Introducing... Quite Vexing
(Articles about) crosswords that don't suck, and some other stuff
Hi! Welcome to Quite Vexing, the best newsletter about crossword puzzles on this (or any other) website.
As you’re well aware, puzzles are kind of having a moment right now. All your friends became obsessed with word games during quarantine, and then Wordle dropped and suddenly every website was trying to hook you on some word game or other. Even if you limited yourself to the really good stuff, there are more puzzles available online than one person could possibly keep up with: something like 500 a week, if you believe Daily Crossword Links.
But while crosswords themselves have never been better, most writing about crosswords is dreck — islands of culture war horseshit in a sea of blatant SEO farming — written by and for people unaware that puzzles exist beyond the freebies on the NYT games app. If only, one wonders, there was someone who could cut through all the noise and deliver not just links to the coolest puzzles out there, but also scintillating analysis of crosswords as an art form, sport, and pillar of the news economy? And could that someone be a fairish maiden with an overly broad New York accent?
That someone is me, the lovely Quiara Vasquez. I am a Brooklyn-based writer, technically, but not like that kind of Brooklyn-based writer, and certainly not that kind of Brooklyn. Um, how do I put this... Did you see Anora? Imagine if, instead of pole dancing, Anora got paid to write crosswords themed around Juvenile’s “Back that Azz Up,” and there you go. (A less flippant description would note that I write several hundred puzzles a year and solve ten times as many, and that I am one of the very few full-time crossword editors in America and one of the top contenders on the competitive speedsolving circuit, with my fastest solve time on the New York Times crossword being 82 seconds.1)
The main attraction of this newsletter — the thing you’re all here for — is link roundups collecting the best in crossword puzzles from across the internet. I used to do this sort of thing on my blog, but now I am doing that on Substack because… that’s just what bloggers do in 2025, I suppose. We’ll have some very large posts this week playing catchup with January and February’s puzzles, but after those, the roundups will come twice a month.
In addition to that, on the weeks where I’m not doing roundup posts I intend to post a whole bunch of other stuff. Most of it’ll be crossword related — interviews with notable puzzle personalities, reviews of puzzle-related books and cinema, that sort of thing. But some of it will be about games more broadly, and some of it will be culture writing that has nothing to do with my day job at all.2 But all of it is going to be smart and interesting, or at the very least more interesting than going “teehee, look at these quirky nerds putting WORDS into BOXES!” as most mainstream reportage on puzzles does. There’s some good writing about puzzles out there,3 but not nearly enough, considering how central they’re becoming to our daily lives. I’m excited to try and raise the bar on that front, and hope you’ll come along for the ride.
xoxo QV
And no, I don’t mean the mini.
At least one of these posts will be an apologia for Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis: A Fable, which I’m sure you are all awaiting with bated breath.
Including on Substack, incidentally — I would be remiss if I didn’t mention
, and there are a couple other veteran constructors who post their puzzles here. and are the two who come to mind; I’m pretty sure I’m missing someone obvious.
Unironically cannot wait for the Megalopolis apologia
Hooray, looking forward to your posts!