2026-01-17 01:22:37
It may seem like they’ve been around forever, but the crossword as we know it is barely a century old. They started in the New York World in 1913, where it was originally called a “word-cross.” Going on to obsess writers like T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov, who reportedly wrote the first Russian-language puzzle as a teenager, the crossword settled into a kind of urbane normalcy over the course of the 20th century, a feature of newspapers and cheap jumbo packs dominated by the editor Will Shortz. More recently, puzzle games, particularly those created and owned by the New York Times, exploded in popularity during the COVID-19 lockdowns, forming an unlikely bedrock alongside other mobile games for the financial vitality of papers of record.
Cruciverbalist and crossword constructor Natan Last’s recent book Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle supplies a history of the game, but also compelling perspectives on its evolution: From an unlikely early 20th-century American craze the New York Times once compared to disease, to a thriving and idiosyncratic subculture, a point of artistic inspiration, and a forum for politics and social mores. After all, the vocabulary treated as common enough for millions of players to grasp, written in an increasingly globally dominant language, is chosen by a group of biased individuals, each of whom bring their own worldview to the form. As Last writes, “There are puzzle-makers who invest their political essences into the grid; there are those who reject the notion the grid should be anything more than a zone of play, Huizinga’s magic circle become square. The crossword traffics in at least two distinct registers of language: the pun clue’s dad joke, and the trivia clue’s prodding for erudition.”
Recently, Last and I discussed the crossword’s democratization, the labor of both editing and solving, the limits to which the puzzle can be a political tool, and whether we’re playing through a boom-and-bust cycle of digital gaming.
2026-01-17 00:53:26
It's hard to pinpoint the moment that Jonathan Kuminga first became disenchanted with the Golden State Warriors and their management, so we will have to start the clock with the trade demand that sparked the latest stage in their preposterous standoff. By that reckoning this is merely Day Two of Kuminga Held Hostage, and yes, it's already stupid.
But we all knew it would be. When a trade period begins with no trade, no predictions of a trade, and the advertised likelihood that no trade may happen until the summer, you've got something special. And by special we mean staggeringly tedious.
Kuminga and the Warriors have been a mismatched set almost since the day he was drafted. That was five years ago, and the only thing that has actually been accomplished over the course of that relationship is that Kuminga has four years into his pension. He was a central part of the team's two-track plan to introduce a wave of young players who would allow them to stay at contender level after Stephen Curry ascends into heaven/fades into retirement; the other cornerstones of that gambit were James Wiseman and Moses Moody, which is why that plan died in the dirt. The Warriors have only succeeded in getting three years older, Wiseman has already been traded twice and has had health issues throughout his career, and Moody has slowly become a reliable 24-minutes-per-game guy, for what that may be worth. Curry, for his part, remains every bit the Stephen Curry he was when the succession plan was first devised.
2026-01-17 00:20:45
In light of the Trump administration's escalating threats of military action overseas and the militarized occupation of Minneapolis, the administration's announcement on Jan. 11 may have come as a surprise. The White House, it seems, will be ending the war on protein, per a tweet with the words "WE ARE ENDING THE WAR ON PROTEIN" emblazoned over an ominously hazy photo of some haunted specter assuming the form of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., white hair and deeply furrowed forehead dissolving into a shroud of darkness like Homer into the hedge. The tweet links to a website, realfood.gov, where three foods—a slab of steak, a carton of whole milk, and a floret of broccoli—converge to reveal another slogan: "Real food starts here."
What war on protein? you might ask if you live in the United States or seen an advertisement for one of this nation's increasingly deranged purchasable foodstuffs. I will admit that I participate in this culture. I have tried and enjoyed the Eggo Buttermilk Protein Waffles and the Barilla Protein+ Penne. Sometimes after working out I drink a protein juice with the flavor "Fuzzy Navel" (I am not proud of this). If there has indeed been a war on protein, surely Protein must have pulled off a flanking maneuver, soldiers massacred by the battalion by Starbucks's new lineup of Protein Lattes, featuring protein-boosted milk and "a variety of protein cold foams"; regiments splintered and picked apart by the 20g of whey protein isolate in Pure Genius Ready Clear Protein Water; POWs dispatched ruthlessly by Khloe Kardashian's Khloud protein popcorn. A moment of silence for all the lives lost in this needless war.
