Brain Trust

Last Friday afternoon, in the lobby of a Marriott in downtown Stamford, Conn., attendees of the 47th American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the annual confab of word nerds hosted by The Times’s puzzle editor, Will Shortz, joyously convened. Veteran puzzlers greeted old friends with the excitement of a homecoming. First-timers smiled nervously, eyeing others’ name tags in hopes of catching a glimpse of a favorite crossword constructor. Some broke off into groups to chat or work on one of the many crosswords stacked on the welcome table. “Electric!” I scrawled in my notebook, smiling eagerly at the scene despite my efforts to be a dispassionate observer.

Before last weekend, I thought of myself as a crossword person, insofar as I do the Times puzzle regularly and with some speed. I had, since seeing the 2006 documentary “Wordplay,” dreamed of attending the tournament, but only idly, sometimes musing to my one crossword friend about how it might be fun to spend an entire weekend doing puzzles. I had no idea what an amateur I was. At the tournament I encountered puzzlers who can finish a Saturday puzzle in three minutes. I met a fan who can, when presented with a constructor’s name, recall with precision just how many crosswords that person has had published in The Times. I witnessed a die-hard dressed as a cruciverbalist Phantom of the Opera, replete with grid-printed cape and mask and a rose whose stem was a giant pencil.

“There are no casual puzzle people here,” I wrote in my notebook after the late-night wine-and-cheese reception where I sipped pinot grigio and listened to two constructors try to articulate the ecstasy they feel when, while painstakingly crafting a crossword, they realize the grid is actually going to come together, that they’re going to be able to complete an elegant puzzle.

On Saturday, I did six timed puzzles with the competitors, only one of which I didn’t manage to complete in the 30 minutes allotted, and I felt some measure of pride that I wasn’t totally out of my league. But like a majority of the nearly 1,000 people at the tournament who had no hope of making it to the final round (grand prize: $7,500) my times were beside the point. The point was the community, the shared love and language participants possessed. In the hotel elevator after the first puzzle session, strangers became immediate comrades in arms as they commiserated over the clues they didn’t get: “Wait, how is POT a three-letter word for ‘Cash on hand’?” The puzzles they’d all just completed were enough of a connection to start a conversation, to linger and chat when they got to their floor, then make plans to get lunch together.

This kind of fast intimacy is nearly impossible in the real world. If we take the time to even acknowledge a stranger in an elevator, we’re apt to nod, smile politely, look down at our phones: I see you, I recognize your humanity, but I have no desire to take this liaison any further. At a conference of enthusiasts, this impulse to withdraw is inverted. You’re there because you want to connect, because you’ve been doing puzzles alone in your kitchen for the past year and this is your one chance to geek out with others who share your niche interest. I spend most of my time avoiding eye contact with strangers; at a summit of the devoted, everyone is wide open, gazes get met eagerly. Here we are, all of us with this one passion in common, so we have common ground on which to establish a warm and satisfying chat, if not a lasting friendship.

On my way home from the conference, I stopped in to see my old friend Peter, whom I’ve known since college. As much as I’d marveled at how easy it was to bond with strangers over crosswords at the tournament, it was a relief to be around someone who really knew me, to relax into the easy flow of our shared history. Meeting new people is exciting, but it’s also exhausting. What would be ideal, I thought, was if Peter were into crosswords — then I could have the excitement of this shared interest within a rich, established relationship. That’s unlikely to materialize though; he’s shown no interest.

But for many years, we’ve both convened regularly with a group of friends for “Cookbook Club,” a roving potluck where everyone prepares a dish from the same cookbook. It’s our own sort of conference, based on an existing shared interest in cooking and eating. For several years, I sampled a different grape varietal every month with a group of friends at “Wine Club.” My friend Avi jokingly calls our weekly dinners out “Restaurant Club.” Eating and drinking with friends is hardly an arcane interest akin to speed-solving puzzles. But putting some structure around our everyday enthusiasms elevates them, adds some of the pageantry of the fan conference to an ordinary gathering, rendering the goings-on of ordinary life a little more exciting.

THE LATEST NEWS

Immigration

• The Trump administration clashed with a federal judge, refusing to comply with her demand for a road map to release a man deported to a Salvadoran prison last month.

• An immigration judge ruled that the Trump administration could deport the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil, though it’s unlikely to happen while a federal judge in New Jersey considers a broader challenge to his detention.

• The top federal prosecutor in New Jersey, an ally of President Trump, said she was investigating Gov. Philip Murphy and the state’s attorney general over an immigration policy.

• The Trump administration will end temporary protections for more than 10,000 people from Afghanistan and Cameroon.

More on Politics

• The Trump administration has purged certain books from U.S. Naval Academy’s library: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou is gone, while “Mein Kampf” remains.

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. pledged to discover the cause of the increasing rates of autism in the U.S. by September. Scientists consider that timeline unrealistic.

