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What Explains Epstein’s Friends? Plus, Crossword Politics | Start Making Sense · The Nation Podcasts

0:08
[SPEAKER_01]: From the nation magazine, this is start making sense.
0:11
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner.
0:12
[SPEAKER_01]: Later in the hour, the crossword puzzle clues that expose the hidden politics of the New York Times crossword editors.
0:21
[SPEAKER_01]: The Tom last will explain.
0:23
[SPEAKER_01]: His new book is across the universe, the past present and future of the crossword puzzle.
0:30
[SPEAKER_01]: But first, the important people in the Epstein files, what was wrong with them?
0:36
[SPEAKER_01]: Katha Pollock will comment in a minute.
0:41
[SPEAKER_01]: This coming Friday is the big deadline for the Justice Department to turn over its Epstein files to Congress.
0:48
[SPEAKER_01]: House Democrats have already released some new Epstein material, including photos of Epstein with important people, which come from the 95,000 photos collected by the Epstein estate.
1:01
[SPEAKER_01]: For comment on the important people and their relation to Epstein, we turn to Catholic, poet, essayist, and columnist for the nation.
1:10
[SPEAKER_01]: She also writes for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and the New York Times.
1:14
[SPEAKER_01]: We reach you today at Home in Manhattan.
1:17
[SPEAKER_01]: Catholic, and welcome back.
1:19
[SPEAKER_02]: Oh, thanks so much for having me, John.
1:21
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, the photos released last week showed Trump at an Epstein event with five young women and Epstein himself and other photos with Larry Summers, Bill Gates, Woody Allen, Richard Branson, the billionaire founder of the Virgin Group and Epstein's former lawyer, Harvard Law Professor Allen Dershowitz.
1:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Most of the speculation about the coming release this Friday focuses on Trump himself and his likely crimes with what Epstein calls the girls as in his statement that Trump quote new about the girls.
1:58
[SPEAKER_01]: But your focus is not on Trump.
2:01
[SPEAKER_01]: It's on the other important men in the story and there are a lot of them.
2:06
[SPEAKER_01]: Some are Republicans, some are Democrats,
2:14
[SPEAKER_02]: They were not curious about what these young women were doing there.
2:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, you would think you go to a mansion in New York and they're all these young women and girls floating about or maybe you're down on that private island and wouldn't it?
2:32
[SPEAKER_02]: You think you would occur to you to ask, what are these young women doing here?
2:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Where did they come from?
2:38
[SPEAKER_02]: Why are they here?
2:39
[SPEAKER_02]: What's their story?
2:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Why do you think that is what is that suggest to us?
2:47
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, to me, what it suggests is that they didn't care.
2:51
[SPEAKER_02]: they were, they were the scenery, they were the help.
2:56
[SPEAKER_02]: Or as Dominique Strauss-Con, this is amazing.
2:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Memorably put it the equipment.
3:00
[SPEAKER_02]: And even people who thought that he hadn't done anything didn't notice, sort of like, yes, he always had this sort of bevy of young women.
3:10
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, he would go up to Harvard with a bevy of young women.
3:13
[SPEAKER_02]: Who does that?
3:16
[SPEAKER_01]: Just a quick review here of the basic facts, Jeffrey F. Dean went to jail in 2008.
3:21
[SPEAKER_01]: That was after a controversial plea deal for state crimes in Florida.
3:29
[SPEAKER_01]: And then he was arrested again in jailed in 2019 on federal charges and met 2008 case.
3:37
[SPEAKER_01]: He pleaded guilty to two state felony charges regarded related to prostitution.
3:44
[SPEAKER_01]: And was sentenced to 18 months in jail.
3:47
[SPEAKER_01]: And that was big news everywhere.
3:48
[SPEAKER_01]: Everybody read all about the details.
3:51
[SPEAKER_01]: The news that came out at that time, this is 2008 reported that the girls were as young as 14, that some were high school students,
4:02
[SPEAKER_01]: The Palm Beach police had spoken with at least two dozen of them.
4:07
[SPEAKER_01]: They said they were Lord to Epstein's Palm Beach mansion under the pretense of a legitimate job as a masseuse, but then pressured or forced to engage in sex acts.
4:18
[SPEAKER_01]: And in many cases, the girls had explicitly told Epstein their age.
