Solving The Broken Crossword Puzzle Economy

The crossword puzzle can seem utterly authorless. If you haven't caught the documentary Wordplay, or bothered to look up the name that appears in tiny agate type below the grid in The New York Times, you might join many others in assuming that the crossword is written by editor Will Shortz. Or volunteers. Or a computer.

In fact, crosswords are made by people (called constructors) whose status is roughly equivalent to freelance writers—that is to say, low. Puzzles are sent on spec to editors, who buy them or turn them down, and who fine-tune the ones they accept without, as a nearly universal rule, consulting the constructor. Submissions may sit in an editor's inbox for months or even years before the author hears back. (A few months ago, constructor Tim Croce received an acceptance from The New York Times—for a puzzle he submitted in 2001.) Even after a puzzle is accepted, the constructor may not know in advance when it will run. Attribution comes in the form of fine-print bylines, and in syndication the author's name is often excluded altogether. And this is true not just at The Times, but at other papers that run puzzles, such as Newsday and the LA Times. If you're hoping for riches, you'll be disappointed. Pay is—to use a puzzle term—olid (foul). Most outlets offer less than $100 for a daily crossword and less than $300 for a Sunday-sized, despite the huge number of readers who presumably buy the paper in part or in whole for the crossword, and despite the substantial labor and creative energy that construction requires. For aspiring constructors, things don't look so rosy—but that's changing.

The financial stakes of the crossword are higher than a casual solver might realize. The New York Times, which runs the most prestigious American crossword series, pays $200 for a daily or $1,000 for a Sunday, which is certainly more generous than its competitors. However, The Times also makes piles of money from its puzzles. Standalone, online subscriptions to the crossword cost $40 a year ($20 for those who already subscribe to the dead-tree edition of the paper). In this 2010 interview, Will Shortz, the paper's famed puzzle master, estimated the number of online-only subscribers at around 50,000, which translates to $2 million annually.

Meanwhile, The Times buys all rights to the puzzles, allowing them to republish work in an endless series of compendiums like The New York Times Light and Easy Crossword Puzzles. In that same interview, Shortz called these "about the best-selling crossword books in the country." All royalties go to the New York Times Company, the constructor having signed away—as is the industry standard—all of his or her rights. Visitors to NYTimes.com will also be familiar with the crossword merchandise—mugs, shirts, calendars, pencils, and the like—pitched aggressively by the paper, and perhaps also with the 900 number answer line, which still makes some money from a presumably less Google-minded segment of solvers. Finally, the crossword has a significant impact on overall circulation. Lots of people buy the paper, or even subscribe, in whole or part because of the puzzle. Of course the feature has expenses as well, including Will Shortz's salary, the cost of testing, and so on, but these are moderate compared to the millions of dollars that the puzzle earns from a variety of revenue streams. And out of that total, constructors collectively earn well under $200,000.

by Ben Tausig, The Awl |  Read more:

Paris. Montmartre. Sunday lunch.
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Obama's Pot Problem

When voters in Colorado and Washington state legalized recreational marijuana in November, they thought they were declaring a cease-fire in the War on Drugs. Thanks to ballot initiatives that passed by wide margins on Election Day, adults 21 or older in both states can now legally possess up to an ounce of marijuana. The new laws also compel Colorado and Washington to license private businesses to cultivate and sell pot, and to levy taxes on the proceeds. Together, the two states expect to reap some $600 million annually in marijuana revenues for schools, roads and other projects. The only losers, in fact, will be the Mexican drug lords, who currently supply as much as two-thirds of America's pot.

Drug reformers can scarcely believe their landslide victories at the polls. "People expected this day would come, but most didn't expect it to come this soon," says Norm Stamper, a former Seattle police chief who campaigned for legalization. "This is the beginning of the end of prohibition."

But the war over pot may be far from over. Legalization has set Colorado and Washington on a collision course with the Obama administration, which has shown no sign of backing down on its full-scale assault on pot growers and distributors. Although the president pledged to go easy on medical marijuana – now legal in 18 states – he has actually launched more raids on state-sanctioned pot dispensaries than George W. Bush, and has threatened to prosecute state officials who oversee medical marijuana as if they were drug lords. And while the administration has yet to issue a definitive response to the two new laws, the Justice Department was quick to signal that it has no plans to heed the will of voters. "Enforcement of the Controlled Substances Act," the department announced in November, "remains unchanged."

