What’s a 9

Aug 15, 2023

To some, Michael Sharp is internet royalty. But many of his followers don't know his real name.

Colleagues and students at Binghamton University know him as Professor Sharp, an English lecturer with an interest in crime fiction and comics. To crossword lovers around the world, he is Rex Parker, the witty persona behind one of the most influential blogs in the crossword community, a nebulous but passionate network of solvers and constructors.

Every night at 10 p.m. Sharp waits for the online release of the next day's New York Times crossword puzzle, downloads it, and typically solves it in three to 10 minutes, depending on the difficulty — speeds dizzying even to seasoned solvers. (On Saturday and Sunday nights, the puzzle is released at 6 p.m.) Then he publishes the filled-in grid online and writes a blog post. He details words he liked, clues he hated, and judges the snappiness of the theme. He's unflinchingly honest. "No. No to all this … this is grating," he wrote about this Tuesday's puzzle.

We are unable to fully display the content of this page.

The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network. Please make sure your computer, VPN, or network allows javascript and allows content to be delivered from c950.chronicle.com and chronicle.blueconic.net.

Once javascript and access to those URLs are allowed, please refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.

If you continue to experience issues, contact us at 202-466-1032 or [email protected]

To some, Michael Sharp is internet royalty. But many of his followers don't know his real name.

Colleagues and students at Binghamton University know him as Professor Sharp, an English lecturer with an interest in crime fiction and comics. To crossword lovers around the world, he is Rex Parker, the witty persona behind one of the most influential blogs in the crossword community, a nebulous but passionate network of solvers and constructors.

Every night at 10 p.m. Sharp waits for the online release of the next day's New York Times crossword puzzle, downloads it, and typically solves it in three to 10 minutes, depending on the difficulty — speeds dizzying even to seasoned solvers. (On Saturday and Sunday nights, the puzzle is released at 6 p.m.) Then he publishes the filled-in grid online and writes a blog post. He details words he liked, clues he hated, and judges the snappiness of the theme. He's unflinchingly honest. "No. No to all this … this is grating," he wrote about this Tuesday's puzzle.

And, with occasional help, he's kept this up every day for 12 years.

When The Chronicle first interviewed Sharp, in 2008, the blog was just two years old, hitting around 6,000 visitors a day. Now, page views can climb up to 50,000, he said, especially on a Sunday, when befuddled solvers flock to it in search of an elusive answer.

As the internet morphs into a space increasingly controlled by content algorithms designed to funnel eyeballs to the hottest takes and hippest products, his blog, Rex Parker Does The NY Times Crossword Puzzle, has remained purposefully and stubbornly the same. There is no snazzy interface, no slick upgrade, just text, a few links, and a crossword.

Though the site remains a holdover from an internet era long gone, Sharp has had to navigate digital landmines only too modern: mindless bigotry in the comment section, politics on Twitter, and a readership that has become simultaneously more socially conscious and politically divided. In the past decade, his voice has shaped the way many in the crossword community think and talk about the tricky little puzzles they so love.

The blog was an accident. Its success was even more so.

In 2006, when blogging was becoming all the rage, Sharp figured he should try it out. It might prove a useful teaching tool, he thought.

Crosswords seemed a natural topic for his experiment, he said. Sharp was introduced to the puzzles by a friend during his senior year at Pomona College in 1990. In grad school he became a fiend, looking for ways to procrastinate on his Ph.D. work and distract himself while he quit smoking. The puzzles, if "done right," are like caffeine to his brain, he said.

His alias, Rex Parker, was completely made up. At first, Sharp posted the link to his new blog on the New York Times crossword message board, but traffic was slow, trickling in in the dozens, if that.

The New York Times puzzle is syndicated five weeks after its original publication, and sure enough, about five weeks after his first post, traffic to the site skyrocketed. When stumped solvers around the world Googled tough clues, Sharp's blog was the first hit. Soon enough, his self-appointed moniker, "King of CrossWorld," proved true.

"It was dumb, dumb luck. It felt like chance to me. I never meant to do this," he said.

Solvers bookmarked the site and kept coming back. Over the last decade, crossword fanatics and dabblers alike have navigated to Sharp's site, looking for answers before the Times posts them or searching for other solvers to discuss the day's puzzle with.

Through it all Sharp has remained almost brutally honest about the puzzles. There is even a website created by a fellow crossworder that tracks the percentage of puzzles Sharp has liked since 2016, broken down by day of the week, month, and trends. Friday puzzles are his favorite — he likes around 70 percent — but Sundays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays get the Rex Parker stamp of approval only about a third of time, according to the calculations.

Will Shortz, the renowned puzzle editor at The New York Times, once told CBS that he had "mixed feelings" about Sharp and his blog, but appreciates what it does for the community.

Rex Parker isn't the only crossword blog, but, with the exception of The New York Times's page, it's the only one widely known to die-hard fans and casual solvers alike, said Laura Braunstein, a digital-humanities librarian at Dartmouth College who became friends with Sharp through "crossword Twitter."

"I think what Michael showed in the early days – what, 11 years ago – was that this was something that people would want to read," said Braunstein, a constructor who writes for several crossword blogs including Sharp's. "I don't know if it was the only one at the time, but it is sort of the one that has lasted."

Sharp has even molded the way crossworders talk about the puzzle, Braunstein said. There's a specific language to the subculture: "fill" is the non-themed answers in the grid, "wordplay" refers to punny answers, and "crosswordese" is the collection of odd words seen frequently in puzzles but rarely in real life. Thanks to Sharp, there's now "Natick."

