#anna shechtman

[pneumaticpresence]

"[C]rossword puzzle constructor," I found, was a compatible identity container with "anorexic." She has a discipline, I imagined people thinking, so she must be disciplined. […] I was using these highly impersonal labels to develop a personality. I was misrecognizing myself in their image.

The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes such scenes of misrecognition—scenes in which we feel the gap between who we are and who we want to be—as foundational to the development of the ego.

But his English translators always retain the French spelling of misrecognition (méconaissance) in his writings, because Lacan was playing with French to unmask this psychic truth. He understood "self-knowledge" (or, a pun on the French reflexive pronoun me and the French word for knowledge, conaissance) as the flip side of "misrecognition."

Méconaissance (misrecognition) = me-conaissance (self-knowledge). By this logic, there is no way to know the self outside of a tragicomic interplay between who we are and who we aren't, who we could be and how we feel. The anorexic, then, is just another person trying to be a better version of herself. That she risks death in so trying is the most disastrous paradox of the disease.

[…]

After spending the better half of a year in [recovery], I returned home to New York City, my recovery precarious but hard-won. I was learning to trust my body's hunger cues and to reimagine my days in terms of opportunities and responsibilities—relations with a syntax—not willfully overdetermined by food rules and restrictions. Nothing about life in recovery felt natural to me. My older sister and I even went to couples therapy to rediscover the cadences of our connection, which, like so much else, had been disarticulated by my eating disorder. I had to figure out who I was without anorexia—how I related to myself as a woman, as a student, as a body in space, to other women and to men, and even to crossword puzzles. I had to figure out that these relationships couldn't be "solved" but only developed and hewn through perpetual, ever-humbling misrecognitions.

—Anna Shechtman, The Riddles of the Sphinx: The Feminist History of the Crossword Puzzle (2024)

[puzzlenation]

Women of Letters (and Squares and Boxes and Clues and...)

Puzzles bring joy to so many of us. They’re an escape, a challenge, a satisfying little test of our wits, our dedication, our creativity, and our flexibility of thought. In uncertain times, in times of trouble, people often turn to puzzles. Puzzles were a refuge for many during lockdown when COVID hung over our heads. And now, when so much seems uncertain, if not downright unstable, people will…

[transmutationisms]

hey! i saw all the crossword stuff and wanted to ask if there are any other crosswords you like besides nyt/new yorker. thanks!

hi! so, the closest you'll get to nyt is the washington post and wall street journal puzzles; these are generally drawing from roughly the same knowledge base, though i find their clueing tends to be a bit straighter and less creative (new yorker's knowledge base skews a little more toward arts and academic theory, though this depends heavily on who the constructor is on any given day). the usatoday puzzle tends easy (meaning lots of straight clues; usually about the difficulty of an nyt monday) but it's also become much more interesting since erik agard took over as their puzzle editor: he's really pushed to move beyond the usual stodgy newspaper knowledge base, so although that puzzle doesn't scratch the same itch as, like, an nyt saturday, i do still really like it. i also love the black crossword, which is a free daily mini that places emphasis on terms and clues from across the black diaspora, and there are some free online puzzles that are pretty good: brendan emmett quigley posts a themeless one on mondays and a themed one on thursdays, and there's merl reagle's archive, which posts a sunday puzzle once a week.

but! puzzle preferences are highly individual so it's always worth poking around to see what you like. this is a good list of puzzles you can try out; you might also find that you really like certain constructors, and just follow their work (i love erik agard and anna shechtman, eg).

[jrmilazzo]

Of course, there is no such thing as “The Algorithm” or even “the Facebook algorithm”—nor “the TikTok algorithm,” which is said to be better. It’s both a synecdoche and a hypostatization, like if I called my car “my wheels” and then insisted they were reinventing everything. The Algorithm—sometimes short for algorithmic rec­ommendations, sometimes a stand-in for social media or the inter­net in toto—does seem to know what I want to see, if not exactly what I want to know. It’s easy to get the impression that it knows everything, but also only what I’ve told it. It homogenizes, and it silos. It’s the commons, but with gatekeepers. There’s never been anything like it! But it’s really just an extension of Enlightenment rationalism. It’s all there in Leibniz. None of this is strictly true, but it’s all become truism. If only there were some method of think­ing—some procedure or set of rules used in calculation and prob­lem solving—that could help us work through these contradictions.

