Who is Rex Parker?

Over at Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle, the pseudonymous Mr. Parker pays tribute to Bill Kristol as his “new best friend.” That’s because Bill steered us to Mr. Parker’s highly amusing Pop Sensation site. Bill has also forwarded us the fruit of his family’s online sleuthing:

Michael Sharp, an English professor at the State University of New York’s Binghamton campus, devotes serious time to his blog, Rex Parker Does the New York Times Crossword. (Rex Parker is his nome de crossword.) Since he started posting the answers to the Times puzzle last September, traffic on his site has increased to 4,000 unique hits a day. His blog is the one most often mentioned by puzzle professionals.
“My way of blogging is idiosyncratic and personal. It creates a conversation about the puzzle,” Mr. Sharp said. “The good part of criticism about puzzles is not saying whether they’re good or bad, but the way it creates talk around something that had been a silent experience.”

The quote comes from the May 2007 New York Sun story “Blogs answer, question crossword puzzles.”

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