A crosswording miscellany

I just finished reading Natan Last's 2025 book _Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle._ It was... fatiguing. Now, I myself am a "discursive" writer, so I'm throwing stones from a glass house here; but it seemed to me that Last's _every_ paragraph consisted of three or four anecdotes halfway told, capped off with some nonsensical simile. Open the book at random…