4:23
[SPEAKER_01]: So pretty much everybody knew everything about Epstein and the girls in 2008.
4:31
[SPEAKER_02]: And yet they must not have paid very much attention to it or they didn't care I found some amazing quotes here's Lawrence Krauss theoretical physics very famous theoretical physicists who I miss I gave him a Nobel he didn't deserve.
4:46
[SPEAKER_02]: in my piece, because I couldn't correct it yet, but he said, get this.
4:52
[SPEAKER_02]: As a scientist, I always judge things on empirical evidence, and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around it.
4:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Imagine how precise that is.
5:01
[SPEAKER_02]: How could you possibly know?
5:02
[SPEAKER_02]: 18, not 17, 18, you know?
5:05
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, but I've never seen anything else.
5:07
[SPEAKER_02]: So as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were, I would believe him over other
5:16
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey, I feel raised by it.
5:22
[SPEAKER_01]: I feel raised by it and this was I understand in 2011, so this is just three years after Epstein has been found guilty in a trial and sentenced to 18 months in prison.
5:34
[SPEAKER_01]: Whatever happened to Lawrence Krauss.
5:37
[SPEAKER_02]: Lawrence Krauss got into trouble for sexual harassment at the University of Arizona State.
5:45
[SPEAKER_02]: And he resigned.
5:47
[SPEAKER_01]: I googled him today.
5:48
[SPEAKER_01]: It said today he has a sub-stack in a podcast.
5:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, so many of us, but here's another one.
5:59
[SPEAKER_02]: Can I read you another incredible quote?
6:01
[SPEAKER_01]: Please.
6:02
[SPEAKER_02]: So we had a friend, an evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, who are also very famous.
6:07
[SPEAKER_02]: And he told Reuters in 2015, girls grow up fast now, quote, by the time they're 14 or 15, they're like, grown women were 60 years ago.
6:17
[SPEAKER_02]: So I don't see these acts as so heinous.
6:19
[SPEAKER_02]: can you believe it?
6:21
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean that's incredible.
6:22
[SPEAKER_02]: It's unclear from that quote whether he means they're like grown women were physically or they're like grown women psychologically.
6:31
[SPEAKER_02]: But neither of those things are true.
6:33
[SPEAKER_02]: So I do see those access so high in heinous and so should he.
6:37
[SPEAKER_02]: And there were a lot of these people where they were not really very astute people.
6:43
[SPEAKER_02]: in terms of ordinary human behavior, and they also, some of them, stood to benefit from their association with Epstein who was ladling out large sums of money to various institutes and departments and research that people were doing.
7:00
[SPEAKER_02]: So they had a motive to not see what, say, you and I might have seen.
7:05
[SPEAKER_01]: Another great quote, actually my personally favorite quote about all of this is from Alan Dershowitz, who was exposed for having gone to Epstein's Palm Beach mansion and getting a massage while he was there, but he defends himself by saying, quote, I kept my underwear on, close quote, during the massage.
7:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, these people are just incredible.
7:33
[SPEAKER_01]: I found only one exception to the pattern we're talking about here, Howard Lutnic.
7:41
[SPEAKER_01]: He was Epstein's next door neighbor on the upper east side for 10 years.
7:47
[SPEAKER_01]: When he moved in in 2005,
7:50
[SPEAKER_01]: Epstein gave Lutnik and his wife a tour of his home.
7:55
[SPEAKER_01]: At that time, Lutnik was CEO of a big Wall Street brokerage house, an Epstein showing them around showed him his massage room, and Lutnik asked him how often he used it.
8:06
[SPEAKER_01]: This is all in the New York post.
8:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Lutnik explained that Epstein answered every day.
8:12
[SPEAKER_01]: And Lottnik continued quote, and then he gets like weirdly close to me, and he says, and the right kind of massage, close quote.
8:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Lottnik said he and his wife at that point, exchange glances, excuse themselves, and left, and quote, I decided that I would never again be in the room with that disgusting person ever again.
8:38
[SPEAKER_01]: Close quote seems like he's pretty much the only important person I've been able to find who said anything like that And this was eight years before Epstein was convicted in Florida Isn't he our secretary of commerce now?
8:52
[SPEAKER_02]: Perfectly is so I'm Maybe he can do something good with the economy like he did with Epstein
9:00
[SPEAKER_01]: And Epstein was of course interested in Harvard and spent a lot of time with Larry Summers and his wife.
