It may seem like they've been around forever, but the crossword as we know it is barely a century old. They started in the New York World in 1913, where it was originally called a "word-cross." Going on to obsess writers like T.S. Eliot and Vladimir Nabokov, who reportedly wrote the first Russian-language puzzle as a teenager, the crossword settled into a kind of urbane normalcy over the course of the 20th century, a feature of newspapers and cheap jumbo packs.
A swarm of AI "crawlers" is running rampant on the internet, scouring billions of websites for data to feed algorithms at leading tech companies -- all without permission or payment, upending the online economy. Before the rise of AI chatbots, websites allowed search engines to access their content in return for increased visibility, a system that rewarded them with traffic and advertising revenues.