswords in particular experienced a dramatic resurgence during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when puzzles became both refuge and ritual. Today, tens of millions of people around the world solve crosswords weekly—many daily—yet, as Last convincingly argues, these seemingly apolitical grids have never been more controversial. Institutions like The New York Times, still the gold standard in the crossword world, have come under scrutiny for privileging certain cultural perspectives as “normal” while marginalising others.
What makes Across the Universe so compelling is its balance of critique and optimism. While Last interrogates the crossword’s historically narrow lens, he also highlights its rapid democratisation: younger, more diverse, and more tech-savvy solvers and constructors are reshaping what these puzzles look like, as well as what they can represent. With a thoughtful, critical eye, Last explores whether the crossword can evolve into a vehicle for cultural change, or even progressivism, without losing what makes it beloved. Insightful, accessible, and surprisingly provocative, this book reveals how words—and the games we build around them—both reflect and reshape the world in which we live.
Last effectively constructs his book to argue in subtle, yet powerful ways about the role of crosswords and their importance. Through a handful of well-charted chapters, the book comes to life, through numerous vignettes and social analyses. I quite enjoyed how Last builds things up from chapter to chapter, before culminating the historical assessment, as one might a hidden word in a Sunday puzzle. While I am no expert or even a crossword aficionado, I quite enjoyed the book and all it had to offer. Natan Last made this reading experience once for which I will long be grateful and provided clues that ensure my Across and Down life moments intersect with greater ease.
Kudos, Mr. Last, for a great look into the puzzling world of the crossword!
From Wordle to Spelling Bee, we are living in a full-blown word-game renaissance. Crosswords in particular experienced a dramatic resurgence during the COVID-19 lockdowns, when puzzles became both refuge and ritual. Today, tens of millions of people around the world solve crosswords weekly—many daily—yet, as Last convincingly argues, these seemingly apolitical grids have never been more controversial. Institutions like The New York Times, still the gold standard in the crossword world, have come under scrutiny for privileging certain cultural perspectives as “normal” while marginalising others.
What makes Across the Universe so compelling is its balance of critique and optimism. While Last interrogates the crossword’s historically narrow lens, he also highlights its rapid democratisation: younger, more diverse, and more tech-savvy solvers and constructors are reshaping what these puzzles look like, as well as what they can represent. With a thoughtful, critical eye, Last explores whether the crossword can evolve into a vehicle for cultural change, or even progressivism, without losing what makes it beloved. Insightful, accessible, and surprisingly provocative, this book reveals how words—and the games we build around them—both reflect and reshape the world in which we live.
Last effectively constructs his book to argue in subtle, yet powerful ways about the role of crosswords and their importance. Through a handful of well-charted chapters, the book comes to life, through numerous vignettes and social analyses. I quite enjoyed how Last builds things up from chapter to chapter, before culminating the historical assessment, as one might a hidden word in a Sunday puzzle. While I am no expert or even a crossword aficionado, I quite enjoyed the book and all it had to offer. Natan Last made this reading experience once for which I will long be grateful and provided clues that ensure my Across and Down life moments intersect with greater ease.
Kudos, Mr. Last, for a great look into the puzzling world of the crossword!
February 4, 2026
Thank you Pantheon for sending me a free copy!
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE by Natan Last provides the history of crossword puzzles as well as the direction it’s headed in the future. While the word game made its first appearance in newspapers over a century ago, it saw a resurgence when everyone was staying at home during the COVID lockdown. Revenue from crosswords and other games are vital in keeping news divisions afloat. Creators of crosswords often see editors making changes to their puzzles due to politics and failure to catch up with the times.
I’ll admit I was not a huge fan of the writing style as it was hard to follow at times. The author is definitely a wordsmith and while I found much of the info interesting, the way it was presented was not for me. My average intelligence was not enough to keep up with everything. I recommend the book to anyone who is smart enough to fill out a weekend NY Times crossword in pen.
ACROSS THE UNIVERSE by Natan Last provides the history of crossword puzzles as well as the direction it’s headed in the future. While the word game made its first appearance in newspapers over a century ago, it saw a resurgence when everyone was staying at home during the COVID lockdown. Revenue from crosswords and other games are vital in keeping news divisions afloat. Creators of crosswords often see editors making changes to their puzzles due to politics and failure to catch up with the times.
I’ll admit I was not a huge fan of the writing style as it was hard to follow at times. The author is definitely a wordsmith and while I found much of the info interesting, the way it was presented was not for me. My average intelligence was not enough to keep up with everything. I recommend the book to anyone who is smart enough to fill out a weekend NY Times crossword in pen.
August 21, 2025
This is a highly comprehensive and engaging review of crosswords throughout history. I did find it a bit dense at times, but it was playful and packed with facts. I did not know crossworditis was a thing (prior to WWII) where people were mocked for being addicted to them. Librarians even blacked out the puzzles in papers before shelving them. It was the librarian's duty to ensure that the public didn't stumble upon them. I also liked the chapter on tricky puzzles and double meanings. Those are the hardest ones for me.
December 3, 2025
I have somewhat complicated feelings about this book: it’s chock-full of interesting tidbits about crossword puzzles and the people who make them, and it has a very artistic sensibility, but its organization is frankly mystifying! Last’s prose is rich and lyrical but also prone to such stretchy, lateral associations that at times, I felt I was in a fever dream. One moment, the book is discussing Schrödinger crosswords, and the next, Nabokov’s dating life; after some concerted effort rereading, I think the unifying theme there was supposed to be that modernist literature, quantum superposition, and crossword puzzles have a lot in common, though I am still rather bemused.
My favorite parts of the book were more straightforward: the profiles of people like Erik Agard, Manesh Ghogre, Elizabeth Gorski, and David Kwong; the discussion of the politics of the puzzle and its potential as an activist vehicle; the analysis of neat/notable puzzles and exemplary bits of wordplay; and the history of the 1920s crossword craze. These parts were delightful and absolutely worth the price of admission. I even discovered my new anthem: “Cross-word Mamma, You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out)”! I’d just warn prospective readers to be prepared for a unique and sometimes impenetrable structure along the way.
My favorite parts of the book were more straightforward: the profiles of people like Erik Agard, Manesh Ghogre, Elizabeth Gorski, and David Kwong; the discussion of the politics of the puzzle and its potential as an activist vehicle; the analysis of neat/notable puzzles and exemplary bits of wordplay; and the history of the 1920s crossword craze. These parts were delightful and absolutely worth the price of admission. I even discovered my new anthem: “Cross-word Mamma, You Puzzle Me (But Papa’s Gonna Figure You Out)”! I’d just warn prospective readers to be prepared for a unique and sometimes impenetrable structure along the way.
December 6, 2025
There is a moment early in “Across the Universe” when a computer, left humming overnight on Eric Albert’s desk, quietly discovers an 8×8 word square that had been hiding in English all along. Albert comes home from work and finds the solution waiting for him in green phosphor, like a dog with a bone. Natan Last lingers there – on the glow of the monitor, on the improbable feeling of having coaxed something new out of the alphabet – and you realize that this is not going to be a quaint book about puzzles. It is a book about how we live inside language, and how language, in turn, lives inside systems of power, immigration, technology, desire.
“Across the Universe” bills itself as a history of the modern crossword, and it is that, but the noun never quite keeps up with the verbs. Last is forever constructing, excavating, reframing. The chapters spiral outward from the grid into computer science, colonial literature, neuroscience, avant-garde poetry, game shows, TikTok, and an adult-education classroom in Hell’s Kitchen. The through-line is a conviction that what happens in the little black-and-white box is not a sealed diversion but a microcosm: of who gets named, who gets erased, which accents get flattened, which jokes land, and who is left holding the pencil.
