Puzzle tips

Amid the cafes and boutiques of Athens’s Kolonaki neighborhood is a housewares shop that’s also a showcase for Greek craftsmanship. It’s the first brick-and-mortar location for Crini & Sophia, the brand that the former interior and set designer Maya Zafeiropoulou-Martinou founded in 2022. Its wood-and-rattan shelves, two-tone marble floors and furniture are all made by Greek artists, while one window is decorated with a vinelike steel and spray-paint piece by the Cypriot sculptor Socrates Socratous. The shop’s goods are designed by Zafeiropoulou-Martinou, whose inspirations include the colors in Francis Bacon paintings and the Amazon rainforest. Linens are produced in Portugal before being embroidered in Greece with patterns that often take cues from antiques on view at Athens’s Benaki Museum. Hand-painted ceramics and glassware are made in partnership with artisans in New York, Greece, Italy and France. When it comes to designing your own table, Zafeiropoulou-Martinou encourages layering. “The pattern isn’t just the plate or the tablecloth,” she says of her pieces, “but a puzzle of the two on top of each other.”

Sylvain Saudan, who was widely known as the “skier of the impossible” for his audacious and potentially life-ending descents down some of the steepest, most inaccessible slopes in the world, died on July 14 at his home in Les Houches, France. He was 87.

An Australian airline's frequent flyers were left puzzled after a technical glitch with its app logged users into the wrong accounts.

During the pandemic, doing jigsaw puzzles became a form of meditation for me (and thousands of others) and I’m still doing them four years later. Puzzles have come a long way from the dusty old landscapes and cat illustrations you may still have on your basement shelf; dozens of new brands (many of them women-owned) have popped up and they’re creating beautiful, unique, statement-making works of art that are fun to do and worthy of framing.

This Atlas Obscura–themed crossword comes from independent crossword constructor Brendan Emmett Quigley. He has been a professional puzzlemaker since 1996, and his pieces have appeared in dozens of publications. He’s also a member of the Boston Typewriter Orchestra.