There’s a perception that in order to solve challenging crosswords, you have to be some sort of master of obscure facts, like a Jeopardy! contestant. The reality, however, is that you don’t have to be a know-it-all to become good at crossword puzzles; persistence and dedication are the most important traits. Because a crossword is a bit like an escape room: The author intends to make it challenging, but ultimately, they want you to be able to crack their code. After noticing that all of the New York Times puzzles had bylines, I figured, why couldn’t one of them be mine? I could construct a puzzle of my own—and have it published in the Times, the gold standard of the form.

I bought crossword construction software and a dictionary of valid crossword puzzle entries with scores indicating how “good” they are—for example, TSPS (as in the abbreviation for teaspoons), is considered a mildly acceptable answer with a score of 25, but TOP is a very common word with a score of 50—and dove in.

I started with a blank 15×15 grid, the standard size of all Times puzzles, except for Sunday’s supersized 21×21 grids. To start, I laid out my theme entries—the handful of related answers that form the backbone of the entire puzzle. It was a baseball-themed rebus puzzle (which means you enter more than one letter in certain squares) with the words HOME, FIRST, SECOND, and THIRD placed on the grid in a shape resembling a baseball diamond. Then, placing black squares strategically around my theme entries, I built my grid, which consisted of mostly 3-5 letter answers and a small number of 6-8 letter ones. Next, I started filling in the rest of the puzzle, the most complicated and time-consuming step. Finally, I got to clue writing, the easiest part. This is where a constructor can take an ordinary answer, such as OBAMA, and make it more interesting by cluing it as “Noted 1983 Columbia graduate.” A boring alternative could be “U.S President: 2009–2017.”

After reading, rereading, and more rereading of my puzzle, I decided that it was as good as it was ever going to be. So I sent it off to the Times and anxiously waited for their response. Several weeks later, I received an email from a Times staffer writing on behalf of editor Will Shortz—perhaps the most famous figure in the puzzle world—with the subject line “Crossword.” His answer was basically, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Frustratingly, I received nearly the same rejection from Shortz and his colleagues for the next several puzzles I submitted.

I was definitely down on myself at this point—clearly, I needed more help and guidance. So I found my way to the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory group on Facebook, the creation of veteran constructors trying to increase the number of people regularly contributing to daily newspaper crosswords. There, members post questions (e.g., is Y-WING, the name of a type of starship from the Star Wars films, crossworthy?), theme ideas, sample puzzles, and tournament announcements. In the group I connected with Mark, a more experienced constructor who became my mentor, and who responded to my theme queries and puzzle drafts with an expert and impartial eye.

The group—which anyone can join—provided the constructive criticism I needed. The differences between an amateurish puzzle and a professionally constructed one geared toward a wide audience are subtle. For example, only after you’ve been doing this for a while do you understand that clumps of moderately difficult proper nouns are bad because solvers can get stuck and would have no way of gaining a foothold in the area.

While my Times rejection streak continued, some of those rejected puzzles were eventually accepted by other publications. My first-ever published puzzle ran on April 4, 2019, in the L.A. Times, and had theme answers of LAB ASSISTANT, SKETCH ARTIST, WORKOUT ROUTINE, and SNICKERS ALMOND, with GO FISH as the answer that revealed the pattern. Over the next 18 months, I had another three puzzles accepted for publication, including by the Wall Street Journal. But the New York Times remained elusive.

I learned that there was considerably less competition for the New York Times Sunday slots, and set my sights there. After much brainstorming, and an investment in a rhyming dictionary, I came up with a theme that used wordplay to poke fun at how Canadians stereotypically end their sentences with “eh.” One of my theme answers was LET’S MAKE A DELAY, which is supposed to sound like, “Let’s make a deal, eh?” My original clue: “We should slow things down, shouldn’t we?” After coming up with six other similar entries, I started the difficult task of making a usable grid.