He begins, sensibly enough, with a programmer and a baby. Eric Albert, looking for work he can do from home as a stay-at-home father, decides that the only way to make a living from crosswords is to make the human out of the equation. Albert’s journey – from pencil-and-paper tinkerer to a pioneer of computer-assisted construction – gives Last a chance to reconstruct a pre-software era of graph paper, eraser shavings, and reverse-letter dictionaries that look like relics from a parallel publishing universe. By the time Albert’s code is pruning impossibly large search spaces down to viable word squares, the crossword has already drifted into something more interesting than a hobby. It has become an experiment in how much of language can be formalized without losing its charm.
Last belongs to a particular New York tribe: the youngish, politics-literate puzzler who can talk as easily about bigrams as about Gramsci. The book is full of those quick crossovers. A digression on the Latin Sator square turns into a meditation on determinism; a close reading of clue databases leads to a quietly devastating indictment of how often “INDIA” appears in grids only as a backdrop for British writers and colonial exploits. The effect is not quite the pile-up of references in “The Waste Land,” but you can hear the family resemblance. Crosswords, like certain modernist texts, have sometimes been derided as a “puzzle school” of literature. Last accepts the insult and writes from inside it.
The early chapters are historical and analytic in roughly equal proportion. Joseph Pulitzer’s “New York World” becomes a vertical diagram of early mass media: golden dome, editor’s floor, pressroom, color supplement. Arthur Wynne, scrambling to fill a Christmas issue of that supplement, invents the “Word-Cross” almost by accident. The detail that really sticks is the business logic. When Wynne invites readers to send in their own grids, barrels of puzzles arrive and the magazine quietly acquires a near-infinite supply of content for almost no money. Last, who has worked in publishing, is attuned to this. Crosswords, from the beginning, are tied to precarious labor and to the transformation of leisure into revenue.
As the narrative moves into the twentieth century, the book gets both more personal and more sharply political. Last writes warmly about his own apprenticeship under Will Shortz in Pleasantville – a house full of crossword clocks and crates of submissions – and about the charge of sitting at the Times’s proprietary editing terminals typing “Crosswords – Yes!” into acceptance emails. He remembers the thrill of a clue he suggested for LEIA (“Film character known for her buns”) making it into print. He also remembers, years later, watching a minor controversy flare over the entry JEWFRO, and realizing that his earlier instinct to treat puzzles as “just a game” had been too easy.
From there, the grid becomes a soapbox. A substantial section of the book is devoted to gender and representation: who gets to appear in the crossword as an answer, and who gets to decide. Last is very good on the quiet violence of editorial judgment – the minus sign in a spreadsheet that labels MARIE KONDO “too niche” or BLACK GIRLS ROCK “too risky,” the way generic EROTICA appears dozens of times while GAY EROTICA is deemed off-limits. When a woman constructor submits a puzzle filled entirely with women’s names and one clue is quietly rewritten to reference a male actor instead, the edit is small enough to pass unnoticed in the solving experience, but, in Last’s telling, emblematic of a pattern. The crossword is a canon engine; it lags behind the culture not by accident but by habit.
One of the strongest chapters, “Except for the Marabar Caves,” takes its title from the opening line of “A Passage to India” and works outward to Edward Said and “Orientalism.” We are asked to count, over the Shortz era, how often “INDIA” is clued via British adventurers, colonial administrators, or anodyne outsourcing references, and how rarely via Indian languages, writers, or living politics. The numbers are not flattering. The crossword, for millions of solvers, is a first encounter with certain names and places; if those entries are consistently framed through a narrow Western lens, the grid quietly reproduces a distorted atlas.
Last’s interest in gatekeeping extends to technology. A chapter on AI and crossword-solving programs could have been dutiful; instead, it becomes a tour of the limits of current machine reading. Dr.Fill, the program built by the computer scientist Matt Ginsberg, can assign probabilities to clue–answer pairs faster than any human solver, but it “doesn’t know that letters have shapes.” It can, in other words, treat the string CLINTON as an answer to a question about the 42nd president, but it cannot spontaneously appreciate the acrobatics of Jeremiah Farrell’s Election Day puzzle where the central entry can equally be BOB DOLE; it has no native sense of what it means for a capital M to rotate into a W.
Last detours, unexpectedly, into Stanislas Dehaene and the neuroscience of letter recognition: the visual word form area, neuronal recycling, the way alphabets mirror the statistics of junctions and edges in natural scenes. It is an ambitious set piece, and you can feel the book straining a little to hold it all. Readers who come for gossip about constructors may find the cortical diagrams a bit much; readers who thrill to cognitive science will wish for even more. The chapter signals one of the book’s few weaknesses: a tendency to carry each associative leap as far as possible, even when that means the narrative wanders.
“Across the Universe” is most satisfying when it returns from theory to concrete puzzles and people. The chapters on “Schrödinger” crosswords – grids that can be solved correctly in more than one way – are small masterpieces of formal criticism. Farrell’s “BOB DOLE”/“CLINTON” stunt puzzle is the familiar example, but Last also attends to later constructions about gender fluidity and indeterminacy. These grids, he argues, nudge the crossword closer to an art form that can register multiple truths at once. A standard puzzle valorizes uniqueness; a quantum puzzle allows ambivalence, invites you to live in the space before the box collapses.
The book’s second half broadens further, into performance and time. There is a delightfully detailed account of Zach Sherwin’s live show in which comics solve a themeless crossword on stage while the host anagrams their names and breaks into rap. There is a student musical, “Word Nerd,” in which a crossword game show becomes a vehicle for debates about authenticity and selling out. There is a magic trick by David Kwong, performed at the Magic Castle, that culminates in a crossword grid constructed in real time from audience suggestions that also hides the identity of a previously chosen playing card. Here, the crossword is literally theatre: a prop, a script, and a reveal.
Time, too, is both subject and medium. Last writes about David Hockney’s photo collage “The Crossword Puzzle, Minneapolis,” in which many slightly offset photographs of a couple solving shuttle our gaze, in sequence, from the solver’s hairline down to the tip of her pen. It is a way of rendering the act of solving as a series of micro-moments layered on top of one another. Last is persuasive that this is how we actually move through a grid – not left to right like a line of prose, but in darting saccades, eyes and mind jumping around in search of a foothold. Crosswords become a time art alongside film and music, experienced as much as read.
Running parallel to all of this scholarship is a quieter narrative about teaching. In the conclusion, Last returns to his “Get a Clue!” class for older adults, first in a John Jay College classroom, then on Zoom during the pandemic. Together, he and his students construct a puzzle about PARALLEL PARKING, hiding car brands in stacked entries so that the vehicles are literally aligned in the grid. The image that lingers is not of clever theme entries but of an older woman offering up the key phrase and Last, for all his theoretical apparatus, treating it as the gift it is. The class becomes a kind of counterweight to the book’s institutional and technological powerhouses. The crossword is here a social practice, not an object of critique: a reason for people to keep meeting, keep learning, keep punning, even as the world outside the boxes gets scarier.
The prose is spry, generous, occasionally in love with its own cleverness. Last has inherited, and to some extent earned, the crossword-blog habit of treating short words as characters; ERA, EEL, and OLE are called back with a mix of affection and exasperation. He can be very funny about the clichés of puzzle-speak – the “helpers” and “cheaters” (those extra black squares constructors add to make a grid fillable), the internal acronyms in an editor’s spreadsheet for unexciting themes. At the same time, he is capable of clean, almost reportorial description when the story demands it. There are passages, especially on immigration and on the racial politics of clueing, where the jokes fall away and the tone hardens appropriately.
The cost of this range is that the book sometimes feels more like a collection of linked essays than a single argument unfolding. Chapters that began life, one suspects, as standalone pieces retain their own internal arcs, their own pet frameworks. The motif of “melting pot vs salad bowl,” for instance, sits a bit awkwardly next to the quantum-modernist frame; a long discussion of “cute” as an aesthetic category, borrowed from contemporary theory, will enchant some readers and make others long for the next story about a cranky editor. For the most part, though, the jumps feel earned. Crosswords, after all, are themselves mosaics: bits of language from law, pop music, chemistry, Yiddish, anime, all interlocking in a single grid. It seems fair that a book about them should be similarly motley.