9:10
[SPEAKER_02]: In fact, Larry Summers kept up a correspondence with Epstein long after he had ceased to be the president of Harvard.
9:19
[SPEAKER_02]: And Larry Summers, can you believe this, he wants to seduce a mentee, a Chinese economist.
9:27
[SPEAKER_02]: who was teaching at the LSE, a lot of school of economics.
9:31
[SPEAKER_01]: And had been a Harvard student while he was president.
9:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Although not his student.
9:35
[SPEAKER_02]: But anyway, he's asking Jeffrey Epstein for advice, for romantic advice about how he can get this woman into bed.
9:44
[SPEAKER_02]: And you're just thinking, well, she's not 12, so it's just shocking and being so pathetic and also so, you know, so wrong.
9:58
[SPEAKER_02]: Now his wife, at least a new, she's a special interest to me.
10:02
[SPEAKER_02]: because she was a professor of English at heart.
10:05
[SPEAKER_02]: And she was doing a, or wanted to do at that time, a poetry program for PBS, in which, get this, it's like the worst idea in the world, she would have famous celebrities like Bono or Serena Williams, read poetry.
10:24
[SPEAKER_02]: and so she was getting help from Jeffrey for two things.
10:29
[SPEAKER_02]: One was his help to approach these, to approach these, have an entree into these celebrities to get them to do this, and the other was money that she wanted a million dollars for this program, and Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of contacts, and eventually she did get money from a contact of his,
10:52
[SPEAKER_01]: Were they going to read your poems?
10:55
[SPEAKER_02]: No, and that's another thing I hold against her.
10:59
[SPEAKER_02]: How about a poem by me?
11:03
[SPEAKER_02]: What was particularly amazing was that she, there's one where she said, one email where she says, oh Jeffrey, thank you, thank you, this is so wonderful.
11:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I really appreciate this.
11:14
[SPEAKER_02]: And you know, I'm going to go upstairs right now and find my copy of LoLita, because I think it's a book you might really enjoy.
11:20
[SPEAKER_01]: You're kidding.
11:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah, it's about the lifelong impression made on an older man by a young woman.
11:29
[SPEAKER_02]: Impression?
11:30
[SPEAKER_02]: Not really what, Lily.
11:32
[SPEAKER_01]: Impression indeed.
11:33
[SPEAKER_02]: Impression.
11:35
[SPEAKER_02]: There was another person, and we should mention...
11:37
[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.
11:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Good.
11:39
[SPEAKER_02]: Tomski.
11:39
[SPEAKER_01]: No, Tomski.
11:42
[SPEAKER_02]: In the email dump.
11:44
[SPEAKER_02]: There's a recommendation for Jeffrey Epstein, apparently from Chomsky, although not signed, that just says, oh, he's the most brilliant person I've ever met.
11:56
[SPEAKER_02]: He's just so wonderful in every conceivable way.
11:58
[SPEAKER_02]: And Greg Grandon in the nation suggests that Jeffrey Epstein himself wrote this.
12:07
[SPEAKER_02]: It's not signed and says Greg Grandon,
12:15
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's not on MIT, let her head, but it could be a draft.
12:19
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know.
12:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I don't know about that, but what I do know about No.
12:25
[SPEAKER_02]: Tom's key.
12:25
[SPEAKER_02]: And this, I think, is kind of awful.
12:28
[SPEAKER_02]: He says when he was asked in 2023,
12:33
[SPEAKER_02]: about his extensive contacts with Epstein over many years.
12:38
[SPEAKER_02]: What was known about Jeffrey Epstein was that he had been convicted of a crime and has served his sentence, according to U.S. laws and norms that yields a clean slate.
12:48
[SPEAKER_02]: Now this isn't true, after all, he was a registered sex offender for life in two states.
12:54
[SPEAKER_02]: So that's not a clean slate, but also I just want to say, you know, a crime, I mean,
13:01
[SPEAKER_02]: soliciting prostitution from a 14-year-old is certainly one of worse than, say, passing a bad check.
13:08
[SPEAKER_02]: I just didn't get the feeling that Chomsky was too interested in this.
13:12
[SPEAKER_02]: The interior city of these people, I keep coming back to that.
