The crossword editors also now meet for editorial workshops where the entire team gets to “argue and philosophize” about puzzles, Mason said. (The first edition gave the story behind the answer to “Italian cheese city.”) Mason has also debuted a testing panel that gives feedback on puzzles and has described the panel as “a vibe check” that - aside from looking for typos and fact checking, done separately - is particularly interested in whether the puzzle is fun for a diverse group of people to play. Under Mason, the Times has also launched a new weekly column to give insight into puzzle answers new, old, and evolving. Instead, applicants can submit “a theme set with theme clues,” a partially filled 15×15 grid, and a grid as small as 7×7. Mason noted the barrier to entry and ensured the fellowship application does not require a fully-constructed puzzle.
The learning curve for potential constructors can be steep, and the digital tools most popular with professional constructors can be costly and user unfriendly. If we see a really cool puzzle with new kinds of clues and fills and publish it, hopefully that encourages people to give us more like that.” “And we’re going to be able to model certain things. “I think that in mentoring these constructors, we’re going to learn stuff, too,” Mason said.
The fellowship, she hopes, can help kick off a new pattern. “It was becoming clear that people were sending us the kinds of puzzles they thought would get in rather than really pushing the limits and trying to show us new things,” Mason said. Constructors seemed to have a fixed idea of the kind of puzzles that The New York Times chose to publish. Part of the diversity problem was self-perpetuating, Mason saw. The New York Times, even while interviewing Mason for the job, had acknowledged it need to change. Mason said creating a fellowship has been on her mind from the very beginning. The new constructor fellowship is the brainchild of Everdeen Mason, who joined the Times as editorial director for Games almost exactly a year ago. Only those who have not yet had a puzzle published by The New York Times will be considered. The chosen fellows will receive three months of mentorship from one of five puzzle editors - that’s Liu, Bennett, Joel Fagliano, Sam Ezersky, and the legendary Shortz - as they work to construct a puzzle for general submission. “There’s an expectation that the person solving your puzzle looks like Will Shortz.” (Until editors Wyna Liu and Tracy Bennett were hired in 2020, the Times puzzle team consisted of three white men.) If an interruption occurs in a switch, there will be no electricity beyond that point.March 12, 2021“You’ll get a rejection from the Times saying ‘This is not something that the average solver will know,’ which carries with it this connotation that an average solver is a white man in his 50s,” one crossword constructor told me last year. Voltage passes through these devices in order to continue down the line. Household circuits don't operate like that, you have a consistent average of 120 volt at each receptacle, no matter how many loads you have on the circuit.īy contrast, switches and circuit breakers are wired in series. And if the appliance in the first receptacle shorted out or failed in some other way, it would interrupt the current to the other outlets in the circuit.
If wall receptacle circuits operated like that, you wouldn't be able to plug an appliance in down stream from another appliance in the same circuit because the voltage wouldn't be sufficient to run it.
A series circuit will drop (use) some voltage at each load until it dwindles to an insufficient level at some point down the line. The load itself conducts current down the line to the subsequent loads in the circuit. In a series circuit, current must pass through a load at each device. But, in fact, all household receptacles are always wired in parallel, and never in series. It's common to describe household wall receptacles that are wired together using the device terminals as wired in series.