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In fall 2019, we launched our daily crossword puzzles on Vox, initially as an experiment. We wanted to see: Did our audience like solving crossword puzzles? Turns out, they absolutely did. Over the past few years, crossword puzzles quietly grew and became one of the most consistently popular pages on Vox.com.
That’s why we’re really excited that, just over four years since we launched crosswords on Vox, we’ve taken our wildly popular puzzles and published them in our first-ever crossword books, on sale today wherever you like to buy your books.
The first, Vox Mega Book of Mini Crosswords, features 150 of our bite-sized weekday puzzles, perfect for a break from work or a quick amusement before bed. The second, Vox Pop Culture Crosswords, brings you 80 of our larger and more challenging crosswords, the themed Saturday puzzles, for when you want to curl up with pen and paper and really give your brain a workout. Overarching themes range from puns to antonyms, from anagrams to rhymes to rebuses, each craftier than the last.
Thanks to our puzzle constructors — Adesina O. Koiki, Will Nediger, Patrick Blindauer, Juliana Tringali Golden, and Andrew Ries — Vox crossword puzzles will challenge, amuse, and even educate the intrepid solver. Take your Vox puzzle experience offline for a whole new dimension in solving.
These books make great gifts for the puzzler in your life — especially if that puzzler is you — so shop now.
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In its final episodes, the show becomes a case study in the pleasures and perils of the TV romantic comedy.
The third and final season of Starstruck, Rose Matefeo’s fizzy HBO romcom, is different from the other two. It’s darker and sadder and messier. It has the only ending it could possibly have, and yet I found it deeply unsatisfying.
When the first season of Starstruck reached the US from the UK in 2021, it was like a straightforward bolt of joy, with an ingeniously simple premise: what if the plot of Notting Hill happened to real people? Here, the central real person is Matefeo’s Jessie, an aimless 20-something working in a movie theater. (Matefeo is both showrunner and star.) She meets a handsome stranger at a bar, has a drunken one-night stand with him, and wakes up the next morning to find that he’s a movie star.
Jessie and affable movie star Tom (Nikesh Patel) spend the next few seasons circling around each other, trying to figure out how to deal with their undeniable and growing connection. Will they fall in love? Of course; that’s the plot of the Notting Hill trope. Will they make it work? That’s where it gets tricky. By the end, the whole thing has turned into a case study of the pleasures and perils of moving the romantic comedy from film to television.
Spoilers for the third season of Starstruck follow.
When the midbudget movie died in the 2010s, it threatened to take the romantic comedy with it. Instead, romantic comedies moved to television.
Television has always thrived off a will-they-won’t-they, from the screwball (Sam and Diane) to the soap operatic (Luke and Laura). Traditionally, though, TV romances are one part of a larger ensemble story: they drive plot, but they are not the heart of the story. Friends wasn’t called The Ross and Rachel Show for a reason.
In the 2010s, though, the kind of romantic comedies we used to see in theaters started to appear on televisions. There were shows explicitly centered on love stories, not on their ensembles, like You’re the Worst and Lovesick. There were shows built around playing with and deconstructing romantic comedy tropes, like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and Jane the Virgin and The Mindy Project. You couldn’t go to the movies and see the equivalent of You’ve Got Mail on the big screen, but you could watch Chris Messina charm Mindy Kaling with a little dance on The Mindy Project, and it sort of felt like the same thing.
There were some trade-offs in moving the genre from the big screen to the small. Romantic comedies had to get smaller, but they could also get more detailed.
Romcoms used to be powered by the superhuman charisma of the movie star. They were about basking in the warm glow of Julia Roberts’s smile and Hugh Grant’s yearning gaze, projected larger than life and softly glowing above our heads. When Roberts and Grant acted out Notting Hill in 1999, they didn’t have to explain why Grant’s everyman was able to get Roberts’s superstar actress to fall for him with a single tentative kiss. Their presences were so huge that we could be swept away by the emotion of the moment, rather than worrying about little character details.
Television can’t blow up its stars like movies can, but it does send them into our living rooms week after week after week. That means we experience TV stars more intimately than we do movie stars. Movie stars are gods, but TV stars are humans whose every thought we know.
