This scientist’s side hustle is creating crosswords for The New York Times

If you’re feeling unaccomplished, stop reading. It’s only going to get worse.

In his day-to-day life, Dr. Mark MacLachlan is a professor of chemistry researching something called ‘supramolecular materials’ (don’t ask) and dean of science at the University of British Columbia. His days are filled with unpronounceable chemicals and long meetings.

For the average reader, relaxing after work might involve scrolling through Instagram, reading a book, watching some junk television, say.

Dean MacLachlan creates crosswords. For The New York Times, LA Times, and The Wall Street Journal, no less. And no, he doesn’t watch Love Island.

“When I was a postdoctoral fellow, my wife and I would buy the newspaper every week and do the New York Times crossword puzzles together. At some point, I started thinking, somebody must create these puzzles. So I made some, submitted them and promptly had them rejected.”

The florally festooned dean (he wears an aloha shirt every day) first had a crossword accepted by The LA Times in 2016 and he estimates he’s created about 75 puzzles since; for the math whizzes in the back, that’s about one every two months.

Did you know? A crossword enthusiast or constructor is called a CRUCIVERBALIST.

It’s not his first foray into competitive word play: As a child, he won a contest for the local newspaper for free copy-editing to find the most errors in the classifieds section, and in elementary school, challenged his classmates to an anagram competition using the word “incubator”. “I think I found more than a hundred words in the end.”

If you’re in Vancouver, you may spot Mark in a café on a Saturday morning, filling out The New York Times crosswords in the local newspaper, which he says is his “little addiction” and Alzheimer's test. “It’s my test to make sure that I'm still with it.”

If you’re flying into the city, you might see him creating them on the plane, his most common crossword workshop where he has a good chunk of time to spare. On a flight to Toronto, he conceived what may have been his pièce de resistance: a chemistry-themed crossword featuring the noble gases.

Or perhaps it was the crossword created in a very special collaboration: with his son John MacLachlan, who will be studying music this fall at UBC. Appropriately, the theme was ‘musical turns of phrase’.

Mark created his first crosswords with pen and paper, but these days he uses a computer program, aided by crossword dictionaries stuffed with puzzle-friendly words.

He starts by choosing a theme. Mark then creates a grid to fit the theme entries, and fills it with words, introducing black squares and making sure to maintain rotational symmetry. “Crosswords do have a certain science to them. Creating them requires a mathematical, puzzle-inclined mind.”

Rules include that words can’t be obscure (so no 16^th-century Italian chamber pots), can’t repeat, and should generally pass the ‘breakfast test—that is, the word is appropriate to use at the breakfast table with your family (although it’s rumoured at least one NYT puzzle has been ass-themed).

The last step is to create the clues. All of this can take up to 80 hours for just one crossword, depending on the intricacy of the theme and the number of revisions required. Weekday crosswords earn US$50-300 and the larger, more complex weekend puzzles can net as much as US$2,250. “I certainly don’t do it for the money.”

Did you know? There are puzzles that can have multiple solutions, called Schrödinger puzzles. The most famous example was published in the NYT in 1996 on the day of the U.S. election, where Bill Clinton and Bob Dole were the candidates.  The clue was “Title for 39-Across next year”, and the answer was MISTERPRESIDENT. Remarkably, 39-Across could be answered either CLINTON or BOBDOLE, and all the clues and answers worked with either candidate’s name.

Mark’s work has earned him fans. Provost and Vice-President, Academic, Dr. Gage Averill, thwarted by a particularly tricky compass-themed crossword, checked the puzzle creator to find out who to blame for “singlehandedly tanking my average Thursday solve time”. It was Mark. “Mark has a special knack for composing diabolically clever themed puzzles, precisely the kind that I find most satisfying to solve, and I really appreciate his frequent sly music references.”

Another UBC fan is former dean of science, Dr. Simon Peacock, with whom Mark has co-created, but yet to publish, a number of crosswords. “Mark is an expert crossword constructor.  My favourite (and at the time, most frustrating) crossword puzzle was constructed by Mark nearly 10 years ago.  Solving the puzzle, titled “Aluminum Siding” required thinking outside the box, literally.  SPOILER: All of the Across answers had an extra “AL” that need to be added to the words outside of the grid.”

With students heading back to school next week, is his puzzling now in the past? “Although it will be a busy term, I still plan to make some time in the evening and on weekends to construct new puzzles. I have three puzzles submitted and a Sunday crossword in The New York Times in the queue. I was thrilled to get it accepted.”