On Sunday, June 9, The New York Times published its 25,415th daily crossword since the newspaper debuted its first in 1942. Times puzzle editor Will Shortz mentioned that this particular crossword had been in the works for more than a decade—but as the puzzle-obsessed internet immediately pointed out, it could have been much longer. The clues included a Waltons actor who had been dead for 40 years; inelegant acronyms or abbreviations showed up as answers 11 times, including the nearly unforgivable double abbreviation MTST (the clue: “____ Helens”). “Cringeworthy,” one person wrote on Twitter. “This puzzle feels like it was sitting in a box … for decades,” wrote another.

Other offenses in the puzzle riled for different reasons, which Rebecca Falcon, a 30-year-old crossword constructor, enumerated at length on Twitter. It used PATERNO without acknowledging that the football coach has been criticized for his response to Penn State's child-abuse scandal, and answers mentioned only four women, two fictional and two dead. One of the names, ROXANE, could have been clued as a reference to best-selling (and living) author Roxane Gay but instead defaulted to a character from the 19th-century play Cyrano de Bergerac. Another puzzle-maker, who writes The Washington Post's Sunday crosswords, showed how easy it would have been to replace PATERNO with the phrase AM RADIO. “The message here and all too often from the Times,” Falcon wrote, “is that to be relevant enough for mainstream crossword inclusion is to be male.”

The crossworld—a loose collection of people who analyze puzzles the way others do hip hop lyrics or fantasy novels—kibitzes about every major puzzle published in newspapers and digital subscription services, but most of its critiques aim squarely at The New York Times. It's obvious why. Even if you've never solved a crossword, you know the Times' reputation as the gold standard of cruciverbalism. It has the biggest audience and casts the longest shadow. More than 500,000 customers pay up to $40 a year for stand-alone crossword subscriptions, and millions solve the crossword each month on the Times website. It's where every crossword constructor wants to be published. But because the culture is changing, puzzles are changing too—and though those changes didn't start at the Times, constructors are going to make sure they take root there.

The New York Times was decades late to the crossword craze. Puzzlemania had struck in the 1920s, inspiring songs like “Cross-Word Mamma, You Puzzle Me (But Papa's Gonna Figure You Out),” but the Gray Lady's concession to popularity vaulted the pastime into higher-browed territory. Margaret Farrar, the puzzle's inaugural editor, imposed Times-ian rigor on what was then considered a thoughtless amusement, codifying most of the rules you know today: The grids are nearly always square; words must be three letters or longer; black squares must be arranged symmetrically so that the grid's pattern looks the same upside down; every letter should be “checked,” meaning it appears in both a word reading across and one reading down, giving you two chances to figure it out.