stone of arc

Birders remember entering the Ramble in Central Park on sunny days and seeing Elise Bainbridge Hill, a 63-year-old unhoused woman, working with watercolors and a coffee-cup-lid palette. “She was there at all hours,” Sandra Paci, a birder who used to work in art galleries, tells me. In recent years, Hill at times slept in a gazebo amid the overgrown woods. She spent her days feeding the birds and making art, creating striking paintings of animals and night skies, pieces of the city that few others really saw. “When you look at the works, the quality was extremely high,” Paci says. “She had a real feeling for nature.” On Sunday, September 27, Hill, also known as Francis Lee Rogers — and several other names, according to those who knew her — was found dead, violently killed in a case that is still being investigated for motive. Her death brought an outpouring of grief. “She wasn’t a gimmick,” says Karen Gehres, who made a documentary about Hill. “She was a true artist. That was her life.” Read more about the life of the painter in Central Park: nymag.visitlink.me/36KgBk

Last weekend — for the first time in the puzzle’s 84-year history — ‘The New York Times Magazine’ printed an unsolvable crossword. Clues didn’t align with their corresponding answers or were missing altogether. The grid was correct online, but for print-magazine solvers, the damage to their weekends, and esteem, had already been done. Some solvers who complete the Sunday puzzle in the print magazine (often with pen) complained on crossword forums and social media, saying they were “nearly in tears,” some with fears of “sudden onset dementia” or, worse yet, ineptitude. When Mike McFadden, in New Jersey, couldn’t crack it, he thought, “something was wrong with me. I didn’t think that they would have an error.” It nagged at him all day. For others, the error triggered an existential crisis. “We trust that it’s always going to be something that at least somebody can figure out,” Irene Papoulis, a former writing instructor at Trinity College, said. “The world is making less and less sense. So it’s like, ‘The crossword puzzle? Not you, too!’” Several people said they felt robbed of a sacred morning routine. “Maybe I’m overreacting,” McFadden said. “But it ruined the best hour of my week.” Maggie Duffy reports on the crisis in the crossword community after an erroneous grid was published in the ‘Times’: nymag.visitlink.me/dVShF6