A big reason for the get-tough stance, say White House insiders, is that federal agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration are staffed with hard-liners who have built their careers on going after pot. Michele Leonhart, a holdover from the Bush administration whom Obama has appointed to head the DEA, continues to maintain that pot is as dangerous as heroin – a position unsupported by either science or experience. When pressed on the point at a congressional hearing, Leonhart refused to concede any distinction between the two substances, lamely insisting that "all illegal drugs are bad."

"There are not many friends to legalization in this administration," says Kevin Sabet, director of the Drug Policy Institute at the University of Florida who served the White House as a top adviser on marijuana policy. In fact, the politician who coined the term "drug czar" – Joe Biden – continues to guide the administration's hard-line drug policy. "The vice president has a special interest in this issue," Sabet says. "As long as he is vice president, we're very far off from legalization being a reality."

by Tim Dickinson, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Illustration by Victor Juhasz

Most Lives Are Lived by Default

Jamie lives in a large city in the midwest. He’s a copywriter for an advertising firm, and he’s good at it.

He’s also good at thinking of reasons why he ought to be happy with his life. He has health insurance, and now savings. A lot of his friends have neither. His girlfriend is pretty. They never fight. His boss has a sense of humor, doesn’t micromanage, and lets him go early most Fridays.

On most of those Fridays, including this one, instead of taking the train back to his suburban side-by-side, he walks to a downtown pub to meet his friends. He will have four beers. His friends always stay longer.

Jamie’s girlfriend Linda typically arrives on his third beer. She greets them all with polite hugs, Jamie with a kiss. He orders his final beer when she orders her only one. They take a taxi home, make dinner together, and watch a movie on Netflix. When it’s over they start a second one and don’t finish it. They have sex, then she goes to wash her face and brush her teeth. When she returns, he goes.

There was never a day Jamie sat down and decided to be a copywriter living in the midwest. A pair of lawyers at his ex-girlfriend’s firm took him out one night when he was freshly laid-off from writing for a tech magazine, bought him a hundred dollars worth of drinks and gave him the business card of his current boss. It was a great night. That was nine years ago.

His friends are from his old job. White collar, artsy and smart. If one of the five of them is missing at the pub on Friday, they’ll have lunch during the week.

Jamie isn’t unhappy. He’s bored, but doesn’t quite realize it. As he gets older his boredom is turning to fear. He has no health problems but he thinks about them all the time. Cancer. Arthritis. Alzheimer’s. He’s thirty-eight, fit, has no plans for children, and when he really thinks about the course of his life he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself, except on Fridays.

In two months he and Linda are going to Cuba for ten days. He’s looking forward to that right now.

***

A few weeks ago I asked everyone reading to share their biggest problem in life in the comment section. I’ve done this before — ask about what’s going on with you — and every time I do I notice two things.

The first thing is that everyone has considerable problems. Not simply occasional tough spots, but the type of issue that persists for years or decades. The kind that becomes a theme in life, that feels like part of your identity. By the sounds of it, it’s typical among human beings to feel like something huge is missing.

The other thing is that they tend to be one of the same few problems: lack of human connection, lack of personal freedom (due to money or family situations), lack of confidence or self-esteem, or lack of self-control.

The day-to-day feel and quality of each of our lives sits on a few major structures: where we live, what we do for a living, what we do with ourselves when we’re not at work, and which people we spend most of our time with.

Making a major change in just one of these areas will necessarily make a major change in the feel and quality of your day-to-day life. It simply can’t stay the same.

by David Cain, Raptitude |  Read more:

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John Register, Waiting Room for the Beyond, 1988
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Putting Charities to the Test

December is giving season. According to Charity Navigator, charities surveyed reported that 41 percent of their annual contributions from individuals arrives between Thanksgiving and New Year.

How do you decide where to give? People want to give where their money will be used effectively, of course. For many, that means researching on Charity Navigator or the Better Business Bureau’s Web site to see which charities are well run and take only a small percentage of donations for administration or fund-raising needs.

Overhead does matter. But it is dwarfed by a different question: Is this group’s work effective?

“When people think of giving, they look at the issue of whether a charity has a 10 or 20 percent administration cost, and that makes the difference for them,” said Toby Ord, a researcher in moral philosophy at Oxford University and founder of an organization based there called Giving What We Can. “But in reality some things they could be funding are hundreds or thousands of times more effective than other things. People never guess there could be such large discrepancies. Instead of a 20 percent difference, there can be a 1,000 percent difference.”

In an essay called “The Moral Imperative Towards Cost Effectiveness,” Ord poses the example of helping the blind. Surely everyone would agree that a charity that trains guide dogs for the blind is a worthy charity. According to Guide Dogs of America, the cost of training a dog is around $42,000. So if you had $42,000 to give, you could greatly improve the life of one blind person.