13:15
[SPEAKER_02]: If one of my friends had done time for a crime, I'd want to know more about it.
13:21
[SPEAKER_02]: Wouldn't you?
13:21
[SPEAKER_02]: And they don't.
13:23
[SPEAKER_02]: Why is that?
13:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Chomsky's defender say when he was called by the Wall Street Journal, he was 94 years old.
13:30
[SPEAKER_01]: This was just a couple of months before the stroke that left him disabled and unable to speak.
13:36
[SPEAKER_01]: He was asked about a 2015 relationship with Epstein in view of his 2008 conviction.
13:45
[SPEAKER_01]: But I certainly agree with you that what he said was kind of awful.
13:49
[SPEAKER_02]: Well, he is very old, and maybe we should put him some slack for that, but you just think somewhere along the way, there would have been the glimmer of curiosity, of distaste, of horror.
14:03
[SPEAKER_02]: I mean, okay, in curious before, but what about now?
14:06
[SPEAKER_02]: It's very few of them have said, you know, I feel so sorry for those, those girls and those young women.
14:13
[SPEAKER_02]: I had no idea what they were going through, but now that I do know, I just want to apologize to all of them.
14:20
[SPEAKER_02]: I'm sorry that I didn't.
14:22
[SPEAKER_02]: Nobody has said that.
14:24
[SPEAKER_01]: Ketha Pollett, you can read her piece.
14:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Why did so many people in Epstein Circle look the other way at thenation.com?
14:33
[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, Ketha.
14:34
[SPEAKER_02]: Thanks for having me.
14:49
[SPEAKER_01]: Now it's time to talk about the hidden politics of crossword puzzles.
14:53
[SPEAKER_01]: That we turned to Natan last.
14:55
[SPEAKER_01]: He writes essays, poetry, and crossword puzzles through the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Atlantic, the LA Review of Books, and the Nation.
15:04
[SPEAKER_01]: His new book is across the universe, the past, present, and future of the crossword puzzle.
15:10
[SPEAKER_01]: We reached him today in Providence, Rhode Island, where he's on a book tour.
15:15
[SPEAKER_01]: Natan last, welcome to the program.
15:18
[SPEAKER_01]: Well these days the New York Times Crossword puzzle and it's associated word games has over 1 million paying subscribers for the games app, more than 10 million daily players.
15:32
[SPEAKER_01]: The time games app alone, I read, makes $24 million a year, so the puzzle is big business.
15:41
[SPEAKER_00]: It absolutely is.
15:42
[SPEAKER_00]: There's an internal joke at the times that the company has now become a gaming outfit that just happens to offer news.
15:51
[SPEAKER_01]: Well, a few years ago, you submitted a crossword puzzle to the New York Times, and the grid included the word Anwar, a and W-A-R, and the clue that you provided was the usual one.
16:04
[SPEAKER_00]: What was it?
16:05
[SPEAKER_00]: Just something about Anwar, so dot the former president of Egypt who is almost always, I think, literally always the direction that clues for that five-liter name take.
16:15
[SPEAKER_01]: But that was not what appeared when the puzzle was published.
16:20
[SPEAKER_01]: The clue had been changed by the editors of the Times.
16:24
[SPEAKER_01]: The new clue was terrorist killed in a 2011 American drone strike.
16:31
[SPEAKER_01]: Now that was Anwar Al-Allaki.
16:34
[SPEAKER_01]: a name unknown to most Americans.
16:37
[SPEAKER_01]: So that clue you say, struck you is strange.
16:40
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly why was that?
16:42
[SPEAKER_00]: One, the drone strike was sort of personified as an American, but the fact that all walkie was American is left out.
16:50
[SPEAKER_00]: Two, this is a drone strike in my morning puzzle, unclear that that passes the Sunday morning breakfast test, as it's called, you know, the victim to avoid
17:01
[SPEAKER_00]: death or disease in the puzzle, and instead just do something a little bit more diverting.
17:08
[SPEAKER_00]: But three, it just didn't really drive with the politics of myself and my co-constructors.
17:15
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a puzzle made alongside a class that I teach, the jasa crossword class.
17:20
[SPEAKER_00]: And that class featured retirees and seniors who'd work at the ACLU or a civil liberties lawyers elsewhere who thought that this, you know, first extrajudicial killing of the Obama era was not something salutary and we're extremely unhappy to have their name associated with it in the puzzle.