How much a reader enjoys “Across the Universe” will depend on where they come from. Word-game devotees will recognize themselves on almost every page and will thrill to the deep dives into the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, into the etiquette of bylines and constructor credits, into the minor scandals that have ruffled the squares. General readers without an existing puzzle habit may find a few sections a touch inside-baseball, but the book offers more than enough doors in: a history of media economics, a primer on early AI, a case study in how seemingly apolitical objects transmit cultural values. Even someone who never intends to fill in a grid might finish the book and inspect the words around them differently.
If the book has a central moral argument, it is that crosswords are not just for fun and not just for outrage; they are part of the way a culture imagines itself. To treat them as trivial is to miss an opportunity to see how bias and imagination knit together at the level of names, abbreviations, little three-letter answers that accumulate into a worldview. The corrective, in Last’s vision, is not to make every puzzle didactic or earnest, but to widen the circle of who gets to play, who gets to be clued, who gets to appear at all. It is a serious argument made with considerable joy.
Asked to reduce all of that to a number, I would say that “Across the Universe” earns something like an 89 out of 100: a lively, intellectually ambitious, occasionally baggy but genuinely illuminating tour through the crossword’s past and possible futures, written by someone who loves the grid enough to want it to do better.
“Across the Universe” bills itself as a history of the modern crossword, and it is that, but the noun never quite keeps up with the verbs. Last is forever constructing, excavating, reframing. The chapters spiral outward from the grid into computer science, colonial literature, neuroscience, avant-garde poetry, game shows, TikTok, and an adult-education classroom in Hell’s Kitchen. The through-line is a conviction that what happens in the little black-and-white box is not a sealed diversion but a microcosm: of who gets named, who gets erased, which accents get flattened, which jokes land, and who is left holding the pencil.
He begins, sensibly enough, with a programmer and a baby. Eric Albert, looking for work he can do from home as a stay-at-home father, decides that the only way to make a living from crosswords is to make the human out of the equation. Albert’s journey – from pencil-and-paper tinkerer to a pioneer of computer-assisted construction – gives Last a chance to reconstruct a pre-software era of graph paper, eraser shavings, and reverse-letter dictionaries that look like relics from a parallel publishing universe. By the time Albert’s code is pruning impossibly large search spaces down to viable word squares, the crossword has already drifted into something more interesting than a hobby. It has become an experiment in how much of language can be formalized without losing its charm.
Last belongs to a particular New York tribe: the youngish, politics-literate puzzler who can talk as easily about bigrams as about Gramsci. The book is full of those quick crossovers. A digression on the Latin Sator square turns into a meditation on determinism; a close reading of clue databases leads to a quietly devastating indictment of how often “INDIA” appears in grids only as a backdrop for British writers and colonial exploits. The effect is not quite the pile-up of references in “The Waste Land,” but you can hear the family resemblance. Crosswords, like certain modernist texts, have sometimes been derided as a “puzzle school” of literature. Last accepts the insult and writes from inside it.
The early chapters are historical and analytic in roughly equal proportion. Joseph Pulitzer’s “New York World” becomes a vertical diagram of early mass media: golden dome, editor’s floor, pressroom, color supplement. Arthur Wynne, scrambling to fill a Christmas issue of that supplement, invents the “Word-Cross” almost by accident. The detail that really sticks is the business logic. When Wynne invites readers to send in their own grids, barrels of puzzles arrive and the magazine quietly acquires a near-infinite supply of content for almost no money. Last, who has worked in publishing, is attuned to this. Crosswords, from the beginning, are tied to precarious labor and to the transformation of leisure into revenue.
As the narrative moves into the twentieth century, the book gets both more personal and more sharply political. Last writes warmly about his own apprenticeship under Will Shortz in Pleasantville – a house full of crossword clocks and crates of submissions – and about the charge of sitting at the Times’s proprietary editing terminals typing “Crosswords – Yes!” into acceptance emails. He remembers the thrill of a clue he suggested for LEIA (“Film character known for her buns”) making it into print. He also remembers, years later, watching a minor controversy flare over the entry JEWFRO, and realizing that his earlier instinct to treat puzzles as “just a game” had been too easy.
From there, the grid becomes a soapbox. A substantial section of the book is devoted to gender and representation: who gets to appear in the crossword as an answer, and who gets to decide. Last is very good on the quiet violence of editorial judgment – the minus sign in a spreadsheet that labels MARIE KONDO “too niche” or BLACK GIRLS ROCK “too risky,” the way generic EROTICA appears dozens of times while GAY EROTICA is deemed off-limits. When a woman constructor submits a puzzle filled entirely with women’s names and one clue is quietly rewritten to reference a male actor instead, the edit is small enough to pass unnoticed in the solving experience, but, in Last’s telling, emblematic of a pattern. The crossword is a canon engine; it lags behind the culture not by accident but by habit.
One of the strongest chapters, “Except for the Marabar Caves,” takes its title from the opening line of “A Passage to India” and works outward to Edward Said and “Orientalism.” We are asked to count, over the Shortz era, how often “INDIA” is clued via British adventurers, colonial administrators, or anodyne outsourcing references, and how rarely via Indian languages, writers, or living politics. The numbers are not flattering. The crossword, for millions of solvers, is a first encounter with certain names and places; if those entries are consistently framed through a narrow Western lens, the grid quietly reproduces a distorted atlas.
Last’s interest in gatekeeping extends to technology. A chapter on AI and crossword-solving programs could have been dutiful; instead, it becomes a tour of the limits of current machine reading. Dr.Fill, the program built by the computer scientist Matt Ginsberg, can assign probabilities to clue–answer pairs faster than any human solver, but it “doesn’t know that letters have shapes.” It can, in other words, treat the string CLINTON as an answer to a question about the 42nd president, but it cannot spontaneously appreciate the acrobatics of Jeremiah Farrell’s Election Day puzzle where the central entry can equally be BOB DOLE; it has no native sense of what it means for a capital M to rotate into a W.
Last detours, unexpectedly, into Stanislas Dehaene and the neuroscience of letter recognition: the visual word form area, neuronal recycling, the way alphabets mirror the statistics of junctions and edges in natural scenes. It is an ambitious set piece, and you can feel the book straining a little to hold it all. Readers who come for gossip about constructors may find the cortical diagrams a bit much; readers who thrill to cognitive science will wish for even more. The chapter signals one of the book’s few weaknesses: a tendency to carry each associative leap as far as possible, even when that means the narrative wanders.
“Across the Universe” is most satisfying when it returns from theory to concrete puzzles and people. The chapters on “Schrödinger” crosswords – grids that can be solved correctly in more than one way – are small masterpieces of formal criticism. Farrell’s “BOB DOLE”/“CLINTON” stunt puzzle is the familiar example, but Last also attends to later constructions about gender fluidity and indeterminacy. These grids, he argues, nudge the crossword closer to an art form that can register multiple truths at once. A standard puzzle valorizes uniqueness; a quantum puzzle allows ambivalence, invites you to live in the space before the box collapses.
The book’s second half broadens further, into performance and time. There is a delightfully detailed account of Zach Sherwin’s live show in which comics solve a themeless crossword on stage while the host anagrams their names and breaks into rap. There is a student musical, “Word Nerd,” in which a crossword game show becomes a vehicle for debates about authenticity and selling out. There is a magic trick by David Kwong, performed at the Magic Castle, that culminates in a crossword grid constructed in real time from audience suggestions that also hides the identity of a previously chosen playing card. Here, the crossword is literally theatre: a prop, a script, and a reveal.
Time, too, is both subject and medium. Last writes about David Hockney’s photo collage “The Crossword Puzzle, Minneapolis,” in which many slightly offset photographs of a couple solving shuttle our gaze, in sequence, from the solver’s hairline down to the tip of her pen. It is a way of rendering the act of solving as a series of micro-moments layered on top of one another. Last is persuasive that this is how we actually move through a grid – not left to right like a line of prose, but in darting saccades, eyes and mind jumping around in search of a foothold. Crosswords become a time art alongside film and music, experienced as much as read.
