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Will Shortz Is Back in the Game
The Times’ crossword-puzzle editor returns to work — and table tennis — after two strokes that nearly ended his career.
“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. He still has a pronounced limp on the left side; otherwise, presiding over his kitchen table in a pair of gym shorts, he looks hardly changed from the grinning, mustachioed man familiar to generations of solvers from the covers of the many published collections of crosswords he has edited, though his hair is a little thinner on top. As soon as we entered, a group of therapists — some assigned to him, others walking patients in robotic exoskeletons to train their gaits or restore atrophying muscles — perked up: “What’ve you got for us today, Will?” A puzzle master is never unprepared.
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