THE END OF AN ERA by Deborah Elliott-Upton Several of my friends have remarked, “How can it be almost 2010? Where did the decade go? Weren’t we worrying about Y2K just a couple of years ago?” Time supposedly flies, but isn’t that only when you’re having fun? Not always. This has been a decade of […]

GOOD YEAR, BAD YEAR? by Rob Lopresti It being the time for it, I have been looking back at 2009, trying to decide if I had a good year. Writing-wise, I mean. The problem is, there are so many ways to judge it. I have written before about the seasons in a writer’s life; not […]

Everybody knows that the hardest-boiled guys are, in reverse order, investigative reporters, spies, cops, private eyes, and government documents librarians. Government documents librarians have to be tough because they deal with government documents. And none come tougher than Rob Lopresti. He can’t tell us everything he knows—that would put us in danger. But he can […]

ANNOUNCING OUR CHRISTMAS CONTEST WINNERS SPOILER ALERT: One of the descriptions below of the solutions submitted by the winners contains the answer to the puzzle. If you are following Leigh’s columns for this and next week describing the evolution of the puzzle and how it can be solved, and do not want to know the […]

CHRISTMAS CONTEST FINISH LINE by Leigh Lundin Except for announcements of finalists and post-game analysis, our Christmas contest concluded at midnight GMT. In two parts, this Sunday and next, I’ll explain how the contest came to be created and how it was solved. The Seed The idea for the puzzle derived from two sources. In […]

Today is the final day of our Christmas Contest. Here is one last hint, courtesy of our fearless librarian, Rob Lopresti: In a puzzle like ours, proper names can be a problem. If, for some reason, you can’t use the word talk you may be able to substitute the word chat. Ditto with could and […]

Our Christmas Contest continues. Today we consider references to other places on the web we pointed to during the week aimed at helping our readers solve the puzzle. Here are your hints: On Tuesday, December 15, JLW gave a big hint by linking to a certain piece by Leigh — and provided a linguistic clue […]