I'm Adam Aaronson, and I like making things, especially software, music, and crossword puzzles.
So you’re in third grade. You’re looking at a map of Europe, and you notice something peculiar sandwiched between France and Spain, like a pea between two mattresses. Somehow, there’s a tiny country there. It’s called Andorra, and you show it to your classmates as if you’ve struck gold.
The International Bartenders Association, or IBA, maintains a list of official cocktails, ones they deem to be “the most requested recipes” at bars all around the world. It’s the closest thing the bartending industry has to a canonical list of cocktails, akin to the American Kennel Club’s registry of dog breeds or a jazz musician’s Real Book of standards.
The story starts in Crosscord, the crossword Discord server. Over 5,000 users strong, the server has emerged as a central hub for the online crossword community, a buzzing, sometimes overwhelming, sometimes delightful town square where total noobs, veteran constructors, and champion solvers alike come together to talk about words that cross each other.
Ever heard of the Tetris effect? It’s where you play so much Tetris that the game starts to seep into your thoughts, your dreams, your half-waking hallucinations, and pretty much every part of your reality that has nothing to do with Tetris. Well, I do a lot of crosswords—by “do” I mean both “solve” and “make”—and it turns out the “crossword effect” is also a very real thing.
One of my favorite idea-having times is when I’m in bed, with my eyes closed, not quite asleep but not quite awake, in the hypnagogic state where the mind starts to make connections and realizations that it wouldn’t normally make during the day. Oftentimes these thoughts aren’t worth remembering, but sometimes I get out of bed and write them down, and sometimes they turn into yearlong side…
You know the game Scattergories? You roll a twenty-sided die labeled with letters instead of numbers, it lands on a letter, and you have to name something starting with that letter in a bunch of predetermined categories.
Amid the cornfields of central eastern Illinois lies a public land-grant research university. What’s it called? For most universities, this question is simple, but in this case, its answer has perplexed students, alumni, and Wikipedia editors for decades.
This Christmas Eve, my mom asked me, “hey, are you gonna do that New Year site this year?” I hadn’t thought about it in almost a year, but last New Year’s Eve my dad and I had talked about making some kind of site that celebrates the New Year around the world.
In February 2020, after my first New York Times crossword got published, I used my earnings to treat myself to a pair of AirPods Pro. Little did I know, this would become one of the most valuable purchases I’d ever made.
H-O-R-S-E (pronounced “horse”) is a basketball minigame you play when you don’t feel like playing a real game but you have a basketball and a hoop and a friend.