Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon are sexagenarians (a word that starts well but finishes a bit anticlimactically) who merged minds and hearts on the campus of Tufts University in the 1970s.
He majored in English, while she studied electrical engineering; they both had a bent (or was it a warp?) for wordplay. Puzzle-writing followed as naturally as a falling piano follows the laws of gravity.
Residing now in Lemoyne, Pennsylvania, near the Susquehanna River, they make puzzles for the Boston Globe (Sunday crosswords), the New York Times (biweekly acrostics), the Wall Street Journal (cryptic crosswords), and Readers Digest (vocabulary quizzes).
Their puzzles for The Scientist are (like this biographical blurb) pangrammatic (i.e., they use every letter of the alphabet). Check out their latest puzzle. (Written by the wordsmiths themselves.)
Peter Hotez was captivated by maps and microorganisms as a child. “I think tropical diseases became the natural hybrid of maps ...