I calculated that there were 144 possible ways to lay out my theme answers in the big 21×21 grid. That’s where my computer science degree came in handy: I wrote a simple computer program that went through each of the 144 possibilities and told me how promising each option was. After several weeks of dithering with various layouts, I was finally able to create a usable grid for my puzzle. After making some edits at Mark’s suggestion—like cutting back on proper names in the northwest corner and getting rid of words no one knows like SETAE (the plural of “seta,” a stiff hair)— I sent my puzzle off to the New York Times. And then I waited. A few months later, I got something new in my inbox: an actual acceptance message from the New York Times! They weren’t too keen on the whole “Canadian-speak” angle of my theme, though, so they changed those clues to be more straightforward. (The clue for LET’S MAKE A DELAY became “Maybe we should stall.”) While that was a bit disappointing, it was an acceptance nonetheless. All my hard work finally paid off. Naturally, I told all my friends and family to get a copy of the paper on the publication date, March 21, 2021.

After crossing “having crossword published by the New York Times” off my bucket list, I’m semi-retired from building crosswords. To publish just a few puzzles in various venues each year still would require me to always be working on a new puzzle, and I don’t have the time for that right now while working and raising a family.

But I do still try to come up with ideas and also to solve other people’s puzzles. Now that I’ve made some of my own, I’m able to form my own opinions and offer reasons for why a particular puzzle is good or not. And the lesson I learned from the several weeks it took me to construct that 21×21 grid is that even if it feels like an impossible task, it’s probably not. Very few things in life are truly impossible.

The post Where I Go<span class="colon">:</span> My <em>New York Times</em> Crossword Construction Quest appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Behind those illustrious credits, however, Marion Thompson Wright had a deeply troubled life. All black Americans of her time suffered under Jim Crow; Wright also dealt with what the civil rights activist Pauli Murray called “Jane Crow,” or the limits placed on black women in a patriarchal society.

Most of her academic colleagues never knew it, but early in her studies, Wright had faced a heartrending decision: abandoning her husband and two children to pursue her career. Her acts as a teenage mother shadowed Wright for the rest of her life and ultimately led to her suicide. Wright’s struggles reflect the sacrifices that many lower-class black women of her place and time had to make if they hoped to follow a path to professional success.

Wright was born Marion Manola Thompson in East Orange, New Jersey, on September 13, 1902. Her parents were Moses B. Thompson, a laborer, and Minnie B. Holmes Thompson, a domestic, and she had three siblings. Sometime between 1910 and 1915, Moses Thompson disappeared.

Marion went to high school in Newark, New Jersey, and excelled, but then abruptly dropped out in her junior year to marry William Henry Moss of Montclair, New Jersey. The reason for the hasty marriage became apparent on January 2, 1919, when a daughter, Thelma Mae Moss, was born. Within six months, Marion was pregnant again, and she gave birth to a son, James Allen Moss, on March 27, 1920.

The burdens of parenting created tension in the young couple’s relationship, and the pair quarreled often about Marion’s ambitions. To catch up on her high school studies, Marion attended school full-time during the day and took classes at night at Drake’s College, a local business school. Alongside a heavy academic load, Thompson threw herself into high school activities, serving on the board of the Epilogue and the Acropolis, the student-run magazines, and joining the science club, glee club, and cheering squad.

The allure of school pushed her away from her family. In October 1921, as her father had done a decade earlier, she vanished from her family, never to return. One day in 1922, her husband spotted her in a crowd at Lincoln Park in Newark. William beseeched Marion to come back, but, as he claimed in his divorce suit against her, “She finally said she could not be bothered with the responsibility of children.”

William Moss didn’t know it then, but Marion Moss had dropped her married name. She graduated from high school near the top of her class in 1923 and was accepted with a full scholarship at Howard University in Washington, D.C. Howard did not accept married women or women with children, which was common practice at the time. So, Thompson reclaimed her maiden name, took three years off her age, and forsook all references to her husband and children when she enrolled there in the fall of 1923.

When William Moss learned that his wife had become a student at Howard, he sent her, as part of the divorce proceedings he had initiated, a registered letter asking her to return home and care for the children. Thompson wrote back that she was “willing and shall do all I can for the children,” but that coming back was “utterly impossible.” It would not be best, she explained, for the children to live in a home where “no affection or respect exists between the parents.” Any love that she felt toward William, Thompson added, “died long ago”—and if he did not understand that before, Thompson hoped it would be “clear to you now.”

On September 21, 1925, William Moss was granted an uncontested divorce from Marion Thompson and gained full custody of the children. He soon remarried. Thompson wrote in a letter dated around 1939 to her son James that she felt after the divorce that “everything was settled without my being in [the children’s] future … I then set up my goals and worked toward them.”

