THRONE OF GAMES

Wordle. Connections. Spelling Bee. Ye olde crossword. THE NEW YORK TIMES is home to the most popular brainteasers online-and that fandom is key to the paper's bottom line. Meet the mischievous masterminds stumping the solvers and running the show

- CHARLOTTE KLEIN

ON THE NINTH floor of the New York Times headquarters, high above the bustling newsroom, a group of editors are doing the Sunday crossword. Or, rather, they’re undoing it. The editors already accepted this submission, one of the 150 to 200 puzzles arriving weekly, and are now working through it clue by clue— questioning, waffling, rewriting. They nitpick and fact-check. They debate the timelessness of a hint; whether the solver’s reaction will be Oh, I guess versus Aha!

There’s a completed puzzle onscreen, along with little video boxes for editors beaming in, including Sam Ezersky, joining from upstate New York, and Christina Iverson, from her Iowa home, where a cat can occasionally be heard meowing in the background. A few seats away, Joel Fagliano, sporting a New York Times T-shirt, a hoodie, and Allbirds sneakers, hunches over his computer and clicks around the grid while reading each clue and its answer aloud. Fagliano, known for never letting a meeting run long, works efficiently but also lets the group nerd out when appropriate. Like now. “All right, ‘Norwegian city depicted in’—oh really? I didn’t know Oslo was in the background of The Scream,” Fagliano says. He pulls up an image of the iconic Edvard Munch painting. “Hard to say what’s back there,” he chuckles, squinting at the ghostly image. “It seems like it’s sort of a whirling.”