Running parallel to all of this scholarship is a quieter narrative about teaching. In the conclusion, Last returns to his “Get a Clue!” class for older adults, first in a John Jay College classroom, then on Zoom during the pandemic. Together, he and his students construct a puzzle about PARALLEL PARKING, hiding car brands in stacked entries so that the vehicles are literally aligned in the grid. The image that lingers is not of clever theme entries but of an older woman offering up the key phrase and Last, for all his theoretical apparatus, treating it as the gift it is. The class becomes a kind of counterweight to the book’s institutional and technological powerhouses. The crossword is here a social practice, not an object of critique: a reason for people to keep meeting, keep learning, keep punning, even as the world outside the boxes gets scarier.
The prose is spry, generous, occasionally in love with its own cleverness. Last has inherited, and to some extent earned, the crossword-blog habit of treating short words as characters; ERA, EEL, and OLE are called back with a mix of affection and exasperation. He can be very funny about the clichés of puzzle-speak – the “helpers” and “cheaters” (those extra black squares constructors add to make a grid fillable), the internal acronyms in an editor’s spreadsheet for unexciting themes. At the same time, he is capable of clean, almost reportorial description when the story demands it. There are passages, especially on immigration and on the racial politics of clueing, where the jokes fall away and the tone hardens appropriately.
The cost of this range is that the book sometimes feels more like a collection of linked essays than a single argument unfolding. Chapters that began life, one suspects, as standalone pieces retain their own internal arcs, their own pet frameworks. The motif of “melting pot vs salad bowl,” for instance, sits a bit awkwardly next to the quantum-modernist frame; a long discussion of “cute” as an aesthetic category, borrowed from contemporary theory, will enchant some readers and make others long for the next story about a cranky editor. For the most part, though, the jumps feel earned. Crosswords, after all, are themselves mosaics: bits of language from law, pop music, chemistry, Yiddish, anime, all interlocking in a single grid. It seems fair that a book about them should be similarly motley.
How much a reader enjoys “Across the Universe” will depend on where they come from. Word-game devotees will recognize themselves on almost every page and will thrill to the deep dives into the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, into the etiquette of bylines and constructor credits, into the minor scandals that have ruffled the squares. General readers without an existing puzzle habit may find a few sections a touch inside-baseball, but the book offers more than enough doors in: a history of media economics, a primer on early AI, a case study in how seemingly apolitical objects transmit cultural values. Even someone who never intends to fill in a grid might finish the book and inspect the words around them differently.
If the book has a central moral argument, it is that crosswords are not just for fun and not just for outrage; they are part of the way a culture imagines itself. To treat them as trivial is to miss an opportunity to see how bias and imagination knit together at the level of names, abbreviations, little three-letter answers that accumulate into a worldview. The corrective, in Last’s vision, is not to make every puzzle didactic or earnest, but to widen the circle of who gets to play, who gets to be clued, who gets to appear at all. It is a serious argument made with considerable joy.
Asked to reduce all of that to a number, I would say that “Across the Universe” earns something like an 89 out of 100: a lively, intellectually ambitious, occasionally baggy but genuinely illuminating tour through the crossword’s past and possible futures, written by someone who loves the grid enough to want it to do better.
October 28, 2025
Pantheon Books provided an early galley for review.
My love of word puzzles started as far back as elementary school. I come by it honestly as my father, for most of his life, enjoyed doing the daily crossword. So, this new book called out to me.
As a former computer scientist, I found the discussion around the use of software (and more recently AI) in crafting puzzles to be fascinating. I appreciate the efforts that the constructors go through as they craft their grids, so any modern tools that can help I am sure are appreciated. Of course, any book focusing on wordplay would be obligated to include those elements; Last does not disappoint in this area (the book is riddled with answers and clues).
This one will certainly appeal to all the word-nerds and cruciverbalists (yes, I learned a new word - thanks, Mr. Last) out there.
My love of word puzzles started as far back as elementary school. I come by it honestly as my father, for most of his life, enjoyed doing the daily crossword. So, this new book called out to me.
As a former computer scientist, I found the discussion around the use of software (and more recently AI) in crafting puzzles to be fascinating. I appreciate the efforts that the constructors go through as they craft their grids, so any modern tools that can help I am sure are appreciated. Of course, any book focusing on wordplay would be obligated to include those elements; Last does not disappoint in this area (the book is riddled with answers and clues).
This one will certainly appeal to all the word-nerds and cruciverbalists (yes, I learned a new word - thanks, Mr. Last) out there.
January 24, 2026
So fun and informative and stylish. My crossword game has improved measurably over the course of reading this
January 28, 2026
As a devoted crossworder this was a fun read that peels back the curtain on crosswords and crossword culture across many dimensions- the history and business of the American crossword, the politics, the art, etc etc. What I enjoyed the most was the clever wordplay of the writing, and the many personal stories of constructors interspersed in the different themes of the book.
Funny enough I had my first NYT crossword submission rejected while I was reading this book, but after finishing Across the Universe I am motivated to keep trying :)
Funny enough I had my first NYT crossword submission rejected while I was reading this book, but after finishing Across the Universe I am motivated to keep trying :)
October 14, 2025
Thank you Pantheon and NetGalley for the gifted digital ARC.
In this part history, part memoir, Last takes us on a journey every puzzle lover and crossword enthusiast will enjoy. You will walk away knowing more than you ever thought you could about a humble (or is it?) puzzle, while also seeing its larger societal impacts. I think experiencing this while knowing literacy rates are dropping, AI is dominating attention spans, and conversations around anti-intellectualism are prevalent, very much added a level of urgency to the traditional roots of the puzzle. They were all interesting dynamics to be aware of as an undercurrent to my reading experience.
This was one of my most-anticipated nonfiction releases of the year and it did not disappoint! I’m a big crossword fan so I already had a vested interest in what was going to be shared, and I will admit, I think that might be a prerequisite to fully enjoying it (or at lease a willingness to experience a nerdy and wordy book). My preferred puzzle is the weekly crossword in the print edition of The New Yorker (I’m a subscriber and I am devout to a black ballpoint pen), which also means I’ve had the meta experience of working on Last’s own puzzles. Overall, I think he did a great job of capturing the spirit of the crossword and the fascinating, differing philosophies around it.
My only qualm is that I wished I had the audiobook to tandem read it, as some sections got a little slow to eyeball read (I’ve been reading this on-and-off for the past two months). But I do think tandem reading is the way to go regardless, because it’s nice seeing how clues are written out and the accompanying pictures of various puzzles.
📚Follow for more on Instagram: @oliviasbooktalk
In this part history, part memoir, Last takes us on a journey every puzzle lover and crossword enthusiast will enjoy. You will walk away knowing more than you ever thought you could about a humble (or is it?) puzzle, while also seeing its larger societal impacts. I think experiencing this while knowing literacy rates are dropping, AI is dominating attention spans, and conversations around anti-intellectualism are prevalent, very much added a level of urgency to the traditional roots of the puzzle. They were all interesting dynamics to be aware of as an undercurrent to my reading experience.
This was one of my most-anticipated nonfiction releases of the year and it did not disappoint! I’m a big crossword fan so I already had a vested interest in what was going to be shared, and I will admit, I think that might be a prerequisite to fully enjoying it (or at lease a willingness to experience a nerdy and wordy book). My preferred puzzle is the weekly crossword in the print edition of The New Yorker (I’m a subscriber and I am devout to a black ballpoint pen), which also means I’ve had the meta experience of working on Last’s own puzzles. Overall, I think he did a great job of capturing the spirit of the crossword and the fascinating, differing philosophies around it.