17:39
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I looked up all alachy at Wikipedia and they identify him as the first U.S. citizen to be targeted and assassinated by a U.S. government drone strike.
17:53
[SPEAKER_01]: You think that would have made a better clue?
17:55
[SPEAKER_01]: That sounds way better to me.
17:56
[SPEAKER_01]: Much more worth right.
17:58
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, there's a question, the clue described him as a terrorist, a sigh from the fact that should terrorists be killed without judicial process, you weren't that happy with calling him a terrorist.
18:12
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, this was an era in which that word came to have a much more expansive meaning, both in common parlance and legally, because I'll walk you with someone who spread anti-American
18:27
[SPEAKER_00]: And, you know, certainly the things he was saying about the country and its future were not a little rosy, but again, we live in a place where at least until recently freedom of speech was highly prized and it was extremely unfortunate to have this person just tired as a terrorist.
18:47
[SPEAKER_00]: In a way that the crossword puzzle tends to do, right, we come to clues in the New York Times
18:53
[SPEAKER_00]: expecting this, you know, encyclopedic one-to-one relationship between clue-and-answer, but of course, behind every more of the leveling, which is a point of view and a person instantiating it.
19:04
[SPEAKER_01]: Second example that you talk about in your book was a 2022 Monday puzzle, the easiest of the puzzles, easiest of the week, that one included on the grid, the entry clean coal, and what was the clue that was published for that?
19:23
[SPEAKER_00]: The clue that was published was greener energy source.
19:27
[SPEAKER_00]: That's an extremely dubious claim.
19:29
[SPEAKER_00]: And originally, Lim Lempel, the constructor of that puzzle, had submitted the clue dubious source of green energy, which strikes me as much true, but also strikes me as just as editorial opposition is out and out claiming that clean call is somehow green.
19:46
[SPEAKER_01]: I understand that there was a protest to puzzle editor Will Shorts about defining clean coal as greener energy source and he actually defended it.
19:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right, the original clue instigated some back and forth and eventually the editors at the time decided that greener energy source was more concise, it didn't hedge and went with that.
20:13
[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a solvership uproar, so people who happened to be both
20:18
[SPEAKER_00]: dedicated New York Times crossword solvers and activists and policy researchers in the environmental space took to Twitter and to cry at the clue in really intense tones.
20:30
[SPEAKER_00]: Some, you know, thinking about this is the same kind of anodine climate copy that, you know, gives denialous cover, right, that this was an extremely intense misstep.
20:40
[SPEAKER_00]: And it did broaden
20:47
[SPEAKER_00]: pushing everything from misinformation to, you know, tweaked and skewed information to all the above.
20:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, what we want from the New York Times is a correction, and in this case, the most unusual of all corrections appeared a correction to a clue in the crossword puzzle.
21:08
[SPEAKER_01]: Tell us about that.
21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
21:10
[SPEAKER_00]: The times issued that rarest of things across wood correction, which read the clue for 47 across in the Monday puzzle, implied incorrectly that coal is a viable source of clean energy.
21:25
[SPEAKER_00]: Then went on to hedge a little bit further while it is possible to capture and sequester some of the greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from coal-fired power plants.
21:34
[SPEAKER_00]: The technology has never been used on a large scale because of
21:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you get, you know, that classic second sentence of any apology sort of going one step back and say, well, you had reason for this.
21:49
[SPEAKER_01]: We've looked at a couple of political controversies about crossword clues that have to deal with current political debates.
21:59
[SPEAKER_01]: You have some other really interesting ones about how clues have changed as our historical knowledge has changed.
22:15
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so NAU, NAU, those are great crossword letters.
22:19
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got four vowels, which is a really great ratio.
22:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Crossword constructors need those vowel heavy words.
22:25
[SPEAKER_00]: And the mammal, of course, the rebels who threw off British colonial rule in Kenya.
22:32
[SPEAKER_00]: This is part of the decolonization push in the 50s and 60s.
22:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And when in the early 50s that answer appeared in the times, the clue just as the international reporting desks would have had it read something like African terrorist or Kenyan menace and later.
22:53
[SPEAKER_00]: as the decades go on, the times clues as well as the international reporting deaths continue to say something like African terrorists.
