IN FEBRUARY 2024, the New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz was sitting at his desk in Pleasantville, hard at work around 11 p.m., when he shifted to the left and found he couldn't shift back. The side of his mouth was drooling. Shortz recognized the signs: He was having a stroke. Later, at the hospital, he had a second, larger stroke and then, after thrombolysis to dissolve the clot that caused it, a brain bleed—a rare and serious complication. He spent ten days in intensive care, prognosis uncertain, before he was stable enough to move to an inpatient rehab center, where he would begin the long work of recovery.

Early on, Shortz said, the doctors offered him a sliver of good news: The strokes had affected the right hemisphere of his brain (which controls nonverbal abilities, like emotions and musicality), not the left (where linguistic abilities, like puzzling, originate—though all brain function involves both sides to some degree). While still in the hospital, he was making puzzles again, and before his full recovery, he left the rehab facility to attend the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which he founded. “When I came out of the wheelchair and went up onstage, there was just thunderous applause,” Shortz said, sitting in a newly set up workspace in his house in Pleasantville, wedged between a kitchen with NPR mugs drying on the dish rack (he has also been puzzle master for “Weekend Edition Sunday” since 1987) and a white leather couch draped with a crossword-print throw. “Really brings tears to my eyes to think about it.”