But what if instead, you spent that $42,000 on eye surgeries for people with trachoma in Africa? Helen Keller International, which works to prevent blindness, says trachoma surgery costs as little as $25 per person and is 80 percent effective. That same money, then, could restore the sight of 1,344 people. If you value all lives equally — and in a minute I’ll get to the fact that we certainly don’t — then if you are training a guide dog, you might as well be giving to a charity that wastes 99.93 percent of its money. (Actually even more, as a guide dog does not restore sight.)

Ord’s point is that if we care about what our money is doing, we should look for the most effective charities. (His group asks people to pledge to give 10 percent of income to the places where it will be most effective. He has decided he can live comfortably on $18,000 pounds (a little less than $30,000) per year and will give away everything he earns above that.)

What are the “most effective charities?” Ones that:

— Aim to solve the most serious problems (in the normal calculus, this means that providing bed nets to save children from malaria ranks above helping public radio stations or art museums).

— Use interventions that work.

— Employ cost-effective strategies (trachoma surgeries, rather than training guide dogs, to help the blind).

— Are competent and honest. The percentage of donations spent on overhead is one measure of these qualities.

— Can make good use of each additional dollar. This is the hardest point to assess, but it asks whether the group has the program on the ground to use your money well, and whether your donation will make something happen that otherwise wouldn’t.

Most individual donors lack the resources or training to determine which charities meet these requirements. So does Ord, for that matter, so he relies heavily on the research of a like-minded Brooklyn-based organization called GiveWell.

by Tina Rosenberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Ransomware

Kidnappers used to make ransom notes with letters cut out of magazines. Now, notes simply pop up on your computer screen, except the hostage is your PC.

In the past year, hundreds of thousands of people across the world have switched on their computers to find distressing messages alerting them that they no longer have access to their PCs or any of the files on them.

The messages claim to be from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, some 20 other law enforcement agencies across the globe or, most recently, Anonymous, a shadowy group of hackers. The computer users are told that the only way to get their machines back is to pay a steep fine.

And, curiously, it’s working. The scheme is making more than $5 million a year, according to computer security experts who are tracking them.

The scourge dates to 2009 in Eastern Europe. Three years later, with business booming, the perpetrators have moved west. Security experts say that there are now more than 16 gangs of sophisticated criminals extorting millions from victims across Europe.

The threat, known as ransomware, recently hit the United States. Some gangs have abandoned previously lucrative schemes, like fake antivirus scams and banking trojans, to focus on ransomware full time.

Essentially online extortion, ransomware involves infecting a user’s computer with a virus that locks it. The attackers demand money before the computer will be unlocked, but once the money is paid, they rarely unlock it.

In the vast majority of cases, victims do not regain access to their computer unless they hire a computer technician to remove the virus manually. And even then, they risk losing all files and data because the best way to remove the virus is to wipe the computer clean.

It may be hard to fathom why anyone would agree to fork over hundreds of dollars to a demanding stranger, but security researchers estimate that 2.9 percent of compromised computer owners take the bait and pay. That, they say, is an extremely conservative estimate. In some countries, the payout rate has been as high as 15 percent.

by Nicole Perlroth, NY Times |  Read more:

Georges Braque
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Every Man His Own Shopping Channel

‘Before the theological caprices of commodities, the consumers become temple slaves. Those who sacrifice themselves nowhere else can do so here, and here they are fully betrayed.’ – Theodor Adorno

‘Steve and I spend a lot of time on the packaging […] I love the process of unpacking something. You design a ritual of unpacking to make the product feel special. Packaging can be theater, it can create a story.’
– Jonathan Ives, Apple lead designer


About six months ago, I bought an iPad through the online Apple Store. Some three or four business days later, a DHL guy appeared at my door and presented me with a rectangular package. I signed for it and carried it into the kitchen, where I selected from the cutlery drawer a knife sufficiently sharp and sturdy for the job of slicing open the formidable carapace of packaging. I removed the white plastic DHL bag, then made my way through the outer husk of plain cardboard to the compact tabernacle of the Apple packaging proper. As I did so, I became aware of a voice in my head. This voice was briskly self-assured, astringently American; it spoke not to me, but through me, and the words it spoke were these: Okay, let’s go ahead and unbox this sucker.

