Puzzle 17: Words on the Street (with Laura Braunstein)
Crossword puzzles can feel frivolous even in the best of times. I get a few hours of enjoyment (and frustration) from creating them, and I hope all of you get at least a few minutes of enjoyment from solving them, but we’re not exactly changing the world. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people around the world are out there protesting and are changing the world, and the least we can do is help them out. And while this puzzle offers moral support to Black Lives Matter, it can’t offer any concrete support. For that, I encourage you to join protests (while wearing a mask and keeping six feet away from your fellow marchers), lobby your officials, and, especially, donate money.
I’d love to be able to offer you some bonus puzzles in return for donating, but that would require me to actually have more puzzles available, and if that were the case I wouldn’t have gone six months without posting a puzzle here. Luckily, a bunch of other people do have extra puzzles to send you in return for your donations:
- Erik Agard has a bunch of old puzzles that he’ll send you if you donate to One Struggle KC
- Paolo Pasco has assembled a pack of new puzzles that he’ll send you in return for a donation to any Black Lives Matter group
- Lone Shark Games will send you a pack of Marching Bands Puzzles if you donate to Campaign Zero
- Eric Berlin has just released a pack of variety puzzles for those who donate to Feeding America
I’ve solved some of these puzzles already, and so far they’re all great.
I don’t have much else to say about today’s puzzle, since I think it speaks for itself. Big thanks to Laura Braunstein for co-constructing with me. The two of us will be teaching a free online class on crossword construction next Tuesday, June 23, and we’d love to see some of you there. We don’t exactly know what we’re doing teaching-wise, but we’ve taught some classes to kids so far, so I can guarantee that this will at least be fun and you’ll probably even learn something.
