There are at least three big ways in which Robbie Kubala, assistant professor of philosophy at UT Austin, appreciates crossword puzzles.
One: Kubala is exceptionally good at doing them, having placed in the top ranks of speed-solvers at the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
Two: They are a shared interest with his partner, assistant professor of linguistics Kyle Mahowald, who is an expert crossword constructor.
Three: They are an object of philosophical interest. In his recent paper in the British Journal of Aesthetics, “The Aesthetics of Crossword Puzzles,” Kubala makes the case that crossword puzzles should be understood as having aesthetic qualities in much the way that art objects do.
“I suggest that there are three distinct sources of aesthetic value in crosswords,” Kubala writes. “First, and in common with puzzles such as jigsaws and sudoku, crosswords offer us an aesthetic experience of our own agency: paradigmatically, the aesthetic experience of struggling for and hitting upon the right solution. In addition to instantiating the aesthetic value of puzzles in general, crosswords in particular can have two other sources of aesthetic value: the visual appeal of grid art and the poetic delight of idiomatic language.”
Kubala’s serious interest in crosswords began, he says, when he and Mahowald started dating about 10 years ago. Kubala had been an occasional player before then, but Mahowald was hard core. He had placed the first of many puzzles he constructed for the New York Times when he was in high school, later interned with legendary New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz, and was friends with many of the elite players and constructors in the larger crossword milieu.
Kubala started doing the daily Times puzzle with Mahowald, and eventually got faster than him.
“Making puzzles and doing them relies on different parts of the brain, I think,” says Mahowald, who would eventually place 18 puzzles in the Times. “Robbie was a pretty serious musician when he was growing up, and I suspect there’s a connection there. A lot of the fastest solvers have a musical background.”
Both Mahowald and Kubala have found ways to connect their interest in crossword puzzles to their academic work. Mahowald recently co-authored a paper on using large language models, the framework behind ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, to solve the “cryptic” crosswords that are popular in the U.K.
Kubala’s paper in the British Journal of Aesthetics may be the first to ever approach crosswords with the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy.
“There’s been a lot of work over the past few years on the aesthetics of games,” says Kubala, “but as far as I know nothing else that addresses crossword puzzles.”
Kubala’s paper is both a technical argument about whether crosswords should qualify as “aesthetic” (they should), and a quite accessible introduction to thinking philosophically about crosswords. He lucidly explains the difference between American and British-style crosswords. He talks about themed and non-themed puzzles, the basic question of what playing a game is — “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles,” according to one definition—and the world of what might be called “crossword criticism,” in which people enthusiastically analyze and argue about a given puzzle.
“We expect a certain amount of disagreement when it comes to works of art,” says Kubala, “and other kinds of aesthetic objects. I might judge some Picasso to be really awful. You might find it aesthetically wonderful. We expect that kind of disagreement, and we see that in the crossword blogosphere. The very fact that there is a crossword blogosphere, the fact that we’ve got these practices surrounding crosswords, to me suggests an important parallel between crosswords and canonical works of art.”
Kubala is currently at work on a follow-up paper, for The Philosophers’ Magazine, about what makes a word or phrase a good crossword entry (or “cross-worthy,” as they say in crossword circles). He imagines that he may write more in the future. “It’s a really rich subject,” he says. One could write about, for instance, how to characterize the unique style of different crossword constructors, which is often quickly evident to sophisticated puzzlers. “You can totally tell who it is,” says Kubala.
I ask him for a good example of a puzzle by Mahowald that evinces style. “Kyle likes wordplay, and he likes being very creative in the answers that his clues generate,” he says. Kubala points to the February 17, 2016 puzzle in the Times, in which Mahowald puns on the theme of coldness.
“I remember one clue was ‘Next Republican nominee after Dwight D. Ice in Shower?’” says Kubala. “The answer was ‘Barry Coldwater.’”