The NY Times crossword is a strange beast. It’s bigger and has fewer black spaces for one thing, but the clues are a strange mix of general knowledge and synonyms, sometimes cryptically combined, although not in the same way that Australians or Brits are used to at least.

There’s quite an entertaining movie about them, Wordplay, which is definitely worth seeing just to watch our cousins (they’re part of the same family as us, but not quite the same immediate family) in the USA and their own crossword-solving culture.

And what inspired this post: here’s an interesting guide to solving the NY Times crossword by Will Shortz, who is the crossword editor for the paper and is the only person in the world to have a degree in Enigmatology, or the study of puzzles.