23:01
[SPEAKER_00]: You had this racist othering lens on the event and it isn't until 2013 that the clues speak any modicum of truth to power and go something like a Kenyan rebels who fought for independence from British rule.
23:18
[SPEAKER_00]: same event, same historical stage, just the way history books of reinterpreted the events, so too can the crossword correct the record.
23:28
[SPEAKER_01]: And even broader change occurs around the word India.
23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: That's right.
23:34
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, when India first appears in the puzzle, it's not even include very frequently by reference to the country.
23:43
[SPEAKER_00]: The early clues for India are things like kippling story setting.
23:49
[SPEAKER_00]: Or even where George Orwell was born because his father worked in the colonial administration there.
23:53
[SPEAKER_00]: And so rather than clues about the rich history of the subcontent, some cultural item that the country has produced, you instead get these white lenses on the country and its history.
24:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And it took a long time for in particular South Asian crossword makers to push for more interesting lenses on
24:15
[SPEAKER_00]: the country clues the reference Raga or reference the immense food history and contributions, something that's actually about India.
24:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Not a high bar.
24:25
[SPEAKER_01]: Then there's the question of who writes the puzzles.
24:29
[SPEAKER_01]: You've emphasized that most of the crossword puzzle authors are white men.
24:36
[SPEAKER_01]: But in 2020, you say there was a woman who submitted a puzzle where all the names that appeared in the puzzle were of women, no men's names appeared in the grid.
24:48
[SPEAKER_01]: What happened to that puzzle?
24:50
[SPEAKER_00]: That puzzle had one clue changed, I believe it was D, D-E-E, which then was changed to Billy D Williams.
24:58
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, happily in this case, a black man and someone worth knowing, but the original intent of the constructor Sally Hulsher was to finally have a puzzle in which every reference was to a woman.
25:09
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was of course meant to undo the decades of puzzles in which it's
25:14
[SPEAKER_00]: not at all hard to find references exclusively to men, you know, along the same lines of if the Supreme Court were nine women, it wouldn't at all make up for the decades in which it was nine men, right?
25:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And that puzzle story day, a large discussion about what exactly across world world needs to do to sort of
25:35
[SPEAKER_00]: correct the gender imbalance that's crept up.
25:37
[SPEAKER_00]: And in fact, worsened in the last 10 to 20 years, when it comes to who makes the puzzle.
25:43
[SPEAKER_00]: And therefore, often, who appears at it.
25:45
[SPEAKER_01]: Last, but not least, I want to talk about the clue for the word illegal that you objected to, that we all would object to.
25:55
[SPEAKER_00]: I hope so.
25:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, the clue for the word illegal in 2012
26:03
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's going to huge movement, of course, to not not tar any single person as illegal, right?
26:08
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a human being who even if they pass into the country in a way that flouts immigration law, which as someone who works in that field, I know you'd still to give someone the respect and the dignity to not call them illegal, no person as illegal, no human being as legal is the activist chant.
26:26
[SPEAKER_00]: And
26:27
[SPEAKER_00]: It really was a surprise to the editors of the Times crossword when someone brought up, that this was an insensitive and just downright nasty type of clue.
26:38
[SPEAKER_00]: And what wasn't expects and what has slowly happened is a softening there that eventually you don't get the response you got back then, which is, well, it's an addictionary that way.
26:47
[SPEAKER_00]: but rather you now get, you know what?
26:49
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a ton of ways to clue every single word.
26:52
[SPEAKER_00]: We should be thoughtful, just pause a half second before introducing a clue like that.
26:57
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think happily things are mending slowly.
27:00
[SPEAKER_01]: In a completely different key, when we're talking about politics in the Cross-Repuzzle, we have to talk about the greatest political puzzle of all time, and that was the day of the presidential election in 1996, when Bill Clinton and Bob Dole were
27:18
[SPEAKER_01]: basically tied, as it went to election day, and the day of the presidential election, the New York Times Crossword puzzle had a clue that read, the headline of tomorrow's paper two words, it was going to be blank, elected, and both seven letters.
27:39
[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, Clinton Fit, how did they do it?
27:43
[SPEAKER_01]: Did the puzzle writers know who was going to win the election?
27:48
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so on the Tuesday of election day 1996, Bob Dole and Clinton, which I've about seven letters long, appeared next to the word elected in the New York Times crossword.