My only qualm is that I wished I had the audiobook to tandem read it, as some sections got a little slow to eyeball read (I’ve been reading this on-and-off for the past two months). But I do think tandem reading is the way to go regardless, because it’s nice seeing how clues are written out and the accompanying pictures of various puzzles.
📚Follow for more on Instagram: @oliviasbooktalk
February 2, 2026
I spent a good chunk of this book with the back of my mind churning up clever ideas of how to elucidate the author’s erudite pomposity. But I’ve now realized that 1) building a themed crossword actually takes quite a bit of skill, and 2) I was really enjoying the book, despite, or maybe due to, Natan Last’s intelligence and artistry.
I found pretty much all of this book fascinating. Every chapter took a dive into aspects of the crossworld that I had vaguely wondered about previously but never long enough to look into. There was a lot of jumping around (temporally, thematically, though not literally, I stayed seated while reading), and a bit of a fixation on one single publication and one single editor there, but it does open the door to a world of future puzzling possibilities.
I found pretty much all of this book fascinating. Every chapter took a dive into aspects of the crossworld that I had vaguely wondered about previously but never long enough to look into. There was a lot of jumping around (temporally, thematically, though not literally, I stayed seated while reading), and a bit of a fixation on one single publication and one single editor there, but it does open the door to a world of future puzzling possibilities.
December 13, 2025
Loved this re-telling of the crossword puzzle. While this book covers topics spanning from the introduction of the crossword puzzle in the New York World in 1913, through the first Times puzzle in 1942, and then to more modern developments brought by both technological and cultural change, it does not do so linearly. It tends to skip around, juxtaposing parallel storylines. I found this engaging, and but I think it is something worth knowing before you get into it. Overall, I thought the approach gave it a rather poetic and musing vibe, which I enjoyed, and I think it mirrors crosswords’ own tendency to eschew linear thinking and find unexpected links.
December 29, 2025
My Rating: 2 Crossword Puzzles
Started out okay, but soon lost my interest.
Started out okay, but soon lost my interest.
January 29, 2026
Maybe it only deserves 4 stars but I just love crosswords so much plus Natan signed my copy crossing his name with mine so I have to give 5.
Covers a ton of ground *across* history, economics, and the cultural impact of the crossword. After reading I have a newfound appreciation for the great power and great responsibility of this silly little word game.
Covers a ton of ground *across* history, economics, and the cultural impact of the crossword. After reading I have a newfound appreciation for the great power and great responsibility of this silly little word game.
December 20, 2025
The experience of reading this book was so much like solving a brilliantly constructed crossword. At turns, fun, clever, literary, mathematical, political, it reads with both the density and the joy of a neatly filled grid.
The crossword intersects with just about everything else out there in the world. I feel inspired.
The crossword intersects with just about everything else out there in the world. I feel inspired.
December 2, 2025
Very interesting I really like the book
December 7, 2025
I am definitely the target audience for a book on crossword puzzles!! My mother loved doing the crossword in ink, and I was introduced to the practice when I was 10 or 11. I remember my mother teaching me to look up every clue/answer I didn't know. Even if I had figured it out, she wanted me to learn the reference. This taught me to love research from a very young age (and I'm still reaping the rewards today).
As a long-time crossword nerd, I enjoyed Last's exploration of the puzzle's origins, conventions, growing pains, and both descriptive and prescriptive cultural roles. Last has a lot of great fodder here, but it's let down by subpar editing, in my opinion. There's too much cutesy wordplay within the book itself, and the tangents about ERB and magic tricks stretched the connective tissue to the breaking point. I strongly believe if I read a re-edited version of Across the Universe, it'd be a 5-star read.
I'm glad the book exists, but I'd include a litany of caveats before recommending it to someone other than a diehard puzzler.
As a long-time crossword nerd, I enjoyed Last's exploration of the puzzle's origins, conventions, growing pains, and both descriptive and prescriptive cultural roles. Last has a lot of great fodder here, but it's let down by subpar editing, in my opinion. There's too much cutesy wordplay within the book itself, and the tangents about ERB and magic tricks stretched the connective tissue to the breaking point. I strongly believe if I read a re-edited version of Across the Universe, it'd be a 5-star read.
I'm glad the book exists, but I'd include a litany of caveats before recommending it to someone other than a diehard puzzler.
December 5, 2025
3.5 — it was quite dense, and while some of the anecdotes will stick with me I fear I will not retain most of it. it was entertaining when it wasn’t suffocatingly self referential. some people are so creative. also I was worried it was going to be a Will Shortz bashfest and it was more a call for improvement….idk
December 8, 2025
3.5 stars. The content is very interesting as is the prose but the organization is odd resulting in redundancies
December 11, 2025
Natan's familiarity with the subject is vast, and his language sparkles throughout. It's a deeply researched book about the history and culture of crosswords written by a poet. What's not to love?
October 22, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advance copy of this book that takes a look at the enduring fascination and popularity that people have with crossword and word puzzles, something that in this fast quick and easy entertainment age, is still making new fans, making big money, and facing challenges from both technology, and the the changing face of culture.
I don't know when I started doing crossword puzzles. I remember them from reading the New York newspapers, usually near the comic section where I was usually flipping too. My parents bought the New York Times on weekends, but I remember reading the magazine section, but never looking at the crossword puzzle. Knowing me I was stuck somewhere without a book, found a puzzle, and said this was better than pretending to be interested in human conversation. Now I leave a crossword puzzle book in the car, just in case, do the weekend puzzles, and rip out pages from magazines being recycled at work. I have a slight addiction. I am not alone in this. Crosswords and word puzzles are big money now. I know this again from work with the constant stream of books, and magazines that we sell. The New York Times to some is a crossword puzzle company that has some news articles, usually read just for clues. There is a simple beauty to filling in boxes, in pen, that makes me soul feel right. I thought I knew much about the history of crossword puzzles, but this book taught me much, and much about the uncertain path that lies ahead. Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle by Natan Last is a dual biography of both crossword puzzles, the author, profiles of many writers, doodlers, and crossword fanciers, and a look at where crosswords originated and the hi-tech future that might change everything.
The book is, as a stated a bit memoir, a bit of paean to words, a look at the money, the making and what the future might hold for a culture that seems to be using emojis more than words. The book starts with Last discussing his interest in crossword puzzles, and of submitting his own puzzles to Will Shortz, the current editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzles, and a big celebrity in crosswords. Shortz is also the lightening rod for a lot of controversies in the crossword world, some of which Last, gets into. Readers learn about the different styles, the popularity of themes, or puzzles within puzzles. The use of puns in both clues and themes. Also how changes in culture, how people are perceived, and how certain words should never be in a crossword puzzle are addressed. The use of computers creating and solving puzzles, something I never really thought about is written about, along with how other technology is being brought into the mix. And of course, lots of information about puzzles, their design, their history and what makes people so enraptured.
A very different kind of history, not one that follows a linear path but one that moves around, like clues in a puzzle. Each page has something very interesting, a fact, or something new. I liked he personal information, why the author enjoys doing and creating puzzles, and the Last's views on much that seems to be affecting crosswords today. There is a lot of wordplay hidden in the writing, one that I am sure straight readers will not like, but stuff that I found funny, or punny. Last did a really good job on research, while I never thought I was a expert in the field, I learned quite a bit, and found myself quite engaged by the narrative.
A book for people just getting into crossword puzzles, and for people have been doing them for years, with big Sharpie pens. A very good gift for the holidays, along with a few books of puzzles perfect to fit in a stocking. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and look forward to reading more from Natan Last
I don't know when I started doing crossword puzzles. I remember them from reading the New York newspapers, usually near the comic section where I was usually flipping too. My parents bought the New York Times on weekends, but I remember reading the magazine section, but never looking at the crossword puzzle. Knowing me I was stuck somewhere without a book, found a puzzle, and said this was better than pretending to be interested in human conversation. Now I leave a crossword puzzle book in the car, just in case, do the weekend puzzles, and rip out pages from magazines being recycled at work. I have a slight addiction. I am not alone in this. Crosswords and word puzzles are big money now. I know this again from work with the constant stream of books, and magazines that we sell. The New York Times to some is a crossword puzzle company that has some news articles, usually read just for clues. There is a simple beauty to filling in boxes, in pen, that makes me soul feel right. I thought I knew much about the history of crossword puzzles, but this book taught me much, and much about the uncertain path that lies ahead. Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle by Natan Last is a dual biography of both crossword puzzles, the author, profiles of many writers, doodlers, and crossword fanciers, and a look at where crosswords originated and the hi-tech future that might change everything.