In the record of the divorce proceedings, Marion Thompson comes across as heartless and indifferent to her family—but leaving them to resume her studies, while harsh, had been an existential choice between domesticity and ambition. It was one that many other professional women, then and now, have also had to make. Thompson surveyed her surroundings and saw dim prospects for a woman with two children and no high school diploma; poorly paid and demeaning work as the servant of white people, a job her mother had endured, was the likely future. Thompson knew that school offered personal joy. Home did not.

Howard University represented the peak of black academic achievement and a pathway to success, and Washington, D.C., was home to the nation’s black political elite: professionals, politicians, and prosperous families who upheld a strict set of social mores. Young black undergraduate women were expected to be moral and ladylike above being feminist. Chastity was the litmus test for a young woman’s reputation and served as a class and cultural wedge between middle-class college women and their classmates from poorer black families.

When Thompson started at Howard, she tried to keep her past under wraps. She had been the “target of so many insulting proposals from men as to be nauseating,” she informed her son James as he entered adulthood. And if men knew her story, she worried that they would regard her as “sexually experienced and available.”

She found a mentor in Lucy Diggs Slowe, Howard’s first Dean of Women. Slowe was part of the New Negro Womanhood that emphasized leadership in social affairs, voluntarism, club membership, activism toward universal suffrage, and the democratic promise of education for all black people. Under Slowe’s guidance, Thompson plunged into college life. By the autumn of her sophomore year, she had been elected to the Howard University Student Council and served as recording secretary for her class. As a junior, Thompson became president of the Women’s League at Howard, a newly formed club that lent support to the Howard football team and set up a loan fund for needy female students, among other projects. The same year, she was elected to Kappa Mu, Howard’s academic honor society, and joined Delta Sigma Theta, a black sorority that emphasized public service.

But Thompson always worried that people would find out about her past—and eventually, people did, with some mudslingers implying that both of her children were illegitimate. Instead of telling the world of her failed marriage, Thompson decided to “get along” by sticking to her ambitious goals and ignoring gossip and her sorrow. When the tattling escalated in 1927, Thompson told Slowe her secrets. Slowe asked to see Thompson’s marriage license and divorce decree. Then she told Thompson to say nothing further.

Marion Thompson graduated from Howard magna cum laude in 1927 and easily could have found employment as a school teacher in a black school anywhere in the United States. Slowe, who sought to open young educated women to broader prospects, had encouraged her to think bigger. Most college-educated black women became teachers, but it was a hard and lonely life. Black teachers were underpaid, worked in difficult conditions, had little or no contact with their white counterparts, and were often resented by poorer blacks. Few married. So, Thompson chose to remain at Howard, earning a Master’s degree in education in June 1928.

Thompson eventually moved on to Columbia University, attaining candidacy in 1931 for a doctorate in history. The same year, she returned to Newark and married Arthur Wright, a postal clerk, and in 1937, the Wrights purchased a home in middle-class Montclair, New Jersey. Wright transferred into the graduate program at Teachers College at Columbia, finished her doctorate, and rejoined Howard University’s education department in 1940.

Howard’s illustrious male faculty included sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, poet Sterling A. Brown, philosopher Alain Locke, and historian Rayford Logan; Wright also joined female scholars such as political scientist Merze Tate and librarian Dorothy Porter. Soon Wright, too, rose as an academic star. Howard students adored her—she paid close attention to their personal needs—and her colleagues admired and valued her, which was no small accomplishment in an otherwise all-male department. In 1950, Wright was promoted to full professor.

Wright’s life in Washington could seem charmed. She lived in a comfortable apartment in Washington’s Adams Morgan district, decorated her home with porcelain figures of horses, and enjoyed embroidering her name on handkerchiefs. Wright treated herself to expensive diamond rings from a New Jersey jeweler and spent several months traveling in Europe in the mid-1950s. She joined academic organizations, gave public lectures, and worshipped at the Plymouth Congregational Church (now the Plymouth Congregational United Church of Christ), known for its abolitionist history in the district. She divorced Arthur Wright, though he continued to live in Montclair with her mother.

But under her polished, professional demeanor, Wright suffered from severe depression and anxiety. Her difficult decisions weighed on her. Now that she was a professor, her marital status shouldn’t have mattered, but if Mordecai Johnson, the autocratic, socially conservative president of Howard, ever learned that she had lied as an undergraduate, she would have been terminated immediately.