[magnetictapedatastorage]

BBC News: The ‘real outlier’ in the crossword puzzle-making community

BBC News - The ‘real outlier’ in the crossword puzzle-making community

[thatsonemorbidcorvid]

“"The other woman who I really admire is Julia Penelope," says Anna. "She is a linguist and was writing her own puzzles that she deemed lesbian-separatist crossword puzzles filled with words like herstory and womyn spelt with a y. She could not get her puzzles published in the New York Times, and so she self-published a collection of puzzles that I really love."”

“An activist and an organizer, Penelope attended the first conference of the Gay Academic Union in 1973 at the City College of New York. She was a delegate to the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977, and she participated in the planning meetings that led to the founding of the Lesbian Herstory Archives. She founded several activist groups, including the "Lincoln Legion of Lesbians" and "Lesbians for Lesbians."[4] She was one of the first scholars to teach women's studies courses, including Twentieth-Century Lesbian Novels and Feminist Literary Criticism.[2]

Penelope insisted on lesbian visibility in the academy, bringing Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Mary Daly, Pat Parker, Chrystos and others to the University of Nebraska. She encouraged Catherine Nicholson and Harriet Desmoines to bring the lesbian-feminist journal Sinister Wisdom to Lincoln. In 1977, at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in Chicago, she organized the "Lesbian Languages and Literatures" panel with Daly, Lorde, Judith McDaniel, and Adrienne Rich as speakers.[4]

In 1988, she co-edited with Sarah Lucia Hoagland the first anthology on lesbian separatism, For Lesbians Only: A Separatist Anthology. As a lesbian separatist, Penelope was controversial among lesbians. According to her biography in Lesbian Histories and Cultures: An Encyclopedia (2000), she became disheartened by lesbian infighting and withdrew from lesbian writing.[3]”

[pneumaticpresence]

Freudian psychoanalysis runs on word association and linguistic substitutions. Freud's case study of Dora is a case in point: his analysis of his patient's second dream, for example, in which, in her telling, she compared a darkened forest to a Secessionist painting of woodland nymphs, allowed him to draw out the double meaning on nymphae, signifying both mythological sprites and also, evidently, the labia minora. From Dora's dream Freud correctly deduced that she had been covertly reading an encyclopedia—even, and maybe especially, its entries on sex and the body—and that she therefore knew the term's taboo second meaning, however buried it was in her unconscious. He could then make his final deduction: Dora wished to be vaginally penetrated, just as she had entered the forest in her dream.

Such symbolic displacement (forest = vagina) is the bread and butter of Freudian psychoanalysis; it should also be familiar to the average solver of a crossword puzzle. Freud was inventing a new language—the language of the unconscious—but it operated according to the logic of the "old" one, as it was being elaborated in the field of modern linguistics during the same period. This new science of language established a general truth of usage: words don't serve as proxies for "real" objects in the world; they serve as proxies for other words, gaining meaning only through these substitutions. The meaning of the word forest, for example, is determined as much by its antonyms, its negatively defined substitutions (not desert, not ocean), as it is by its synonyms (woods, thicket, jungle), all of which conjure figurative associations that inhere in the word's meaning. Freud saw the unconscious as the realm of the unspeakable, and so the sexual fantasies it guarded could only be articulated by way of figurative proxies. In other words, a pipe is not just a pipe; a forest is not just a forest.

Crossword clues also play on such substitutions. A clue can be straight-forward: three letters for "consume" (answer: EAT); or it can play on linguistic misdirection: three letters for "not fast" (answer: EAT). Although crossword clues might provide insight into the mechanisms of the unconscious, they are not, ultimately, written in its language. The average solver wouldn't know what to make of six letters for "forest" (answer: VAGINA), but the potential for words to mean so much with so little context remains the puzzler's—and the Freudian's—great pleasure.

—Anna Shechtman, The Riddle of the Sphinx: The Feminist History of the Crossword (2024)

[puzzlenation]

5 Questions for Crossword Constructor Erica Wojcik!

In today's blog post, we've got 5 Questions for crossword constructor Erica Wojcik! @ewojcik

Welcome to 5 Questions, our recurring interview series where we reach out to puzzle constructors, game designers, writers, filmmakers, musicians, artists, and puzzle enthusiasts from all walks of life! This feature is all about exploring the vast and intriguing puzzle community by talking to those who make puzzles and those who enjoy them. And this marks the second edition of a new series of…

[pleasantlyfulldetective]

The ‘real outlier’ in the crossword puzzle-making community

Anna Shechtman is determined to make the crossword puzzle scene more diverse, but has also had to deal with her own anorexia. from BBC News - Home https://ift.tt/gj5X8EU via IFTTT

[funnynewsheadlines]

New Yorker Crossword Constructors Recommend the Best Games to Play While Social Distancing

The New Yorker crossword constructors Natan Last, Aimee Lucido, and Anna Shechtman suggest games to play while social distancing, including CodeNames and Fibbage. from Humor, Satire, and Cartoons https://ift.tt/3cHI0V4 from Blogger https://ift.tt/3bqAJbM

[shirlleycoyle]

New York Times Crossword Constructors Are Fighting Against its Systemic Bias

Hundreds of crossword constructors and enthusiasts co-signed a letter to the man in charge of the New York Times puzzles, voicing concerns about implicit bias in a system that they believe favors old, straight, white men and erases the voices of minority crossword constructors and solvers.