The book is, as a stated a bit memoir, a bit of paean to words, a look at the money, the making and what the future might hold for a culture that seems to be using emojis more than words. The book starts with Last discussing his interest in crossword puzzles, and of submitting his own puzzles to Will Shortz, the current editor of the New York Times Crossword Puzzles, and a big celebrity in crosswords. Shortz is also the lightening rod for a lot of controversies in the crossword world, some of which Last, gets into. Readers learn about the different styles, the popularity of themes, or puzzles within puzzles. The use of puns in both clues and themes. Also how changes in culture, how people are perceived, and how certain words should never be in a crossword puzzle are addressed. The use of computers creating and solving puzzles, something I never really thought about is written about, along with how other technology is being brought into the mix. And of course, lots of information about puzzles, their design, their history and what makes people so enraptured.
A very different kind of history, not one that follows a linear path but one that moves around, like clues in a puzzle. Each page has something very interesting, a fact, or something new. I liked he personal information, why the author enjoys doing and creating puzzles, and the Last's views on much that seems to be affecting crosswords today. There is a lot of wordplay hidden in the writing, one that I am sure straight readers will not like, but stuff that I found funny, or punny. Last did a really good job on research, while I never thought I was a expert in the field, I learned quite a bit, and found myself quite engaged by the narrative.
A book for people just getting into crossword puzzles, and for people have been doing them for years, with big Sharpie pens. A very good gift for the holidays, along with a few books of puzzles perfect to fit in a stocking. I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and look forward to reading more from Natan Last
November 26, 2025
I solve a New York Times crossword (usually a Thursday or Friday) once a week with friends, so I am not a seasoned solver, but there was plenty in Across the Universe to amuse, entertain, and provoke thought in me. There is quite a bit of personal reflection, but this is helpful to demonstrate Last's evolution of thought on crosswording. Last also certainly did considerable research, as there is a very comprehensive historical narrative of the past and present of crosswords.
Some of the historical bits were overly dry and included unnecessary detail and names, but it was fun to learn that crosswords were yet another cultural phenomenon of the youths that startled the older generation. (For example, Last explains that the New York Times was the last of the big US newspapers to establish a crossword after stubbornly resisting what would supposedly dilute the purity of "news", but the advent of World War II inspired the paper to institute something to entertain and occupy Americans during trying times.) Last's research was very comprehensive, and I am honestly impressed by how much there was to learn about the history of crosswords.
My favorite parts of this book were the discussions of inclusivity and diversity as it relates to crossword and modern developments in crossword. There are a couple interesting examples of how it really is that deep about the words used in crosswords (e.g. the clue for a 90s crossword answer "clean coal" implying there is such a thing as "clean" fossil fuel burning sparking an environmental group backlash). The inclusion of words and ideas in crosswords has the power to raise some folks up (e.g. including facets of trans experience like "top surgery" as a puzzle answer) while also potentially setting folks down and apart (e.g. only including European-centered clues for "India" as a puzzle answer such as Kipling setting). I personally prefer to partner/group solve crosswords (rather than on my own), so I especially appreciated parts where Last highlighted mentorship and partnership in creating puzzles, especially when the goal was to encourage diversity. There is a fairly long (maybe too long) deep dive into how technology has changed how crosswords are created and solved, and I was cheered to find that while the latest AI models could potentially solve a puzzle, there is a distinct human element that sometimes alludes the models. I was also very pleased about the references to Rex Parker, a daily blogger about the NYT crossword and Katie Grogg, a content creator on TikTok and Youtube about crosswords under the username, coffeeandcrosswords. (I religiously read Rex's take after finishing a NYT crossword, and I love the community of coffeeandcrosswords.)
This definitely doesn't read like a coffee table book, and, at times, I could really tell Last was overly excited to whip out alliteration, rhyming, or other wordplay for the sake of wordplay rather than for readability. And that's fine (it's a crossword book!), but it did slow me down considerably reading this and I could see some readers getting fed up. If you're even a casual or occasional crossword solver, I think you will enjoy this, and veteran cruciverbalists will certainly have plenty food for thought from this book.
Thank you, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor/Pantheon, for the arc!
Some of the historical bits were overly dry and included unnecessary detail and names, but it was fun to learn that crosswords were yet another cultural phenomenon of the youths that startled the older generation. (For example, Last explains that the New York Times was the last of the big US newspapers to establish a crossword after stubbornly resisting what would supposedly dilute the purity of "news", but the advent of World War II inspired the paper to institute something to entertain and occupy Americans during trying times.) Last's research was very comprehensive, and I am honestly impressed by how much there was to learn about the history of crosswords.
My favorite parts of this book were the discussions of inclusivity and diversity as it relates to crossword and modern developments in crossword. There are a couple interesting examples of how it really is that deep about the words used in crosswords (e.g. the clue for a 90s crossword answer "clean coal" implying there is such a thing as "clean" fossil fuel burning sparking an environmental group backlash). The inclusion of words and ideas in crosswords has the power to raise some folks up (e.g. including facets of trans experience like "top surgery" as a puzzle answer) while also potentially setting folks down and apart (e.g. only including European-centered clues for "India" as a puzzle answer such as Kipling setting). I personally prefer to partner/group solve crosswords (rather than on my own), so I especially appreciated parts where Last highlighted mentorship and partnership in creating puzzles, especially when the goal was to encourage diversity. There is a fairly long (maybe too long) deep dive into how technology has changed how crosswords are created and solved, and I was cheered to find that while the latest AI models could potentially solve a puzzle, there is a distinct human element that sometimes alludes the models. I was also very pleased about the references to Rex Parker, a daily blogger about the NYT crossword and Katie Grogg, a content creator on TikTok and Youtube about crosswords under the username, coffeeandcrosswords. (I religiously read Rex's take after finishing a NYT crossword, and I love the community of coffeeandcrosswords.)
This definitely doesn't read like a coffee table book, and, at times, I could really tell Last was overly excited to whip out alliteration, rhyming, or other wordplay for the sake of wordplay rather than for readability. And that's fine (it's a crossword book!), but it did slow me down considerably reading this and I could see some readers getting fed up. If you're even a casual or occasional crossword solver, I think you will enjoy this, and veteran cruciverbalists will certainly have plenty food for thought from this book.
Thank you, Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor/Pantheon, for the arc!
January 2, 2026
This is a very deep dive into the world of crosswords and related esoterica. I’ve published crosswords in major venues, so have a more than passing interest in them. But, this was more about crosswords than I ever had a desire to know. Very niche read. Some parts including the excerpt linked to below were interesting, but much of it was crossword trivia and plunges into rabbit holes of loosely related topics. It made for a very uneven and, at times, a dense read. I prefer reading to listening to a book. This was no exception. Some concepts such as Schrodinger puzzles could not be adequately explained in the audible version. (I listened to it first, and upgraded my rating after reading it).
Interesting point addressed at the books’ beginning: the New York Times Is turning into a gaming company. Natan Last discusses how the process of accepting and editing the puzzles has changed dramatically from 2009 when he was a summer intern at Will Shortz’s home assisting him with this to the current Games Department where puzzles are edited by committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New...
https://gamesbeat.com/how-the-new-yor...
https://sherwood.news/business/the-ne...
https://beebom.com/the-new-york-times...
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/news-game-b...
