‘It’s just a hobby’: Meet the B.C. scientist whose crosswords have run in the NY Times

What do you do to relax after a hard day at work — trash TV? Hit the gym? Maybe fiddle around with a crossword puzzle if you’re feeling ambitious?

Well, one UBC scientist doesn’t just try and solve crosswords for entertainment; he creates them. And his work has been featured in some of the United States’ most prestigious publications, including the New York Times, LA Times and Wall Street Journal.

“I think the New York Times is the ultimate place to publish a crossword puzzle. It’s kind of like as a scientist publishing in Nature,” Mark MacLachlan told Global News.

MacLachlan isn’t just a professor of chemistry researching supramolecular materials, a complex full-time job that involves developing new materials that mimic the structures of things like beetle shells and butterfly wings.

He’s also an administrator who serves as the university’s dean of science.

Despite that, he’s somehow found the time, energy and mental fortitude to produce 75 crosswords in the last decade, a dozen of which have been published. That’s no small feat, given that he estimates each one takes about 20 to 40 hours to craft, with some taking up to 80.

“There’s a lot that goes into making a puzzle,” he said. “You start with a theme… and then you have to find theme entries that have the right symmetry to fit into the grid, and you have fill in all the words around it so they’re all interlocking. You can’t have any words that are less than three letters long…

“Then you spend your time cluing the puzzle. And that’s coming up with clever but doable clues that can allow people to access the puzzle.”

MacLachlan said he’s been interested in playing with language since he was a child, including winning a contest for spotting the most mistakes in the classified section of a local newspaper.

His interest in crosswords crystallized when he and his wife used to complete the New York Times crossword every week.

“At some point I asked myself, who makes these puzzles and what’s involved? So I looked into it and found out that actually the newspapers take submissions from anyone,” MacLachlan said.

MacLachlan said he started producing puzzles in 2007, but it was nearly a decade before he successfully pitched his first crossword to the LA Times in 2016.

Ever since, he’s been hooked — thinking about words, clues and layouts in at home, in coffee shops, on airplanes or in hotels while travelling.

“I’m always thinking about crossword puzzles when I’m not at work,” he said.

“It’s very much a creative outlet. Coming up with the theme is pure creativity, trying to find interesting wordplay, also, I find that creating the clues is a really creative outlet as well. I like to try and make a few of the clues have really mislead the puzzle solver.”

While that might sound surprising coming from someone whose day job involves working on the molecular level and materials with names like “cellulose nanocrystals,” McLachlan sees it the other way around.

“Believe it or not, doing science is almost pure creativity, when I go into the lab and think up a new idea, I’m trying to think of something that nobody else in the world has ever done before,” he said. “We make materials that have only ever been made in our lab. I find it so exciting to come up with creative new materials in research.”

Fortunately for MacLachlan, the crossword obsession is a passion project, not a primary source of income. Selling a weekday crossword to a publication will net you between US$50 and US$300, while landing one in a larger weekend edition can be worth up to US$2,250.

The math on that doesn’t work out very favourably once the labour is factored in.

“Unfortunately, for the time that I put into it, it’s way less than minimum wage for me,”  MacLachlan said. “I don’t it for money. It’s just a hobby for me.”

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