After achieving success, Wright had hoped to be more a part of her children’s lives. But Wright’s protector Lucy Diggs Slowe had died prematurely in 1937. So, to maintain her cover, Wright maintained distance from her children. As they matured and became successful adults, she kept them secret from even her closest friends. Theodora Daniels, with whom Wright traveled extensively, knew about the children but understood that she should never ask about them. Moments such as when an undergraduate rushed up to Wright in a hallway at Howard, exclaiming, “I did not know you were Jimmy’s mother!” created terror for her.

Her first attempts to reconcile with her children in the 1930s had been futile. Her children were understandably upset about her absence from their lives, but being more present, as they wanted, could have upended her career. The best policy, she told her son in a letter around 1939, was “for me to completely withdraw.” There were ways, she admonished her son James, that “you made it increasingly difficult for me to work with you, so for the time, I gave up.” What, she asked her son, would he have done in the same circumstances? Only in 1953, after her own dying mother urged her to reopen relations with the children, did Wright reach out to them. There were clandestine meetings over the years, but repairing the family remained impossible. On October 26, 1962, Marion Thompson Wright committed suicide by asphyxiating herself in her automobile.

Today, Wright is commemorated with a lecture in her name, held every February at Rutgers University-Newark. It is the most prestigious black studies celebration in New Jersey and one of the largest in the nation. In the 1980s, her children James and Thelma attended the event, and in 1989, the year before his death, James gave a stirring account of his mother’s role in the writing of black history. Today, visitors to the Marion Thompson Wright lecture can read a short bio of her on the program. As they do, they might reflect on the terrible sacrifices she made to create a better America.

The post The Black Scholar Who Gave Up Her Family to Earn Her Ph.D. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“I can honestly say this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone high-five over New Jersey,” the activity leader says. The group chuckles. I shrug. She just doesn’t get it.

To be fair, most people don’t. They think of New Jersey as “the armpit of America” or some sort of Jersey Shore/Sopranos hybrid, where in between getting drunk and getting tan it’s perfectly normal to firm up your illegal deals in the back room of a strip club. As someone who grew up in the Garden State (like Buzz Aldrin, Queen Latifah, Dennis Rodman, and many, many others—after all, N.J. is the 11th most populated state in the country), I can tell you that it’s far more mundane than the television shows would suggest. Many were the Saturday nights in high school when my friends and I lamented that there was nothing to do in town.

I think my experience in Livingston was typical of American suburbia. I was happy to live close enough to Manhattan that a trip into “The City” was easy and quick, but I liked spending time in my hometown, too. I loved the neighborhood haunts where you could get a meal named after the high school mascot and the small shops that, while not brand names, carried high-quality, fashionable goods.

When it was time to think about college, I wanted to get out of the state not because I felt I needed to escape something, but simply because I wanted to see more of the country. In doing so, I found out that when you leave Jersey’s borders—even if it’s just, as in my case, to venture as far away as Boston—outsiders with a ton of assumptions and associations await.

Some samples:

“I was on the turnpike once. Is the whole state like that?” (No. There are lawns and trees and businesses other than strip malls and rest stops.)

“I’ve heard it smells bad.” (The Meadowlands are, literally, a swamp, surrounded by factories, so yes, that particular area, which you pass through when you head east from Manhattan, does have an acrid smell. But the solution is simple: get off the turnpike.)

“There sure are a lot of diners.” (Yes, and thank god for them.)

What surprised me most was how much other people’s opinions about my home state bugged me. I never had felt any particular pride about where I was from while I was growing up. It was just a fact, like my eye color or my age. I didn’t think it meant anything. But once I left the state, it became part of my identity. How else to explain my unbridled excitement the one and only time I ever worked a gas pump myself, my understanding of jug-handle turns, or why I feel no shame when belting out any Bruce Springsteen or Bon Jovi song, regardless of who is around?

I admit that I may have gone a little overboard at first. By the time my first semester at college was over, for every negative comment someone made about “the dirty Jerz,” I would be ready to counter with interesting facts (New Jersey is the only state where every town is a suburb of either New York or Philadelphia), celebrity natives (Jason Alexander and Chelsea Handler went to my high school), or just straight-up pride (New Jersey is awesome, and you have no idea what you’re talking about).