Of course there is no such thing as the war on protein, which is shockingly even faker than the war on Christmas. The nation is more protein-pilled than ever. Would a nation enmeshed in such a war create the Dunkin' Donuts Megan's Mango Protein Refresher as a part of a campaign with Megan Thee Stallion playing her alter ego, "Pro-Tina?" We are living in a moment of peak protein propaganda, and research suggests that, on average, adult Americans are already eating 20 percent more protein than we need—so much that it might be giving us kidney stones.
2026-01-16 22:57:17
On December 15, the Buffalo Sabres finally fired general manager Kevyn Adams, and no, there wasn't some kinky backstory. As Comrade Theisen explained, owner Terry Pegula just got kind of sick of him, or more properly, his results. When he was hired, the Sabres had already missed the Stanley Cup playoffs for 10 consecutive years, and never saw them in his five years and change in the leather chair. That he was fired on a three-game winning streak out west seemed not to matter; hope had been abandoned years ago, and attendance reflected that truth. The town only has the Bills and the Bulls, the Division 1 college team, and lost its pro women's hockey team, the Beauts, three years ago, so the Sabres stood out for not standing out, or up.
But an odd thing happened when Adams was excused from further migraines. The Sabres stopped sucking. They came home and beat Philadelphia and the New York Islanders, and other than the very occasional hiccup have won ever since. Thursday night they outlasted Montreal, 5-3, for their 15th win in 17 games.
2026-01-16 22:31:29
Texas Tech is good. Good enough to play into April again. On Wednesday night, the Red Raiders ran away from visiting Utah early and stayed there, winning by a final score of 88-74. JT Toppin played as a reigning and likely future Big 12 player of the year should, with 31 points and 13 rebounds, and seven assists.
Tech is now 13-4, ranked 15th in the ESPN coaches poll, and 3-1 in the Big 12, easily the strongest college hoops confederation in the land. Big games come in bunches for the Red Raiders these days. They beat then-third-ranked Duke by a point in Madison Square Garden over the holidays in the thrillingest regular season game I’d seen in years. There’s another biggie Saturday, with Tech hosting 11th ranked BYU. This Red Raiders roster is as deep as Lubbock is flat. Sophomore superstar-in-waiting Christian Anderson put up 26 points and 10 assists on Wednesday night. Freshman Jaylen Petty only put up 8 points against the Utes, but he’s had two 20-point games out of the last five.
Tech’s good at lots of stuff now. The softball team came within one win of a softball World Series title last year, and the football team just finished a season with 12 wins, a conference championship, and a high enough seed to get a first-round bye in the playoffs.
2026-01-16 22:17:23
This blog contains major spoilers for Transistor, Hades, and Hades II.
Supergiant's 2014 game Transistor is a love story in the drapings of an apocalyptic sci-fi action-adventure game. The protagonist, Red, is a singer whose voice is stolen after an attempt on her life. Her companion is the titular Transistor, a greatsword that killed and then integrated the soul—or data—of her lover, referred to in the game as only Unknown, who speaks to her through the sword and is the primary voice in the game. Taking the Transistor in hand, Red returns to the city of Cloudbank, which is now overrun by a semi-autonomous force called the Process. Once wielded by Cloudbank's leaders to shape the city in the direction of their choosing, the Process has slipped its leash and effectively become malware, indiscriminately deconstructing the city and its residents down to a bare slate. (As with any science fiction story, there are a lot of new proper nouns.) As she progresses through the city, Red learns more about the Transistor, the Process, and the events that led to the attempted assassination.
What is most appealing about Transistor is its restraint. It is not a long game. Depending on difficulty and the player's motivation to do combat-focused side content, the game is a tight six to eight hours with a tight six-to-eight–hour story. What it lacks in scale, it makes up for in formal precision. There are finer plot and world-building details that can be unlocked by tweaking combat builds, but the game understands that it doesn't need to explain all of the minutiae. Instead, it allows a lot of the story to be conveyed through art direction, mechanical flavor, and a killer soundtrack. The game's combat revolves around Functions that imitate coding syntax, like Cull() and Void(), which is thematically apt in a story about a city that's effectively being torn apart by its own code. The soundtrack is split between diegetic vocal tracks and non-diegetic background music; there's enough story significance that the publishers highly recommend playing the game before listening to it, which is honestly reason enough to purchase the game.