Television romcoms, in turn, are more human-scaled than movie romcoms, with smaller screens and longer runtimes. They make us care about their love stories not by the sheer overwhelming power of their size and charm, but by delving deeply into the human foibles and neuroses of the characters who somehow find a way to love each other anyway.
On Starstruck, the central problem of the first season is the one that Notting Hill, with its everyman played by a movie star, never had to face for real: It’s very, very hard to be a regular human being next to a movie star.
“When people see us together, it’s like one of those weird animal friendship shows where you see a Labrador and a hedgehog who are friends,” a humiliated Jessie tells Tom after they’re spotted flirting at a film premiere.
“People don’t think that,” Tom assures her.
“Obviously you would say that,” Jessie returns. “You’re the fucking Labrador!”
The jolt that comes from saying this unspoken and awful truth is part of what gives the first season of Starstruck its power. The trope of a civilian dating a movie star is such an over-the-top fantasy, but the people on this show are so well-observed, such smartly written human beings. You almost don’t believe that such real-feeling people are going to live out such a silly trope. The magic of the show is that it makes you root for them to do it anyway.
And they do, over and over again. The first season ends with a lovely, understated take on the classic airport chase scene trope: Jessie, deciding not to fly home to New Zealand but to stay in London with Tom, fails to get off the bus at the stop for the airport, and Tom leans over and kisses her. In the second season, the pair split up after Jessie’s insecurities push Tom away, but in the season finale she makes a rain-soaked declaration of love to Tom and the camera swirls around them as, once again, they kiss.
The third season is where the trope falls apart. In the first five minutes of the premiere, Starstruck efficiently walks us through the entirety of Jessie and Tom’s romantic relationship in a single, dispassionate montage. They move in together. They flirt and cuddle. Tom flies off to location shoots and Jessie stays home looking bored and lonely. She stays home again, looking more lonely. Their flirty banter starts to become repetitive. They split up. Next time we see either one of them, it’s two years later, and Tom’s engaged to another woman.
The whole thing functions as a kind of reverse of the famous montage of Notting Hill that shows a year going by in Hugh Grant’s life without Julia Roberts. There, part of the idea is that we only need to see glimpses of that year, because Hugh Grant stays static as life moves on all around him, stuck emotionally in one place without his love. In Starstruck, the montage suggests a different idea: the relationship doesn’t really matter because what we need to know about these people is what we saw of them when they were coming together and what we’ll see of them now when they separate.
This is Starstruck tackling another of the formal differences between romcoms on film and romcoms on TV. In movies, the romantic comedy can end on the big kiss, when the protagonists are finally reunited and all their problems are solved. They capture a moment in time, a breath, the split second when love has conquered all, before all the problems start up again.
TV shows, however, can only drag out the lead-up for so long. Eventually, they have to show us what happens after the kiss.
By and large, the TV shows that successfully keep their central relationship intact after the big kiss are ensemble shows that don’t rely solely on the love story for narrative tension. Sitcoms like Schitt’s Creek and Parks and Recreation had big, beloved love stories, but because their genres were respectively family sitcom and workplace sitcom, they were able to keep generating story after their central couples got together and stayed together. True romantic comedies, however, tend to have a harder time of it on TV. On The Mindy Project, Danny left the show not long after he and Mindy had a baby together.
Probably the TV romcom that was most successful at dealing with the problem of the post-kiss period was Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show that was as much a creeping antihero horror show as it was a romantic comedy. On Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, every time Rebecca got close to another boyfriend, we knew it was only a matter of time before her self-destructive influences kicked in and she began plotting and scheming and stalking again. Part of the project of the show was for Rebecca to learn to free herself from the romantic comedy that was constantly running in her head, and for her to find a way to love herself enough to chase something she wanted even more than she wanted a boyfriend: an avocation that could give her life meaning.
Starstruck’s third season comes to a similar conclusion for Jessie: It tries to make the argument that what Jessie needs is not her fantasy-land Notting Hill love story, but a friendship that will nurture her. It attempts — not altogether successfully — to recenter the heart of the show around Jessie’s relationship with Kate, her best friend and former roommate (played by Emma Sidi, Matefeo’s IRL bestie).
As the season opens, Jessie is discombobulated not by her now long-past breakup with Tom, but because Kate is pregnant and getting married. Both of them fear that their relationship won’t survive the transition because how can someone be the person you tell all your secrets to if they also belong to other people?
