"Travel back in time and solve a puzzle from every year of [Will] Shortz’s career at The Times."

"These puzzles will be available for free until Nov. 30. When solving, remember the context of the year you’re solving in. Some facts and figures have changed since the year each puzzle was originally published."

So it says, in "Will Shortz’s Life as a ‘Professional Puzzle Maker’/The New York Times Crossword editor celebrates his 30th year in a job many would love to have" (NYT).

I'll give you the links to those free puzzles... as the dealer tries to hook you. This is a good way to learn the levels of difficulty on the various days of the week. Me, I like Friday best (and then Saturday):

"I have never subscribed to the 'breakfast test.' Of course the puzzle should be polite, but it should follow modern standards of good taste..."

"... and those have changed over the years. The word 'ass,' when it appeared in crosswords in the old days, it was always the animal. Now there might be a polite way to clue it in terms of the rear end. I remember I submitted a crossword to Will Weng, one of my predecessors at the Times, in 1975, and it had the answer 'belly button.' And he returned the puzzle saying that was indelicate.... An answer that got controversy once was 'scumbag,' which was clued in terms of the person, of course, but it has a literal meaning that’s really not nice, and some people objected to that.... I remember early on I had the answer 'brownnose' in a crossword. To me, the common meaning is so far removed from the literal origin of the term that it’s not a problem. But some people who know the origin don’t like to see that in a puzzle.... Once somebody—this is hilarious, I think—sent me a puzzle whose theme was four anagrams of 'Adolf Hitler.'"

I'm reading "Will Shortz’s Life in Crosswords/The veteran Times puzzle editor discusses his favorite clues, debates in the crossword community, and unexpectedly finding his first serious romance" (The New Yorker).

The "breakfast test" imagines people doing the crossword at breakfast and therefore not wanting to feel like puking.

About that first serious romance:

"I worried that giving my time over so fully to crosswords would somehow prove symptomatic of relapse."

"But I uncrossed the wires—puzzles ≠ disembodiment ≠ anorexia ≠ relapse—and took the job. Four days a week, I rode the Metro-North train from the city to Pleasantville, New York, to join [NYT crossword editor Will] Shortz at his home office.... Shortz is known for editing up to ninety per cent of the clues in a crossword submission, tailoring its references to suit a desired level of difficulty and an imagined audience—one that could be as broad or as narrow as Shortz wanted it to be.... We had markedly different frames of reference—he was a sixty-two-year-old who had grown up on a horse farm in Indiana, and I was a twenty-three-year-old who grew up in Tribeca—and the collision of our backgrounds made for good conversation and better crosswords. One of my proudest moments was getting him to rewrite the clue for bro (traditionally, 'Sister’s sib' or 'Sibling for sis') as 'Preppy, party-loving, egotistical male, in modern lingo.' But, when I constructed a puzzle that prominently featured the term male gaze in the grid, he insisted that the phrase wouldn’t be in the average Times solver’s lexicon; it wasn’t 'puzzle-worthy.' (Although I lost that battle in 2014, the term appeared three years later, under his editorship.)"

 
Writes Anna Shechtman in "Escaping Into the Crossword Puzzle/If, by the dumb logic of my eating disorder, I was losing something special about myself by gaining weight, I was bolstering my self-esteem by creating crosswords, something I knew to be difficult, precocious, and exceptional" (The New Yorker).