Our hero gets lost in a corn maze in Vermont, plays a chess puzzle with Garry Kasparov and even represents his country in the World Jigsaw Puzzle championship (he and his family come in second to last). He goes to CIA headquarters in Langley to try and crack a famous cipher statue on its campus. In “The Puzzler,” Jacobs meets the man who put him in the world’s most storied gridded box. High on that notoriety, Jacobs endeavored to write a whole book about puzzles. Crestfallen, but undeterred, this sent Jacobs on a puzzling journey, one that saw him answering The Times crossword religiously until one day – thanks to the intervention of a sympathetic crossword constructor – Jacobs was the answer for a Tuesday puzzle.

As the author’s brother-in-law was first to note, a cameo in a Saturday puzzle – the hardest puzzle of the week – was a confirmation of Jacobs’ obscurity. My wedding was good, but this – this is what I had been waiting for.”īut for the many who aren’t devotees of Jacobs’ brand of endurance journalism, the answer was a head-scratcher. “As a word nerd, this was the Holy Grail.

“I thought this was the highlight of my life,” Jacobs said over Zoom from his home in Manhattan. Jacobs’ masochistic career – in which he lived by the strictures of the Hebrew Bible for 365 days and thanked the countless people involved in producing his daily cup of coffee – may have had no problem solving a Saturday New York Times crossword a few years ago Jacobs was the answer to 1-Down.

One sending a zoom link crossword clue