Kate tells Jessie’s secrets to her husband; Jessie starts keeping secrets from Kate. “Will you still tell me all your secrets when the baby’s born?” Kate asks, half-asleep, in the tenderest scene of the new season. “Can I tell the baby all your secrets?”
“I don’t have much of a choice, do I?” Jessie whispers sweetly back to her.
As Kate and Jessie argue and stop talking to each other, Jessie continues to circle Tom, but she does so with a kind of exhausted resignation. Both of them are in relationships with likable new characters, and though they keep getting drawn back into each other’s orbits, their love scenes together now play as though they’re too tired of the same old rhythms to feel all that much of anything for each other. That moment on the bus at the end of season one feels lifetimes ago. It’s strange to imagine you ever rooted for them to be together.
In the last moments of the season’s penultimate episode, Tom shows up to surprise Jessie at the maternity ward where Kate’s going into labor, and she just says, “Hi,” and turns around to follow Kate. This, the subtext goes, is the real love story. This is what really matters. Jessie and Kate, best friends fighting and making up again and being there for each other in the big moments. It’s the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend lesson all over again; the guys are not the point.
Which would come off rather more successfully if Starstruck hadn’t just spent the past two seasons telling a story in which the guys very much were the point. Starstruck in its first two seasons is not a deconstruction of the romantic comedy, but a romantic comedy, full stop: a story powered by the giddy pleasures of watching two people fall in love with each other, and sparkling with wit and psychological nuance to boot. It doesn’t warn us, as Crazy Ex-Girlfriend does, that trying to live out a real-life romantic comedy is dangerous and obsessive. It says, Isn’t this real-life romantic comedy fun? Don’t you hope it will work out?
It’s as though Starstruck adapted the Notting Hill formula for television a little too well for its own good, so that everything that made it sparkle at the beginning has locked it into its left turn of an ending. The psychological intimacy of TV means we can see the characters’ neuroses too clearly to believe they’ll get past them. Losing the epic scale of the movie screen means we can see how silly the premise is, and we feel how hard it would be to make it work in real life. Television’s serial structure means we can’t just stop the story at the moments when it looks like it might work.
Starstruck maybe had to end where it did, but it got there messily, without a clear in-universe setup. As sweetly well-observed as the friendship between Jessie and Kate is, the third season doesn’t have the fizzy joy of the first, that sense that Matefeo was a really good writer going to go to town on one of the silliest and self-indulgent romantic tropes in the book, and that she was going to make it work.
We all already know why movie stars and aimless movie theater ushers rarely date. The magic comes from building a world where they can.
Three mind-bendy conversations about glass later, I see the sublime in my windowpanes.
There’s a myth about glass you might have read about in high school: If you go to a church that’s hundreds of years old and look at the glass windows, you’ll find that the panes are thicker at the bottom of the frame than at the top. That’s because, according to lore, glass is actually a liquid, just one that flows very slowly.
This is a myth for a lot of reasons. The simplest is that the thickness of glass at the base of the windows can be explained simply by how glass panes were manufactured in the olden days. Back then, flat windows were made by spinning a glass form into a flat disc, which left the finished product with uneven thickness.
But also as a scientific explanation, the myth does not do glass justice. Glass is so much weirder than a very slow-moving liquid. In fact, even though glass is one of the most common, most useful materials in the world — lining our windows, covering our phones, delicately holding our stems of roses — scientists still have deep questions about what it fundamentally is.
“It defies the very simple categories we have of liquid, solid, and gas,” says Camille Scalliet, a theoretical physicist at the University of Cambridge. She’s not the only scientist flummoxed by glass. All over the world, physicists, chemists, and other specialists are trying to unlock its secrets.
It’s true that glass does have some liquid-like properties. But remarkably, rather than flow, glass doesn’t move very much at all. In 2017, scientists analyzed the church glass myth in a paper, determining that, over a billion years, church windowpanes would flow a single nanometer. (That is one-billionth of a meter; it’s infinitesimally tiny. A piece of paper is around 100,000 nanometers thick.)
And this finding gets us closer to the deepest mystery of glass. The question scientists grapple with isn’t “why does it flow.” Instead, “we don’t really know why it’s solid,” Scalliet says.