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I understand the easy appeal of generalizations. I’ve made a few pithy comments about other locations myself. When my AmeriCorps team was assigned to work in Oklahoma, I wondered aloud how a group of cows and horses had filled out the application to receive help from the program. Of course, after spending time there, I realized how badly I’d misjudged the place. I only wish others would afford the Garden State some open-mindedness as well.

It’s not that New Jersey is better than other states. The George Washington Bridge scandal was embarrassing, as is the fact that The Real Housewives of New Jersey is filmed there. And I admit that you can’t call either the Turnpike or the Parkway “scenic.” But for all of its flaws, real or perceived, New Jersey is still the place where I feel comfortable. I like that its greatness is understated, as opposed to Manhattan’s glamour or California’s cool. It’s not going out of its way to try to impress you. It is what it is, and you either get it or not.

Travel is said to broaden horizons and gain understanding. However, it also brings an awareness to what you have left behind, to what is home.

The post I Heart N.J. appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I wasn’t so sheltered that I didn’t know I was lucky to take tennis lessons and swim in an Olympic-sized pool and to have the chance to go into The City (New York, about 30 miles to the northeast) every so often to see a show. And while I knew that Jews only made up a small fraction of the population of the country and the world, there was nothing interesting about the fact that they made up about three-quarters of the people in my world.

Which is why I was so astounded to read Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, the story of a summer romance between a working-class Jewish boy from Newark (home to my grandfather’s firm, in which my dad still practices law) and an upper-middle-class Jewish girl from Short Hills. I was probably 11 or 12 when I read Roth’s 1959 novella for the first time, along with the accompanying short stories (my favorite being “The Conversion of the Jews,” which was set in a Hebrew school that shared some similarities to my own and doubtless every other Hebrew school in America). I was a voracious reader, but I had never before seen my name (well, half of it) on a book jacket, nor had I ever seen the names of towns I recognized between a book’s covers. But more incredible than my own thrill of recognition was the thrill that people—not just Jews in New Jersey, but people around the country and the world—were interested in this story. And this story could have been, if not my story, than the story of a grandparent or parent or aunt or uncle of mine.

My discovery of Roth, in the 1990s, coincided with his magnificent late-career resurgence. First I read backward (The Ghost Writer, Portnoy’s Complaint), and then I read forward: The Human Stain and The Plot Against America as soon as they came out. For years, my favorite book was American Pastoral (set in a thinly disguised version of Morristown, an older and waspier neighboring town). On a day-to-day basis, my mom’s neuroses were a source of annoyance (does the discovery of a $5-off coupon really merit a second trip to the mall in a single day?), my family’s ambivalence about our Jewishness a source of joking (my grandfather always made reservations at the fanciest restaurants in New York on Yom Kippur because you got better service when there were fewer customers), and the tensions between the more and less observant factions of our family a source of argument. But with Roth as my prism, these peccadillos could have pathos and weight and meaning, not just for me but for people outside my family circle.

My affection for Roth held steady through college despite learning that some people considered him a misogynist and a self-hating Jew—and despite realizing that not all his books were created equal (his baseball book, The Great American Novel, is a classic case of overpromising and underperforming). When it came time to write my senior thesis, the first adviser I approached—who had taught my late-20th-century American literature survey course on Roth, John Updike, Saul Bellow, and Norman Mailer (a decidedly narrow survey)—declined to work with me. “I’ve shot my load on Roth,” he explained. But I found another professor who still had something left in the tank, and I spent a year reading and rereading Roth’s Zuckerman novels for a project I wanted to title “Rothbard on Roth.” (I settled instead for something much more academic, boring, and appropriate, but I got to use the title in the preface.)

Immediately after graduating, I entered the world of New York book publishing. Roth had long since retreated into near-isolation in Connecticut, so while I dreamed of running into him at a book party, I settled instead for his editor (it turned out she’d gone to high school with my aunt; I doubted she edited him much anyway) and his publicist’s assistant (I cornered the guy at a Christmas party and demanded to know if the rumors about a young girlfriend were true). I loved that I could in turn tell them the story of the literature class my dad took at the University of Pennsylvania with Roth just after Portnoy’s Complaint came out; on the first day of class, Roth slapped a piece of liver on his desk.

Every year, I’ve rooted for Roth to win the Nobel Prize and felt just a little bit crushed by the announcement that it’s gone to yet another novelist I’ve never heard of. In 2005, I delighted in his proclamation, upon the installation of a plaque by his boyhood home, that “Newark is my Stockholm.”