My favorite parts were learning about Elizabeth Gorski, constructor extraordinaire and other constructors. “She was born in 1955 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Polish parents who came to America after World War II. Her mother was a refugee, interned in the Dachau concentration camp, then sheltered in Poona, India and Karachi, Pakistan, eventually making her way to Nottingham, England, where she met Gorski’s father. He was in the Polish army under British command, stationed in Alexandria, Egypt. A cryptologist, he taught his daughter to write secret codes, and lavished her with books tattooed with hieroglyphics and rebuses…He’d tap out Morse code to young Gorski on the kitchen table and she’d reply…” They were both fans of Jeopardy!. She excelled in spelling bees, and plays viola, violin and blues guitar. She completed Barnard in three years. She sang in the Barnard-Columbia chorus and has played violin with the Riverside Orchestra, New Amsterdam Symphony and as archival intern at the New York Philharmonic. She took ear training courses at Julliard, additional violin and viola lessons at the Manhattan School of Music, and currently plays in the Broadway Bach ensemble and string quartets on the Upper West Side. It wasn’t until she was working as a paralegal in her early thirties when she started completing then constructing crossword puzzles. Her first NYT puzzle was published in 1995. She excels in grid art. She eventually became a full-time puzzle-maker, striking out on her own to do commissioned puzzles, including some for a Sandra Bullock movie, “All About Steve”. She launched the paid subscription Crossword Nation delivering digital puzzles to customers weekly. She’s built four websites and has advised Anthony Lewis, creator of the puzzle constructing software, Crossword Compler.
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?d...
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Eliz...
Other interesting cruciverbalists discussed in the book include:
Pete Muller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Mu...
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Pete...
https://www.petemuller.com/listen
Matt Ginsburg
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Matt...
https://archive.nytimes.com/wordplay....
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.Fill
magician, David Kwong
https://www.davidkwongmagic.com/#ment...
https://www.ted.com/speakers/david_kwong
Sid Sivakumar
https://engineering.washu.edu/news/20...
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Sid_...
Mangesh Ghogre
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangesh...
Youngest NYT constructor now author Artie Bennett
http://www.artiebennett.com/fame.html
http://www.artiebennett.com/books.html
I also enjoyed learning about Malaika Handa, a software engineer at Google, and Quinta Vasquez. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they recruited volunteers to complete the 312 possible permutations of a 7x7 grid, then combined these to form a large work of digital art.
Pre-Shortzian project
https://www.xwordinfo.com/MovingForward/
http://www.preshortzianpuzzleproject....
ACPT
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/cr...
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/0...
https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/...
JASA Crossword Class
https://www.xwordinfo.com/JASAClass
Reviews:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment...
https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/acro...
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2025/11/...
Author Interviews:
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2025/11/...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/quick-...
https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2437259962...
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/24372599...
Author Information
https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/a...
Excerpt:
https://www.thenation.com/article/soc...
Book Summary/Discussion
https://www.probinism.com/across-the-...
Articles by:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/op...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
Interesting point addressed at the books’ beginning: the New York Times Is turning into a gaming company. Natan Last discusses how the process of accepting and editing the puzzles has changed dramatically from 2009 when he was a summer intern at Will Shortz’s home assisting him with this to the current Games Department where puzzles are edited by committee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New...
https://gamesbeat.com/how-the-new-yor...
https://sherwood.news/business/the-ne...
https://beebom.com/the-new-york-times...
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/news-game-b...
My favorite parts were learning about Elizabeth Gorski, constructor extraordinaire and other constructors. “She was born in 1955 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Polish parents who came to America after World War II. Her mother was a refugee, interned in the Dachau concentration camp, then sheltered in Poona, India and Karachi, Pakistan, eventually making her way to Nottingham, England, where she met Gorski’s father. He was in the Polish army under British command, stationed in Alexandria, Egypt. A cryptologist, he taught his daughter to write secret codes, and lavished her with books tattooed with hieroglyphics and rebuses…He’d tap out Morse code to young Gorski on the kitchen table and she’d reply…” They were both fans of Jeopardy!. She excelled in spelling bees, and plays viola, violin and blues guitar. She completed Barnard in three years. She sang in the Barnard-Columbia chorus and has played violin with the Riverside Orchestra, New Amsterdam Symphony and as archival intern at the New York Philharmonic. She took ear training courses at Julliard, additional violin and viola lessons at the Manhattan School of Music, and currently plays in the Broadway Bach ensemble and string quartets on the Upper West Side. It wasn’t until she was working as a paralegal in her early thirties when she started completing then constructing crossword puzzles. Her first NYT puzzle was published in 1995. She excels in grid art. She eventually became a full-time puzzle-maker, striking out on her own to do commissioned puzzles, including some for a Sandra Bullock movie, “All About Steve”. She launched the paid subscription Crossword Nation delivering digital puzzles to customers weekly. She’s built four websites and has advised Anthony Lewis, creator of the puzzle constructing software, Crossword Compler.
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?d...
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Eliz...
Other interesting cruciverbalists discussed in the book include:
Pete Muller
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Mu...
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Pete...
https://www.petemuller.com/listen
Matt Ginsburg
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Matt...
https://archive.nytimes.com/wordplay....
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/17/te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr.Fill
magician, David Kwong
https://www.davidkwongmagic.com/#ment...
https://www.ted.com/speakers/david_kwong
Sid Sivakumar
https://engineering.washu.edu/news/20...
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Author/Sid_...
Mangesh Ghogre
https://www.xwordinfo.com/Crossword?d...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mangesh...
Youngest NYT constructor now author Artie Bennett
http://www.artiebennett.com/fame.html
http://www.artiebennett.com/books.html
I also enjoyed learning about Malaika Handa, a software engineer at Google, and Quinta Vasquez. During the Covid-19 pandemic, they recruited volunteers to complete the 312 possible permutations of a 7x7 grid, then combined these to form a large work of digital art.
Pre-Shortzian project
https://www.xwordinfo.com/MovingForward/
http://www.preshortzianpuzzleproject....
ACPT
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/01/cr...
https://yaledailynews.com/blog/2022/0...
https://slate.com/technology/2021/04/...
JASA Crossword Class
https://www.xwordinfo.com/JASAClass
Reviews:
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment...
https://www.bookpage.com/reviews/acro...
https://chireviewofbooks.com/2025/11/...
Author Interviews:
https://www.cambridgeday.com/2025/11/...
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/quick-...
https://m.twitch.tv/videos/2437259962...
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/24372599...
Author Information
https://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/a...
Excerpt:
https://www.thenation.com/article/soc...
Book Summary/Discussion
https://www.probinism.com/across-the-...
Articles by:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/10/op...
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...
August 18, 2025
Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle
by Natan Last
⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 (3.5 rounded up because nostalgia is powerful)
Big thank you to Knopf Books for the ARC!
Okay listen, I might be in my early 20s but crosswords have me in a chokehold. I used to do the big Sunday puzzles with my grandma, and yes, I am way too young to be this obsessed… but here we are. 🧩🖊️
Vibe Check: Nerdy, chaotic, wordplay-heavy. Like someone threw a dictionary and a history book in a blender, then made you solve for X.
What I Liked:
• The history of crosswords is way juicier than I expected — like, there’s drama in the grids 👀
• Cultural critique woven into the puzzle world? Absolutely fascinating
• The quotes from constructors and language nerds gave this a “clubhouse” feel I adored
• Gave me major nostalgia for puzzle nights with my grandma 🫶
What Didn’t Work for Me:
• The writing style sometimes felt like solving a puzzle about puzzles — clever, but exhausting
• The timeline jumped around so much it made my brain do somersaults
• Some of the really cool stories got buried under too much wordplay
• Honestly… at times I wanted to go do an actual crossword instead of decoding the prose 🤷♀️
Final thought: If you’re a puzzle freak like me, you’ll vibe with this. If not, it might feel like trying to fill in a Saturday NYT crossword when you’re hungover — doable, but painful. Still, Natan Last clearly loves his craft, and it shows.