The quest comes with some deep prizes. One prize would just be a better definition of one of the most common materials in the world. A complete understanding of glass would be satisfyingly sublime: It would teach us about how this material changes over billions of years, and tell us about its final form. We could learn whether certain forms of it could be considered a new state of matter. Contemplating glass also forces us to consider the limitations of perceiving time on the scale of a meek human life span.
There are less heady prizes, too. If we understood glass better, “you can really start creating materials that don’t exist yet,” Scalliet says. Glasses that are stronger or bendier, or have properties we can’t yet imagine. “But at the moment, we don’t really have this knowledge.”
To explain the weirdness of glass, it’s helpful to think about what typically differentiates between liquids and solids.
Solids and liquids are both made up of atoms and molecules. Temperature changes how these components are arranged. Cooler temperatures solidify molecules; warmer temperatures make them juicy.
The important differences are seen on the microscopic scale of molecules. In liquids, the molecules are very disordered; they move around each other and flow. “If you could zoom in and see individual molecules, they would be packed randomly and they would be moving around very fast,” Scalliet says.
I think of a liquid like a crowd of people dancing at a club. They’re energetic, packed in, vibing. They can move around each other, bump and grind, dancing to the music. If you took a snapshot of the dancers, it would look like a chaotic, jumbled mess. That’s a liquid.
Solids are much more tame. As we typically think of them, they are made up of crystals, which are structured, orderly patterns of molecules. When the temperature cools down, the atoms and molecules line up in a regular geometric pattern. In the dance club metaphor, instead of undulating past each other, these ravers stop dancing and sit down in concert seats. They can still squirm a bit in those seats (as long as the thermostat in the theater isn’t set to absolute zero), but they’re mostly locked in place.
So those are liquids and crystalline solids: simple and easily distinguished from one another. Glass is neither of those things — while still retaining some properties of each.
The simplest explanation for how glass forms is that it’s a liquid that cools too quickly for those crystals to form. So the molecules get locked in place in a chaotic liquid-like arrangement.
Imagine you’re in the crowded dance space, and you decide you need to use the bathroom. But when you try to get there, a lot of the dancers decide to stop moving. When that happens, it becomes harder and harder for you to navigate across the dance floor. “If you’re with your partner and you want to just trade places, you can’t do it because you’re so jammed, you need to get other people to move,” David Weitz, a Harvard physicist, says.
And when you can’t move, it makes it harder for other people to move around you. So gradually, and then very suddenly, the whole dance floor seizes up. You’re locked in place, and not in an orderly geometric pattern. It’s a mess. It’s glass. And you’re not going to make it to the bathroom in time (again, it might take some billions of years to move just nanometers).
This is the basic definition of a glass: a liquid that has been locked in place. Or, in science-speak: an “amorphous solid.” And it applies to a lot of materials, not just the silica-based glasses that hang in our windows or cover our phones.
“When you think of glass, you think of a glass that you drink water from, or window glass,” Weitz says. “But to me, it’s so much richer. There’s so many materials that behave glassy-like.”
Some plastics are considered glasses, as are natural materials like amber. And some parts of your cells are considered to be glass-like. Even foams like whipped cream can be described as glass-like, Weitz says. Finding out the underlying mechanics that connect all these forms of glass, that’s “the real challenge to me, the beauty of the whole science.”
The club scenario is the start of the explanation for why glass is solid, but for scientists, it’s incomplete. The problem lies in the end result. If you take a picture of the molecular structure of a glass and the molecular structure of a liquid, they look the same. So why does one flow and another is locked in place?
“There are currently different ways to explain this, why the glass is not moving,” Scalliet says. But no theory is universally agreed upon.
The various explanations involve some very math-heavy invocations of thermodynamics. But in short, scientists are in search of a deeper order to this system that we can’t see just in a snapshot — something to explain glass’s solidness like you could explain the solidness of table salt by pointing to its crystal structure. The secret is likely in the collective action of the molecules over time, and how they influence one another as the liquid seizes up.
But it’s just such a complicated system to unravel. “It’s sort of a massively collective phenomenon where you look at a huge number of atoms and molecules,” Weitz says. “A lot of the theory of glass is trying to understand how [the molecules] collect together.”
