In February 2024, the New York Times crossword editor Will Shortz was sitting at his desk in Pleasantville, hard at work around 11 p.m., when he shifted to the left and found he couldn’t shift back. The side of his mouth was drooling. Shortz recognized the signs: He was having a stroke. Later, at the hospital, he had a second, larger stroke and then, after thrombolysis to dissolve the clot that caused it, a brain bleed — a rare and serious complication. He spent ten days in intensive care, prognosis uncertain, before he was stable enough to move to an inpatient rehab center, where he would begin the long work of recovery.

Early on, Shortz said, the doctors offered him a sliver of good news: The strokes had affected the right hemisphere of his brain (which controls nonverbal abilities, like emotions and musicality), not the left (where linguistic abilities, like puzzling, originate — though all brain function involves both sides to some degree). While still in the hospital, he was making puzzles again, and before his full recovery, he left the rehab facility to attend the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, which he founded. “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. “Really brings tears to my eyes to think about it.”

Shortz has been the puzzle editor at the Times since 1993, when he was considered a young upstart: At 41, he was 36 years younger than his predecessor, Eugene T. Maleska. But time passes quickly in easy Mondays, tricky Thursdays, taxing Saturdays, and oversize Sundays. About a month after his strokes, the paper announced that for the first time in 30 years, the crossword would be in non-Shortz, though recognizably Shortzian, hands: those of Joel Fagliano, who has published under Shortz since he was 17, spent college summers as Shortz’s intern, and became a puzzle editor at the Times in 2016.

The Times crossword has a relationship to other crosswords roughly akin to the one the paper has with competitors: It’s beloved and assailed equally. A vibrant, often cranky community of solvers congregate in blog comments and Reddit threads to celebrate and complain as puzzling has proliferated. Under Shortz, the crossword has modernized, though a running conversation in Crossworld is whether he has modernized enough. The decades-stale fill of the pre-Shortz crosswords, when any reference less than 25 years old was deemed suspect, has been replaced by BABYSHARK. Female constructors and constructors of color have ticked up but still fall far short of parity. (The Times runs an annual Diverse Crossword Constructor Fellowship to try to address this.)

When Shortz started out, he was the Times’ sole full-time puzzle employee; now, there are roughly 100. The main crossword has been joined by the Mini and new games like Wordle and Connections with more likely to come. The “Games” department is a major moneymaker and subscription driver to an increasingly polyvalent company. The paper is cagey about specific numbers, but more than 11 billion of its puzzles were solved last year. More than 150 crossword submissions come in every week, of which 10 to 15 percent make it to the weekly Thursday “maybe” meeting. Shortz has the final say.

After arriving home in a wheelchair in April, with a long road to recovery still in front of him, Shortz threw himself into rehabilitation. He moved quickly from the wheelchair to walking with a cane to walking unassisted. 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. A major brain injury might be enough to dim anyone’s sunniness, but Shortz bore up cheerfully. He has an imperturbable equanimity joined to a logician’s clarity. “That’s funny,” he would say steadily if I said something he thought was funny. “I’m a naturally optimistic, upbeat person,” he told me. “Even if I lost an arm or a leg or something, I would figure out how to make the best of it.”

Shortz volunteered to bring me along to his two-hour session of physical and occupational therapy at Rehabologym, a “neurorobotic” facility in Tarrytown he visits several times a week. 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. As he bounced through Wii-style video games — Shortz as a squat-thrusting octopus, Shortz as a slaloming penguin — designed to retrain his flexibility, balance, and reach, he called out clue after clue. Name two heroines of Shakespeare, nine letters, beginning with C and ending with A! (Cleopatra, Cassandra.) Name two six-letter animals that begin with B and end with R! (Beaver, badger.)

At the end of the session, his husband, a 30-year-old programmer and gamer whom Shortz asked me to call “S” for privacy’s sake, picked us up. The two share a passion for table tennis and met in 2021 at the Westchester Table Tennis Center, which Shortz co-founded, and following their courtship, Shortz came out as gay. They got married there in 2023 before a crowd of fellow players and a few Times colleagues; the reception included games of trivia about the couple and a scavenger hunt. Despite a 42-year age difference, and S’s indifference to crosswords, they seem quite contentedly in love. The day after I met them, I couldn’t help noticing 48-down in the Thursday puzzle: “Separation in some relationships?” (AGEGAP.)

Shortz plays table tennis two to three times per week against his husband (who now routinely wins) or one of the club’s national-champion pros. (Until his strokes, he had a 4,141-day streak of uninterrupted daily play.) His standing has fallen somewhat — the day I visited, the club rankings listed him as No. 52; S was No. 5 — but both the therapists at Rehabologym and the pros at the Westchester Table Tennis Center consider it a critical part of his recovery. “He’s getting there,” Rawle Alleyne, the former national table-tennis coach of Barbados, told me as balls flew by us in all directions. “I can see the progress.” The popcorn sound of dozens of balls connecting with paddles filled the air.

Shortz returned to his post just before the New Year. When I asked Fagliano what he thought about his brief tenure as lead editor, he said, “One of the highest compliments I got was somebody telling me they hadn’t even noticed.” The biggest difference, he said, was that he “maybe took a lighter touch on some of the younger pop culture.”

Though Shortz has already identified his pick for his successor — Fagliano — it’s the Times that will decide. Whoever it is will have to wait in any case; Shortz insisted he was in no rush. “I’m doing exactly what I want,” he said. “I never plan to retire.” He and S. are going to take a brief break, though, to honeymoon in Grenzau, Germany. “There’s a four-star hotel,” Shortz said, “and just across the street is a table-tennis facility.”

 The Times’ crossword-puzzle editor returns to work — and table tennis — after two strokes that nearly ended his career.