I wasn’t unsettled by the sudden interjection of this cockily demotic voice, because I knew where it came from. Before purchasing the iPad, I had done quite a bit of research: the usual perusal of user-reviews and product specs undertaken to persuade yourself that you’re not throwing your money away. At some point during this period of consumer research, I had discovered a curious category of YouTube video that occupies a generic no-man’s-land between the user-generated product review and the shopping channel talk-through. The ‘unboxing’ video offers the viewer the vicarious experience of removing a newly purchased product (usually an electronic device of some sort) from its packaging. It is a visual document of the consummation of the purchaser–product relationship, that apex of possibility and anticipation right before the start of the slow, inevitable decline into disappointment and neglect.

I couldn’t really begin to say why, but in the process of working myself up to buying an iPad I became slightly addicted to these strange, homemade videos, with their mildly intoxicating mixture of smugness and exhilaration. I started off watching iPad unboxings, and then worked my way haphazardly outward toward the fringes of the technological orbit: to webcam footage of people unboxing leatherette iPhone cases, Kindle reading lights, limited-edition Nintendo DS replacement styluses. I saw a well-heeled New Jerseyite named Lance Linton unbox a Dualit brushed-steel toaster; I saw a nervous and bespectacled Irish schoolboy unbox a Russell Hobbs Glass Touch cordless kettle; I saw a tracksuited and baseball-capped East Londoner unbox a Gamucci Micro V2 Electronic Cigarette starter kit; I saw a pallid old Texan unbox something called a Medtronic Carelink Monitor, a modem-linked device whereby cardiac patients can send data from their pacemakers to their doctors; I saw a young American kid loquaciously unpacking first a stapler (‘contoured for handheld use’), then, in a companion-piece video, the separately-sold staples with which he intended to load it. I saw every conceivable consumer durable unsheathed and admired, I saw the broken labyrinth of the Internet itself, and I saw the face of the free market, saw my face and my viscera reflected back in it, saw your face, and I felt dizzy. Mostly, though, I just saw a lot of Apple products and Sony games consoles being taken out of their boxes and exhaustively talked about by young American men.

To those who have never seen an unboxing video – a category to which I’d imagine most readers of this essay belong – it is easy to describe what they’re like, but difficult to account for their appeal. On some level, they’re all essentially the same: a guy telling you he’s bought some gizmo online (or, more rarely, spent hours queueing at a midnight launch down at the local Apple store) and that he’s going to do a quick unboxing for the folks at home. Next, he’ll provide a fetishistically painstaking exegesis of the process of removing the gizmo from its packaging and then, usually, of the physical properties of the gizmo itself (its array of buttons, its control pads, its as-standard allotment of USB ports and SD slots). The thing itself – and this is an important feature of the genre – is rarely actually turned on. Unboxing is mainly about packaging and its removal. It focuses on the first sensuous encounter with the object of consumer desire.

by Mark O'Connell, The Dublin Review |  Read more:

Photo: Endgadget

Selena Maestrini (Firenze, Italia-b. 1982)
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Paul Krugman: Asimov's Foundation Novels Grounded My Economics

There are certain novels that can shape a teenage boy's life. For some, it's Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged; for others it's Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. As a widely quoted internet meme says, the unrealistic fantasy world portrayed in one of those books can warp a young man's character forever; the other book is about orcs. But for me, of course, it was neither. My Book – the one that has stayed with me for four-and-a-half decades – is Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, written when Asimov was barely out of his teens himself. I didn't grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behaviour to save civilisation.

OK, economics is a pretty poor substitute; I don't expect to be making recorded appearances in the Time Vault a century or two from now. But I tried.

So how do the Foundation novels look to me now that I have, as my immigrant grandmother used to say, grown to mature adultery? Better than ever. The trilogy really is a unique masterpiece; there has never been anything quite like it. By the way, spoilers follow, so stop reading if you want to encounter the whole thing fresh.

Maybe the first thing to say about Foundation is that it's not exactly science fiction – not really. Yes, it's set in the future, there's interstellar travel, people shoot each other with blasters instead of pistols and so on. But these are superficial details, playing a fairly minor part in the story. The Foundation novels are about society, not gadgets – and unlike, say, William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, which are excellent in a very different way, they're about societies that don't seem much affected by technological progress. Asimov's Galactic Empire sounds an awful lot like the Roman Empire. Trantor, the empire's capital, comes across as a sort of hyper-version of Manhattan in the 1940s. The Foundation itself seems to recapitulate a fair bit of American history, passing through Boss Tweed politics and Robber Baron-style plutocracy; by the end of the trilogy it has evolved into something resembling mid 20th-century America – although Asimov makes it clear that this is by no means its final state.