People who have paid close attention to the New York Times crossword, which is solved by millions upon millions of people every day, know that the cluing of the puzzles often seem targeted at imagined solvers who are older white males. This is evident in the clues the puzzles use, the fact that many of the constructors and editors are white men, and the fact that the crossword has had a few sexist and racist cluing controversies in recent years. In this open letter, constructors say that answers such as "MARIE KONDO" and "FLAVAFLAV" are too “niche” to understand. Meanwhile "HOOD," clued by "Place with homies," has made the puzzle.

Outlets running crosswords for hundreds of thousands of subscribers a week, in digital and print form, are overwhelmingly edited by white, cis-gendered men, catering to a white, cis-gendered male audience. A group of current and former crossword constructors aims to change that—and they've amassed nearly 600 supporters in the process.

Those enthusiasts, professional constructors, and test-solvers voiced concerns about implicit bias at the New York Times in a letter openly published last week and addressed to Eric von Coelln, the executive director of puzzles at the Times.

Following an article published in the Atlantic last month by former Times crossword constructor Natan Last, as well as the recent resignation of constructor Claire Muscat over concerns about being tokenized in her role as a test solver, the letter asks readers to sign in support against "the systematic erasure of minority voices in puzzles written by women, people of color, and queer constructors."

"This occurs both at the selection stage—when puzzles are disqualified because they include references that are considered unfamiliar to an imagined straight, white, male, and middle-aged audience—and at the editing stage, when clues are changed to cater to this imagined community of solvers," the letter says.

The majority of co-signers on the letter are subscribers to the newspaper who solve the puzzle. Many are also crossword constructors themselves, who have made puzzles for the Times and for other outlets.

"It's so easy to write off crossword puzzles as a frivolous activity," Aimee Lucido, a constructor for the New Yorker crossword who co-signed the letter, told Motherboard. "It’s a game, after all… Many people solve the crossword in the morning, and then forget about it by the afternoon."

According to Danielle Rhoades Ha, vice president of communications at the Times, von Coelln spoke with Muscat, Last, and Times constructor Anna Shechtman last week about the letter.

"We are also making the puzzle submission process more collaborative by sharing proofs with constructors and by digitizing the process, which will be complete by the end of May," Rhoades Ha said.

A written response to the constructors from von Coelln, which Rhoades Ha sent to Motherboard, outlined the ways he and the rest of the puzzles department plan to address the concerns in the letter—including a commitment to diversifying and expanding the editorial team, and more inclusive processes for collaboration within that team.

"By the end of 2020, we will rely on a combination of collaborative digital tools and more collaborative interaction models within the team to make the editorial process more creative and transparent for everyone on the editorial team, including test-solvers and fact-checkers," von Coelln wrote. "We're also focused on improving our communications with constructors. We recently cut the submission response time for constructors in half, and plan to further digitize the process this quarter. We share edited proofs with constructors as part of our puzzle pack editing system and we will address how we begin to do that with our daily puzzles by the Fall if not sooner."

Muscat told Motherboard that she doesn't feel comfortable judging the Times' response as adequate at this point.

"Making a change to a conservative institution is a long and difficult process, and a response is just the start," she said. "We are, however, grateful for the Times’ openness to continuing this dialogue and are eager to continue advocating for a fairer process and safer workplace for those who have been and continue to be marginalized."

"The truth is, it’s not about whether or not I get to solve a crossword with FLAVAFLAV in it," Luciado said. "It’s about what it says to the world when voice of The New York Times crossword puzzle is consistently and aggressively white, male, cis, straight, and roughly 55 years old. It’s what we’re telling our solvers when we insist that ORR (hockey player) is common knowledge but OPI (nail polish brand) isn’t. That KITTENHEEL isn’t well-known enough to belong in a crossword. That IED is more cross-worthy than IUD."

New York Times Crossword Constructors Are Fighting Against its Systemic Bias syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/