Grammar Girl here. I'm in Jan Fogarty, and today I'm here with Natan Last, author of a fabulous new book about crossword puzzles called Across the Universe. At 16, Neton was the youngest person ever at the time to get a Sunday puzzle accepted by the New York Times. And now

he teaches crossword writing classes and regularly contributes puzzles to the New York Times and the

New Yorker, Natan. Welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast. Thank you so much for having me. It's a

thrill to be on. Oh, I'm excited to have you. I really loved your book. I think it's going to be,

I'm going to get some as gifts this holiday for people.

I learned so much.

So you're going to hear me say I was surprised so many times in this podcast.

So one, I was surprised to learn that American and British puzzle conventions are different.

They're very different.

Yeah, they kind of play to type a little bit. So the

British style are pure cleverness. In look, they are lattice shape, so they look like waffles,

and they don't have as many crossings. There are fewer crossing words. But each clue is kind of built up

out of puns and riddles and sly bits of language. Whereas the American style that we're all

familiar with has that huge swatches of white space and more pop culture, cleverness here and there,

but a lot of trivia as well. So like if I went to do a British crossword puzzle, would I find it,

like is it hard to cross the,

the two styles or do people go back and forth pretty easily? There are definitely bilingualists,

for sure. It really, really scratches a different itch and uses a different part of the brain.

The kinds of clues you would see in a Friday or Saturday New York Times crossword,

sometimes with a question mark indicating that wordplay is afoot,

every single British style cryptic crossword they're called is like that. And so if you like

that style of the Friday and Saturday deviousness, then the British style is definitely for you.

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