Let me be clear, however: in pointing out the familiarity of the various societies we see in Foundation, I'm not being critical. On the contrary, this familiarity, the way Asimov's invented societies recapitulate historical models, goes right along with his underlying conceit: the possibility of a rigorous, mathematical social science that understands society, can predict how it changes, and can be used to shape those changes.

by Paul Krugman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Illustration: Alex Wells

Amok by erokism
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For Athletes, Risks From Ibuprofen Use

Many active people use the painkiller ibuprofen on an almost daily basis. In surveys, up to 70 percent of distance runners and other endurance athletes report that they down the pills before every workout or competition, viewing the drug as a preemptive strike against muscle soreness.

But a valuable new study joins growing evidence that ibuprofen and similar anti-inflammatory painkillers taken before a workout don’t offer any benefit and may be causing disagreeable physical damage instead, particularly to the intestines.

Studies have already shown that strenuous exercise alone commonly results in a small amount of intestinal trauma. A representative experiment published last year found that cyclists who rode hard for an hour immediately developed elevated blood levels of a marker that indicates slight gastrointestinal leakage.

Physiologically, it makes sense that exercise would affect the intestines as it does, since, during prolonged exertion, digestion becomes a luxury, said Dr. Kim van Wijck, currently a surgical resident at Orbis Medical Center in the Netherlands, who led the small study. So the blood that normally would flow to the small intestine is instead diverted to laboring muscles. Starved of blood, some of the cells lining the intestines are traumatized and start to leak.

Thankfully, the damage seems to be short-lived, Dr. van Wijck said. Her research has shown that within an hour after a cyclist finished riding, the stressed intestines returned to normal.

But the most common side-effect of ibuprofen is gastrointestinal damage. And since many athletes take the drug for pain before and after a workout, Dr. van Wijck set out to determine the combined effect of exercise and ibuprofen.  (...)

The health implications of this finding are not yet clear, although they are worrying, Dr. van Wijck said. It may be that if someone uses ibuprofen before every exercise session for a year or more, she said, “intestinal integrity might be compromised.” In that case, small amounts of bacteria and digestive enzymes could leak regularly into the bloodstream.

by Gretchen Reynolds, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Getty Images

On Growing Up

One recent Monday morning, I was telling a co-worker about my weekend: There had been a playdate with my daughter, Sasha, and one of her friends, and I'd been having some trouble with my apartment's hot-water heater, and I'd gone shopping at the farmers' market for vegetables for the week. All in all, nothing special. Just a typical Brooklyn weekend.

But for my co-worker, this was amazing. "You're a real grown-up!" she said.

I wasn't quite sure what to say. I'm still relatively new to the working world. After freelancing for the last eight years, I've only just taken a full-time job—and it's one where I'm at least a decade older than almost everyone on my team. At the age of 38, married, with kids, a mortgage, a beard, and a receding hairline, I suppose I must really seem like an adult to them.

If only I seemed like that to myself! Though I never wanted to be one of those much-derided man-children loafing around Brooklyn coffee shops—"grups," New York magazine dubbed them—I was never all that eager to embrace the traditional outward markers of adulthood: suit and tie, office job, lightless dead eyes. And in truth, I'd always felt like a child. The sense of smallness and powerlessness that are a child's everyday experience had never fully left me. When I'd look at my own father, a tenured history professor, I could never imagine becoming like him. And when I looked at kids, I felt nothing but sympathy—I know what you're going through—and imagined they were looking at me and thinking, Dude, you look older, but I see through you; you're just like me.

Still, degree by degree, things shifted. Six years ago, I grew a beard, mostly because, clean-shaven, I looked like I was still 17 years old. I invested in some good shirts and stylish blazers—not office-drone garb, but clothes I felt comfortable in. And, of course, I got married and had kids and bought an apartment. Inside, I felt no different from before—small, nervous, new to everything—but apparently I was. Or, quite possibly, the world was different, not in its essence but in how it viewed me. My own children, for example, will never see me as anything but a grown-up, and as they age, the kids of her generation will see me that way, too. One day, my daughters may look at me as I looked at my own father, and think: How am I ever going to become that?

The secret (which is only a secret to those still too young to have experienced it) is that adulthood is not something we consciously embrace, a set of rules we one day agree to follow. It's a set of perceptions and assumptions that everyone has about us, though we may still feel like children inside. How the hell did I become an adult? It's because the young people at my office decided I was. And one day, 10 or 15 years from now, it'll happen to them, too. We all grow up, whether we want to or not.

by Matt Gross, Theodore Ross, and Nathan Thornburgh, The Atlantic | Read more:

Photo: Weinstein Company

How to Live With Introverts

by Schroeder Veidt | Read more:

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Sergei Parajanov, Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors, 1964
(here, with english subtitles)
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