“Whether you want it or not, there’s a kind of inherent politics [to a crossword],” said Michael Sharp, a SUNY-Binghamton English professor who, under the pseudonym Rex Parker, pens a blog critiquing The Times crossword and has constructed puzzles for them .“You’re making an assertion about what counts as ‘common knowledge.’”
For decades the people making decisions about what should be in a puzzle have been straight white men according to Tausig, who said crosswords were a “very much elite, hyper educated, white, New York City thing, where if you didn’t know chess and your classics you were screwed.”
When Shortz became editor of The Times crossword in 1993, things began to change. Shortz brought pop culture into crosswords, Tausig said. Yet Shortz doesn’t always get it right. A few years ago, Shortz included the word “beaner” in a puzzle. “It’s baseball slang for a ball that hits the batter’s head. But it’s also, as I did not know at the time, an offensive term for Hispanics,” he said. “There was a lot of anger over that.”
Even Sharp, who is one of Shortz’s biggest critics, said that “Shortz changed the New York Times, radically in terms of how fun it was…turning away from being a test about arcane knowledge and toward a kind of playful, wordplay-oriented kind of puzzle.”
— The Surprisingly Messy Culture Wars Within The New York Times Crossword Puzzle