• Trump administration officials are recommending the elimination of the scientific research division at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

• Trump’s special envoy met with Vladimir Putin in St. Petersburg, Russia, to make progress on cease-fire talks over the war in Ukraine.

• Five more prominent law firms facing punitive action by Trump reached deals to do free legal work on causes he supports.

Economy

• Yields on usually steady U.S. government bonds have spiked sharply. It’s a sign that Trump’s trade war has shaken faith in the U.S. economy.

• Tesla sales in the U.S. fell almost 9 percent in the first three months of the year, even as the overall market for electric vehicles grew.

Other Big Stories

• Surgeons removed a genetically engineered pig’s kidney from an Alabama woman after her body rejected it. She had lived with the kidney for 130 days — the longest anyone has tolerated such an organ.

• The mayor of Miami-Dade County vetoed legislation that would have removed fluoride from the drinking water in Florida’s most populous county.

• For the second time this year, South Carolina executed an inmate by firing squad. Both men chose the method over lethal injection.

THE WEEK IN CULTURE

Film and TV

• Josh Johnson doesn’t have a tight five minutes like most stand-up comics. Instead, he’s winning fans with his sets of up-to-the-moment material.

• For a second year, people waited outside Trader Joe’s stores for a chance to buy miniature tote bags. At some locations, they sold out in less than an hour.

• A “Fiddler on the Roof” revival and a “Benjamin Button” musical were among the big winners of the Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.

CULTURE CALENDAR

📺 “The Last of Us” (Sunday): A show to make you think twice about that lunchtime portobello burger or pizza ai funghi, “The Last of Us” is an unusually stylish and affecting adaptation of a popular video game, and it returns for a second season. Set in a future in which cordyceps mushrooms have turned people into near zombies, the show centers, initially, on Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a mysteriously immune teenager, and Joel (Pedro Pascal), the smuggler who delivers her to what he hopes will be safety. The first season ended with a violent shootout. This one, set several years later, begins more peaceably. (Therapy has returned to the land.) But post-apocalypse, things rarely stay calm for long.

Chocolate-Caramel Matzo Toffee

Passover starts tonight. If you’re looking for a last-minute gift to bring to a Seder, there’s still time to whip up a batch of chocolate-caramel matzo toffee. To make it, bake matzo crackers beneath a buttery topping of brown-sugar toffee and then cover it in bittersweet chocolate. You can add any toppings you like (chopped nuts, dried fruit, candied ginger, even crushed potato chips), or leave it pleasingly minimalist with just a sprinkle of flaky sea salt. It will keep up to a week when stored airtight at room temperature, but it rarely lasts that long in our toffee-loving house.

REAL ESTATE

The Hunt: A couple scoured pastoral properties in Maine, Vermont and New York for a space where they could live and work. Which did they choose? Play our game.

Budding industry: To revive the farm that had been in his family for seven generations, this antique collector chose to plant cannabis.

What you get for $1.6 million: A 1875 Colonial Revival house in Kennebunkport, Maine; a converted church in Thunderbolt, Ga.; or a contemporary house in Phoenix.

No phone, no guidebook: A writer visited Casablanca, Morocco, for the first time — without the internet. Here’s how it went.

All about looks: Restaurateurs are finding that ambience and branding matter more to some diners than the food.

Micro-retirement: Some young people are spending their savings on an extended break earlier in their careers.

Green your garden: Read about four ecologically crucial things you should do in your garden.

ADVICE FROM WIRECUTTER

Create an al fresco oasis

The right patio dining set can instantly make your home feel bigger and transform your outdoor space. But this furniture is often expensive, and it can be hard to know where to start. Wirecutter’s experts recommend considering a few factors. First, the layout: Putting down painter’s tape will help you imagine the set’s overall footprint. And choose materials you can realistically maintain. Wood, for example, generally requires the most upkeep, but it’s also often the most repairable. To help, we spent more than 80 hours assembling and testing sets in all kinds of climates and spaces. Any of our five favorites would make a lovely setting for upcoming spring meals. — Daniela Gorny

The Masters golf tournament: Turn up the volume this weekend and enjoy the sounds of Augusta National Golf Club: the thwack of a 7-iron, the polite applause of well-heeled patrons, the chirps of birds greeting springtime. We asked Kathi Borgmann, an expert at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, what types of birdsong viewers might hear this weekend. “Keep your ears tuned in for the ‘peter, peter, peter’ of the tufted titmouse and the boisterous ‘teakettle, teakettle, teakettle, tea’ from the Carolina wren,” she said. “You might even hear a ‘birdie, birdie, birdie’ from a northern cardinal, or an announcer getting excited about a good shot.” Today and tomorrow, starting at 2 p.m. Eastern on CBS

Oh, about the golf … Justin Rose (-8) leads after two rounds, but Rory McIlroy is closing in. Follow Masters coverage at The Athletic.

NOW TIME TO PLAY

Here is today’s Spelling Bee. Yesterday’s pangrams were hollowing and howling.

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