27:59
[SPEAKER_00]: That night, news anchors before the race was called deadpan to a shocked news watching audience that the times had been early and flagrant and calling the race.
28:11
[SPEAKER_00]: But what it happened was Jeremiah Farrell, the ingenious and devilish constructor of that puzzle, had written clues going down that worked regardless of which candidate you picked for that slot.
28:25
[SPEAKER_00]: So one of them at that first letter was black Halloween animal, which could rightfully be
28:38
[SPEAKER_01]: And the clue for the last letter of the answer that worked for both Clinton and Bob Dole, that clue was much debated political initials.
28:49
[SPEAKER_01]: And the answer was both NRA and ERA.
28:54
[SPEAKER_01]: And for the last letter of Clinton, E for the last letter of Bob Dole.
28:59
[SPEAKER_01]: So both Clinton and Bob Dole worked for the seven letter answer.
29:06
[SPEAKER_00]: And so he found this beautiful way to trick this all over ship, whereas a crossword normally has one single important solution.
29:14
[SPEAKER_00]: This was what was called a shrug in her puzzle, because it had two solutions that day.
29:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Jeremiah Farrell, we thank him even now for doing that.
29:25
[SPEAKER_01]: That's my favorite political puzzle.
29:27
[SPEAKER_01]: Do you have one?
29:29
[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, that's a great question.
29:30
[SPEAKER_00]: I loved a puzzle in that same vein by Ben Talzig, that ran in the times.
29:37
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also a shrugink or puzzle.
29:40
[SPEAKER_00]: In this case, it was a puzzle interested in the concept of gender fluidity.
29:46
[SPEAKER_00]: So gender fluid was an answer.
29:47
[SPEAKER_00]: And,
29:48
[SPEAKER_00]: clues like word that may precede sex could be same if you chose the M for masculine or safe if you chose the F for feminine.
29:59
[SPEAKER_00]: So in a kind of homage to that Jeremiah Feral puzzle, but also in a way to update it for the present conversation around gender politics.
30:07
[SPEAKER_00]: I thought that was a really ingenious puzzle.
30:10
[SPEAKER_01]: want to ask one last thing about you.
30:12
[SPEAKER_01]: You are not only a writer of Crossword puzzles, it says here that you have worked as director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project.
30:22
[SPEAKER_01]: Please explain how you work on both Asylum Seekers and Crossword puzzles.
30:29
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't often know how I find the time, but my day job, my career has been in policy and economic integration policy, and it's been a great pleasure to work for in particular humanitarian migration and migrants, so refugees and asylum seekers for the past 10 years.
30:48
[SPEAKER_00]: It's obviously a very difficult time to work on that issue, but they do in some ways inform each other.
30:55
[SPEAKER_00]: And so by day, I think I'm exposed
30:58
[SPEAKER_00]: cultures, languages, people that aren't often in the New York Times puzzle, let alone its reportage.
31:05
[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's really nice to open up a blank crossword grid and try to infuse my puzzles with some of the things I've learned about at the rest of the world through my
31:23
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
31:24
[SPEAKER_00]: Here it is, anger, iron, temper, rage, era, epoch, eon, age, doremi, and fassol la, Egyptian sun god, rah, rah, rah, rah.
31:38
[SPEAKER_01]: The town last, his new book is across the universe, the past, present, and future of the Crossword puzzle, and you can read his article, The Hidden Politics of the Crossword puzzle at thenation.com.
31:52
[SPEAKER_01]: The town, thanks for this book, and thanks for talking with us today.
31:56
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much, John.
32:06
[SPEAKER_01]: You've been listening to Start Making Sense, a podcast from The Nation magazine.
32:11
[SPEAKER_01]: Renee Reynolds is our associate producer, Alan Minsky is our producer, Jack Merkinson is Executive Producer.
32:19
[SPEAKER_01]: Baskar Sunkara is President of The Nation, Katrina Vandenhuvul is editor and publisher of The Nation.
32:26
[SPEAKER_01]: Our theme music is from Barcelona, Afrobe, License by Creative Commons.
32:31
[SPEAKER_01]: You can find out more about StartMakingSense at thenation.com and you can subscribe to StartMakingSense on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
32:42
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm John Weiner.
32:44
[SPEAKER_01]: Thanks for listening.