In 2006, Roth published Everyman, a slim, dark story about a man dying alone and full of regret. It’s the last book of his that I loved, but my mother’s father, then in his mid-80s, loved it more. For a few months, it seemed like he could talk about nothing other than Roth’s grim, cold vision of death, never mind that my grandfather was in excellent health at the time.

When I heard the news that Roth had given up writing and announced his retirement (in a French magazine; how delightfully contrarian!), I didn’t feel mournful for myself, although I hoped he might have one last big book left in him. While it may sound silly, I felt worried for my grandfather. He’s 81 years old, and he’s got a broken ankle (courtesy of a golf cart accident at the club this summer) as well as a broken heart. He hasn’t been able to get through a book since my grandmother died in May. I don’t think he’d tell you he was looking forward to reading Roth’s next book; it’s unlikely that he even bothered with Roth’s past few books (I haven’t, either, frankly). But a new book by Roth could make us all feel special for a little while. Like our stories weren’t over—and might be worth reading.

The post Letting Go of Philip Roth appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Except on Mondays. Monday is the day to repent for the alcohol and food excesses of the weekend. That’s when we go to the Raymond Food Court or, as we call it, the Buffeteria. Only one of us three partners likes the Buffeteria, and that partner is not myself, but office harmony requires that we accommodate him. Three-day weekends, which eliminate Mondays, also eliminate a trip to the Buffeteria. I appreciate them more than ever.

The Buffeteria consists of three large buffet tables, one hot and two cold. Everything is $5.95 per pound. In better economic times there was also a sushi bar with a server in faux Japanese attire, but that folded as suddenly as Lehman Brothers. The grill and sandwich section, once manned by the cheerful Chef Hampton, who never saw a woman upon whom he would not hit, has been replaced by a less-expensive teriyaki station. I could not resist the invitation of an attractive Asian waitress to try the teriyaki chicken once, despite the risk to my colon from such exotic fare, but that was enough to satisfy any craving for the mysteries of the Orient.

The rest of the food choices are the same as in any pay-by-the-pound buffet in the tri-state area: overcooked vegetables, heavily dressed salads of all kinds, a selection of fresh fruit, and chicken, pork, and shrimp bathed in enough glutinous sauce to remain edible during a two-hour stay on the steam table. I’ll admit that the fruit selection is impressively large.

My younger partner, who periodically tries to stay on the Atkins diet, is the force behind our visits. He enjoys the absence of breadbaskets, around which, in ordinary restaurants, the rest of us must build a wall in order to restrain him. At the Buffeteria, he fills his plastic dish with hills of salad, faux crab legs, and tuna fish; to this he adds the daily mushroom special (sometimes sautéed, sometimes stuffed). My older partner, whose appetite has waned since he turned 70, sticks to walnuts, melon, and some type of overcooked fish. I cope with the stressfulness of so many choices by making the same selection every Monday: a mixed green salad, a piece of roasted turkey thigh, a few boneless spareribs, cashews, some papaya, and a diet peach Snapple.

There are plenty of free tables from which to choose. We usually sit at a rectangular table for six, since it offers plenty of room to stow our trays. The other customers include partners in large law firms, corporate employees, and homeless people who make their selections but bypass the cashier. On one crowded Monday, an elderly toothless woman with dubious hygiene joined our table. She ate a plate full of shrimp, belched, and went on her way. I did not finish my lunch that day. But the following Monday we were back.

Lunches at the Buffeteria are not time-consuming. There is no prolonged conversation. These are additional drawbacks, since I’m rarely in a hurry to return to the wheels of justice. Twenty minutes after our arrival, the three of us play our daily game of liar’s poker (all the proceeds go to a New York steakhouse dinner pot), and then it’s back to the office at 50 Park Place. I’d be happy never to dine at the Buffeteria again, but I suppose it has some redeeming qualities. Forgoing the martini proves to me I’m not an alcoholic. And the fresh fruit really is quite good. Not that I’d ever miss it.

Jeffrey M. Rothbard is a partner in the law firm of Rothbard, Rothbard, Kohn & Kellar and rarely misses lunch. He is also the father of Zócalo’s managing editor.

*Photo courtesy of goodiesfirst.

The post Making Monday More Miserable appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.