🖤 For the crossword girlies, this one’s for you.
by Natan Last
⭐️⭐️⭐️💫 (3.5 rounded up because nostalgia is powerful)
Big thank you to Knopf Books for the ARC!
Okay listen, I might be in my early 20s but crosswords have me in a chokehold. I used to do the big Sunday puzzles with my grandma, and yes, I am way too young to be this obsessed… but here we are. 🧩🖊️
Vibe Check: Nerdy, chaotic, wordplay-heavy. Like someone threw a dictionary and a history book in a blender, then made you solve for X.
What I Liked:
• The history of crosswords is way juicier than I expected — like, there’s drama in the grids 👀
• Cultural critique woven into the puzzle world? Absolutely fascinating
• The quotes from constructors and language nerds gave this a “clubhouse” feel I adored
• Gave me major nostalgia for puzzle nights with my grandma 🫶
What Didn’t Work for Me:
• The writing style sometimes felt like solving a puzzle about puzzles — clever, but exhausting
• The timeline jumped around so much it made my brain do somersaults
• Some of the really cool stories got buried under too much wordplay
• Honestly… at times I wanted to go do an actual crossword instead of decoding the prose 🤷♀️
Final thought: If you’re a puzzle freak like me, you’ll vibe with this. If not, it might feel like trying to fill in a Saturday NYT crossword when you’re hungover — doable, but painful. Still, Natan Last clearly loves his craft, and it shows.
🖤 For the crossword girlies, this one’s for you.
November 1, 2025
ARC Review — Across the Universe by Natan Last
Releasing November 11, 2025
Across the Universe, Natan Last takes the socially familiar form of the crossword puzzle and makes it the subject of a compelling cultural journey. It is much more than a simple story about grids and clues; it shows how a one-hundred-year-old hobby has morphed into a reflection of society, including our language, our politics, our biases, and our creative capabilities.
Last befittingly combines crisp journalism with poetic insight. He starts with the crossword's origins in 1913 and moves steadfastly to its digital revival. He is both precise like puzzler's solver and innocently inquisitive, dissecting technology, diversity, and generational evolution to better describe the framework the puzzle occupies in our our collective minds. Interspersed within anecdotes about those legendary editors, like Will Shortz, are fascinating musings on trends towards inclusiveness and imaginative approaches to modern puzzling and problem-solving.
What is especially powerful about this book (besides all the wonderfully informative content shared in a most passionate and intelligent manner) is Last's ability to connect the structure of the crossword puzzle (its symmetry, logic, and humor) to our deeper human limitations of connection and meaning. His writing style is respectful, literate language about both word puzzles and their own seekers.
It’s a cultural book more than a crossword puzzle book, but anyway, a very enjoyable and smoothly written excursion into this art-form of a simple grid.
Releasing November 11, 2025
Across the Universe, Natan Last takes the socially familiar form of the crossword puzzle and makes it the subject of a compelling cultural journey. It is much more than a simple story about grids and clues; it shows how a one-hundred-year-old hobby has morphed into a reflection of society, including our language, our politics, our biases, and our creative capabilities.
Last befittingly combines crisp journalism with poetic insight. He starts with the crossword's origins in 1913 and moves steadfastly to its digital revival. He is both precise like puzzler's solver and innocently inquisitive, dissecting technology, diversity, and generational evolution to better describe the framework the puzzle occupies in our our collective minds. Interspersed within anecdotes about those legendary editors, like Will Shortz, are fascinating musings on trends towards inclusiveness and imaginative approaches to modern puzzling and problem-solving.
What is especially powerful about this book (besides all the wonderfully informative content shared in a most passionate and intelligent manner) is Last's ability to connect the structure of the crossword puzzle (its symmetry, logic, and humor) to our deeper human limitations of connection and meaning. His writing style is respectful, literate language about both word puzzles and their own seekers.
It’s a cultural book more than a crossword puzzle book, but anyway, a very enjoyable and smoothly written excursion into this art-form of a simple grid.
Read
December 29, 2025As a crossword fan, but perhaps not quite a fanatic, I found this informative and amusing but somewhat of a slog. It's a collection of mini-biographies of crossword-associated people including the author, along with descriptions and/or reproductions of their work. The snippets are held together by literary interpretation that often left me shrugging (the crossword is performance art! it's a blending of materialism and imagination!, etc.) The chapter structure sometimes left me thinking "Wait, didn't I read about this guy a hundred pages ago? I guess the context is be different now... what's this chapter supposed to be about again?" Cleverness abounds on every page, but I found my enjoyment hindered by the dissection and analysis of every joke -- but that's on me; I probably should have spent the time doing crosswords rather than reading about them. The book did rekindle my interest in constructing puzzles myself, and also turned me on to the work of Emily Gorski -- I decided to skip pages 197-206, filled with answer keys for her puzzles, in favor of finding and solving some.
December 14, 2025
Disclosure: I have the NYT Crossword Puzzle App and do the puzzles probably 4 times/wk.
DNF the audiobook.
I suggest to NOT get the audiobook. The author mentions types of puzzles in the past, and (I’m assuming) in a book form, it will show you what these puzzles look like. When listening, it’s confusing cuz you can’t visualize what the author is describing. There are also longgg lists of long words. In book form, this should make sense, but what seems like out of the blue, listening to 10 - 20 words is just wasting my time. There is also a disconnect between examples of clues and the answers.
The other thing that seriously distracted me was when the author referred to “himself”. What? It’s a woman reading…and I couldn’t get over/stop thinking about the disconnect.
If I try a book version, I’ll update this review. But, as now (and NOT too far in) the fawning over Will Shortz has gotten old.
DNF the audiobook.
I suggest to NOT get the audiobook. The author mentions types of puzzles in the past, and (I’m assuming) in a book form, it will show you what these puzzles look like. When listening, it’s confusing cuz you can’t visualize what the author is describing. There are also longgg lists of long words. In book form, this should make sense, but what seems like out of the blue, listening to 10 - 20 words is just wasting my time. There is also a disconnect between examples of clues and the answers.
The other thing that seriously distracted me was when the author referred to “himself”. What? It’s a woman reading…and I couldn’t get over/stop thinking about the disconnect.
If I try a book version, I’ll update this review. But, as now (and NOT too far in) the fawning over Will Shortz has gotten old.
January 9, 2026
This book answers the question, "why the crossword?", both on its prominence in American newspapers and its popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The construction and design of crosswords is a main focus throughout. Last speaks to his own history with the crossword, including anecdotes from Will Shortz's, Margaret Farrar's, and countless other's lives regarding the process of creating crosswords. I personally found the book to drag in its pace during the discussion of crosswords as art, which was interesting. It was a part of the book I expected to find more interesting than I did. The book is an interesting micro-history and discussion of an everyday encounter for many of us, whether through the Times' daily offerings or as a memory of solving with grandparents or friends, despite its dry prose and slower pace in the middle and end.
February 9, 2026
If you are into crosswords, this is an excellent read. While I might quibble with the writing at times—really, to me, it’s the editor’s fault, this book just needed some good editing and appears instead to have gotten the “good enough” touch—the detail and information contained in here overwhelms any fault in the writing.
I particularly enjoyed the back and forth nature of the book, which others here seemed not to like—I.e., this was not a linear history of the crossword in America, but a back and forth from present to past and back again. The old stuff was probably the most juicy, but some of the new stuff held its own.
All in all , a fun read that was highly informative and illuminating, even for this reader, who came to the table with a lot of knowledge about crosswords already. Highly recommended.
I particularly enjoyed the back and forth nature of the book, which others here seemed not to like—I.e., this was not a linear history of the crossword in America, but a back and forth from present to past and back again. The old stuff was probably the most juicy, but some of the new stuff held its own.
All in all , a fun read that was highly informative and illuminating, even for this reader, who came to the table with a lot of knowledge about crosswords already. Highly recommended.
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