From  | | | | When Portia Lundie published her first crossword puzzle in the New York Times last year, she didn't know of any other Black female creators who had been featured in what she calls "America's crossword gold standard." The crossword-maker world, after all, is heavily male-dominated, she writes in The Washington Post. Not many people even know that a woman, Margaret Farrar, popularized crosswords as the Times's founding crossword editor in the mid-20th century. "Like so many other hallmarks of culture, crosswords as we know them were standardized by a profound woman, yet the authority on language still seems to be in the hands of a few White men," Lundie writes. | |  | | But that's changing. For Women's History Month, The Post is publishing a special collection of crosswords, made entirely by women and edited by Patti Varol, creator of the Women of Letters collection. Along with Lundie, Zhouqin Burnikel, Paige Larkin Halsted, Angela Olson Halsted, Robin Stears, Ann Shan and Brooke Husic have created themed crosswords that will publish every Wednesday through March. | | Their puzzles rewrite history: They include the names of notable female athletes, famous mother-daughter pairs, women who should have been credited with science discoveries and more. What better way to commemorate Women's History Month than to start solving? | | | | | Three need-to-know stories | | | Residents evacuate from a separatist-controlled town in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on March 11. (Alexander Ermochenko/ Reuters) | 01.Russian missiles struck a Ukrainian military range Sunday near Poland, killing at least 35 people and injuring more than 134. The strike came a day after the Kremlin warned that it viewed Western weapons shipments as "legitimate targets," heightening the possibility of a direct conflict with the West. Read the latest. 02.In the latest move to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth, Idaho's House of Representatives passed a bill criminalizing such procedures. It goes further than other legislation by making transporting a child to another state to receive that care a felony, too. 03.Disney announced Friday it would pause all political donations in Florida in the wake of a controversial state bill that restricts discussion of LGBTQ issues in public schools. The company had received criticism in previous weeks for remaining silent about what critics call the "don't say gay" bill. | | | | | | | A story to make you smile | | | Anna Afanasieva, left, co-owner of Laika Cheesecakes and Espresso, with employees Andrea Lee, Inna Prolinska and Ray Trevino. (Ricardo Perez) | | Since the Russian invasion began in Ukraine, Anna Afanasieva has been heartsick with worry for her parents and sister who live in Odessa in southern Ukraine. "I felt desperate to do something," said Afanasieva, 28, who grew up in Odessa but has lived near San Antonio in recent years. She and the small staff at the cheesecake bakery she co-owns decided there was one thing they could do: work around-the-clock making cheesecakes and donate the sales to the war effort. Once she put out the word on Facebook, people came by the thousands. "It was like all of San Antonio showed up," she tells Cathy Free in The Post. | | | | | But before we part, some recs | |  | Casey ParksSocial issues reporter covering gender and familyWhat did you want to be when you grew up?
I've wanted to be a journalist since I was a little kid. My dad was in the Gulf War in the early 1990s, and my mom used to take us to the library every Sunday to read articles about the war. We were very poor, so we couldn't always afford to buy a paper, but when we could, we'd cut out the articles and tape them to poster boards. My mom treated those articles as if they were the most important good, so I knew even back then that I wanted to one day write them myself. What's a tab you've had open forever?
I do not keep tabs open! I'm super anal, so I usually clean up my desktop and my Internet browser a few times a week. Occasionally I'll let a transcription linger for a day or two, but nothing lasts a week. What's one thing you hope people take away from your reporting?
Essentially, I want to bring readers as close as possible to people. I always tell people that they won't show up as perfect. They'll have faults. They'll make mistakes. And that's good, because readers won't be able to see themselves in perfect people. | | | | | | |
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