In practical terms, it matters that scientists don’t have a complete theory of glass. For one, it means they simply don’t understand glass as well as they do crystalline solids.
With a crystalline solid, you can predict many of the properties of the solid just by looking at its simple crystal structure. Just by knowing the arrangement of the molecules in the crystalline solid, “you can understand, for example, how the solid will absorb heat,” Scalliet says, or “where it will break.” But in the case of glass, “you have basically an infinite number of arrangements. You don’t have this well-known underlying structure.”
That means it’s hard to predict the properties of glass. We learn how glass breaks by breaking it, how it holds on to heat by heating it. That leaves the manufacturing of new types of glass to be a bit of trial and error. But the lack of a complete theory also leaves scientists with some fundamental — even existential — questions about what glass truly is.
For one, it’s hard to say, exactly, when a liquid stops being a liquid and starts being a glass. “There’s no clear boundary,” Scalliet says. “At this moment, we basically have a very anthropocentric way to separate what’s a liquid and what’s a glass.”
That’s because glass will still flow a tiny bit over millions and billions of years. If we lived for that long, and experienced the passage of time more quickly, we might not think glass is very mysterious at all. We might think it was a liquid.
It could also be that, also over an immense period, glass will eventually crystallize and become a typical solid. In this light, glass is just liquid “that’s sliding on its way to being a crystal,” Mark Ediger, a chemistry professor at the University of Wisconsin Madison, says.
But there’s another exciting possibility here: that instead of crystallization, over very long periods, glass can inch closer to the state of “perfect disorder,” as Ediger describes.
“Let’s suppose that you have boxes,” he says, “many different boxes of different sizes and shapes, and you’re trying to pack them all into the back of a U-Haul.” If you manage to squeeze all the boxes in the back of the U-Haul, with no possible room for any others, and there’s only one possible configuration of the boxes that will allow you to do this, that’s perfect disorder.
A glass that has achieved perfect disorder would be called an “ideal” glass, Ediger says. “It’s not ideal in the sense that it has the best composition to be on the front of your cellphone,” he says. “It’s ideal in the sense it has the best possible packing of those constituent entities without crystallizing. If you wanted to make it any tighter, you’d have to start having crystals.”
The problem is that no one is sure if ideal glass can actually exist, let alone create it or use the material. Though it would be an exciting discovery, as Ediger says, the material would arguably represent an entirely new phase of matter. Ediger has done some experiments trying to make a glass as ideal as possible, packing molecules into a material one at a time. The problem is that “the closer you get to the ideal glass, the longer everything takes,” he says. “In terms of packing the U-Haul, we have one box left and it doesn’t quite fit.”
There are also studies of 100-million-plus-year-old pieces of amber to see if the material has evolved into a more “ideal” state over its long time on Earth. But the question remains unanswered.
If ideal glass exists, it could help scientists understand the more common kinds of glass better. The solidness of less-than-ideal glass could be explained, in part, by how close it is to being perfectly disordered.
(That’s because the closer a glass is to the ideal state, the less it’s able to reconfigure itself, and the longer it takes to reconfigure itself. And a system that takes a long time to move is “stiff,” as Ediger says — a.k.a. solid. )
The search for ideal glass is mostly an academic quest that flirts with sublime ideas; the researchers I talked to seemed to love the jigsaw puzzle nature of the problem. But discovering it could also lead to better predicting the properties of glass, and help with engineering new ones. “If you can identify what this ideal packaging [of molecules] looks like, that’s really telling you what the ultimate properties of glasses are,” Ediger says. “Now, if you don’t make it that well, then you’re not going to get those properties, but at least it tells you what you’re shooting for.”
Any deeper insight into the nature of glass might help scientists engineer better ones. “If you understand how physical properties emerge from a given [disordered] structure, then you can start making new materials,” Scalliet says. Like smartphone screens that are bendy, or less likely to break. Or making glass that can trap nuclear waste for longer and longer periods.
The future might be built on more advanced glasses. But for now, we can just appreciate glass for what it is: intensely useful, flowy like a dance floor but rigid like a gem. And deeply, beautifully unknown.
“Look at this window,” Scalliet says. “Like, there is this thing, it’s everywhere. And we don’t understand why it exists.”