Natick, a suburb of Boston with a population of roughly 36,000, was the answer to a clue seven or eight years ago, Braunstein said. When solvers don't know a proper name, they can often still solve the puzzle using the words that cross the unknown name. But when two proper names overlap, and the solver doesn't know either, "you could potentially just be kind of out of luck completely," she said. That happened to Sharp with Natick. Every time a proper name crosses another proper name in the puzzle, it's dubbed a Natick.

"That has pretty much entered the language," Braunstein said. "There are people that have verbed it."

As much as Sharp has shaped the crossword community, the website has remained staunchly the same, with a simple, modular look. Sharp said there is an "uglification" of the internet as businesses have figured out how to socially engineer users’ experience.

"I nearly responded by trying to quote-unquote evolve, but then I realized, you know what, I’m going to respond by not evolving," Sharp said. "It went from being this novelty to being this retro curiosity over the course of a decade, just by my standing still and doing roughly the same thing for 12 years."

He has changed how he deals with the comment section. Sharp used to let the comment section flow freely, but some users tried to bait him or others into an argument, and some, too, were blatantly racist or anti-Semitic, he said. It started early on on the blog, and it's gotten worse since the 2016 election.

"How did we go from the crossword puzzle to people using racial epithets? Like, I have no idea," Sharp said.

Sharp tried to moderate all the comments himself, but it was too time-consuming. Over time he's selected a small group of trusted users to police the comments. It seems to be working for now.

Still, even with the occasional troll, the comments and his blog are a pillar in the crossword community, a "little clubhouse" where people have formed meaningful connections, he said.

Sharp prefers engaging with the crossword world on Twitter, where the community has blossomed. It's also where his alias as Rex Parker and his true identity are indistinguishable: He started the account in 2008 with the handle @rexparker, because that was how people knew him, but "it's basically just me, Michael Sharp," he said. Like so many others, he's trying to figure out how to talk about politics on Twitter and his blog without being just another voice screaming into the void.

He's trying to tweet out of anger less, he said. "Mostly I talk about crosswords, but because I’m a human being and I’m connected to other human beings around the world, that part has come out," Sharp said. "So I’m trying to dial it way back." (His pinned tweet, however, remains a photo array juxtaposing Ivanka Trump, clad in a shiny silver dress, and a bag of Jiffy Pop.)

Sharp's tweets and his blog have also amplified conversations in the crossword community around inclusion and representation, ones that have increased in the last several years.

"A reminder that the MAMA clue (27D: Papa's mate) is heterosexist," he wrote about Wednesday's puzzle. On Twitter, he often discusses the lack of female constructors published by The New York Times. It loses him readers, too. Sometimes he gets emails and snail mail that he describes as "break-up letters," but it doesn't bother him.

"The crossword in its own little way has become kind of a front line for certain cultural debates and issues, especially regarding the use of language," Sharp said. "And whenever that happens, because of the world we live in, you find people retreating into camps and you can see a certain acrimony sometimes come up in response to people, say, objecting to the word ‘co-ed’ used as a noun or to the word ‘illegal’ used as a noun."

Sharp, an occasional constructor himself, promotes the independent crossword scene, a group of constructors who publish their puzzles on a crop of independent sites as opposed to in big-name papers and media outlets. The indie scene tends to be more focused on politics and social inclusion — a puzzle pack made by queer constructors was recently released.

With all its conundrums, the online crosswording world has given Sharp a plethora of new friends, some of whom he meets in real life at crosswording competitions, like Braunstein.

The one place where his alias as Rex Parker and his identity as Michael Sharp don't often collide is in the classroom at Binghamton. He doesn't use a lot of crosswords in class, and he said he never knows who is aware of his online presence — that was, until Joe Goldin and Clare Gilroy emailed him.

Goldin and Gilroy, now both 24-year-old alumni of the State University of New York campus, had been doing the New York Times puzzle and reading Sharp's blog for about a year when they found out that Rex Parker was Michael Sharp.

"It was like fangirling for me," Gilroy said, about finding out Sharp's online alias during the fall semester of her senior year.

Goldin and Gilroy persuaded him to teach an independent study on crosswords. Given his strong opinions on his blog, Gilroy wasn't sure what she was walking into, she said.

"But he couldn't have been any nicer or more excited for us," she said. "He was very good at recognizing and appreciating that we were in the beginning of this experience and was definitely very patient. I never felt like he viewed me as lesser because I wasn't as good."

As a result of the course, Goldin and Gilroy both went to the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and met Will Shortz. Goldin even got an original puzzle published in the campus paper. "That never would have happened if it wasn't for Rex," Goldin said.

They still do the puzzles, and, thanks to Sharp, have a keen eye for what makes a puzzle "good."

The blog feels like work sometimes, Sharp said. But it's become part of his routine, and gives definition to his day.

"It's like a little present," Sharp said of puzzles. "You have no idea what's in there. And if you’re lucky, something weird or strange or funny is in there. And you get to unwrap this little present every day that will make your brain light up in weird ways if it's done right."

Sometimes, those little presents are a mixed bag. "Though the fill is not good, it could’ve been much much worse," he wrote about Wednesday's puzzle.

For Rex Parker that's something akin to a compliment.

Follow Claire Hansen on Twitter at @clairechansen, or email her at [email protected].