'Second Sunday puzzles' see below) to appear alongside the Sunday Times puzzle, and serves as 'Puzzlemaster' on the NPR show ' Weekend Edition Sunday'. In addition to editing the Times crosswords, Shortz founded and runs the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament as well as the World Puzzle Championship (where he remains captain of the US team), has published numerous books of crosswords, sudoku, and other puzzles, authors occasional variety puzzles (a.k.a. Maleska until his death in 1993 and the current editor, Will Shortz. There have been four editors of the puzzle: Margaret Farrar from the puzzle's inception until 1969 Will Weng, former head of the Times's metropolitan copy desk, until 1977 Eugene T. That first daily puzzle was published without an author line, and as of 2001 the identity of the author of the first weekday Times crossword remained unknown. In 1950, the crossword became a daily feature. The puzzle proved popular, and Sulzberger himself authored a Times puzzle before the year was out. The motivating impulse for the Times to finally run the puzzle (which took over 20 years even though its publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, was a longtime crossword fan) appears to have been the bombing of Pearl Harbor in a memo dated December 18, 1941, an editor conceded that the puzzle deserved space in the paper, considering what was happening elsewhere in the world and that readers might need something to occupy themselves during blackouts. The first puzzle ran on Sunday, February 15, 1942. Although crosswords became popular in the early 1920s, The New York Times (which initially regarded crosswords as frivolous, calling them 'a primitive form of mental exercise') did not begin to run a crossword until 1942, in its Sunday edition.

Times crossword editor will